By Philip Gambone
Topping virtually every list of greatest Mexican novels is Juan Rulfo’s “Pedro Páramo.” Although it garnered a tepid reception when it was first published in 1955, it has gone on to become one of the most acclaimed novels of Mexican literature. An early harbinger of the literary movement that would become magic realism, Rulfo’s short novel had a huge influence on writers like Gabriel García Márquez, who claimed that he “could recite the whole book, forwards and backwards.” The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who included “Pedro Páramo” among his personal list of 100 great works of literature, considered the novel to be one of the finest texts written in any language.
“Pedro Páramo” begins in a conventional and straightforward manner. The narrator, Juan Preciado, promises his dying mother that he will go to the village of Comala to find his long-lost father, Pedro Páramo. “Make him pay for the way he forgot us,” the mother tells him. But a few pages into the narrative, things start to get weird. As he makes his way to the village, Juan Preciado meets another traveler, who tells him that Páramo is his father too, and that he died a long time ago. The village he seeks is deserted now, the stranger tells Preciado. “Nobody lives there anymore.”
Entering Comala, Juan Preciado is struck by its silence. The hollow sound of his footsteps on the paved streets echoes against the walls. Wherever he goes in this grave-like pueblo, he meets wandering souls who have died without receiving absolution and can find no way to receive it. Noises, voices, murmurs, faraway songs fill the emptiness. Time itself seems to have shriveled.
“If you could just see all the souls that walk loose in the streets,” one of the village’s few living (or is she?) inhabitants tells Juan Preciado. “As soon as it gets dark, they start coming out … There’s so many of them, and so few of us, we don’t even try to pray for all of them.”
Rulfo moves the plot, if indeed his novel can be said to have a plot, through scenes that slip in and out of flashbacks and flashforwards, giving us fragmented glimpses of what kind of a man Páramo was. We learn how he started taking over control of Comala, his power growing like a weed (creciendo como una mala yerba). Through his illegitimate son, Miguel, Páramo continues to expand his ruthless hold on the lives of everyone in the village. His brutality is such that people believe he is capable of ruining everything in a flash, en un santiamén. Indeed, when his father, Don Lucas Páramo, is killed, Pedro takes out his savage revenge on everyone.
But Páramo is also a man who suffers a deep-seated grief, the death of Susana San Juan, a woman for whom he has possessed an obsessive love since they were children. Some of Rulfo’s most hauntingly lyric passages are given to Páramo’s recollections of his youthful days with Susana:
“I was thinking of you, Susana, in the green hills, when we flew kites in the windy season. We heard the sounds of the village down below us while we were up there, up on the hill, and the wind was tugging the string away from me … The wind made us laugh—our glances met while the string paid out between our fingers—but it broke, softly, as if it had been struck by the wings of a bird. And up there the paper bird fell in somersaults, dragging its rag tail, until it was lost in the green of the earth. Your lips were moist, as if they had been kissing the dew.”
These blissful and lyric moments are the only instances of beauty, of spiritual transcendence, in the otherwise harsh, claustrophobic, merciless and cursed world of Comala. Suffering is omnipresent: murder, suicide, unrequited love, abuse, injustice, crushing sorrow. (“Every time you sigh, a little bit of your life goes out of you,” one character says.) Rulfo was a master at portraying the bitter life of grinding poverty and desperation to which the Mexican peasantry, during the first decades of the 20th century, were condemned.
“Why does the world press in on us from all sides and break us into pieces, and water the ground with our blood?” one ghostly character asks his daughter. “What have we done? Why have our souls rotted?”
As writer and journalist Carlos Monsiváis points out in his excellent discussion of “Pedro Páramo,” “Rulfo is not the least interested in idealization but, rather, in showing the village man as a concrete being, in his terrible subjection, living under the terrible weight of the rules of a game imposed and sustained by others.”
Rulfo’s critical eye took in a lot more than just the malevolence of cacique patriarchs like Páramo. The novel also takes aim at the criminality and ineptitude of the revolutionaries and at the corruption of the Church. Meanwhile, the poor campesinos make their way through life as best they can. “We’re so all alone here,” one character says. “Wanting to know a little something of life.”
Rulfo’s debt to the great Southern gothic novelist William Faulkner has been repeatedly noted. Literary critic Daniel Avechuco Cabrera writes that Faulkner “showed Rulfo the way to compose a peasant almost totally devoid of the colorful folkloric veneer and paternalism prevailing in the literature of the first half of the 20th century.”
Rulfo’s novel also reminds me of Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology,” a collection of poems delivered by the dead, which paints a candid, unadorned portrait of small-town middle American life. To my mind, Spoon River, Illinois, is the early 20th equivalent of Rulfo’s Comala.
Rulfo, who was born in 1917 in the state of Jalisco, managed to write only two major works, “El llano en llamas” (The Plain in Flames, 1953) and “Pedro Páramo.” He died in 1986.
“Pedro Páramo,” which is available in two English translations, may seem like a depressing read, especially in the gloriously cheery town of San Miguel. But it’s short enough that I recommend you give it a try. I confess to being somewhat bewildered the first time I read it. Nevertheless, I was so taken by the haunting aura it cast that I read it again, almost immediately. That second reading convinced me that Rulfo’s little masterpiece is indeed one of Mexican literature’s great treasures.
Philip Gambone taught high school English for 44 years, his last 14 at Boston University Academy, where he gave courses in world literature. He was also an award-winning faculty member at the Harvard Extension School, where he taught expository and creative writing, for almost 30 years.
