SIGNS OF NATURE AND THE NATURE OF SIGNS IN THE SONNETS OF

Recent literary theory and criticism perhaps most differ from their precedents by reducing the role of interpretation and expanding the role of self-analysis. One might call this phenomenon a crisis of the critical conscience or an urge for accountability in the analytical process. The prefix meta—as in metacommentary, metacriticism, metatheater, metafiction, metapoetry, metadiegetic narrative, and so forth--is a watchword of contemporary critical sensibility, an identifying sign of the self-conscious approach to literary texts. Deconstruction and the new rhetoric, inspired by structuralism even as they deviate from it, point to the structures and strategies which underlie texts and which often run counter to apparent or surface structures. A tenet of the “new historicism,” currently in fashion in Elizabethan studies, is that, through distance, one may determine the ideological forces behind a given text, forces “invisible to the culture in which the text was produced and accessible only from the privileged perspective of remoteness” (Belsey, paraphrased in Pechter 299). There is, thus, a radical distinction between the North American New Criticism of the 30s, 40s, and 50s--which viewed poetic texts in isolation from their creators and consumers, and, in a sense, from the historical record--and the “newer,” self-reflective, and often more skeptical views espoused since the early 60s. Semiotics, the science of sign systems, provides a type of mediation between the divergent critical currents of the present. Semiotics treats all objects as signs, and the various semiotic models work to place signs, including the language of literature, in context, to study its forms and signifying functions. Whatever one's critical orientation might be, it would be difficult to discuss the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz without reference to the “self and circumstance” of the author or to the contexts implicit in or generated by her poetic creation.

There is an obvious paradox in the life and works of Sor Juana, a paradox captured in the subtitle of Octavio Paz's important study, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe. Sor Juana the poet and intellectual vies with Sor Juana the nun. Sor Juana the woman contends with a social hierarchy and with a literary canon invented and sustained by men. The interplay of social, spiritual, and creative impulses marks the historical Sor Juana, as well as the Sor Juana reconstructed through readings of her texts. In his essay on Fray Luis de León and San Juan de la Cruz in Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry, Pedro Salinas calls attention to what he terms the “peculiarity of our mystics, their realistic sense, their exact and selfless performance of the daily duties of their calling, and at the same time their prodigious capacity for detachment from the temporal, for living in the absolute” (101-02). The principal motif of this poetry--escape--becomes paradoxical when the poet uses symbols of “profound material reality” to describe pure spirituality (120). The message here is that the poet intent upon seeking the higher spiritual realm must take recourse to the signs of this world. (This is a dilemma not unlike the double bind of deconstruction, which refutes the linguistic, or logocentric, premises of Western culture by means of the discursive conventions being refuted.) The conflict widens when the poetic goals are more profane than sacred, when the person who has taken holy vows wishes to practice “art for art's sake,” to explore secular feelings and language. And the gap becomes especially notable when the poet is a woman.^[1]

In a chapter entitled “The Word Made Flesh: Magic and Mysticism in Erasmian Spain” in his study The Birth and Death of Language: Spanish Literature and Linguistics, 1300-1700, Malcolm K. Read notes that Erasmus “gave birth to a religious movement characterized by a profound suspicion of language” (100). Recognizing the corrupting potential of language, the Erasmians favored “a kind of language that had been stripped of all its refinement. The humanistic delight in the aesthetic value of language has gone: the word serves merely to ‘sprimir los concetos de vuestros ánimos,’” as Juan de Valdés puts it in the Diálogo de la lengua (Read 115). In addition, in Renaissance Spain there lingers a dichotomy based on gender, in which deeds connote the masculine and words the feminine. And according to Read, “Being a sexual activity, speech is more suspect in some groups than in others, particularly when it is affected and ornate. Feminine indulgence in language is condemned by Alfonso de Valdés [Juan‘s twin brother, in the Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón]: ‘ ... porque el callar en las mugeres, especialmente donzellas, es tan conveniente y honesto como malo y deshonesto el demasiado hablar’” (113). Baroque discourse is the antithesis of direct speech and of directed silence. The language of Golden Age Spanish poetry contains its own theoretical presuppositions, which would certainly include an interest in words both as conveyers of ideas and as things of beauty. By appropriating the poetic conventions of Baroque Spain--by breaking the silence, as it were--Sor Juana strays from accepted protocol for a member of a religious order and for a woman. As a poet, she seeks a voice of her own^[2] and a place in earthly and celestial domains.

Sor Juana's most ambitious work, the Primero sueño, is truly impressive in its synthesis of Baroque form with theological and philosophical subtleties lacking, for example, in the Soledades and in the Polifemo of Góngora. The Sueño possesses what may be termed Baroque decorum, a self-consciously difficult language at the service of an equally difficult conceptual scheme. The most striking feature of the sixty-five sonnets of Sor Juana may be their range--not of subjects, which are fairly traditional--but of treatments, or poetic modes. The sonnets alternately respect and violate decorum to produce an internal movement or dialectic. Sor Juana not only rewrites the intertext, as do all poets, but she rewrites her own work. This paper will consider this process in three of Sor Juana’s sonnets, those numbered 147, 148, and 158.^[3] I would like to suggest that this sonnet sequence exemplifies, or reifies, the crisis facing the artist whose authority is always in question. The first sonnet offers a variation on a common theme, the second a refashioning of the conventional message, and the third a deconstruction of sorts of the initial premise. Gerard Flynn notes in Sor Juana's attitude toward nature the influence of Scholasticism, which adheres to a strict order within every part of nature and which allows only God to take exception to that order. This explains, for Flynn, what he calls the poet’s “profound respect” for the social order (95-98). What I will attempt to show is, to a degree, an opposing perspective: that in her poetry Sor Juana perhaps may find a means to circumvent the rigid hierarchies that dominate her existence. The enterprise more likely stems from psychological than from political stimuli, so that in the case of Sor Juana poetic expression is not an act of rebellion, but a form of release. It is also, I would submit, a commentary on the nature of signs.

The three sonnets by Sor Juana bear a relation to a process described by Julia Kristeva in an essay entitled “From Symbol to Sign,” although Kristeva refers specifically to narrative. The essay focuses on a lessening of faith in the power of the word, a shift from absolute and predetermined meanings to more capricious or contextually determined meanings. Kristeva argues that “from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, the symbol was challenged and weakened. This did not make it altogether disappear but it did assure its passage (assimilation) into the sign. The transcendental unity supporting the symbol--its other-worldly wrapping, its transmitting focus--was called into question” (65). The symbol has its own history; in the words of C. S. Peirce, it “operates above all by virtue of an institutionalised and learnt contiguity between signifier and signified” (quoted in Kristeva 71). The sign, on the other hand, depends on conditional rather than prescribed meanings. According to Kristeva, once the sign “is free from its dependence on the ‘universal’ (the concept, the idea in itself), it becomes a potential mutation, a constant transformation which despite being tied to one signified, is capable of many regenerations. The ideologeme [or semantic thrust] of the sign can therefore suggest what is not, but will be, or rather can be. And this future tense is accepted by the sign not as something caused by extrinsic factors, but as a transformation produced by the possible combinations within its own structure” (71-72). The essay concludes with a list of the basic characteristics of the sign, stressing its difference from the symbol:

—It does not refer to a single unique reality, but evokes a collection of associated images and ideas. While remaining expressive, it nonetheless tends to distance itself from its supporting transcendental basis. (It may be called arbitrary.)

—It is part of a specific structure of meaning and in that sense it is correlative: its meaning is the result of an interaction with other signs.

—It harbours a principle of transformation: within its field, new structures are forever generated and transformed (72).

Within this framework, the “reading” of symbols is an acquired knowledge, a learned activity, a positing of universals, while “reading” of signs is a more open venture, in which such factors as function and context affect meanings. The fact that signs may be devalued or reconstituted symbols not only gives the signs a multiple temporal base, but frequently also leads to an ironic juxtaposition of signifiers. Kristeva contrasts the immediacy of the sign with the permanence of the symbol. Equally significant is the symbolic “residue” of the sign, that is, the deferred significance of the symbol as it becomes a sign. The present (or future) status of the sign depends upon its lost--or, more properly, recast--symbolism. In sonnets 147, 148, and 158, Sor Juana takes the rose “from symbol to sign.” The stability of the symbol in the first poem moves toward a glorification of the instability of the sign in the third poem, which is, in effect, a metacritical response to the conventions that inform it.

The rose is, arguably, the ideal poetic symbol. From classical antiquity onward, it has represented beauty and the impermanence of youth, of beauty, and of earthly existence. It has been the source of numerous images and a model for themes such as carpe diem. Sor Juana's three sonnets are apostrophes to the rose and, it would seem, apostrophes--respectively--to poetic tradition, semantic variation, and literary ingenuity. There is a feeling of past, present, and future, as well as an increasing subjectivity, in the poems. If in the first sonnet Sor Juana confronts the work of previous poets, in the second and third she makes herself the subject--or the target--of the composition. She challenges the symbol around which she constructs the first poem and, in a manner of speaking, frees it from the binds of tradition. The rose is, of course, the most obvious common denominator of the sonnets, but the rhetorical structure of each poem also has points of contact with the others. The refurbishing on the formal level has a conceptual counterpart in the modified messages and changing “voices” of the sonnets. Sor Juana experiments with poetic expression and with the rules of decorum that govern her life as a woman, as a nun, and as a writer. Her personal history is relevant if one is to appreciate the daring nature of her work and the reciprocity (one might be inclined to say conversion) of medium and message. The emergence of the authorial persona--the poetic, subjective “I”--stands in opposition to the woman isolated from the world and part of a community which shuns the egocentric and the defiant. The very act of creating poetry is a symbolic gesture, and the sonnets directed to the rose may add to the intellectual autobiography of the poet.

In sonnet 147, Sor Juana captures the rose in all its glory: in full bloom, fragrant, vividly colored, basking in its beauty, and oblivious to its fate. There is an irony in the adjective divina in line one. The poet begins with a deceptive description as a correlative of the theme of mortality. The lesson of the poem is that the rose is not divine and that we must learn from its example, that we must recognize the brevity of this life. “Magisterio purpúreo en la belleza” in line 3 and “enseñanza nevada a la hermosura” in line 4 operate on two planes: the rose is a model of beauty--a teacher, a guide--which also demonstrates the destruction of this beauty. The two metaphors are themselves guides to the motif of learning by example. The hidden conceits of verses 3 and 4 are “activated” by the following lines, “Amago de la humana arquitectura, / ejemplo de la vana gentileza.” The metaphor (or periphrasis) within the metaphor of line 5 addresses the true object of the apostrophe: humankind. The movement from positive example to negative example is reflected in the semantic shift from “gentil cultura” in line one to “vana gentileza” in line 6. Nature unites life and death--the joyful cradle and the somber grave--in the rose and in the “human form,” and the poet makes this fundamental point by joining antithesis, chiasmus, prosopopoeia, and metonymy.

The tercets add an exclamatory flourish to the message of exemplarity. The haughty rose scorns the threat of death, but as it withers it gives off “signs” of death and proof of life's vanities. In the final verses, the poet sustains the antithesis and the lesson: “ ... con docta muerte y necia vida / viviendo engañas y muriendo enseñas.” The rose is a guide, not to beauty but to mortality. Its “learned death” is the consequence of its “foolish life,” a life in which it did not heed signs of imminent destruction. Through these signs (“en señas”), the rose may teach (“enseñas”) men and women to guard against the illusions of immortality. The disillusionment--desengaño--follows a careful reading of the signs. By inverting the force of the early metaphors, the poet gives readers a similar task by asking them to analyze these signs in another context. The sonnet teaches us about beauty by rejecting the aesthetic vision of the first quatrain in favor of an analogy between the dying rose and human beings facing death. The rose as a symbol of beauty and of the brevity of life is ultimately a teacher, whose short-lived splendor is a reminder of the human condition.

Sonnet 148, well grounded in tradition, is noteworthy for its reversal of expectations. The first quatrain would seem to introduce a lesson on time and beauty reminiscent of the preceding poem, and perhaps an admonition to “seize the day.” The poetic lexicon draws from Sonnet 147, as in the case of “la vana gentileza” and “cuán altiva en tu pompa,” which become “ostentaba feliz la pompa vana.” The poetic speaker Celia (not Juana) has a message for the rose. In the carpe diem paradigm, a man generally gives advice to a young woman. Here, the woman apostrophizes to a rose. Despite the familiar admonition “ ... Goza ... / el curso breve de tu edad lozana” of lines 5 and 6, the particular execution and the rationale to follow affect the direction and significance of the statement. If sonnet 147 warns against youthful presumption, sonnet 148 delights in the moment of glory. Celia directs herself to the rose--and, one may assume, “a sus semejantes”--not in cautionary terms, not with her mind on spiritual matters, but to foreground the present. She indeed wants the rose to relish its brief luxuriance, and, indeed, the rose will die on the morrow, but what precisely is the message here? It is, simply, that the beauty enjoyed today cannot be destroyed by death and that it is preferable to die young (“siendo hermosa,” line l3) so as to avoid the ravages of age (“y no ver el ultraje de ser vieja,” the final verse). In order to remove the message from a specifically Christian context, the poet refers to “hado” (line 5) and “fortuna” (line 13). To a degree, the sonnet inverts the hierarchy of heaven and earth. Through its beauty, the rose attains a type of immortality, something akin to fame, which will remain even after death. Death, as represented in the second tercet, is desirable, not by virtue of Christian dogma and the superiority of eternal life over the mundane, but because death may “freeze” youth and beauty in their highest state. And one may accept this option without fear of fate ("sin temor del hado"), without the burden of theology.

In Sonnet 148, Sor Juana distances herself from the speaker and gives the message a secular edge. The poem lauds beauty for its own sake and sees death as a means of preserving the glow of youth. It is as if Sor Juana's “deceptive” portrait, to which she addresses her most famous sonnet (145), were no longer a “false syllogism of colors” or a “delicate flower in the wind,” but something more permanent and more powerful than its subject. Old age is no longer a logical transition to eternal life, but a final affront to vanity. And for Celia, whose thoughts are on this life, experience teaches--“la experiencia te aconseja,” line 12--that the lucky die young. Sonnet 147 censures the rose (and the young and beautiful) for their pride. It points to the end of the road and to the lesson to be learned from the rose's brief moment in the sun. Sonnet 148 exalts--seeks to immortalize--that moment. In the first poem, the “divine” rose is shown to be ephemeral. In the second, what is called the “empty splendor” of the rose becomes a sign of everlasting beauty. Sonnet 158 does not employ this kind of internal shift; its course and its deviation from the traditional course are clear from the beginning. In the third sonnet, Sor Juana once again addresses the rose, but without the moral-theological underpinnings of the first or the earthly alternatives of the second. Sonnet 158 is a metapoem, a poem whose subject is poetry itself. It is a work about tradition, about signification, about the author as poet, and about the sonnets that precede it.

The opening apostrophe to “Señora doña Rosa” sets a jocular tone. The rose is no longer “amago de la humana arquitectura” but “hermoso amago de cuantas flores miran sol y luna.” The double metaphor and the lesson of sonnet 148 are now rendered in tautological or anticlimactic terms: the rose is like all other flowers. Verses 3 and 4 further question the nobility of the rose by challenging the description of sonnet 148 and the intertext in general. How can the rose be a lady if she is still in the metonymical “cradle” of youth, and how can she be subject to the ravages of human time if she is “divine”? The author of the Primero sueño here examines the validity--the logic--of figurative language. The second quatrain continues to pursue the issue of logic, ironically through a rhetorical question and with recourse to hyperbaton, prosopopoeia, and periphrasis. The quatrain essentially asks how the rose--tied to this world, and defenseless against the whims of nature--can presume to contemplate what lies beyond? And yet the poet, through her use of the apostrophe, implies that this meditative rose is capable of understanding her figurative discourse and offers the image of a rose “begging” for nourishment, for water, the “turbio humor de un cenagoso lago” of line 8. The rose’s fall from divinity is thus punctuated by linguistic mudslinging.

The tercets of sonnet 158 recall Lope de Vega's “Soneto de repente” (“Un soneto me manda hacer Violante”), the second verse of which is “que en vida me he visto en tanto aprieto” (Rivers, Poesía lírica 266). After a conventional show of authorial modesty--“mi mal limada prosa(!),” line 10--Sor Juana supplies a concluding statement, or warning: “y advierta vuesarced, señora Rosa, / que le escribo, no más, este soneto / porque todo poeta aquí se roza.” This ending completes the trivialization--demystification, deconstruction--of the earlier poem and of its literary roots. The rose loses its symbolic vigor as an ideal of beauty and as an admonition to those who would overvalue this beauty. It becomes, instead, the sign of a poetic rite of passage. One must get one's feet wet--as conveyed through the pun, se roza--by composing a poem about a rose. In the sonnet to her portrait, Sor Juana curses the illusions of art and reduces the subject (ironically, herself) to nothingness. In sonnet 158, the rose becomes a marker, not of existential but of expository concerns, a shadow of its former self. In lines 9 and 10, Sor Juana speaks of losing respect, when, in fact, it is her poem which treats the rose with disrespect. In the sonnet sequence, she would seem to place her allegiance on the side of creativity, of individual authority, and of changing signs. She is not betraying the rose but bestowing her trust on poets who may create it anew in their verses. In this implied ars poetica, she anticipates Vicente Huidobro, who invokes his colleagues thus: “Por qué cantáis la rosa, ¡oh Poetas! / Hacedla florecer en el poema” (I 219). When Sor Juana sings of the rose, she makes and remakes her object. And her voice is, if nothing else, polyphonic.

Sor Juana’s examination of the rose reflects her affinity to letters and her need for self-expression. In the “Respuesta a Sor Filotea," she comments: “ ... desde que me rayó la primera luz de la razón, fue tan vehemente y poderosa la inclinación a las letras, que ni ajenas reprensiones--que he tenido muchas--ni propias reflejas--que he hecho no pocas--han bastado a que deje de seguir este natural impulso que Dios puso en mí” (Obras selectas 774). This was a woman with more than one calling, who believed that both serving God and pursuing one’s God-given talents were possible. For her, God was the source, not the adversary, of reason and intelligence. And it is precisely “this natural impulse” that led her to consider the validity, and the stability, of signs. Sor Juana's poetry, like her life, is informed by the security of her faith, a faith unintimidated by reason. The writings show “the anxiety of influence” in the most comprehensive sense, for the poet must justify her endeavor and her role. The literary object is not just a manifestion of the self, but an extension of the sheltered and inspired persona.

Works Cited

Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980.

Clamurro, William H. “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Reads her Portrait.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 20.1 (1986). 27-43.

Huibodro, Vicente. Obras completas de Vicente Huidobro. Prólogo de Hugo Montes. 2 vols. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1976.

Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor. Obras completas de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Ed. Alfonso Méndez Plancarte. 4 vols. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1976 [1951-57].

________. Obras selectas. Ed. Georgina Sabat de Rivers and Elias L. Rivers. Barcelona: Noguer, 1976.

Kristeva, Julia. “From Symbol to Sign.” Trans. Sean Hand. In The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 62-73.

Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982.

Pechter, Edward. “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama.” PMLA 102.3 (1987): 292- 303.

Perelmuter Pérez, Rosa. “La estructura retórica de la Respuesta a sor Filotea.” Hispanic Review 51.2 (1983): 147-58.

Read, Malcolm K. The Birth and Death of Language: Spanish Literature and Linguistics, 1300-1700. Potomac, Maryland: Studia Humanitatis, 1983.

Rivers, Elias L., ed. Poesía lírica del Siglo de Oro. Madrid: Cátedra, 1979.

Sabat de Rivers, Georgina. “Sor Juana y sus retratos poéticos.” Revista Chilena de Literatura 23 (1984): 39-52.

Salinas, Pedro. Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry. Trans. Edith Fishtine Helman. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1966.

^[1]The intellectual dilemma of Sor Juana finds expression in the autobiographical and understandably complex “Respuesta a Sor Filotea,” written in 1691 (Obras selectas, ed. Georgina Sabat de Rivers and Elias L. Rivers 769-808). For an analysis of the text, see Perelmuter Pérez, “La estructura retórica de la Respuesta a sor Filotea.”

^[2]Influenced by Octavio Paz's study, Clamurro notes that “perhaps the most interesting problem of poetic voice . . . is Sor Juana’s willingness to give up her own voice to Góngora's, as the attempt to place herself solidly in the poetic tradition of the Spanish Baroque further undermines the autonomy and poetic authority of her own text” (39). His examples are Sor Juana’s “A su retrato” and Góngora’s “Mientras por competir con tu cabello.” In contrast, Sabat de Rivers finds “el sello avanzado y original que supo impartirle a su poesía de tradición de siglos nuestra Fénix Americana, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” (“Sor Juana y sus retratos poéticos” 52).

^[3]The sonnets are from the Obras selectas (627, 628, 633). Readers may also consult Méndez Plancarte I (278-279, 284).

147

En que da moral censura a una rosa, y en ella a sus semejantes

Rosa divina que en gentil cultura

eres, con tu fragante sutileza,

magisterio purpúreo en la belleza,

enseñanza nevada a la hermosura.

Amago de la humana arquitectura,

ejemplo de la vana gentileza,

en cuyo ser unió naturaleza

la cuna alegre y triste sepultura.

¡Cuán altiva en tu pompa, presumida,

soberbia, el riesgo de morir desdeñas,

y luego desmayada y encogida

de tu caduco ser das mustias señas,

con que con docta muerte y necia vida

viviendo engañas y muriendo enseñas!

148

Escoge antes el morir que exponerse a los ultrajes de la vejez

Miró Celia una rosa que en el prado

ostentaba feliz la pompa vana

y con afeites de carmín y grana

bañaba alegre el rostro delicado;

y dijo: --Goza, sin temor del hado,

el curso breve de tu edad lozana,

pues no podrá la muerte de mañana

quitarte lo que hubieres hoy gozado;

y aunque llega la muerte presurosa

y tu fragante vida se te aleja,

no sientas el morir tan bella y moza:

mira que la experiencia te aconseja

que es fortuna morirte siendo hermosa

y no ver el ultraje de ser vieja.

158

Jocoso, a la rosa

Señora doña Rosa, hermoso amago

de cuantas flores miran sol y luna:

¿cómo, si es dama ya, se está en la cuna,

y si es divina, teme humano estrago?

¿Cómo, expuesta del cierzo al rigor vago,

teme humilde el desdén de la fortuna,

mendigando alimentos, importuna,

del turbio humor de un cenagoso lago?

Bien sé que ha de decirme que el respeto

le pierdo con mi mal limada prosa.

Pues a fe que me he visto en harto aprieto;

y advierta vuesarced, señora Rosa,

que le escribo, no más, este soneto

porque todo poeta aquí se roza.