Quotation, Plagiarism, Allusion, and Reminiscence: Intertextuality in Celestina1

CHAPTER 4 Quotation, Plagiarism, Allusion, and Reminiscence: Intertextuality in Celestina1

Amaranta Saguar García

Intertextuality has been a favorite topic of literary theory since Julia Kristeva first coined the term in reference to the Bakhtinian notion that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and trans- formation of another.”2 Because the term “quotation” may refer to fragments or passages of varying lengths and the imprecise nature of the term “text” it- self, scholars have approached intertextuality from different angles. Some, like Roland Barthes, extend the definition of “citation” and “source” beyond the realm of the written word, defining text as “a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.”3 Others, like Gérard Genette, limit intertextuality to the “actual presence of one text within another.”4 I will adopt a rather restrictive approach to intertextuality in this chapter. Here, I will rely on Genette’s definition of intertextuality as a “relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts,”5 and on the three possible degrees of copresence he defines: quotation, plagiarism, and allusion. In its most explicit and literal form, intertextuality is the traditional practice of quoting within quotation marks, with or without specific references to the source. In another less explicit and canonical form, it is the practice of plagiarism, which is also a literal borrowing, but without acknowledgment of the source. Similar, however less explicit, is the practice of allusion: an enunciation whose full mean- ing presupposes the perception of a relationship with another text to which it

1 I wrote this piece during my research stay at the University of Münster as an Alexander von Humboldt Post-Doctoral Research Fellow. 2 Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, trans. Alice Jardine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 34–62, p. 37. Originally published as “Bakhtin, le mot, le dialogue et le roman,” Critique, no. 239 (1967): 438–65. 3 Roland G. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen, no. 5–6 (1967): art. 3, §5. 4 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newmann and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 2. Originally published as Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982). 5 Genette, Palimpsests, p. 1.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi ��.��63/9789004349322_005 Intertextuality in Celestina 59 necessarily refers by some inflection.6 Because of the particular circumstances of the late medieval and early modern periods that we will examine below, I will necessarily include a fourth degree of copresence: the relationships spontaneously established by the reader with texts not present, but which the reader is reminded of by virtue of a subjective perception of common features, topics, or ideas, and a well-established habit of associative reading. I will refer to this as “reminiscence.” Unlike the subjective relationships among texts implied in either Michael Riffaterre’s definition of intertextuality as “the reader’s perception of the relationships between one text and others that have either preceded or followed it,”7 or in Genette’s concept of transtextuality as “all that set the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts,”8 the above- mentioned subjective relationships are the result of the purely mechanical procedure improperly dubbed as “humanistic reading.”9 Humanistic reading refers to a didactic practice taught at universities in the last decades of the late Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, and which, therefore, is not pertinent for the abstract idea of literariness discussed by Genette and Riffaterre, which only applies to late periods. However, the notion of humanistic reading is essential to understanding the reception of Celestina by its intended audience: people formed in the humanistic method of reading. That the contemporary readers of Celestina followed the methods of humanistic reading is evidenced in the earliest testimony on how the Comedia—the first version of Celestina—was received by its contemporaries. By this testimony, I mean the prose prologue to the Tragicomedia or the extended version of the text:

Some tut-tut, that there is no wit, that the story is too much of a much- ness, that the detail is wasted, that lots more stories could have been spun. Others wax fulsome about the jokes and common adages, praising

6 Genette, Palimpsests, p. 2. 7 “La perception par le lecteur de rapports entre une œuvre et d’autres, qui l’ont précédée ou suivie.” Michael Riffaterre, “La trace de l’intertexte,” La Pensée, no. 215 (1980): 4–18, p. 4 (my translation). 8 See Genette, Palimpsests, pp. 1 and 2–3 for a discussion of Riffaterre’s article. 9 The bibliography on the topic is immense. However, of particular interest for Celestina are Enrique Fernández Rivera, “Una forma no lineal de leer Celestina: El compendio de senten- tiae como mapa textual,” Celestinesca 21, no. 1 (1997): 31–47; and Peter E. Russell, “Discordia universal: La Celestina como ‘floresta de philosophos,’ ” Ínsula, no. 497 (1988): 1 and 3. A less specific but still useful summary approach to humanistic reading can be found in Anthony T. Grafton, “El lector humanista,” in Historia de la lectura en el mundo occidental, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, Roger Chartier, and Robert Bonfil (Madrid: Taurus, 1997), 281–328.