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 "tragicomedy," which is considered a key literary work in Romance Europe's 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 Rojas's 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. According to the historical document, he had written La Celestina in his youth and had wanted to represent his father-in-law, Álvaro de Montalbán, in an Inquisition trial in 1525. Because of his status as a converso, however, he had been rejected as counsel by the tribunal. The author's name had been known to be Fernando de Rojas since La Celestina's 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 letter's 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 authorship—the first act does indeed differ from the rest of the piece—that, 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.

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 author's identity. One of the first essays of this kind was an article by Louis G. Zelson titled "The Celestina and Its Jewish Authorship," which appeared in the journal Jewish Forum in December 1930. In it Zelson demands acknowledgment of La Celestina as a work of Jewish literature. 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. In the following decades, the archival-based discussion about the Jewish, converso, or Christian origin of Celestina's author grew into a veritable research tradition.

Building upon the writings of his academic mentor, Américo Castro, Stephen Gilman has compiled essential studies that interpret La Celestina as a document of the author Fernando de Rojas's "Jewish-Christian split consciousness." While Gilman stresses overall that he does not want to unambiguously declare the literary text an inevitable result of the historical conditions of the author's existence, he interprets the tragicomedy's uniqueness from the "archivally imagined perspective of Spanish conversos," namely, the biographical experience suffered by Fernando de Rojas that was reflected in this text. This and other attempts, following Gilman, at a conjoined consideration of the author's 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 "Jewish Skepticism" (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 Celestina's 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.

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 Pleberio's 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 Melibea's heart and bedchamber. The plan succeeds, even though Calisto's second servant, Pármeno, warns him against accepting the procuress's services. Both servants know Celestina, and when she guarantees them regular relations with Elicia and Areusa, two girls in her...