Juan Rulfo
Pedro Páramo

I don't really know what I'm doing. I don't know under what right I'm assuming the authority to speak about one of the most important novels of the '1900s, the cornerstone and cornerstone of Hispanic-American literature, the source from which the narrative stream of magical realism flows. A book that counts among its greatest supporters Calvino, Sonstag, Fuentes, Bolaño, Cortázar, and the immense Borges, and was a primary source of inspiration for Marquez (who lifted a passage for the famous opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude); what hope do I have of writing something unpublished about Pedro Páramo?

Yet there are things to be said about this slender text. Pedro Páramo is a strange book. It's easy to narrate: Rulfo is an extreme minimalist, in his very rare writings he always worked by subtraction (his entire published bibliography probably doesn't reach 500 pages), stripping the prose to the bone. In its final form, Pedro Páramo consists of little more than one hundred twenty pages: Rulfo later said, "if they had left me with it for longer I would have trimmed another fifty pages". Yet such little space manages to encapsulate much of the history and literature of South America: the disappearance of collective memory, social injustices and oppressions, the voiceless despair of the destitute, the hypocrisy of religion, the charm of timeless remote villages, intricate family sagas, the indomitable dignity of women bent but not broken by male oppression.

Pedro Páramo sheds light on a particularly dark period in Mexican history (the Zapatista revolution that drowned in blood and the Cristeros war left the country, in the 1930s, at the mercy of a powerful and ruthless landowning elite) even without naming it openly, and it carries the forgotten legacy of thousands of human lives erased by the violence of the terrible century; in parallel, Juan Preciado in the novel becomes the spokesperson for all the restless souls of Comala, emblematic representation of all the erased and irrelevant villages in the grand scheme of History. Comala, a site of infernal and perpetual suffering, symbolic even by name (the comal is a type of clay dish used for slow cooking), is a non-place metaphysical populated by ghosts and whispers, by the diaphanous shadows of what was, whether houses, people, animals, or stories: everything in Comala, physical or immaterial, is crumbling, ruinous, eroded by the winds of time. This, if that weren't enough, makes Pedro Páramo one of the greatest, most disturbing, and effective ghost stories ever written. In its being eerie in the manner that will later be described by Mark Fisher ("there is nothing where there should be something"), Páramo anticipates by a good half-century the concept of Hauntology. The same unusual, progressive disintegration of the initial plot recalls Basinski's Disintegration Loops: at first, we follow Juan Preciado in search of his mysterious father in the lost Comala, but once he reaches the village, Preciado's character starts to evaporate metaphorically, becoming rarefied, ethereal. Just as personal history is lost in the great History, the novel's plot, in a skillful play of imperceptible fades, gradually shifts focus to Pedro Páramo: the father-lord of Comala, a terrifying demiurge who controls life and death over the entire existence of the village (in every way an extension of his person), the epitome and archetype of the tyrannical caciques that truly plagued early 20th-century Central American society. Páramo steals, kills, tramples, and rapes for his own gain, but he is an extraordinary, complex, Mephistophelian and beastly, brutal and pathetic character, in his own way tragic in his incapacity to conceive of love as anything other than forced possession. A living resentment, he is defined in the book.

If the character Pedro Páramo is unforgettable, the novel Pedro Páramo has somewhat fallen into obscurity. In South America, it is a subject of study due to the illustrious epigones it generated and the historical context it describes, while in the rest of the world its fame is as opaque as the lunar ghosts that inhabit it; even among us, despite Calvino's endorsement and the enthusiasm with which we embraced South American magical realism, it remains a book for few initiated. Yet it deserves a far better reputation than that of a cult object: it is a wonderful piece of the highest literature.