Óyeme con los ojos,
ya que están tan distantes los oídos
[Hear me with eyes alone,
since ears are out of hearing’s farthest reach.]
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Lira (1951, 211; 1988, 71)1
In the metaphorical framework of Sor Juana’s Primero sueño [First Dream], as in the baroque in general, visual perception is the central vehicle. The spaces envisioned in the mind’s epistemological quest, however, resonate with sounds: voices haunting the microcosm of the body and birdcalls in a terrestrial landscape. The baroque poetics of Primero sueño transform figurations of the visual into metaphors of sound, beginning with the description of nightfall in lines 1–96 and the gallery of somnolent creatures in lines 97–150. Night signals the temporary release of the dreaming mind from the sleeping body, freeing “Alma,” the protagonist of the epistemological narrative, to explore earthly and celestial phenomena.
In these opening passages, darkness and silence are made visible and audible through contrasts with distant light or fading sounds. Night is represented as a shadow reaching towards the ever-changing moon and the scintillations of stars in the opening lines, “Piramidal, funesta, de la tierra / sombra” [Pyramidal, lugubrious, / a shadow born of earth] (1951, 1.335, line 1; 1988, 171), while the imposition of silence on the creatures of earth calls attention to the continuing, albeit diminishing, presence of “Este, pues, triste són intercadente” [This dismal intermittent dirge] (1951, 1.337, line 65; 1988, 173) which “menos a la atención solicitaba / que al sueño persuadía; / antes, sí, lentamente, / su obtusa consonancia espaciosa / al sosiego inducía” [insisted on attention less / than it coaxed a listener asleep. / Indeed, with all deliberation / its dull and drawn-out harmony / invited all to rest] (1951, 1.337, lines 68–71; 1988, 173). I approach Primero sueño through the interplay of the sounds of words, read aloud or imagined as they are read silently, with the visual and auditory sensations that are their referents, and the metaliterary references to systems of signs and discourses of knowledge. These symbolic systems are exemplified by the astronomical diagrams suggested in the opening lines and musical notation that doubles the textual supplement within the description of birdcalls. This essay explores the ways in which the poem brings visual models of knowing into dialogue with the poem’s inscription of sound. I address the interlinking phenomena of sights and sounds, architecture and music, beginning with the architecture of the macrocosm, and concluding with the codifications of music and the resonance of fantasized voices in the microcosm of the body. Within this context, I focus on some of the ways in which this long lyric poem simultaneously stages and challenges discourses of power.2
At stake in early modern philosophies of both visual perception and music theory was a powerful, totalizing cosmology that lent its authority to religious and political institutions. In the field of optics, “linear perspective came to symbolize a harmony between the mathematical regularities in optics and God’s will” (Jay 1988, 5–6). While the hierarchical social and political order derived its authority from the concept of a divinely ordained natural order, this correspondence was threatened by astronomical discoveries made possible through new optical technologies. These developments challenged the geometrical symmetry of the solar system and the mathematical proportions among the perfectly spherical orbits of planets, imagined as generating the “music of the spheres.” Catherine Bryan perceives a challenge to the scientific model of Cartesian optics in Sor Juana’s poetry (Bryan 2007, 107).3 In positing a “situated knowledge” in Sor Juana’s work, she draws upon Donna Haraway’s proposal of an objectivity grounded in “particular and specific embodiment” as opposed to the illusion of “infinite vision” produced by optical technologies, “the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere” (Haraway 1998, 192).
Primero sueño exemplifies both the ocularcentrism of early modern epistemology and the doubts and anxieties that arose from the study of optics. In his 2009 article “Fortunes of the Occhiali Politici in Early Modern Spain” Enrique García Santo-Tomás examines the figurative use of mirrors, magnifying lenses, and telescopes in seventeenth-century Spanish satirical narratives as “an indicator of the tensions in Spain between artistic experimentation and religious constraints” (García Santo-Tomás 2009, 60).4 He draws upon Martin Jay’s concept of “the overloading of the visual apparatus with a surplus of images in a plurality of spatial planes” (Jay 1994, 48) to study the seventeenth-century Spanish critiques of baroque “spectacle, fantasy, and a continuous collapse of the traditional frame … In this new scopic regime, the perspectival arrangement is as fluid as it is spatially limitless” (68). Pertinent to the metaphors of optics in Primero sueño is his discussion of “the increasing tensions between astronomy and religion stemming from the use of lenses as stargazing tools” (60). Tellingly, the mind, or Alma in Sor Juana’s poem, is not aided by spectacles as she attempts to scale the mountain of knowledge: “la vista perspicaz, libre de anteojos, / de sus intelectuales bellos ojos” [the probing gaze, by lenses unencumbered, / of her beautiful intellectual eyes] (1951, 1.346, lines 440–1; 1988, 182). Cognitive processes connecting external objects and mental concepts are figured in terms of the concave mirror in the lighthouse at Alexandria that collected distant images in lines 258–91, and the projection of images in the eye as a “magic lantern” in lines 873–86. Notwithstanding the comparisons with ancient and modern technologies, the failure of the epistemological quest is metaphorically attributed to the inadequacies of the human sense of sight.
In addition to the pyramidal form described by the opening lines of Primero sueño, the syllables form a phonetic pattern in two groups of four syllables flanking a three-syllable central word: “Piramidal, funesta, de la tierra.” Each term in the sequence of three elements makes a distinct visual and spatial reference: first shape, then darkness, and finally a link between the shadow and its cause, endowing the abstract form and the darkness with astronomical dimensions. Phonetically, these eleven syllables also present a reverse of the pyramidal shape of the aspiring shadow reaching towards the stars: the deep “u” of “funesta” is surrounded by high, sharp “i” sounds, which convey the spatial effect of an inverted triangle. Thus, the first line produces, semantically and phonetically, the conceptual figure, apparently drawn from Athanasius Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1653), of two intersecting pyramids that form the central figure in the long passage beginning in line 340. One is the “cuerpo opaco” [opaque body] with its base on the earth, aspiring towards spiritual perfection; the other, luminous, corresponding to the soul, with a celestial base and a single point of contact with the earth.5 This initial condensation of the poem’s conceptual and narrative structures in one line signals the multiple kinds of signification in poetic language that will be brought into play throughout Primero sueño. The phonetic and rhythmic patterns of the poem and the convolutions produced by baroque hyperbaton create virtual temporal and spatial dimensions, capable of enhancing or contradicting the semantic significance of the sounds and visual objects the poem describes.
From the first words of Primero sueño and the images they evoke, the paradox of the natural world and the verbal structures of the poem, are at odds with the narrative of knowledge as system and control. In this lyric gateway, the materiality of language is, paradoxically, represented through darkness and silence. In a literal sense, it is impossible to represent silence through words, but Josefina Ludmer’s discussion of the Respuesta a sor Filotea [Answer to Sister Filotea] shows how Sor Juana invests the signifier “silence” with multiple meanings as it is aligned against knowing and saying. Knowing and not saying, referring to knowing what must not be said without saying it, create the fantasmal voice of a subject who has been silenced, or threatened with being silenced. The adjectival phrase describing the pyramidal shadow “born” of the earth is interrupted emphatically by two caesuras, indicated by commas. The sentence flows on after the staccato enunciation of these three elements, in convoluted syntax that pits the imagined sound of a series of words and phrases against the necessary rearrangement of the sequence in order to decipher its rational meaning.
Thus, the poem exploits at least three registers of signification. First, the sounds – pronounced aloud or imagined in the process of silent reading – create a visual illusion, conveying effects of light and dark through vowels and consonants. In the affective register, the dark “u” sound of “funesta” matches semantically the words evoking doom, some with long “o” sounds (“sombra,” “vanos,” “tenebrosa guerra,” “pavorosa sombra fugitiva”) [shadow, vacuous, shadowy war, dreadful moving shade] (1951, 1.335, lines 2, 3, 7, 9; 1988, 171). The sonorous effect of these lines is enhanced by its resonance with Luis de Góngora’s ominous “infame turba de nocturnas aves” [infamous mob of nocturnal fowls] (Rivers 1988, 165) of Polifemo line 39. While the meaning of words and phrases is modified by words and phrases that follow them, the word order necessitates a pause and a reversal of the temporal flow of the lines, in order to unravel the hyperbaton. In addition, words and phrases are recollected in webs of repetition and allusion, thereby transforming verbal linearity into a multidimensional process. Mary M. Gaylord observes that Góngora uses “syntax to disrupt absolutely the regular march of meter, at the same time that he uses meter to confound the ordering power of syntax” (1993, 244; italics in original). In Primero sueño, the rhythm of the words has another effect. If the geometrical diagram of the pyramidal shadow in the macrocosm imposes order and creates an illusion of control, the irregular rhyme and combination of seven and eleven-syllable lines in the silva is appropriate to Alma’s epistemological flight and the ultimate failure of reason to systematize the cosmos. The attempt to impose orderly, rational limits on nature is suggested by the clear-cut geometrical shape of the pyramid while the pauses indicated by commas between the powerful words “piramidal” and “funesta,” and the rolling “de la tierra sombra” obstruct the rhythmic flow of the first line before giving way to the meandering sentences that follow.
The sonorities of the opening lines of Primero sueño constitute a verbal gateway, phonetically and semantically. A brief consideration of the architectural project of the triumphal arch outlined in Sor Juana’s Neptuno alegórico [Allegorical Neptune] can illuminate the baroque architecture of the portal to Primero sueño.6 The ephemeral structure of wood, plaster, papier-mâché, and pigment was designed to celebrate the arrival of the new viceroy, Tomás de la Cerda, Marquis of la Laguna, and his wife María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, Countess of Paredes in 1680. The complexities of the arch’s symbolism are described in detail in the text of Neptuno, which ends with a series of poems briefly summarizing the conceptual configurations of each of eight allegorical paintings and six emblematic “hieroglyphs.” The sonnet that concludes the explication of the arch’s symbolism posits another, “immaterial” structure consisting of form rather than matter, whose potentially infinite dimensions are more appropriate to the viceroy’s grandeur (2009, 202). The metaphysical double of the ephemeral arch, which was constructed for a single event, has survived in textual form. As words shape the visual image and then displace it, Sor Juana’s metaphor, “voces de colores” [voices consisting of colours] (2009, 190), folds back on itself. The doubling, mirroring, and echoing in the Neptuno alegórico as well as in Primero sueño exemplify twentieth-century views of baroque and neobaroque. Sor Juana’s aesthetic seems to anticipate Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of dynamic models of perception in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Although Cuban writer Severo Sarduy did not address Sor Juana’s poetry directly, her poetry adds a cognitive dimension to his characterization of the baroque figurative language of Góngora’s Soledades as “metáfora al cuadrado” [metaphor squared]. He frames this aesthetic in mathematical terms, but also describes it as “cambio perpetuo, como substitución siempre inestable y nacimiento precario de signos, allí donde tiene lugar esa pulsación entre lo externo y la verdad: allí en la frontera oscilante de la página” [as perpetual change, as ever-unstable substitution and precarious birth of signs, there at the place of pulsation between the external and truth: there on the oscillating frontier of the page] (1969, 60).
With the eventual dismantling of the arch in the Zócalo of Mexico City, what remains is the baroque text, the explication of the decorative program, an “immaterial” structure, an always-unstable substitution for wood, plaster, and paint. In contrast to the baroque design and purpose of the arch constructed in 1680 to honour the Spanish monarchy’s political and ideological power in New Spain, the opening lines of Primero sueño set the stage for the drama of questioning rather than control. They constitute a formal entrance into an uncertain realm, the parallel temporal dimension of dream. Staging the reader’s access, these lines present an auditory counterpart to the symmetrical arrangement of structural elements and spaces occupied by images in the architectural design of the Neptuno.
The initial visual element in the verbal gateway to the Sueño, the pyramid, suggests at least two intellectual contexts: the arcane knowledge of ancient Egyptian civilization (and implicitly of pre-conquest Mexican culture) and the diagram of a geometrical solid composed of static points, angles, and lines on paper, inscribing in a quantifiable system of human knowledge the astronomical phenomenon of light and dark created by sun, moon, earth, and stars in space and time. The epistemological quest that structures the Sueño invokes a network of graphic images: geometric figures, emblematic woodcuts, musical notation, and printed texts superimposed upon macrocosm and microcosm in time and space. The second word of the poem charges the initial shape with emotion. “Funesta” is the affective shadow of the astronomical “sombra de la tierra,” casting its melancholy foreshadowing of failure upon Alma’s (soul’s / mind’s) vain attempts to scale the heavens: “de vanos obeliscos punta altiva, / escalar pretendiendo las Estrellas” [towering tips / like vacuous obelisks bent on scaling stars] (1951, 1.335, lines 3–4; 1988, 171). The first four lines can be read as a preview of the next 971; Verónica Grossi sees them as a mise-en-abîme of the poem as a whole (2007, 42). Throughout the poem, metaphorical relationships stage the baroque drama of ambition and failure, creating a series of condensed versions of the searching mind pitting itself against unattainable knowledge.
The cosmic pyramid that extends into galactic space in the first lines of the poem magnifies a human-scale counterpart: the optical pyramid, a model of visual perception in which light reflected from objects outside the eye converges on the retina. In Sor Juana’s poem, the striving of earth’s shadow to reach the moon prefigures Alma’s doomed quest.7 In the Cartesian optical model of perception and cognition, however, the pyramid’s apex reaches its goal, the retina of the eye, a point of connection between the interior of the human body with objects exterior to it. Martin Jay gives a rough definition of Cartesian perspectivalism as positing a monocular view of space and the objects in that space in terms of Euclidean geometry (1988, 5–6).8 A comparison of Sor Juana’s figuration of the physical process of visual perception with Cartesian perspectivalism shows some expected similarities but also reveals significant divergences; Ruth Hill argues that the passages on optics, visual perception, and mental processes show a greater affinity with Gassendi (2000, 64–5). In lines 267–79, Sor Juana describes the activities of memory and the mental faculty she terms “fantasía” [imagination]. She refers to the retina-like convex mirror at the ancient port of Alexandria as “tersa superficie” [polished surface] (1951, 1. 342, line 268), shimmering like an “azogada luna” [quicksilver moon] (line 274)9 with the activity of processing “imágenes diversas” [diverse images], gathering information about “el número, el tamaño y la fortuna / que en la instable campaña transparente / arresgadas tenían” [their number, size, and fortune, / and the risk they ran / in the transparent / unsteady country of the deep] (1951, 1. 342, lines 275–7; 1988, 178) on the turbulent surface of the Mediterranean.
While mirrors and lenses were key to seventeenth-century scientific exploration, Jay and Crary both explain the centrality of another technological model of human perception in the early modern period, the camera obscura, in which images are projected onto the wall of a dark room through a small opening in the opposite wall. In Descartes’s and Leibniz’s models, the light that enters the camera obscura through the single peephole provides “a vantage point onto the world analogous to the eye of God” (Crary 1990, 48). A natural version of the camera obscura can be perceived in Góngora’s description of the dense vegetation that hardly allows any light to penetrate the mouth of the cyclops’s horrifying cavern where nightbirds circle ominously in Polifemo, lines 33–40.10 In contrast to the widespread scientific acceptance of a monocular model of visual perception, the singularity of Polyphemus’s vision is monstrous. A cave, similarly dark at midday, inhabited by the “king of beasts,” a creature both feared and admired, is described in lines 97–102 in Primero sueño. However, in an ingenious inversion of space, Sor Juana first turns the camera obscura inside out in lines 25–38. In addition to the moon and stars of the opening lines, this passage reveals another source of illumination amid the darkness of night: the lamplit interior of a temple. Through the windows and the interstices of the doors the owl breaches the boundaries of sacred space to drink the consecrated oil: “la avergonzada Nictimene acecha / de las sagradas puertas los resquicios … y sacrílega llega a los lucientes / faroles sacros de perenne llama / que extingue, si no infama, / en licor claro la materia crasa / consumiendo” [shamefaced Nictimene keeps watch / by chinks in sacred portals … / to desecrate the brightly shining / holy lamps perpetually lit, / extinguishing, even defiling them] (1951, 1.336, lines 27–36; 1988, 172). In this spatial transformation, interior and exterior, sacred and profane, change places. The perceptive model for the female intellectual is not the camera obscura, surrounded by light; rather, the ambivalently transgressive nightbird must seek out the luminous temple whose imperfectly sealed doors and windows allow some of its light to escape.
Towards the end of the poem, lines 873–86 refer to another optical device, as morning light interrupts the dream and the body awakens. Within the eye, light-images of external objects are projected, at first blurred, then clearer as the eyes become accustomed to light. The eye is imagined as a “magic lantern,” a device described in the Jesuit polymath Athansius Kircher’s Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1646; second, revised edition 1671). It is a device whose basic principles are far older, while its basic design anticipates that of the modern slide projector, with a convex mirror behind the transparent image rather than a lens in front of it to magnify the images cast on a flat surface in a dark room. Sor Juana’s choice of model is significant. Kircher emphasizes both the importance of the emotional effect of the images and the ethical necessity of demystifying its images by explaining the technology to viewers. He describes the exhibition of objects made to move by using threads or magnets, or a series of slides with which “whole satiric plays, theatrical tragedies and the like can be shown in a lifelike way” (Musser 1994, 19–21 citing Kircher 1671, 768–70). Motion and sequential displays of images are key to Kircher’s presentation of the device in Ars Magna, while Sor Juana imagines visual perception in dynamic rather than static terms. Sor Juana presents both devices in narrative contexts: the ancient lighthouse with its mirror that displays the fate of distant ships, and the “magic lantern” whose images can accompany a recitation or words printed on the slides.
As the epigraph from Sor Juana’s poem affirms, eyes can become ears. Words on a page function symbolically as visual and aural signs, whether voiced aloud or in imagination, while their sounds are commonly described phonetically in terms of spatial relationships and visual imagery – “high” and “low” pitch, “bright” and “somber” tone quality. The Sueño exploits the full range of resources, in the sounds of words (obvious and subtle onomatopoeia, alliteration, emphasis, hyperbaton, enjambment, and caesura), discursive registers (authoritative third-person description, direct address in first person), and the vocabularies and syntax of legal and political authority including argumentation and punishment. And yet, there is a paradox of sound in the Sueño that corresponds to that of the poem’s visual paradox: the dream quest takes place in the darkness and silence of night. The voices of birds fade in the description of nightfall in the opening lines, creating the illusion of a silence that is interrupted by nine first-person interjections, eight of these consisting of the single word “digo” in lines 47, 226, 328, 399, 460, 690, 795, and 947 of the 975-line poem (translated by Trueblood as “I mean,” “as I was saying,” and “I speak of”). In addition, clarifications and elaborations set off by parentheses or dashes are more subtle techniques of creating the illusion of a speaking voice interrupting itself in mid-sentence. My approach to the poem focuses on the interplay of the sounds of words, the visual and auditory sensations they evoke, and the metaliterary references to systems of signs: words, diagrams, and musical notes. These symbols encode sounds into visually apprehensible form and displace the sensory and emotional with a quantitative version of the sonorities of the world that the questing subject in the poem seeks to know.
While vision provides the predominant mode of access to knowledge in Primero sueño, in the first ninety-two lines nightfall shifts the poem’s mode of perception from sight to sound. These lines foreground the sense of hearing and the sounds of words while describing silence at nightfall, an “overture,” as Stephanie Merrim describes it, to the revelation of dream vision (Merrim 1999, 191). Ruth Hill’s commentary on this passage finds in it evidence of a “highly sophisticated knowledge of then-modern theories of sound and its movement through space,” knowledge she attributes to Sor Juana’s familiarity with Gassendi’s writings on auditory phenomena and music (2000, 56–7).
Electa Arenal observes the poet’s “overriding interest in the reorchestration of sounds and silences” (1991, 125–6) in a feminine key, and discusses the central role of “Música” in staging a display of the perfect structure of Nature in Sor Juana’s Loa a los años del Reverendísimo Padre Maestro Fray Diego Velázquez de la Cadena [Loa in honour of the birthday of Father Diego Velázquez de la Cadena], dating from 1687/8 (1951, 3.483–502). Mario A. Ortiz explains the use of the notes of the scale as allegorical characters in another brief dramatic work, Loa 384, “Encomiástico poema a los años de la Excma. Sra. Condesa de Galve” [Encomiastic Poem on the Birthday of Her Excellency, the Countess of Galve] (1951, 3.462–82), a condensed treatise on music theory (Ortiz 2007b, 242).
While Sor Juana’s Loas stage a geometrical model of music theory, the intervals of the Western scale were in the process of modernization. The baroque disruption of the correspondence of the order of nature with a mathematical ideal was not limited to models of visual perception and representation. While seventeenth-century theories of perception revealed the geometrical principles of optics as well as the ways in which the eye could be deceived by appearances, musicians and composers were struggling to develop practical solutions to the problems of notation and instrumental tuning resulting from discrepancies between the ideal of geometrical perfection on one hand, and on the other, human acoustical production and perception of pitch and duration. Although R.O. Jones wrote that “[m]usic and references to it in poetry were a shorthand sign for the harmony of the universe,” a system of “overtones that held the universe in a shimmering web of harmony” (1966, 30–1), John Hollander finds that English literature of the period from 1500 to 1700 reflects “a gradual process of disconnection between abstract musical mythology and concrete practical considerations of actual vocal and instrumental music” (1961, 19). A shift in musical style towards greater expressive range through chromatic and rhythmic contrasts revealed the limits of the medieval scale and notation.
The traditional Pythagorean or “speculative” theory was based on simple whole-number ratios – the octave, the fifth, and the third – as manifestations of the ideal harmony of the cosmos. The practical application of this celestial system, “just intonation,” worked well enough with plainsong, but with the increase in compositions for instrumental accompaniment and ensemble playing, this traditional approach produced anomalies of pitch and limited the possibilities for key modulation. The system of equal temperament was a practical compromise, celebrated in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, which allowed a player to shift among all the possible major and minor keys without retuning. Pamela Long and Mario A. Ortiz explain how Sor Juana addresses these conflicting musical theories in Romance 21 (1951, 1.61–5), written to her learned patron the Countess of Paredes, “excusándose de enviar un Libro de Música” [excusing herself from sending a Book of Music] (Long 2009, 28–41; Ortiz 2007a, 250–60). Line 127 of this romance mentions an apparently lost theoretical treatise which the poet refers to as Caracol (Spiral Shell). Lines 23–4 refer to proportions, qualities, and intervals, aspects of music that differed according to the basis of each system: Pythagorean or practical, that is, by ear.11
Long, Ortiz, and other musicologists agree that Pietro Cerone’s synthesis of sixteenth-century musical theory, El Melopeo y maestro [The Musicmaker and Master] (Naples, 1613) was the major influence on Sor Juana’s theory of music, as well as on the Maestros de Capilla [music masters] of seventeenth-century New Spain who composed music for the sets of carols or villancicos she wrote for religious occasions at the cathedrals of Mexico City and Oaxaca (Long 2009, 7; Ortiz 2007a, 248). Ortiz, however, observes that in Romance 21, Sor Juana questions, adapts, and revises Cerone’s theories (2007a, 244).12 His interpretation of the poem proposes that the spiral envisioned in the title Caracol is not the “circle of fifths” of equal temperament, in which the intervals between semitones are uniform rather than those determined by geometrical intervals based on the octave. The figure of the spiral, he argues, preserves the anomalies of just intonation. For Sor Juana, he argues, mathematical purity, rather than sensory perception, is the basis for aesthetic judgment (2007a, 255).
The cosmic and optical diagrams of the first line can be approached through their reference to writing and print culture. The references to musical notes, however, dramatically foreground the abstract and arbitrary nature of the sign. Nictimene, the daughters of Minyas, and Ascalaphus, transformed into owls and bats, form a fearsome, discordant choir,
máximas, negras, longas entonando,
y pausas más que voces, esperando
a la torpe mensura perezosa
de mayor proporción tal vez, que el viento
con flemático echaba movimiento,
de tan tardo compás, tan detenido,
que en medio se quedó tal vez dormido.
[droning long and longer lengthened notes,
and pausing more than singing,
to hang on the torpid, lazy measure,
more dragged out still at times, kept by the wind
to a phlegmatic beat,
so slow in tempo, so sustained,
that sometimes the wind would doze between two notes]
(1951, 1.336, lines 56–62; 1988, 173)
The notes floating in crepuscular space designate indeterminate pitch and duration of sound. Although lyric poetry is closely linked to music, it is important to note the significant differences between the two kinds of visual sign. References to sight throughout the poem use visible symbols on the page to call attention to the subject of perception. Verbal references to musical notation, however, defer the imagined sound through one more level of signification, textualizing the materiality of human and animal voices while creating a textured backdrop for the attenuated narrative line with the rhythm and timbre of birdcalls. In addition, lines 57–68 are all endecasyllabic, imposing upon the process of reading the very lethargy they describe. A few lines after the birds’ voices are envisioned as musical notes, the ancient personification of silence places a finger to both lips to signal the cessation of sound: “uno y otro sellando labio obscuro / con indicante dedo, / Harpócrates, la noche, silencioso; / a cuyo, aunque no duro, / si bien imperïoso / precepto, todos fueron obedientes” [Night, an index finger / sealing her two dark lips– / silent Harpocrates – enjoined / silence on all things living, / a summons, however peremptory, complied with easily and promptly obeyed by all] (1951, 1.337 lines 76–82; 1988, 173). Significantly, this imposing figure cannot restrain the continuing voice of the poem.
The voices of birds in these lines are transformed into visual sign, silent in itself. There are no fixed, preexisting objects signified by the sonorous and semantic aspects of the “overture” or by their metaliterary references to texts, diagrams, and, in the lines quoted above, musical notes; rather, their meaning is contingent, conveyed only in relationship to others in the same system. In Primero sueño, letters, phonemes, words, and lines of poetry are in spectacularly complex dialogue with those around them, and with other texts, ancient and modern. The preceding and subsequent words and phrases also establish the material qualities of objects mentioned in the poem. For example, the geometrical figure of the pyramid named in the first word of the poem has, initially, the potential for astronomical expansion or contraction to terrestrial, human dimensions. Its relative size, however, is roughly indicated by the textual references to sun, moon, and earth in lines that follow. In lines 20–64, references to musical notation call attention to the contingent value of all textual signs; however, unlike the phonemes signified by linguistic signs, pitch and duration can only be imagined, played, or sung within frameworks of key and tempo.
Phonetically and visually, the description of the “capilla pavorosa” [fearsome choir] (1951, l.25 line 57) of winged denizens of Sor Juana’s philosophical night resonates with the description of Polyphemus’s cave, mentioned above. It also transposes into a minor key the “polyphony” of birdsong and youths in procession towards a wedding, which is “sustained by the natural figured bass” of a brook in lines 540–2 of Soledad primera (Collins 2002, 104–5). While Góngora compares the music of nature to courtly and rustic instruments, Sor Juana inscribes the nightbirds’ calls as musical notation. The textuality of music in Sor Juana invokes the self-referentiality of Soledad primera, exemplified in a much-commented passage:
Pasaron todos pues, y regulados
cual en los equinocios surcar vemos
los piélagos en el aire libre algunas
volantes no galeras,
sino grullas veleras,
tal vez creciendo, tal menguando lunas
sus distantes extremos,
caracteres tal vez formando alados
en el papel diáfano del cielo
las plumas de su vuelo.
[Onwards they went with undiminished pace,
Such as we see in autumn or in spring
Ploughing the boundless ocean of the air,
Which are not ships that fly,
But cranes that sail the sky,
Like moons that wax and wane, their outmost pair
Closing and opening,
While letters with their flying quills they trace,
And on the sky’s transparent parchment write
The record of their flight]
(Góngora 1972, 649–50, lines 602–11; 1972, 45)
However ancient the connection between the V-formation of migrating birds and the origin of the alphabet, this brilliantly self-reflexive passage is quintessentially baroque. Its “incorporation of the act of writing into the text” has been illuminated by Chemris (2007, 74), Ruiz Pérez (1996, 244), and Sánchez Robayna (1983, 40–53). Soledad primera transforms landscape and birds into writing; Sor Juana adds musical notation to the web of textualities. By referring to the calls of the nightbirds not as human instruments, as Góngora does in Soledad primera, but as written notes, Sor Juana introduces another deferral of signification to her representation of sound.
Despite the importance of the diminishing sounds of birds in the opening lines of the Sueño, vision is the privileged sense and words the privileged form of signification throughout the poem, with one other notable exception. As the body falls asleep and the soul is freed, the heart and lungs continue their action, “uno y otro fiel testigo” [these two witnesses, then, reliable, unimpeachable, in fact] (1951, 1.341, line 227; 1998, 177). Meanwhile, the tongue becomes mute, thus disavowing the evidence of the heart and lungs in a miniature courtroom drama: “mientras con mudas voces impugnaban / la información, callados, los sentidos /–con no poder replicar solo defendidos–, / y la lengua que, torpe, enmudecía, / con no poder hablar los desmentía” [while the silent senses, vocal silently, / impugned their testimony, / citing their very silence, / and the torpid tongue by silence of its own / disputed them as well] (1951, 1.341, lines 229–33; 1988, 177). These verses create the illusion of an intimate theatre of the body in which silence resonates as if it were sound. Although the bodily tongue is silent, the poetic speaker’s is not: scattered throughout the poem are first-person interjections (“digo”) and parenthetical comments that abruptly call attention to the voice that the poem represents through the text on the page. This voice objectifies the body, speaking externally, as an observer of interior mechanisms of production and theatrical space. The imagery of the visual in the long passage regarding the body is located not in the eye but in the mind, the “fantasía” that is compared to the mirror in the lighthouse at Alexandria, with the difference that it can reveal not only what is near and far away, but also what does not have visible form. Thus the imagination, the faculty that processes the information of the senses and the mind, is the link between interior and exterior, microcosm and macrocosm. However, as the body awakens in the last hundred lines of the poem, the “magic lantern” of the eye resumes its role as bridge between body and mind, and between mind and cosmos, the world surrounding the body.
While the speaker’s gender is not made evident until the last, feminine, word of the poem, “despierta,” the opening lines present a series of mythological women whose transgressions can be interpreted as analogous to the nun’s daring narrative of her intellectual voyage: the incestuous Nictimene, transformed into an owl; the Minyades, transformed into bats as punishment for preferring domestic labours to the celebration of Bacchus; and Ascalaphus, also transformed into an owl as punishment for telling the gods that Persephone had eaten the seeds of a pomegranate in Hades. Rather than ascribe to these transgressive figures a stable feminine subjectivity, Merrim locates them within “the fluid nightworld” where binaries are blurred and “order loses its sway” (Merrim 1999, 240). From the outset, this mythological drama has the effect of destabilizing the connotations of light and dark. Nightfall brings intellectual freedom, while sunlight, associated with order, signals failure.
The references to pagan gods, goddesses, and the human victims who were turned into the nightbirds in the opening lines superimpose onto the everyday phenomenon of nightfall the ancient narratives of divine retribution for defying the incest taboo in the case of Nictimene and the daughters of Minyas’s refusal to render proper homage to Bacchus. In multiple registers, the opening lines of the poem enact challenges to laws that seem immutable; however, the narrative thread of the poem, the sound of vowels and consonants, the syntax (particularly hyperbaton), and the form of the silva – that is, the words themselves – defy Alma’s quest for an orderly, rational method of knowledge. Their excess and convolutions present a verbal counterpart to the vastness and complexity of the natural world, the intended object of knowledge. The first hundred lines of Primero sueño are a preview of the extended drama of restless nature against rational form, the central trope of the poem. While they foretell the failure of the project, they also present an embodied, voiced epistemological subject. In the opening lines of Primero sueño, the signifying mouth is Harpocrates’s, symbolically blocked by a finger that signals the prohibition of language; in the closing lines it is vision rather than the voice that represents the return to consciousness, but it is an embodied rather than a transcendent vision.
1 All translations of Sor Juana’s poetry are Trueblood’s unless otherwise indicated. All other translations are mine. Citations from Sor Juana’s Obras completas are indicated with volume, page number, and line.
2 For a detailed study of Sor Juana’s major works in their sociopolitical and ideological context, see Grossi.
3 Bryan addresses Sor Juana’s treatment of colour in two sonnets, “Este que ves, engaño colorido” [These lying pigments facing you] (1951, 1.277; 1988, 95) and “Verde embeleso de la vida humana” [Green allurement of our human life] (1951, 1.280–1; 1988, 101).
4 García Santo-Tomás analyses Luis Vélez de Guevara’s use of “mirrors, lenses, telescopes, spectacles, and even the eye’s retina” in El diablo cojuelo [1641] as “doubly fascinating, for it revels in the eternal follies of spectacles while cautiously inquiring about the new mysteries of the skies above” (67).
5 In his note to lines 400–7, Méndez Plancarte cites Vossler’s interpretation based on the explication of an engraving of intersecting triangles in Kircher’s treatise (1951, 1.594).
6 Grossi reads Primero sueño in architectural terms, perceiving the images of the pyramid, the mountain, the Tower of Babel, and the magic lantern as “retratos” [portraits] of the structure of the poem as a whole (2007, 42). Patricia Saldarriaga compares geometrical and architectural references in the poem to Juan Bautista Villalpando’s 1596 treatise on sacred architecture.
7 Although he acknowledges some scholars’ claims that the opening lines describe a lunar eclipse in which the earth’s shadow covers the moon, Alberto Pérez Amador Adam explains how the image of earth projecting its shadow without reaching its goal is a figure for the failed attempts at ascent in the poem, anticipating the ultimate defeat of the project of comprehending the universe through human intellect (1996, 114).
8 The relationship between the epistemological endeavour of Sor Juana’s long poem and Descartes’s scientific methodology continues to be a matter of debate (Merrim 1999, 241; McKenna 2000, 241–3).
9 “Luna,” literally “moon,” is a lexicalized metaphor for “mirror” in Spanish; however, the moon as feminine symbol is also important in Primero sueño.
10 Other references to optical phenomena in Soledad primera are addressed by Collins (2002, 94–5).
11 Although the practicality of equal temperament has rendered it the default tuning, and most listeners are not aware of the musical “compromise,” some twentieth-century composers, among them John Adams, Lou Harrison, György Ligeti, and Pauline Oliveros, specify the use of just intonation for a particular quality of sound in some of their compositions.
12 In his notes to Romance 21, Méndez Plancarte refers to Sor Juana’s handwritten notes in the convent’s copy of Cerone’s treatise (1951, 1.386–7). Ortiz also observes that in addition to her critical approach to the Melopeo, Sor Juana commented ironically on Cerone’s emphatic opposition to women’s study and performance of music in a marginal note, “su discípula, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” (2007a, 248).
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