Emblems, Optics and Sor Juana’s Verse: “Eye” and Thou

E M B L E M S , O P T I C S A N D S O R J U A N A ' S V E R S E : "EYE" A N D T H O U Frederick Luciani Colgate tJniversity It has become axiomatic in Sor Juana studies that the Mexican nun was well acquainted with the emblem literature so in vogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Critics have drawn significant parallels between references in SorJuana's work and emblems from some of the most widely known collections of the time, beginning with the enormously influential Emblemata of Andrea Alciato.1 Emblem books offered Sor Juana and her contemporaries a repository of visual/textual symbols—the raw material for the creation or adaptation of vivid tropes, erudite allusions, and so on. Perhaps more importantly, they appealed to and helped to promote the kind of emblematic intellectual reflexes that we associate with Sor Juana and with the Baroque Age in general—an inclination to look for the occult correspondences between things and to manifest those correspondences ingeniously. Conjoining image and text, emblem books also embodied a seventeenth -century delight—so apparent in Sor Juana's work—in semantically laden visual art, and, conversely, in ekphrastically conceived verbal art. The emblem was a perfect illustration of the prevalent idea that painting and poetry were "sister arts." Often cited in this regard was the assertion that painting was mute poetry, and poetry a speaking picture.2 Sor Juana's reiterations of that commonplace were many. Indeed, entire compositionsby the nun were conceived in such terms: her poetic "portraits," her Neptuno alegorico ("este Ciceron sin lengua, / este Demostenes mudo" 4:403), even her auto sacramental, El Divino Narciso, which is introduced, in its preceding loa, as "una idea / metaforica/vestida / de retoricos colores, / representable a [la] vista" (3:17).3 In a well-known lira, Sor Juana exhorts her reader, "oyeme con los ojos" (1:313), inviting him to see, not only in the epistolary poem he is reading, but in the scenes from nature that she directs him to read symbolically, emblem-like "ejemplos" of her love for him. Many more such examples of Sor Juana's metaphoric and ekphrastic joining of the "sister arts" could be adduced. Their omnipresence in the nun's work suggests an intellect and a sensibility strongly drawn to the visual—indeed, interested in the phenomenon of vision itself. Such an interest is clearly evinced in references in Sor Juana's work to optical phenomena , to optics as a science. The most explicit of such references can be found in her Respuesta a Sor Filotea, in which she recounts having ob- 158 «S Frederick Luciani served that the lines of vision seem to form a pyramidal shape as they recede from the viewer. Sor Juana presents the observation as an original discovery, one of her "readings" in the "Book of Nature." In fact, this was a well-known phenomenon since ancient times, and was illustrated in a book that the nun cites elsewhere: Athanasius Kircher'sArs magna lucis et umbrae. Kircher is also the source for the reference in the Primero Sueno to the "linterna magica," a device for projecting images. The Sueno evokes the legendary Lighthouse of Alexandria, with its prodigious mirror that captured the images of distant ships at sea. And the phenomenon of the "optics" of dreams is described, in physiological terms, in the Sueno as well. Given these apparent interests, it makes sense that Sor Juana would be drawn, not only to emblems in general, but to emblems in which optical phenomena (light and shadow), organs (eyes), art (paintings) and instruments (telescopes, eyeglasses, mirrors) have a central role. Such emblems form an interesting subcategory within the emblematic tradition. They are, in a sense, twice witty because they are self-reflexive: if all emblems , as visual art, depend upon the optical illusion of reality and the optical apprehension of that illusion, these emblems are about those very phenomena. They serve as a reminder that, indeed, all emblems were conceived in such self-reflexive (and reflective) terms. Emblem books often were given titles that equated them with looking glasses: Speculum amoris, Mirrour ofMaiestie...