Dante, Boccaccio & Machiavelli: From Belief to Amorality by Way of Slapstick
Reading these three books—Dante's Inferno, Boccaccio's Decameron, and Machiavelli's The Prince—has given me the opportunity to appreciate how much Italian literature has influenced modern writing and philosophic thought. For one thing, Dante's writing was the first to break away from Latin to what was then the vernacular. By doing so, he opened up an entirely new universe of literature. At the same time, he was able to create a literary space that had never been worked out before, while still basing his journey on that of Homer's Odyssey. He also opened the route to humanism and the Renaissance.
On a different level, what Boccaccio gave me was the opportunity to move forward into the Middle Ages in terms of getting down to the average person and individual characters (lusts, desires, live and let live and who really cares). Boccaccio decided that he wouldn't allow the doom and gloom of the age to get him down. Instead, he snubbed his nose (and other parts of his anatomy) at the Black Death to bring us a series of timeless stories that combine black comedy with the most atrocious slapstick. One needs only to recall the famous scene in the scrubbing barrel or the jump into the black muck to make merry in the face of undeniable death.
Finally, what Machiavelli offered most succinctly was a reduction of the political game to its lowest common denominator. In many ways, he was like a modern day "Boys In The Hood" kind of guy who said: "Enough of this Platonic garbage with the shadows in the cave and the form of the Good. We must come to realize that the shadows are all that exist. Anything beyond that is merely fantasy, the creation of flag-waving fascists." Okay, so we don't want to believe that as human beings. We always try to tell ourselves that something exists beyond our own greed and clannish sexuality. But then we simply have to point at what i...