Juan Rulfo

Mexican novelist and short-story writer

• Born: May 16, 1918
• Birthplace: Barranca de Apulco, Sayula, Jalisco, Mexico
• Died: January 7, 1986
• Place of death: Mexico City, Mexico

Biography

Juan Rulfo has been recognized as one of the greatest modern Mexican novelists, one of the forerunners of the “boom” in Latin American fiction of the 1960’s, and one of the initiators of Magical Realism. He was born to a landowner family impoverished by the Mexican Revolution. Both his parents died in his early childhood; his father and various other relatives were assassinated. The brutality of the countryside Cristeros uprising of 1926 to 1929 persisted in his memory. Rulfo was raised both in an orphanage and by relatives. He studied law in Guadalajara, but he soon moved to Mexico City to pursue his literary ambitions. He scraped a bare living working as an immigration officer, a salesman for a tire company, a movie scriptwriter and television producer, and, after 1962, as the director of the editorial department of the National Institute of Indian Affairs. As adviser to the Mexican Center of Writers, he helped to educate generations of Mexican literati. In 1970 Rulfo received the National Prize for Literature; in 1980 he became a member of the Mexican Academy of Language; and in 1985 he was awarded the prestigious Cervantes Prize in Spain.

Rulfo’s fame rests on two slim volumes, the collection of short stories The Burning Plain, and Other Stories and, especially, the novel Pedro Páramo, in which he distilled his stark vision of the Mexican countryside ravaged by the revolution, poverty, and violence. Páramo can be translated as “wasteland.” His photographs in Inframundo are a powerful companion to his vision of Mexican barren landscapes. Although he began to write earlier, Rulfo found his characteristic voice in the mid-1940’s when he began to craft, one by one, his masterpiece stories. Behind the deceptively simple facade of his rustic characters and their discourse stripped to “bare bones” hides a stunning virtuosity of narrative technique. Each story is narrated in a different way, yet the experiment is not showcased for the sake of experiment itself but blends with the other elements to convey the author’s bleak view of modern, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary Mexico.

“Luvina,” one of his best stories, adds a magic—almost fantastic—dimension, and through myth, modern and provincial Mexico stands for the universal condition of modern humankind.

Pedro Páramo appeared at a time when Mexico was consolidating its postrevolution and wartime gains and dreamed of participating, although belatedly, at the banquet of modernity. In his novel, Rulfo magnificently tied together the different threads from his stories and mixed them together in an anguished parable of the modern and yet ageless Mexico, violently torn between history and myth.

What makes Pedro Páramo a unique achievement is its masterful blend of the stark realities evoked, in which murder, death, rape, and incest destroy life; of modern experimental techniques, which turn the apparent chaos of fleeting narrative fragments into an artistic structure executed with a clockwork precision; and of Mexican folklore and traditional culture, which put familiar faces on any absurdity. As if in homage to the Day of the Dead (celebrated in Mexico on November 2), all the characters of the novel are long dead; their “souls in pain” cannot rest in peace; the monsoon rains resuscitate them, and the skeletons begin to remember and to replay their squalid lives. Black humor, absurdity of situations and dialogue, and an overall dreamlike character all bring the novel close to surrealism, a connection borne out in Rulfo’s later film scripts.

Rulfo continued to work on the text of his novel for the next quarter of a century, sometimes augmenting, sometimes deleting. Thus in each edition, the textual sequence is broken up into different narrative fragments. In the 1980 edition, he strengthened the graphic markers and established seventy segments. With hindsight, it is relatively easy to identify the nuclear narratives; the hard part comes when the reader attempts to relate them to the historical chronology. Yet the degree to which the historical background can be reconstructed is surprising. What is even more interesting is that Rulfo, who had up to a point striven to establish the historical, chronological, and geographical points of reference for the story, started to demolish them with vengeance. In Pedro Páramo, realism and its conventions become but a pretext for their own subversion and parody.

Readers have recognized from early on that behind the father-son relation in the novel hides the Oedipus myth. Allegorical readings have sprung up based on everything from classical and Aztec myths to psychoanalysis. Yet the mythical layer of the novel relies more on the haunting Mexican realities than on the Greek, modern West European, or pre-Columbian myths. Pedro Páramo closes the cycle of Mexican postrevolutionary rural novel and has become a part of the Mexican national myth, one of the Mexico’s founding fictions.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Pedro Páramo, 1955, revised 1959, 1964, 1980 (English translations 1959, 1994)

Short Fiction:

El llano en llamas, 1953, revised 1970, 1980 (The Burning Plain, and Other Stories, 1967)

Screenplays:

El gallo de oro y otros textos para cine, 1980 (partial translation, “The Golden Cock,” Review 46, 1992)

Nonfiction:

Juan Rulfo: Autobiografía armada, 1973 (Reina Roffé, compiler)

Inframundo: El México de Juan Rulfo, 1980 (Inframundo: The Mexico of Juan Rulfo, 1983)

Miscellaneous:

Toda la obra, 1992 (critical edition); Los cuadernos de Juan Rulfo, 1994

Bibliography

Burton, Julianne. “A Drop of Rain in the Desert: Something and Nothingness in Juan Rulfo’s ‘Nos han dado la tierra’ [‘They’ve Given Us the Land’].” Latin American Literary Review 2, no. 3 (Fall/Winter, 1973): 55-62. Analysis of Rulfo’s use of absences (“nothingness”) such as barrenness, poverty, isolation, in combination with the presence (“something”) of elements like the buzzards that symbolize death and magnify the sterility of the locale and the people’s lives.

Ekstrom, Margaret V. “Frustrated Quest in the Narratives of Juan Rulfo.” The American Hispanist 2, no. 12 (November, 1976): 13-16. Discusses “No Dogs Bark,” “Talpa,” “The Burning Plain,” and “Macario” in relation to the actual journeys and symbolic quests undertaken by Rulfo’s characters, who are “unsuccessful” heroes on frustrated quests.

Janney, Frank, ed. and trans. Inframundo: The Mexico of Juan Rulfo. New York: Ediciones del Norte, 1983. Collection of critical articles by major Latin American authors like the Nobel-prize-winning Gabriel García Márquez, along with Rulfo’s story “Luvina” and nearly a hundred of his stunning black and white photographs illustrating the Mexico described in his works.

Jordan, Michael S. “Noise and Communication in Juan Rulfo.” Latin American Literary Review 24, no. 27 (January-June, 1996): 115-130. Excellent analysis of several short stories and Pedro Páramo, investigating the presence of noise and abundance of “speech acts” in a narrative universe in which real communication is ultimately impossible.

Leal, Luis. Juan Rulfo. Boston: Twayne, 1983. The first full-length study in English of Rulfo’s work. Relates Rulfo’s first unpublished novel, The Son of Affliction, to Rulfo’s difficult childhood. Divides Rulfo’s writing into the first prose work, the early stories, and the later stories, then focuses on the novel, Pedro Páramo, by examining “Context and Genesis” and “Structure and Imagery.” Also a brief chapter on Rulfo’s screenplays and the films made from them, as well as his public lectures. Excellent bibliography.

Lyon, Ted. “Ontological Motifs in the Short Stories of Juan Rulfo.” Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century 3 (Winter, 1973): 161-168. Examines all fifteen stories of The Burning Plain and Other Stories according to four motifs: walking, memory, futility of effort, and vision impeded by darkness.

Ramírez, Arthur. “Juan Rulfo: Dialectics and the Despairing Optimist.” Hispania 65 (December, 1982): 580-585. Claims that despite the tensions between the dualities of life and death, love and hate, hope and despair, heaven and hell, reality and unreality in Rulfo’s fiction, the overall effect is cohesiveness rather than polarities. Further finds that Rulfo’s pessimism contains a kind of affirmation: a preoccupation with death underscores the importance of life and love.

Reinhardt-Childers, Ilva. “Sensuality, Brutality, and Violence in Two of Rulfo’s Stories: An Analytical Study.” Hispanic Journal 12, no.1 (Spring 1991): 69-73. Discusses “At Daybreak” and “The Burning Plain” from the perspective of extreme and unpredictable violence they contain, perhaps because Rulfo witnessed violence while growing up during the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution.