La desnudez como naufragio: Borrones y borradores (review)

This is a collection of short essays written in the last decade of the twentieth century. As a literary critic, Glantz's forte is the close reading in pursuit of a philological quandary. Here she chooses to focus on a number of prologues by various chroniclers as well as on lesser aspects of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's texts. Glantz mixes and matches questions on writing and the body, writing and editing, problems of language and cultural translation in the conflict of conquest as she moves over pages authored by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Bernal Díaz del Castilllo, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Sor Juana, and others.

The collection is organized into two parts: "La conquista y el fracaso" and "Sor Juana y otras monjas." In the first part, the reader will find a series of essays dealing with very specific topics buried in the voluminous works of figures such as Bartolomé de las Casas, Cabeza de Vaca or Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Glantz seemingly intends to cast light from a neglected angle on a secondary aspect of the work of these explorers and conquistadors, or on the received understanding of their writing. In this fashion, the title of the book, "la desnudez como naugrafio" allows for a reflection on a discourse on the body. Already in Columbus's letters and reports nudity acquires very specific connotations as it revives old European myths that will, in turn, be transformed and reutilized as needed in future conquests. She reminds us that nudity in the Biblical story "presupone la inocencia," while nudity, once associated with the Amerindians, "evoca y provoca un eroticismo" (p. 67). As she continues to lightly explore the topic she comes to the central thesis of her essay, namely that the really true failure in Cabeza de Vaca's expedition is not the shipwreck: "El verdadero naufragio se inicia justamente con la desnudez" (p. 68).

In the second part of the book, Glantz has gathered a number of notes on colonial nuns and a long essay on Sor Juana. The essays here correspond to the same interests explored in Glantz's earlier work on Sor Juana (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Placeres y saberes [1996]): how the infinitely clever Sor Juana made use of the immense network of allusions and motifs accumulated in her archive in order to speak of the forbidden pleasures and knowledges that surrounded and beckoned her. As elsewhere in the volume, the reader is treated to close readings of single lines, single metaphors, repeated allusions or the movement of an entire poem. Yet Glantz's figurative prose avoids technical analysis of the form-content complexity in Sor Juana, and thus makes the book amenable without ignoring the long shadow cast by Octavio Paz's work and the cultural milieu in which she lived.

The subtitle of the book, "Borrones y borradores" makes reference to a theme that Glantz sets out to explore in the prologues to the various cronistas included in the collection. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, in the prologue to his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la nueva España (1632), assures the reader that what is now in his hands is free of "borrores," that is to say smudges, errors and mistakes. The published text is no longer a draft; it is beyond erasures, corrections and mistakes. Glantz exploits the etymology of the word "borrones" (not the Derridian implications) and finds it interesting that Sor Juana, the consummate stylist, also speaks of "borrones" in her work. Yet Glantz remains within the field of the philological in her discussion of "borrones," and does not pursue the full extent of what erasure, crossing out, re-writing, over-writing, copying, eliding and other Borgean language games would have meant to the Mexican nun, an intellectual so dearly invested in discovering a philosophy of language that enabled her to speak her palimpsestic games, her strategies of hide and seek, and her...