Tuesday, May 24, 2016

so that dust was above and below us all the time - some Juan Rulfo

Read more Mexican literature, suggests Caravana de Recuerdos.  So I read Juan Rulfo’s two little books, The Burning Plain and Other Stories (1953) and Pedro Páramo (1955).  Both books are set in the interior of Jalisco, rough country, brush and scrub.  In the story “They gave us land,” some peasants – soldiers? – are given parcels in a land reform, land without “even the shadow of a tree, or a seedling of a tree, or any kind of root,” where there “isn’t even enough here for the wind to blow up a dust cloud” (15).

That is more or less the setting of the stories and the novel, too, sometimes in town, sometimes more up in the mountains, but always bad, bad country.  Puerto Vallarta is part of Jalisco – it’s a coastal province!  Rulfo’s characters have no notion of the ocean.  They have enough trouble staying alive.  Many do not.

The characters in Pedro Páramo may all be dead.  A man looking for his father, the title character, finds a town full of ghosts, and himself becomes a ghost.  Or he is a madman who imagines a town full of ghosts.  The first option is more fun.  The conceit that the ghosts are confused about exactly who else is a ghost is too good to throw away for some “he’s crazy” explanation.

Please see Vapour Trails and six words for a hat and many others I have forgotten for more on Rulfo’s novel.  It is a lot like Absalom, Absalom with the narrators replaced by ghosts.  Huge debt to Faulkner.

The stories (the novel, too) take place mostly during the 1910s and 1920s, during the Mexican Revolution and a later regional uprising, the Cristeros War, giving plenty of room for social comment and violence, along the lines of Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs (1915).  The tone is sardonic fatalism.  “Everything is going from bad to worse here” (31, “We’re very poor,” yes, that’s the title of the story).

But there is also a weird strain that runs through the stories, anticipating Pedro Páramo, that I enjoyed a lot.

“It was like bats flitting through the darkness very close to us.  Bats with big wings that grazed against the ground.  I got up and the beating of wings was stronger, as if the flock of bats had been frightened and were flying toward the holes of the doors…  I saw all of the women of Luvina with their water jugs on their shoulders, their shawls hanging from their heads and their black figures in the black background of the night.”  (“Luvina,” 117)

Or “Talpa,” a grotesque story, where adulterous lovers try to murder the sick husband by accompanying him on a religious pilgrimage, over a month on the road which they hope will do him in, but which means that they are simultaneously, sinfully, blasphemously making the pilgrimage themselves.

At that point people coming from all over began to join us, people like us who turned onto that wide road, like the current of a river, making us fall behind, pushed from all sides as if we were tied to them by threads of dust.  Because from the ground a white dust rose up with the swarm of people like corn fuzz that swirled up high and then came down again; all the feet scuffling against it made it rise again, so that dust was above and below us all the time.  And above this land was the empty sky, without any clouds, just the dust, and the dust didn’t give any shade. (69)

A mix of close observation and leaps into nightmare.

The translator of The Burning Plain is George D. Schade; of Pedro Páramo, Margaret Sayers Peden.

13 comments:

  1. chihuahua, about 300 miles south of el paso, is a lot like that, except surrounded by high dry treeless mesas. tarahumara indians live outside the town; they don't speak spanish. they come into town early in the morning to steal garbage to live off of. also they camp in the dry river beds, counting on flash floods to carry off their extra trash. although chihuahua is a fairly peaceful place, at certain times of the year, when the rancheros come into the city, it can be dangerous for tourists or frequenters of night spots, as shootings occur on a regular basis after which the perps disappear into the desert again. all in all, a place much like that in Paramo, but further north...

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  2. i forgot to add, that was the way it was when i lived there, in the early sixties...

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  3. Chihuahua in the 1960s sounds like a good setting for a novel and a bunch of stories, too.

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  4. I didn't see it at the time when I read Pedro Paramo, but yes, Faulkner. All those intersecting narrators, all those ghosts, all that fatalism. Faulkner would've set the whole thing at Pedro's hacienda, though, not in the town.

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  5. Don't know this writer but liked your account. Wonder if Bolaño was influenced by him?

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  6. "Like Faulkner" may be what I actually learned from Rulfo's novel. One path - the path? - by which the massive Faulkner effect entered Latin American fiction.

    Bolaño - yes! Although that squib makes me wonder if the "influence" is more Rulfo's "failure" to write a second novel. Then again the squib claims Faulkner "admitted to having been influenced by Rulfo" - a Borgesian joke, I hope.

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  7. Great quotes from the stories, Tom. I've read them last year and have been meaning to return to them and write something but I'm trudging through my own bad land at the moment where blog posts die from lack of water and a surfeit of dust. The bones lie bleaching in the river bed of my drafts... You also remind me of the fact that I need to catch up on Faulkner, now having amassed a few of his books.

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  8. Séamus, the band and Finnegans Wake take priority, absolutely.

    The absence of Faulkner has been for me one of the great mysteries of book blogs. He is the most influential novelist of the 20th century, a colossus. Almost unread by book bloggers, even the international fiction crowd that could use him. Maybe everyone read Faulkner pre-blog.

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    1. Apart from a few short stories in compilations I had not read him pre-blog and have only managed The Reivers since then, and that three years ago. I have now pulled As I Lay Dying from it's hiding place on your earlier recommendation.

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  9. Yeah! The Reivers is Faulkner with the colors badly faded. As I Lay Dying is colorful.

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    1. Chronologically, The Reivers is the only Faulkner book that could have been influenced by Rulfo. (Pedro Paramo's English translation by Lysander Kemp came out during 1959).

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    2. I just read a book of Faulkner stories. When I sat down to write about it, there was so much to say (and so much of it contradictory) that I was sort of choked into silence.

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  10. How I wish The Reivers has been influenced by Rulfo. Yoknapatawpha ghosts. The book instead shows the debilitating influence of William Faulkner.

    Several years from now I will turn Wuthering Expectations into a Southern fiction blog. The logical endpoint.

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