THE FACT IN FICTION
4-43
I must know what the novel is;
it
is like advertising for a
miss–
ing person; first you need a description of what he looked like
when last seen.
Let me begin with the birthmarks. The word novel goes
back to the word "new," and in the plural it used to mean
news-the news of the day or the year. Literary historians
find the seed or the germ of the novel in Boccaccio's
Decameron,
a collection of tales set in a frame of actual life. This frame of
actual life was the Great Plague of 1348 as it affected the city
of Florence, where more than a hundred thousand people died
between March and August. The figures and dates come from
The Decameron,
along with a great deal of other factual
information about the Black Death: its origin in the East,
some years before; its primary and secondary symptoms, dif–
fering from those in the East; the time between the appear–
ance of the first symptoms--the tumors or buboes in the
groin or armpits, some the size of a common apple, some of
an egg, some larger, some smaller-and the onset of death; the
means of contagion; the sanitary precautions taken; the medical
theories current as to the proper diet and mode of life to stave
off infection; the modes of nursing; the rites and methods of
burial; and, finally, the moral behavior (very bad) of the
citizens of Florence during the scourge. Boccaccio's account is
supposed to be a pioneer contribution to descriptive medicine;
it is also a piece of eyewitness journalism, not unlike the
Younger Pliny's account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius;
the difference is that Pliny wrote
his
report in a letter (a classic
literary form) and that Boccaccio's report is used in a new
way, as a setting for a collection of fictions. The "realism," also
new, of the separate tales, is grounded, so to speak, in the
journalistic frame, with the dateline of a certain Tuesday morn–
ing, of the year 1348, when seven young ladies, between the
ages of eighteen and twenty-eight, and three young men, the
youngest twenty-five, met in the Church of Santa Maria
Novella.
