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MLN, Volume 129, Number 2, March 2014 (Hispanic Issue), pp. 308-329
(Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/mln.2014.0019

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The Existential Juan Rulfo: Pedro

Pramo, Mexicanness, and the
Grupo Hiperin

Stephanie Merrim

In the first pages of Juan Rulfos oracular Pedro Pramo (1955), Juan
Preciado meets his half-brother, Abundio Martnez, at a crossroads
called Los Encuentros. Abundance, crossroads, encounters: all three
come to characterize the novel itself, which burgeons into the meeting
place of paths as diverse as myth, theology, history, and ideology and
thus into a classic of the twentieth century. This article will argue that
among the abundant paths converging in Pedro Pramo we may count
existentialism, especially as deployed in constructions of mexicanidad,
or Mexicanness, that were circulating in Rulfos milieu precisely when
his novel was gestating, the 1940s and early 1950s.
From its very beginnings in Latin America, we should note, existentialism partnered with identity discourse. Eduardo Malleas prescient,
Kierkegaardian Historia de una pasin argentina (1937), which contrasted
the authenticity of the Argentine countryside with an inauthentic
Buenos Aires, kindled the partnership. Latin American philosophers,
essayists, and creative writers of the mid-twentieth century then seized
with a vengeance on the enabling positives of existentialism for socalled Third World nations, such as the weight that existentialism
places on existence over essence, as well as on authenticity, alienation
versus commitment, freedom, and new ways of envisioning religion.1
1
On the fit between existentialism and Third World concerns, see Lewis R. Gordon.
My article, Living and Thinking with Those Dislocations: A Case for Latin American
Existentialist Fiction, discusses Mallea and surveys various agendas of Latin American
existentialist literature.

MLN 129 (2014): 308329 2014 by Johns Hopkins University Press

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Martin Heideggers existential Dasein (being-in-the-world), above all,

spoke to Latin American thinkers. Dasein equated to Spaniard Jos
Ortega y Gassets celebrated Yo soy yo y mi circunstancia and offered
Latin Americans both a mandate and modus operandi for inquiring
into their own contexts. As European existentialism reached its peak
in the 1940s and 1950s, Mexico arguably took the lead in marrying
it to Latin American self-definition. Hence, not just Octavio Paz, in
El laberinto de la soledad (1950), but also the essayists of the Grupo
Hiperin (active between 1948 and 1952 in Mexico City) recruited
existentialism for Mexican identity discourse. Novelists like Carlos
Fuentes and Jos Revueltas, among many others, carried existentialism into Mexican literature.
Can we include Juan Rulfo in the existential ranks? The claim that
we can, I suspect, may at first inspire skepticism. After all, Rulfo professed anti-intellectualism (e.g., considero que el escritor debe ser
el menos intelectual de todos los pensadores [Desafo 385]), and,
to my knowledge, neither the authors own statements nor extant
scholarship has associated him with the Grupo Hiperin.2 Yet, Rulfos
self-mythmaking displays a penchant for fabulation and withholding (Garca Bonilla Introduccin), and despite Rulfos professed
anti-intellectualism Carlos Blanco Aguinaga deemed him one of the
best-read men in Mexico (16). Walking into a slippery territory, this
article will explore Rulfos connections with existentialism and intersections with the discourse of Mexicanness. The article does so with a
key caveat: evidence of Rulfos involvement in various manifestations
of existentialism, as we will see, is not lacking, but what follows does
not purport always to unearth proof of the elusive authors direct
engagement with them, particularly in the case of Hiperin. It simply
contends that Pedro Pramo resonates, sometimes quite closely, with
the existential trends alive in Rulfos milieu and that they, in turn,
illuminate the novel. Letting readers decide whether the kinships
with Hiperin thinking constitute direct influences, in toto I wish to
demonstrateperhaps more interestinglythat aligning Rulfo with
the philosophical and ideological concerns of his milieu opens up
rich zones of Pedro Pramo (henceforth PP), zones that have a special
bearing on the novels treatment of racial issues in Mexico.
2
After listing several authors whom Hiperin influenced, Guillermo Hurtado states:
Brilla por su ausencia de esa lista el nombre de Juan Rulfo (xvii); issuing a call to
action that I have taken to heart here, Garca Bonilla urges that scholars locate Rulfo
in his context and study him vis--vis las transformaciones de la cultura en Mxico a
lo largo del siglo XX (Rostros biogrficos de Juan Rulfo,Literatura Mexicana19, 2,
[2008] 89).

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Stephanie Merrim

Whereas associating Rulfo with Hiperin may require some finesse,

it takes little imagination to insert PP in the broad existential Weltanschauung that had captivated Western literary production of the time.3
Anguish, bad faith, and alienation, largely a result of Pedro Pramos
iniquitous regime, suffuse the text. When Pedro says to his henchman,
Cules leyes, Fulgor? La ley de ahora en adelante la vamos a hacer
nosotros (107), he arrogates unto himself the godlike position that
Fyodor Dostoevskys if God doesnt exist then anything is permitted
darkly heralds (The Brothers Karamazov, A Hymn and a Secret). That
Pedro co-opts the church symptomatizes the novels interrogation of
Christianity, a fundamental impulse of existentialism with which the
novel pervasively makes common cause. PP assails the immorality of
an institutionalized religion that sets a monetary price on salvation,
a religion with an unyielding, dogmatic code that damns the forlorn
inhabitants of Comala who believe por supersticin y por miedo
(140). Father Rentera questions the Catholic code (9597); Susana
San Juan, an outright non-believer, repeatedly profanes it. The novel
traffics heavily in theological allusions only to systematically ironize
and degrade them. Adam and Eve (Donis and his sister), the Fall
(Pedros destruction of Comala after Susanas death), the flood (the
omnipresent rain that never purifies), and heaven (a dystopia for
Dorotea when it crushes her hopes for a child [129]) undergo an
existential transvaluation that strips them of transcendence.
One might therefore inquire how Rulfos novel came to engage
several bedrock issues of existentialism, that is, whether Rulfo had
any actual commerce with existential thinking. Certain benchmarks
of his early trajectory establish that he did. Before and while Rulfo
worked for the Secretara de Gobernacin, starting in 1936, he audited
classes in the UNAMs Facultad de Filosofa y Letras, then housed in
the Mascarones building. There Rulfo attended classes of Antonio
Caso, one of the first intellectuals to teach Heidegger in Mexico.4 At
3
Norma Klahn captures certain existential traits of PP: La narrativa de Rulfo subvierte
los supuestos lgico-racionalistas del positivismo. Rulfo profundiza en el yo individual,
abre paso hacia espacios existenciales inslitos del ser humano y desde all toca el tema
de la angustia frente a la soledad y la muerte (424). On Susana San Juans alienation,
see Mara Luisa Bastos and Sylvia Molloy.
4
On Rulfos studies at Mascarones, see Garca Bonilla 8889, Lpez Mena 44, and
Vital 55. A clarification on citations from Garca Bonillas book: Un tiempo suspendido:
Cronologa de la vida y la obra de Juan Rulfo (2009) weaves hundreds of works by and
about Rulfo into a narrative compendium of sources that proceeds chronologically.
The book is tremendously useful, but citing it is problematic because Garca Bonilla
often lists all the sources in which the information appears, resulting in the citation of
multiple sources. It is not always clear which information pertains to which source, and given

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Mascarones, Rulfo may have met Octavio Paz (Garca Bonilla 88),
whose existential bent I will discuss shortly. The early 1940s witnessed
Rulfos first publication of the stories that would comprise El Llano en
llamas (1953) in Pan. Revista de Literatura and in Amrica. Amrica, whose
editorial board Rulfo eventually joined, focused on Indoamerican,
nationalist, and existential issues (Lpez Mena 6567). According to
Sergio Lpez Mena, Rulfos stories well matched the concerns of the
journal (67). El Llano en llamas afforded Rulfo the renown that earned
him fellowships to the Centro Mexicano de Escritores between 1952
and 1954. At the Centro, Rulfo had contact with two important figures
of the Grupo Hiperin, Rulfos fellow Jaliscan, Augustn Yez, and
Jorge Portilla, whom Rulfo photographed (see the photo in Vital 86).
Rulfos readings, the crux of his intellectual formation, provide a
larger window into his involvement with existentialism. The author
has said: Ms que tener una preparacin formal, yo he sido un lector
casi patolgico, en que he llegado a leer hasta dos libros por noche
(Garca Bonilla 89). This voracious autodidacts library contained
up to 10,000 books, hundreds of them philosophical, historical, and
international literary works (Garca Bonilla 274; Juan Francisco Rulfo
15). We know that Rulfo pored over at least one of Dostoevskys novels
during the Mascarones period (Garca Bonilla 88), and that before
finishing PP he was riveted by Mara Luisa Bombals existential La
amortajada (1939) (Garca Bonilla 137; Carballo 23). Rulfo admired
the premier Mexican existential cum Marxist writer of the time, Jos
Revueltas, to the degree that he reportedly wrote a story for El Llano en
llamas with Revueltas as a protagonist (Garca Bonilla 130; Lezama 8;
unfortunately, Rulfo never published the story). At some point harder
to determine, Rulfos existentialist readings also included Jean-Paul
Sartres Nausea (1938) (Lpez Mena 44) and Alejo Carpentiers Los
pasos perdidos (1953) (Garca Bonilla 82; Poniatowska, Agente 1).
Four pieces of Rulfos earliest but unpublished novel, El hijo del
desaliento, offer striking proof that the Mexican author both read
and wrote existentialist literature prior to PP. Scholars date Rulfos
El hijo to the start of the 1940s, an incandescent period for existentialist literature because Nausea, Alberto Camuss inaugural works,
and, in Latin America, Juan Carlos Onettis novella, El pozo (1939),
the complexities of obtaining older Mexican journals, I was not always able to consult
the original sources. I therefore provide double referencesto Garca Bonilla and to
the original, as cited in Tiempo suspendidowhen Garca Bonillas original source is clear.
When it is not, I simply reference Garca Bonilla. In other words, readers should be aware
that Garca Bonilla is almost always citing another source and should consult his book.

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Stephanie Merrim

had recently appeared. Rulfo would ultimately disavow his El hijo as

cerebral, bombastic, and conventional (Lpez Mena 45), but he did
publish one fragment of it in 1959, as the story Un pedazo de noche.
The posthumous issuing of Rulfos Cuadernos brought other pieces of
the novel to light, they being the fragments the editor entitled Mi
ta Cecilia, Cleotilde, and Ya no habr quien nos odie (3643).
As a composite, the four pieces of El hijo revolve around the loss of
the mother, as would PP. They melodramatically recount the death
of the narrators mother-substitute aunt, his marriage to a prostitute
who refuses to forsake promiscuity (Un pedazo de noche gives her
backstory), and the narrators murder of his wife, catalyzed by her
defamation of his aunts sacred memory. The degraded, hysterical narrator who defiles a prostitute unmistakably reincarnates Dostoevskys
underground man, and the guilt that torments the narrator, Crime
and Punishment.
The existentialism of Rulfos fledgling novel does not end there.
For especially Cleotilde (Cuadernos 3843) turns out to be Rulfos
rewrite of Onettis El pozo. Onettis text permeates Rulfos, sometimes
verbatim. The Mexican authors complex yet obvious transposition of
El pozo, upon which to my knowledge no one has commented, deserves
a study unto itself. In brief, though, Rulfos Cleotilde recapitulates
the brutality, the objectifying gaze, and primarily the notion of woman
as a source of salvation in the absence of God that so distinguish the
revolutionary El pozo. Rulfo at the same time shifts the lost innocence
of El pozos Cecila onto the lost aunt Cecilia; he compacts Onettis
prostitute Ester and the adolescent Ana Mara whom Eladio Linacero
rapes and figuratively kills into the prostitute wife whom the narrator
of Cleotilde murders. Onettis sordid El pozo, of course, inscribes
itself in and reinvents Dostoevskys squalid Notes from Underground. The
extant portions of Rulfos El hijo del desaliento therefore triangulate
with foundational existentialist literary works, forming, so to speak, a
perfect existential storm.
Nonetheless, the dialogue that PP (1955) conducts with a foundational text of Mexican identity, Octavio Pazs El laberinto de la soledad
(1950), has the most far-reaching implications for an existential
Rulfo. Pazs monumental study resounds with existentialism. Already
familiar with Heidegger from his studies in Mexico City,5 Paz wrote
5
Jos Manuel Zamorano Mezas detailed account of Pazs existential formation
demonstrates that Paz had already read Heidegger when Gaos arrived in Mexico,
and that Paz studied with Gaos (7880). Oswaldo Daz Ruanova remembers a lecture
on Heidegger that Paz delivered in Mascarones in the 1950s (99). Also on Paz and
existentialism, see, for example, Enrico Mario Sants magisterial introduction to his
edition of Laberinto, and Ramn Xirau.

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Laberinto in Paris at the apex of Sartrean existentialism. Holding

Sartre in low esteem, scorning him as derivative of Heidegger, Paz
returns to the roots of existentialism.6 He answers the siren call of
Dasein and predicates his investigation of the Mexican condition on
alienation, authenticity, and inauthenticity: the essential dialectics of
Laberinto can be said to revolve around these concepts. To wit, and
in the most basic terms, Paz views Mexicans as living in a state of
alienation primed by a history of domination and violence. Violated,
orphaned, and alienated, Mexicans suppress their authentic (a word
Paz continuously employs) being, which results in solitude. Socially,
they retreat into the self-protective, negative postures, or masks, that
betoken inauthenticity. Paz regards the overall history of Mexico in
similar terms, namely, as oscillating between eras of inauthenticity in
which Mexico cleaves to foreign forms, like the positivist epoch of
Porfirio Daz, and of authenticity, such as the Mexican Revolution,
the verdadera revelacin de nuestro ser (279280).7 On a quotidian, routine basis, though, Mexicans escape their masks and briefly
unleash their authentic selves in fiestasthe most prominent of which
is the Da de los muertos.
The Da de los muertos, which in Laberinto also illustrates the intimate relationship of Mexicans with death, almost inevitably brings the
living dead of PP to mind. Indeed, Emil Volek calls PP an appendix
to, and sly rebuttal of, Pazs famous El laberinto de la soledad (552).
In its role as an appendix to the existentially inflected Laberinto, PP
dramatizes the solitude of the Mexican, alienated in life by Pedros
depraved regime and still alienated in death. What Paz sees as the
defining Mexican condition of solitude touches even Pedro, unexpectedly nuancing the sinister character. Consigned to solitude by a
chain of traumatic deaths and an unattainable love, Pedro sublimates
his anguish into the entrenched masks of machismo and despotism.
The despot then recreates the conquest of Mexico by engendering
scores of chingados: Pedros orphaned, illegitimate children and, by
extension, the people of Comala, whom he screws over with impunity. Rulfo so thoroughly deplores Pedros hegemony that he denies

6
Paz has left ample testimony of his encounters with and opinions of Sartre in his
Corriente alterna (1967), El ogro filantrpico (1979), and Itinerario (1993). For a pungent
summary of Pazs critiques, see the obituary he wrote for Sartre, Memento: Jean-Paul
Sartre. (PN Review 35 10.3 [1984]: n. pag. Web. 5 July 2013).
7
For example: Toda la historia de Mxico, desde la Conquista hasta la Revolucin,
puede verse como una bsqueda de nosotros mismos, deformados o enmascarados por
instituciones extraas, y de una Forma que nos exprese (Laberinto 311312).

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Stephanie Merrim

fiestas their consoling potency. PP does contain fiestas, notably the

misguided carnival that accompanies Susanas death (18587), but
they backfire into tragedies. When after that macabre event Pedro
swears revenge on Comala (187), he initiates the death of the town
and carries Rulfos rebuttal of Laberintos fiestas to a chilling peak.
Be it by fleshing out or contesting Laberinto, Rulfo clearly adopts
Pazs treatise as one template of his novel. In so doing, he writes PP
into the discourse of mexicanidad, Mexicanness. Paz, however, could by
no means claim sole ownership of that discourse. For example, while
Paz was writing Laberinto in Paris, in Mexico City the Grupo Hiperin
had vigorously launched onto the scene with a burst of conferences
and the prolific book series, Mxico y lo mexicano. Upon returning
to Mexico, Paz praised Hiperin but distanced himself from it. In a
1975 interview with Claude Fell he declared that Laberintos social,
psychological, and political concerns with Mexicanness differentiated it from Hiperins ontological endeavors (Paz 421).8 The several
contradictions in Pazs statement will emerge as we proceed, but he
aptly acknowledges Hiperins distinctive stance on Mexicanness. For
his part, the Rulfo who, as we have seen, was drawn to the subject
and knew members of Hiperin, likely found his interest piqued by
the group that was cutting a large swath in the cultural landscape.
Therefore if, as I propose, we are to lend some credence to Evodio
Escalantes assertion that Rulfo dealt more deeply with Mexican identity than any writer of his times (Garca Bonilla 291; Escalante 23A),
it makes sense to move beyond Paz and into Hiperin.
The core members of Hiperin, founded by Leopoldo Zea, most
prominently included Ricardo Guerra, Jorge Portilla, Joaqun Snchez
McGregor, Emilio Uranga, and Luis Villoro. Other luminaries of the
era, like Jorge Carrin, Ramn Xirau, and Agustn Yez, involved
themselves with the groups approach and activities (Hurtado ix, xvi).
Although, Pazs statement to the contrary, the writings of Hiperin
ranged into anthropology, history, literature, psychology, and sociology, they shared a grounding in existentialism. Hiperin owed that
grounding to unique transatlantic circumstances. After the Spanish
Civil War, Mexican president Lzaro Crdenas invited partisans of the
defeated Republican cause to Mexico and in 1938 founded the Casa
8
Sant (4546, 54) authoritatively details Pazs involvement, or lack thereof, with
Hiperin. He informs us that Paz, in Paris, was aware of Hiperin and concerned
about how the group would receive Laberinto. When Paz returned to Mexico in 1953,
he maintained relationships with some members of Hiperin, notably Emilio Uranga,
but Paz himself did not participate in the activities of Hiperin (54; might Paz have
seen Hiperin as a rival?).

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de Espaa, soon to become the Colegio de Mxico, around them.

Among those who accepted the invitation was Jos Gaos, in Madrid a
disciple of Ortega y Gasset and in Mexico the translator of Heidegger
and the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl into Spanish. The transplanted Gaos soon lent his supple mind to fostering the creation of
a truly Mexican modern philosophy.
At the Colegio, Gaos directed the theses of Zea and Villoro. They,
in turn, shaped Hiperin, which inaugurated its activities in 1948 with
a cycle of lectures on French existentialism. As the conferences topic
indicates, the young mavericks of the group leaned towards French,
rather than Gaoss German, existentialism (maybe estranging Paz in
the bargain). The resistant, activist thrust of Sartrean existentialism,
its emphasis on freedom, held special appeal for Hiperin, operating as it did in the years that President Miguel Alemn abdicated
the objectives of the Mexican Revolution and joined forces with U.S.
capitalism (Medin). Committed intellectuals la Sartre, the members
of Hiperin hoped to compel change in Mexico.
In order to achieve that goal, Hiperin undertook fresh assessments
of Mexicanness. Availing themselves of the tools that existentialism,
and the phenomenology bound up in it, placed at their disposal, the
new intellectuals sought to describe la esencia del mexicano, o sea
su peculiar estilo de vida, su radical proyecto de existir que slo a l
le pertenece y que lo distingue del espaol, del norteamericano y del
europeo (Uranga 45). Rather than a fixed essence of Mexicanness,
the Hiperin project aimed to apprehend the dynamic contextual
being of Mexicans, their living throwness (Heideggers Geworfenheit). As it grappled with Mexicans being-in-the-world, Hiperin also
confronted the inferiority complex that Samuel Ramoss influential El
perfil del hombre y la cultura en Mxico (1934) and Laberinto after it had
pinpointed as a fundamental trait of Mexicanness. Zea, for example,
asserted that World War II had exposed a Europe in decline and a
New World in ascendancy, which warranted revisiting entrenched
notions of Mexican inferiority (1942; Filosofa 3839).
Zea himself shouldered the task of rediagnosing the ills of Mexico,
no less than of Latin America writ large, in historical and existential
terms.9 The first chapter of Zeas Dos etapas del pensamiento en Hispanoa9
The name Hiperin, based on the Greek mythological Titan who joined heaven
and earth, indicates the groups desire to utilize Mexicanness as a platform for investigations that bridge the local and the universal. Zeas work radiates out from the Mexican
to the Latin American, but more commonly the Grupo Hiperin sought to investigate
what the ontology of the Mexican could reveal about the human condition itself. As
Uranga put it: No se trata de construir lo mexicano, lo que nos peculiariza, como
humano, sino a la inversa, de construir lo humano como mexicano (23).

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Stephanie Merrim

mrica: Del romanticismo al positivismo (1949) alleges that Latin America

has not yet assimilated its colonial past, its Spanish past. Rather than
authentically, as Zea says, assimilating them, thereby installing
them in the dialectics of History and transforming them into a true
past, Latin Americans have tried to amputate them. Zea emphatically maintains that because the past must be assimilated instead of
amputated, it ends up constantly obtruding in Latin Americas present.
Latin Americans fall back on European institutions, and the unsavory
behavior that the conquest introduced persists. In sum, from Zeas
standpoint the inevitable return of what Latin America has inauthentically repressed tethers it to the past and condemns it to endlessly
repeating the modes of the past that it wishes to bury. As a means
of escaping the vicious cycle, Zea urges that Latin America come to
consciousness of these recurrences and formulate Latin American,
not European, solutions to Latin American problems. Only then will
Latin America have an authentic History.
Not by chance does Zeas essay recall Pazs Laberinto or, for that matter, PP. As outlined above, Laberinto embraces the belief that Mexicans
exist in an alienation and inauthenticity that derive from their past.
Chapter 7 of Laberinto, on Mexican intellectuals, in fact expounds
Zeas ideas, which suffuse Pazs text explicitly and implicitly.10 More
interesting for our purposes is the centrality to PP of the ideas that
Zea and Paz share. By this I mean that although PP dramatizes several
features of Laberinto, the overarching scenario of the novel reflects the
dimensions of Pazs argument most akin to Zea. It is impossible to
determine if Rulfo had direct knowledge of Zeas writings or if he
imaginatively embellished upon the Zea-esque aspects of Laberinto; in
any case, PP evidences a profound investment in the ideas that the
founder of Hiperin championed.
Rulfos profound investment in history drives the kinship. He first
engrossed himself in the chronicles of the colonial period when
working at the Secretara de Gobernacin (Poniatowska, Ay vida
47), later sketched out a novel on eighteenth-century Jalisco (La
cordillera), and his last publication was a preface to Bernardino de
Sahagns sixteenth-century treatise on pre-Hispanic Mexico.11 Like
10
A notorious polemic arose around Pazs alleged hide-and-seek with another major
source of Laberinto, Ramoss El perfil del hombre y la cultura en Mxico. See, for example,
Sant 5760. Pazs Posdata (1970) also revolves around the eternal return of the past.
11
Sahagn y su significado histrico, Rulfos short, historical prologue to Claus
Litterscheids edition of Sahagns Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva Espaa (Barcelona: Tusquets/Crculo, 1985) was published the year before PPs author died. Fell
reprints it (393394).

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Zea, Rulfo laments that disowning its colonial past has led Mexico
to repeat the barbarity of the conquest en una especie de eterno
retorno que slo podra romperse cuando nos atrevisemos a ver de
frente, sin autoengao, nuestra historia (Jimnez 19). The conquest,
in Rulfos view, had especially dire consequences for his home state of
Jalisco, where it resulted in the extermination of the Indians and in
the descendants of the conquerors considering themselves dueos
absolutos of the land (Sommers 107). Whence Pedro Pramo himself,
whom Rulfo explicitly identifies as a cacique, the prototypical representative of what he calls the antiguo coloniaje al que an estamos
sometidos (Vital 200).
For who is the Pedro who shuts out memory (136) if not a rencor
vivo (68), and what is his regime if not the persistence into modern
Mexico of the colonialism and the neocolonialism that the Revolution
attempted to unseat? Pedro has appropriated all the land and has
arrogated unto himself absolute, merciless power. He has imprisoned
Comala in an economy based on usufruct (100) and the commodification of human beings that mirrors the worst of the conquest. The novel
unequivocally shows that the Mexican Revolution, which purported to
undo the colonial past, changed nothing. Pedro exploits the empty,
energetic hulk of a war and buys it as he had bought everything else.
The Revolution leads only to a new eruption of atavistic violence,
in the Cristero wars. Moreover, PP concretizes the image of the past
as the living dead that Zea fiercely advances. The Comala that Juan
Preciado meets is a ghost town, un lugar de mala muerte, a purgatory
inhabited by the ghosts of people who had colluded with the cacique
Pedro Pramo voluntarily or otherwise. Their souls haunt Comala in
search of someone to pray for them (38). Rulfos Comala, in short,
delivers a mis-en-scne of the unburied, still-living past that Zea and
Paz assail.
At least one component of Zeas essay that Laberinto does not take up
has a strong presence in PP. Zea dwells on the lure of utopias, which
breed the illusion that one can always start over again from a tabula
rasa, eschewing the past. Rulfos text begins and ends in utopias, in
Doloress vision of Comala as paradise and Pedros concluding vision
of Susana and the Paradise tree (193). The body of the text, though,
steeps us in the real, dystopian Comala to which Dolores sent her
son. That dystopia leaves us with one of the greatest enigmas of the
novel, namely, if the paradisiacal, idyllic Comala with which Dolores
enthralled her son ever actually existed or if it was literally a u-topia,
a merely notional place. Textual evidence does not allow us to resolve
the enigma, but reading PP alongside Zea elucidates it. Inserted in

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Zeas framework, Doloress possibly egregious lie shades into a means

of seducing Juan to assume the burden of the past that she had apparently forsaken. The burden, sadly, proves lethal; the murmurs of the
ghosts kill Doloress son (127). In the second half of the novel, however, Juan Preciado and Dorotea channel the repressed stories of the
townspeople, suggesting the dynamic hope that perhaps, just perhaps,
the revitalized understanding of the past that the stories bequeath
readers of PP can free the wandering souls from their purgatory and
Mexico from the eternal return.
Therein, immanently, lies one hope for Mexico that PP holds out
to readers. Anotherfleeting but palpable and powerful in ways that
I believe interpretations of the novel have yet to disclose fullyemanates from the Indians of Apango who briefly enter Comala in the
forty-eighth section of the novel (15556).12 The rest of the characters,
Rulfo has importantly confirmed, are mestizos.13 Pedro, the central
mestizo character, stands in for the criollos who foisted on Mexico
the alien forms of life that according to Zea and Rulfo have affected
it so deleteriously. By contrast, the Indians of Apango endow PP with
an autochthonous dimension that, as I shall illustrate with the help of
further Hiperin writings, insinuates a more salutary, autochthonous
model for Mexico, a wholly Mexican model for the country of the
kind Zea promotes. Among Rulfos many photographs of indigenous
artifacts, one particularly speaks to the role of the Indians in PP that the
remainder of the present article strives to uncover. Rulfos photograph
of a small bas-relief from a Franciscan chapel in Texcoco captures the
figure of an Indian as Atlas (Juan Rulfos Mexico 187, 223), holding up
the world as I maintain the Indians of Apango hold up the novel in
ideological and existential terms.
One naturally wonders if the few, laconic pages of PP on the Indians
can carry so much weight. Given that after publishing PP Rulfo would
devote much of his life to Mexicos indigenous peoples, it also seems
curious that they make so scant an appearance in the novel.14 Rulfos
12
According to Amit Thakkar: Over 50 years since the publication of Juan Rulfos
masterpiece, the novel PP (1955), publications on the writer are as prolific as ever. Few
of these have shed light on the text of his one fictional treatment of indigenous people,
and none has done so in the context of his thoughts as editor of anthropological works
for the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (196286) (192). Thakkars reading of the Indian scene greatly helps fill the critical void and contains the insights that I reference.
13
Personal interview of Rulfo with Gonzlez Boixo cited on p. 57 of PP.
14
Shortly after finishing PP and up to 1956, Rulfo worked for the Comisin de la
Cuenca de Papaloapan, investigating the Indian populations of the regions affected by
the dam. Throughout the latter third of his life, Rulfo worked for the Instituto Nacional
Indigenista in various capacities. They included writing numerous anthropological and
archeological studies of the Indians and editing an extensive book series on the subjects.
On Rulfos indigenist activities see, for example, Vital 158, 165168.

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declarations and photographs respond to such issues tellingly, in ways

that will percolate through what follows here. The author has repeatedly attributed the near absence of indigenous characters from his
literary work to his overwhelming respect for them, a conviction that
the Indians, impenetrable and hermetic, elude his comprehension.
For instance: Nunca empleo a los indios porque para m es imposible
entrar y llegar a profundizar en la mentalidad indgena (Thakkar
192), and lo nico que logr saber, lo nico que se puede saber de
ellos [the Indians] es lo que se ve, no cmo piensan (JR examina
876). It ensues from the second statement that Rulfo would reach out
to the indigenous world through photography, which he did starting
in the late 1940s. Photography thus functioned as a supplement to
writing: Rulfos son remarked that an exhibit of his fathers photographs podra ser la imagen fotogrfica de aquello que no escribi
(Garca Bonilla 322; emphasis added). And Rulfos copious, stunning
photographs of the Indians more than compensate for his reticence to
enshrine them literarily. Though numerous, the photographs cluster
around the main themes of ruins, sacred spaces and festivals, single
and collective portraits, and the nature that still rules many Indians
lives. Not entirely abandoning his respectful trepidation, Rulfo often
photographs indigenous peoples from behind (Billeter 40).
This said, we can survey the tantalizing cameo of the Indians in PP.
On a Sunday, under a torrential rain, the Indians of Apango descend
into the marketplace of Comala. They spread out their herbs and other
wares in the central square (where Juan Preciado would later die) and
await customers. The Indians fear it is a mal da (155) for sales and
correctly so, because the workers of Comala are in the fields trying
to salvage their crops from the rain. Quickly resigning themselves to
the situation, the Indians se cuentan chistes y sueltan la risa (156).
Justina, Susanas nursemaid, approaches them, crossing herself when
she passes the church. The Indians subject Justina to intense scrutiny
as she purchases rosemary from them. Justina then goes off to bring
Susana the rosemary. The Indians gather their wares, stop by the
church to pray to the Virgin and offer her a bunch of thyme, and set
out for Apango, again contndose chistes y soltando la risa (156).
The preceding deceptively simple cameo begins to reveal its magnitude for the novel at large when aligned with Luis Villoros watershed
Los grandes momentos del indigenismo en Mxico (1950; henceforth LGM),
originally the thesis he wrote under Gaoss direction. Villoro, who
went on to have an illustrious philosophical career in Mexico, had
gained additional knowledge of existentialism from studies in Paris

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Stephanie Merrim

and Munich.15 He completed LGM in 1949, a year after the founding

of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (the INI) at which Rulfo would
work from 1962 up to his death in 1986. Villoros book complements
the founding of the INI and tacitly furnishes the institution with a
platform. A compendium of others positions and a position statement
in itself, for the first time, LGM traces the history not of Mexicos
indigenous peoples per se but of indigenismo, the philosophical and
ideological positions on the Indians that intellectuals in Mexico have
espoused throughout the ages. LGM employs a phenomenological
methodology and tells an existential story. That is, it charts perspectives
on the indigenous peoples, which pre-twentieth-century ideologies had
distorted into a prejudicial conciencia falsa (9) of them, and in a
Sartrean mode details the objectification (cosificacin, the treatment
of the Indians as a thing, an in-itself) that the ideologies entailed.
Villoros account of twentieth-century indigenismo attends importantly
to evolving notions of mestizaje and mestizos. According to his analysis,
the early part of the century endorsed the westernizing of Indians
as well as the absorption of their culture and race in a mestizaje that
largely eradicated them. Jos Vasconceloss La raza csmica (1925)
reflects this orientation.16 La raza csmica notwithstanding, the Mexican
Revolution incited a new valorization of the Indians that would reach
into Rulfos formative years. For example, in 1948, Manuel Gamio,
who served as the first director of the INI, wrote that the Indians are
the ms pura fuente de la americanidad (Villoro 235) and thus a
model for mestizos. Villoro comments that views such as Gamios,
which located Indians at the center of the nation and removed them
from the status of objectified other, rendered indigenous culture
una de las races de nuestra ms autntica especificidad, de nuestra
americanidad (235). Agustn Yez was instrumental in promoting
the Indians as the authentic center of Mexico and the very essence

15
Born in Spain, raised in Mexico, Luis Villoro (1922) has continually opened up
new fields of investigation, in works such as El proceso ideolgico de la revolucin de Independencia (1953), Estudios sobre Husserl (1975), El poder y el valor. Fundamentos de una tica
poltica (1997), Estado plural, pluralidad de culturas (1998). Villoro taught at the UNAM
and was inducted into the Colegio Nacional in 1978. He has served as president of
the Asociacin Filosfica de Mxico and as a member of the Consejo Nacional para el
Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indgenas.
16
Despite the fact that he treats many issues directly implicating Vasconcelos, Villoro
only mentions the author of La raza csmica once (218). The quite odd omission leads
one to wonder if the young Villoro hesitated to address so major (as is well known,
Vasconcelos had reformed Mexican education) or so controversial a personage, still
alive at the time of LGMs publication.

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of mexicanidad, a term he coined in his 1939 introduction to Crnicas

de la conquista (Villoro 236).
Yez further observed that the Indian subsiste dentro del alma
nacional (1942; Estudio xxv; Villoro 236), as the repressed, authentic
heart of it. Yezs observation sets the stage for Villoros deliberations
on the indigenismo and self-concept of the mestizo that were materializing when he wrote. In Lo indgena como principio oculto de mi yo que
recupero en la pasin, Villoro construes the new indigenist mestizos
as engaged in recuperating the authentic indigenous core that lies deep
inside themselves. Captar al indgena within, he pronounces, means
capturing una dimensin del propio ser and thus the recuperacin
del propio Yo (272). Realizing their indigenous roots and activating
solidarity with the Indian will constitute the mestizos freedom and
transcendence (294). Villoro clarifies that this momento del espritu
mexicano (275) understands the indigenous core as la comunidad,
el pasado ancestral, la tierra, the latter being el principio telrico
que nos liga a la naturaleza (274). He adds the loaded qualification
that only by love rather than reason can one fully access the Indian
within. An obscure, almost Dionysian life form, it resists the logical
western mind (274275). The final paragraph of LGM underscores
that the indigenous heart of the Mexican self alberga una realidad
oculta y misteriosa que no podemos alcanzar y cuya presencia nos
fascina (295), words which pointedly recall Rulfos attitude toward
writing about the Indians.
To enter PP through Los grandes momentos del indigenismo is, first off,
to recognize the existential implications of the novels Indians. We have
heard Villoro and Yez acclaim the Indians as Mexicos authentic
core. Rulfo writes PP into that force field by associating the Indians
with an inalienable tellurism. They sell the products of the earth; rain,
reminiscent of the ancestral god Tlloc (Lienhard 84950), marks their
day in Comala. The tellurism thus tied to the Indians, as any reader
of PP will notice, saturates the novel. Comala may have died off, but
the four elements and natural flora and fauna endure. They imbue
the novel with a lush lyricism and unite the local with the cosmic. The
rain that heads most chapters serves as the essential hinge between
past and present. Susana takes water, the sea, as her lover (165). Rain
triggers Fulgor Sedanos erotic thirst (sed, hence his name) for the
very land (13031) on which Pedro predicates all his machinations.
PP thus immerses us in the deep structures of Mexico, the atemporal
heart of the heart of the country. It is familiar territory for a Latin
American existentialism whose adherents, including and beyond those

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Stephanie Merrim

of Hiperin, have tended to site authenticity in the telluric properties

and Indians of their nation or continent.17 Rulfo joins the current with
a vision of Mexicos authentic core that precisely anticipates Mxico
profundo, a construct Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (then a colleague of
Villoro) articulated in 1987.18 Mxico profundo distinguishes itself
from Mxico imaginario, a Mexico devoted to imitating Europe
such as that which Pedro represents and Zea denounces. In its stead,
Mxico profundo capitalizes on indigenous ways of life, exactly on
the community, ancestral past, and land that Villoro mentions. As Rulfo
has observed of what he dubs the indigenous inframundo (Thakkar
193), en los indios hay algo distinto, algo nuevo y muy viejo que no
hemos logrado valorar ni aprovechar debidamente (19798). In PP,
significantly enough, the Indians appear not as individuals but as a
group, a community. Rulfos photographs augment the novels slim
portrait by frequently focusing on Indians-as-collectivity, in scenes of
families, marketplaces, pilgrimages, rituals, and so forth. His photographs of individual Indians, moreover, often depict them as melting
into the landscape.
Minimalist as it is, PPs cameo of the Indians robustly conveys the
detachment of an authentic, deep Mexico from the mestizo world. The
Indians from Apango train a discomfiting stare on Pedros servant,
Justina (156): when in his Mito y magia del mexicano (1952) Jorge Carron translates the Sartrean gaze into Mexican terms, he formulates it
as the admonitory, judging gaze of the Indians at those who oppress
them (8587). Subsisting on the margins of the dominant economy,
Carrin also says, frees up the Indians to cast that gaze (87). In like
manner do PPs Indians operate in another economy, literally and
figuratively.19 Practical necessity may lead the Indians to intersect with
mestizos in the marketplace, but the shortage of customers barely
perturbs them. Rather, as the text twice tells us, the Indians tell jokes
and unleash (the text both times uses the verb soltar) their laughter.
The Indians response to the negative situation is truly arresting. It
signals their distance from the economy and values of Imaginary
17
One thinks of the Argentine philosophers Carlos Astrada (Tierra y figura, 1963)
and Rodolfo Kusch (Amrica profunda, 1962). Kusch discusses Villoro; Bonfil Batallas
Mxico profundo clearly references Kuschs Amrica profunda. I thank Ana-Irma Patete,
Brown University 2013, for enlightening me on the telluric existentialism of Latin
American writers.
18
Thakkar (19798) discusses the relationship between Mxico profundo and PP, though
in terms somewhat different from mine.
19
See Thakkars discussion of PPs indigenous society as a world parallel to but disconnected from Comala on pp. 19293.

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Mexico, and it contains both the sole pure laughter and the sole
untainted festivity of the text. As such, the scene resonates not just
with Mikhail Bakhtins portrayal of the carnival as the upending of
hierarchies but also, closer to home, with the portrayal of relajo by
Rulfos friend, Hiperins Jorge Portilla.20 Portilla defines relajo as a
brief, liberating gesture in which an individual mockingly repudiates a
value of the dominant society amidst that societys members. Fittingly,
PPs Indians enact their relajo in the public square of Comala, albeit
to an audience of one.
The Indians transient penetration of the mestizo stronghold and
their glaring separation from it raise the issue of mestizaje. Indeed, I
submit that one of the matters vitally at stake in PP is the theory of
mestizaje that Jos Vasconcelos (18821959) and, according to Villoro,
his cohort, had blazoned. (Chapter 12 of LGM explains that portions of
Vasconceloss ideas retained currency in the 1950s.) As is well known,
Vasconceloss La raza csmica advocates the submersion of the Indians
in a quinta raza universal, fruto de los anteriores y superacin de
todo lo pasado (5), a fusion of races in which the tipos bajos de la
especie sern absorbidos por el tipo superior (27). Rulfo radically
disrupts the racial hierarchy that underlies Vasconceloss mestizaje by
setting PPs happy, insouciant Indians against an array of wretched
mestizos. Dependent upon Pedro, standard-bearer of the never-ending
colonial past and beacon of capitalism, all the inhabitants of Comala
except Susana lead lives of unremitting misery. A pernicious mix of
feudalism and modernity contaminates them all. PP thus begs the
question: what would the Indians gain from any kind of mestizaje?
Although it remains unclear if Rulfo is advocating total separatism
of the Indians or proposing that Mxico imaginario adopt Mxico
profundo as a model, he has clearly voiced a negative opinion of
mestizaje. In his essay, Mxico y los mexicanos (1985), Rulfo remarks
that the previous years economic crisis prompted a resurgence of
works on Mexicanness such as those published thirty-five years ago,
which imagined that el crisol del mestizaje would resolve the grandes
diferencias tnicas, econmicas, sociales, regionales of Mexicos
indigenous people (400). He then declares: Hoy sabemos que el
mestizaje fue una estrategia criolla para unificar lo disperso, afirmar
20
See the long first section of Fenomenologa del relajo (1966). Although Portillas work
on relajo only reached publication after his early death in 1963, he had been working
on Mexicanness since 1947 and perhaps discussed relajo at the Centro Mexicano de
Escritores, where he coincided with Rulfo. I am grateful to Carlos Alberto Snchez,
author of an excellent book on Portilla (The Suspension of Seriousness [Albany: SUNY
Press, 2012]) for his generous assistance with this matter.

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Stephanie Merrim

su dominio, llenar el vaco de poder dejado por los espaoles (400).

Doing the math, we realize that Rulfos first statement targets Pazs
1950 Laberinto, a work that praises Vasconcelos and La raza csmica.21
Here, Rulfo swerves away from both Paz and Vasconcelos on mestizaje;
the presentation of the Indians in PP as an authentic, pure, differentia
specifica of Mexico equates to Hiperins stance.
The connection that Rulfo establishes in PP between the Indians and
Christianity, generally identified with the Hispanic world, apparently
introduces a fissure into that presentation. As did Justina, the Indians
pay their respects to the Christian church. Rulfos photographs pay
theirs to Indian participation in Christian rites. The novels interrogation of Christianity renders its Indians allegiance to the church all
the more cryptic. We find a means of addressing the contradictions
in Amit Thakkars observation that the two communities of Christians and Indians have a spiritual need which happens to coincide in
Catholicism (205). To Thakkers analysis one might add the fact that
Yez and Jimnez Rueda (whose classes Rulfo audited) privileged
indigenous spirituality, viewing religion as a preeminent feature of
prehispanic Indian culture (Yez, Estudio xxi; Jimnez Rueda
381; both from 1942). It follows that whereas the Indians contact
with the Hispanicized mestizo world in the marketplace of PP fulfills
a utilitarian need, their homage to the church and the Virgin meets
an essential autochthonous and atavistic spiritual need. The foregoing
lines of thought would lead PP to valorize Indian spirituality, whatever
shape it might assume, while spurning mestizaje.
Magic, emblem of ancestral indigenous spirituality and its imponderable mysteries, countervails Christianity in PP. Diametrically opposed
to the positivism of the Porfiriato, magic also appealed to Hiperins
Mexicanist existentialism. In this respect, let us remember Villoros
characterization of the mestizos indigenous core as una realidad
oculta y misteriosa que no podemos alcanzar y cuya presencia nos
fascina. His words link up with Carrin and Yezs appraisal of
magic in the indigenous world. Yez avers that throughout their lives
the magical oculto sentido of nature spoke to the ancient Indians
(Estudio xvii). Carrin regards the Indians as the subconscious
21
Paz praises Vasconcelos in Laberinto as an hombre extraordinario (296) who
possessed an unidad de visin (297). He describes La raza csmica as la natural consecuencia y el fruto extremo del universalismo espaol, hijo del renacimiento (298).
The conflicts between Paz and Rulfo that developed as the latter gained renown may
also have propelled Rulfos critique of Paz in 1985. Garca Bonilla (21011) presents
various testimonies to the two mens vexed relationship, including Toms Segovias
opinion that Paz, seeing Rulfo as competition, did not give Rulfo his due (210).

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mother lode of Mexico (84) and belief in magic as a distinguishing

trait of primitive versus modern societies (89). Building, it seems,
on Villoro, Carrin concludes that now the mestizo empieza a ser
consciente del apremio de unir los senderos del sentimiento, de la
magia, con los del pensamiento lgico para formar as el ancho cauce
de la nacionalidad mexicana (21; emphasis added). Together, the
three Hiperin authors seed a reading of the magic that clandestinely
rules PP.
The principal vestige of the indigenous rather than the colonial past
that crosses into PP is magic. It does so via the small, unassuming conduit of the rosemary that Justina buys from the Indians, whose herbs
eventually provide an antidote to the mala yerba, Pedro (138). Once
Susana receives the rosemary, a series of magical eventsembedded
in the Indian scene to which the text returns at the end of the segment, bracketing it off (161)immediately transpires. The ghost of
Susanas father, Bartolom, appears first to Justina (157) and then,
in the form of a cat, twice to Susana. This pivotal narrative unit also
encompasses the flashback that divulges the source of Susanas madness, which arose when her father lowered his young daughter into
a mine to search for gold (160). Now recognizing the cat as her
fathers ghost, Susana emits wild guffaws, an echo and distortion of
the Indians laughter. All three episodes of the narrative present have
taken place within twenty-four hours of the Indian scene, under the
selfsame torrential rain.
The herbs have set off a chain reaction that connects the mestizas,
Justina and Susana, to the Indians and to magic. Susana, una mujer
que no era de este mundo (179), emerges powerfully in the latter
third of the novel as the locus of those connections. The sensuous
pleasure that she derives from nature and Florencio unites her with
the happy, telluric Indians. Susanas erotic trances in imaginary dalliance with her deceased husband Florencio allow her to occupy, as
do the Indians, a world that escapes Pedros sphere of influence, to
erect a zone of resistance to him. By repeatedly intersplicing the sections on Susana with those on the Revolution, the novel places her in
counterpoint with that other zone of resistance. The Revolution fails
to overturn the despot, but Susana succeeds in unhinging Pedro. He
watches his wife helplessly from the margins of her world, incapable
of reaching her and haunted by her until the end of his days. Susana
dies in a fetal posture (185), head on belly, closed in on herself and
always already giving birth to her hermetic, resistant world. As the
famous lines read: Pero cul era el mundo de Susana San Juan? sa

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Stephanie Merrim

fue una de las cosas que Pedro Pramo nunca lleg a saber (165).
Through textual transference, the unknowable, authentic Indians
whom Rulfo demurs from narrating attain fuller expression in an
authentic, unseizable (for Pedro) Susana. Inchoately, suggestively, the
cameo of the Indians from Apango has ascribed a host of characteristics
to the Indians and then played them out expansively through Susana.
Her multiple, auspicious correspondences with the Indians parlay the mestiza Susana into the embodiment of the Indian within
that Villoro describes as the mestizos freedom and transcendence.
Aydame, Susana, beseeches Pedro in the texts first mention of his
impossible love (76). The stakes, for Villoros construct and for Mexicanness, heighten as Susana further crystallizes in Pedros memory. His
second recollection of Susana depicts her as hiding en la inmensidad
de Dios (77), and subsequent ones juxtapose her with the Paradise
tree. In his last reference to Susana, a dying Pedro sees the Paradise
trees leaves fall and remembers the final encounter with his beloved,
a memory that casts her as a luminous composite of moon and stars,
blotted out by the sun (194). The several images of Susana envelop
her, and the Indian within, in a saintly aura, which recapitulates the
idea of woman as salvation that Rulfos existential Cleotilde debuted.
Additionally, by orchestrating Susana with the imagery of moon, stars,
and sun (in a novel long intended to bear the title La estrella junto a
la luna), Rulfo plants a link between his heroine and the Virgin of
Guadalupe, the quintessential Mexican symbol of religious and racial
unity as well as of Mexicos indigenous core.
A web of magic that fans out from the Indians and Susana to Dolores enhances the correspondences between Pedros two wives, each of
whom has escaped his grasp, and ties the tyrants two spouses to the
redemptive Indian within. Here again, herbs function as a bridge.
We learn at the outset that when she left Pedro to reside with her
sister outside Comala, Dolores kept a photograph of herself in a clay
pot llena de yerbas (68), among them flores de castilla (alluding
to the Guadalupan Castillian roses?). Fraught with mystery, as are
Susana and the Indians, the photograph has a hole where the heart
should be. We learn shortly after that Dolores had dark skin (at least
darker, more morena, than Eduviges [82]), and that a guard of cats
surrounded her when she lived in Comala (83), which confederates
Pedros first wife, respectively, with the Indians and with Susana, whose
father returned in the form of a cat. All of these tell-tale signs animate
the enigmatic photograph of Dolores, lleno de agujeros como de
aguja (69). They hint that Dolores, who considered photography to

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be a cosa de brujera (69), may have done violence to her inherently sweet (74) nature by employing the photograph riddled with
pinpricks and the herbs in a magical effort to conjure up a false,
rhapsodic Comala. The Dolores who had once requested conjurer
Inocencio Osorios assistance for her wedding night with Pedro would
now exercise her own magic on her son, enticing him to complete
after her death the task of making Pedro pay that we know Pedros
second wife Susana had so efficaciously discharged before her death.
The conjurer Inocencio Osorios none too innocent name helps
me bring this essay to a close. The name Osorio rings with Osiris,
the Egyptian God of the underworld. When Osiris died, his body was
scattered over the four corners of the earth. His wife Isis reunited the
fragments and resurrected Osiris. As suggested above with regard to
PP and Zea, Rulfos death-haunted novel performs a similar act in
uniting the dispersed, submerged fragments of the past. For its part,
my essay has argued that existentialism and Mexicanness constitute
related pieces of PPs own past that deserve restoration. A literary
conclusion ensues from the restoration. When read as the foregoing
pages propose, PPs Indians and their magic acquire an unsuspected
lineage, one that unmoors them from magical realism, for which Rulfo
harbored no great fondness,22 and couples them with the discourses
of Mexicanness and existentialism. On a larger scale, according to
the myth, Isis, goddess of wisdom, magic, and the earth, resurrected
Osiris so that they could have a child, Horus. Horus the falconhence
the birds with which PP teems?symbolizes healing and renewal.
The indigenous aspects of PP that an existential reading uncovers,
we might conclude, tender a real rather than mythical possibility for
healing, for a presente y futuro propios (Villoro 289).23
Brown University

22
In his lecture of 1965, Situacin actual de la novela contempornea (in Fell,
371379), Rulfo stated: Pues la novela actual, en cualquier parte del mundo, camina
con la bandera del realismo mgico; es una puerta difcil, ms bien una entrada que
a ninguna parte conduce (379).
23
As a coda, I note that it is precisely around the issue of the future that the correspondences between Susana and the Indians break down. The very image of Susana
dying collapsed onto herself, suffocating herself, signals that her hermetic mode of
existence cannot provide a viable model for the future. PP may afford Susana a more
imposing presence, but on a larger scale the Indians for whom she fronts prevail.

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Stephanie Merrim

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