I found the path through
Pedro Páramo a bit tricky to follow. I've read it twice, yet parts of it are still hazy. My path through this review will be tricky too. I'm tempted to pick the book apart, and show you how it's constructed, so you can solve its spell. But Juan Rulfo's ghost is telling me not to do that. He warns: if I spill all his beans, I'll be haunted by the voices of his townsfolk, and sleep will abandon me.
When you read Pedro Páramo, you are supposed to walk with Juan Preciado (the first narrator), to discover the strange town of his birth, where days and dreams, people and memories tumble over each other without signposts. This is the most engaging, yet the most confusing, aspect of the book. You are here as an explorer, gathering images to reconstruct the fables of Comala.
Pedro Páramo is piecemeal - but Juan Rulfo has put great thought and care into his mosaic. You will flicker between times and narrators, and you must find your own way. The journey does start clearly, then collapses into shards of anecdote for most of the middle - but it grows more clear and sequential in the second half, so it will mostly make sense by the time you put the book down. I suggest that then, and only then, you should go read the wikipedia article on Pedro Páramo, which gives a succinct overview of what just happened, and how it all fits together.
Walking into Comala at Dusk
It's a very strange book; let me admit that at the outset. It's as primitive and uncanny as a folk tale, plain-spoken but infinitely complex, a neat little metaphysical machine—one of those small, perfect books that remake the world out of paradox, like Waiting for Godot, or Nadja.
When it was first published in Mexico City in 1955, it received a few tepid notices and sold poorly. Its author was 37 at the time, or 38. (No one seems to know for sure when he was born.) He was from Jalisco, near Guadalajara, and he'd published one mildly interesting collection of short stories a few years earlier. I suspect no one knew what to make of the new book, since it was entirely unlike—well—anything else. Perhaps the critics were astounded into silence; more likely, they were puzzled and a little bit blind. As for the author, he went silent and never wrote another book, though he lived on for more than 30 years, long enough to see himself credited with the invention of an entire movement, to see his only novel sell millions of copies, to receive mash notes from Nobel Prize winners. . . .
Peculiar things start to happen on the page, things I've never seen in a book. The tenses switch back and forth, past to present and back again, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph, until time itself becomes senseless. The stories begin to refract, shatter, and rebuild; pronouns multiply—I, he, she, you, stumbling over each other. Dialogue and thoughts are left unattributed. The perspectives shift from internal to external and back again, from Preciado to Paramo to Paramo's childhood love, Susana San Juan. "This town is full of echoes," one character says. "It's like they were trapped behind the walls or beneath the cobblestones. When you walk, you feel like someone's behind you, stepping in your footsteps. You hear rustlings. And people laughing. Laughter that sounds used up. And voices worn away by the years."
This Salon review is illuminating. Here's
the link; but if you haven't read
Pedro Páramo, don't go there yet. You also probably shouldn't rush out and buy this book. Note especially these lines from the Salon review:
When it was first published in Mexico City in 1955, it received a few tepid notices and sold poorly.
This book won't grab you so you can't put it down. In the end, it won me over. It has passages of perfect writing, it has puzzles and poetry and soul. It's a svelte 122 pages. But it has more cleverness than clarity in it, and it's rated highly by critics because of its timing and influence.
Perhaps I'm being too harsh. You see, I'm very partial to clever books which invent new styles of storytelling, and influence writers who come after them. So I go read such books, then come back and tout them here. And sometimes, months later, I see a kossack commenting, "someone recommended this book, but I found it too dry or difficult, and gave up after 50 pages." The general caveat here, about Books Brecht Likes, is this: I'm a sucker for a book which feels unlike anything I ever read before. I almost always find such a book an interesting challenge, that stretches my imagination. But most people don't suffer from this quirk, this xenophilia of mine.
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Timing, Influence and Magical Realism
Pedro Páramo is most famous for leading the way, both towards the birth of Magical Realism and a boom in Latin American fiction. I don't know much about Magical Realism. I'll essay a view of Pedro Páramo's place in history, but I hope some more learned reader will comment further on this.
In the 1940s there were already Latin American authors, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Alejo Carpentier, breaking fresh ground. Many writers were playing with elements that later became essential to Magical Realism. Finally in 1967, Gabriel García Márquez published One Hundred Years of Solitude. This did for Magical Realism what Lord of the Rings did for modern Fantasy: it pulled together diverse strands of experiment, and crystallized them into a powerful new style of storytelling.
Magical Realism worked particularly well for the stories that many Latin American writers were telling in the '60s and '70s (boom years in which Latin American writers produced hundreds of books, and earned popular and critical success around the world). Since then, while remaining central to a lot of Latin American fiction, the toolbox of Magical Realism has also been borrowed by writers everywhere.
With so many Latin American authors playing near each other in the same vast sandbox, it's surprising that Pedro Páramo (1955) gets singled out for such kudos, in the development of Magical Realism. It did succeed in significant crystallizing of its own, it found a particular voice balanced between folk-tale, social realism, and modernist puzzle-making. It is esteemed and reread by many of the best Latin American authors who came after. Gabriel García Márquez says that he felt blocked as a novelist after writing his first four books, and it was only his life-changing discovery of Pedro Páramo that opened a way to the composition of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Here's what Carlos Fuentes said: "The work of Juan Rulfo is not only the highest expression which the Mexican novel has attained until now: through Pedro Páramo we can find the thread that leads us to the new Latin American novel." And when Gabriel García Márquez first arrived in Mexico City in 1961, a friend pressed a copy of Pedro Páramo on him; he read it twice that night and so often thereafter that, he has said, "I could recite the whole book, forwards and backwards." Moreover, he acknowledges, "The examination in depth of Juan Rulfo's work gave me at last the way that I sought to continue my books." And thus was Magic Realism born, although, in truth, Rulfo's own book is more diabolical than magical and more phenomenal than real; and, more importantly, none of his descendants are like him at all.
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Rulfo's World: Surface and Depths
Rulfo is a brilliant writer. He juggles all the pieces of his story, he keeps us readers watching all the hints and the grand pattern, so we never see Rulfo's hands move. He also captures the voices of many different characters, and can turn a phrase to twist your heart. There is a lot of subtle magic here. He can be evocative and oblique at once, he gets you imagining sideways before you know where you are. His pathetic fallacies resonate on many levels, so that details, feelings, visions and meanings all pull each other's strings. A piercing kind of poetry.
Here is the first we see through Pedro Páramo's eyes as a boy. Not that we know who we are, we just wake into this:
Water dripping through the roof tiles was forming a hole in the sand of the patio. Plink! plink! and then another plink! as drops struck a dancing, bobbing laurel leaf caught in the crack between the adobe bricks. The storm had passed. Now an intermittent breeze shook the branches of the pomegranate tree, loosing showers of heavy rain, spattering the ground with gleaming drops that dulled as they sank into the earth. The hens, still huddled on their roost, suddenly flapped their wings and strutted out to the patio, heads bobbing, pecking worms unearthed by the rain. As the clouds retreated the sun flashed on the rocks, spread an iridescent sheen, sucked water from the soil, shone on sparkling leaves stirred by the breeze.
"What's taking you so long in the privy, son?"
"Nothing, mamá."
"If you stay in there much longer, a snake will come in and bite you."
"Yes, mamá."
I was thinking of you, Susana. Of the green hills. Of when we used to fly kites in the windy season. We could hear the sounds of life from the town below; we were high above on the hill, playing out string to the wind. "Help me, Susana." And soft hands would tighten on mine. "Let out more string."
The wind made us laugh; our eyes followed the string running through our fingers after the wind until with a faint pop! it broke, as if it had been snapped by the wings of a bird. And high overhead, the paper bird would tumble and somersault, trailing its rag tail, until it disappeared into the green earth.
Your lips were moist, as if kissed by the dew.
"I told you son, come out of the privy now."
"Yes, mamá. I'm coming."
I was thinking of you. Of the times you were there looking at me with your aquamarine eyes.
So Rulfo is a master at showing us the surface of his world, at bringing a scene to life, and putting us in the middle of it. And there are also depths here, that are not at first apparent.
Juan Preciado travels to Comala at his dying mother's behest, to find his father, Pedro Páramo. Pedro Páramo means "rocky barren plain". When I first read the passage I just quoted, I knew nothing about Pedro Páramo. Over the course of the book, I discovered he was crucial to Comala, both a leader and a guiding spirit to the town.
Pedro Páramo is a kind of male principle, a Fisher King. By himself he is ruthless and dangerous. The influence that most humanizes him is his love for Susana San Juan. Throughout the novel, Susana is associated with water and rain (and fertility and crops for the town). When Pedro is loving Susana, he is vigorous and determined, and Comala flourishes; when Susana is not watering Pedro's heart, he is just a rocky barren plain, scorching all in his path.
The naive reader just sees the surfaces Pedro sees, without knowing their significance. We must reread and connect many separate points to learn that the raindrops plinking while Pedro thinks of Susana, her lips "moist, as if kissed by the dew", and her aquamarine eyes are the beginning of a metaphor that informs all the world of the novel.
I'm not sure you will enjoy Pedro Páramo, it's not for everyone. But if you do enjoy it, you'll find yourself wanting to read it again, to savor what you already saw, and to find the hints you missed before.
Rulfo impresses me in how he uses such basic language, yet opens windows of wonder that look far beyond everyday experience. Here is Juan Preciado, dusty from traveling, walking into Comala at dusk:
It was the hour of the day when in every little village children come out to play in the streets, filling the afternoon with their cries. The time when dark walls still reflect pale yellow sunlight.
At least that was what I'd seen in Sayula, just yesterday at this hour. I'd seen the still air shattered by the flight of doves flapping their wings as if pulling themselves free of the day. They swooped and plummeted above the tile rooftops, while the children's screams whirled and seemed to turn blue in the dusk sky.
Now here I was in this hushed town. I could hear my footsteps on the cobbled paving stones. Hollow footsteps, echoing against walls stained red by the setting sun.
Such aptly chosen details and words, adding up to poetry for the soul. The "doves flapping their wings as if pulling themselves free of the day" is inspired; "the children's screams whirled and seemed to turn blue in the dusk sky" is genius. On the surface, it makes no sense, yet in our heart we feel its truth.
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A Compact Gem of Meaning
It is a shame that Juan Rulfo, who had so much art in his fingers and his heart, left us so few books. But I believe he poured many sides of himself into Pedro Páramo: aspects of his personality, both lived and imagined; memories from all of his life; Mexico and the changes he saw her going through; ideas about men, women, love, evil and myths.
Pedro Páramo strikes me as The Great Gatsby and The Old Man and the Sea did. In each case, the author had a great shaggy novel in their mind, but then they edited away every word they could stand to cut. In the end, we're looking into a gem which reflects whole worlds of understanding, that lurk between the lines and pages of the book in our hands.
I'll borrow some final thoughts from a second review of Pedro Páramo. As with the previous links, don't click on this one, unless you find spoilers more delicious than puzzles.
Innumerable interpretations have been spun about Pedro Páramo. It has been said to represent, embody, allegorize or illuminate: the times of Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship, the social context of the Revolution, patriarchal rancher culture and the repression of women, the poetic qualities of rural speech, Mexico's relationship with death, the lingering influence on Mexicans of Aztec cosmology, Mexican deruralization and the ghost towns it created, Mexican culture, Mexican history, Mexican modernity, universal myths and archetypes. All of these interpretations are right, except those asserting that they alone are right. For me, the novel is about the Novel: the wonders of storytelling, the power of the literary word that spins so fast it never lets the reader catch it.