Juan Rulfo World Literature Analysis
From the time of Spanish colonialism until the present day, Mexico has been forced to deal with issues of social justice. Class struggles between large landowners and native Indian farmers over land ownership were the basis for revolutions in 1810, 1855, and 1910 and continue to be an issue of contention in Mexico. In the first half of the twentieth century, Mexican novelists such as Mariano Azuela and Martín Luis Guzmán highlighted these questions of social injustice and turned the novel into an instrument of social reform. Out of this background, in the 1940’s and 1950’s other Mexican writers used these social concerns as an implied background for their stories and turned their attentions to the individual stories of people affected by these conditions. Juan Rulfo is one of these writers.
Standing at the forefront of both modernism and Magical Realism, Rulfo pioneered a new style of writing that turned the microscope on the everyday harsh realities of individuals. Both in his choice of subject and in his choices of style and narrative structure, Rulfo turned away from the explicit goals of social realism and turned toward the expression of a more interior reality conditioned by the harsh strictures of life, the torments of memory, and an everyday existence shaped by the concrete realities of the present and the myths and religious beliefs of the past.
Rulfo’s style and narrative structure in his two major works, The Burning Plain and Pedro Páramo, are striking. As in modernist poetry, his prose strips away nonessentials and relies upon dialogue and stunning visual imagery. In Pedro Páramo’s memories of his youth, the drops of rain moisten the roof tiles, shake the branches of the pomegranate tree, and awaken his memories of his love, Susana San Juan. In the short story “Nos han dado la tierra” (“They Gave Us the Land”), the men walk like insects across the parched and cracked land, featureless in the dust, almost becoming part of the dry landscape.
The most unusual feature of Rulfo’s brief novel Pedro Páramo is the use of disrupted narrative. The story begins in a fairly straightforward manner but rapidly becomes a series of brief vignettes that shift rapidly and often with little explicit transition to a series of stories spanning three generations of the town of Comala. Shadowy characters come and go, and sometimes the reader hears only voices. The reader eventually learns that all of the characters in the novel are dead, even the narrator Juan Preciado. The technique is reminiscent of other modernist works, such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) or the novels of William Faulkner.
Rulfo is often credited with being a forerunner of the technique known as Magical Realism, a technique most associated with Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. Magical Realism introduces surreal elements of fantasy in startling juxtaposition with realistic narrative. This technique in Rulfo, however, underscores the reality of the unreal in the minds of Rulfo’s characters. Miracles, myth, memory, and imagination are as real in the lives of Rulfo’s characters as are eating lunch or drawing water from the well. Partly this reflects the importance of ancient myth as a vital part of the lives of contemporary Mexican Indians, and partly it reflects the strong tradition of Catholicism. Even though religion is often a negative and corrupting influence in Rulfo’s work (witness the ineffectual and corrupt priest Father Rentería in Pedro Páramo), its traditions form an integral part of the lives of the people.
The lives of the characters in Rulfo’s works are circumscribed by violence, poverty, death, and an unforgiving landscape....
(This entire section contains 2053 words.)
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His characters struggle to survive, but they have little optimism. Women are subject to sexual predation and a lack of opportunity and power. Men are apt to become murderers or the victims of murderers and live lives where no amount of hard work can cause crops to spring from infertile soil or the rain to fall. One of Rulfo’s particular concerns is the relationship between fathers and sons. The premise ofPedro Páramo is Juan Preciado’s search for his father. Not only does he wish to meet his father, but he wishes to be acknowledged by him, to be validated. In Pedro Páramo he finds only a failed and corrupt father. Father Rentería, the spiritual father of Comala, also fails as a father, succumbing to the corruption of Pedro Páramo and failing to be absolved by the priest of the neighboring village. Rulfo’s bleak, fatalistic, yet visually stunning portraits of the lives of the Mexican Indians of the inhospitable plains of central Mexico have made his work influential among other Latin American authors and, in translation, for readers throughout the world.
The Burning Plain, and Other Stories
First published: El llano en llamas, y otros cuentros, 1953, revised 1970 and 1980 (English translation, 1967)
Type of work: Short stories
These fifteen varied stories chronicle the harsh living conditions and threats of violence and death the Mexican Indians endure on the harsh plains of central Mexico.
Juan Rulfo’s collection The Burning Plain, and Other Stories contains a variety of short stories ranging from brief character sketches such as “Macario,” an interior monologue by a mentally deficient boy; to longer, more complex tales such as the title story, “El llano en llamas” (“The Burning Plain”), which follows the skirmishes of a band of revolutionaries led by Pedro Zamora; or the haunting but humorous “Anacleto Morones,” in which a flock of women dressed in black descend upon the porch of the narrator to interrogate him about the death of Anacleto Morones. In one story, “Luvina,” the narrator describes moving to the village of San Juan Luvina with his family to become the schoolteacher. He finds a dried-up town, where the old women flock like bats and nothing grows. This story in particular recalls the deserted town of Comala in Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo.
Although the stories in the collection are varied in terms of length, point of view, and narrative method, certain common features emerge. Death is a constant in all of the stories. In “Talpa,” a dying husband, his wife, and the husband’s brother make a pilgrimage to a sacred site in hopes of a miraculous cure for the husband. The wife and the brother-in-law are in love, and they know full well that the husband will probably not survive the trip. In stories like “La cuesta de las camarades” (“The Hill of the Comadres”), “¡Díles que no me maten!” (“Tell Them Not to Kill Me!”), and “Anacleto Morones,” men confess to murders and fully expect to be punished for their crimes. Death is commonplace in stories like “The Burning Plain” and “La noche que lo dejaron solo” (“The Night They Left Him Alone”), which are both set against a background of guerrilla skirmishes in revolutionary-era Mexico.
Women fare poorly in these stories. In “Es que somos muy pobres” (“We’re Very Poor”), a twelve-year-old girl risks becoming as sexually promiscuous as her older sisters because the cow upon which her entire financial future rests has drowned in the river. Groups of old women dressed in black in “Luvina” and “Anacleto Morones” are described as sterile, harsh crones who avenge past sins.
Illness and poverty are common in many of the stories. Characters scratch out a meager living and carry their burdens against unforgiving landscapes. Heat, dust, floods, and infertile soil keep people from escaping their harsh lives. Characters struggle to survive while at the same time succumbing to a kind of fatalism in which they fully expect that poverty, violence, and death are the usual state of affairs.
Pedro Páramo
First published: 1955, revised 1959, 1964, 1980 (English translation, 1959, 1994)
Type of work: Novel
Juan Preciado, searching for Pedro Páramo, the father he has never known, discovers a village haunted by the memories, secrets, and voices of the ghosts of its former residents.
Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo stands at the forefront of Latin American works employing the techniques of modernism and Magical Realism. The novel begins in a straightforward fashion with a traveller, Juan Preciado, returning to the village of his mother’s birth, Comala. At a fateful crossroads meeting, he encounters his half brother, Abundio Martínez, who serves as his guide as he descends into the village.
As Juan Preciado arrives in Comala, he finds a town totally at odds with his mother’s recollections. Instead of the verdant, fertile town of her youth, he finds a deserted and rundown ghost town, whose scarce inhabitants lurk in the shadows and mumble mysterious comments. The novel rapidly becomes much more complex, introducing a series of plotlines in rapid, abruptly introduced vignettes that travel in and out of the minds of such characters as Pedro Páramo, Susana San Juan, Dorotea, Damiana, the village priest Father Rentéria, and Abundio Martínez, and back and forth across time.
The chronology of the story follows events in Comala from approximately 1880 to the Mexican Revolution in 1910 to the Cristero Revolt of 1926. The earliest events in the narrative describe the childhood and adolescence of Pedro Páramo, Juan Preciado’s father, and his love for Susana San Juan. Pedro Páramo grows up in a prominent landowning family in Comala, which has fallen on hard times as a result of the murder of Luis Páramo, Pedro’s father. Pedro grows up to take control of the family through ruthless behavior, violence, and murder, restoring the fortunes and power of his family at the expense of the people of Comala. He routinely preys sexually upon the young women of the town and eventually marries Juan Preciado’s mother, Dolores, as a means of seizing her land and wiping out the debt he owes her family. At the same time, however, he yearns for his lost love, Susana San Juan, who has moved away from Comala with her father and who has eventually married another man.
The narrative then follows the wild exploits of Miguel Páramo, the only one of his sons whom Pedro Páramo has ever acknowledged. Miguel sleeps with all of the virgins and young women of the town and roams the countryside at night on his chestnut stallion. One night the stallion returns home without him, and Miguel is found dead at the side of the road, having fallen from the horse.
The widowed Susana San Juan returns to Comala, where she marries Pedro Páramo. Susana declines into ill health and madness and dies, haunted by the memories of her life with her father and by her continuing love for her former husband. Shortly thereafter, a despondent Pedro Páramo and his housekeeper are murdered by Abundio Martínez. The town declines, along with the fortunes of the Páramo family, and lies deserted as Juan Preciado comes to search for his father.
This narrative chronology of Pedro Páramo, however, fails to capture the striking method by which these various plotlines unfold. Rulfo’s brief novel begins simply and then rapidly disrupts both time and space. Bits and pieces of each story emerge through scenes that go back to Pedro’s childhood and then forward to Juan Preciado’s search. The voices of the primary characters blend with the multiple voices of the townspeople, the servants, and the local priest to build a story that forces a reconsideration of what is past and present, who is alive or dead, and where and when the events occur.
The most startling discovery of the novel is that all of the characters are dead, including the narrator Juan Preciado. Midway through the story readers learn that he is speaking from the depths of the grave, eavesdropping on the memories of the sleeping dead around him. Comala emerges as a liminal space between life and death, a kind of purgatory, where the rain awakens the dead and stirs their memories. They bemoan their past sins, try to justify the lives they lived, and futilely try to atone for their pasts. Life and death, sanity and madness, good and evil, innocence and oppression, reality and fantasy all play out in Rulfo’s story of the generations of the Páramo family in the ghost town of Comala.
