A Companion to Celestina ed. by Enrique Fernández (review)

A COMPANION TO CELESTINA IS COMPRISED of twenty-three essays that aim to provide state-of-the art analyses that emerge from, or seek to enlarge upon, canonical critical issues and conventions of scholarship on Celestina (1499?). In it one finds studies dedicated to Celestina in its multiple early textual incarnations—titled, among others, Comedia, Tragicomedia, and Celestina de Palacio—and to the work's origins, authorship, and its sources by scholars like José Luis Canet, Gustavo Illades Aguiar, Amaranta Saguaría, Devid Paolini, José Luis Gastañaga Ponce de León, Fernando Cantalapiedra Erostarbe, Ivy A. Corfis, and Bienvenido Morros Mestres. On the work's themes and readings there are chapters by Ryan D. Giles, Enriqueta Zafra, Raúl Álvarez-Moreno, Patrizia Botta, Ricardo Castells, Manuel da Costa Fontes, and Connie L. Scarborough, and, finally, on Celestina's influence on posterity, by Antonio Pérez-Romero, Ted L. L. Bergman, Kathleen V. Kish, Consolación Baranda, Beatriz de Alba-Koch, Enrique Fernández, and Yolanda Iglesias. The essays are followed by a listing of electronic resources on Celestina (principally modern and digital editions of the work) and a select bibliography. The compendium is thus a summation and a point of reference for identifying the typical questions and problems that have defined the history of Celestina research until the present day, as it seeks to be the gateway to scholarship on Celestina.

And this is precisely the difficulty with it. It is a collection that can lead only to the entrenchment of exhausted critical modes, themes, received ideas, and trends, rather than function as an opening to the immense literary, artistic, and historical possibilities of Celestina. In the kind of scholarship it chronicles, the Companion is all too predictable, bland, and, with four or five exceptions (Illades Aguiar on the poetics of voice; Gastañaga on vernacular humanism; Giles on approaches to parody; and Kish on early responses to the work through translation), largely unimaginative and outmoded. Even in the occasional essays that seek to break the mold (Iglesias on television and cinematic adaptations of Celestina and Fernández on images and the history of the work's visual culture, for example), the efforts fall short, or, in the end, do not fulfill their promise.

Although Iglesias, for instance, does not refer to her work on the cinematic and television adaptations of Celestina as an exercise in "medievalism" per se (i.e., the study of the representation of the Middle Ages in modernity, especially in and through new media), it is clearly just that. Her willingness to examine the cinematic and television adaptations of Celestina, at first blush, seems promising and thought-provoking. Originating some thirty years ago, medievalism is a conscious critical posture that studies reinventions and reworkings of the medieval—its basic reception—in relation to contemporary values and culture. One of the classic examples of a work created in the medievalist vein is, of course, the wildly popular series Game of Thrones. In her study of Gerardo Vera's 1996 filmic adaptation of Celestina, Iglesias notes the director's disengagement from Celestina's original humor, the original work's propensity to parody sentimental romance, and the way Vera seems unaware of Celestina's earliest audiences' expectations of the plot, thus marking the differences between the early modern Celestina and its representation in late twentieth-century film. Iglesias for these reasons finds a fundamental limitation, an artistic flaw, in Vera's cinematic version. She does not interrogate Vera's possible motivations for all this in his film and in the other adaptations of Celestina she examines. Vera's Celestina revolves around a darkly serious plot which the director renders through often violent, hyperrealistic images that I find both fascinating and very effective in his reading of Rojas's book from Vera's vantage point of the late twentieth century. Although Iglesias's interests are to be praised, I believe that Vera's cinematic work, as well as that of others, should not be judged for its alleged absence of...