Flowering narcissus

You'll have gathered (I must have mentioned it in this blog at some point) that my friend C and I are team-teaching a course on Religion & Theater, starting in September. We've spent much of the last week working on our syllabus, which has given me an excuse to read lots of plays. What fun! Some are revelations, like Stephen Adley Guirgis' The Last Trial of Judas Iscariot, the play with which we'll close our course. Some are too weird or too old-fashioned, like T. S. Eliot's fascinating The Cocktail Party. And then there's things so weird and old-fashioned that it almost seems we need to confront students with them.

Case in point, The Divine Narcissus, an "auto sacramental" by 17th century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (that's her at right with the mongo brooch), which I just finished reading this morning. To my religious studies eyes it's an absolute marvel, an audacious and in its way remarkably successful act of theological appropriation of pagan myth, just what you'd want on Corpus Christi in colonial Mexico. The real Narcissus is Christ, willing to die for love of his image - Human Nature - in the fountain of the Virgin (and the true Echo is Satan)! To our students, however, it will seem like the worst kind of intolerance and imperialism - especially if they read the opening "Loa" in which the figures of America and her Aztec husband Occident are cajoled and threatened into accepting Christianity by Religion and her thuggish conquistador husband Zeal!

And yet, sometimes it's a reason to assign something that it's something students would never in a million years otherwise get a chance to read, let alone to understand. You know, knock their little worlds, or - as a friend of mine in grad school used to put it - watch the little gerbbil brains race. No question that it will be - if we dare assign it - fun to explore with students the possibilities opened up by typology (Ovid had long been mined for proto-Christian messages) quickened by an assertive view of transubstantiation. Here's a little taste, after the Divine Narcissus dies for his love of Human Nature, and returns in triumph.

GRACE
He arranged to leave
a reminder and a sign
in memory of his death,
as a pledge of his affection. ...

He wanted to remain
as a white flower,
so that his absence would
not be cause for apathy.

No wonder it flourishes today,
since in times past in his writings
he called it flowers of the fields,
and lily of the valley.
In white dress is its veil
over his loving designs,
a disguise to the gross
cognition of the senses
He wanted to remain hidden
in ermine white
to assist as a lover,
vigilant and zealous.
Who, as the soul’s spouse,
is jealous of her wanderings,
spying on her from windows,
lying in wait around corners.
Generous as he is,
he stayed to grant new favors.
but did not want to give a gift
that was not beneficial.
He showed his love
with loving extravagance.
He did everything he could
the one who could do anything he wanted.
As food for our souls he remains,
generous and kind,
nourishment for the just,
poison for the guilty.

(The float with the fountain appears.
Next to it a chalice with a host on top of it.)

See from the clear fountain’s
crystalline edge has come
the beautiful white flower
of which the lover says:

NARCISSUS
This is my body and my blood
martyred so many times
for you. Repeat this
to commemorate my death.

Surely the brazenness of the appropriation is part of Sor Juana's intention. Indeed, not appropriation but decoding. Should we do it? The original is apparently a masterpiece of Spanish poetry, not something you really feel in this translation. Does it tell us anything important about theater and religion, the religion of theater, the theater of religion? Perhaps...