Dialogism and the Sonnet:
Silence, Reading and the Ethics of Knowledge
in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
This paper proposes to demonstrate how the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz configures an informed reader who is led to question the epistemological and ethical presuppositions conveyed by poetic conventions through an interpretive strategy that centers itself around the silences and erasures of the literary text. These erasures and excluded voices come into relief through a praxis of reading which reframes official and institutional discourses from the perspective of traditionally silent ¡°participants¡± in the text. I seek to illuminate these strategies through an analysis of two love sonnets which provide a working model of the dynamic relationship between reader and text. In these two poems Sor Juana first reveals how the real presence of the object of desire, as Other, is artificially erased and, then, how this object of discourse can be recovered through a hermeneutical peformance which takes an oblique view—looking awry—at the silent stain in the text behind which the voice of the object of desire is figuratively sealed. Such an interpretive stance necessarily calls into being a new ethics of reading and of knowledge. We will see that this contestatory ethical posture reconfigures the search for knowledge around excluded and marginalized voices in order to analyze how the conventions of official discourse inform and deform the construction of knowledge through an act of culturally-specific valorization which is erased in its moment of performance.
One of the most striking chracteristics of the criticism of the seventeenth-century, Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, is the manner in which her biographical circumstances are read as if the life and death of the poetess were themselves a literary text. Sor Juana has been read as a proto-feminist (Merrim, Arenal, Feder, Sabat Rivers), as the embodiment of a nascent Creole consciousness (Jara and Spadaccini), and as a symbol of Mexican national (mestizo) identity (Paz).[1] In other words, the analysis of her literary and epistolary texts tends to place her writings as well as her historical persona into narrative structures which find their ultimate realization and justification in the present act of interpretation. I do not think it would necessarily surprise or even concern Sor Juana that her texts have become subject to readings of this type; in fact, one of the lessons of her literary and philosophical project is that reading is by definition a personal act which cannot, nor should it attempt to, escape the historical circumstances which inform its production. This idea that any act of reading, or writing for that matter, is historically specific and, ultimately, political is at the crux of her contribution to literary and historical studies. As Elena Feder writes in her intertextual study of Primero Sueño and ¡°La Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz,¡± ¡°Sor Juana¡¯s work foreshadows one of the most effective and resistant conclusions of contemporary feminists, the radical insistence that the personal is political, to which she adds her singular perspective on the ways in which the private and the public (dis)join one another¡± (518).
As many critics have pointed out, Sor Juana constantly underlines the fact that she is a woman writing in a man¡¯s world, calling attention to the particular circumstances in which her creative act is embedded. Of course, there are different reasons for such a strategy, many of them having to do with the implicit dangers that her appropriation of discourse carries. In both ¡°La Carta Atenagórica¡± and ¡°La Respuesta,¡± for example, she frames her writing as an act of obedience in response to ¡°requests¡± made by superiors, in effect, waving responsibility for the effects of her defiant posture and underlining the fact that these are the thoughts of a writer who is situated on the political and social margins. For Octavio Paz, these strategies of self-preservation direct the eye of the reader to consider that which is not written yet still present in the very real circumstances of her writing: ¡°Her work tells us something, but to understand that something we must realize that it is utterance surrounded by silence: the silence of things that cannot be said¡± (24). These strategies call attention to writing as an act of public performance and open it up to scrutiny, revealing both its relationship to power and its implicit dangers.
One result of this insistent contextualization is that whenever Sor Juana picks up a discursive form she immediately underlines its conventional nature. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari, the fact that she is a woman who writes from an ¡®other¡¯ point of view, ¡°sends language racing [and] places the public language¡¯s system of variables in a state of variation¡± (97). Such a strategy creates critical distance and forces official discourse to occupy a minority status, bringing about the questioning of its presuppositions. By refusing to erase her feminine presence from the construction of knowledge, Sor Juana calls attention to the fact that ¡°an assemblage of enunciation does not speak ¡°of¡± things; it speaks on the same level as states of things and states of content¡± (Deleuze and Guattari 87). The reader of such texts is, in a matter of speaking, taught to approach the act of reading from an ¡°Other¡± perspective, as the mediating influence of the author¡¯s rhetorical decisions is made to stand side-by-side with the knowledge which has been produced, instead of disappearing from the scene behind a mask of universal authority.[2] It is my contention that Sor Juana, by handling discursive tools as if they belonged to someone else—which in fact they do—says as much about the political nature of reading as the political nature of writing, and that her works teach the reader to search the margins for silences and erasures where the contingent ¡°assemblage¡± of a text¡¯s production can be found.
Sor Juana¡¯s sonnets, many of which were addressed to her patroness María Luisa Manrique, la Condesa de las Paredes, have attracted the attention of critics for a number of reasons, including the nature of the relationship between the two women.[3] As Feder points out, ¡°the fact that the body of a woman could contain a mind like Sor Juana¡¯s has been seen as an aberration of nature; her vocation, as indicative of a sexually pathological inclination; her life and letters, as anomaly¡± (515). Octavio Paz, for instance, evidently could not have the protagonist of his allegory of Mexican national identity be a woman unless she was in some sense masculine. In his mind her literary ¡°...transgression is a move towards maleness,¡± (83) when in fact it is her very femaleness which places her in a transgressive position in relation to the symbolic order of the Counter Reformation. Nor is Paz alone in his efforts to qualify the issue of Sor Juana¡¯s gender by emphasizing Sor Juana¡¯s neo-Platonic understanding of an androgynous human soul. Though it is certain that Sor Juana stresses the idea the soul is neither male nor female in more than one poem, (Sabat-Rivers) this in no way mitigates the very real presence of gender markers throughout her literary production, nor does it erase the historical realities confronted by a Creole woman in baroque New Spain. My position here is that the ¡°truth¡± of the issue of sexual preference is hidden behind the masks of Sor Juana¡¯s poetic personae, and the fact that she only ever admitted to writing one text ¡°for pleasure¡± makes it somewhat risky to conjecture on the personal value of her sonnets with any amount of certainty.[4] The desire of Sor Juana¡¯s poetic voices is always very consciously mediated by the language in which it is expressed. Georgina Sabat-Rivers deflects this issue most effectively when she writes ¡°she presents intellectual concerns that are not limited to woman but belong to the human race in general, concerns always considered essential to man¡¯s thought, such as how to establish knowledge of a universal sort¡± (145).
In these two sonnets, for example, although the discursive roles of poet-lover and object of desire are reversed, the poetic voice occupies both male and female positions: that of the beloved as well as the poet-lover. The opening sally in the lyric joust comes under the heading ¡°No quiere pasar por olvido lo descuidado.¡±
Dices que yo te olvido, Celio, y mientes
en decir que me acuerdo de olvidarte,
pues no hay en mi memoria alguna parte
en que, aun como olvidado, te presentes.
Mis pensamientos son tan diferentes
y en todo tan ajenos de tratarte,
que ni saben si pueden agraviarte,
ni, si te olvidan, saben si lo sientes.
Si tú fueras capaz de ser querido,
fueras capaz de olvido; y ya era gloria,
al menos, la potencia de haber sido.
Mas tan lejos estás de esa victoria,
que aqueste no acordarme no es olvido
sino una negación de la memoria. (151)
Here we have a perfect example of Sor Juana¡¯s tampering with an institutionalized literary genre by inverting the categories of poet-lover and object of desire. The male voice and the female voice take up each other¡¯s place markers thus forcing the reader to come to terms with an anamorphic or deformed reflection of the traditional or institutionalized sonnet.[5] The female voice now becomes the active molder of discourse, and the male ¡°voice¡± occupies the position of the object of desire, seemingly powerless over a discourse which attempts to define his (no)place in relation to the poet-lover.
Nevertheless, there are enough conventional characteristics in the poem for the reader to place the sonnet in relation to more traditional articulations of its form. The topos corresponds to that species of sonnet in which the poet-lover, having been rejected by the object of his desire, takes up the task of loosening the hold that the beloved once held on his affections through the act of forgetting. The strategy by which this is accomplished in the baroque generally consists of an acceleration of the ravages of time on the physical beauty of the amada which culminates in an expression of desengaño, in which the poet laments the fact that he was ever fooled by the beloved¡¯s beauty, which is afterall fleeting. If we take Luis de Góngora¡¯s sonnet CLXVI, which begins ¡°Mientras por competir con tu cabello...¡± and ends ¡°se vuelva, mas tú y ello juntamente/ en tierra, en humo, en polvo, en sombra, en nada¡±, we can see how the poet-lover begins the poem with a description of the beauty which first captivated his desire and ends with a demonstration of how time will convert this transitory beauty into the abject nothingness from whence it came. Granted, Góngora¡¯s poem is a particularly brutal example of the lyrical revenge of the spurned lover—a product of the Cordoban¡¯s singular genius—, nevertheless his virtuoso-rendering of a conventional theme underlines rather than disguises a fundamental truth concerning the generic exigencies of the sonnet: the object of desire is a construct which seemingly holds sway over the mind of the poet-lover only as long as his desire holds out. In his stylistic analysis of Góngora, Dámaso Alonso writes ¡°Abstraen [las metáforas] del objecto sus propiedades físicas y sus accidentes, para presentarle sólo por aquella cualidad, que para el poeta, en un momento dado son las únicas que tienen estético interés¡± (Estudios 73). After the object of desire loses her aesthetic interest—which corresponds to her rejection of the poet¡¯s advances—the poet will have his vengeance for her rebuff by placing an expiration date, if you will, on his adoration. Her refusal of his advances is followed by his attempted erasure of her existence. Moreover, the poet removes himself from the scene by making the woman¡¯s vanity and self-deception, along with the inexorable movement of time, responsible for the fading of his love. If the beloved participates in the discourse of the poem at all, it is as an absence marked by the indirect statement of her rejection of the poet¡¯s ardor.
Sor Juana begins her poem with just such an indirect statement; but in this case it reports the (masculine) beloved¡¯s protest concerning the poetess-lover¡¯s ability to forget the amorous spell that he once held over her. This subject-object inversion, moreover, is not the only problem that Sor Juana¡¯s poetic game presents, as the disparaged (male) object of desire seems to have motivated this poetic reaction of the poetess by insisting on hanging around after the act of forgetting has ostensibly taken place. This problematizes the conventional topos—tem¡©poral decay ending in oblivion—and illuminates what is normally erased in the process of narration. That which is forgotten and erased from the memory of the poet becomes present, and the poem is reoriented around the performative act and aesthetic conventions of forgetting. In fact, this sonnet and the one which follows carry on a dialogue concerning the possibility of forgetting something which is inscribed as a silence or erasure in the memory of the discursive performance.
In this first sonnet the poet-lover declares not only that she has forgotten the object of desire, Celio, but that his very existence as love object depends on her expression of a desire which has now faded, because her ¡°pensamientos son tan diferentes.¡± Unlike the example of Góngora, the poetess emphasizes the fact that time and vanity are not the sole or even the primary mediating factors in this forgetting. Her thoughts are revealed as the prime movers of the discursive fading of the other, and they have changed—perhaps due to time, perhaps not—; thus the poetic voice does not hide itself behind forces external to its expression, such as Celio¡¯s vanity or the intervention of time. Moreover, the poetic reality of the beloved is revealed as an empty placeholder, a structural necessity, for the desire of the poetess: ¡°Si tú fueras capaz de ser querido,/ fueras capaz de olvido; y ya era gloria,/ al menos, la potencia de haber sido.¡± The object of desire here is not a real masculine (or feminine) presence but rather a potential reality that is called into being by language: in Deleuzian language, ¡°an order-word.¡± [6] The call which the poet sends to the object of desire is not one that can be refused in the world of the poem. Nor, as we shall see, is it a call that can be safely answered. Moreover, according to the poet, the forgotten object of desire should be grateful for the mere possibility of existence which the rhetorical apparatus of the poem has offered. Love, in Sor Juana¡¯s lyric poem, is not so much a theme or metaphysical force of the universe as a reflection of the poet¡¯s narcissistic efforts to construct an object of desire equal to her necessities which are capable of changing at any given moment. The poet-lover is unveiled not as the victim of Cupid¡¯s arrow, but rather as the fabricator of a weapon with which the amorous prey is hunted down and annihilated. The final tercet expresses as devastating a negation as ever Góngora or Quevedo wrote: ¡°Mas tan lejos estás de esa victoria,/ que aqueste no acordarme no es olvido/ sino una negación de la memoria.¡± In the mind of the poet there is not even the memory of having forgotten the desire once felt for the beloved. This memory is absolutely erased from the poem, and we are left, much as in the case of Góngora¡¯s poem, with nothing but the erasure of the act of forgetting.
Several ¡°truths¡± that heretofore had remained on the margins of the sonnet, cloaked in the silence and shadows of its vanishing structure, stand out in the harsh light of Sor Juana¡¯s rendering of its form. First, the existence of the object of desire is brought about by the conscious effort of the poet and is not a positive reality that the poet simply describes. Second, although the theme of the spurned lover is immanent to the form of the sonnet, this does not mean that the poem must necessarily elevate the status of the suffering poet nor his (her) abilities out of time in order to idealize the object of desire or, conversely, wreak vengeance on the ¡®self-possessed¡¯ beloved. And third, the forgetting of the beloved does not come about through the impersonal workings of time or the indifference of the beloved but is, instead, the result of an active performance on the part of the poet. To return to Deleuze and Guatarri, Sor Juana makes the language of the sonnet ¡°stammer,¡± revealing in the gaps of its movement the contingent desire behind the valorizations which become naturalized and mystified through the poetical tropes. [7]
In the second sonnet, which presents a dialogic response to the first, speech is now bestowed on Celio who reads and interprets Clori¡¯s poetic chastisement and questions whether her act of forgetting can ever be successful. It is entitled ¡°Sin perder los mismos consonantes, contradice con la verdad, aún más ingeniosa, su hipérbole:¡±
Dices que no te acuerdas, Clori, y mientes
en decir que te olvidas de olvidarte,
pues das ya en tu memoria alguna parte
en que, por olvidado, me presentes.
Si son tus pensamientos diferentes
de los de Albiro, dejarás tratarte,
pues tú misma pretendes agraviarte
con querer persuadir lo que no sientes.
Niégasme ser capaz de ser querido,
y tú misma concedes esa gloria:
con que en tu contra tu argumento ha sido;
pues si para alcanzar tanta victoria
te acuerdas de olvidarte del olvido,
ya no das negación en tu memoria. (151)
The male poet-beloved responds to the harsh rebuff of the woman he has evidently spurned with a lesson in dialectics which literally deconstructs and rebutts the first poem stanza by stanza. He begins by stating that as an object of desire he is indeed present in her mind through the very act of forgetting: ¡°alguna parte en que, por olvidado, me presentes.¡± In other words, he inhabits the mark of an absence of what once was, even if this existence is that of a silent ruin or fragment. Next he points out that if her feelings really had changed she would now allow the advances of her new pretender ¡°Albiro¡± instead of writing punishing verses about her ¡°forgotten¡± love, Celio. Indeed, she does herself a disservice by attempting to persuade him and herself that she feels differently than she really does, rejecting, in effect, her own desire.
The dialogic encounter with the poetic object brings facets of its construction that had been placed purposefully out of focus into plain view. Celio, for example, recognizes that his existence as poetic signifier, or object of desire, has nothing to do with his actual physical and temporal presence but rather is nothing more than a verbal image, a sign which empowers Clori to control his discursive reality and by extension articulate and simultaneously disguise her own desire. What Sor Juana is pointing out is that Clori (the poetess) in her rejection of Celio is rejecting her own desire. Celio, qua object of desire, is a chimera of her imagination. When this chimera does not return her gaze in the appropriate manner the desire itself becomes shameful and must be erased. In essence, the desire that she seeks is an impossible expression of an ideal, a mystified phantom of her own imagination whose loving gaze guarantees her ideal narcissistic image of herself. By encarnating this ideal gaze in a real subject, Clori¡¯s desire is shown to be impossible and therefore shameful. Celio, however, challenges Clori¡¯s right to erase this desire by silencing him, making of him what she will to satisfy her own demands.
In her ¡°Sátira filosófica,¡± a much more pointed analysis of phallic desire, Sor Juana points out the impossible position of the idealized object
Hombres necios que acusáis
a la mujer sin razón,
sin ver que sois la ocasión
de lo mismo que culpáis:
si con ansia sin igual
solicitáis su desdén,
¢¯por qué queréis que obren bien
si las incitáis al mal?¡±
Con el favor y el desdén
tenéis condición igual,
quejándoos, si os tratan mal,
burlándoos, si os quieren bien.
Opinión, ninguna gana;
pues la que más se recata,
si no os admite, es ingrata,
y si os admite, es liviana. (109)
Sor Juana shows that woman¡¯s vanity is nothing more than the result of the impossible double bind in which she is held by male discourse and desire. Caught between two absolute imperatives, to reject absolutely or to love shamelessly, woman as object of desire has no free will; and unlike the similarly conflicted male protagonist of a baroque honor play, there is no sense of agency with which she may take action to protect her name. Since the lyrical articulation of the object of desire is an attempt to transcend the temporal and material limitations of human existence, in effect, merging the voice of the poet with atemporal beauty and truths, there is no place in the poem for a real feminine presence. What is created is a recognition of the poet¡¯s god-like mimetic abilities which come about as a result of the erasure of the contingent moment of creation. By framing this narcissistic project in a dialogue between an identified poetic voice and its bothersome object Sor Juana is able to question the presuppositions of the love sonnet and point out the violence that lyric poetry commits on real human subjects.
Similarly, Celio¡¯s strategy is to keep moving himself back into the center of the picture, refusing to occupy the marginal position that Clori has prepared for him. The first tercet of the second poem points out an error in the logic of Clori¡¯s narrative of forgetting by reiterating that she had already conceded to Celio a capacity for attracting her desire. By his reasoning, if he never were desirable her attraction for him would never have been comprehensible. The death blow to her argument, however, does not arrive until the last tercet in which Celio explains how Clori¡¯s remembering to forget the act of forgetfulness is not in fact a sign of the negation of her memory of him. Behind the sign of erasure the silenced voice of the ¡°forgotten¡± object of desire waits to be picked up by the critical reader (leyente) who questions the conclusions as well as the presuppositions of the act of writing.
How does this take place? First, the reader Celio does not take it for granted that the poem is describing a given reality, but instead interprets Clori¡¯s declaration as an expression of her desire to take control of her feelings and of Celio¡¯s existence by denying them a place in her memory. Celio, in other words, reads the words as ¡°an assemblage of enunciation,¡± subject to specific historical circumstances, rather than an unequivocal expression of a given reality.[8] Much like a psychoanalyst or detective, Celio reads Clori¡¯s language by looking for the expression of a lack whose truth is to be found not in the finished poetic artifact but in the contingent act of its performance. Instead of knowledge, what interests him is how the desire of Clori, the moment of her poetic act, and the rhetorical strategies of representation interact in a temporal expression of a desire for power. Discourse is understood here as the symptom of a will to mimetically bring an imagined reality into being rather than the holder of knowledge and truth itself. Second, Celio highlights the contradictions in Clori¡¯s discourse that belie her true feelings. The syllogistic style of her writing does not hold up to the light of negative dialectics. By picking up on the absences and silences in her poetic tour de force, he is able to expose the impossibility of her project of forgetfulness. In the attempt to erase her desire along with Celio¡¯s memory she reveals that they are two views of the same fantasy. Moreover, annihilation of the object would be tantamount to self-annihilation, since the desire only takes form through the mediation of an object. Through his absence he motivates her desire as well as her rancor; when present he endangers both.
Finally, it becomes apparent through Celio¡¯s ingenious word play that Clori¡¯s demonstration of the fact that she has forgotten Celio¡¯s memory is, in part, the effect of syntactical virtuosity. He rearranges ¡°los mismos consonantes¡± in order to expose a semblance of Clori¡¯s true desire and find symptoms of his own very real presence in the silences of the sonnet¡¯s language: ¡°mientes, olvidarte, alguna parte, presentes, diferentes, tratarte, agraviarte, sientes, capaz de ser querido, gloria, ha sido, victoria, olvido, memoria.¡± Words are linguistic tools that are subject to infinite polysemous possibilities which can only be pinned down through the location of the concrete temporal circumstances of their articulation. He rearranges the rebus, recentering its thematic sequence around the silences and then makes them ¡°speak volumes.¡±
The hermeneutical effort required for deciphering baroque poetry is a structural necessity, as can be seen in the prose writings of poets like Góngora and Quevedo, as well as the philosopher Baltasar Gracián. As Edward Friedman points out in a study of Góngora, ¡°Spanish baroque poetry lends itself to the imagery of combat, in that the reader must struggle with the mysteries of the text and must use all resources available to decode and recode verbal messages¡± (55). Yet, for the likes of Góngora and Quevedo, poetic meaning is made more difficult in order to more effectively impress upon the mind of the reader the new knowledge that the poet has ¡°discovered.¡± In the words of Gracián, ¡°La verdad, cuanto más dificultosa, es más agradable: y el conocimiento que cuesta, es más estimado¡± (50).[9] The poet in this case constructs a labyrinth through which the reader must pass in order to appropriate knowledge, which is presented as if it were substantial and prior to its assemblage of enunciation. His personal voice, along with its ¡°political¡± desire, vanishes from the scene of knowledge and gives way to an illusion of disinterested mastery and ingenuity. Mary Malcolm Gaylord notes that the reading subject is lured into a similar mentality of linguistic gamesmanship: ¡°the very same emphasis on the text as object can be turned around to focus on this reading subject who engages in exegesis as a kind of adventure, as heroic exercise of entendimiento and voluntad, moving as in a quest or a hunt toward discovery¡± (93). Thus poet, reader and artifice, all together, are raised to a plane from which they can gaze down on a newly revealed, or uncovered reality. To attain this level, however, the reader must lay down the inquisitive gaze and occupy the position that has been articulated for her/him, or risk missing the ¡°knowledge¡± that the poet offers. The ethical imperative for the reader is to respect the genius and wit (ingenio and agudeza) of the poet, the structural integrity of the poetic artefact and, most importantly, the ontological status of the reality which is suggested. Her/his own symbolic power is increased by refusing to question the bases which inform the power of the symbolic other. Knowledge is produced via the lack of transgressive inquisitiveness.
Sor Juana understands perfectly well how this symbolic economy functions, and she rejects its foundations as well as its product. The ethical imperative for Sor Juana¡¯s reader is much more dangerous and subversive for all parties concerned: these include the integrity of the poetic act, the forms of poetic language, and the symbolic status of the reader. By underlining the concrete historical circumstances of her act of creation, the Mexican poetess forces the reader to consider the contingent nature of the ¡°truths¡± that she offers. René Jara glosses Ortega y Gasset when he remarks on this particular characteristic of baroque art: ¡°En vez de ser conceptos absolutos, el ser y la verdad son una ocurrencia que tiene lugar en las circunstancias únicas y singulares de cada acto interpretativo¡± (42). These are the intellectual weapons that the reader must take on the ¡°ethical¡± quest for knowledge: ¡°For Sor Juana reading is not a frivolous act; it is a mission implicated in the search for knowledge and truth¡± (Jara and Spadaccini). Like Cervantes¡¯s lector mío or Borges¡¯s leyente, Sor Juana¡¯s reader is rarely allowed to mistake language for truth nor permitted to lose sight of the fact that what stands behind the voice of the narrator is an artist who is consciously creating fictions.
To conclude, I would like to point out that part of my rationale for placing Sor Juana¡¯s poetry alongside that of writers like Gracián and Góngora has been to contrast her literary project from theirs. However, by understanding what it is that Sor Juana is doing with the sonnet it is also possible to reposition literary criticism of writers whose works traditionally have been studied more for their stylistic or manneristic virtuosity and aesthetic innovations than their potential for political readings. Sor Juana¡¯s critical project opens up the possibility of not only approaching a ¡°political¡± reading of a gongorista or conceptista sonnet, but also questioning a literary history that has traditionally privileged the non-political reading of poetry. Hers is a writing praxis which constantly forces the reader to become other, to read as if looking at a mirror, observing the performative characteristics of reading, in order to better be able to study the literary artifice itself and understand how it mediates and obscures our access to the world. All discourse is subject to similar interpretive vicissitudes if the reader is armed with the appropriate hermeneutical tools. As Leo Mazzota observes in a study of Petrarch: ¡°Language betrays desire, both in the sense that it reveals desire, is its spy, and because language bears an essential otherness to the desire that generates it¡± (294). Both of the sonnets analyzed here end the first line of the first quatrain with ¡°mientes¡± and the last line of the last tercet with ¡°memoria.¡± What Sor Juana seems to be telling us is that due to the inherently polysemous nature of its signs and the infinite posibilities of its production all language lies, and, more importantly, all language remembers.
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–––. Góngora y El ¡°Polifemo¡±, vol. 1. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1967.
Arenal, Electa. ¡°Where Woman is Creator of the Wor(l)d. Or Sor Juana¡¯s Discourses on Method.¡± Merrim, 124–142.
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Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la. Obras Completas. Prólogo de Francisco Monterde. México: Editorial Porrúa, 1989.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. and Foreword Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Feder, Elena. ¡°Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; or, The Snares of (Con)(tra)di(c)tion.¡± Jara and Spadaccini, 473–529.
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___. ¡°The Construction of a Colonial Imaginary: Columbus¡¯s Signature.¡± Jara and Spadaccini, 1–95.
___. ¡°Allegorizing the New World.¡± 1492–1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing. Ed. Jara and Spadaccini. Hispanic Issues IV. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. 9–50.
Mazzota, Giuseppe. ¡°The Canzionere and the Language of the Self.¡± Sph 7s, 1978. 271–296.
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___. ¡°Mores Geometricae: The ¡°Womanscript¡± in the Theater of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.¡± Merrim, 94–123.
Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana, or the Traps of Faith. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1988.
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Sabat-Rivers, Georgina. El Sueño de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Tradiciones literarias y originalidad. London: Tamesis Books, 1976.
___. ¡°A Feminist Rereading of Sor Juana¡¯s Dream.¡± Merrim, 142–162.
[1]Concerning Sor Juana¡¯s ¡°feminism(s)¡±, Electa Arenal, writes ¡°I want to argue that in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz¡¯s poetry and prose we find prefigurements of the theoretical modes of twentieth-century feminist scholars, especially literary critics¡± (125). Sabat-Rivers, similarly says ¡°She invents a new feminine rhetoric to theatricalize everyday aspects of women¡¯s lives, making them significantly relevant to the adventure of scientific thought¡± (1991 154). Stephanie Merrim writes ¡°Its metaphysical dimensions now fully in view, it becomes clear that the womanscript encompasses a fair sampling of Sor Juana¡¯s most central concerns: knowledge, God, woman, transgression, and so on¡± (117). Discussing Creole consciousness, Jara and Spadaccini write ¡°Her passion for knowledge and her rancor toward a world built for men lead her to abandon the court of the Viceroy and opt for life in a convent. These motives, coupled with the jealousies that were prompted by her brilliant intellect, are prevalent topics in her poetry and prose as well as a symptomatic feature of the first phase of Creole consciousness that is beset by feelings of persecution and guilt¡± (1989, 33); and later, ¡°As a Creole, Sor Juana is concerned with the search for power, truth, and freedom which are represented in the poem through the figure of the mythical Phaeton¡±(38).
[2]René Jara writes of a similar strategy of reading which is articulated by Julio Cortázar in his short story ¡°Axolotl:¡± ¡°Y la transformación alegórica de la actividad mental del lector que se transforma en leyente al darse cuenta que él mismo debe asumir la agencia de un cambio en su propia actividad de lectura, convertirse en axolotl, ser capaz de mirar el mundo desde su propia intimidad y entonces extimirse: ser el joven que mira y es mirado¡± (13).
[3]Octavio Paz, for example, writes ¡°There are so many poems written to María Luisa Manrique, the emotions so intense, that they cannot be ignored. One thing is for certain: from 1680, the relationship with the Countess of Paredes became the emotional center of Sor Juana¡¯s life¡± (195); and later, ¡°Most of Sor Juana¡¯s biographers, while aware of her relationship with María Luisa Manrique de Lara, have preferred to skirt the issue, although one bookishly self-assured scholar, Ludwig Pfandl, armed only with a few texts on psychiatry, has attempted to uncover the secrets of her soul¡± (196). Paz¡¯s preemptive dismissal of Pfandl belies the fact that he himself performs a rather crude freudian psychoanalysis of Sor Juana¡¯s psyche.
[4]Feder translates from ¡°La Respuesta:¡± ¡°I do not remember ever writing anything for my own pleasure except a scrap of paper they call The Dream¡± (473).
[5]The bibliography of works on pictorial anamorphosis and its uses in literature is extensive. The most influential for this study include Bakhtin¡¯s The Dialogic Imagination, Ernest Gilman¡¯s The Curious Perspective, Slavoj Zizek¡¯s Looking Awry, and the chapter on anamorphosis in Jacques Lacan¡¯s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
[6]Deleuze elaborates on the relationship between language and power, explaining that ¡°the order-word is a death sentence; it always implies a death sentence, even if it has been considerably softened, becoming symbolic, initiatory, temporary, etc. Order-words bring immediate death to those who receive the order, or potential death if they do not obey, or a death they must themselves inflict, take elsewhere¡± (107).
[7]¡°It was Proust who said that ¡°masterpieces are written in a kind of foreign language.¡± That is the same as stammering, making language stammer rather than stammering in speech. To be a foreigner, but in one¡¯s own tongue, not only when speaking a language other than one¡¯s own. To be bilingual, multilingual, but in one and the same language, without even a dialect or patois. To be a bastard, a half-breed, but through a purification of race. That is when style becomes a language¡± (Deleuze and Guattari 98).
[8]Deleuze and Guattari point out that an immanently materialist analysis of discourse leads to the location of its temporal coordinates which are masked behind its insistence or will to universality: ¡°A type of statement can be evaluated only as a function of its pragmatic implications, in other words, in relation to the implicit presuppositions, immanent acts, or incorporeal transformations it expresses and which introduce new configurations of bodies¡± (83).
[9]In his book on the Polifemo Dámaso Alonso quotes Góngora: ¡°si deleitar el entendimiento es darle razones que le concluyan y se midan con su contento, descubierto lo que está debajo de esos tropos, por fuerza el entendimiento ha de quedar convencido; y convencido, satisfecho. Demás que como el fin del entendimiento es hacer presa en verdades, que por eso no le satisface nada, si no es la primera causa...¡± (133).