Sor Juana and Carlos Fuentes between times and lines
Linda Egan
[Indicaciones de paginación en nota1]
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Este artículo es un estudio de la inter- o transtextualidad tanto en como entre Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y Carlos Fuentes. Dicho de manera bajtiniana, es un intento de amplificar y comentar un diálogo entre la poeta del siglo XVI y el novelista del siglo actual. Ya que Fuentes, siguiendo a Mikhail Bakhtin, considera sus textos como enunciados en un continuo diálogo literario sostenido a través del tiempo y del espacio, es lícito suponer que las muchas veces que cita a Sor Juana en sus novelas señala un proyecto transtextual. Quiere que sus lectores escuchen lo que la monja sigue contribuyendo al diálogo intrahistórico de México. A la luz de ello, queremos establecer la importancia del transtexto para Sor Juana y Carlos Fuentes y las semejanzas psicogeográficas, existenciales y, por tanto, ideológicas entre ambos escritores. Queremos señalar los mensajes sociohistóricos que quedan (re)doblados a través de enunciados de personajes, textos sorjuaninos y el narrador de Fuentes en tres de sus novelas: La región más transparente (1958), Terra Nostra (1975) y Cristóbal Nonato (1987).
By 1693, the pressure had grown too great. She was tired of struggling to continue writing. The churchmen had won. She sold her beloved books and in 1694 confessed to being «la peor del mundo» (IV, 523). For her readers, Juana Inés de la Cruz died then, a year before they buried her in 16952. She was 46.
A literary descendent of Sor Juana, Carlos Fuentes says her premature silencing «mutilated» Mexico's history. He believes the poet-nun's unremarked removal from the literary scene established a precedent for repression that crippled their country's independence and modernity (Tiempo 11). However, Sor Juana still speaks to Fuentes and through him via the intertexts in which her voice is heard in many of his novels.
Providing the nun a fictional forum is a poetically just strategy of (re)empowerment, for the interdiscursive mode is as integral to Sor Juana's writing as it is to Fuentes's. Both their works reveal «lo invisible [...] lo no dicho [...] lo olvidado [...] marginado [...] lo perseguido» (Fuentes Geografía 21) against the official —222→ culture's will; both thus give us discourses of detection3. Both ceaselessly challenge us to identify the many languages they quote out of their time and place, often hiding them in (neo)baroque verbal excess.
To those who complain about the difficulty of his prose, Fuentes might reply: «Todo narrador se reserva la facultad de no aclarar los misterios, para que no dejen de serlo; y al que no le guste, que reclame su dinero» (Terra Nostra 660), Sor Juana also openly admits her penchant for «stealing» from other texts. She denies being worthy of an admirer's praise, for example, because she takes the worst bits from many other poets (I, 156-57), slyly turning self-denigration into feminist critique. Her work seduces with a Mona Lisa smile4. Still, she is not above playing a joke on herself. To someone who had entrusted her with a secret, for instance, she murmurs: «El paje os dirá, discreto, / cómo, luego que leí, vuestro secreto rompí / por no romper el secreto». She is so close-mouthed, says the metahermetic nun, she swallowed the bits of paper (I, 249-50).
Intertextual quoting is dramatic grave-digging. It stands the past back up to talk. In the interdiscursive space Fuentes delineates, we might easily imagine Sor Juana reaching through the bars of the convent's visiting room grille and accepting from Carlos Fuentes an autographed copy of, say, Cristóbal Nonato. She might smooth her fingers over the glossy cover picture of the prehistoric god of rebirth, Xipe Tótec5, before reading that she is one day going to be regarded as one of the country's treasured «broads» (viejas; 84), women who, before and after her, added their chromosomes to the nation's cultural DNA. Fascinated with autochthonous Mexican culture and with Mary6, Sor Juana would agree on the transcendent importance of such female figures as the pre-Hispanic mothergoddess Coatlicue, the Indian lover whom Cortés used as interpreter (Malinche), and the Virgin Mary reborn in Mexico as the goddess Tonantzin (Guadalupe). She would be delighted with the notion of the «liberated» soldier-woman (Adelita) of the 1910 Revolution (84)7. She would surely smile ironically over the image of herself as the strong-willed genius who invented an immeasurable portion of the national literature.
«Like bread and love, language is shared with others», Fuentes would say. «There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing» (Myself 27). As she thanked him for the book, he would thank her for helping him write it.
The reader never knows when a Fuentes narrator will open an intertextual dialogue with Sor Juana. Both thinkers are cultural hybrids. Fuentes was born to a Mexican diplomatic family in Panama City, spent his childhood and youth in the United States, Chile and Argentina and has divided his adult years among Mexico, Europe and the United States. He is Mexican «by will and by imagination» (Myself 4). Sor Juana was born to a Spanish family living in an indigenous village just outside New Spain's capital. Although a citizen of the crown, she counted herself a criolla (Sabat-Rivers «Mujer»), Spanish by blood but Mexican —223→ by birth8. The will to identify themselves with Mexican culture is one among myriad affinities that textually bind Sor Juana and Fuentes through remarkably similar preoccupations, wordplays and worldviews.
Both draw deeply on marginal aspects of Judeo-Christian theology, including an androgynous Trinity and a Mary both divine and human. They tend to dematerialize the body in pursuit of a gnostic redemption. Their dualistic-trinitarian mode of perception infuses their worlds with carnivalesque ambivalence9. Each is at once elitist and popular, adept at serio-comically pressing the limits of the Spanish language's expressivity. Their multiple-track thinking tends to destabilize supposedly fixed concepts, including their own subjectivities10. Cervantes' «desfacedor de agravios y sinrazones» (Fuentes Cervantes 87) inspires both to occupy quixotic textual positions against racism, militarism, machismo, hypocrisy, misogyny, censorship, fools and excessive solemnity11. Neither is satisfied with what can be seen on the surface; each will autopsy a word to reach a cause of signification, only to uncover still deeper meanings. One is as excessively baroque as the other; for Carlos Fuentes, Sor Juana is a signifier of excessive signification.
What we cautiously assume as autobiographical in Sor Juana's works casts her as the first (doomed) feminist of a misogynist Mexico that chronologically belonged to the Modern Era but which, as a matter of everyday life, was still notably medieval12. Fuentes would naturally be drawn to call on the unjustly silenced Sor Juana to represent an authoritarian Mexico he wishes to refute. Her baroque moment and style intensify her symbolic adequacy; for Fuentes, «el inmenso vacío entre la realidad y el sueño es llenado por el barroco americano» («Tradición» 19), which is as paradoxical as Mexico itself in his own oceanic baroqueness, Sor Juana's identity seems to merge with Fuentes, a metaphor I will examine in three of his novels.
With the publication of the first of these, La región más transparente (1958), Fuentes began to import a transtextual Sor Juana -diffusively in the evocative richness of his often poetic prose, allusively in the myriad philosophical postures I have described, (con)textually in citations of her works or references to her. The then radical narrative experiment, La region más transparente, inaugurated the so-called Latin American boom, alienated much of the critical establishment and launched Fuentes as a leading light of Mexican letters. All that was icing on the cake. First, he had hugely entertained himself in the novel's intertextual play, especially in resurrecting pre-Hispanic gods.
In Región, however, when he restores her voice, it is to make Sor Juana a co-conspirator who condemns bourgeois pretensions, economic corruption and social inequality. She first appears at an upper-class party, when a European woman complains to Rodrigo Polo that Mexico's middle-class women embody only two female types: «beatas hipócritas fruncidas o unas putas baratas» (176). Who's to blame? Rodrigo asks. Natasha replies: «Los hombres mexicanos, bien —224→ sûr. ¿Qué cosa decía la monjita esa? "Hombres necios", etcétera. Ellos quieren que las mujeres sean beatas o putas, algo definido que no los obligue a gastar mucho la imaginación» (176).
In the context, «la monjita esa» would be an «enunciado metalingüístico» sufficient to bring Sor Juana to mind (Pérez Firmat 6). Still, Natasha cannot resist quoting the first two words of the most-memorized of the nun's poems -the «Sátira filosófica» that begins, «Hombres necios que acusáis / a la mujer sin razón, / sin ver que sois la ocasión / de lo mismo que culpáis» (I, 228). Fuentes allows Sor Juana's verses to speak for his narrator when attributing responsibility for women's dichotomous existence to men. If women are always either saints or sinners, it is because men cannot imagine any other roles for them, says the trio Sor Juana, Fuentes and Natasha.
To make essentially the same point near the novel's end, Fuentes inserts a five-word phrase in a «doble proceso de ocultamiento y revelación» (Ortega 40). When we see Sor Juana's name pronounced amid a baroque catalogue of national icons («mil rostros una máscara Acamapichtli, Cortés, Sor Juana, Itzcóatl, Juárez, Tezozómoc [...]» [455]), we unconsciously prepare for the unmarked quotation several pages later. That citation is further precontextualized by the title given this section of the book, a phrase Alfonso Reyes had coined to evoke the splendour of the indigenous past, in an influential essay on Mexico City's geographic and historical setting («Visión de Anáhuac»). In its current textual site, Fuentes has devoted nearly 500 pages to reversing the meaning of the phrase, «la región más transparente del aire»: At this point in the Región's post-conquest literary dialogue, Sor Juana speaks five words:
| (460; my emphasis) | ||
In the oft-quoted sonnet that begins, «Éste, que ves, engaño colorido», the words are part of an anaphoric series in which Sor Juana emphasizes a negative view of her portrait. She gestures toward her likeness and says to someone dialogically inscribed next to her that «this, which you see», is a lie painted to trick the senses, a flagrant bid for favour on the part of the artist. Among the nine other metaphoric equivalences she lists occurs the verse Fuentes partially quotes: «es un resguardo inútil para el hado» (I, 277), meaning: this portrait of mine is meant to fix my beauty eternally against the destructive effects of age, but the «guarantee» is false; «es un afán caduco» to halt Time, «y bien mirado, / es —225→ cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada»13. To stress her divergence from the perspective of the painting, she accelerates through death and disintegration into nothingness.
Distanced from their original context, the words double their critical irony. The novel's neo-mexica narrator mythically depicts the moment in history when «time stopped» for the Aztecs amid «gritos y silbos» (another intertext, from Bernal Díaz's chronicle of the Conquest)14. Thereafter, the tables of history turn in Mexico and time starts over. In the precise middle of the catalogue of cultural indices listed by Fuentes, a parenthetical comment is slipped in, right after the word canciller (the town magistrate), an administrative authority that Sor Juana judges to be «un resguardo inútil para el hado». We can assume that she and Fuentes together mean that Spain's paternal authority was no guarantor of well-being for any of New Spain's citizens -either Spanish citizens or those of the eventual republic of Mexico.
Through the complex of associations he installs here, Sor Juana's phrase helps us now see Fuentes as the one who stands before a verbal painting to explain that «this [glorious history], which you see», is a trick of the mind, a cultural architect's attempt to placate the conquered, a flattering lie meant to guarantee the place of Spanish grandeur in Heaven, but the presumed protection is false and, to be completely candid about it, «es cadáver, es polvo, es sombra, es nada».
A more massive, nonverbal intertext lies at the discursive centre of Fuentes's 1975 Terra Nostra: El Escorial, the church-palace Felipe II built to eternalize Spanish ideology and empire15. For the king, El Escorial functioned as «a religious text of official discourse» and as «a dwelling place for God» (Williams 53), as well as a tomb. For Carlos Fuentes, El Escorial became «a key metaphor for the directions that Spain took in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, directions that prevented the spirit of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment from flourishing in the Americas» (Williams 63). El Escorial and the paintings that Fuentes also cites become signs of the doubly-repressive social system Mexico inherited from Spain and the conquered Aztec empire. These images are surrounded by oceans of criss-crossing discourses16.
Terra Nostra is at once a «frame», or receiving text, (Sternberg 296) and a prolific number of «exotexts» or portions of text that immediately surround the imported citations (Pérez-Firmat 1-2). While this study privileges the ways in which the novel frames the historico-literary figure of Sor Juana and her writings, Terra Nostra is overall a vast complex of mythological, historical and literary memory. The novel's critical eye roves back and forth over the entire Christian era of Hispanic cultural evolution, from the time of the Roman Empire contemporaneous with Jesus's ministry to the dawning of a new millennium of hope, a re-Creation of the world. In the context of a novel deeply critical of Mexican authoritarianism, Fuentes unwinds a string of «latent or implicit intertexts» (Pérez Firmat 7) to unsilence an irrepressible Sor Juana who, as the —226→ beautiful nun Inés, challenges dominant notions of who she was -and who had the power in her world.
To help us decode Sor Juana's role in Terra Nostra, Fuentes counts on our initial capacity to connect a fictional nun named Inés with an historical nun named Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. To grasp other parts of the historical model's identity, we must «activate» our knowledge both of the Sor Juana as characterized in the documentary evidence we possess and of Juana Inés as she «could have been» had history let us see her thus17.
Fuentes is most challenging when he inscribes Sor Juana in the same kind of implicit chain of symbols that in her texts makes the Virgin Mary a direct descendant of the Great Mother Goddess of prehistory, a «fusion or confusion» of the real and the imagined that Christine Brooke-Rose calls «palimpsest history». For instance, from the «Juana» in the historical nun's name, Fuentes makes a sidewise move to identify his character Inés with Juana la Loca, here depicted as the mutilated mother of Felipe II (El Señor), who in turn is identified with the daughter-in-law Isabel (La Señora), who at one point speaks as the nineteenth-century mad empress of Mexico, Carlota. Making another lateral move, Fuentes links Inés (through Juana la Loca/Isabel/Carlota) to his intertextualized Celestina, also characterized as Carlota.
On the surface of the discourse, Celestina and Inés are separate figures. For example, Celestina delivers Inés to a convent in Seville (530) and later, she repairs the young nun's hymen (602). When Celestina does so, she lines Inés's vagina with some little teeth so that the «fatal» part of femme fatale is parodically emphasized. Inés -and Sor Juana- are thus very powerful female figures who represent threats to men. This allusion to the virgin-repairing crone of Fernando de Rojas's classic La Celestina (1499) strengthens our inclination to position Inés very close to Terra Nostra's Celestina. To do so, we must link the fact that Inés first loses her virginity to El Señor with the additional fact that, as a bride-to-be, sixteen years of age, Celestina had been offered initially to young prince Felipe and, when he proved too squeamish to take her, was then raped by the other El Señor, Felipe's father.
That both Felipe and his father are fused into a single character known as El Señor helps the reader imagine a similar intratextual fusing of Inés and Celestina. Celestina is also characterized as Old Woman, Mother of the Gods (which, for Fuentes and Sor Juana, further implies the Virgin Mary). This mélange of female forces is enriched by traces of Aztec goddesses such as Xochiquetzal (Goddess of Erotic Love) and Tlazoltéotl (Goddess of Filth and Confession), as well as Queen Elizabeth I and the she-wolf who nurtures the rival twin brothers of mythology who founded Rome and, by extension, the Hispano-Roman civilization (Terra Nostra 197-98, 255, 760). Such play with images and symbols elevates the female role in the creation of the world, myth and history: Terra Nostra's Sor Juana becomes a hypostatic Everywoman and Feminine Divine.
—227→At the same time, the Cruz of the nun's name crosses her identity with that of the novel's multiform masculinity. A central motif of the novel, the cross refers severally to the Cross of Christ and Christianity, the cross of human suffering and sacrifice, the crossing of subjectivities, times, spaces and genders, the (criss-)crossing of the ocean between Spain and the New World -and the trinity of Youths bearing a cross on their backs. Through the symbolic linking of Inés with Celestina, an aspect of the nun is also fused, in the last pages, in a hermaphroditic union with Polo Febo. The entire string of cross-associations prepares us for an eventual reading of Terra Nostra's Sor Juana as an androgynous deity, the female half of a gnostic creator god.
As a parody of the historical Sor Juana, Inés is immediately pictured as I imagine Sor Juana's confessor, the forbidding Father Antonio Núñez de Miranda (Alatorre), imagined her in less guarded moments: as a beautiful young woman whose «camisón no puede ocultar la forma de los senos» (Terra Nostra 215). Inés is a slightly androgynous figure with very short hair who makes Felipe exclaim: «¿[...] qué hermosa muchacha, qué blanca, qué ojos tan negros, qué piel de azucena, qué ojos de aceituna [...] quién es?» (216) Portraits of Sor Juana could easily have modelled this description of the nun Inés. There are many full-colour images in Aureliano Tapia Méndez's gorgeously illustrated Carta de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz a su confesor: autodefensa espiritual. In particular, Fuentes might well have had in mind the famous eighteenth-century painting by Juan de Miranda (Tapia Méndez 217) and its luminous close-up of the nun's face with its lily-white skin and intensely black eyes, round like olives (219).
Guzmán, the kings chief huntsman and right-hand man, assures El Señor that this beautiful woman, «aunque virgen, es sabia» (Terra Nostra 216). A novice, Inés appears at that moment both when a nun is scarcely a nun and when a woman is not quite a woman. Although the historical Sor Juana said she became a novice («Entreme religiosa») because she wanted to avoid marriage (IV, 446), Fuentes alludes to many of the lingering questions regarding Sor Juana's uncertain gender identification and her even more mysterious brand of Catholicism when he makes Inés an ambivalent figure -both boyish and sexily female, both nun and not-nun. Born in an indigenous village between Mexico's two most famous volcanos, a town whose Nahuatl name means «in between»; the historical Sor Juana's move to the capital plunged her at a young age into the radically other world of the viceregal court of New Spain, and into the whole Western world through libraries of books. Fuentes's fictional nun is also a provincial, born in Spain's «hot-blooded» Andalusia. She, too, moves to the centre of power, where her father trades her for a title and she later flees to the New World, where she impersonates Sor Juana as a cloistered writer.
At the start of her adventure, Inés is passed from Felipe to Don Juan, another elaborately intertextual character based on the Spanish literary anti-hero, as depicted in both Tirso de Molina's Golden Age masterpiece, El burlador de —228→ Sevilla y convidado de piedra (1630), and José Zorrilla's Romantic drama, Don Juan Tenorio (1844). Inés, who shares the name of one of the infamous seducer's women victims, becomes a willing partner of Don Juan. Her body thus forms a link between Spanish Catholic tyranny and the shape-shifting trio of rebellious, adventuresome and lusty youths marked with a red cross on their backs and six toes on each foot, of which collective character Don Juan, Pilgrim and Polo Febo are aspects, Inés eventually helps us perceive that El Señor and the Triform Youth are the mythical rival brothers, Romulus and Remus, reincarnated18.
Despite her characterization as a lusty wench who enjoys sex, we cannot ignore that Inés is also a pawn of patriarchy, just as was the historical Sor Juana. Inés was offered to the king first by her own father and then by Guzmán, she was raped by the king, handed over to Don Juan, and finally used to torture her lover. Locked with Inés in a mirror-lined room, the young seducer suffers his worst nightmare when faced with the inescapable image of enforced monogamy. Even dour Felipe has a sense of humour19.
Don Juan and Inés eventually escape the prison and, disguised, make their way to the New World. In the dynamic chaos of a liminal space (the dock, the ship, the voyage), Inés is transformed. She drops the attitude of a submissive nun, dons a man's clothing and takes charge. When Guzmán, now metamorphosed into Columbus and later to become Cortés (Terra Nostra 650-57), was preparing to set sail for the New World,
| (656) | ||
Carlos Fuentes wants to amuse us with this vision of a cross-dressed Sor Juana melting into a crowd of men, just as Sor Juana invited our smiles when she cast herself as a male theology student in the loa to her sacred drama El mártir del sacramento, San Hermenegildo. She had always wanted to disguise herself as a man and infiltrate the male world of knowledge and power (IV, 446).
This textual joke prepares us for the most significant sighting of Sor Juana in Terra Nostra, when she is cast as a criollo dissident. As such, she is another of many symbolic «rebels» in Terra Nostra who persist in their quixotic pursuit of freedom and justice. The utopian motifs of «going back to make different choices» and of redemptive love are constants in both Fuentes and Sor Juana; each employs the poetic word to expose Western history's betrayal of Christianity's New Testament promise and to posit anew the non-divisive, (neo)platonic (re)union embodied in gnostic and cabalistic beliefs.
—229→To cast Sor Juana as a criollo dissident, Fuentes makes an ingenious reappropriation of Sor Juana's hermetic poem, Primero sueño, itself a text about rebellions against a series of authorities, from Aristotle's physics to the all-male Christian Trinity (Egan «Donde Dios» 337-40, Sabat-Rivers «A Feminist Rereading»). Ludovico, a scholar-musician usually depicted as a companion of Celestina and the Pilgrim, is also at one point characterized as Felipe's (good) twin (124-26). The lines of poetry Ludovico hands El Señor on returning from the New World are exact quotes from Primero sueño.
In their original context (I, 335), the first four verses of the poem, describing a pyramidal shadow reaching into the heavens, allude on one level to the darkness of night in which the poet's soul escapes its sleeping body and journeys to embrace the totality of Gnosis and thus the Creator: «Piramidal, funesta, de la tierra, / Nacida sombra, al Cielo encaminaba / De vanos obeliscos punta altiva, / Escalar pretendiendo las Estrellas» (Terra Nostra 744). In their new context, these verses suggest the shadow of El Escorial, a doomed ideology rising against the authority of the modern era.
The meaning of verses 111-22 is also radically altered. In Primero sueño, they allude (intertextually) to Actaeon, the formerly illustrious king of Greek mythology who is transformed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds after surprising the hunter goddess Diana at her bath20. In Terra Nostra, the once illustrious king is Felipe. He represents a power that has walled itself off from the changing society around it, refused to recognize the existence of the New World, denied popular demands for justice, ruthlessly silenced dissidence, betrayed its own religious ideals, and finally, its spiritual and moral corruption fitted into a coffin, threatened to decompose the body politic. On reading this assessment of his reign, Felipe is alarmed: «¿Quién se atrevió a escribir de mí estas [...]?» (744) He cannot accept that Inés wrote them; he is so out of touch with reality, he does not realize that she and Don Juan have escaped the room he had locked them in.
In this context, Inés is every nonconforming Don/Dona Nobody who escaped Spain to become Somebody in the New World. At this juncture in the novel, Inés is unmistakably identified with Sor Juana, «Pierde cuidado», Ludovico reassures Felipe: «La monja Inés ha sido silenciada por las autoridades: no escribirá una línea más. Ha sacrificado su biblioteca y sus preciosos instrumentos matemáticos y musicales para dedicarse, como le ordenaron su confesor y su obispo, a perfeccionar los empleos de su alma» (745). These are clear allusions to the scant facts we have surrounding the sudden silence of Sor Juana. Following Barthes' S/Z, we «traverse» Terra Nostra's discourse in reverse to re-touch our previous understanding of Inés's role.
When Cristóbal Nonato, an exuberant metanarrative, metatheoretical and metahistoriographic fiction, reaccentuates Sor Juana's texts, it emphasizes her humanism. A masterpiece of theory impersonation in which interdiscursive (re)incarnations abound, the novel clothes with bodies and faces the concepts —230→ of textual borrowing, narrative discourse production, reception theory and literary tradition. As a special trick, the narrator gestates himself, the novel and the author (Carlos Fuentes) all at the same time. Sor Juana is (re)born with him.
Everything in the novel is narrated to us from Angeles' womb, where the eponymous Christopher Unborn transmits what he learns from his family's and nation's «genetic code» (23). Thus he is already able to «remember» Sor Juana fondly as a significant influence in his life. She first comes to his mind about a month after his conception, injecting his precocious consciousness with her questioning spirit. Little Cristóbal will inherit her talent for articulately examining received truths. Thus, in the midst of a disquisition on the Misfortunes of Mexico, Cristobalito is unable to keep Sor Juana's voice from mingling with his when he wonders:
| (24; my emphasis) | ||
The queries are rhetorical: Fuentes supposes his readers already know that Mexico boasted too soon when, in the petroleum-rich seventies, it claimed it could live forever off its oil reserves; a handful of politicians managed that wealth into Swiss bank accounts and Mexico sank deeper into its historical poverty. In the midst of this catechism of catastrophe, Sor Juana reasserts that Mexican men are still unjustly blaming women for the evil men themselves have caused. The last question cited leads to the logical suggestion: if women had been in charge, starting with Sor Juana, perhaps Mexico would not be in such trouble. The ultimate implication is that Mexico's future must include egalitarian males like this little feminist-in-the-making.
Three words next enlist Sor Juana's aid in updating the society Cristóbal will be born into. In «genetic» dialogue with his father Ángel, the narrator learns that Mexico in fact has no eternal springtime but instead «sólo estás Fabio ay dolor» (63; my emphasis). The words allude to Sor Juana's Fabio poems, in which the speaker is represented as a helpless victim of disdainful man's (Fabio's) contempt. The implication is that Mexico is technologically retarded because it is psychologically immature, clinging to the victim's eternal plaint: I deserve better but must accept whatever my tormentor inflicts on me.
In Sor Juana, the long suffering victim of unrequited love is a woman (Poems 4, 5, 75, 76, 140, 166, 212 and 213, all in Vol. I). «Escucha, Fabio, mis males, / cuyo dolor, si se mide, / aun el mismo padecerlo / no lo sabrá hacer creíble» (I, 21), she complains with a disconsolate hyperbole that reverses the traditional male and female roles in the courtly love genre21. She confesses that she has surrendered —231→ to Fabio's tyrannical cruelty because suffering is such sweet joy. In Cristóbal, she means that «macho» Mexico is the «womanly» victim of itself.
Cristóbal again calls on Sor Juana to question patriarchal machismo when he scornfully observes that the baby contest his parents hoped to win when they conceived him was not designed to celebrate the woman's role in shaping Mexican history, but instead to reinforce the power of men, starting with Christopher Columbus's discovery of America. Our narrator thinks it would be good to honour Mexico's national viejas, who include Sor Juana, mentioned right after a goddess (the Virgin of Guadalupe) and just before an Amazon (the camp-following woman soldier of the Revolution) (84). If Sor Juana's Virgin can be Amazonian -«la valiente Belona, / de Dios armada, / que al Infierno y sus huestes / vence y espanta» (II, 287)- so can the heroic women of Cristóbal's heritage.
Our little hero pounds at the theme of Mexican women's struggle to liberate themselves. While it is true his mother Ángeles is, on the one hand, characterized as the abject victim of a man who is unfaithful to her when she is pregnant, she is, on the other, a courageous woman who chooses to leave Ángel rather than raise her child with a womanizing father. Ángeles' combination of strength and weakness in the manner of Sor Juana is dramatically represented in Cristóbal when one day Ángel spies Ángeles flagellating herself. Around her neck she has hung a scarlet sign that says «Yo la peor del mundo» (242), the statement that capped Sor Juana's writing career (IV, 523).
When church authorities had finally ended the nun's literary adventure and she had signed a series of confessions, Sor Juana followed conventional religious language of the time, masking extreme devotion as extreme self-denunciation (a style of «self-scourging mysticism» [Cervantes 104-05]). But the lucid, confident, often jocular tone of all her previous writings exposes the sham of her selfcastigating rhetoric. Sor Juana was in fact the best of her New Spain world; and Cristobalito's mother is also seen to be intellectually, morally and spiritually superior to the father. That is precisely why the patriarchy obligates both «threatening» women to sacrifice themselves.
Cristóbal again thrusts a verbal lance in defense of his terrific mother («gracias, gracias, por crearme sólo a mí!» [553], with verbal pyrotechnics that highlight Ángeles' skill at always finding «la palabra contraria a la que le fue dada» (280).
If in fact Ángeles is gestating twins (the narrator and the invisible Niña Ba), metatheoretically, the novel carries an invisible Sor Juana who twins with Cristóbal:
| (280-81; my emphasis) | ||
The narrating Cristóbal-Sor Juana swears to rebel and free its censored voice. Cristobalito explains he must for the moment remain as «silent as a fish at the bottom of the sea» -as silent as the bottom-lying fish in Sor Juana's Primero sueño; Fuentes takes his cue from the segment referring to «[...] los dormidos, siempre mudos, peces, / en los lechos lamosos / de sus obscuros senos cavernosos, / (que) mudos eran dos veces [...]» (I, 337). The nun's poem and Cristobalito's vow emphasize the desire in the novel to unsilence the censored feminine half of divine humanity. To help the unborn child keep a good sense of humour while his promise awaits fulfillment, Sor Juana lends Cristóbal one of her favourite exclamations. Her cheery repetition of the phrase «¡Válgame Dios!» becomes an identifying tic (see poems 38, 214, 249, 303): a verbal shrug of the shoulders, a roll of the eyes heavenward, a wry wisdom that helps one serenely accept the things that one cannot change... yet.
Cristóbal had prepared us from the beginning for this sorjuanesque view of himself. The instant he is conceived he tells us he's swimming like a silent fish in the sea of his Mother's womb: «océano origen de los dioses» (II,15) y «el océano dador de vida y origen de los dioses» (307). Further, Cristóbal instructs us to intuit symbolic leaps between apparently unrelated textual facts (505)22. Thus authorized by Cristóbal, I say that the mythical language with which he describes his mother's womb links her to the Great Mother Goddess of earth and sea, Mother of gods, creator of life -and marries this discourse of Carlos Fuentes to Sor Juana's, especially in the chain of signifiers she forges to link the mar (sea) of Mary/María to Isis, Sor Juana's favoured goddess (see her Neptuno alegórico IV, 353-410, and Egan «Donde Dios»).
Explicit and implicit intertextualities direct us to see Cristóbal-Nina Ba as an emerging sexual egalitarianism that will perfect a length of Mexico's unfinished «genetic chain». The links Fuentes adds place Sor Juana's censored but rebellious self next to Cristóbal's rebellious but submerged self and link both of these to Ángeles' rebellious, back-talking self. This feminized genetic sequence is then joined to the «other half» of macho Mexico's future in the image of the twin sister Cristóbal discovers during his passage through the sea of his Mother's womb to the westernmost edge of the New World, the beach at Acapulco. The baby boy tells us: «Toco esos deditos vecinos [...] y sé de quién son: la Niña Ba! Aquí estaba todo el tiempo! [...] La mujer apareció en el mismo tiempo que yo! Cristina apareció con Cristóbal! No estoy solo: no lo estuve nunca, Electra!» (561)23.
—233→Irony strengthens this miraculous reunion myth about the return of female equality in society. The retransmitter of feminist resolve is here a boy, and besides -«¡Válgame Dios!»- he is a «menor de edad» who will be born sounding like an idiot. When Cristóbal is reduced to babbling «goo-goo», Sor Juana's voice will once again be silenced. Like the fish in Primero sueño, however, it will remain suspended throughout time as an already spoken challenge, always gestating, always ready to be reborn.
The last time Sor Juana surfaces to speak in Cristóbal Nonato, Fuentes transfers another distinctive text of the nun into an incongruous situation that would surel y prompt a «¡Válgame Dios!» of surprise from her. This is a sex scene between the narrator's womanizing father and the mother of the young lady with whom Ángel would in fact prefer to be in bed. That, while fishing for Penny López he is caught by Lucha, the mother, is already something of a poetic deconstruction of the Mexican Macho. What perfects the joke is knowing that Sor Juana is muttering «Hombres necios» from the corner of the bedroom while Ángel fails to fend off the matronly Lucha's advances. The more he says «no-no» the more she hears «yes-yes». When Ángel desperately cries «pero ya ódieme un poquito, señora!» Sor Juana's genetic sister-in-arms Lucha retorts: «Si me tratas mal, te quiero más; si me tratas bien te quiero más; no tienes manera de escaparte, querubín: Angelote!» (394) This is vintage Sor Juana honed by vintage Fuentes, a stiletto slipped between pretentious solemnity's ribs.
In her day, it was Fabio who rejected the plaintiff: «Que no me quiera Fabio, al verse amado, / es dolor sin igual en mi sentido» (I, 288); it was Feliciano whose adoration she rejected and Lisardo who hated her in turn (I, 288); it was dallying with the paradox that «al que ingrato me deja, busco amante; / al que amante me sigue, dejo ingrata» (I, 289). If in their origin Sor Juana's wordplays subtly masked the extent of woman's power over man, in the new life Fuentes gives them they openly expose the macho's weakness: Love me or hate me, says Lucha, you can't win. Three hundred years ago or now, subtly or sharply, satire cuts most deeply.
This is particularly true of the complex humour of intertextual parody. A shared philosophy of language, history and culture inspires the incessantly polysemic labour of both Sor Juana and Fuentes to weave the past into the present and these into a future in which their society is borne out of the dark, toward the light. In his fiction, Fuentes embroiders the worldly power of the shut-in nun and brightens the critical edge of her elegant verse. At the same time, he coaxes from behind the courtly mask of orthodoxy an earthy Juana Inés whose consciousness was conceived where Spanish gypsies danced and where native Mexicans tucked their goddesses for safekeeping between volcanoes.
University of California, Davis.
—[234-235]→ —236→
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