Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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Sor Juana's Divine Narcissus: A New World

Rhetoric of Listening

Julie A. Bokser

To cite this article: Julie A. Bokser (2010) Sor Juana's Divine Narcissus: A New World Rhetoric of
Listening, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 40:3, 224-246, DOI: 10.1080/02773941003617418

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Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 224246

Sor Juanas Divine Narcissus: A New

World Rhetoric of Listening
Julie A. Bokser

While traditional rhetoric missed opportunities for potent change in the New World, alternative
rhetorical theory nonetheless existed. This essay argues that a play by renowned nun Sor Juana Ines
de la Cruz is a source of protofeminist, New World rhetoric, prompted by multicultural
seventeenth-century New Spain. Immensely respected by the dominant powers of Church and state,
Sor Juana was also attuned to issues of nondominance because she was criolla and female. Her
religiously orthodox Divine Narcissus is simultaneously a rhetoric of listening that rewrites
classical rhetorics focus on speaking within a community to attend to people at odds with one
another. It highlights the need for Spaniards, criollas, and Mesoamericans to go beyond talking at
one another, and instead listen with care. The Divine Narcissus is an important text in rhetorical
theory, concerned with dominant and nondominant rhetors and audiences in early Mexican
society.

The multiracial, multiethnic society of colonial New Spain (current day Mexico)
provides a fruitful locale for study of how rhetorical issues played out in a cultu-
rally diverse historical period. If there are lessons to be learned, the most salient
may concern the cost of ignoring the vastly different cultural situations encoun-
tered in the Americas. As current scholarship suggests, classically trained scholars
and practitioners largely neglected the opportunity to adapt rhetorical theory and
were slow to depart from the traditional conception of an audience with similar
background and assumptions as the speaker. In addition, although conversion
was certainly a dominant colonial discourse, it was considered distinct from per-
suasion; an audience of others was not understood to fall within the purview of
rhetoric (Abbott 1518). In a recent College English essay, Susan Romano high-
lights how fear of these others played a pivotal role. Examining rhetorical edu-
cation at the colonial college of Tlaltelolco, Romano uncovers sixteenth-century
curricula in which Mesoamerican males were taught to read, write, and then
translate Christian doctrinal materials from Latin and Spanish into indigenous

Julie A. Bokser is Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse at DePaul University,
802 W. Belden, Chicago, IL 60614, USA. E-mail: jbokser@depaul.edu

ISSN 0277-3945 (print)/ISSN 1930-322X (online) # 2010 The Rhetoric Society of America
DOI: 10.1080/02773941003617418
 Rhetoric of Listening 225

languages for catechetical purposes. Probably because such translation was

necessarily collaborative and thereby gave considerable authority to native
students, it was soon curtailed, and the overall project of teaching indigenous
young men was dismantled by the seventeenth century with significant, long-term,
negative effects on indigenous groups autonomy and mobility. University training
soon became accessible almost exclusively to males of Spanish descent. Don
Abbott asserts that by confining rhetoric to the scholarly realm and to European
individuals and traditions, New World rhetoricians had no compelling incentive
to understand the variety of audiences potentially available to the orator in the
Americas (113). Nonetheless, Abbotts Rhetoric in the New World traces the work
of rhetorical theorists in the New World, explains theories of conversion specific to
missionary work in the region, and uncovers a rich store of rhetoric that was not
labeled rhetoric, such as the culturally infused polemics of mestizo writers
Garcilaso de la Vega and Guaman Poma de Ayala. Both Abbotts and Romanos
scholarship implicitly points to the ways in which rhetorical innovation necessarily
took place in alternate forms and forums. In other words, to find rhetorical theory
and practice that attended to the specific indigenous, mestizo, and criollo (Creole,
or Spaniards born in the New World) cultures that populated New Spain, we need
to look in unexpected places.
One such site of unexpected rhetoric is a play by the seventeenth-century nun
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, whose better known La respuesta is also, I believe, a
source of alternative rhetorical theory. In the following pages, I explore the ways
in which The Divine Narcissus, a religious verse play by Sor Juana, serves as a rhet-
oric. This play was written by a criolla with a passion for Western European knowl-
edge, personal beliefs that were decidedly protofeminist, and the beginnings of
what we would now call a mestiza consciousness. Recent criticism has underscored
Sor Juanas use of the mythic Echo to contemplate female voice, explicated the
plays deployment of Lacanian mirroring, understood the work as a site for Latina
feminist theology, and used the play to debate Sor Juanas own narcissism.1
Instead, I read the play as rhetorical theory, and following Ratcliffes example,
extrapolate theory from the seemingly nonrhetorical text (Anglo-American 4).
This essay reveals Sor Juanas involvement with rhetorical concerns: she expands
the traditional concept of audience for relevance in a multicultural, colonial world;
her characters debate the plays persuasive agenda and discuss valid evidentiary
proof and visual versus verbal persuasion; and she employs an author persona
who, I argue, can be seen as Lady Rhetorica. Recognizing these extrapolations
as serious rhetorical work, we might begin to see The Divine Narcissus as a
New World Phaedrus.

1
See Merrim and Kirkpatrick on the echo; Strouds Lacanian reading; Gonzalez, Granger-Carrasco, and
Kirk on theology; and Merrim on narcissism. Like me, Ackerman emphasizes the theme of utterance and
hearing voices, but stresses this as a means of encouraging an interpretive devotion to Christ (73).
226 Bokser

Indeed, Sor Juana emerges as a rhetorical theorist who looks beyond the classical
realm of the good man speaking well: La respuesta investigates the rhetorical utility
of silence, especially for women (see Bokser), and The Divine Narcissus addresses
the rhetorical problems of listening and reception, using a transgendered protag-
onist. Sor Julia was a prolific author who was immensely respected in her own
time, and her attention to gender was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that
she was prevented from formal study because she was a woman. As a female intel-
lectual in colonial Mexico City, she was challenged by male authorities throughout
her life, and ultimately succumbed to pressure to renounce her studies. And
despite her prominence in New Spains hierarchy, she was also sensitive to her sta-
tus as criolla, by definition of lower social and political standing than Spaniards
from Spain, or peninsulares. Consequently, Sor Juana understood the rhetorical
problems of this highly stratified society from the varied stances of both speaker
and listener. She knew the situation was fraught with rhetorical roadblocks that
often prevent people from really listening, and, as Jacqueline Jones Royster has
said of our own era, prevent people from talk[ing] back rather than talk[ing]
also (38). In The Divine Narcissus, Sor Juana concerns herself with listening
and talking back, especially through the mythic character of Echo, who, in Sor Jua-
nas hands, has the capacity to subtly alter the sounds she hears and repeats. Sor
Juana is both iconoclastic and conventional; her efforts to inscribe into the rhe-
torical tradition a more positive and equilateral approach to listening reflect both
her attention to and correction of classical rhetoric.2
Speaking of recent efforts at dialogue between African Americans and whites in
the United States, Royster says, we need a clearer understanding that voicing at
its best is not just well-spoken but also well-heard (40). Similarly, Sor Juana sees
the need for exchange between potentially contentious groups to be well heard.
In The Divine Narcissus she considers the tensions surrounding native autonomy,
conversion practices, and royal intervention. The play presents an interesting cri-
tique of the conversion of indigenous peoples that occurred in the century preced-
ing Sor Juanas era, and suggests the authors empathy for native cultures whose
traditions had been removed through questionable persuasive means.3 At the same
time, however, the work maintains an orthodox attitude toward Christian

2
Work on rhetoric and listening is now being explored by rhetoricians such as Royster, Krista Ratcliffe
(see Cassandra, Rhetorical Listening), Michelle Ballif, and Gemma Fiumara. Wayne Booth is one of the
few scholars to posit listening as an overlooked but traditional part of rhetoric. See also Cynthia Selfes recent
argument for composition studies to reclaim aurality, the reception and production of aural communi-
cations (646, note 1).
3
Naming indigenous groups is a fraught endeavor. Current scholarly practice favors using an ethnic
groups name for itself when feasible; the specific group Sor Juana refers to here are the Mexica. I use Nahua
(of which Mexica are a prominent subgroup) to refer to a wider group of Nahuatl speakers and their
religious practices, and I use Mesoamerican as a general term for indigenous peoples of central Mexico
and environs. While sensitive to the history of associating native with pejoratives like primitive, I use native
as a neutral term for connoting indigenous inhabitants.
 Rhetoric of Listening 227

Communion and professes belief in the overall superiority of Christianity. Reading

this complex stance alongside the plays intriguing presentation of listening as a
dynamic, rhetorical act, we can see Sor Juana presenting new rhetorics of listening
as tools her society can use to sort out for itself the problem of asking indigen-
ous groups to belong to the New World.

Listening and Traditional Rhetoric

Meaningful rhetorical exchange goes beyond speaking to include listening and
silence. Audiences must attend to who is speaking, what is said, and what is not
said (Glenn 9). My scholarship positions Sor Juana as a theorist of the intercon-
nected rhetorics of listening and silence, yet in traditional rhetoric, silence and lis-
tening are not addressed extensively. When broached, there is often
disparagement. In the Phaedrus, for example, Socrates remarks that silence is for
those not worth speaking to (276). Articulating the attitude of much classical
theory, George Campbell understands listeners as a group to be vanquished; the
orators goal is ascendancy over the minds of his hearers (148). Traditional rhet-
oric typically sees silence as something one does to a passively listening audience.
For instance, in Ciceros On Oratory, when asked about the proper exercises for
aspiring orators, Crassus begins with the simple recommendation to write,
declaim on poetry, and observe actors. But then his recommendations become
progressively overwhelming in intensity. In the final analysis, the student must
read and know all the liberal arts, all laws, all antiquity, and extract a certain
intellectual grace from every kind of refinement (1.34)! The response to this
onslaught is silence. As Cotta, one of the young orators hoping for useable tips,
remarks, the rapidity of his words was such, and his oration was winged with
such speed, that, though I perceived its force and energy, I could scarcely see its
track and course (1.35). Crassuss rhetoric produces an impotent silence by
psychologically subduing its listeners.
Aristotles enthymeme provides a provocative contrast because it enfranchises
the listener while ironically precluding listening. As an abbreviated syllogism,
the enthymeme exerts persuasive force not through its logical construction, which
must nevertheless be present, but through what it does not say. When part of the
syllogistic premise is left unstated, Aristotle says in his On Rhetoric, the hearer
supplies what is missing, and through cognitive participation, the listener com-
pletes the communicative circle (1357a). This participatory dynamic gives more
agency to the listener than many subsequent classical accounts. When the audience
participant perceives that a logical connection has been left out, she fills in the gap
with something generated by her own mind. For Aristotle such persuasion is
especially effective because of the pleasure we take in our own involvement in
the exchange. We are pleased with our ability to make connections for our-
selvesto get it without handholding. Of course, the self-persuading listener
might not supply what the speaker intended, possibly filling in the enthymematic
228 Bokser

gap with a host of new, deviant associations. Aristotles theory of the enthy-
meme demonstrates the extent to which Aristotelian persuasion is grounded in
self-persuasion and self-love, processes that capitalize on our attentiveness to
ourselves rather than others.
The New World rhetor is even less certain than the classical rhetor of controlling
deviant connections. In a society composed of multiple races, castes, and ethnic
affiliations, audiences are unpredictable and unstable. Only a foolish rhetor hopes
to silence an audience she is not certain of to begin with. Grappling with similar
problems of intergroup relations today, especially relations between dominant and
nondominant groups, recent rhetoric scholars have expanded or revised tra-
ditional rhetorical boundaries, stressing the need for members of mixed societies
to not simply speak to but also speak with one another, which entails attentive
listening, openness to diverse forms of delivery, and the recognition of purposeful
silences.4 Sor Juana posits a triadic conception of audience that re-works rhetor-
audience identification and re-tools the Aristotelian speaker-text-audience triad.
Her Divine Narcissus has a complicated, tripartite audience: Mesoamerican con-
verts, Christians of European background in the New World, and Spaniards in
Europe. If enhanced communication is to occur, all of these audiences need to
become speakers and listeners. The most significant intended audience may be
the Spanish king. In the plays introduction, or loa, the character Religion insists
that the play will be performed in Madrid, which is the center of the Faith,=the
seat of Catholic majesty,=to whom the Indies owe their best=beneficence (Divine
Narcissus, Loa lines 437440).5 The title page of the first printing of The Divine
Narcissus in 1690 corroborates the internal assertion of Madrid as the intended
performance site. It says that the piece was composed at the urging of the viceroys
wife the Marquesa de la Laguna, whose aim was to take it to the Court of Madrid
so it could be performed there (OC 4.513). Despite the fact that this is one of
only a few of Sor Juanas works that was first published in Mexico instead of Spain,
it seems that her intentions were to present the Spanish court with an enactment
of the cultural problems that had arisen out of the conquest, problems that
traditional rhetoric was not adequately addressing.

4
For example, Flower suggests that in composition studies we teach students how to speak up and
speak against but not how to speak with others (2). Her rhetoric of public engagement aims for inter-
cultural dialogue in urban settings, often through hybrid discourse or nontraditional delivery (32).
Ratcliffe investigates rhetorical listening as a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in
cross-cultural exchanges (Rhetorical Listening 1). Glenn examines how nondominant groups use silence,
as a rhetoric, a constellation of symbolic strategies (xi).
5
As an auto sacramental, The Divine Narcissus is a one-act play with a prefatory loa. While both are
divided into scenes, the numbering of lines is consecutive throughout each respective unit, so my citations
specify loa or auto and the line number only. This and subsequent citations from The Divine Narcissus (here-
after abbreviated DN in parenthetical citations) are from the first and only full English translation of the
play, by Patricia Peters and Renee Domeier, now out of print.
 Rhetoric of Listening 229

Not only did classical rhetoric inadequately consider the audience=listener, but
rhetoric traditionally conceived of persuasion as occurring within a community,
presuming a continuity of culture between speaker and audience. A classical rhetor
takes account of audience variation, but a core homogeneity is assumed. More like
her twenty-first-century counterparts, Sor Juana sees rhetoric as a problem of
inter-group relations, and knows that a New World rhetoric must ask how one
speaks to a truly mixed audience, which includes whites of European descent,
indigenous peoples, blacks from the Indies and Africa, and, by Sor Juanas time,
an astonishing array of racial mixtures of these various groups. Sor Juanas use
of Nahuatl (the language of most indigenous people in what is now Mexico City)
in several devotional poems marks her awareness of interlanguage issues, challeng-
ing the classical presumption of linguistic unity.6 In a contact zone like this, the
speaker has a heightened need to hear from audience members in order to be cer-
tain they have climbed on board. At the same time, constituencies that do not have
sufficient power (such as indigenous peoples or women) develop ways of com-
municating without speakingof using silence instead of being silenced. Thus,
the New World necessitates a shift in traditional rhetorical theory by considering
how one speaks to mixed audiences, as well as how one listens.
The absence of Nahuatl in The Divine Narcissus helps confirm an intended royal
audience, since this language would of course have had no currency in Spain. Fur-
thermore, a direct attempt at conversion would have been misplaced since most of
the indigenous people had been converted by this time. In the late seventeenth
century, when the missions were mostly Jesuit, the focus was on criollo subjects,
not native ones (Ricard). A great deal of tension with and suspicion toward
Mesoamerican subjects remained, however. Hence, in a sense, The Divine
Narcissus is a letter to the king that critiques his subjects rhetorical interchange
with natives. Unfortunately, it possibly shared the same fate as Guaman Pomas
now famous letter to the Spanish king, since there is no record of the play being
performed in either Spain or New Spain (DN, Introduction xix).7
Today, however, The Divine Narcissus can be read as comment on how Com-
munion has been and should be taught to indigenous people, as well as theory
regarding the role of listening in this rhetorical transaction.8 In other words, the
play is not simply trying to convert or persuade others to Christianity, but also
reflects on persuasion itself, posing a theory of rhetoric that interacts with classical

6
For poems in which Mesoamericans speak Nahuatl and Blacks speak their own dialect of Spanish and an
African language, see Obras completas 2.14 (translated into English in Trueblood 125), 26, 39, 71, 94, and
138. Sor Juanas use of Nahuatl in these poems reflects a concern for native speakers that is also a rhetorical
device, making parishioners feel the Church was also theirs.
7
See Pratts discussion of Guaman Pomas letter (Arts).
8
Mendez Plancarte, one of the two twentieth-century editors of Sor Juanas collected works, argues
against the possibility that this auto was used to explain doctrine or that it had a missionary goal of educat-
ing indigenous groups (Juana, OC 3.511).
230 Bokser

texts and reaches beyond their traditional focus on speaking. Like many rhetorics,
the play investigates issues of pedagogy (how to teach indigenous groups),
especially the persuasive ethics of pedagogy. In fact, Sor Juana asks a question that
resonates today in our debates over immigration, open admission, and public edu-
cation: in a hierarchical, patriarchal, and racist world, what issues surround the
task of enabling unprivileged groups to join a dominant discourse community?
The Divine Narcissus looks at the opportunities and problems of persuading
people to be more like one another or to co-exist with differences. Sor Juana
understands the boundaries of difference occurring at multiple sitesespecially
the intersection of Mesoamericans and Spaniards, and Spaniards in the New
World and Spaniards in Spain. When the character Zeal suggests that writing
Madrid is an impropriety, Religion, speaking in the guise of author, responds,
Is it beyond imagination=that something made in one location=can in another be
of use? (DN, Loa 445; 446448). Zeal asks Religion to defend her choices in rhe-
torical terms. He challenges her to explain not only the performance location, but
also her choice of metaphor, title, and audience, and to justify the appropriateness
of the New World topic for this European audience. Eventually, Zeal decides
humility is the best approach: Then, prostrate at his royal feet,=beneath whose
strength two worlds are joined=we beg pardon of the King (473475). Through
the veil of humility, Sor Juana insists on her right to make the king aware of the
exigencies that arise when two worlds are joinedyet she also knows the worlds
are joined by force, or strength. While at times the plays anti-Spanish critique
and pro-Catholic orthodoxy appear to compete with or contradict one another,
their simultaneity also serves as an effective way to present the royal crown with
the nature of the contact zone in his distant territory.

Conquering with Verbal Steel

Autos sacramentales like The Divine Narcissus were persuasive tools: in Spain they
were frequently used to celebrate the Eucharist against Protestant attacks, and in
the New World they were prevalent instruments of instruction, designed to
inculcate an indigenous audience that might still lean toward pagan customs
(Granger-Carrasco 22, 5; Gutierrez 83).9 While I am reading The Divine Narcissus
as a needed revision of rhetorical tradition, it was written for the feast of Corpus
Christi and perceived to be in line with Church orthodoxy. Written around 1688
and first published in 1690, The Divine Narcissus is in many respects quite con-
servative, and neither its content nor form is wholly original.10 It contains an
introductory loa, in which Mexica nobles are seen encountering the conquerors,

9
Auto sacramental is a generic designation for a religious play that is often allegorical, and which typically
during this period honored the Eucharist (Granger-Carrasco Ch. 1).
10
Between 1691 and 1725, The Divine Narcissus was published in Spain several times in collections of
Sor Juanas works. It was not reprinted again until 1924, in Mexico.
 Rhetoric of Listening 231

resisting Christianity, and then preparing to accept it. The 500-line loa formally
prepares the audience for the auto sacramental that follows by announcing that
the play will use allegory to explain the Eucharist visually. In the auto sacramental,
Sor Juana uses the mythical characters Narcissus and Echo to represent the figures
of Christ and Satan.11 Narcissus was popular in Spanish poetry, and Sor Juanas
play alludes to acclaimed seventeenth-century dramatist Calderon de la Barcas
1661 Eco y Narciso.12 The frame of good and evil represented as male and female
respectively is sexist and conventional, but it receives a surprising twist through
the emergence of transgendered qualities, discussed later in the article.
Alongside its adherence to generic convention and religious orthodoxy, the loa
is also quite stunning for its critique of the Spanish conversion. Sor Juana critiques
conversion methods and their reliance on a form of persuasion that is hard to dis-
tinguish from the force of the conquest.13 Religion, an author persona, is the
character tasked with converting the Mexica. She sees herself tempering the
violence of her military companion, Zeal. She posits her persuasive tactics as an
alternative to violent conversion:

I will also go, since piety

inclines me to approach (before
your fury attacks them)
inviting them,
to receive my peaceful form of worship. (DN, Loa 9195; my translation)14

Yet despite differentiating herself from Zeal, Religions comments raise the
age-old question regarding the distinction between persuasion and violence.
Exactly how much free will does a persuasive situation permit? Where do we draw
the line between persuasion and force? The Divine Narcissus enters rhetorical his-
tory as one of many voices in the debate regarding force and persuasion, a debate

11
Echo plays the part of Angelic nature, fallen from grace.
12
New Spains literary scene was determined by Spain, where Narcissus was a ubiquitous literary pres-
ence from the fifteenth century on (Mendez Plancarte in Juana, OC 3.514). Both Mendez Plancarte and Paz
aver that Sor Juanas play is not only different from but also far superior to Pedro Calderon de la Barcas play
(Juana, OC 3.lxxiv; Paz 351).
13
My reading contrasts with Gerard Flynns: All in all, her attitude towards the Conquest seems neutral.
She shows no recrimination for Zeal, and yet the pagan Occident and America are not ugly . . . . Sor Juana
assents to both that which is Spanish and that which is Indian. The Conquest happened, and she accepts it
(74).
14
Yo ire tambien, que me inclina
la piedad a llegar (antes
que tu furor lo embista)
a convidarlos, de paz,
a que mi culto reciban.
I offer my own translation because Peterss and Domeiers is quite off the mark: And I, in peace, will also
go=(before your fury lays them low)=for justice must with mercy kiss;=I shall invite them to arise=from super-
stitious depths to faith. Sor Juanas Spanish is more generous. There is no mention of superstitious depths;
both Nahua and Spanish religious practices are referred to as cultos (forms of worship; cf. Loa 95, 178).
232 Bokser

perhaps begun by Gorgias, whose Encomium of Helen argues that persuasion can
be like rape. Cicero, too, sees rhetoric as a power that can impel the audience
whithersoever it inclines its force (3.15). Religion speaks with this history
behind her.
Furthermore, I would like to suggest that Sor Juana configures the author per-
sona Religion as a Spanish lady to purposefully allude to Lady Rhetorica (DN
scene 2 stage directions). In the classical tradition, Lady Rhetorica is often repre-
sented as armed with a mighty sword, her verbal acuity depicted as a weapon.
Like Lady Rhetorica, Religion vanquishes with influential speech. Her words
to Zeal support a reading of Religion as the personification of rhetoric: It
was your part to conquer her=by force with military might;=mine is to gently
make her yield, persuading her by reasons light (214217, emphasis added).
Regardless of Religions claims, Occident and America know there is often little
difference between persuasion and force. The gallant Indian Occident reveals
their potential similarity through antithesis: I must bow to your aggression,=but
not before your arguments (DN, Loa scene 1 stage directions; 203204). Once
again, in the very act of distinguishing between aggression and persuasion, he
manages to imply their resemblance: like weapons, some arguments leave little
room for autonomy.
Significantly, it is America, Occidents female partner, who is even more pointed
in her critique of the Spaniards. She makes the similarity between force and per-
suasion even more explicit by alluding to persuasion as weaponry of verbal steel
(intelectivas armas), potentially more devastating than gunpowder:

If your petition for my life

and show of Christian charity
are motivated by the hope
that you, at last, will conquer me,
defeating my integrity
with verbal steel where bullets failed,
then you are sadly self-deceived.
A weeping captive, I may mourn
for liberty, yet my will grows
beyond these bonds; my heart is free,
and I will worship my own gods! (226236)

This is a rousing assertion, yet despite her insistence that her people can hold on to
their dignity in their own hearts and minds, she and Occident soon capitulate to
Religions verbal steel. Religion confesses her devious rhetorical strategy to the
audience: she uses the Mexicas own preexisting beliefs and practices (their
deceit) regarding the consumption of a god to entice them, by making Com-
munion appear familiar. Mock on!, she taunts, For with your own deceit,=if
God empowers my mind and tongue,=Ill argue and impose defeat (273275).
Her persuasive deployment of verbal steel leaves us questioning how close defeat
is to conversion.
 Rhetoric of Listening 233

Here, in a drama celebrating the Eucharist we are nonetheless led to question

the sincerity of the Mexicas easy capitulation. Occident soon complies, wishing
to be made free=of old beliefs that shackle me (379380). Given the contentious
dialogue, one wonders whether his conversion is sincere or purely pragmatic. That
is, perhaps he really means he is shackled not by but because of his old beliefs, and
that given the circumstances, publicly disavowing these beliefs will bring a modi-
cum of freedom. Thus, while his acquiescence conveniently represents conversion,
conforming to the greeting, battle, and submission pattern standard in the auto
sacramental (Gutierrez 83), the play also hints that for Occident such conver-
sion may be the price he must pay to become literally unshackled, even while
the steel chains of persuasive education linger.
The politics behind Sor Juanas rhetorical use of indigenous characters are
suggestive, but difficult to pinpoint. On one hand, the antagonistic relations
between rhetor and audience that mark the early interaction between Religion,
America, and Occident illustrate what Fiumara has called certainly not listening
so much as endurance or forced feeding, hypnotic induction, or epistemic viol-
ence (93). This serves in contrast to other more positive kinds of rhetorical listen-
ing that Sor Juana reveals, which I discuss later. The ugliness of the attempted
conversion is also painfully honest self-disclosure, an unflinching reflection on
the work of Sor Juanas own religious compatriots. Nevertheless, some skepticism
is needed to temper comments such as Patricia Peterss assertion that The Divine
Narcissus is a remarkable reflection on the plight of the Aztecs under the scourge
of Spanish colonization and that a performance of it would have constituted
one of the earliest examples of anti-colonialist drama (DN, Introduction xxii).
The questioning of Spanish conversion methods constitutes powerful but brief
moments in a largely orthodox text. It could also be argued that these moments
have been inserted to render actual indigenous viewers more receptive to the
orthodoxy that follows.
Additionally, Sor Juanas sympathetic portrayal of indigenous culture represents
an early assertion of Mexican identity, and this strategy of nationalistic
self-assertion is a response to Spain as much as compassion for the natives.15
Jacques Lafaye suggests that interest in the indigenous past took place in New
Spain after 1650 because, due to the thoroughness of the Conquest, an actual
threat no longer existed. Sor Juanas assertion of Mexican identity is reinforced
by another author persona; alongside the Spaniard Religion, the authorial voice
is registered through a Mexica, America. The loa ends with Religion, Zeal, and
America jointly begging pardon of the king, queen, and other royal personages.
In a litany of humility, America adds: and from=their poets, I most humbly

15
Octavio Paz views Sor Juanas works as crucial to the early formation of criollo identity. It is only
recently, though, that Sor Juanas works have been classified as literature of Mexico, not Spain
(Granger-Carrasco 15).
234 Bokser

beg=forgiveness for my crude attempt,=desiring with these awkward lines=to rep-

resent the Mystery (Loa, lines 481485, emphasis added). Sor Juanas bicultural
affiliation via Religion and America is a complex maneuver indicating openness
toward indigenous culture that is also an appropriation of that culture. Sor Juana
had to imagine belonging, at least temporarily, to several competing cultures.16
It is quite possibly this contradictory state that elicits her alternate version of
rhetorical theory.

Native Education: Blood and Colored Rhetoric

In The Divine Narcissus, Sor Juana is most interested not in rhetorics traditional
realm, the production of speech, but rather another side of rhetoric, the reception
of communication. The play focuses on hearing sounds and seeing images. This
focus on receptive rhetoric is quite fitting in a work that celebrates the reception
of the Eucharist. Religion implores the Mexica to convert and live through an
appeal to open their sense of hearing (DN, Loa 225): Listen, Occident!=and hear
me, blind Idolatry!=for all your happiness depends=on listening attentively (293
296). Americas initial response to the Spaniards intrusion is to stop her ears and
close her eyes, as if a sensory roadblock might stop the invasion when a military
one has failed. She tells Occident to close off [his] hearing and [his] sight . . .
refuse to heed (175176). Religion then makes appeals to sight, employing retor-
icos colores, a visually based metaphoric device. The colored rhetoric is the auto
sacramental itself, the allegorical play the loa introduces, which enacts the passion
of Christ through mythical characters that stand for Christian abstractions.
The phrase retoricos colores appears in both the loa (403404) and auto
sacramental (338), translated by Peters and Domeier as rhetoric so colorful
and iridescent rhetoric. Rhetorical colors refer to the visual vibrancy of the
enacted allegorythe meaning of Christianity will play itself out before the spec-
tators eyes. In other words, Sor Juana employs the classical convention of rhetori-
cal colors, or ornamentation. Specifically, her allegory uses energeia as a literal
bringing-before-the-eyes, making the lifeless living by staging an actual per-
formance (Aristotle 1411b). In the use of colored rhetoric to educate colored
natives, a connection to race, to the multicolored blood that runs through this
society, is unavoidable to modern ears. Ironically, Religions colored rhetoric
deracinates; it aims to make the natives less colored and more like us,
European Christians. While it cannot be comfortably argued that Sor Juana
intends these particular ironies, it is clear that she consciously engages racially
infused rhetorical issues of her time, including debate over native intelligence
and how to best reach an indigenous audience.

16
A similar multiplicity of identity is what Gloria Anzaldua capitalizes on in her twentieth-century
rhetorical theory for Mexican Americans.
 Rhetoric of Listening 235

Debate over the sophistication of Mesoamerican cultures was pervasive. For

example, Jose de Acosta saw the lack of alphabetic literacy as a deficit, necessitating
some military coercion (Abbott 6675). Many commentators agreed that words
alone would not work with indigenous peoples, a bias that Peters and Domeier
perpetuate when they translate Occident and Americas need for visualization as
occasioned by their cognitive shortfall; they need objects rather than words
because they are creatures with ears too deaf to hear (DN, Loa 408409). Sor
Juanas Spanish, however, is less overtly pejorative. Sounding like a teacher trying
out different pedagogies, Religion literally tells America and Occident:

For now I know that you are inclined

toward visible objects, more than
to that which Faith counsels in your ear,
and so, its necessary that you are administered to
through the eyes, so that
through them you receive faith. (DN, Loa 406412, my translation)

Traditionally, faith was counseled in the ear, and then found a place in the
heart. In the medieval Compendium on the Art of Preaching, Alanis de Insulis says
that good preaching should appeal to the ears of the listeners, awaken their
hearts, arouse true sorrow, pour forth wise teaching, thunder forth admonitions,
soothe with promises, and so completely serve the one purpose of aiding other
people (qtd in Miller et al., Readings 232, emphases added). Hence, conversion
was assumed to occur through listening, or more accurately, it occurred to listen-
ers, and not as the result of speaking. That is, the Word could not be received
rationally nor could a rhetor set out to persuade someone to convert.17 Rather,
grace simply arrived through faith, which came from hearing speech (Kennedy,
Classical Rhetoric 146, 140). Words trigger conversion, not through what they
explicitly say, but through their nuances and associations.18 As Paul says to the
Corinthians: When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to
you the testimony of God in lofty words of wisdom . . . and my speech and my
message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit
and power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power
of God (Kennedy 150151; 1 Cor 2:1, 45).
In her depiction of conversion, then, Sor Juana pursues a traditional ears-
to-heart pathway and also moves beyond it with attention to visual and tactile

17
The Requerimiento demands allegiance to the Church as supreme ruler, but also tells Mesoamericans
that Spaniards shall not compel you to turn Christians, unless you yourselves, when informed of the truth,
should wish to be converted to our holy Catholic faith (Washburn 308).
18
It is this aspect of language that Morana attributes to Sor Juana, claiming that her rhetoric of silence
(the capacity for words to persuade beyond their overt reference) is affiliated with the sublime (176).
236 Bokser

persuasion. In the auto sacramental, Pride and Self-Love articulate the traditional
Pauline words of Spirit using terms that echo Alanis de Insulis:

PRIDE: I have listened

to their discourse, and more than words
have touched my ears; both sound and sense
have penetrated to my heart.
SELF-LOVE: And I as well, from listening
to the sweetness of their rhythms,
am awestruck and beside myself. (DN, Auto 280286)

But in the loa, Religion consciously adjusts the traditional rhetorical prescription
because the ears-to-heart mode does not appear to work for the characters in the play.
Their motivation seems to derive from something more material than evanescent
words. For instance, the god they desire to worship is someone they can see and touch.
I do prefer to see it more than have you tell me about it, Occident says, while America
queries, And so that I can be convinced,=may I not see this Deity? (Loa 413414, my
translation; 377378). America also wonders, then tell me, is this God so kind=this
deity whom you describe=that I might touch Him with my hands (321323).
Sor Juanas audience understood the Nahua to want even more than visual and
tactile access; they wanted to be able to eat their god. Teocualo, translated God is
meal, was a pre-Conquest Nahua ceremony in which the blood of sacrificial victims
was eaten as a way of connecting with the deity. In the loa, the threat of blood initially
suggests this sacrificial and cannibalistic ritual. Then the tainted cannibalistic blood
rites are transformed into Christian Communion, which purifies blood. The Nahua
ritual of eating the gods body and drinking his blood (provided via sacrificial victims)
is implicitly compared to the Eucharist, which is put forth as an unbloody con-
sumption of holiness that converts Gods body and blood into bread:

[ . . . ]His boundless
Majesty is insubstantial,
but in the Holy Sacrifice
of Mass, His blessed humanity
is placed unbloody under the
appearances of bread, which comes
from seeds of wheat and is transformed
into His Body and His Blood; (Loa 354361)

Religion points out that bread comes from wheat seeds because the audience would
know these same seeds were praised by the Mexica when they worshipped Huitzilo-
pochtli as God of the Seeds.19 In this way, the practice of Communion is shown to be
prefigured (although less holy and less complete) in their own tradition.

19
Sor Juana seems to be conflating rituals that apply to two different Nahua gods, Huitzilopochtli (god of
the seeds) and Quetzalcoatl (to whom human sacrifices were made) (Sabat de Rivers 290291).
 Rhetoric of Listening 237

Sor Juana uses both indigenous and classical rhetorical systems. She makes
allusion to the visceral experience of bleeding, sacrificial bodies and transforms
them into an unbloody vision of sanctified blood=wine contained within a
sacred cup, most innocent, unstained, and pure (Loa 358, 363, 365). Hence,
blood that is not blood becomes the most sacred substance. Replacing their lewd
rituals with Christianity cleanses their blood of its bloodiness (Loa 97). When
Religion describes the rite of Communion as a way of making the deity tangible
and transforming the bloody sacrifice into an unbloody bread, Mexica interest
is piqued. America asks warily,

Such miracles, unknown to us,

make me desire to believe;
but would the God that you reveal
offer Himself so lovingly
transformed for me into a meal
as does the god that I adore? (Loa 368373)

Here Sor Juanas characters explicitly discuss the rhetorical proofs, or pisteis, of
their belief system, which are not Aristotelian logic, but food, blood, and material
evidence, what Aristotle calls nonartistic proofs. Sor Juana stands out from
classical theorists by acknowledging the primary appeal of basic bodily desire.
Instead of ignoring that the body craves food, she recognizes that God . . . in
the bread is a powerful motivator (Loa 400): Lets go, for anxiously I long to
see=exactly how this god of yours=will give Himself as food to me (486488).
Thus, by elevating different evidentiary proofs than classical rhetoric and
attending to visual and material rhetorics, Sor Juana revises traditional rhetoric.
Her colored rhetoric attempts to get around the insubstantiality of language
by making abstract ideas visible, and therefore understandable:

. . . and I
shall make for you a metaphor,
a concept clothed in rhetoric
so colorful that what I show
to you, your eyes will clearly see. (DN, Loa 403405)

The technique accords with the New World rhetoric of Diego Valades, the
first mestizo to publish in Europe and a theoretician whose view of Mesoamer-
ican ability is much more generous than Acostas. In Rhetorica Christiana
(1579), Valades highlights the usefulness of visual communication for crossing
cultural barriers. According to Don Abbott, Valades believed that indigenous
peoples were by nature and by tradition receptive to ideas conveyed by
images (49). His work is elaborately illustrated with pictograph alphabets
and scriptural scenes because his New World experience had convinced
him that actual images must be joined with mental images for persuasion to
be more effective (56).
238 Bokser

Sor Juana appears to endorse Valadess assertions about the efficacy of visual
persuasion and does so without condescension. The rhetorical colors of her
allegory are no simple animated versions of otherwise complex verbalizations.
Allegory means something other than what it saysit is employed by a poet
who composes sentences of such=iridescent rhetoric [retoricos colores]=that what
they seem, they never mean (DN, Auto 337339). The trick of the allegory is that
by making ideas colored and visible, it ultimately explains a religion of unsee-
able truths. It uses sensual tricks to get at the unseeable and unspeakable. Allegory
is particularly adept at teaching the unseeable since it emphasizes the role of rep-
resentation and substitution: Narcissus is not simply Narcissus, but also God; Echo
is also Satan, and so on. Sor Juanas continual reminders that she is using allegory
reinforce this theme of representation. The idea is not to captivate readers with a
scintillating story, but to make them aware that behind each character and the
overall story is something more than visual display.

Pour Your Voice into My Ear!

Once the message is made visual through the performative dimensions of the auto
sacramental, in the very first scene of this main section of the play, Human Nature
re-establishes an ear-to-heart correspondence. In this way, Sor Juana suggests a
two-part process: visual to entice, and aural to sustain. Somewhat similarly,
Augustine separates conversion, accomplished through biblical storytelling, and
rational persuasion, used to impel the converted to act consistently with their
beliefs (Abbott 16). Augustine recommends the delivery of words, at different
levels or registers, for both heathens and the converted. In contrast, Sor Juana
represents a two-part conversion process of seeing and hearing. And unlike Augus-
tine, her stages are concurrentthe calls to hear occur within the visual allegory.
Quite possibly, the nun recognizes the need for a more protracted period of
actively persuading the receptive but still potential(ly resistant) convert. Sor Juana
embraces traditional conversion theory (ear-to-heart) and simultaneously goes
beyond traditional rhetoric with a much more nuanced, refined attention to the
rhetorical stances of the listener.
Before examining what she says about listening, we need to consider why Sor
Juana focused on it. On one hand, given her status in New Spain, she could par-
take in what Adrienne Rich calls the male assumption that people will listen
(243). This is most strikingly illustrated in her official Church biography, where
she is described as a 17-year-old genius, placed in a competitive performance by
the viceroy, and valiantly displaying brilliance in the answers she gave to more
than forty male professors who tried to stump her. The scene is portrayed as ago-
nistics among unequals, which yields only truncated listening: Like a royal gal-
leon, a heavy, substantially equipped warship, Sor Juana fend[s] off attacks
from opponents comparable to a few flimsy canoes (qtd in Paz 98). In this pairing
of Spanish warship and Indian canoe (chalupa), traditional rhetorics silencing
 Rhetoric of Listening 239

or subduing of listeners is displayed: Sor Juana, on the Spanish side of this binary,
vanquishes canoe-paddling natives. And yet, forty university men are clearly
European-affiliated masters. According to Lyotard, the speculative game of the
West is a game without a listener, because the only listener tolerated by the
speculative philosopher is the disciple . . . (Just Gaming 72). In other words, while
attempting to position Sor Juana as an exceptional (and model) nun, the 1700
biography, written after her death, also reveals the listening problems inherent
when New World speaks to Old World.20 Participants are trapped within the
binarized parameters of rhetor=audience, speaker=listener, master=disciple, con-
queror=conquered, male=female.
Given this ingrained dynamic, Sor Juana was inevitably also acquainted with the
female experience that no one will listen, at least not to what she really wanted to
say. She was acutely aware of the masters inability to listen because she was a
student deprived of a master: she says her lessons go unheard, her only teachers
are mute books (The Answer=La respuesta 59). My assertion is that because
she was a woman who was praised as knowledgeable but prevented from formal
study, Sor Juana understood the problems on either side of the speaker-listener
dyadrhetorical and pedagogical problems which often prevent people from really
listening. She is both master and disciple, speaker and listener, subject and object.
While Church figures worked after her death to shape the reception of Sor Juana as
text, during her life Sor Juana worked on reception itself, attempting to theorize a
mode of communication that encompassed a listening that was also talking back.
Throughout The Divine Narcissus there are at least twenty occurrences of
Spanish words for listening, or, escuchar, and atender (their forms occur ten, eight,
and two times, respectively). Human Nature says:

[N]ow let my words enter your ears,

and in your hearts let them be treasured.
Since I am mother to you both [Synagogue and Gentile],
in each, let Natural Law inspire
the listening you yourselves desire. (Auto 2226)

What kind of listening is invoked? To counteract the problem of truncated

listening, the text proffers two more positive kinds of listening, receptive and
resistant. Both show listeners engaging with what is said, responding, and being
part of a rhetorical transaction, so that listening is shown to be dynamic and
active, a correlate of speech.
The most pointed comments on this topic come through the character whose
name itself invokes sound, Echo. Although she doubles back what she hears, Echo
is a mostly resistant listener. As the allegorical representation of the Christian

20
The incident is quite possibly apocryphal, and at the very least, sculpted to resonate with the stories
of St. Catherine of Alexandria and the young Jesus in Luke 2:4647.
240 Bokser

Satan, Echo recalls the mythical nymph who talked too much and was punished by
becoming only a voice, unable to speak first, capable only of reply. The character
therefore offers rich possibilities for rhetorical theory. Sor Juana skillfully plays
with the echoing theme in the brilliantly choreographed Scene 12 of the auto sac-
ramental, where a duet between Narcissus (the allegory for God) and Echo (Satan)
underscores both the limitations and possibilities of the echo. Close study of the
dialogue will help us to understand both types of listening. In this scene, after dis-
covering that Narcissus has another love, Echo hides inside a tree trunk to spy on
him. Narcissus can hear her, but he cannot see her. In contrast to Ovids rendering
of the myth, here, Echo is more than just a voice. But as in Ovid, she is unable to
initiate conversation, and can only repeat the last word of the speaker with whom
she converses. Yet she listens resistantly:

NARCISSUS: How agonizing is the pain

ECHO: Pain.
NARCISSUS: of the sorrows that I suffer
ECHO: I suffer.
NARCISSUS: in torture so unbearable
ECHO: Unbearable.
NARCISSUS: since in My pain, so terrible
and grief from which I must expire,
deprived of all My hearts desire,
THE TWO: I suffer unbearable pain. (Auto 14711480)

Although Echo hears Narcissus, and longs for union with him, she does not echo
his message. She does not speak as we or of shared pain; for her there is only
isolated, individual anguish.
This interestingly illustrates Michelle Ballifs recent depiction of feminist listen-
ing. Like my above critique of traditional rhetorical listening, Ballif says patriarchal
rhetoric cannot ask what is it that the audience wants? because the audience is
expected to want exactly what the speaker has induced it to want, and to identify
itself with the speaker so that its own desires are no longer at issue. But what the
audience really wants, she asserts, is to remain other (54). By stealing Narcissuss
words to make them speak for herself, Echo resists being subsumed by the rhetor.
She remains other.
Resisting how Narcissus uses words, Echo wrest[s] others words from their
original context and oblige[s] them to serve her own purposes (Merrim 113).
Like actual echoes that distort the sounds we make, Echo sometimes turns
Narcissuss words into their opposites. In the following passage, inhuman becomes
human, and invulnerable, vulnerable:

NARCISSUS: Why am I so cruelly subject

ECHO: Subject.
NARCISSUS: to that torture, so inhuman
ECHO: Human
 Rhetoric of Listening 241

NARCISSUS: though divine, invulnerable?

ECHO: Vulnerable.
NARCISSUS: But without doubt, invincible
is love in its great potency
since it has made My loveliness
THE TWO: Subject, Human, Vulnerable. (Auto 15011510)

The female Echo as the typically male Satan parallels Ballifs ideal listener: a listener
who is transgendered and hermaphroditic in order to mark his=her difference from
hearers. For Ballif, hearers selflessly mirror speakers and respond to their
demands. In contrast, Ballifs transgendered listener resists the speakers demand
and refuses to become fully legible. If, in the traditional configuration, speaker
and hearer are on two opposite sides of a sexualized relationship in which the
speaker does something to the hearer, then to speak and listen is to be a hermaphro-
dite. Echo=Satan conforms to Ballifs ideal listener by refusing to be receptive to
Narcissus, to understand him, to identify and to recognize him according to
his drive (Ballif 59). However, the application of Ballifs listening to The Divine
Narcissus is limited. What I am calling listening, Ballif says, would be a result
of a sending, celebrating that the message may never arrive at its destination and
even if it did it would remain ultimately illegible and (mis)understood (60). In fact,
Echo is not illegible; she is actually quite expressive even in her semi-mute con-
dition (Merrim 113). Stephanie Merrim points out that, The punning mechan-
isms at play when Eco [sic] converts Narciso to hizo, hueco to eco, and so
on, force a single signifier to yield up the variety of unrelated signifieds it encloses.
Echos language, it has been said, is a way of deconstructing words . . . into their
hidden but operative ultimae (114). Thus, Echos resistant listening does ulti-
mately speak to Narcissus, and through this strategy of recopilacion, Sor Juana stages
a wonderful complication of the notion of dialogue.
Nonetheless, resistant listening is limited. Echos miming selfishly reuses isolated
or cut down (cortadas) words, as Pride tells her (DN, Auto 1431). She hears only
what she already believes and is guided, as Narcissus says, by Self-Love and no con-
cept of your error (15751576). Gemma Fiumara underscores the problem with this
kind of listening: But if we were capable of listening only to what we are willing to
receive, . . . we might then consider only those evident and massive questions to which
we could respond while remaining within certain safety limits (38).
To be capable of listening to more than what we are willing to receive, we must
have a theory of receptivity in place. Although with its passive, feminine associa-
tions, reception raises feminist concerns in addition to Ballifs, we cannot sim-
ply dispose of it.21 The fact is that we need receptivity for listening to occur

21
An attitude of complete receptivity, of openness to any view or hypothesis that a participant seriously
wants to advance, still puts a woman, I believe, in a dangerous stance, Susan Jarratt cautions, quoting Peter
Elbow (117).
242 Bokser

and rhetoric to persuade. As in her depiction of resistant listening, in Sor

Juanas receptive listening, bodies also meet and hear one another without
merging, rejecting patriarchal vanquishing and subsuming. And where the
transgendered Echo=Satan resists, the male Narcissus receives, both challenging
gender norms.22 In the passage above, when Echo and Narcissus together recite
Subject, Human, Vulnerable, Echo=Satan is repeating her=his own words, the
words s=he has wrested from others and to which s=he has imparted new, per-
sonal meaning (DN, Auto 1510). Meanwhile, Narcissus, speaking as Christ, incor-
porates both his original statement, that he is subject to inhuman torture despite
his divine invulnerability, and the new one he has acquired by listening to Echo:
that he is subject, human, vulnerable. Where Echo resists and changes meanings,
Narcissus acquires them, receives them.
What is more, once Narcissus recognizes Echos presence, he speaks directly to
her, trying to understand her pain: Who cries out so piteously? . . . Through what
perspective are you seeing? (1567, 1569). Narcissus tries to connect with others,
yet he recognizes there are perspectives other than his own. This recognition of the
other is Sor Juanas most dramatic alteration of the classical myth. When he gazes
into the fountain, instead of falling in love with himself, Narcissus recognizes
another, Human Nature, in his reflection. Echo, ever resistant, is completely
bewildered by such behavior. She goes toward him, then recoils:

But what do I see?

Confused and daunted, I draw back:
He is gazing into the fountain,
contemplating His own likeness,
but seeing Human Nature in it.
Oh, fatal Fortune in my stars!
How much I feared Hed see her clearly,
become entranced, and love her dearly,
and at last, it came to pass! (13191327)

At this climax of the auto sacramental, Narcissus recognizes Human Nature in his
own reflection, and invites her to become a part of his divinity, which in turn
causes him to die. This, of course, is the enactment of Christs incarnation, which
the Eucharist celebrates. In verse reverberating with allusions to the Song of Songs,
Narcissus gazes at Human Nature, whom he sees in his reflection in the Crystalline
Fountain. He is touched by an image of himself that is simultaneously another.
He cries out:

Come, my spouse, to your beloved:

tear away your veils sheer:

22
Why is the Devil a woman?, Merrim asks of the play, and reconciles the dilemma by finding parallels
between Satan and Sor Juana, who must also dissimilate because divine authorities restrict her voice (114).
 Rhetoric of Listening 243

let me see your lovely face;

pour your voice into My ear!23 (DN, Auto 12971300

Narcissus announces his own receptivity, and simultaneously makes clear that his
acceptance of another is a being who remains other. His appeal, Pour your voice
into My ear!, is an eroticized call for listening, encapsulating the fundamental
yearning of rhetoric, which seeks union between voice and listening, between what
is said and what is heard. At the same time, it maintains the distinction between
your and my, tu and mi (Pour your voice into My ear!). The apex of
Narcissuss rhetoric is love, reminiscent of Platos Phaedrus, but here the ultimate
rhetorical act is not a speech that speaks to souls and subsumes them, but a listen-
ing that receives souls as a part of, yet apart from, the self.
Similarly, Hans-Georg Gadamer connects listening with respect for the other as
other (or Thou):

In human relations the important thing is, as we have seen, to experience the
Thou truly as a Thoui.e., not to overlook his claim but to let him really
say something to us. Here is where openness belongs. But ultimately this open-
ness does not exist only for the person who speaks; rather, anyone who listens is
fundamentally open. Without such openness to one another there is no genuine
human bond. Belonging together always also means being able to listen to one
another. (361)

In German this last phrase is propelled by a linguistic pun on horen (hearing) and
zuhoren (belonging). To Gadamer, open listening implies mutual persuasion by
two people who somehow belong together. In classical rhetoric this relation is
often figured as love, and often it is a negative or threatening kind of love: there
is the dangerous sexuality of Gorgiass persuasive scene, in which rape is a likely
outcome; or the mocking sexual banter between Platos Socrates and Phaedrus.
Sor Juana counterposes this with a positively charged, sexualized encounter in
which a male listening speaker desires to receive the sounds of another. Mean-
while, by doubling as Satan, Echos resistant listening is transgendered. Sor Juana
defies the traditional Western model in which binaries prevail, moving beyond
philosopher=disciple, speaker=listener, male=female. While the options of resist-
ance and receptiveness are both clearly important strategies for a listener such
as a convert, Sor Juanas discussion may be most valuable for its concern with
how converts, natives, mestizos, criollosall the citizens of New Spainand
the Spanish crown will talk and talk back. She seeks Gadamers openness, aware

23
In Spanish, the last line cited here (line 1300) reads, Suene tu voz a mi odo: Make your voice sound
within my hearing. Sor Juana is playing upon verse 2.14 of the Song of Songs: Let thy voice sound in my
ears (Douay-Rheims version). The English translation given by Peters and Domeier does not change the
meaning, and the use of pour manages to allude to the fountain into which Narcissus gazes.
244 Bokser

that if they are able to listen to one another, then they may eventually belong
together.
In summary, The Divine Narcissus quietly heralds a conscious entry into the
domain of rhetoric and is thus a significant historical document reflecting a con-
tribution to the rhetorical tradition by an early modern woman. But I also want to
argue that the play-cum-treatise is worth reading now. Its consideration of how to
teach the uneducated resonates with charges of illiteracy confronting open
admissions enrollees, first-generation college students, and new immigrant popu-
lations in our own era. Moreover, the plays complex configuration of listening as
crucial to rhetorical transactions is integral to the complicated demands of belong-
ing in todays still racially and ethnically mixing worlds.
In such worlds, it cannot be denied that differences among individuals and
groups do exist. In Narcissuss plea, Pour your voice into My ear! the distinction
between your and my affirms the need for continuing persuasive encounters.
As Kenneth Burke reminds us, Identification is affirmed with earnestness pre-
cisely because there is division. [ . . . ] If men were not apart from one another,
there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity (22). Sor Juana
knows that the distance between the your of the Spanish king to whom she
writes and the my of her New World life will not be bridged easily. Nevertheless,
her reconceptualized understanding of audience attempts to reflect the very real
heterogeneity of the world all now share.
In Sor Juanas Divine Narcissus, a rhetoric of reception is introduced, making an
appeal for meeting and joining others without losing oneself. What I am urging is
that we receive the play as a catechistic explanation of Communion and simul-
taneously resist such orthodoxy and perceive the texts critical stance. Read as rhe-
torical theory, the play identifies the problem of forced conversion as unethical,
nods to the efficacy of visual tactics in persuasive conversion, and then devises more
responsive kinds of listening as ways to establish connection with others. Sor Juana
shrewdly uses the character of Echo to probe both the limitations and possibilities
of the resistant echo, and she connects Communion and conversion with listening
as receptive, dynamic acts. She generates rich possibilities for a gender-conscious
rhetorical theory of listening and belonging. Above all, she implies that rhetorical
listening will be crucial to solving the problem of minority populations and auto-
nomy and that it is those in power who not only need to learn about different kinds
of listening, but also need to become better listeners themselves.

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