In his controversial psychoanalytic study of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ludwig Pfandl offers her five burlesque sonnets as proof that the Mexican nun suffered from a chronic mental disorder, because of which she sometimes slipped into an abnormal and indecent deficiency of sensibility and taste. Says Pfandl [in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, la décima musa de México: Su vida, Su poesia, Su psique, translated by Juan Autonio Ortega y Medina, 1963]:

Por último podemos también aqui mencionar esos cinco malos sonetos que los biógrafos de nuestra monja no saben precisamente como justificar y declarar inofensivos y tampoco saben cómo ponerlos en consonancia con el elevado estado intelectual de la Décima Musa…. Nosotros … consideramos que los cinco malcriados incubos son productos de la Juana ya madura y monacal, pues sabemos cómo renovaba y resbalaba reiteradamente hacia un anormal estado de sensibilidad.

Pfandl's observations neatly summarize the general critical posture with regard to the burlesque sonnets: they have long been both a source of perplexity for critics and an object of direct or indirect censure. Their rather frivolous, discordant rhymes have not been to everyone's taste, and their presentation of a picaresque sort of love (unrefined, even bawdy), along with the occasional indelicate word or reference, have struck a number of modern critics as incongruous and inappropriate, especially considering Sor Juana's sex and religious calling.

A quick description of the form and content of the burlesque sonnets will help to explain why, as Pfandl correctly noted, critics have been hard-pressed to explain their presence within Sor Juana's oeuvre. All five are written in forced consonantal rhyme, and use farcical, sometimes coarse, language to describe aspects of love among the lower classes. The characteristic rhymed consonant of the first sonnet, "Inès, cuando te riñen por bellaca …," is /c/; the person addressed, perhaps by her suitor, is Inés, who is scolded for her loquacity in terms which do not exclude the scatologic. The second sonnet, "Aunque eres, Teresilla, tan muchacha …," has a characteristic ch in its rhyme scheme, and deals with the deceitful Teresilla and her cuckolded husband Camacho. The only peculiarities in rhyme of the third sonnet, "Inés, y con tu amor me refocilo …," are the use of the prefix re in the rhymed words of the first quatrain and the first tercet, and the final o of all the lines. In this poem, an Inés is again addressed, this time by a suitor who describes his reactions to her fickle, and sometimes violent, moods. The consonant f is characteristic of the rhyme scheme in the fourth sonnet, "Vaya con Dios, Beatriz, el ser estafa …," in which a Beatriz receives the complaints of her rufo, who accuses her of being deceitful and unfaithful. In the last sonnet, "Aunque presumes, Nise, que soy tosco …," the characteristic rhyme is -sco. In this poem, a Nise is assured by the man in her life that he is not deceived by the traps she sets for him.

Where critics have gone wrong is to divorce these sonnets from the literary context which makes them intelligible: the courtly love tradition, in both its serious and burlesque forms. When examining this tradition, a convenient place to start is with Guillaume IX of Aquitaine, generally acknowledged as the first troubadour, at least the first whose works are extant. Guillaume's lyric manifests many of the refined notions of courtly love whose echoes are heard in the Baroque age of Sor Juana, yet in his songs on con, for example, Guillaume treats the most earthy aspects of physical love in a broad and bawdy fashion. But the presence of the exalted and the base is not schizophrenic in Guillaume, any more than it is in Rabelais or Quevedo, or for that matter, Sor Juana. Rather, high and low treatments of love coexist as parallel and connecting modes, in constant dialogue with each other. Refined courtly love depends upon its burlesque counterpart; its elegant attitudes need to be somehow grounded in baser reality so as not to become empty posturing. Similarly, burlesque views of love depend on their refined counterpart for their humor and surprise; only as thematic and linguistic deformations of an ideal are they ingenious, and therefore amusing.

This element of dialogue, a dialogue of texts, of voices and attitudes, to which the attentive reader is sensitive, is important in Sor Juana as well. Her burlesque sonnets do indeed stand in contrast to her sublime amorous lyric, a contrast whose intention is to surprise and delight. Pfandl is of course correct when he suggests that these poems cannot be put "in consonance" with Sor Juana's more elevated moments; his mistake is to view the dissonance of the burlesque sonnets in ethical and psychological terms rather than in terms of an evolving tradition.

The third sonnet is a good example of how burlesque love poems can best be appreciated as a deformation of the ideal courtly love lyric. It reads:

The sonnet is essentially a lover's lament, but this lover is not a courtier, and the object of his affections is no lady. As in serious courtly love poetry, the beloved enjoys a superior position relative to her suitor, who rejoices in any sign of affection or attention on her part. And as in courtly love connection, the beauty of the lady, which the lover contemplates with delight, is the source of love. The beginning of the poem, then, presents a perfectly traditional situation: the lover rejoices in his lady's beauty and attentions. But the serious tone of this beginning is undermined by the discordant forced consonants of the quatrain; the last word of each line, the key verb which expresses the lover's emotions, begins with the prefix re-, a prefix which suggests repetition and intensification. Each of these verbs is also reflexive, preceded by the pronoun me. The repetition of these verbs ("me refocilo," "me regodeo," "me recreo") vulgarizes the essential message, suggesting emotions that are more self-indulgent than courteous.

The lover goes on to treat the theme of jealousy; he is devastated when his beloved looks at another, and trembles when she herself is jealous. The lover's trembling recalls that of the ideal courtly lover, who manifests symptoms of love illness (hereos). However, this lover trembles, not because of his extreme humility, not because his worship of the lady leads him to fear her slightest sign of displeasure, but rather, as it turns out, because of her habit of walloping her man when provoked. The ideal courtier's heroes, caused by the alteration of humors in his lady's presence, is thus parodied by the lower-class lover, the rufián, whose nervous trembling is a result of the fear of physical violence: "tu con un voleo / no dejarás humor ni aun para quilo"

The first tercet of the sonnet returns to the use of words beginning with re-, and each line recalls a traditional courtly love theme. In the first line, the lover notes how he does not dare to breathe when Inés is angry. This corresponds to both a symptom of hereos (the "impedido aliento" found elsewhere in Sor Juana's verse) and the theme of the silent adorer, the fenhedor of courtly love lyric. But here Sor Juana's lexical choice, the verb resollar, colors the concept with a more vulgar shade of meaning: it recalls the noisy respiration of animals as well as the familiar meaning of "breathing a word," speaking up. The next line echoes the courtly theme of the refining effect of love; the lover's courteous service is a source of virtue, a process of self-improvement through the exercise of humility, devotion, and self-discipline. But this lover's service is of a more prosaic nature; it is Inés' henpecking that keeps him in line. The last line recalls the courtly theme of the wakeful lover, Petrarch for example, whose lonely bed is his duro campo di battaglia. But in Sor Juana's sonnet, the lover's sleeplessness is not a result of unrequited passion; it is a more practical kind of vigilance, directed towards Inès' activities outside the house.

The sonnet ends with an expression of hope or expectation; this corresponds to the courtly lover's role of precador, or beseecher. But the guerdón that this lover anticipates is ambiguous: He expects that Inès' love will land him in bed or out on the street. If bed is his fate, he will either have won the object of his heart's desire, or else he will be convalescing. If the street is his fate, he will either have been dismissed by his disdainful lady, or else he will have joined her in some mutually profitable enterprise.

The fifth burlesque sonnet by Sor Juana also constitutes a humorous deformation of courtly love commonplaces. It reads:

As with so many poems in the courtly love mode, this sonnet hinges upon the antithetical contrast of images and metaphors of heat and cold, light and darkness. But the lover who speaks in this poem uses these antitheses to systematically deny similarity between himself and the traditional courtier.

The first quatrain constitutes a reworking of one of the oldest and most common metaphors of courtly love verse: the lover as a moth attracted to the flame. The standard metaphor is well suited to the commonplaces of courtly love sentiment: just as the moth flits about the flame, unable to approach and unable to depart, so is the courtly lover trapped in a perpetual state of longing, of frustrated desire, of "have-and-have-not"; the moth's attraction is ultimately fatal, just as the lover's passion is self-destructive. Poets traditionally noted the madness of the moth in its attraction to flame (in the words of the troubadour Floquet de Marseille, "parpaillos qu'a tant folia natura"), as well as its artless, ingenuous nature (Petrarch's "semplicetta far alla," Herrera's "simple mariposa"), and its literal and figurative blindness (in Góngora's words, "Mariposa, no sólo no cobarde, mas temeraria, fatalmente ciega").

In Sor Juana's sonnet, all of these commonplaces are alluded to, but with a difference: the lover who speaks denies the relevance of the traditional metaphor; his is not the classic situation. He is not stupid ("tosco") despite what Nise may think. He is not blinded with passion, but rather, exceedingly clear of eye: he sees Nise for what she is without seeking her "light": "tu luz no busco," "tus engaños reconozco." In short, he is no butterfly, and no dreamy courtly lover; his love is lucid and self-interested, and he is not be its victim.

The second quatrain continues to contrast images of light and darkness. The lover, however deeply involved he may be with Nise, and even entangled in her deceitful plots, denies being confused ("ofuscado"); his skin color may be dark ("fusco") but his disposition is even darker ("más hosco"). These lines recall many of Petrarch's which contrast the lover's dark and depressed state with Laura's bright and serene nature: "Che'l nostro stato è inquieto a fosco, / Si come'l suo pacifico e sereno." But such sentiments are corrupted in Sor Juana's sonnet; the lover who speaks is not only dark of disposition, but also of skin color. He is probably a mulatto or mestizo, that is to say, of the lower classes. Thus, a kind of racial joke is used to parody the traditional courtly lover's spiritual darkness and despair.

In the tercets, the contrast of light and darkness gives way to the contrast of heat and cold, in antithetical image that recall qenerations of European love lyric. But here again, the classic situation is reversed: the lover is cool and collected, not burning with passion. He is the one whose heart is cold, who offers his snowy disdain to the lady. The poem ends on a defiant note: the lover knows what he is about, and is not to be trifled with.

This affirmation of control over the amorous relationship on the part of the suitor is a direct negation of courtly lover sentiment, and of the traditional roles of courtly lovers. Nise is warned not to play the cruel mistress, for her man is not the courtier of love lyric, and has no intention of being dominated. He is clever, self-possessed, keen of visions; even his skin color is a denial of resemblance to the poetic ideal. This denial of resemblance is carried out in the poem on the rhetorical level: standard comparisons are employed, but vulgarized or trivialized so as to stand the conventions of love lyric on their ear. The difference is obvious if one juxtaposes Petrarch's "stato fusco" with the "color fusco" of the lover in Sor Juana's sonnet, or if on one compares the standard expression of amorous disorientation, the "camino errado" of so many courtly love poets, with this lover's colorful and impudent expression of self-assurance: "yo sé muy bien lo que me pesco."

As the preceding analysis has suggested, it is the final word of each line which gives the five burlesque sonnets their farcical tone. Aside from the peculiar consonantal rhymes which they possess, these words are unique in their general semantic, morphological, and acoustic properties. Among them one finds examples of onomatopoeia (triquitraque, chasco), of germanía and colloquialisms (mequetrefe, cuca, and so on), of popular variants of words (ducho, rather than docto), and of poliptoton (ofusco, fusco, hosco). In addition, the first sonnet includes one common scatological word (caca), and the fourth sonnet concludes with a line that mimics the laughter of which the rufián will be the object ("afa, ufo, afe, ofe …") and ends by naming the characteristic consonant of the sonnet, efe. In short, these final words are deliberately and self-consciously anti-poetic, if by "poetic" we mean mellifluous, idealized, euphemistic, and erudite. They are the direct antithesis of "poetic" language, just as the plebeian lovers who are referred to are, in their actions and emotions, the antithesis of the prototypical lovers of courtly tradition.

Antipoetic too, by traditional standards, is the consonantal rhyme of these sonnets, the insistent repetition of sound which is percussive but not musical. The result is a kind of vertical alliteration, read or heard downward from line to line, not the linear, mimetic alliteration of traditional verse. This alliteration is used in a playful, nonfunctional way; the forced consonants are, to borrow Severo Sarduy's words [in América Latina en su literatura, edited by César Fernández Moreno, 1972], a "divertimiento fonético," an intratextual operation which invites an unorthodox, nonlinear reading, and which, like the anagram and so many other "curiosities of Baroque verse," is ultimately self-referential. If there is a correspondence, a harmony of sound and sense in these poems, then it is a cacophonous harmony; the acoustic discord of the final words reminds the reader of the general nature of the sonnets: their deliberate corruption of courtly love ideology, their lexical deviation from conventional poetic language, in short, their carefully contrived dissonance with regard to traditional amorous lyric.

The burlesque sonnets, then, can be regarded as poems of contrived dissonance. The reader can attune his ear to the acoustic and intertextual dissonances of the poems, but what about the elements of contrivance? How can one explain the sonnets' systematic rhetorical and thematic upending of the courtly love tradition? They are obviously meant as humorous pieces; one must assume that their buffoonish humor was more engaging in the seventeenth century than in our own. And certainly the ingeniousness of the metrical tricks performed must have appealed to the Baroque Age's love of wit. Yet even allowing for differences in taste and humor between Sor Juana's century and our own, one cannot help but sense a certain ponderous quality in these sonnets; without judging them ethically or censuring them aesthetically, one can still recognize that they are something of a vulgar stunt. When read within a literary tradition, and especially when juxtaposed with serious treatments of courtly love, they are more then comical and clever: they are somewhat aggressive, even subversive. The trivaility of the situations presented does not change the fact that these sonnets turn back on the tradition in a critical way; this is cumbersome parody, but with a pointed tip.

Sor Juana's burlesque sonnets refer constantly to a poetic tradition, and ultimately, to themselves. This circular referentiality makes determining the fundamental sense and purpose of these poems a difficult task. But the task can be made practicable by stepping briefly outside the circle, by looking to another writer and another text as points of comparison. The humorously parodic nature of the burlesque sonnets, their metaliterary consciousness, their constant reference to an established literary genre, are all reminiscent of similar tendencies in the Quixote. Cervantes and Sor Juana share, among other things, a keen awareness of the permutations that can be realized by the writer who works with topoi that are over-familiar, time-worn. The Quixote offers a wealth of comparative possibilities, but one episode in particular, that of Don Quixote's penitence in the Sierra Morena, can serve as a vir tual simulacrum for the feats performed by Sor Juana in the burlesque sonnets.

As the reader of the Quixote will remember, in part I of the novel the hero sends his squire on a mission: Sancho must ride to Dulcinea and communicate his master's love to her. During Sancho's absence, Don Quixote proposes to imitate the mad fury of Orlando and Amadis, two of his principal models in knight-errantry. The purpose of Don Quixote's imitation will be to prove his love for Dulcinea, to give, in his words, "testimonio y señal de la pena que mi asendereado corazón padece." To this end, it is necessary that Sancho be his medium; he must observe some of Don Quixote's actions before leaving and report them to Dulcinea: "Por lo menos, quiero, Sancho … que me veas en cueros, y hacer una o dos docenas de locuras, … porque habiéndolas tú visto por tus propios ojos, puedas jurar a tu salvo en las demás que quisieres añadir …".'

Sancho immediately begins to suspect what Don Quixote never does, namely that such actions will not make sense out of their conventional context. He notes that, while the chivalric heroes had sufficient cause to lose their sanity, Don Quixote's "madness" will be unprovoked. His mas ter's answer is too pragmatic, too well reasoned, and is a reminder of the totally contrived nature of his enterprise: '"Ahi está el punto …, y ésa es la fineza de mi negocio; que volverse loco un caballero andante con causa, ni grado ni gracias: el toque esta en desatinar sin ocasión y dar a entender a mi dama que si en seco hago esto, ¿qué hiciera en mojado?'" Don Quixote's purpose is too obviously rhetorical; he hopes to physically enact the figures and topoi of amorous convention in order to convince Dulcinea that he indeed is in love. As most often is the case in the novel, Don Quixote's real madness lies in his inability to recognize what Cervantes makes refreshingly clear to the reader: that literary conventions make sense only on a literary plane, that they cannot be translated into action without becoming absurd.

Sancho, again, realizes that his amo is embarked upon an enterprise doomed to failure. When Don Quixote mentions that he proposes to smash his head against the rocks as part of his amorous derangement, Sancho advises: "Por amor de Dios …, que mire vuestra merced cómo se da esas calabazadas: que a tal peña podrá llegar, y en tal punto, que con la primera se acabase la máquina desta penitencia. Y seria yo de parecer que … se contentase … con dárselas en el agua, O en alguna cosa blanda, como algodón." Sancho's premonitions turn out to be valid ones: Don Quixote's mad fury is never quite realized in action. His descriptions to Sancho of his proposed derangement are most of what constitutes his imitatio. Beyond that, all he does is to half undress, and, just as Sancho embarks upon his mission, stand upon his head, "descubriendo cosas, que, por no verlas otra vez, volvió Sancho la reinda a Rocinante, y se dió por contento y satisfecho de que podia jurar que su amo quedaba loco." Once Sancho is gone, Don Quixote decides, in a wave of pragmatism, to imitate the gentle penitence of Amadis rather than the violent variety of Orlando. Mostly he wanders and prays the rosary, and occasionally carves a love poem on a tree or traces one in the sand, since without a witness, a reader of his actions, and without the powers of linguistic figuration, his crazed actions are meaningless, merely absurd.

Within the story of Don Quixote's adventures, his penitence in the Sierra Morena is a dismal failure. His attempts to physically enact the figures of literary convention are impossible; the message he endeavors to send to Dulcinea never arrives, and even his medium, Sancho, does not understand the spirit in which his penitence is intended, even if he understands its concrete implications only too well. But the episode of Don Quixote's penitence is remarkably successful novelistically. The artificiality of Don Quixote's stunts effectively turns the convention upside down, and reveals the ridiculousness of the original literary theme. Don Quixote's imitation of his literary heroes' penitence may be a disaster for Don Quixote, but it is something of a novelistic coup for Cervantes; the episode is utterly successful as a parody of hyperbolic declarations of love.

Somewhat the same thing can be said for Sor Juana's burlesque sonnets. As love poetry, they are a deliberately garish failure, a grotesque inversion both of courtly love sentiment and of love poetry's euphonic metrics. A parallel can be drawn between Don Quixote's contrived poses and Sor Juana's contrived verses; in both cases, the trick is pre-announced. The consonants in the burlesque sonnets are indeed "forced" upon the reader; each line seems to be contrived so as to produce the prearranged word, which strikes the ear with its gratuitous discord. As with Don Quixote's physical displays of madness, the metrical trick performed comes across as too pre-meditated, too heavy-handed.

But as parody the sonnets are very effective. By presenting a farcical lower-class version of the idealized love of courtly tradition, the sonnets, like Don Quixote's penitence, demonstrate how the themes and tropes of a given literary mode are untranslatable from their conventional context; the parodic deformation of the convention, in turn, reveals the latter's artificial and arbitrary nature. If the trick performed is absurd, so are the original literary commonplaces which it apes. On this plane, the intrusive metrical design of the sonnets serve to complement their parodic mission: the percussive noise heard at the end of each line, in the repetition of the forced consonants, is really the sound of literary clichés being exploded, clichés which, too, have long been forced upon the reader.

It is this rather violent final image of the burlesque sonnets that perhaps best captures their essense and importance. These poems struggle to deal with a decadent and stifling courtly love mode, a mode which, in the seventeenth century, could be reworked or debunked but never sidestepped or merely ignored. But Sor Juana's struggle was carried forth without the eminently convenient persona of Don Quixote, who, living in a twilight world between literature and physical reality, could slip back and forth between the two, and thereby act out the fancies of Cervantes' sophisticated metaliterary consciousness. Without this mediating figure, Sor Juana's gymnastics are confined to the rhetorical plane, but as Pfandl and others have sensed without understanding, the trick performed in the burlesque sonnets is not just a brief, frivolous, somewhat scandalous cartwheel; it is also an aggressive and revealing one. As the sonnets turn literary convention upside down, they uncover a defiant and irreverent attitude with regard to tradition, an assertion of authorial will, a celebration of the generative power of the artist.