Toward a Baroque Theory of Knowledge in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 

Di William Egginton 

In: Semicerchio LVI (01/2017), “(Neo)Barocco. Poesia del Seicento nella teoria contemporanea”, pp. 31-37. 

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, poet, playwright and polemicist of colonial Mexico, has long been recognized as one of the most important intellectual and cultural figures of the Hispanic tradition, male or female. In this paper, I look at this cultural icon not merely in her role as a canonical author of numerous poetic and prosaic works, but rather as an indicator of the epistemological framework of her historical context, a cultural barometer, if you will, for a time of momentous epistemic changes. To this end I have isolated three ‘case studies’ corresponding to the different genres of Sor Juana’s oeuvre, theater, prose and poetry, and have situated them within a context emphasizing their relation to a specific, contemporaneous conceptual framework: in the first study, I examine one of Sor Juana’s plays, Los empeños de una casa, in the context of its primary, European influence, the Spanish Siglo de Oro , and, in particular, the work of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, finding in it a desire to soften the tyranny of honor she inherits from that tradition; in the second, I present her famous letter,«Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz», as a creative act of enunciating a public self, a response to an interpellation, offering an example of subjectivity that escapes the restrictive dichotomy between freedom and determination; lastly, I read her best known poem, Primero sueño, as the elaboration of a Baroque cosmology, which destabilizes knowledge from it apodictic root in theology without yet being able to ground it in human subjectivity. If there is a commonality to be drawn from these readings, it lies in the insight that Sor Juana’s relationship to her cultural, political and epistemological context may supply a unique perspective from which to understand the cultural, political and epistemological concerns of contemporary forms of subjectivity. 

Theatrical Ideologemes 

Among countless valid and illuminating approaches to the work of Sor Juana is the need to grasp it within a particular literary and cultural tradition, as at once preserving aspects of that tradition while responding to or transgressing others. In the case of her theater, specifically the comedia Los empeños de una casa, that tradition is the Comedia del siglo de oro, the product of the remarkably influential and popular theatrical institution of early 17th century Spain. 

In a short paper I cannot help but begin with more than a handful of presuppositions, among which is a certain conception, perhaps a bit reductive, but for the most part defensible, of the social role this theatrical institution played1. Briefly, the theater of the time served as an immensely powerful nexus for the identification, and exemplary modification, of social values and behavioral patterns. In this larger context, individual plays were often fora for the dramatization of moral issues of extreme relevance to the popular imagination. Thus the theater could propagate or rearticulate certain packages of values, or ideologemes2, which, while receiving individual treatment by the different playwrights, may, nevertheless, by mapped out as a general whole. One such ideologeme is centered around the concept of honor. Among the most intense and sophisticated treatments of the problem of honor in the Spanish Baroque was that of the playwright Calderón de la Barca, who is, at many points in Sor Juana’s play, the direct focus of her response. Of particular interest to the reading of Los empeños de una casa, is Calderón’s, El médico de su honra, an especially dark play in which the protagonist, Don Gutierre, bleeds his wife, Doña Mencía, to death on the basis of a mere suspicion, never proven, that she has been unfaithful. At the risk of oversimplifying Calderón’s intricate plots, I would characterize this play, along with the bulk of his work, as propagating two themes, both more or less endemic to the comedia as a genre: 1) the absolute dominion of ‘reputación’ over actual conduct, and 2) the justification (or at least repeated thematization) of dire measures for the satisfaction of honor. This much I must propose as given in order to suggest that Sor Juana, writing in New Spain about a generation after Calderón, situates her work within a tradition and a genre clearly marked by his influence, while critically questioning both of these ethical tendencies. 

To begin with, Sor Juana is not overly secretive about her problematic relationship with Calderón in this piece. In the second sainete, Arias and Muñiz, two actors in the production of the very same play, ridicule the supposed author as «un estudiante que en las comedias es tan principiante y en la poesía tan mozo, que le apuntan los versos como el bozo» (675)3, and contrast the work to those of Calderón, Moreto or Rojas, whose plays would, in theory, not receive or deserve the disdain of the audience. Certainly the disgruntled comediantes are exaggerated in their criticism of the play; in many respects it follows devotedly the conventions of Siglo de oro drama: to place the honor of one or more characters in conflict; achieve some apex of dramatic tension - either fatal or at least life-threatening; and then successfully resolve the conflict, often through the intervention of some representative of royal authority. Yet, in certain important ways, Sor Juana’s play deviates, not from this sequence of stages, but in the manner in which they are approached and resolved. One of the most striking elements that distinguishes Los empeños de una casa from the classic comedia is that it explicitly problematizes the dominion of ‘reputación’, one of the centerpieces of Baroque ideology4. In the classic comedia, even when the validity of ‘non-public’ behavior is allowed, its importance is completely overshadowed by that of the appearance that behavior generates for the public eye. A man’s honor, which is portrayed again and again as more important than life and possessions combined, is completely contingent on opinion, that is to say, his identity is one with his ‘reputación’. The character in Sor Juana’s play who perhaps most exemplifies the values of the classic comedia is Don Rodrigo, the well-born but impoverished father of the beautiful and talented Leonor. As he says, in a conversation with Don Pedro, 

Bien habréis conjeturado/ que lo que puede, Don Pedro,/ a vuestra casa traerme/ es el honor, pues le tengo/ fiado a vuestra palabra;/ que, aunque sois tan caballero,/ mientras no os casáis está/ a peligro siempre expuesto;/ y bien veis que no es alhaja/ que puede en un noble pecho/ permitir la contingencia;/ porque es un cristal tan terso,/ que, si no le quiebra el golpe,/ le empaña sólo el aliento. (693) 

The metaphoric equation of honor to fragile glass is anything but unusual in the tradition of the comedia; what is so innovative about this scene is the fact that the conversation is taking place at all. Rather than opting to take revenge on Pedro, who he believes has taken his daughter from him, Rodrigo, on the advice of his servant Hernando, decides to reason with Pedro and negotiate for the safety of his honor. One factor that allows for this negotiating room is an awareness that honor and ‘reputación’ are limited to the sphere of public knowledge5, and, more importantly, that the borders of this sphere are themselves negotiable. In other words, public knowledge can be fooled, and as long the parties agree to honor their mutual dishonor, there need be no violence. 

Another way in which Sor Juana problematizes the ethics of the comedia is by way of showcasing certain qualities in undeniably positive characters. In clear contrast to Mencía in El médico de su honra, for whom suspicion is tantamount to guilt and hence death, Leonor is granted benefit of the doubt by Carlos, who, in words very like Sor Juana’s own in certain poems6, actually theorizes the injustice of the double standards that afflict women. 

No, hasta saber cómo vino; que si yo en la casa propia estoy, sin estar culpado, ¿cómo quieres que suponga culpa en Leonor? Antes juzgo que la fortuna piadosa la conduja adonde estoy. (663) 

From such a ‘reasoned’ approach to the problem of perceived infidelity, one can see that Sor Juana is interested in portraying a world in which the prescriptive force of honor, in particular its almost automatic condemnation of women, is far less straightforward than in the world of Calderón. 

A second apparent point of contention for Sor Juana is the implicit justification in Calderón, among other authors of the comedia, of extreme measures for the vindication of one’s honor. In fact, if there is a ‘message’ to the ‘wrap-up’ of the final few pages, it is that problems of honor may be solved by more reasoned, less drastic means. Don Rodrigo’s words make a barely disguised reference to El Médico de su honra, as he adopts a similar, anatomical metaphor: 

Tomad, hijo, mi consejo:/ que en las dolencias de honor/ no todas veces son buenos,/ si bastan sólo süaves,/ los medicamentos recios,/ que antes suelen hacer daño;/ pues, cuando está malo un miembro,/ el experto cirujano/ no luego le aplica el hierro/ y corta el dolorido,/ sino que aplica primero/ los remedios lenitivos [...]. (694) 

If the mere suspicion of dishonor in Calderón occasions radical surgery, Sor Juana clearly favors a more ‘homeopathic’ approach. Not only does she recommend searching out second opinions before deciding on a treatment, she is clearly quite circumspect about resorting to the knife. 

Are the attitudes evident in Los empeños de una casa merely reflective of Sor Juana’s personal feelings about Calderón and the comedia in general? Or, at a broader level do they tell us something about criollo culture in baroque New Spain and its most prevalent social values? Or, finally, are they due more to a historical change in values that would be equally evident in Spanish literature and theater of the same historical period? Clearly, the answer is not any single one of these possibilities, but, more likely, a complex combination of all three, if not others as well. Nevertheless, working to answer them in as systematic a way as possible may lead toward a cultural history that can help explain the propagation of ideologemes and power structures from baroque times to the present. 

Interpellation and its Respuesta 

In his chapter on the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz, ostensibly written by Sor Juana in response to certain public admonitions made against her by the bishop of Puebla, Octavio Paz suggests that Sor Juana is showing herself to be in the grips of a pervasive contradiction, running through the very center of her existence as both a religious and an intellectual. He quotes from the Respuesta: 

he intentado sepultar con mi nombre mi entendimiento, y sacrificárselo sólo a quien me lo dio; por no otro motivo me entré en religión, no obstante que al desembarazo y quietud que pedía mi estudiosa inclinación eran repugnantes los ejercicios y compañía de una comunidad7, 

and in this statement claims to find a striking contradiction between, in the first instance, a desire to renounce her studious inclination, and, in the second instance, the claim that she joined the convent despite her knowledge that the atmosphere would not be conducive to studying. From this explication de texte he teases out a deeper contradiction: namely, ‘la contradicción entre su vocación de solitaria estudiosa y las obligaciones de la vida comunal en un convento.’ 

Whether or not this contradiction indeed corresponds to the particulars of Sor Juana’s ‘actual’ life is of little concern to me; it is quite likely true, but apart from in the Respuesta, signs of this as a central site of struggle do not abound in her work. What is more striking to me is the way in which Paz must force through an interpretation of this passage in order to defend his thesis, an interpretation which, under a closer examination might not appear so obvious. Paz reads the first part of the passage as meaning a renunciation of Sor Juana’s inclination to study, [«lo cual significa, justamente, la renuncia a su estudiosa inclinación»], but such an interpretation is just that, in the most radical sense of a translation into another formulation. Literally, Sor Juana says that she had tried to bury, with her name, her understanding, and to sacrifice it alone to the one who gave it to her. To bury does not necessarily mean the same as to renounce, for it can also mean to hide, i.e. from public knowledge, as she has done with her name. If she is to sacrifice her understanding, it must only be to God, rather than to others. But if the passage is about renunciation, then whatever is sacrificed to God must be an exception, for she certainly cannot intend to renounce her understanding only to God, but to keep it for the rest of the world. 

There is, in fact, a contradiction apparent in this passage and in all of the Respuesta; but it is a far more subtle one than that which Paz would claim against her. Rather, this contradiction lies in the medium of the letter itself, which undermines the official ‘renunciation’ of her public role by making the very act of renunciation a public act. At the same instant in which she accepts the private, cloistered nature of women’s knowledge, she is effectively carving for herself a discursive space in a public realm, and participating in a knowledge and a power of which she is ostensibly deprived. 

Two models of ideological discourse that are similar in fundamental ways bear mentioning here: Althusser’s interpellation and the genealogy of the confession proposed in Foucault’s Histoire de la sexualité8, both of which emphasize the act of responding on the part of the subject of ideology: responding to a call or a naming in Althusser’s model, and to a questioning in Foucault’s. In both models, the subject is subjected to an identity, a pre-structured place in an ideological order or a ‘grid’ of power relations, by means of an answer to a query by some representative of power. My position is that such an understanding of the interpellative function of the law or of power is incomplete. In this I follow Slavoj Zizek’s critique of Althusser, in which he argues that what is truly constitutive of subjectivity is that interpellation, the call of the symbolic order of representation, always misses its mark, is always stained by some irreducible excess9. The contradiction that I have suggested is the primary trope of the Respuesta is an excellent illustration of just this dialogic and constitutive relation between the call of power, and the response which situates a subject in relation to that power, and, in some fundamental way, in excess of it. 

One of the great lines of argumentation in the Respuesta is Sor Juana’s defense of her desire for knowledge, in which she ranges from the autobiographical detail of childhood anecdotes to a general and erudite statement on the nature of a woman’s right to knowledge. Each of these arguments is organized around a specific caveat or escape-clause: that Sor Juana’s pursuit of knowledge is a private affair, and that all incursions of her work into a public realm have not been her doing. Even her defense of women’s pursuit of knowledge acknowledges that it should be private: 

y al fin resuelve, con su prudencia, que el leer públicamente en las cátedras y predicar en los púlpitos, no es lícito a las mujeres; pero que el estudiar, escribir y enseñar privadamente, no sólo les es lícito, pero muy provechoso y útil. (Obras 840) 

Yet, while couching her defense of a woman’s right to study in these terms, terms ‘demanded’ by propriety, values, patriarchy, in short, the symbolic order of power, Sor Juana reinscribes the contradiction previously mentioned: the very act of proclaiming the necessary privacy of a woman’s knowledge is at the same time an act of public reason, by virtue of being a persuasive polemic launched against a representative of power. In her narrative account of herself, in which she describes that self in relation to certain parameters of acceptability, she at once creates a discursive space that enters into a problematic tension with that normative space dictated by the interpellative discourse, producing an excess of self that remains unaccounted for. 

In the work of both Zizek and Lacan, this excess of ideology is produced by the splitting of the subject into the ‘I’ of the utterance, and the ever-receeding sujet d’énonciation. It is this latter subject that inhabits the excess and escapes the standardization that discursive power seeks to impose. Toward the end of the Respuesta, in an often cited passage, Sor Juana claims never to have written of her own volition, ‘de tal manera que no me acuerdo haber escrito por mi gusto sino es un papelillo que llaman El sueño’ (845). It is, of course, commonplace to refer to the Repuesta as a prose version of that epic quest for knowledge; but it is not so common to remark that in this very remark the contradiction has returned, that the same words that announce this lack of volition in her writing are written entirely of her own volition. They are the words of that other subject, that place of enunciation which, while straining to account for a Sor Juana who would fit the precepts of her ideological environs, exceeds those very limits in the narration of a self who is never entirely accountable. 

Baroque Anxiety 

What can a poem, even one of the intellectual scope of Sor Juana’s Primero Sueño, reveal about the epistemological horizons of its historical context? I must certainly begin by admitting freely the limits of such a use of poetry: one cannot merely assume that a poem is the expression of a collective consciousness; most poems are written by individuals, who, as imbued as they may be with the mentality and ideology of their environment, will necessarily inflect what they write with the problems and experiences that are nearest to them. Furthermore, poetic language tends to problematize the expression of the day-to-day, to emphasize the ‘form of expression’ over the ‘substance of expression,’ which, while always in part conventional, may correlate more to a moment in a poetic tradition than to a broader context of structures of thought and perception. On the other hand, if the work of a given poet is read among that of others of her time, certain themes or general preoccupations may emerge, which, while provoking diverse responses from the individual writers, may, when taken together, delineate some of these horizons and suggest new ways of thinking that period’s historicity10. Such an approach suggests that Sor Juana is ensconced in a historically unique perspective, one which has superseded the medieval episteme’s model of the world as allegory of God, its absolute truth resting with Him alone, as well as the more recent confidence of the unity of earthly (phenomenal) and divine (noumenal) knowledge centered in the God-like figure of Man; and yet, from her epistemological perspective, the human capacity to reason has not replaced the loss of this ground. Sor Juana’s poetic quest for the ultimate grounds of knowledge, in this light, may be taken as symptomatic of an epoch’s liminal state, a distinctly baroque subjectivity not yet securely planted in the ‘enlightened’ confidence of its own reason. 

It is, of course, common enough to read Primero Sueño as a quest for knowledge, although the reasons for and the results of, and even the ambit within which—sleep or dream?—are not always agreed upon. Octavio Paz emphasizes Sor Juana’s familiarity with the prevalent intellectual currents of the time, in particular the new cosmologies stemming from Galileo’s and Kepler’s observations of the skies and the laws of motion11. That is to say, whether or not Sor Juana believed the revelations of the new scientific method or not, she was certainly aware of its claims, and of its disrupting effects upon the long-held tenets of scholastic philosophy. Yet, the knowledge which the poem targets through its extensive allegories is often of a similar vein, one that stretches from the vastly cosmological to the particular and miniscule, and which finds a precarious unity of the two in an almost monistic deity, a primera causa that lends a possible homology to the title’s debated significance. 

My reading will focus on two sections of the poem that recount distinct but similar quests, one by the soul, and the other by the understanding. The fact that Sor Jauna’s poem differentiates these two approaches to absolute knowledge is already an indicator of its unique equivocation between the divine and the profane. As Octavio Paz explains it: 

A diferencia de las escuelas filosóficas de la Antigüidad, cuyo fin último era la sabiduría y la vida recta, ninguna guía mística cristiana prescribe el estudio de los minerales, la botánica, la física y las matemáticas para llegar a Dios. En el Primero Sueño y en la Respuesta la distinción entre los dos órdenes de saber no es clara. Sor Juana defiende su amor a las ciencias profanas por ser un camino hacia las divinas [...]. (495) 

At the same time, if she does acknowledge the interconnectedness of the two modalities of knowing she also makes certain to separate them, treating each as a distinct moment in Primero Sueño. 

The first of these moments describes the soul’s experience atop a mountain whose hyperbolic dimensions have been the focus of much of the previous two hundred lines of verse. From this vantage the soul casts her vision over all of creation: 

En cuya casi elevación inmensa,/ gozosa mas suspensa,/ suspensa pero ufana,/ y atónita aunque ufana, la suprema/ de lo sublunar Reina soberana,/ la vista perspicaz, libre de anteojos,/ de sus intelectuales bellos ojos/ (sin que distancia tema/ ni de obstáculo opaco se recele,/ de que interpuesto algún objeto cele),/ libre tendió por todo lo creado:/ cuyo inmenso agregado,/ cúmulo incomprehensible,/ aunque a la vista quiso manifesto/ dar señas de posible,/ a la comprehensión no, que --entorpecida/ con la sobra de objetos, y excedida/ de la grandeza de ellos su potencia--/ retrocedió cobarde. (Obras 191-192) 

In an extraordinary moment of ‘desengaño’, the soul’s incapacity to apprehend belies the enormity of its vantage; faced with the vision of the totality of creation, the soul, ‘esa centella o chispa de Dios,’ is utterly defeated and forced to retreat and revoke its hubristic intentions. The language with which she describes the effects of this experience on the individual soul cannot help but evoke the ever-repeated judgement of the Baroque on its world, a world turned topsy-turvy. 

Despite its terrifying defeat, however, the soul regroups, and finding a new champion in its understanding, attempts to scale the mountain of knowing by means of scientific methods, as represented by the Aristotelian categories. Beginning with the most basic level of being, the inanimate or mineral, the understanding attempts to climb through the various stages, the vegetable, the animal, in order to arrive at last at the apex of worldly knowledge, that composite of forms that is humanity: 

y de este corporal conocimiento/ haciendo, bien que escaso, fundamento,/ al supremo pasar maravilloso/ compuesto triplicado,/ de tres acordes líneas ordenado/ y de las formas todas inferiores/ compendio misterioso. (195) 

Yet this learning, this grandiose dialectic, is also doomed, as the understanding comes to realize that its analytic power fails even before the least significant inhabitants of the natural world, such as a stream, or a flower. If reason falters before a mere object, how could it ever hope to comprehend the tiniest part of the entire creation? 

Pues si a un objeto solo --repetía/ tímido el pensamiento--/ huye el conocimiento/ y cobarde el discurso se desvía;/ si a especie segregada/ --como de las demás independiente,/ como sin relación considerada--/ da las espaldas el entendimiento,/ y asombrado el discurso se espeluza/ del difícil certamen que rehúsa/ acometer valiente,/ porque teme --cobarde--/ comprehenderlo mal, o nunca, o tarde,/ ¿cómo en tan espantosa/ máquina inmensa discurrir pudiera,/ cuyo terrible incomportable peso/ --si ya en su centro mismo no estribara--/ de Atlante a las espaldas agobiara,/ de Alcides a las fuerzas excediera;/ y el que fue de la Esfera/ bastante contrapeso,/ pesada menos, menos ponderosa su máquina juzgara,/ que la empresa de investigar a la Naturaleza? (197-98) 

Although Sor Juana’s last conceit, in the face of the impossibility of comprehending the totality of knowledge, is a tragic/triumphant recollection of Phaeton, whose fatal arrogance in driving the chariot of the sun serves as a model for her own sleep-quest, this existential heroism only foregrounds the fact that despite its continued attempts, neither the path of faith nor the path of science will lead the soul to Absolute knowledge, nor, what is perhaps more important, to a knowledge of itself, of how its own reason is possible. This is made clear by Sor Juana’s placing the human organism at the highest level of the dialectic of scientific knowledge, and by the explicit comparison between the unfathomable complexity of this creation and that of the flower, whose relatively simple secrets are still beyond the reach of the intellect. 

On the basis of this reading then, can one conclude, with Octavio Paz, that this is the first ‘modernist’ poem, prefiguring the works of Mallarmé and the existentialists? This may, in fact, be a valid interpretation, more because of the historical insights it affords than from any inherent value as a classificatory tool. The indispensable element in such a conclusion, however, is to remember that despite the homologies between Primero Sueño and some of the most typically modernist works, Sor Juana was not a modernist: the fact of such similarities can only imply that her epochal concerns, the preoccupations and conceptual horizons of a baroque subjectivity, are the product of this liminal episteme which I have already advanced. They are not yet the musings of a subject whose philosophical existence rests squarely at the center of her own being; if expression in the twentieth century shares a little of this fundamental uncertainty, it is perhaps because we are no longer so confident, and are, rather, ourselves decidedly Baroque. 

Note 

1 The historical approach I have found most convincing and fruitful is to be found in Maravall, J. A. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, and Teatro y literatura en la sociedad barroca. Barcelona: Ed. Crítica, 1990. 

2 Cf. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981, p.76. 

3 Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Obras completas. México: Editorial Porrúa, 1972. All other quotes from her work in this paper will be from this edition. 

4 Aside from the comedia, cf. the works of Baltasar Gracián, especially Oráculo manual, and El discreto, in: Gracián, Baltasar. El héroe, el discreto, oráculo manual y arte de prudencia. Barcelona: Planeta, 1984. Hernando: «Sí Señor, que el remedio es bien se aplique antes que el mal que pasa se publique» (647). See «Hombres necios...» (109)...Cf. as well, an earlier speech by Carlos (658). Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, o las trampas de la fé. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994, (540). All other quotes from Paz will be from this book. Cf. Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Lenin and Philosophy. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971; and Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la Sexualité. Vol. I: La volonté de savoir. Editions de Gallimard, 1976. 

9 See Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London, Verso, 1989, chapter 3. 

10 While for practical reasons this paper cannot focus on him, I especially have Gracián in mind, whose work reveals many of the same epistemological quandaries as that of Sor Juana, without sharing similar desires or purposes. 

11 See Paz, (491, 501-2), although he stresses a different center, or origin, of these intellectual currents, namely neo-Platonism, which for my purpose here is not particularly relevant.