La Celestina y el mundo como conflicto (review)

Consolación Baranda attempts to identify the moral message of Fernando de Rojas's fifteenth-century masterpiece by investigating the intellectual context within which it was written. The study's assumption is two-fold: Rojas wrote La Celestina having been influenced by the academic debates concerning certain contentions of neo-Epicurean philosophy; and Rojas was a lawyer, which also contributed to a tendency to regard life as contest or conflict. This argument is reflected, up to a point, in the study's structure, since it is divided into three parts which address the philosophical debates of the fifteenth century, the connection between the practice of law and the lawyer's worldview, and finally the relationship between the Celestina's notion of time and the fates of its characters.

Baranda devotes approximately one half of her study to the debates about neo-Epicureanism, and this is perhaps the weakest part of the work, for several reasons. One is that, as the author herself admits, "en ningún caso se puede hablar en esta época de defensa del epicureísmo en sentido estricto, ni aquí ni en el resto de Europa, sino de neoepicureísmo en el sentido de un difuso materialismo" (46). This means that the scholar is constructing what Epicureanism stood for on the basis of polemics against its tenets. Another reason that this section is less convincing is that its connection to both the theme of the world as conflict and the Celestina itself is rather tenuous. Baranda dedicates many pages to discussing the opinions of various academic and/or clerical philosophers with regard to the immortality of the soul, for example, when the issue never arises in Rojas's fictional world. The most valuable portion of this part of the study is therefore that which demonstrates that Rojas's irony, pessimism, and vision of the world as conflict are just as likely to have arisen from his academic and professional formation as from his status as a converso, given that "carecemos de datos que permitan desarrollar de forma sólida tal relación" (111).

The second and third parts of Baranda's book are more persuasive because they keep both the literary work and Baranda's own theme more consistently in view. She argues in part 2 that Rojas, in spite of the undeniably realistic details his work contains, purposely excludes the largest segment of the urban population — the commercial and artisan middle class — to focus on the highest and lowest classes because those were most likely to produce individuals who felt, albeit for opposite reasons, that moral norms did not apply to them. In contrast to those scholars who have a tendency to "romanticize" Rojas's portrayal of his lower-class characters, Barandas bracingly reminds us that some social and political commentators of the fifteenth century argued that "la pobreza puede ser un obstáculo para la salvación del alma, pues induce al pecado" (134). Similarly, she firmly identifies Rojas, because of his training in the law, as "alineado con los impulsos de reforzamiento normativo de la vida ciudadana promovidos desde la monarquía" (137), rather than as the social liberal that some have seen in him.

Part 3 of Baranda's study examines the role of time in Celestina, not (as in previous works) as a matter of verisimilitude or narrative coherence, but as a moral problem. The scholar rightly notes that almost all of the Celestina's characters are in an unseemly hurry to satisfy their desires, and that the only ones who escape with their lives are those who want the least. Correspondingly, the characters make reference to their memories, but they never learn from past experience, nor are they capable of correctly evaluating cause and effect, in spite of their efforts to do so. Baranda links both of these effects to the consciousness of the rapidity of social change during the fifteenth century, as well as to the...