The Reality of Fernando de Rojas

No quiere mi pluma ni manda razón
Que quede la fama de aqueste gran hombre
Ni su digna fama ni su claro nombre
Cubierto de olvido ...

— Alonso de Proaza

The Testimony of the Text

Not long ago a distinguished American humanist proposed to the present generation of scholar-critics a radical and disconcerting query as specially appropriate for changing the course of our meditations. The question he asked, and urges us to answer, was simply: "How is literature possible?" And, as far as I am concerned, the troubled critical reception of a book of mine entitled The Art of "La Celestina" justifies the proposition. Labeled by reviewers either as an "Existentialist" or as a "New Critical" interpretation, its close textual analysis of La Celestina seemed to them anachronistic. In my opinion, the labels are contradictory and the accusation of anachronism is unfounded. Yet at the same time I must admit that the misunderstandings are my responsibility. Captivated by the vitality of speech and speakers, I failed to consider the preliminary historical question: "How was the completely unprecedented, immensely original art of its author, Fernando de Rojas, possible?" By which is meant primarily: "How could a man living at the end of the fifteenth century in Spain have written a book so significant to us and our concerns?" And, secondarily: "What can be found out about him and his life which may help provide an answer?"

The question just set forth is manifestly identical to that presented by every time-traveling masterpiece — by Don Quijote, by Oedipus Rex, by Hamlet, and by their limited number of peers. The only difference is that in these cases the would-be answerer may take advantage of a great deal of previous historical and biographical spadework, whereas in the case of La Celestina he has very little, neither a known life nor an adequate understanding of the times, upon which to support his insights. As a result of this lack of foundation, Celestina interpretation has gone in two directions. On the one hand, there are those who attempt to supply historical comprehension of an archaeological sort from their own stores of erudition. La Celestina is a creation of fifteenth-century rhetoric, a mirror of medieval morality, or an allegory of the seven deadly sins — which is to say, it is interesting but dead. On the other hand, there are a few of us who have been so concerned with the bursting life of Rojas' dialogue that we are open to the charge of ignoring what La Celestina was historically speaking. A new approach, therefore, is not only appropriate but urgent. Having tried to show how the work lives, we must now try to provide the background necessary for understanding how the book came alive so immortally. Evaluation of La Celestina as one of man's major creations, I now see, requires more than textual analysis of style, structure, or theme. A sustained effort to comprehend the historical agonies of its birth is also necessary. We cannot, in other words, really know what La Celestina is without speculating as rigorously and as learnedly as possible both on how it came to be and on the broader query of how it could come to be. It is to nothing less than this that the present book is dedicated.

Such a statement of purpose confronts both writer and reader with theoretical problems of the sort for which confessions of commitment are more proper than attempted solutions. To begin with, interrogation in terms of possibility was designed to eliminate positivistic search for historical causation. La Celestina was not written by its "race" (Judea-Spanish), "milieu" (Salamanca), or "moment" (the Isabeline Renaissance). Instead, it was written (setting aside for the time being the excruciating problem of Act I) by a man called Fernando de Rojas, who encountered and experienced these three determinants, who lived within — and through! — his historical climate. Not out of history, but from deep inside individual awareness of history, masterpieces make their way up into the light. Which is to proclaim the obvious: that history shapes art only insofar as it works through the whole of the artist's life. There are no short cuts or short circuits. La Celestina may perhaps be conceived of as a historical possibility realized by a Fernando de Rojas de carne y hueso. But it cannot be conceived of as a historical necessity.

Thus our commitment and thus our program. If literature is, as Jean-Pierre Richard would have it, "an adventure in being human," we must accordingly view the "times" of a work from the point of view of their impingement on and assimilation to the biography of a "human being." We shall not be concerned with what happened in history but with history as we may relive with Diltheyesque reverence its immediate presence for a man alive and super-sentient within limited carnal, rural, and urban circumstances. Domesticity in the broad sense will above all be decisive. Furthermore, since our only significant knowledge of the man who concerns us is his work, it is through the prism of our reading that we shall have primarily to look. In this sense it can be maintained without paradox that La Celestina creates its times rather than the other way around. What it has to say to us is our only possible measurement of the historical and biographical meaning of whatever facts, old and new, we may present. The work does not select the facts (such license when so few are available would be grossly improper), but it does evaluate them and arrange them in an inevitable hierarchy. Only by allowing La Celestina to perform this essential function may we hope to avoid the critical fallacy against which we are warned by Jose F. Montesinos, the fallacy "according to which the real life of a poet conditions comprehension of his art, when the truth of the matter is just the opposite."

A second and perhaps more vulnerable flank separates us from those who are discouraged by the perils of relating historical and biographical information to literature. In spite of all precautions, certain critics feel, approximation of the two is at worst noxious and at best nonsensical, a foolishly complacent mixture of irreconcilable criteria. Against such beliefs, two separate lines of defense may be erected. The first is that of my master, America Castro: comprehension of history itself as a dominion of value within which literature rather than being alien is indigenous — and among the most respected inhabitants. Characteristic of Castro's valiant and unceasing effort to recapture history...