«Being absent Carlos, / what difference do the festive voices applauding him make if he hears nothing?»: Sor Juana’s loas for King Carlos the Second’s birthday

Abstract

Starting in 1650, Calderón de la Barca assigned a new role to the ‘loa’, elevating it artistically to the level of the ‘auto’. In America, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz followed the Spaniard’s example by aggrandizing the panegyric loa and including the essential elements: allegorical characters, hermetic fragments, emblematic reminiscences and a sensorial setting. These loas are pieces that adhere to certain templates to glorify power and exalt authority. These templates are constituted of compositional paradigms that structure the design, in part or as a whole, of the stylistic and argumentative architecture, as Arellano correctly asserts about the Auto Sacramental but also applicable to Sor Juana’s last half of the 17th century panegyric loas. I propose an analysis of the five loas that the nun composed for Carlos the Second’s birthday that consists in identifying and comparing the compositional paradigms, to be able to formulate a three act structure based on the functional identification of the paradigms.