The Ancients and the Postmoderns by Fredric Jameson

Author:Fredric Jameson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Chapter 6

Dekalog as Decameron

It is always wise, when confronted with a mass frenzy of interpretation, to sober up on purely formal problems. I will therefore approach Kieślowski’s philosophical enigmas by way of a little structural analysis, of the now old-fashioned kind. Actually, it is to the Russian Formalists that we owe what is perhaps the most dazzling narrative analysis in the canon. To begin with that would constitute an acknowledgement of the peculiar kinship of the episodes of the Dekalog with the short story as a form, radically different as they are in temporality and in plot resolution with the standard-length feature film, about which one does not want to decide whether its kinship lies with the novel or not, but which at least arouses very different generic expectations, which any perceived kinship with short-story form tends to frustrate (just as it is frustrated in another way by theatricality and the sense of the filmed play).

“The Hawk” is the shortest story in Boccaccio’s Decameron: it tells the story of a very poor young nobleman, whose only possession is a hawk as legendary throughout the region as is his own skill in maneuvering it. Pining away for love of a neighboring heiress, he invites her to his modest dwelling. She accepts, because she has become fascinated by the stories about the hawk and the expertise of its owner. But he has had to serve the hawk to her for lunch, having no money for anything else.

It is one of the most fascinating stories in the archive, and not least because it is about fascination as such. If it seems to promise to reveal the very secret of the short story itself, this is probably accounted for by the fact that the central experience of the short story, namely chance—Goethe’s unerhörte Begebenheit, or unparalleled event—is here for once internalized within the narrative as such, and motivated. Chance here suddenly becomes revealed as what people themselves do, as part of their destiny.

So this is what the Formalists said: “The Hawk” is a paradigm of the short-story genre in that it offers two distinct plotlines or centers: the hawk and the love-passion. But these are like the empty shells of the shill game: we think the telltale pebble is under the one; it is in reality under the other. The hawk unexpectedly passes from its plotline over into the other one where it becomes a dinner fowl. And this abrupt displacement unites the two plotlines, but against all probability: their sudden unification is the paradigmatic event of this genre, and after it happens, nothing more remains to be said.

Of course a great deal might still remain to be said in the way of interpretations: Is not the lover himself, all skin and bones and eternally fasting from love, indeed, devoured by it, is he not himself the bony carcass he serves up in honor of the noble lady? Or we could talk about thirdness, and the way in which the hawk makes a third

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