Posted by Miguel A. Balsa on April 18, 192003 at 12:52:06:
NOTES ON “SOR JUANA IN PRISON”
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, one of the most prominent women in the history of Mexico, is Rodríguez’s choice for embodying her caustic portrayal of the country’s political, social, and cultural scene at the turn of the century. The play creates an absurdly humorous situation in which Sor Juana is imprisoned due to incongruous accusations, such as violating “the intimacy of human persons” by staging “the birth of the Messiah” in “total frontal nudity with the object of attracting morbid attention.”
The humorous tone that constitutes the play’s backbone is especially designed to enhance the sharpness, even the bitterness, of Rodríguez’s critique. The play’s preposterous plot conveys a feeling of absurdity about contemporary Mexican political, social, and cultural life. “Sor Juana in Prison” confronts us, as it were, with the distorted image of an already distorted “reality.” As the subtitle of the play announces, “Sor Juana in Prison” is a “virtual” play, a mere image projected on a screen, immaterial, insubstantial, removed from “reality.” By placing the play’s action in such a context, those are also the traits that Rodríguez seems to attribute to the entire set of situations and characters that dwell in the Mexico of the new millenium.
Rodríguez’s sense of the absurd as an appropriate lens through which “reality” can be grasped takes on an interesting dimension when one considers that Juana and Lysi, both temporally and spatially decontextualized , maintain full capacity to “make sense.” Their words and actions are informed by a certain logic--they try to understand the absurd “virtual reality” in which they are trapped. In contrast, “logic” and “sense making” are altogether absent from that of the established “law and order” that brought Juana to her prison. The Prosecutor’s ridiculous words and deeds are exclusively aimed at maintaining and confirming the functioning of the absurd system from which they themselves emerge. This is especially evident, for example, in the scene in which the Prosecutor stabs the Baby Jesus in order to justify Juana’s inprisonment and sentence.
Rodríguez’s “virtual play” proposes that a humorous look at the world appears as the only worthy means of dealing with “reality.” No matter how absurd that humor may be, it will always be more reasonable than a ludicrous political and social establishment that takes itself too seriously, and therefore is unaware of its own ridiculousness. By parodying “reality,” Rodríguez’s message seems to be that humor is the spell which will keep all sorts of threatening monsters at bay.
“Sor Juana in Prison” takes on a particular form of humor--parody, which reaches one of its most remarkable moments in the play when Juana’s and Lysi’s on-stage sex scene is confronted with Octavio Paz’s “The Traps of Faith,” alluded to by an off-stage voice. While the words echo Paz’s well-known biography of Sor Juana--in which the relationship between the two women is configured as one of “sublimated saphism”--the staged action shows two women “kissing passionately” as they “frolic wildly.”
As literary and art critic Linda Hutcheon says, “parody[...]is a form of imitation, but imitation characterized by ironic inversion[...]. Parody is, in another formulation, repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity.” Parody, and humor in general, allows for the necessary distance to look at things with some perspective. Every “repetition” opens up a space for the re-creation of whatever is “imitated.” Repetition, therefore, is a space for creativity and criticism. Rodríguez’s parody, in short, emerges as a reminder of the actual possibility of alternative narratives, as a constant reminder of the need for quotation marks everytime one writes, says, or thinks “reality.”