Pedro Paramo / Juan Rulfo

Notes on “Pedro Paramo”

On my first reading of “Pedro Paramo” my impression was of a marvelous and very dark enchantment; after my second reading, I was disappointed with the work as a whole (and I deeply regretted having that reaction); after a third reading I was left with both responses, each stronger. That said, my very strongest reaction to Rulfo’s work, however, was its difference from the other works we have read. Cautions are, of course, in order. This work was created after the Mexican Revolution; after the first World War; after the second World War and the dropping of atomic bombs.

All of the other works have a shape of completion or fulfillment as works that is different from “Pedro Paramo” stylistically and essentially; each author may tell tales that are more or less cryptic and magical, but the voice from which they speak (if not necessarily what they mean to say) is essentially immediately comprehensible from a general Western European cultural perspective.

For example, Azuela’s “Underdogs” could equally well have been written to take place in late medieval or renaissance “Italy;” Borges’ stories are deep philosophical (and comical) ontological musings; Bioys is timeless and entirely modern simultaneously, taking place on an un-located deserted island within the invisible dominant culture of post-industrial Europe; and Bombal’s characters are burdened with culture like window-dressing: individual, cosmopolitan, and ultimately psychological, they could be bourgeois gentry in the south of France or the smaller German states, anywhere.

For want of any other way to describe it, I would have to say that “Pedro Paramo” is a cultural shock. Certainly, Paramo and Susana could be seen as Titans involved in their titanic journey, regardless of the mere mortals or half-mortals who block their essential being, and the endless sufferings and movements of the living, dead, or not-dead is similar enough to stories of the Greek and Roman afterlife. But this work feels essentially Latin/Hispanic in contrast to the others, where Latin and Hispanic issues seem to be largely, though not entirely, the material but not the pattern from which they are made. Obviously, this is an over-statement meant to highlight a point.

However I may want to feel about it, I don’t believe in ghosts, or that I could run home and remind my—waiting—dead spouse to put in a good word when she gets to Heaven for Ines Villalponda. In English there is only one term for the verb “to be;” in Spanish there are two: one for essential characteristics, and one for temporary states. Death, like Life, is considered a temporary condition; this seems simultaneously Christian, primordial, and similar to what some contemporary physicists and scientists hold to be possible, if not exactly true. “Pedro Paramo” is full of strange vitality and horrifying permanence, and, for me, its real and magnificent force is that it is entirely serious, earnest, and desperately huma