The Americas | Mexico’s maestro of menace

Why Juan Rulfo’s fiction of fear is still revered in Latin America

The arbitrary violence of his short stories rings true in modern Mexico

FOR a writer, he was a man of extraordinarily few words. Juan Rulfo produced only one short novel, “Pedro Páramo”, and a collection of short stories, “El Llano en Llamas” (translated as “The Burning Plain”). Together they comprise fewer than 300 pages. And that, apart from a couple of fragments and a few film scripts, was it. Yet not only does Rulfo enjoy a towering reputation in Spanish-language letters. In addition, as has become clear during the commemorations this year marking the centenary of his birth, his work has at least as much relevance for many young Latin American writers as that of successors such as Gabriel García Márquez or Mario Vargas Llosa, who are far better known to English-speaking readers.

Rulfo was marked indelibly by his childhood. He was born into a family of landowners in the western Mexican state of Jalisco. They lost their lands in the turmoil of the Mexican revolution (1910-17) and the counter-revolutionary Cristero war of the late 1920s. His father was murdered, shot in the back when Rulfo was six. His mother died when he was ten. After a spell in an orphanage, at 16 he moved to Mexico City, where he worked as a civil servant and later a tyre salesman while attending courses on literature at the university. After publishing his two books in the mid-1950s, he carried on working as an editor at Mexico’s National Indigenous Institute. He died in 1986.

Rulfo’s stories draw on the rural Jalisco of his childhood. Pedro Páramo, the main character of the novel and the unmet father of its narrator, Juan Preciado, is a cacique (boss), who by violence and threat appropriates all the land in the fictional town of Comala, along with many of its women. He tells his foreman: “From now on we are going to make the law.” Páramo is “living rancour” and “pure evil”. Yet he wins the absolution of the town priest in return for a few gold coins. When guerrillas turn up in Comala, Páramo offers them money and men: “You have to be on the winning side.” He is defeated only by a childhood sweetheart who goes mad rather than succumb to him.

In other hands, “Pedro Páramo” would have been merely a social-realist denunciation of rural injustice, a “regional novel” of a kind fashionable in Latin America in the first half of the 20th century. Two things make it much more than that. The first is the lyricism of Rulfo’s writing. He is acutely sensitive to the earth, its fruits, its barrenness and the changing seasons. Preciado’s mother describes the lost Comala of her youth as “a town that smells of spilt honey”; she inwardly sees “the horizon rise and fall with the wind that moves the ears” of grain.

A second quality makes “Pedro Páramo” perhaps the first modern novel in Latin America of universal significance. Rulfo had read William Faulkner and was aware of surrealism with its emphasis on dreams and the unconscious. Comala is a town of ghosts. “Have you ever heard the groaning of the dead?” an old woman asks Preciado.

“Pedro Páramo” is ultimately about myth, not realism, and about the presence of death in the midst of life. Preciado is overcome by fear of the supernatural whispers filtering through the walls of the town square. The reader gradually realises that all the novel’s characters are dead. It is modern because it frames a reality rather than merely describing it, and because time in it is simultaneous, not sequential, as Carlos Fuentes, a later Mexican writer, noted.

Read Rulfo today and it is impossible not to hear echoes of contemporary Mexico and the cruelty and arbitrary violence of its drug gangs and, sometimes, of the state forces that confront them. There are still too many Páramos who make their own law. One of the stories in “El Llano en Llamas” recounts the murder of migrants seeking to cross the Rio Grande; another tells of a dispute over grazing rights ending in murder.

Many contemporary Latin American writers have grown up hearing “the groaning of the dead”. Rulfo’s terse, spare poetics and his liking for the short story are back in fashion in Latin America today, after the baroque prolixity of García Márquez or Roberto Bolaño. Writers now touching 40 who acknowledge the influence of Rulfo include Samanta Schweblin, an Argentine whose short novel of psychological terror, “Fever Dream”, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year; and Emiliano Monge, a Mexican who says his stories “take place with violence as an ecosystem”.

That death can be arbitrary is part of the human condition. That this is too often the case in Latin America, a century after Rulfo’s birth, is an indictment.

This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "The literature of fear"

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