Political Meta-Allegory in El Divino Narciso by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Abstract

Political Meta-Allegory in El Divino Narciso^ by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz Veronica Grossi U n i v e r s i t y o f T e x a s a t A u s t i n 1 . T h e r h e t o r i c a l c o n t e x t . When Sor Juana’s El Divino Narciso (1690) is situated within the context of colonial religious culture, and in particular within the context of medieval Christian hermeneutics andAugustinian theology, its subversive reinterpre¬ tation of the allegorical trope becomes readily appreciable. Allegory—the complex symbol that poses the epistemological possibility of finding ana¬ logues to transcendental, absolute truth in the temporal, material reality of language—is the rhetorical centerpiece of the auto sacramental (Wardropper 109). By definition, the allegorical figure particularizes the general or the universal (Rollinson xii). The concrete verbal body of the allegory conceals another {alios) meaning, concept, or truth (Whitman 264). Chris¬ tian allegory thus proposes the paradoxical conciliation or identification of the transcendental sacred mystery with its material, temporal representation. The mythological sacred allegory in particular also attempts to reconcile the pagan with the sacred and the recreative with the didactic (the Horatian duke et utile). In this way, mythological allegory purports to neutralize the temporal and ideological alterity of pagan culture. Yet this alterity resists integration into aChristian system ofvalues (Hampton 29). The correspon¬ dence of the sacred to the profane and of pagan cultures to Catholic doctrine through allegory represents asyncretic move characteristic of the expan¬ sionist politics of Catholicism, whose ultimate aim was to institutionalize and authorize itself as auniversal or absolute truth.^ Aclosure of meaning to the allegorical trope is provided by the onto¬ logicalgroundingofChristianallegoryinthedivineLo^osanditsappealto metaphysical values such as transcendence, presence, coherence, unity, totality, and permanence. Within this system of analogical and typological correspondences that originate and close in the absolute presence of the divine Lo£fos or God, all elements and events of historical reality form part of the larger coherent, meaningful, teleological narrative of sacred history (Hampton 13; Ladner 230-31). This all-encompassing sacred narrative reconciles not only the concept of temporality with the concept of meta¬ physical permanence, but also the concept of the historical particular with the concept of the absolute universal. 9 2 Grossi—Political Meta-Allegory In Sor Juana’s El Divino Narciso 9 3 The Christian concept of allegory gives rise to the logocentric medieval idea of the book (divine or natural language) which functions as the sign or metaphor of aunified, homogeneous, total sense of meaning (Gellrich 246-47). The idea of the book, having God as both its author and subject matter, in turn provides agrounding for the system of analogical and typological correspondences. God is the terminal point of this permanently unfolding referential chain (Freccero 28). Not only the divine signs of the Bible, but also nature itself, become an open allegorical book or script that ciphers the absolute divine presence or meaning of God. The multiplicity of reality is ordered and unified through its metonymic and graded partici¬ pation in divine being or absolute meaning. With its fusion of allegorism and exemplarism, the idea of the book inspired medieval architecture as well as the prolific literature of emblems, bestiaries, and lapidaries in which all elements of nature were read as allegorical figures of moral and eschatological truth (Gellrich 248).Allu¬ sionstothebookofGodorNaturewerenotpersonalingeniousinventions or creations, but transcriptions of an «priori absolute text. In this sense, theseventeenthcenturypoeticofcorrespondencewhichplacesahighvalue on the personal virtue or talent of inventio is contrary to the philosophical presuppositions of the medieval idea of the book.^ Christian allegorical logocentrism (represented among other concepts by the medieval idea of the book)—the idea of atotality, finite or infinite, ofsignifiers—isdependentontheconceptofapreexistenttotalityofthe signified which supervises its inscriptions in signifiers: Theideaofthebookistheideaofatotality,finiteorinfinite,ofthesignifier;this totality of the signifier cannot be atotality, unless atotality constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality. (Derrida qtd. in Gellrich 248) In the same sense, the concept of the absolute significance of allegory is dependent on the teleological concept of death, which directs the move¬ mentofthesacred...