A brief summary of the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea) is a book written in theatrical form (no 3rd party voice - all narration is in the 1st person) that is considered to be one of the greatest works of Spanish literature. It is better known by the name of its central protagonist, La Celestina.
La Celestina is a story of how society expects us to bluff our way through life - and when we refuse to play along, and try to live an honest life, we should expect to be decried as the most despicable, egotistical, hypocritical liar of all.
La Celestina is sometimes said to be second only to Don Quixote; the two works are influenced by and influential within the picaresque genre. The picaresque is the quintessentially Spanish literary genre, and is, in brief, a realistic and usually humorous narrative of the lives of people from society's bottom rung.
Picaresques are often satirical social commentary, and it is common that the rogueish characters that inhabit them actually speak with the author's voice - for many authors, this was to allow them to deny voicing the opinions they evince, by claiming that if these were their opinions, why would they put them in the mouths of witches, thieves, and prostitutes, since the association with these 'honorless' characters inherently deprecates the ideas they evince.
La Celestina's persistent trope is the idea that hope (esperanza) and salvation (salud) are fleeting, because nearly everyone is a hypocrite - and those who refuse to be hypocrites will suffer terribly, and for nothing. Celestina herself is described as a puta vieja (old whore) who is treated like a vieja honrada (honorable old woman) in respect for her tremendous social influence. Celestina works as a madame and a blackmailer, and possesses the blasphemously miraculous power of being able to restore a woman's maidenhead through witchcraft.
Celestina is hired by Calisto, a middling hidalgo (nobleman) to help him win sexual access to Melibea, the virgin daughter of a wealthy hidalgo. Celestina switches the desired Melibea with her own daughter - who is a prostitute who exclusively caters to monks and priests - with the aide of Calisto's disloyal servants, Sempronio and Parmeno, who help Celestina extort Calisto into poverty.
Calisto's initial plan to win Melibea was to pray for her, but Sempronio cautions him against the appearance of piety:
An overly devout man will be called a hypocrite, sir. If you have a passion, suffer it at home, don't let the world feel it. Don't let strangers guess your trouble, since the tambourine is in the hands of those who will know how to play it.
In the end, Calisto discovers the betrayal, and laments:
Where is truth? Who is without falsity? In what place shall I not find impostors? Where shall I find a frank enemy, a true friend? Which is the land where treachery is unknown? Alas, why plant in me this hope that leads to my destruction?
Celestina shrugs off this plaintive cry, saying "It is too much to believe everyone; yet not to believe anyone is a mistake".
How should we know whom to believe, in Celestina's mind? Consistency. As she says, "what counts is not the first error, but the persevering". Celestina applauds all consistency. Speaking to Parmeno, whose mother was a prostitute, she says:
Once they bound your mother in a public square, with a painted witch's cap on her head. But these are trifles; people must suffer such things in this world in order to maintain their lives and their honor! And how little did she mind it, or let it change her sense! She did not give up her profession on that account, not she! She even got better at it.
One of the most innovative parts of La Celestina is that it reverses the theatrical convention that when a character is talking to himself, he is being honest - in La Celestina, all monologues are lies and self-deception, implying a tremendous cynicism.
It may not surprise you to learn that the author of La Celestina, Fernando de Rojas, was a lawyer, a politician, and a marano (a term originally intended to be derogatory for a Jewish person who pretended to be a Christian to avoid inquisitorial sanction; similar but more general terms are cryptojew, converso, and anusim [in Hebrew]). In his work, Rojas identifies truth as solely determined by external qualities, not intrinsic ones; put another way, Rojas believes that whatever society believes is truth is true.
If you've read this far, you may be wondering if I think that La Celestina holds lessons for us yet, despite being 511 years old. Absolutely - the way Dennis Kucinich is treated reminds me of the fate of the character Pleberio. Pleberio's name is a play on plebeian, the archaic term for the working class, yet he is the play's most noble character. Extraordinarily principled, Pleberio is the character the others least respect, because they believe that one's public face must be a mask. That everyone must be scheming, bluffing, conniving.
I disagree with this perception; not because I'm certain it isn't true in Kucinich's case - I'm certain of nothing that isn't rigidly internally consistent, and life never is - but because this perception that everyone is bluffing, everyone is willing to compromise their principles, is self-fulfilling. The claim that it is naive to trust a politician implicitly permits politicians to be untrustworthy - it disarms one of the ability to be credibly outraged by hypocrites and liars. We need to hold ourselves to higher standards than that; higher standards than the Republicans hold to.