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What Is “Western Civilization”?
Defenestration in La Celestina, or, Fortune after Columbus
High and low are brought down together, but does anybody rise?
The literature of conquest tracing the incursions of Spanish explorers and conquistadors in the Americas should be read alongside the Spanish belles lettres of the same period, and vice versa. Indeed, in her introduction to Crónicas de Indias, Mercedes Serna spends a good deal of space explaining the literary choices and characteristics of different chroniclers of the New World.
After reading the anthology of explorers’ accounts through the second letter of Hernán Cortés, I am now reading through Spain’s contemporaneous literary output. Without manufacturing any sense of connectedness, I am paying attention to see what motifs may show up in both places.
Modern Spanish literature and modern Spanish theater both begin with La Celestina, composed around 1500 A.D. Almost a century before Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, the Spanish playwright Fernando de Rojas introduced us to doomed lovers in a balcony scene gone bad thanks to the intervention of a crone who was a faulty go-between, with an older generation left to mourn the premature death of their children.
But in laying the groundwork for modern European theater, de Rojas tells a very different, much more violent story than Shakespeare will relate. At the center of this tale is not romance but robbery, not poetry but pandering, a story of plots gone wrong, a story centered upon the chief plotter, the titular character la Celestina. She is a panderer, a conjurer, an old crone who makes her money by feeding the romantic obsessions of young lovers who pay her for her assistance in making their rendezvouses successful. She plots with the friends and servants of her two marks, the lover Calisto and his beloved Melibea, in order to maximize the returns of the engaño, the entangling trickery and profitable deceit the go-between foists upon the hapless pair.
But in pursuit of a greater share of profit, La Celestina’s co-conspirators turn on her and murder her in the upper floor of her home. “!Confesión!” she cries out as she dies, a mortal soul pleading for the sacrament of confession. She dies…
