C O L U M N
LATINO FORUM
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BY TAMARA KAYE SELLMAN, PUBLISHER

Juan Rulfo:
Father of Magical Realism?

THE MAGICAL Realism Boom of the 1950s included the imaginative contributions of many popular literary artists who North American readers still recognize today. However, Mexican author Juan Rulfo, perhaps the most important inspiration behind the discipline of magical realist technique, did not produce a plentiful and popular œuvre of books and is often omitted as a subject for popular discussion about the narrative discipline of magical realism. Yet, his classic novel, Pedro Páramo, became a kind of catalyst for those Latin American authors who dared to venture from established trends in realism and social realism to tell their stories.

Rulfo incorporated many signature aspects of magical realism in Pedro Páramo, including hints of oral tradition, symbolism, universal mythos, Mexican folklore, surrealistic imagery, an allegorical approach to recording national history and a fragmented, avant garde narrative structure which rendered a kind of Mexican modernity in the face of trends in social realism that cleaved to subjective, Outsider notions about rural life.

Pedro Páramo is a slim novel, the story of one man's quest for his own heritage. Protagonist Juan Preciado has returned to the village of his birth, Comala, at the behest of his late mother, who asked him, as a last wish, to find his father. He meets up with someone who claims to know his mother, only to discover that she, like everyone else in town, is dead, a ghost communicating to Juan via his dead mother's crypt. What unfolds from there is a creepy set of events and revelations that teach Juan more than he expected to learn about the dead and dying.

In Juan Rulfo: Autobiografía armada, the author's story about the origins of Pedro Páramo is revealed:

" …It happened when I went back to the town where I used to live, after thirty years, and I found it uninhabited. It's a town I knew with about seven or eight thousand inhabitants. It had one hundred fifty when I returned. Those immense houses—it's one of those big towns with shops measured by the number of street-front doors, there were shops with eight doors, with ten doors—and when I arrived the houses were padlocked. The people had left, just left. But someone had the idea of planting casuarinas along the streets of the town. I was there at night once, and it's a town where the wind blows a lot, it's at the foot of the Sierra Madre. And at night, the casuarinas bellow and howl. And the wind. That's when I understood the loneliness of Comala, of that place."

It comes as no surprise that the infamous Gabriel García Márquez relates in his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, how he memorized and could recite the text of Pedro Páramo at will. One who has read both Gabo's work and Pedro Páramo will doubtless recognize Rulfo's haunting influence.

For those who've read Rulfo's classic, the very notion of being able to memorize and recite what has been considered a difficult book is, in itself, a fabulous proposition. Brazilian book reviewer Alysson Oliveira writes:

"The experience of reading this short book can be very difficult to most of us at first, but, once we get used to the magical ideas and the writer's style the narrative flows smoothly. …what makes Pedro Páramo a difficult book is the style of narrative chosen by Rulfo. His text reads like the hopscotch. …the reading of this novel requires double attention."

(In light of that, new readers might turn to an Internet reading guide produced by Harry Vélez Quiñones, Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Puget Sound, for ways to read and encounter the book's shifts in time, space and perspective. —The Editor, Margin)

Pedro Páramo, published in 1955 and described as the "quintessentially Mexican, modernist gothic," plies its readers with puzzles as a way to express the complex relationship between past and present in early twentieth-century Mexico. As populations from the countryside left for the promises of the city, ghost towns began to crop up across the rural landscape. Urbanization nearly erased the folkways that defined the country up until that time. Rulfo's message to readers in Pedro Páramo reminds them that the traditional Mexican identity is not entirely lost, and certainly not buried. Neither dead nor alive, it still touches the psychic lives of the Mexican people even as they move toward a modern future.

It wasn't until El Boom in the 1960s that critics began to recognize the value of Rulfo's effort. The book was not received well originally; this, perhaps, being one of the key reasons why the book has never been a popular part of the magical realist canon as North Americans interpret it. Only now do literary historians recognize that it was Rulfo's work (not García Márquez's or even Julio Cortázar's) that spawned an entirely new literary universe for Latin American writers.

Rulfo spent most of his life writing and making films, shooting photographs and teaching and advising writing students. The Juan Rulfo Foundation (en Español) exists to honor both the writing and photography of this great Mexican artist.

Writing, for Rulfo, was a secretive occupation. He was ceaseless in his revisions and perfectionist to the point of destroying manuscript pages that didn't measure up. His only other book publications were El llano en llamas, a story collection, and the work, El gallo de oro y otros textos para cine, which collected another novel, some smaller writings and photo essays. He was known as a laconic, creative man; that he did not produce a lot of books is less important than the fact that the work he did create, highly refined and simple in expression, though utterly complex in its meaning, went on to mark a monumentally important evolution in Latin American writing.

Tamara Kaye Sellman is founding editor and publisher of Margin.
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Rev'd 2005/01/26