One
Skepticism and Irony
La Celestina (1499)
Few texts in Spanish literary history had such a lasting impact as the closet drama Tragicomedia de Calixto y Melibea. This âtragicomedy,â which is considered a key literary work in Romance Europeâs transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern age, has become known under the title La Celestina, based on the name of the procuress who unites Calisto, the protagonist whose love is unrequited, with Melibea, who rejects him at first. To this day, hardly any other early modern text is edited and translated as often as this one. The history of its reception includes several film adaptations as well. For a text written in the year 1499, it is unusual in many respects. This is true of its form, which combines elements of both drama and the novel, yet even more so of its linguistic innovations, and not least with respect to its content. This explains why the peculiarities of this text, which in part cannot be explained immediately, have led to the most diverse attempts at explanation and interpretation in the course of Romance literary studies.
On Fernando de Rojasâs Authorship
In 1902 the account of a trial mentioning a lawyer named Fernando de Rojas was found during research in the archives of the Inquisition tribunals.1 According to the historical document, he had written La Celestina in his youth and had wanted to represent his father-in-law, Ălvaro de MontalbĂĄn, in an Inquisition trial in 1525. Because of his status as a converso, however, he had been rejected as counsel by the tribunal. The authorâs name had been known to be Fernando de Rojas since La Celestinaâs second edition of 1505, because he had revealed himself through an acrostic in a dedication poem. The dedication was prefaced by a letter in which the author described his work as the sequel to a literary discovery, the first act of Celestina, a text that according to the letterâs author could only have been written by an author such as Juan de Mena or Rodrigo de Cota. It is not only because of this literary game regarding authorshipâthe first act does indeed differ from the rest of the pieceâthat, despite the archival discovery from the Inquisition files, it has not been decided to this day whether the text was written by one or several authors, nor has the identity of Fernando de Rojas, obscured by a play on words, been established beyond a doubt.2
Nevertheless, following the archival discovery, many studies have striven to complement the interpretation of this early modern text with a consideration of its historic origins as well as a focus on the authorâs identity. One of the first essays of this kind was an article by Louis G. Zelson titled âThe Celestina and Its Jewish Authorship,â which appeared in the journal Jewish Forum in December 1930. In it Zelson demands acknowledgment of La Celestina as a work of Jewish literature.3 Rather than discussing the content of the literary text, he describes the discussion among scholars about the alleged author, which an article by Manuel Serrano y Sanz had triggered in 1902. Zelson also refers to a brief study by Julio Cejador presenting further archival finds on the ancestry and origin of Fernando de Rojas, which declared him a Hidalgo and thus a so-called Old Christian.4 In the following decades, the archival-based discussion about the Jewish, converso, or Christian origin of Celestinaâs author grew into a veritable research tradition.
Building upon the writings of his academic mentor, AmĂ©rico Castro, Stephen Gilman has compiled essential studies that interpret La Celestina as a document of the author Fernando de Rojasâs âJewish-Christian split consciousness.â While Gilman stresses overall that he does not want to unambiguously declare the literary text an inevitable result of the historical conditions of the authorâs existence, he interprets the tragicomedyâs uniqueness from the âarchivally imagined perspective of Spanish conversos,â5 namely, the biographical experience suffered by Fernando de Rojas that was reflected in this text.6 This and other attempts,7 following Gilman, at a conjoined consideration of the authorâs affiliation and the extraordinariness of the text have led to a reading of La Celestina that recognizes in it a pessimism informed by true hardship as displayed by the conversos, whose only form of expression remained skeptical distance and irony. However, not one of the characters in the text is explicitly referred to as a converso, nor are questions of religious affiliation central to the plot in any way.
The passages analyzed in this chapter are taken mainly from the first and last acts of La Celestina, the latter of which has been perceived as that part of the text in which a âJewish Skepticismâ (Castro) finds its central expression in the above-mentioned interpretative tradition. My aim is to open up an alternative approach to La Celestina beyond the exclusively biographical one.
In 1499 the text of La Celestina first became available in print. This edition contained fourteen acts; in 1502 another edition with five additionally inserted acts was published, on which most editions are still based today. The text is difficult to categorize in terms of genre. Its division into acts and dialogical form point to the theater, yet, as Manfred Tietz has rightly pointed out, there was no such institution as the theater and no stage on which such a complex play could have been performed in Spain at that time:
The piece . . . was probably meant for communal reading with assigned roles, yet not at court, in a mostly female dominated milieu, but instead at university, in a mostly male dominated context. This audience helps explain several stylistic traits of Celestinaâs truly new literary language: the use of numerous elements of education . . . , but also the use of many sexual allusions as well as directness. Despite a connection to the theater, La Celestina is considered a novela dialogada today, and thus a precursor to the Spanish novel.8
The plot of this dialogical novel can be summarized as follows: While out hunting with his falcon, young nobleman Calisto finds himself in the garden of Pleberioâs family and falls in love with his daughter Melibea. When she rejects him, Calisto, acting on the advice of his servant Sempronio, charges the old procuress Celestina with gaining him access to Melibeaâs heart and bedchamber. The plan succeeds, even though Calistoâs second servant, PĂĄrmeno, warns him against accepting the procuressâs services. Both servants know Celestina, and when she guarantees them regular relations with Elicia and Areusa, two girls in her charge, even PĂĄrmeno yields, not least because both servants hope to receive a share of the procuressâs fee. Celestina manages to gain access to Melibea, and after having refused his advances at first, she confesses to the procuress that she is in love with Calisto. Celestina arranges a first meeting, for which the two lovers agree to a tryst through a half-open door. Calisto is so happy with Celestinaâs services that he gives her a gold necklace. On the night that Calisto enters Melibeaâs bedchamber with the help of a ladder, PĂĄrmeno and Sempronio demand a share of her generous fee from Celestina, but when she refuses to share with them, she is murdered by the two servants. They are executed for their crime. Meanwhile Calisto visits Melibea as often as possible, but one night he falls from the ladder leading to her chamber and dies from the fall. Melibeaâs despair over her loverâs dying drives her to leap to her death.
The dramaâs ending, Melibeaâs suicide, was interpreted in pointed words as âdeeply un-Spanishâ by Marcelino MenĂ©ndez Pelayo as early as 1915.9 In his introduction to an edition of La Celestina appearing in the series ClĂĄsicos Castellanos, its editor, Julio Cejador, stated: âKnowledge of the fact that the workâs author was a converted Jew explains a lot. I doubt that such an ending would even have occurred to a Christian from the old Spain.â10
How are we to judge such patterns of explanation? A comparative glance at Italian and French literary history of the same era shows the consequences that the archival discovery suggesting the experience of a converso with regard to the authorâs religious affiliation had: In Giovanni Boccaccioâs Decamerone (1348), the character Ghismunda poisons herself out of love (first novella of the fourth day), yet thus far no interpreter of this work has ever suggested this to reveal âcrypto-Judaismâ on Boccaccioâs part. The same is true for the story of the star-crossed lovers Pyramus and Thisbe in Christine de Pizanâs Livre de la CitĂ© des Dames (1405), in which the two lovers take their own lives because of a misunderstandingâPyramus kills himself with a sword when he believes Thisbe to be dead; Thisbe, seeing her lover dead, then kills herself with the same sword. There have been no known attempts in this case, either, to understand this passage by way of speculation about Christine de Pizanâs religious affiliation. The case is very different with the text discussed here, however: âThe author is a converted Jew who has poured out those emotions in the entire work that the forced renunciation of the faith of his forefathers, and the failure to put down roots in his new motherland, has instilled in him.â11
All of the distinctive features of La Celestina, which is indeed a singular document of literary innovation, have been ascribed to the authorâs religious affiliation in this interpretative tradition. The entire plot was interpreted as a coded portrayal of the impossibility of love between an âOld Christianâ (Calisto) and the daughter (Melibea) of a âNew Christianâ (Pleberio), which represented the âspiritual reality in Spain at that time,â the âcomplex society of converts and âOld Christiansâ full of differences, hate, and incompatibilities.â12
There have been several attempts to interpret individual protagonists of the text as representations of conversos, in one case with regard to Calistoâs ancestry13 and in another regarding Melibeaâs lineage.14 In his study The Evolution of Converso Literature, Gregory Kaplan has rightly stated that a definite attribution of individual protagonists in La Celestina as representations of conversos is impossible and has further posited that the text mainly stages doubts about the ancestry, origin, and affiliation of all the characters in a virtuosic manner. Kaplanâs study is one of the most interesting attempts to free the scholarly study of La Celestina from an exclusively biographical approach.15 Kaplan analyzes the semantic signifiers in the text and identifies dominant, recurrent semes that belong to the semantic fields of ancestry, origin, and affiliation and that, most important, raise doubts about a clearly assignable religious identity for the novelâs characters. Kaplan interprets this consciously employed ambiguity as de Rojasâs reflection on his contemporary social reality and as evidence for the interpretation of the text as a converso allegory.16
Thus the archival find, which marked the religious affiliation of the alleged author Fernando de Rojas as converso, continues to dominate the textâs interpretation, despite the focus on the autonomy of the literary text prevalent in reception aesthetics theory. In an allegorical reading, the dramatic novelâs individual plot elements become symbols and metaphors of skepticism and despair. Marcel Bataillon, too, has interpreted La Celestina as a literary treatment of the converted Jewsâ distaste for the practices of procuring and prostitution widely accepted in the Christian world.17
This kind of reading of La Celestina might offer some clues for a more precise definition of what it is that distinguishes those literary texts whose peculiarity has thus far been explained by their authorâs ancestry from other texts of this epoch. In my thesis, it is less the authorâs origin but rather a specific kind of literary writing. In the view represented here, this kind of writing is characterized by a varying yet always specific literary treatment of the biblical text and Christian orthodoxy of the time, which will be described in its variations and shown in the textual analyses in the following sections. Thus any reference to the authorsâ religious affiliation will at most be an abstract dimension.
The Process of Narration
The prologue to the 1502 Seville edition of La Celestina points to the significance of its literary form:
Unos les roen los huessos que no tienen virtud, que es la hystoria toda junta, no aprovechĂĄndose de las particularidades, haziĂ©ndola cuento de camino; otros pican los donayres y refranes comunes, loĂĄndolos con toda atenciĂłn, dexando passar por alto lo que haze mĂĄs al caso y utilidad suya. Pero aquellos para cuyo verdadero plazer es todo, desechan el cuento de la hystoria para contar, coligen la suma para su provecho, rĂen lo donoso, las sentencias y dichos de philĂłsophos guardan en su memoria para trasponer en lugares convenibles a sus autos y propĂłsitos. AssĂ que quando diez personas se juntaren a oĂr esta comedia, en quien quepa esta differencia de condiciones, como suele acaescer, ÂżquiĂ©n negarĂĄ que aya contienda en cosa que de tantas maneras se entienda? Que aun los impressores han dado sus punturas, poniendo rĂșbricas o sumarios al principio de cada auto, narrando en breve lo que dentro contenĂa: una cosa bien escusada segffln lo que los antiguos scriptores usaron.18
In contrast to a reading that considers the work a mere reflection of its authorâs biographical experience, the prologue treats the author in the sense of a textual implication: the reader who subordinates the story to the narrative process will find true pleasure in the text (Pero aquellos para cuyo verdadero plazer es todo, desechan el cuento de la hystoria para contar). The prologue directs the readerâs attention to the specific order of plot elements and the process of narration. The dialogical form that the explicit author has chosen for creating his text is thus given an additional layer of meaning. According to the challenge offered here, the reader is to grasp this layer during the process of reading. It is only in the recognition of the narrative structure that the reader will be able to benefit from the book (âcoligen la suma para su provecho, rĂen lo donoso, las sentencias y dichos de philĂłsophes guardan en su memoria para trasponer en lugares convenibles a sus autos y propĂłsitosâ). The prologue ascribes to the aesthetic process in La Celestina its own meaning.
In the above-mentioned research tradition, the ten listeners mentioned in this passage have been considered a numerical allegory of the minyan, the ten men required for a Jewish religious service.19 Yet the prologue points less to a spiritual reading than to a highly variable perception and interpre...