This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 30, Number 5 (May 2019), p. 5.
Several years ago, I used as the epigraph on the syllabus of my Recent Irish Writing course this wonderful observation by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes: “The English language has always been alive and kicking, and if it ever becomes drowsy, there will always be an Irishman.” I thought of that quotation recently as I read Pedro Páramo, a short novel by another Mexican writer, Juan Rulfo (1918-1986). My interest in the novel, first published in Spanish in 1955, was piqued in part by my understanding that it may have been influenced by Rulfo’s reading of James Joyce. Reading Rulfo, I was definitely on the lookout for affinities between Pedro Páramo and Joyce’s “damned monster novel” (as he described it)—Ulysses.
I read the text of Rulfo’s novel before I read Susan Sontag’s Foreword to the translation by Margaret Sayers Peden. When I did read Sontag, I was struck by how closely her description of the novel’s central concern resonated with the Joycean affinities I had scribbled down in my readerly notetaking: “The novel’s premise—a dead mother sending her son out into the world, a son’s quest for his father—mutates into a multivoiced sojourn in hell.” As readers of Joyce know, the opening episode of
Ulysses, “Telemachus,” reintroduces Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Having returned to Dublin from a brief sojourn in Paris to keep vigil at his dying mother’s bedside, Stephen remains conflicted almost a year later by the memory of his mother: “Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.” Just pages later, the character Haines attempts to engage Stephen in an interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “The Son striving to be atoned with the Father.”
Of course, each of these references could be read simply as a common literary motif or trope. But the further I read in Pedro Páramo the more I was reminded of an admission made by Stephen in “Nestor,” the second episode of Ulysses. Remembering Haines’s casual remark that “It seems history is to blame” for political friction between Ireland and Britain, Stephen explains himself to the officious headmaster of the school where he teaches: “History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” As the novel unfolds, the reader discovers that for Stephen—and likewise for his co-protagonist, Leopold Bloom—“history” is not just general (political, economic, social, cultural, and so on) but personal. Ditto for Juan Preciado, the protagonist of Pedro Páramo. Late in Rulfo’s novel, the reader recognizes that some of the action channels La Cristiada, the Cristero Rebellion of 1926-29, as well as the earlier Mexican Revolution of 1910-20. But much of the novel focuses not on those events but on Juan’s “personal” history relative to his mother, his father, and the lost world—the ghost town—of Comala. And it is really in Rulfo’s inscription of Juan Preciado’s search for his father that Pedro Páramo resonates most meaningfully with Joyce’s Ulysses.
The theme of “the nightmare of history” permeates Ulysses, but two episodes in particular speak tellingly to Rulfo’s narrative. The first of these is the sixth episode, “Hades,” in which Leopold Bloom, attending the burial of his friend Paddy Dignam in Glasnevin Cemetery, effectively makes the same descent into the underworld that Odysseus makes in Homer’s The Odyssey, the text that provides Joyce with the elaborate scaffolding for his narrative. Tracing the route of Dignam’s funeral cortège across Dublin, Joyce invites the alert reader to recognize that the various statues and monuments commemorating Irish political figures that line the city’s thoroughfares—Sir Philip Crampton, William Smith O’Brien, Daniel O’Connell, Sir John Gray, Lord Nelson, Charles Stewart Parnell—represent not just a sampling from “the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture” (a fine phrase Joyce coined in Stephen Hero, a rough draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) but a manifestation of how history—the past, memory of the past—constantly infiltrates the mind and the imagination of the individual. (In the Homeric parallel, these figures also have their counterparts in The Odyssey.)
Obviously, Joyce continues this conceit within the grounds of the cemetery itself, referring overtly to O’Connell’s grave and Parnell’s grave. Relative to Rulfo, however, the more significant passages in “Hades” are those describing first the stonecutter’s yard and then Prospect Cemetery that the cortège passes en route to Glasnevin:
The stonecutter’s yard on the right. . . . Crowded on the spit of land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands, knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence: appealing.
The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze. Dark poplars, rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures on the air.
In her Foreword to Pedro Páramo, Susan Sontag quotes Rulfo as saying that the structure of his novel is “made of silences, of hanging threads, of cut scenes, where everything occurs in a simultaneous time which is a no-time.” In Leopold Bloom’s case, the public memory associated with the statues and the monuments eventually gives way to his private memory of his father who committed suicide and his son Rudy who died in infancy. In Juan Preciado’s case, countlessfigures from the past, their names mere whispers, populate the ghost town that his dead father still presides over.
And that brings me to the other episode of Ulysses that I believe informs Pedro Páramo both thematically and structurally: that is the fifteenth episode, “Circe.” Fortunately for his boundless legion of readers, Joyce shared with three friends—Carlos Linati, Herbert Gorman, and Stuart Gilbert—complementary versions of a schema in which he labels the episode’s “Technic” as “Vision animated to bursting point” or, more simply, “Hallucination.” Many Joyce scholars agree that the term “phantasmagoria” is also apt to describe the effect of “Circe.” While Rulfo’s novel does not resemble “Circe” stylistically (Joyce’s text is written on the page in the form of an expressionistic drama, as if intended to be performed on stage), it nonetheless shares with this climactic episode of Ulysses the idea that the individual carries within himself or herself an elaborate personal “nightmare of history” that needs to be awakened from. No less than the vast cast of characters encountered by Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in “Circe,” the elusive and spectral figures encountered by Juan Preciado in Pedro Páramo represent forces—some in his consciousness, some in his subconscious—that he must engage with, confront, and subdue.
For Stephen Dedalus the awakening from the nightmare is dramatic and emphatic, taking place when, rejecting the phantasmagoric specter of his mother, he declares: “The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. Non serviam!” He then punctuates his declaration by smashing a chandelier with his ashplant. For Bloom the awakening is poignant, coming in his vision of his son as a changeling—a fairy child—fulfilling his father’s dream in an alternative world. For Juan Preciado, whose return to Comala has led him into the collective unconscious of a community ravaged and then decimated by the sins of his father, the awakening occurs in the last sentence of Pedro Páramo, in his vision of his father brought low by his inability to escape “the nights that filled the darkness with phantoms” of his deplorable past: “He fell to the ground with a thud, and lay there, collapsed like a pile of rocks.”
