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This essay is an application of Ren? Girard's critical models to the Celestina, specifically, the concept of "mimetic" or "triangular" desire and the model of violence and sacrifice. According to Girard, violence results from loss of difference, and sacrifice must take place to restore the lost order. In Rojas's text, Celestina, the mediator of desire, de stroys difference by destroying the existing structures of kinship and class. In their place, she sets up a new family order in which she is the mother and the other characters are her children. Celestina's death at the hands of Sempronio and P?rmeno is the first outbreak of violence. Execution?society's attempt to contain violence?and plotted vengeance, which leads to Calisto's accidental death, follow. Melibea's suicide is viewed as the sacrifice necessary to restore order. In closing, Girard's idea of "loss of difference" is applied to the historical context in which Rojas lived and wrote. Violence is fundamental to the Celestina. In the prologue, Fernando de Rojas cites Hera clitus's proposition that the universe is essentially violent: "Todas las cosas ser cre?das a manera de contienda o batalla" (40).2 He next turns to Petrarch to prove his point: "Sin lid y ofensi?n ninguna cosa engendr? la natura, madre de todo" (40). Rojas believes that violence and conflict pervade all spheres of nature. The world of human enterprise is not ex empt; it too is a battleground where violence reigns: "... aun la misma vida de los hombres, si bien lo miramos, desde la primera edad hasta que blanquean las canas, es batalla" (43). The tragic story of Calisto and Melibea and the violent fates of those drawn into Celestina' s web bear the prologue out. With the goal of attaining a clearer understanding of how and why violence occurs in the Celestina, this essay reads Rojas's text using models developed by Ren? Girard. His theory that violence results from a loss of difference is the basis of one model, while his concept of "mimetic" or "triangular" desire, which can destroy differences between individuals, is the basis of another. The link that this critic posits between mimetic desire, loss of difference and violence is found in the Celestina as well and is fundamental to what happens in this text. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard proposes an account of the outbreak of violence within societies. It is often said that violence occurs because of difference, and he quotes the following formulation from the anthropologist Victor Turner as an expression of this idea: "Structural differentiation, both vertical and horizontal, is the foundation of strife and factionalism" (cited in Violence 50). Girard's view is quite to the contrary; he believes that order depends upon difference. "It is not these distinctions," he argues, "but the loss of them that gives birth to fierce rivalries and sets members of the same family or social group at one another's throats" {Violence 49). He finds this view expressed in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. On Girard's reading, loss of difference, with its ensuing violence and chaos, is the subject of the famous "Degree Speech" delivered by Ulysses in the third scene of Act I |
