Juan Rulfo and 100 Years of Modern Mexico

Juan Rulfo (1917-1986) was born a century ago in Jalisco, Mexico (Mariano Azuela was also born in Jalisco). He is one of Mexico's greatest writers, but is worth reading by anyone from any country. Although Mexico gives his work its strength, Rulfo's genius makes his fiction universal. Sadly, he wrote very little. In 1952-53 he received a grant from the Mexican Writers' Center that enabled him to publish his first book in 1953, a brilliant collection of stories titled The Plain in Flames (El llano en llamas -- also published as The Burning Plain). In 1953-54 he received a second grant from the Writers' Center, and in 1955 Rulfo published his masterpiece, the novel Pedro Paramo. By this time he had begun doing some film work, and in 1956-57 probably began writing what would later be the novella The Golden Cockerel (or "the golden rooster" -- El gallo de oro). The novella was not published until 1980, appearing as El gallo de oro y otros textos para cine (The Golden Rooster and Other Texts for Cinema); it seems likely that it was a screenplay later turned into prose fiction.

Before I begin sharing my thoughts and opinions, let me make my caveats. I am not an academic, I am not Mexican, I did not study Rulfo's works in school. I am an outsider. But even in this era that worships the sanctity of "own voices," I believe the viewpoint of the outsider still has value, seeing from without what the culture may not see from within. When one is arguing the universality of a regional author, as I am doing, the value of the outsider's viewpoint increases in purpose. I am simply someone who loves Mexico and the Spanish language.

By rooting his stories deep in the rural Mexico he knew, Rulfo gave his a writing a reality and strength that exists in any language. Placing his fiction in the Mexican countryside might seem to have little to do with many modern and urban Mexicans, but the beginnings of Mexico since the Revolution were rural: everyone seems to have family and relatives who still live out on the ranch. It is familiar. But Rulfo isn't just writing of the countryside, he's writing of people. Making his stage part of a dry, desolate, harsh country sets his characters in relief, shines a spotlight, removes the extraneous and the distractions. It's a bare stage (as with Beckett's Godot) on which we can't help but see these people naked, clothed only in fear, greed, suffering, and all the other omnipresent human feeling and emotion with which we are blessed and cursed.

Rulfo might be called one of the "novelists of the Revolution" (as, more accurately, was Mariano Azuela), since he somewhat frequently mentions the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion (La Cristiada) in his fiction. But he doesn't fit there, as these references are only part of the verisimilitude, showing the reality, the context, as one must mention cars when writing about American life. He isn't writing about the Revolution, he again is writing about more basic and common elements of life and humanity, even in the midst of endless war.

With any of Rulfo's work, the reader can't help but realize that the author was heavily influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Except he wasn't. Garcia Marquez had examined Rulfo's work in depth. When he first received a copy of Pedro Paramo, he read it twice in one night, and then repeatedly until "I could recite the whole book, forwards and backwards." After studying Rulfo, Garcia Marquez acknowledged that he had found "at last, the way I sought to continue my books." Of course Garcia Marquez was Colombian, not Mexican, and influenced everyone. I don't think it's too much for me to claim, given the words quoted above, that Rulfo's influence is far more general than commonly thought. He's not just a regional writer.

Rulfo goes far beyond his native Mexico, to address the emotions, fears, concerns of every person. By writing of, and then leaving the local, the regional, the specific behind, Rulfo brought Mexican writing into the modern era, and made it international writing. His work is really of love, hate, revenge, sin, fear, what we all encounter, feelings we all have. Although the novel Pedro Paramo may have been born in El dia de los muertos (the Day of the Dead), Rulfo's writing of memories, ghosts, death, Hell, and histories, are elements that affect all people, from whatever country. We all face life, our memories, our death, and Juan Rulfo, in fiction, brilliantly does the same.  🐢