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MLN, Volume 129, Number 2, March 2014 (Hispanic Issue), pp. 308-329
(Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/mln.2014.0019
Access provided by Georgetown University Library (23 Jul 2015 10:48 GMT)
Stephanie Merrim
In the first pages of Juan Rulfos oracular Pedro Pramo (1955), Juan
Preciado meets his half-brother, Abundio Martnez, at a crossroads
called Los Encuentros. Abundance, crossroads, encounters: all three
come to characterize the novel itself, which burgeons into the meeting
place of paths as diverse as myth, theology, history, and ideology and
thus into a classic of the twentieth century. This article will argue that
among the abundant paths converging in Pedro Pramo we may count
existentialism, especially as deployed in constructions of mexicanidad,
or Mexicanness, that were circulating in Rulfos milieu precisely when
his novel was gestating, the 1940s and early 1950s.
From its very beginnings in Latin America, we should note, existentialism partnered with identity discourse. Eduardo Malleas prescient,
Kierkegaardian Historia de una pasin argentina (1937), which contrasted
the authenticity of the Argentine countryside with an inauthentic
Buenos Aires, kindled the partnership. Latin American philosophers,
essayists, and creative writers of the mid-twentieth century then seized
with a vengeance on the enabling positives of existentialism for socalled Third World nations, such as the weight that existentialism
places on existence over essence, as well as on authenticity, alienation
versus commitment, freedom, and new ways of envisioning religion.1
1
On the fit between existentialism and Third World concerns, see Lewis R. Gordon.
My article, Living and Thinking with Those Dislocations: A Case for Latin American
Existentialist Fiction, discusses Mallea and surveys various agendas of Latin American
existentialist literature.
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Mascarones, Rulfo may have met Octavio Paz (Garca Bonilla 88),
whose existential bent I will discuss shortly. The early 1940s witnessed
Rulfos first publication of the stories that would comprise El Llano en
llamas (1953) in Pan. Revista de Literatura and in Amrica. Amrica, whose
editorial board Rulfo eventually joined, focused on Indoamerican,
nationalist, and existential issues (Lpez Mena 6567). According to
Sergio Lpez Mena, Rulfos stories well matched the concerns of the
journal (67). El Llano en llamas afforded Rulfo the renown that earned
him fellowships to the Centro Mexicano de Escritores between 1952
and 1954. At the Centro, Rulfo had contact with two important figures
of the Grupo Hiperin, Rulfos fellow Jaliscan, Augustn Yez, and
Jorge Portilla, whom Rulfo photographed (see the photo in Vital 86).
Rulfos readings, the crux of his intellectual formation, provide a
larger window into his involvement with existentialism. The author
has said: Ms que tener una preparacin formal, yo he sido un lector
casi patolgico, en que he llegado a leer hasta dos libros por noche
(Garca Bonilla 89). This voracious autodidacts library contained
up to 10,000 books, hundreds of them philosophical, historical, and
international literary works (Garca Bonilla 274; Juan Francisco Rulfo
15). We know that Rulfo pored over at least one of Dostoevskys novels
during the Mascarones period (Garca Bonilla 88), and that before
finishing PP he was riveted by Mara Luisa Bombals existential La
amortajada (1939) (Garca Bonilla 137; Carballo 23). Rulfo admired
the premier Mexican existential cum Marxist writer of the time, Jos
Revueltas, to the degree that he reportedly wrote a story for El Llano en
llamas with Revueltas as a protagonist (Garca Bonilla 130; Lezama 8;
unfortunately, Rulfo never published the story). At some point harder
to determine, Rulfos existentialist readings also included Jean-Paul
Sartres Nausea (1938) (Lpez Mena 44) and Alejo Carpentiers Los
pasos perdidos (1953) (Garca Bonilla 82; Poniatowska, Agente 1).
Four pieces of Rulfos earliest but unpublished novel, El hijo del
desaliento, offer striking proof that the Mexican author both read
and wrote existentialist literature prior to PP. Scholars date Rulfos
El hijo to the start of the 1940s, an incandescent period for existentialist literature because Nausea, Alberto Camuss inaugural works,
and, in Latin America, Juan Carlos Onettis novella, El pozo (1939),
the complexities of obtaining older Mexican journals, I was not always able to consult
the original sources. I therefore provide double referencesto Garca Bonilla and to
the original, as cited in Tiempo suspendidowhen Garca Bonillas original source is clear.
When it is not, I simply reference Garca Bonilla. In other words, readers should be aware
that Garca Bonilla is almost always citing another source and should consult his book.
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6
Paz has left ample testimony of his encounters with and opinions of Sartre in his
Corriente alterna (1967), El ogro filantrpico (1979), and Itinerario (1993). For a pungent
summary of Pazs critiques, see the obituary he wrote for Sartre, Memento: Jean-Paul
Sartre. (PN Review 35 10.3 [1984]: n. pag. Web. 5 July 2013).
7
For example: Toda la historia de Mxico, desde la Conquista hasta la Revolucin,
puede verse como una bsqueda de nosotros mismos, deformados o enmascarados por
instituciones extraas, y de una Forma que nos exprese (Laberinto 311312).
314
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316
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Zea, Rulfo laments that disowning its colonial past has led Mexico
to repeat the barbarity of the conquest en una especie de eterno
retorno que slo podra romperse cuando nos atrevisemos a ver de
frente, sin autoengao, nuestra historia (Jimnez 19). The conquest,
in Rulfos view, had especially dire consequences for his home state of
Jalisco, where it resulted in the extermination of the Indians and in
the descendants of the conquerors considering themselves dueos
absolutos of the land (Sommers 107). Whence Pedro Pramo himself,
whom Rulfo explicitly identifies as a cacique, the prototypical representative of what he calls the antiguo coloniaje al que an estamos
sometidos (Vital 200).
For who is the Pedro who shuts out memory (136) if not a rencor
vivo (68), and what is his regime if not the persistence into modern
Mexico of the colonialism and the neocolonialism that the Revolution
attempted to unseat? Pedro has appropriated all the land and has
arrogated unto himself absolute, merciless power. He has imprisoned
Comala in an economy based on usufruct (100) and the commodification of human beings that mirrors the worst of the conquest. The novel
unequivocally shows that the Mexican Revolution, which purported to
undo the colonial past, changed nothing. Pedro exploits the empty,
energetic hulk of a war and buys it as he had bought everything else.
The Revolution leads only to a new eruption of atavistic violence,
in the Cristero wars. Moreover, PP concretizes the image of the past
as the living dead that Zea fiercely advances. The Comala that Juan
Preciado meets is a ghost town, un lugar de mala muerte, a purgatory
inhabited by the ghosts of people who had colluded with the cacique
Pedro Pramo voluntarily or otherwise. Their souls haunt Comala in
search of someone to pray for them (38). Rulfos Comala, in short,
delivers a mis-en-scne of the unburied, still-living past that Zea and
Paz assail.
At least one component of Zeas essay that Laberinto does not take up
has a strong presence in PP. Zea dwells on the lure of utopias, which
breed the illusion that one can always start over again from a tabula
rasa, eschewing the past. Rulfos text begins and ends in utopias, in
Doloress vision of Comala as paradise and Pedros concluding vision
of Susana and the Paradise tree (193). The body of the text, though,
steeps us in the real, dystopian Comala to which Dolores sent her
son. That dystopia leaves us with one of the greatest enigmas of the
novel, namely, if the paradisiacal, idyllic Comala with which Dolores
enthralled her son ever actually existed or if it was literally a u-topia,
a merely notional place. Textual evidence does not allow us to resolve
the enigma, but reading PP alongside Zea elucidates it. Inserted in
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15
Born in Spain, raised in Mexico, Luis Villoro (1922) has continually opened up
new fields of investigation, in works such as El proceso ideolgico de la revolucin de Independencia (1953), Estudios sobre Husserl (1975), El poder y el valor. Fundamentos de una tica
poltica (1997), Estado plural, pluralidad de culturas (1998). Villoro taught at the UNAM
and was inducted into the Colegio Nacional in 1978. He has served as president of
the Asociacin Filosfica de Mxico and as a member of the Consejo Nacional para el
Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indgenas.
16
Despite the fact that he treats many issues directly implicating Vasconcelos, Villoro
only mentions the author of La raza csmica once (218). The quite odd omission leads
one to wonder if the young Villoro hesitated to address so major (as is well known,
Vasconcelos had reformed Mexican education) or so controversial a personage, still
alive at the time of LGMs publication.
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Mexico, and it contains both the sole pure laughter and the sole
untainted festivity of the text. As such, the scene resonates not just
with Mikhail Bakhtins portrayal of the carnival as the upending of
hierarchies but also, closer to home, with the portrayal of relajo by
Rulfos friend, Hiperins Jorge Portilla.20 Portilla defines relajo as a
brief, liberating gesture in which an individual mockingly repudiates a
value of the dominant society amidst that societys members. Fittingly,
PPs Indians enact their relajo in the public square of Comala, albeit
to an audience of one.
The Indians transient penetration of the mestizo stronghold and
their glaring separation from it raise the issue of mestizaje. Indeed, I
submit that one of the matters vitally at stake in PP is the theory of
mestizaje that Jos Vasconcelos (18821959) and, according to Villoro,
his cohort, had blazoned. (Chapter 12 of LGM explains that portions of
Vasconceloss ideas retained currency in the 1950s.) As is well known,
Vasconceloss La raza csmica advocates the submersion of the Indians
in a quinta raza universal, fruto de los anteriores y superacin de
todo lo pasado (5), a fusion of races in which the tipos bajos de la
especie sern absorbidos por el tipo superior (27). Rulfo radically
disrupts the racial hierarchy that underlies Vasconceloss mestizaje by
setting PPs happy, insouciant Indians against an array of wretched
mestizos. Dependent upon Pedro, standard-bearer of the never-ending
colonial past and beacon of capitalism, all the inhabitants of Comala
except Susana lead lives of unremitting misery. A pernicious mix of
feudalism and modernity contaminates them all. PP thus begs the
question: what would the Indians gain from any kind of mestizaje?
Although it remains unclear if Rulfo is advocating total separatism
of the Indians or proposing that Mxico imaginario adopt Mxico
profundo as a model, he has clearly voiced a negative opinion of
mestizaje. In his essay, Mxico y los mexicanos (1985), Rulfo remarks
that the previous years economic crisis prompted a resurgence of
works on Mexicanness such as those published thirty-five years ago,
which imagined that el crisol del mestizaje would resolve the grandes
diferencias tnicas, econmicas, sociales, regionales of Mexicos
indigenous people (400). He then declares: Hoy sabemos que el
mestizaje fue una estrategia criolla para unificar lo disperso, afirmar
20
See the long first section of Fenomenologa del relajo (1966). Although Portillas work
on relajo only reached publication after his early death in 1963, he had been working
on Mexicanness since 1947 and perhaps discussed relajo at the Centro Mexicano de
Escritores, where he coincided with Rulfo. I am grateful to Carlos Alberto Snchez,
author of an excellent book on Portilla (The Suspension of Seriousness [Albany: SUNY
Press, 2012]) for his generous assistance with this matter.
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fue una de las cosas que Pedro Pramo nunca lleg a saber (165).
Through textual transference, the unknowable, authentic Indians
whom Rulfo demurs from narrating attain fuller expression in an
authentic, unseizable (for Pedro) Susana. Inchoately, suggestively, the
cameo of the Indians from Apango has ascribed a host of characteristics
to the Indians and then played them out expansively through Susana.
Her multiple, auspicious correspondences with the Indians parlay the mestiza Susana into the embodiment of the Indian within
that Villoro describes as the mestizos freedom and transcendence.
Aydame, Susana, beseeches Pedro in the texts first mention of his
impossible love (76). The stakes, for Villoros construct and for Mexicanness, heighten as Susana further crystallizes in Pedros memory. His
second recollection of Susana depicts her as hiding en la inmensidad
de Dios (77), and subsequent ones juxtapose her with the Paradise
tree. In his last reference to Susana, a dying Pedro sees the Paradise
trees leaves fall and remembers the final encounter with his beloved,
a memory that casts her as a luminous composite of moon and stars,
blotted out by the sun (194). The several images of Susana envelop
her, and the Indian within, in a saintly aura, which recapitulates the
idea of woman as salvation that Rulfos existential Cleotilde debuted.
Additionally, by orchestrating Susana with the imagery of moon, stars,
and sun (in a novel long intended to bear the title La estrella junto a
la luna), Rulfo plants a link between his heroine and the Virgin of
Guadalupe, the quintessential Mexican symbol of religious and racial
unity as well as of Mexicos indigenous core.
A web of magic that fans out from the Indians and Susana to Dolores enhances the correspondences between Pedros two wives, each of
whom has escaped his grasp, and ties the tyrants two spouses to the
redemptive Indian within. Here again, herbs function as a bridge.
We learn at the outset that when she left Pedro to reside with her
sister outside Comala, Dolores kept a photograph of herself in a clay
pot llena de yerbas (68), among them flores de castilla (alluding
to the Guadalupan Castillian roses?). Fraught with mystery, as are
Susana and the Indians, the photograph has a hole where the heart
should be. We learn shortly after that Dolores had dark skin (at least
darker, more morena, than Eduviges [82]), and that a guard of cats
surrounded her when she lived in Comala (83), which confederates
Pedros first wife, respectively, with the Indians and with Susana, whose
father returned in the form of a cat. All of these tell-tale signs animate
the enigmatic photograph of Dolores, lleno de agujeros como de
aguja (69). They hint that Dolores, who considered photography to
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be a cosa de brujera (69), may have done violence to her inherently sweet (74) nature by employing the photograph riddled with
pinpricks and the herbs in a magical effort to conjure up a false,
rhapsodic Comala. The Dolores who had once requested conjurer
Inocencio Osorios assistance for her wedding night with Pedro would
now exercise her own magic on her son, enticing him to complete
after her death the task of making Pedro pay that we know Pedros
second wife Susana had so efficaciously discharged before her death.
The conjurer Inocencio Osorios none too innocent name helps
me bring this essay to a close. The name Osorio rings with Osiris,
the Egyptian God of the underworld. When Osiris died, his body was
scattered over the four corners of the earth. His wife Isis reunited the
fragments and resurrected Osiris. As suggested above with regard to
PP and Zea, Rulfos death-haunted novel performs a similar act in
uniting the dispersed, submerged fragments of the past. For its part,
my essay has argued that existentialism and Mexicanness constitute
related pieces of PPs own past that deserve restoration. A literary
conclusion ensues from the restoration. When read as the foregoing
pages propose, PPs Indians and their magic acquire an unsuspected
lineage, one that unmoors them from magical realism, for which Rulfo
harbored no great fondness,22 and couples them with the discourses
of Mexicanness and existentialism. On a larger scale, according to
the myth, Isis, goddess of wisdom, magic, and the earth, resurrected
Osiris so that they could have a child, Horus. Horus the falconhence
the birds with which PP teems?symbolizes healing and renewal.
The indigenous aspects of PP that an existential reading uncovers,
we might conclude, tender a real rather than mythical possibility for
healing, for a presente y futuro propios (Villoro 289).23
Brown University
22
In his lecture of 1965, Situacin actual de la novela contempornea (in Fell,
371379), Rulfo stated: Pues la novela actual, en cualquier parte del mundo, camina
con la bandera del realismo mgico; es una puerta difcil, ms bien una entrada que
a ninguna parte conduce (379).
23
As a coda, I note that it is precisely around the issue of the future that the correspondences between Susana and the Indians break down. The very image of Susana
dying collapsed onto herself, suffocating herself, signals that her hermetic mode of
existence cannot provide a viable model for the future. PP may afford Susana a more
imposing presence, but on a larger scale the Indians for whom she fronts prevail.
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