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I travel in books...
Juan Rulfo
Richard Halliburton, an adventurous travel writer dear to my mother's heart, judged Mexico to be the most beautiful country in the world. Long before I went there myself I had "seen" Mexico through the eyes of one of its great visionaries: Orozco. And the impression has been a lasting one, equally composed of terror and awe.
The Reading Room
Among the most potent organizing principles of my childhood was Dartmouth's Baker Library. The structure was modeled after Philadelphia's Independence Hall. The sonorous bells in its clock tower ringing out on the quarter-hour, its commanding position on the town green, its culminating role within the complex of structures that made up the mysterious and forbidding College, combined layer after layer of meaning. Here was at once the heart of knowledge, a symbol of democracy, a landmark on the skyline of the landscape, an opposing chess piece in the architectural standoff between town and gown, and the implacable, stoic face of Time. During the 1930's the College hired José Clemente Orozco to paint a mural in the great reading room of the basement, a huge area underlying half of the building, with walls that rise twenty feet. On this virgin space Orozco laid out a historical panorama of the New World in vivid, surreal blues, purples and reds, the stigmata of hallucinations.
From a child's perspective the effect of Orozco's massive scale was as if walking among giants that roared into a dreaming daylight, violent and beckoning. Aztecs were  lined up in stiff two-dimensional forms, Egyptianlike, as if unable to assume a full-perspective representation. They worked at a stone altar slicing out the heart of a nude human sacrifice. Helmeted conquistadors sat astride massive horses. A US. general, in dress uniform and military hat, leaned forward in his death throes to plunge a knife in the back of the revolutionary, Zapata. Zapata himself stood impassively under the shade of his enormous sombrero, cartridge belts crossed on his chest. Peasants skulked everywhere with sorrowful eyes and rags for clothes. Monstrous skeletons piled over each other, reaching out from the nether world. The dead vied with the living for space. This cavernous room was a claustrophobic horizon crammed with symbolic figures, any one of whom might have spoken volumes. But at that age I could not hear the words they spoke. The scene was overwhelming, incomprehensible and ahistorical, always present, always a jumbled now.
 The influence of the Mexican muralists, chief among them José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Siqueiros, on Pan-American artists and writers would be hard to overstate. These men established standards and themes of Latin American art that still prevail. It's a mistake to think of their murals as a Latin variant of socialist realism or history painting. And, in the same breath, it can be said that the iconic self-portraits of Frida Kahlo mark the heroic first step onto the world stage for Latina artists.
Anyway, to Orozco, while cowering under the panels of that subterranean aquarium of nightmares, I can trace my own preoccupation with things further down. Which is to say that, even if I did not know it, my journey below (literally a descent into the vast reading room under the library) commenced many years ago as inchoate images that I dimly perceived as "symbolic."
Now, years later, I have taken out an art book titled The Mexican Muralists, by Desmond Rochfort (1993), to reexamine that childhood dream. Why had I forgotten this startling image of the skeletal academics in their mortar boards and black robes, or their fetal offspring in sealed apothecary jars, these symbols of dead knowledge that Orozco painted on those walls?
At the midpoint of this century two writers etched out the most haunting literary portraits of Mexico I have read. Roughly one-quarter of Paul Bowles' Collected Stories 1939-1976 (1979) are set in Latin America, principally Mexico.i Following World War II Bowles moved to Morocco and most of his subsequent fiction is set there. Nearly all of these collected stories, whether they take place in Chiapas or Tangiers, are framed against brooding cultural and natural landscapes that survive the characters. Many describe traveling foreigners moving in intricate, life-and-death worlds, made unreal and paradoxically intimate because of the dislocation of the characters. Which is not to say that Mexico or the Mexicans, for example, are rendered as a flattened backdrop. Just the reverse. Bowles paints sharp, convincing portraits of the potent allure that these strange foreigners exert within the small communities they pass through.
Juan Rulfo (1918-1986) is the other writer whose minuscule body of writings I prize. There's but a single novel, Pedro Páramo (1955) and a collection of short stories, The Burning Plain (1953). Rulfo was raised in the rural areas of Jalisco, a state where I once lived. It's often hard to gain your footing in these stories he has set in the Jalisco of his childhood. Rulfo will delay the reader's ability to understand who is speaking or writing, or how reliable that narrator is. These tales are not light, wistful moments of ironic musings. Violence permeates the lives of the characters. Real events overwhelm the inhabitants of these villages that Rulfo portrays, but the dramas are often filtered through such a muted and layered consciousness that it's possible to lose sight of the precipitating horrors. Anyway, the translation of The Burning Plain that I have seen is a 1967 edition put out by the University of Texas. The illustrations by Kermit Oliver are wonderful.
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I cannot account for the tiny limits of Rulfo's body of work. Both of these books were written when the author was in his thirties. After this point it would seem that he fell silent. At least in English there is very little critical commentary. This isn't particularly surprising I suppose. There's little enough commentary on Latin American literature in general--in Spanish or English. Nor have I run across much biographical information about Rulfo. I do know that at the end of his life he was teaching in Mexico City. There is a younger generation of Mexican writers, our age and a little older, who studied under Rulfo and speak of him with gratitude. I'm guessing that he taught during the late 1960's and early 1970's. These acknowledgments from his students make me want to speculate that he did not die in obscurity, nor did he end up bitter. But the fact remains that after 1955 apparently he did not publish any of his writing.
I have only just finished reading Pedro Páramo and am still gasping for breath because everything I had heard is true. The translation I have (Margaret Sayers Peden, 1994) is said to be an improvement over an earlier one. In this new version you will find a short introduction by Susan Sontag that sheds no new light on the mystery of Rulfo's life. No matter, there is the book, hallucinatory, packed with a paradoxically cogent ambiguity, a mixture of the altogether recognizably human and a supernatural past that swallows up the narrator. I should have been prepared for this novel, having read the stories, but it's a quantum advance in construction. The difficulty in keeping track of narrative voices is even more pronounced. Yet what immense complexity is outlined in a mere 120 pages! The forlorn villages in the vicinity of Cuidad Guzmán are the same but there's a historical depth that breeds an even greater significance, if that's possible. When it rains in Colama (the fictional setting for the principal events) the dead weep. No wonder his fellow writers, his students, were so respectful, so thankful. Those villages in Mexico and the things that happened there...
 Finally, I want to mention Richard Rodriguez, a contemporary Mexican-American, whose work is thoughtful. You can see his "television essays" at least once or twice a month on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" Not infrequently these essays are given over to the conflicts, compromises and heroics of dual cultural identities. And often these explorations are informed by art--of every conceivable stripe.
His first book of essays, The Hunger of Memory (1981), is, among other things, a very carefully constructed condemnation of affirmative action. Rodriguez rejects the program because, in his estimation, it has only benefited the middle class and ignores the poor. His thinking on this issue is augmented by his own privileged education and the inevitable estrangement from the inner lives of his family. There is also a searching study of the contrasting worlds of Catholicism and Protestantism. Particularly in his ruminations on the differences between Spanish and English, Rodriguez is focused on the public and private experiences of our language, an overarching concern that is also applied to religion, education, racial identity and ultimately the quotidian facts of our lives.
By the time he wrote Days of Obligation (1992), you can see the influence of his television and radio work. The writing is looser, the issues a little more ephemeral, but the dead seriousness of his thinking is plain. And the subject matter is better informed by life, which is to say, by more of what there is to be dead serious about. In and of themselves I'm not sure either of these collections is anything close to the last word but they help to orient the television essays that are appearing on The News Hour and those pieces are provocations.
-May 16, 1997
Endnotes
i I suspect that most of these tales set in Latin America were originally gathered together under the title Delicate Prey (1950), but I've never seen a copy of this volume of early stories.
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