Mike Gonzalez Archive | ETOL Main Page
From Socialist Review, No. 174, April 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Pedro Paramo
Juan Rulfo
Serpent’s Tail £7.99
Juan Preciado returns to his mother’s village in obedience to her dying wish. As he descends into the little town of Comala what he finds is not the green pleasant place of his mother’s memories but a dead town full of disembodied voices.
Comala turns out to be a sort of purgatory in which a series of tormented souls live out a perpetual guilt that forbids rest or sleep.
What all of them have in common is that they were corrupted and used by the man who controlled the town – Pedro Paramo. Not only did he and his son use everyone in the village for their own ends – he also ‘let Comala die’ after the death of his son Miguel.
The setting for the novel is Mexico; the time is the 1940s or 1950s – it is never clear exactly when. The writer, Juan Rulfo, wrote only this and an earlier book of short stories. But Pedro Paramo is a fine novel, and quite enough to justify Rulfo’s reputation.
Within the novel there are many lost worlds – Juan’s mother remembered a utopian place, and the one person Pedro Paramo loves, Susana San Juan, takes refuge from him in a dream of Arcadia he cannot enter.
In 1910 Mexico experienced a revolution whose purpose was to sweep away the class to which Paramo belonged. Its central object was to redistribute land to the small farmers and take it from the great landlords.
Yet here the revolution makes only a brief appearance. The revolutionary leaders are bought off by Paramo and quickly leave. Comala is abandoned by the revolution and plucked out of the stream of history.
Forty years later (in 1955), when Rulfo wrote his novel, he could not fail to suggest the betrayal and corruption of the promises of revolution – and the poor dead souls of Comala as the victims of the process.
The novel is not a conventional narrative. It is, rather, a chorus of disparate voices from which emerges a sense of shared experience, though each of the speakers is obsessed by their own loneliness. It is a poetic, evocative song of regret, and a powerful image of the living death that is the result of isolation from the dynamic process of history.
Mike Gonzalez Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 9 March 2017