Hunger's Brides
Page 146
1667 John Milton completes Paradise Lost.
1667 Juana Ramírez quits the palace for the convent of San José, and leaves three months later.
1669 Juana enters the convent of San Jerónimo, eventually choosing the religious name of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
1680 Grandiose auto da fe in Madrid; the Queen Mother attends in the company of her dwarf Lucillo. Twelve burned alive.
1680 A comet, eventually to be named after Edmond Halley, appears over Europe and America.
1680 The celebrated poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is commissioned to create The Allegorical Neptune in welcome to the incoming viceroy and vice-queen, an auspicious beginning to Sor Juana’s most productive period.
1687 Isaac Newton publishes his Principia Mathematica.
1690 Sor Juana’s published theological arguments attract the notice of the Inquisition.
1691 Inquisition proceedings are instituted against a priest defending Sor Juana.
1691 August 23rd, a total eclipse of the sun.
1692 Floods, crop infestations, famine in Mexico. In June, a revolt against Spanish authority.
1692 Salem witch-hunts. Nineteen women hanged.
1693 The Archbishop of Mexico publishes an edict condemning the scandal and disorder in the city’s twenty-two convents. Sor Juana ceases all writing and study.
1694 Sor Juana’s defender is condemned by the Inquisition. March 5th: Sor Juana signs a statement of contrition in blood.
1695 Plague enters Mexico City. Death of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, aged forty-six.
*approximate dates
NOTES
Echo BOOK ONE
1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated and with a preface by A. E. Watts, with etchings by Pablo Picasso (North Point Press, 1980), p. 62.
2. The refrain of a poem by Sor Juana.
3. ‘Siglo de Oro’s latter, better half …’ Evincing a certain editorial glee, I’d begun compiling lists of solecisms, errors of fact and anachronisms. But this one gave me pause. First, as a statement of personality it accorded well with widely documented instances of Sor Juana’s bold self-awareness. In its devious way, the phrase was also accurate. Spain’s Siglo de Oro was indeed its golden century, and Sor Juana was arguably the only great poet of its second half. Without her holding down the fort, as it were, it becomes merely a golden half-century. She is also, in the distaff sense, a ‘better half,’ being the only great female poet of both that century and that side of the Atlantic divide.
But then what of the anachronisms with which the whole manuscript is rife? Five categories have so far emerged.
i) Unintentional. These are legion.
ii) Deliberate. These are few. (For example, moving the date of a trip or trial from 1678 to 1693.)
iii) Misleading. These seem like anachronisms, but may not be; the intent is evidently to challenge the historical knowledge of someone who reads to debunk. A seventeenth-century reference to cancer, or to a shuttlecock, feels anachronistic even if it isn’t.
iv) Aggressive. Aggressively anachronistic is a term one might apply to the work as a whole (diction, topics, themes).
Should characters sound modern, or instead carry what amounts to a heavy accent that they themselves would not have heard? Which is to say, they will sound bracingly modern to themselves, and we, antiquated, to readers of the future. (Passing over, for a moment, the extent to which ‘modern’ is a construct of modernism.)
Is this, then, an objective portrayal of the seventeenth century, or one filtered by our time? The trap here is plain enough: unfiltered, objective portraits are never available to us, and acting as if they were—in history or in fiction—is pretentious.
v) Chronic. (There was a temptation to call this category meta-temporal or simply nonsensical.) These anachronisms suggest a mission of historical fiction that is not just to lie by getting one’s facts scrupulously straight, nor only to interrogate the concept of Fact as cultural artefact, nor even just to pose an alternative to history’s account and thereby a challenge to it, but rather to mount an inquiry into time itself—its ultimate structure and our relationship with it.
After the digression, then, what to make of the ‘Siglo de Oro’s latter, better half’?
Misleading. Aggressive. Chronic—that is, the temporal knowledge of Sor Juana’s early narration might include her entire century, or else both her time and ours. Indeed, it may be a voice speaking from the ‘always’ of myth; or a voice that begins at these Olympian elevations but ends by falling back to earth.
4. Sor Juana’s own words, from her autobiographical Response to Sor Filotea, translated in part by Alan Trueblood in A Sor Juana Anthology (Harvard University Press, 1988).
5. The paraphrases from page 73 of Octavio Paz’s seminal Sor Juana, Or the Traps of Faith (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988), translated by Margaret Sayers Peden, and are themselves taken from Sor Juana’s autobiographical Response to Sor Filotea.
6. Translation by F. J. Warnke, to be found in his Three Women Poets of the Baroque: Louise Labé, Gaspara Stampa, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Bucknell University Press, 1987).
7. Two famous seventeenth-century anagrams for the angelical salute ‘Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.’
8. Passage taken from a collection edited by Lewis H. Lapham, The End of the World (St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 21–22.
9. For a fine synthesis, see Algis Valiunas,“Commentary.” (Print-out of an online document, original source unknown.)
10. The anagram of a ‘mightier cry’ is the two words ‘mercy’ and ‘right’ plus a missing ‘I.’
11. Poems by Juana and Sor Juana in this manuscript fall into three categories: authenticated (most of these appear with her name in sections separate from the chapters); attributed (one or two poems are used whose authorship is contested); speculatively attributed. All of these will be identified in notes. This anagram poem falls into the third category.
12. About a year after this chapter was written (as closely as this can be determined), an article appeared in the Mexico City daily La Reforma, on the potential discovery of Juana’s earliest poem. Composed by her at the age of eight, it was a loa of some three hundred lines on the occasion of the Feast of Corpus Christi. Among its many interesting aspects are these two: first, that at so tender an age Juana should have been writing on the Eucharist; second, that the poem was bilingual, one line beginning in Castilian and ending in Nahuatl, the next line Nahuatl / Castilian. A coincidence, I would propose, if an interesting one. Beulah might rather have taken it as a validation of her method’ and of her investigations into the phenomenon of entanglement. Until recently, it has widely been supposed by Sor Juana scholars that she had help with her verses in Nahuatl; only recently have Nahuatl experts such as Patrick Johansson begun to assert that Sor Juana’s fluency in the Aztec language might have been superb, given that her verses over such a long period (even longer now, should the attribution of this new poem prove correct) are of such a high calibre.
13. Speculative attribution.
14. The translation is by Margaret Sayers Peden, and is found in Paz’s Sor Juana, Or the Traps of Faith.
15. Translation by Thelma Sullivan, A Scattering of Jades (Simon & Schuster, Touchstone, 1994).
16. Our author appears to have had access to the lecture notes of a Professor A. Carson.
17. Plutarch, Conjugal Precepts, quoted in A. Carson, Men in the Off Hours, p. 147.
18. This may even have been the nominal purpose of a trip from Calgary to Mexico, for just father and daughter, when Beulah was thirteen.
19. Here was an apparent anachronism more difficult for me to categorize. By 1995 quantum entanglement had surfaced in the media because scientists felt they now had the means to begin validating the hypothesis experimentally. The problem for me was that Beulah’s paper had been written in 1992, when, at best, it would have been a hot topic for only a small group of physicists. Certainly, it held no special signific
ance for me and would have escaped my notice altogether, had I not had pressing reasons to be watching the back sections of the newspapers just as entanglement was becoming another tale of the bizarre.
20. I leave the dazzling, self-referential, self-promoting footnote to a younger generation of fabulist, having always found the endnote adequate to my purposes, and instead take the bold step of reserving the footnote for the readers service. Papers and texts by Donald J. Gregory: “James Fenimore Cooper and the Negative Way”(1980); The Liar Paradox (1981); Stratagems of Misdirection, Taxonomies of Falsification (1981); Truth, the White Whale: an epistemological poetics (1983); The Aesthetics of Ideology (1984); Ockham’s Razor: God-Mind as Guillotine (1985); Constructivism and the Architectural Metaphor (1985); Up the Down Periscope: Metaphor as Logical Operator (1986); Truth and Aboriginal Reality (1987); Feldman and Ontic Dumping (1987); Metaphor and Knowing (1989); The Art of Approximate Knowledge (1991); Wisdoms and Constructive Paradox (1993);“You Are Here: labyrinth and the postmodern minotaur” (1995, unpublished).
21. Quoted from Sor Juana’s autobiographical “Respuesta a Sor Filotea.” Adapted from the translation of Margaret Sayers Peden in Poems, Protest, a Dream: Selected Writings of Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz.
22. Phrase from Sor Juana’s The Divine Narcissus.
23. A paraphrase of Sor Juana’s autobiographical account, in her Reply to Sor Philothea.
24. Speculatively attributed to Sor Juana.
25. A similar placard from a poetry tourney of 1683 is quoted by I.A. Leonard in Baroque Times in Old Mexico (University of Michigan, 1959).
26. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote; paraphrase of the translation of P.A. Motteux (Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1993).
27. This following chapter derives its documentation from the accounts of the auto grande (the great auto-da-fé) of 1649 published by Solange Alberro in Inquisición y sociedad en México 1571–1700 (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), pp. 581–82; and a wondrously detailed chapter on that subject in José Toribio Medina’s Historia de la Inquisición en México (Ediciones Fuente Cultural, 1905), pp. 196–208.
28. If Quetzalcóatl came to be the exemplar of the sage and priest and lawgiver, Tezcatlipoca was the shaman who ‘walked backward’ and dealt death with a sinister hand, the berserk warrior whose rages made things fly apart, the capricious sorcerer with an incomprehensible will, above law, reason or even fate. A valuable source in treating of the relations between Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcóatl is the work of Burr Cartwright Brundage, particularly The Phoenix of the Western World and The Fifth Sun. In the former (p. 272) appears a chilling characterization of Tezcatlipoca by the Franciscan scholar Sahagún: “He is arbitrary, capricious, he mocks. He wills in the manner he desires. He places us in the palm of his hand; he makes us round. We roll, we become pellets. He casts us from side to side. We make him laugh….”
29. It would seem that the Conquest and the pacification of Mexico drove the battle underground, unleashing a ‘war of the syncretisms.’The first fathers were stunned by similarities between Aztec and Catholic practices, and the Franciscans, especially, built on these. The ‘Indians,’ meanwhile, worked to conceal and embed their differences within the edifice of Catholicism: a Native artist paints a mural of the Virgin Mother in Indian dress; an Indian stonemason works a pre-Colombian flourish into a cornice of Mexico City’s great cathedral; on a Catholic holy day in the South, a procession of brown villagers carries at its head a cross too vitally organic to be the rustic cross of Calvary: they carry the Mayan tree of life.
30. While doing another edit of these notes, I recall something Beulah once said to me: Your Postmodern, Dr. Gregory, is just the Baroque with its blood sucked out.
31. Appears to have been adapted from the analyses of Alan Trueblood, A Sor Juana Anthology, and Octavio Paz in Sor Juana, Or the Traps of Faith, pp. 350–56.
32. Source the exact quote.
33. I’m not entirely unaware that my analysis of the Baroque has lost some of its balance. Under the circumstances, perhaps I can be forgiven. In the name of fair coverage, then, I give space occasionally to Beulah’s champions: “Let no one forget them. Melancholy, old mawkishness impure and unflawed, fruits of a fabulous species lost to the memory, cast away in a frenzy’s abandonment—moonlight, the swan in the gathering darkness, all hackneyed endearments: surely that is the poet’s concern, essential and absolute. Those who shun the ‘bad taste’ of things will fall flat on the ice.” (Pablo Neruda, “Towards an Impure Poetry,” Ben Belitt, trans.)
34. If that seems too easy a target, then imagine, instead, Ted Hughes acting like a changeling. Or a bird of prey.
35. The other Mexican to be so called was the god Quetzalcóatl, the ‘plumed serpent’ of Toltec and Aztec legend and D. H. Lawrence cult.
36. Someone will now argue that any regular stiff finding himself within five feet of Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo may indeed, in a fit of atavism, think of her as Aphrodite. I concede the argument. In such tight straits the gap between our two centuries is not unbridgeable.
37. Implicit in our modern awareness, I suspect, is the presumption that we must understand a past time better than it could understand us. In regard to our obsession with stardom, the Baroque might understand us better than we understand ourselves.
38. Modernity as the ‘abolition of the past’—Terry Eagleton.
39. Also, some of her passion was of a political order. It was a reclamation project—taking back the night of myth, as it were, from the media (‘hierophants’), politicos (‘eunuchs’), ad agencies (‘Madison Avenue classicists’) and postmodernists (‘toy-makers’).
40. Or in Beulah’s notes the ‘emotional technologies of myth, the sentimental craft of kitsch.’
41. Or as Beulah would have it: ‘Puritan purges, pogroms and putsches—orgies of purity.’
42. The phrase and the insight are Andrew Motion’s: see his Keats. And it is tempting if painful to wonder how many of the great myths might have been brought intimately back to life had that brilliant career been less brief.
43. Beulah would have added that these wilds of the imagination, however dangerous, revive and restore us in ways even the great museums and parks, especially, cannot. ‘Especially’ in that parks are precisely the ‘virtuous virtual’ we take for the real.
44. ‘… azure’s crystal drift,’ Alan Trueblood.
45. From Ovid, Metamorphoses, translation by A.E. Watts.
Isis BOOK TWO
1. This inscription was found, according to Proclus, carved at the base of a statue of Isis, most likely within the temple of Neith, at Saïs, Egypt.
2. This book reference is exactly the sort of thing that gives even the sympathetic editor fits. Although the book itself exists, I have as yet found no hand-sewn, leather-bound edition. Although Sor Juana is one of the three women Baroque poets, the edition I have found bears no image of Sor Juana on its cover, though conceivably an errant dust jacket might have carried one.
3. The date corresponds roughly to the first of the CBC radio specials on Sor Juana, and marks the incept date of Beulah’s formal research. Our national radio network is known, like the BBC, as ‘the Corporation’ (the latter has also been referred to by one wag as ‘a Christian version of the Vatican’). Having heard my own name bandied about by the local franchise of the daughter corporation, I begin to understand how it must have galled Beulah to hear Sor Juana’s name trumpeted in the public domain …
4. On the bottom of this page was scrawled in red ink: See what you make of this, Dr. Gregory. I give you leave, a little ancient history.
5. If I endnote this in passing and enlarge upon a point made earlier, it is not so much to congratulate myself as to round out the picture Beulah presents of me. The first time I read her journal entry for our night at the restaurant, I thought—Good, she was listening, after all. But in reading on, I discovered many other signs, few of them benign, that she had been listening to me very carefully all along.
Beulah and I had been to see a play at about this time. I thought she might enjoy it, a theatrical resurrection of Frida Kahlo. The evening was something of a success—precisely because the play was not, and for once we found ourselves largely in agreement. We took issue, or umbrage in Beulah’s case, with the whole notion of actress X ‘being’ Frida Kahlo. A kind of ‘time-travel tourism,’ was Beulah’s phrase, billing itself as authenticity. Certainly it ruined a brilliant performance by the actress, that she was being offered up to us ‘as’ Frida Kahlo with a very theek Mexican accent. Like most people there that night, we arrived aware Ms. Kahlo was Mexican. From the point of view of ‘authenticity,’ I doubted that she spoke a lot of English, and doubted that the way she spoke Spanish would make her companions think, without really noticing it, that Frida Kahlo sounded like the domestic help. So we decided that what the show had done was give us a transliteration, not a translation (the latter felicitiously defined as similar effects by different means). The one thing we did not experience—and most certainly not in our fetishized sense of the word—was authenticity.
Every time period has an accent, just not one terribly evident to itself. Cockneys have an accent alright, but they will never hear it the way we do. Historical authenticity could be defined in many ways, but rather than confusing it with ‘accuracy’ or ‘facticity,’ one might instead seek how a time sounded to itself, not how it must sound to the tourist from the twenty-first century. Or one might focus on what stood out as unusual or remarkable then—Sor Juana’s worldliness, for instance, and how it might sound in our time. To our time, her intellectualism might be alienating, if untempered by an effort to translate it; to another time, that same trait might be inspiring, or erotic. When translating Homer, the modern translator may consider writing again like Chapman, but that would be translating Homer to the seventeenth century. We read Chapman today for the quality of the writing. But we continue to make translations that resonate for our times without necessarily making Homer a Londoner or New Yorker.