Celestina
With my
next book I am remaining on the Iberian Peninsula, which I take it was the
literary hotspot in Europe around 1500. This one is “Celestina” by Fernando de
Rojas, published 1499 presumably a few years after it was written.
There are
interesting elements to this novel. First of all the subject matter is quite
different from the previous novels I have been through. Here are no mighty
heroes or glorious battles. Instead this is a love story gone terribly wrong.
It features a lovesick gentleman called Calisto who enlists the help of an old
bawd called Celestina to win over Melibea, the daughter of an even wealthier
citizen of the town where the story takes place. Celestina dabbles in magic and
all sorts of unsavory stuff and somehow she does manage to turn the head of
young Melibea who falls hopelessly in love with Calisto. Celestina and Calistos’
two servants Semporio and Parmeno consider the affair a golden opportunity to
milk Calisto of his riches and plot together to make it work. Once successful however
they turn greedy and end up killing each other. Calisto and Melibea and not
better off. Calisto falls down a ladder and breaks his head and Melibea throws
herself off the roof.
That is a
fairly bizarre story.
Secondly
the story is written strictly as a dialogue. There is not a single descriptive
line in the entire book and that at first seems like a very modern trait.
Clearly the story was meant to be read aloud, almost like a stage play.
I normally
like dialogue based stories and find that lengthy descriptive passages are a
burden to a text. But in the case of “Celestina” the dialogue often turns into
lengthy declamations, stilted and elaborate and it totally takes the pace out
of the story.
That is
also a problem since the story is supposed to be a comedy. A brief glance at
the summary above clearly reveals a potential for a hilariously dark comedy of
Monty Python’ish proportions, but the lengthy monologue ruins the comedic
timing and the story never becomes funny. A shame really, because it seems to
be the intent of the book. Maybe 500 years ago people found this sort of
declamation a riot, but that has certainly lost its lure over the centuries.
Instead the
book retains a morbid charm by alternating between characters who build themselves
up with ridiculous self-importance and those who cut them down with crude
remarks. This theme is also found in the general plot as the characters devise
device complicated deceits and conspiracies to their own end only to find that
the result is completely out of their control and essentially random. It is
also the story of big and deep love that seems to be based on silly infatuation
and comes to a brutal conclusion through random events that has nothing to do
with anything. It is not Melibea’s parents who discover and end the affair, it
is not the town constables or the heavy that Elicia and Areusa, the lovers of
dead Semporio and Parmeno, send to kill Calisto, that intercepts them, but a
clumsy misstep on the ladder.
Retold
today this could be a great story I would like to hear or read and it would be
funny. As it is it is still interesting as a window into a world 500 years ago
and to what people thought was funny back then. I am always baffled by how
cheap lives are in these old novels and the importance people assign to things
we would not think twice of today. Taken seriously, which I think would be a
mistake with this book, arranged marriages are a cause of much grief, but you
can also say that all the principle characters are digging their own graves
through stupidity, greed and starry eyed infatuation.
The
backstory behind “Celestina” is something about that de Rojas was Jew but
forced to convert to avoid being burned on the stake, something that apparently
happened to some of his family members, and that “Celestina” is a bitter exposé
of hypocrisies in a world that has condemned his kind. I am not entirely sure
how to read that in the story, but I have a feeling that a story about Fernando
de Rojas himself would be at least as interesting as his book.
