Juan Rulfo is perhaps the best writer of fiction in Latin America
today, and a writer to be reckoned with on a universal scale, as his
fame continues to spread beyond his native Mexico. If we take soundings
here and there of his reputation, in Europe—France, Germany, Spain—or in
the countries of South America, we find the critical acclaim swelling
constantly.
Born in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, in 1918, Rulfo published his first short stories in the provincial little magazines of Guadalajara in the 1940's. Later on he moved to Mexico City, where the two books which have brought him such celebrity were published: his collection of short stories El llano en llamas (1953), translated here, followed by his singular short novel Pedro Páramo (1955), which Grove Press brought out in English translation. A second novel, called La Cordillera, which Rulfo evidently has been working on for several years, has long been announced as forthcoming by his Mexican publishers.
Most critics of Rulfo's work have concentrated their attention on his brilliant novel Pedro Páramo, a bold excursion into modern techniques of writing; however, Rulfo achieves some of his finest moments in the short stories, where the elaboration of a single event or the introspection of a single character allows him to illuminate the meaning, often the utter despair, of a man's life.
Rulfo's world is extremely primitive and profoundly alien to us, at least in its outer aspect, though it is plagued within by the same convulsive agony and fears that strike men's hearts everywhere. The atmosphere is full of repressions and is often mute-a paralytic world seemingly beyond the orbits of time and space. Crude and perverse passions, solitude and death stand out as tangible phenomena against the opaqueness of the Indian characters' tragic lives.
The novels of the Mexican Revolution, beginning with The Underdogs (1916) by Mariano Azuela, which dominated the Mexican literary scene for several decades, portrayed a turbulent world where the individual all but disappeared at times. In the 1940's, with such works as Agustin Yáñez's The Edge of the Storm, and in the 1950's, with the novels and stories of Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Castellanos, and Juan Rulfo, this collective mask is largely stripped away. The Indians who live and die on the burning Plain in Jalisco are usually treated by Rulfo as individuals with interior lives full of anguish as well as exterior lives of struggle against hardship and abuse. Behind their innocent faces often lurk unspeakable horrors of tragedy and violence: murder, incest, adultery, all the violence of need and desire. These characters seem to live on grief and suffering without friends or love. Indeed, love is an emotion which scarcely appears in these stories, though it plays an important role in Pedro Páramo.
Rulfo peels many of his characters down to the core, but some of them, like the landscape, frequently clouded over and hazy, remain blurred, imprecise, and taciturn figures. They are never seen in full face, but always in a silhouette, like the lugubrious, black-garbed crones of "Luvina." The one thing standing forth clear and ubiquitous is death—overpowering life—which seems to hold scant value in this world.
Rulfo has an uncanny feeling for describing the bleak landscape. In the harsh area where his characters live almost nothing stirs or moves, not even buzzards. Life seems to have come to a stop in this paralyzed region, producing a static quality in many of the stories. Macario, for instance, starts out on his rambling monologue, "I am sitting by the sewer waiting for the frogs to come out." And he is still there waiting at the end of the story.
A black, macabre humor of a very special order runs through the collection as a leitmotiv. It is most persistent in "Anacleto Morones," a tale streaked with naturalistic touches: the description of the foetus, and of Pancha's mustache, the vomiting, the women streaming sweat. But the characters' suffering and unhappiness in this bizarre story of a pseudo saint's hypnotic power over ten middle-aged hags occasionally blots out the predominate, acrid humorous tone.
Unlike the novels of the Mexican Revolution and certain Indianist novels of the 1930's, Rulfo's fiction contains no preaching about social abuses, though he refers briefly to the Mexican agrarian question in several stories and sketches the wetback problem most effectively in "El Paso del Norte." Large social ills are commented on dispassionately only when they have bearing on the personal dramas Rulfo is unfolding.
Various techniques which have oriented contemporary fiction along new pathways are present in The Burning Plain. Some stories are one long, sustained, interior monologue ("Macario," "We're Very Poor," "Talpa," "Remember"). In "Macario" the past and present mingle chaotically, and frequently the most startling associations of ideas are juxtaposed, strung together by conjunctions which help to paralyze the action and stop the flow of time in the present. Rulfo succeeds in this excellent story in capturing the sickly atmosphere surrounding the idiot boy, who is gnawed by hunger and filled with the terror of hell, and protected, and at the same time exploited, by his Godmother and the servant girl Felipa.
Dialogues are inserted in other stories that are essentially monologues, sustained by the same person who reconstructs situations and scenes from memory ("Luvina," "They've Given Us the Land," "Anacleto Morones"). In "At Daybreak" and "The Man" the action takes place on several levels simultaneously. In the entire collection the pace is slow and sometimes comes to a halt, giving the static effect of eternity that has so caught the critics' attention. As one Mexican commentator aptly declares, there is a triumph of characters over plot, of persons over acts, of the author over time.
In "Talpa"—a classic tale of adultery in which the gripping emotion is not love or desire, but remorse—we are told the outcome of the story at the very beginning. But the suspense, rather than being destroyed by this technique, becomes sharper under Rulfo's dramatic handling. Chronology is broken effectively here, too, and time is immobilized.
A few stories are scarcely more than anecdotes, like "The Night They Left Him Alone," when Feliciano managed to save himself from being hanged like his two unfortunate uncles. Rulfo unfolds this tale in all its dramatic force, pruning away superfluous material, but repeating details and reiterating phrases that give punch to the story.
Rulfo's narratives are composed with the greatest attention to dramatic effects. He knows how to begin a story with a sentence or two of the right cadence to grasp and hold the reader. Urgency, tension, conflict fill the air. For instance, the opening lines of "No Dogs Bark" set the tone of mystery and doom in a brief dialogue between father and son, a foreboding note swollen with uncertainty that permeates the entire story. The dramatic effect is intensified by the short, agonizing sentences of the dialogue, and the narrative's principal action between the father's words and the son's silence. Here, as in the majority of these stories, the author narrates in a few, brief pages an intense, intimate drama, terse of language, somber in color, with no exterior character description. With remarkable skill Rulfo succeeds in provoking a static impression with his throbbing, dynamic fragments of life.
The technical complexity varies from one story to another: some are relatively simple and develop chronologically, others have different points of view and shifts and shufflings in time. Flashbacks, interior monologues and dialogues with subtle undertones, and an occasional passage of impersonal reflection are employed to give the effect of simultaneity. Time fluctuates among the levels of the present and the causal past, which is vivid in the characters' memories and usually rancorous in its recollections.
The spontaneity of Rulfo's monologues and dialogues is deceptive and points to a conscientious, hard labor on his part to reach this level of stylistic polish. He writes a splendid prose of firm muscularity, its contours never sagging with long patches of commentary. The language is sparse and laconic, unflinchingly realistic, yet charged with poetic qualities. His imagery has a marked rural flavor: earth, rocks, dust, wind, moon, buzzards, coyotes. This imagery never intrudes upon the narrative; it either serves to point up what he is suggesting or else takes on an essential role in the story. In "We're Very Poor" the central image is the river, bringing perdition and ruin in its wake. The river's presence runs through the story, as Rulfo makes us feel its swirling, filthy waters through all our senses. We hear its lapping waves, we smell the stench it leaves as the flood subsides, we witness and shudder at the dirty tears streaming down Tacha's face "as if the river had gotten inside her."
Dominant in Rulfo's stories are the themes of vengeance and death, and the struggle and desire to live. Human nature must always and inevitably assert itself, and in these tales of Biblical power and simplicity it does so convincingly. Rulfo's characters are moved by greed, hate, lust, revenge; they are hampered by fate and beset on all sides by the problems of daily existence. Reality is unendurable but must be faced. Man is abject and lonely. He seeks communication but usually is thwarted. Several stories in the collection, for example, treat the lack of understanding between father and son with particular poignancy. In the domain of violence Rulfo is supreme, and this is all the more impressive as the tone of his writing never becomes rhetorical. It remains calm and measured, pervaded with a classical dignity.
Rulfo's work has immense literary vitality and extraordinary originality. His stories shock and grip us, and many of them make us feel that we are sharing in his characters' pathetic anxiety just to live, to stay alive ("Tell Them Not To Kill Me," "Talpa"). The elements of the harsh physical environment combine with the Mexican Indian's fatalism to forge almost a symbiosis of man and landscape. The parched, dry plain is overwhelming. The Indian accepts life as it is there, and his acts are almost inevitable. He is perpetually in flight, or wracked by fear, mistrust, and remorse, often losing his few cherished possessions and his peace of mind. Impotence and despair reign, and death rattles in the scorching air, the howling wind, the throttling dust of the plain.
Born in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, in 1918, Rulfo published his first short stories in the provincial little magazines of Guadalajara in the 1940's. Later on he moved to Mexico City, where the two books which have brought him such celebrity were published: his collection of short stories El llano en llamas (1953), translated here, followed by his singular short novel Pedro Páramo (1955), which Grove Press brought out in English translation. A second novel, called La Cordillera, which Rulfo evidently has been working on for several years, has long been announced as forthcoming by his Mexican publishers.
Most critics of Rulfo's work have concentrated their attention on his brilliant novel Pedro Páramo, a bold excursion into modern techniques of writing; however, Rulfo achieves some of his finest moments in the short stories, where the elaboration of a single event or the introspection of a single character allows him to illuminate the meaning, often the utter despair, of a man's life.
Rulfo's world is extremely primitive and profoundly alien to us, at least in its outer aspect, though it is plagued within by the same convulsive agony and fears that strike men's hearts everywhere. The atmosphere is full of repressions and is often mute-a paralytic world seemingly beyond the orbits of time and space. Crude and perverse passions, solitude and death stand out as tangible phenomena against the opaqueness of the Indian characters' tragic lives.
The novels of the Mexican Revolution, beginning with The Underdogs (1916) by Mariano Azuela, which dominated the Mexican literary scene for several decades, portrayed a turbulent world where the individual all but disappeared at times. In the 1940's, with such works as Agustin Yáñez's The Edge of the Storm, and in the 1950's, with the novels and stories of Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Castellanos, and Juan Rulfo, this collective mask is largely stripped away. The Indians who live and die on the burning Plain in Jalisco are usually treated by Rulfo as individuals with interior lives full of anguish as well as exterior lives of struggle against hardship and abuse. Behind their innocent faces often lurk unspeakable horrors of tragedy and violence: murder, incest, adultery, all the violence of need and desire. These characters seem to live on grief and suffering without friends or love. Indeed, love is an emotion which scarcely appears in these stories, though it plays an important role in Pedro Páramo.
Rulfo peels many of his characters down to the core, but some of them, like the landscape, frequently clouded over and hazy, remain blurred, imprecise, and taciturn figures. They are never seen in full face, but always in a silhouette, like the lugubrious, black-garbed crones of "Luvina." The one thing standing forth clear and ubiquitous is death—overpowering life—which seems to hold scant value in this world.
Rulfo has an uncanny feeling for describing the bleak landscape. In the harsh area where his characters live almost nothing stirs or moves, not even buzzards. Life seems to have come to a stop in this paralyzed region, producing a static quality in many of the stories. Macario, for instance, starts out on his rambling monologue, "I am sitting by the sewer waiting for the frogs to come out." And he is still there waiting at the end of the story.
A black, macabre humor of a very special order runs through the collection as a leitmotiv. It is most persistent in "Anacleto Morones," a tale streaked with naturalistic touches: the description of the foetus, and of Pancha's mustache, the vomiting, the women streaming sweat. But the characters' suffering and unhappiness in this bizarre story of a pseudo saint's hypnotic power over ten middle-aged hags occasionally blots out the predominate, acrid humorous tone.
Unlike the novels of the Mexican Revolution and certain Indianist novels of the 1930's, Rulfo's fiction contains no preaching about social abuses, though he refers briefly to the Mexican agrarian question in several stories and sketches the wetback problem most effectively in "El Paso del Norte." Large social ills are commented on dispassionately only when they have bearing on the personal dramas Rulfo is unfolding.
Various techniques which have oriented contemporary fiction along new pathways are present in The Burning Plain. Some stories are one long, sustained, interior monologue ("Macario," "We're Very Poor," "Talpa," "Remember"). In "Macario" the past and present mingle chaotically, and frequently the most startling associations of ideas are juxtaposed, strung together by conjunctions which help to paralyze the action and stop the flow of time in the present. Rulfo succeeds in this excellent story in capturing the sickly atmosphere surrounding the idiot boy, who is gnawed by hunger and filled with the terror of hell, and protected, and at the same time exploited, by his Godmother and the servant girl Felipa.
Dialogues are inserted in other stories that are essentially monologues, sustained by the same person who reconstructs situations and scenes from memory ("Luvina," "They've Given Us the Land," "Anacleto Morones"). In "At Daybreak" and "The Man" the action takes place on several levels simultaneously. In the entire collection the pace is slow and sometimes comes to a halt, giving the static effect of eternity that has so caught the critics' attention. As one Mexican commentator aptly declares, there is a triumph of characters over plot, of persons over acts, of the author over time.
In "Talpa"—a classic tale of adultery in which the gripping emotion is not love or desire, but remorse—we are told the outcome of the story at the very beginning. But the suspense, rather than being destroyed by this technique, becomes sharper under Rulfo's dramatic handling. Chronology is broken effectively here, too, and time is immobilized.
A few stories are scarcely more than anecdotes, like "The Night They Left Him Alone," when Feliciano managed to save himself from being hanged like his two unfortunate uncles. Rulfo unfolds this tale in all its dramatic force, pruning away superfluous material, but repeating details and reiterating phrases that give punch to the story.
Rulfo's narratives are composed with the greatest attention to dramatic effects. He knows how to begin a story with a sentence or two of the right cadence to grasp and hold the reader. Urgency, tension, conflict fill the air. For instance, the opening lines of "No Dogs Bark" set the tone of mystery and doom in a brief dialogue between father and son, a foreboding note swollen with uncertainty that permeates the entire story. The dramatic effect is intensified by the short, agonizing sentences of the dialogue, and the narrative's principal action between the father's words and the son's silence. Here, as in the majority of these stories, the author narrates in a few, brief pages an intense, intimate drama, terse of language, somber in color, with no exterior character description. With remarkable skill Rulfo succeeds in provoking a static impression with his throbbing, dynamic fragments of life.
The technical complexity varies from one story to another: some are relatively simple and develop chronologically, others have different points of view and shifts and shufflings in time. Flashbacks, interior monologues and dialogues with subtle undertones, and an occasional passage of impersonal reflection are employed to give the effect of simultaneity. Time fluctuates among the levels of the present and the causal past, which is vivid in the characters' memories and usually rancorous in its recollections.
The spontaneity of Rulfo's monologues and dialogues is deceptive and points to a conscientious, hard labor on his part to reach this level of stylistic polish. He writes a splendid prose of firm muscularity, its contours never sagging with long patches of commentary. The language is sparse and laconic, unflinchingly realistic, yet charged with poetic qualities. His imagery has a marked rural flavor: earth, rocks, dust, wind, moon, buzzards, coyotes. This imagery never intrudes upon the narrative; it either serves to point up what he is suggesting or else takes on an essential role in the story. In "We're Very Poor" the central image is the river, bringing perdition and ruin in its wake. The river's presence runs through the story, as Rulfo makes us feel its swirling, filthy waters through all our senses. We hear its lapping waves, we smell the stench it leaves as the flood subsides, we witness and shudder at the dirty tears streaming down Tacha's face "as if the river had gotten inside her."
Dominant in Rulfo's stories are the themes of vengeance and death, and the struggle and desire to live. Human nature must always and inevitably assert itself, and in these tales of Biblical power and simplicity it does so convincingly. Rulfo's characters are moved by greed, hate, lust, revenge; they are hampered by fate and beset on all sides by the problems of daily existence. Reality is unendurable but must be faced. Man is abject and lonely. He seeks communication but usually is thwarted. Several stories in the collection, for example, treat the lack of understanding between father and son with particular poignancy. In the domain of violence Rulfo is supreme, and this is all the more impressive as the tone of his writing never becomes rhetorical. It remains calm and measured, pervaded with a classical dignity.
Rulfo's work has immense literary vitality and extraordinary originality. His stories shock and grip us, and many of them make us feel that we are sharing in his characters' pathetic anxiety just to live, to stay alive ("Tell Them Not To Kill Me," "Talpa"). The elements of the harsh physical environment combine with the Mexican Indian's fatalism to forge almost a symbiosis of man and landscape. The parched, dry plain is overwhelming. The Indian accepts life as it is there, and his acts are almost inevitable. He is perpetually in flight, or wracked by fear, mistrust, and remorse, often losing his few cherished possessions and his peace of mind. Impotence and despair reign, and death rattles in the scorching air, the howling wind, the throttling dust of the plain.
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