“Ícaros de discursos racionales”: The Comet of 1680–1681, Sor Juana’s Neptuno alegórico, and the Enduring Function of Myths in an Age of Enlightenment

Abstract

Abstract Stark differences have been noted in the ways Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora responded in 1680 to the arrival in New Spain of both a new viceroy as well as a great comet. Such comparisons have tended to hinge on the question of which of the two colonial Spanish-American writers was more “modern” versus “traditional.” Such valuative contrasts between Sor Juana and Sigüenza y Góngora implicitly evoke a commonplace but erroneous historical narrative that privileges the advent of modern science at the expense of poetry and myth. It is by acknowledging the shared affective goal of myth and early modern science in regulating human fears of natural forces, as Hans Blumenberg has done, that scholars can better assess the enduring function of Neptune for a poet like Sor Juana in an Age of Enlightenment. This reappraisal of myth’s function permits in turn a more dialogic reading of Sor Juana and Sigüenza y Góngora’s respective arches and their shared Neptunian response to the debates that raged in seventeenth-century Mexico City over flood control efforts and the value of indigenous hydraulic knowledge. In this reading, Neptune represents a European mythographic discourse of power over nature that serves to both assuage criollo fears of flooding while also displacing the challenge posed by indigenous hydraulic knowledge to Spanish intellectual hegemony in New Spain in part by replacing the Mexica god Tlaloc with Neptune.