"El Sueno: The Baroque Imagination and the Dreamscape"

Abstract

The maximization of the spatial dimension figures among the fundamental organizational principles in Sor Juana's poem, El sueno.1 Her masterful blending of language and aerial imagery has produced a poetic text which transcends the boundaries of time and space through the establishment of relationships-horizontal and vertical-among distinct spatiotemporal realities, and surmounts the temporal barrier of sequence inherent in the literary act through the techniques of juxtaposition and simultaneity. More than a geometry of universal experience, this composition of the Latin American Baroque is a lyric, oneiric topology of psychic expanses and privileged moments, a fantastic landscape which reveals the dynamic quality of Sor Juana's time consciousness, and where time and space become the vehicles of freedom and flight. The principal coordinates of Sor Juana's art are spatial forms and their interrelationships. Yet there is in the poetic text of Sor Juana a new conception and treatment of the poematic space that is distinct from that of her predecessors. Whereas the baroque poet seeks to exalt and transform reality, often replacing it with an elaborate ideality, Sor Juana's objective in El Sueno is to transgress the material world, etherealize it, internalize it,