The Sexual Landscape of Celestina: : Some Observations

T H E S E X U A L L A N D S C A P E O F CELESTINA: S O M E O B S E R V A T I O N S Joseph T. S n o w Michigan State University Celestina is near-universally acknowledged as a great, compelling work of literature; for many it is a masterpiece in the same league as Cervantes' Don Quijote. I endorse these claims. After all, it is a work that—like the Quijote—has been much copied and imitated, translated , rendered into verse, theatrical, musical, operatic and balletic adaptations , edited in many guises for distinct groups of readers (sometimes expurgated and sometimes bowdlerized) and, as well, illustrated in practically every popular format since its initial appearance in 1499, a little more now than half a millennium ago: woodcuts, oils, statuary, porcelain , pen and ink, copperplate, lithograph, watercolor, filmstrip, film and video. And I know this to be an incomplete summary of the forms which Celestina's survival as a classic have taken.1 Celestina was almost assuredly not conceived on a grand scale: it emerged from the seething crucible of criss-crossing ideas in the university town of Salamanca in the late 1490s. Its characters negotiate a confined urban space, busy with private affairs of no seeming transcendence. The lapsed time of its actions varies—according to the reading given it— from a mere three days (in the 16-act Comedia version) to somewhat longer than the month by which it was extended through later interpolations (re-baptized the Tragicomedia). Furthermore, its basic plot line—as narrated in the Argumento—is unremarkable. The work's stated didactic intention: "compuesta en reprehension de los locos enamorados que, vencidos en su desordenado apetito, a sus amigas llaman y dizen ser su dios.. - [y] de los engafios de las alcahuetas y malos y lisonjeros sirvientes" (82), does little to prepare us for the extent of the corrupt and aimless world that the Celestina text so wittily dissects. However, despite the presence of humor in the work and the not infrequent characterization of Celestina as a "funny book,"2 the work is widely read as one which propels us headlong toward a fascinating and revealing face-to-face encounter with the dark side of our humanity. The world of Celestina and her hedonist band of prostitutes, corrupt servants, clerics and officials, swaggering pimps and ruffians, bibulous boon companions and numberless clients, all seeking her services in one or more of her semi-clandestine "officios"3 is—when all is seen and revealed by the CALfOPE Vol. 6, Nos. 1-2 (2000): pages 149-166 150 «S Josepth T. Snow work's tragic close—not morally inferior to the behavior of the obviously more noble, opulent and material world of the families, say, of Calisto, Melibea and their kind. Indeed, through the reader's vivid involvement with the intimate lives—the thoughts and actions—of all the principals of Celestina, the reader comes away from the experience as much impressed by the senselessness of the actions that lead to the individual deaths that take place asby a sense of awe before the artistic achievement that invites us to witness up-close the smallness of spirit that shuts the door on acts of altruism, loyalty and grace. Celestina's characters are so successfully realized, so well-rounded and fully-dimensional that they succeed—in ways profound and permanent—to inscribe themselves upon our own conscious lives. The lessons they inadvertently teach us are, for that reason , immediate and deeply serious. The overt didacticism readers and critics attribute to the work derives , for the most part—in my view, at least—, from the medieval morality convincingly traced in the paratexts that wrap Celestina's twenty-one auctos, but is little seen in the auctos themselves.4 The preliminary and postliminary paratexts are somber and prescriptive, while the lives that emerge from the auctos are guilt-free and conducted as if unaware that anyone is eavesdropping. What quite literally unfolds before the reader's inner eyes and ears, in dialogue and monologue, as often the result of calculation as it is of spontaneously and urgently...