But repeatedly I did try to discuss her project, then later tried more than once to persuade her to return to the university, but the whole subject became too hot to handle. She was convinced I’d fobbed her off on lesser scholars.
Time, now, to move on to other topics.
In the past half-century much has been made of Sor Juana’s ‘emotional instability,’ and more recently of her sexual orientation, or orientations. In an earlier chapter we bore witness to—in all its clinical rigour—Ludwig Pfandl’s interest in the penitential practices of nuns; yet this interest forms but the backdrop to his main theatre of operations: Sor Juana. Unabashed by a quite perfect lack of psychiatric training, Pfandl unleashes upon Sor Juana a torrent of diagnostic speculation as he proceeds to dine out on her accomplishments.
But a book written by Nobel laureate Octavio Paz,35 coming into Beulah’s hands when it did, armed her to defend Sor Juana against the interrogations of her twentieth-century inquisitors. The book was the magisterial Sor Juana, Or the Traps of Faith. In it, in response to Pfandl’s conclusions about Sor Juana’s final capitulation, Octavio Paz comments:
Pfandl writes with astounding assurance that the ‘enigma is resolved’: she was the victim of psychosomatic disturbance. A neurotic constitution, menopause … her case was aggravated by asthenia and thinness of physique…. The clinical portrait is completed with her immoderate tendency to brood, her masculinity, her narcissism … her masochistic tendencies.
We may at least be thankful that in lavishing his attentions on a patient three hundred years dead, he had commensurately less time to inflict his interests on the living. At times Beulah must have felt oppressed by the sheer momentum of Pfandl’s diagnostic élan; whereas in Paz she found a feather-light touch and subtle, poignant glimpses of her Juana:
Solitary amid the flurry of San Jerónimo, wilful and independent; one day inspired and the next spiritless; frequently afflicted by imaginary ills that were nonetheless as tormenting as physical illness—her true, her only, companions were the ghosts in her books.
Beulah marvelled at how easily Paz moved through the world of ideas, turning effortlessly from science to philosophy to history to poetry and, finally, to love:
Love is a passion, a longing that forces us outside ourselves in search of the desired one and then back to search within ourselves for the trace of the beloved, or to contemplate the beloved’s ghost in silence. Sor Juana’s poetry reproduces this dialectic movement with extraordinary authenticity.
And though on occasion Paz too had recourse to Freud, through Paz’s eyes Beulah saw confirmed Sor Juana’s palpable eroticism.
In terms of psychic economy—to use Freud’s expression—Sor Juana’s malady was not poverty but riches: a powerful but unused libido. That profusion, and its lack of object, are evident in the frequency with which images of female and male bodies appear in her poems, almost always converted into phantasmal apparitions. Sor Juana lived among erotic shadows.
Perhaps it was at that moment, during that very passage, that Beulah first began to wonder about Octavio Paz the man, the lover. Did she see him then at the breakfast table, hair ruffled, sharing a single cup of coffee and a cigarette with a sleepy-eyed fellow Olympian? Or did she spare him the acid emulsion of her eroticism?
Sor Juana has a keen awareness of the ‘thus far and no farther.’ That awareness is both existential and aesthetic. Existentially, love borders on melancholy, that is, on absence, solitude and self-reflection. Sor Juana constantly questions herself and the images of her solitary musings: love is knowledge. And the art made with that knowledge is neither excess nor verbal extravagance but rigor, restraint.
Reading this, one wonders whether Beulah didn’t feel even slightly chastened by Sor Juana’s rigorous example.
We must nevertheless concede that in startling contrast to her intellectual rigour and polished manners Sor Juana’s writing offers rich servings of guilty brooding and self-absorption to analysts like Pfandl hungry to find autobiography in a poet’s verses. In fairness, this contrast verging on total disjuncture would likely have jolted and dazed even those who knew her best. But in Paz, Beulah finds a powerful response:
As for brooding: it is not a cause of melancholy, as Pfandl seems to believe, but an effect…. The close connection between melancholy and narcissism has been pointed out any number of times. The differences, nevertheless, are so profound as to suggest they may be opposing tendencies. The melancholic is not in love with himself but with someone who is absent; this is why Freud associated melancholy with mourning. The melancholic believes, furthermore, that he is responsible for the absence of the beloved, hence the unrelenting accusations he directs against himself. The narcissist in love with himself and his unattainable (but not absent) image, suffers from an incapacity to love another being. He cannot objectify his desire.
Octavio Paz goes on to articulate what Beulah had already sensed: that Pfandl’s own ‘sympathetic’ obsession—Sor Juana, c’est moi—leads him to neglect virtually all the social and historical determinants of her actions.
Through several hundred pages he [Pfandl] turns again and again to Sor Juana’s psychic and physiological conflicts, from infantile penis envy to the disorders of menopause, but he overlooks one circumstance that was no less determining than psychology or physiology: the masculine character of the culture and world in which Sor Juana lived. How, in a civilization of men and for men, could a woman gain access to learning without becoming masculinized?
If indeed, as Paz suggests, melancholy and narcissism are polar opposites, then between them may lie a wide, wild world of sexual attitudes. Was Sor Juana a lesbian? Was she bisexual?
Her writings refract and redouble facets of her sexual persona. Donning poetic masks by turns ironic, allusive and sincere, the author variously portrays the ‘I’ of her verses as essentially male in her rationality, as virgin and therefore sexless, as a woman transformed into a man by Isis (the etymology of Isis in turn being doubly man), as a disembodied soul in amorous rapture, as double-sexed, as hermaphrodite, androgynous…. A cascade of possibilities that overwhelms the flimsy edifice of Pfandl’s simplistic sexual schematics. Again Paz:
One cannot read Pfandl’s lengthy description without being struck by the rashness of the claims and the brashness of the conclusions. Of course Sor Juana was bisexual, but what does that say? All but a handful of humanity is bisexual. Furthermore, any somatic masculinity in her case is pure fantasy: look at her portraits. Neither is it psychological: read what she wrote…. I further argue that what is surprising in her poetry is precisely the keen awareness of her femininity, which can range from coquetry to melancholy or take the form of a defiant challenge to men. Thus it would be more exact to speak of erotic ambiguity …
Here is an instance of a woman using complexity as disguise and concealment—not the drawing of a single veil but a dance of seven, deployed to leave the Pfandls pfumbling through the halls of scholarship like guilty schoolboys. In doing so, she goes even further, conceivably, than many gender theorists of our day: rather than sexuality as a continuum on which the individual is situated somewhere between poles of male and female, each individual—godlike, monstrous—is the continuum, a riotous spectrum of sexual colours and emotional shadings, male and female becoming, instead of opposites, contiguous points huddled along a vast and turbulent arc from godhood to monstrosity and back again….
Now, a certain breed of searcher leaves no question unanswered. To the occasionally near-comic spectacle of Pfandl contorting himself to fit answers to his own questions (and not infrequently, the reverse), Octavio Paz often stands in elegant contrast:
… just when we think we can grasp it [the figure of Sor Juana], it eludes us, like the ghosts in her poems … the nun Juana is Isis, lady of letters, and also the pythoness who makes predictions in her cave (her cell), pregnant not with child but with metaphors and tropes …
As we have seen, the examination of Sor Juana’s erotic tendencies is
inconclusive and ends with a question. In accord with the classic definition of melancholic temperament, its two extremes were depression and mania …
Certain questions Paz refrains from trying to answer, finding perhaps more truth in the indeterminate. Beulah is not so scrupulous; in fact she takes Paz’s delicacy not as a model to emulate but as an invitation to drag his inquiry several steps beyond the limits of good taste.
And still the fact remains that Sor Juana’s most impassioned and erotic poems have other women for their object. To lesbianism, Paz proposes an alternative reading: passionate but Platonic love; whereas in Pfandl’s account, Beulah finds Sor Juana’s fall describing a long-charted trajectory: from the inversions of Sapphism to a libidinal leap into the mythic abyss of mania, depression and paranoia. It would seem that under Pfandl’s tender ministrations his patient, once merely neurotic, has begun showing signs of a budding psychosis.
The sympathetic reader will perhaps see how, desperate to refute Pfandl’s diagnosis, hating herself for feeling its temptations, Beulah would find it increasingly difficult to resist a martyrology. Equally difficult to resist seeing clerics and psychoanalysts alike—Sor Juana’s male superiors and the psychotherapists of Beulah’s adolescence—as representatives of that same orthodoxy, of the same alienated, analytical turn of mind.
So I can only suppose Beulah copied with something approaching jubilation this passage buried in the endnotes of Paz’s book.
What is truly eccentric in Pfandl’s interpretation is the energy it expends on Sor Juana’s supposed instability while failing to devote a single line to the mental problems of the three prelates who censured her. Fernández de Santa Cruz’s now-sugary, now-sadistic letters to the nuns of Puebla are filled with disquieting expressions that combine the fragrance of incense with the stench of the sewer. In Núñez de Miranda’s notes, his self-contempt over his eternal defeat in his battle with pride knows no bounds: ‘I am a sack of corruption, stinking and abominable, and what is worse is that, knowing this, I am not humble.’ On one occasion, when removing lice from another priest’s cassock, he said,‘See this, my brother, our harvest: lice, corruption, and stench—yet we are filled with vanity.’ As for Aguiar y Seijas, I need not recall his obsessions and manias, his hatred of women and his pathological charity…. To my mind, the fact that Juana Inés was able to resist so long, that only at the end of the siege did she abdicate and follow her critics in these inhuman mortifications, is glorious proof of her spiritual fortitude.
Nevertheless, one is forced to ask: does Beulah really differ so significantly from the object of her fury? Which researcher, Pfandl or Beulah, does the truth greater violence in the name of sympathy?
But I digress into abstractions just as we are recalled to the concrete by a modern artefact of the Baroque, a throwback: Beulah’s budding infatuation with Octavio Paz.
Perhaps it will not seem so surprising, after all, that Beulah should have begun writing him or that this should parallel certain … disappointments in her personal and scholarly life. Clearly it started with the hope that at last in him she had found someone to share her vision, grasp the mystic enterprise that was becoming her life.36
April 1 [1993]
Dear Señor Paz,
I thought I’d take advantage of the date (do you celebrate April Fool’s in Mexico?) to amuse you with a little request. You see I’ve finally obtained a copy of your biography of Juana. It’s fantastic—not in the sense of fantasy, not that you need someone like me to tell you….
April 2
Querido
Estimado Señor Paz,
I have been attempting a study—of course on a much much lesser scale than yours—of Sor Juana. Your book has given me the courage to think I could finish mine, crouching on your shoulders….
April 10
Estimado Señor Paz
Estimado Mars y Pan
Esteemed Marzipan,
… Reading your book the second time through I’m filled with its completeness. I couldn’t hope to add a word to it—but my study deals with an area that will probably be of no interest to you. Or maybe everything is of interest to you….
April 10
Estimado Abuelo,
How could I hope to add anything to what you’ve written? My mind is like a sail, a puff of wind I turn to see where it comes from it’s GONE. Head full of cotton—wads of filthy cotton / slackflaccid sails they can’t hold enough long enough can’t make the connections I know are there. You could. But you’ve done so much already. You could help me…. I don’t want to fail her—I won’t let her down I am SO IGNORANT. I am barbaric. The classics must be like comic books to you how many languages do you read? I have no where else to turn. Except to you, but when I read my scratchings through your eyes … I hope you’re kind. You must be kind I know your kind, Abuelo—show me the signs teach me the symbols tell me the stories let me sit at your knee. Show me how. Show me …
[April]
She’s a scrap of fresh meat flesh torn at by hungry dogs. Pack hunters—anal-ists shiteating insect princes swarming over her, mantises—preyer books in hand. Catechistic cataclystical converters—thug clericanalists psychopriest houndmasters.
RAGE. The rage in Spain rains mainly on the maids.
My name is Beulah Limosneros. I’ve read your book. Three times. It is a very great book. I’m writing a book too. About hunger. Hunger is sex hunger is love hunger is rage it’s revolting. This little civilization our trivializing drivelization is making promises it can’t keep. And we know it, deep down we all know it we’ve known it for three hundred years. She knew—she was the first. The first! Their contradictions are the jagged ends you cut out of a can. They want us to swallow it whole, their botulistic can of wormy contradictions—
Hunger is love but they build a wall around it. It’s behind the wall they say but the wall’s too high to see over too smooth to climb. How do I know it’s behind the wall I can’t FEEL it PLEASE—We promise! it’s there we told you—have faith—but how do I get over it? You can’t get over it have faith it’s inside you where there is no light no air no one no hope—have faith. We promise. Have faith. Get over it
JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ
AN ATHENAGORICAL LETTER, ‘WORTHY OF ATHENA’
Late spring, 1690. Writing daring theatre and poetry is far from the most dangerous of Sor Juana’s occupations as she finds herself increasingly embroiled in theological questions, disputed by the Princes of the Church with quiet savagery. The mind of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, even half-engaged, is a prodigious resource. Her letters and arguments are coveted and examined by bishops, confessors and inquisitors alike.
… His Excellency may well have thought, seeing me draw towards a conclusion, that I had forgotten the very point on which I have been commanded to write: What is, in my view, the greatest expression, the greatest fineza, of Divine Love….
As Christ our Redeemer preached his miraculous doctrine, and having performed so many miracles and marvels in so many places, he reached at last his native country, in which he should have been owed greater affections, and yet directly he arrived, instead of singing his praises, his neighbours and compatriots began to censure him and list his supposed faults…. With the result that Christ, who had wanted to work miracles for his native land, and to award them all manner of benefices, saw then in their bad faith and dark mutterings how they would receive Christ’s favours, and so He withheld them: so as not to give them occasion to do ill….
And regarding Judas, upon whom He showered many particular favours not given to the others, in the hour of his betrayal Christ lamented not that Judas had hanged himself, but rather the damage such favours had done him…. By which He seemed to regret having favoured Judas with the benefice of creation, saying that it were better he had never been born…. And from which we may conclude that the greatest expression of his Love would be to withhold His favours. Ah me, my Lord and God, how blindly and clumsily we lurch about not seeing the negative favou
rs You give us! …
ABYSS
Naturally enough my thoughts keep returning to this one afternoon, and each fresh return yields some small new detail. What I do not ever recall is the slightest premonition. Just before the Bishop of Puebla arrives I am forced to spend another hour in the locutory when every free moment has become so precious—only to discover that Carlos’s latest guest has come for a flirtation. Once I might have been amused, or flattered that he had been sent to me across an ocean by Louis XIV, in the sort of gesture the French King so likes the world to expect from him. But those times are past; I am no longer a girl at the palace.
I see the beautiful young face of the King’s emissary, recall deciding to bring points of colour to those smooth, pale cheeks…. I ask if a man of his beauty believes he may blunder along with no particular purpose at all. If the rest of the distaff world stands before the blunderbuss and counts itself disarmed. Is it the Sun King himself, I wonder, who eagerly awaits this blundering’s translation, ear cocked to the report? I suggest that my young friend press on, as earnestness may yet win the day. But why not raise his aim—and set his sights not on mere flirtation, but on a conquest less abstracted—
Always at this point Tomasina returns from her watch at the archive windows and rushes into the room.
“The Bishop’s carriage, it’s here—parked beside the canal,” she adds, as if this in some way added to the drama. Then there comes that moment after an arrival is announced when conversation falters. Carlos gets up grudgingly from the Bishop’s chair and pulls another to the grille from the far side of the room. Antonia hastens over with the chess table. As she places it within easy reach behind me she bends to my ear and asks to be excused. She does not look particularly well. I look over at Tomasina and Ana, both standing attentively now at the arras, ready to fetch the slightest thing from the staging area behind them. Finally both my escuchas are actually listening—just when the very authority in whose name they are to eavesdrop will already be present.
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