"In your own house": Boccaccio turns a tomb into an answer
A close reading of Guido Cavalcanti's quick reply in *The Decameron*, where a tomb becomes both a metaphor and an exit.
To be surrounded is to be told where you belong. In Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, a group of Florentine gentlemen corners Guido Cavalcanti beside a church and its tombs, then tries to make his learning look like a social defect. Boccaccio's story was written between 1348 and 1353; this issue uses John Payne's English translation, first published in 1886. 12
Guido answers the group's question by changing what the place around them means. The joke depends on a word that can be heard as ordinary speech and as a judgment about who is alive to the world.
Passage
It chanced one day that Guido set out from Orto San Michele and came by way of the Corso degli Ademari, the which was oftentimes his road, to San Giovanni, round about which there were at that present divers great marble tombs (which are nowadays at Santa Reparata) and many others. As he was between the columns of porphyry there and the tombs in question and the door of the church, which was shut, Messer Betto and his company, coming a-horseback along the Piazza di Santa Reparata, espied him among the tombs and said, 'Let us go plague him.' Accordingly, spurring their horses, they charged all down upon him in sport and coming upon him ere he was aware of them, said to him, 'Guido, thou refusest to be of our company; but, harkye, whenas thou shalt have found that God is not, what wilt thou have accomplished?' Guido, seeing himself hemmed in by them, answered promptly, 'Gentlemen, you may say what you will to me in your own house'; then, laying his hand on one of the great tombs aforesaid and being very nimble of body, he took a spring and alighting on the other side, made off, having thus rid himself of them.The gentlemen abode looking one upon another and fell a-saying that he was a crack-brain and that this that he had answered them amounted to nought seeing that there where they were they had no more to do than all the other citizens, nor Guido himself less than any of themselves. But Messer Betto turned to them and said, 'It is you who are the crackbrains, if you have not apprehended him. He hath courteously and in a few words given us the sharpest rebuke in the world; for that, an you consider aright, these tombs are the houses of the dead, seeing they are laid and abide therein, and these, saith he, are our house, meaning thus to show us that we and other foolish and unlettered men are, compared with him and other men of learning, worse than dead folk; wherefore, being here, we are in our own house.' Thereupon each understood what Guido had meant to say and was abashed nor ever plagued him more, but held Messer Betto thenceforward a gentleman of a subtle wit and an understanding.
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, Day the Sixth, Story the Ninth, "Guido Cavalcanti with a pithy speech courteously flouteth certain Florentine gentlemen who had taken him by surprise." John Payne translation, first published 1886. The passage follows the Project Gutenberg text. 3
Gloss
- "Harkye": an old form of "listen" or "pay attention." The word makes the gentlemen's challenge sound like a public lesson they expect Guido to receive.
- Porphyry: a hard, often purple stone used in monumental columns. The word gives the setting a heavy, ceremonial scale before the scene turns on a quick physical leap.
- "Crack-brain": an insult for a foolish or supposedly mad person. The gentlemen use it when Guido's answer refuses the literal terms of their question.
Close read
Boccaccio builds the exchange through spatial metaphor and then makes the metaphor physical. The gentlemen begin with coordinated movement: they see Guido, spur their horses, and charge him. The sentence places Guido between three barriers, the columns, the tombs, and the shut church door, before naming the result directly: he is "hemmed in." Their question tries to trap him in the same way. They ask what his abstract search has accomplished, expecting him to defend himself on their terms.
Guido changes the noun that controls the scene. His answer, "you may say what you will to me in your own house," sounds at first like a courteous concession. The next action supplies its second meaning. Guido touches a tomb, jumps over it, and leaves. The tombs are houses for the dead, so the gentlemen have surrounded him inside their own house. The sentence gives them a place, and the leap gives Guido an exit.
The story then lets the first audience miss the joke. The gentlemen call Guido a "crack-brain" because they hear "house" literally and cannot connect the word to the tombs. Betto supplies the interpretation: the tombs belong to the dead, and Guido has compared the foolish, unlearned men around him to dead people beside the living mind of a learned man. The rebuke works because Guido never argues about whether God exists. He accepts their physical setting, changes its meaning, and lets his body complete the sentence.
Why it still matters
A group can make a person seem unreasonable by deciding in advance which question counts. Guido's answer creates a different kind of refusal. He does not plead for admission to the company or offer a longer defense of his learning. He gives the group its own location back, then walks out of the frame the group made for him. The scene treats wit as a practical action: language changes the positions available to the people who are speaking.
Reflection
When have you answered a social challenge by changing its terms rather than accepting the role it offered you, and what did that change make possible?
References
- 1
- 2Internet Archive, 1886 Villon Society scan
archive.org
- 3
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