I awake, she slept. Sor Juana Ines and Juan Rulfo or the new Latin American poetic condition

Abstract

The article examines how Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and Juan Rulfo, in dialogue with the literary tradition –especially with the work of Dante, Gongorism and the modern tradition– build a Latin American poetic condition. To that end, it studies the long oneiric ascent of Sor Juana, in First Dream; and Susana San Juan’s story, in Pedro Paramo. For the analysis, it goes to the concepts of resistance when suffering and the signals to transcendence provided by Maria Zambrano in her reflections on the essential condition of the human. It explains how Sor Juana and Susana San Juan offer such resistance: Sor Juana through the journey of knowledge, the sovereignty of the body, the exposure of the precariousness of life and the metaphor of the ascent; Susana, through the fall, madness and eroticism. Finally, it interprets in both characters, the appropriation of the signs of transcendence: the revaluation of the moment, of dreams and the creation-destruction of the divine. It concludes by showing how Sor Juana takes the momentum that starts in Europe with Montaigne, Bacon, the Renaissance and the Golden Age and proposes significant transformations that allow speaking of a different poetic condition. And how Rulfo, starting from the American mythic-religious condition, the non-place, the ontological indefiniteness, stops at the image of Purgatory: showing there the luminous consciousness, the unleashed eroticism and the sacralized madness of Susana as a relief, a possibility of leakage and human of redemption of the sentence.