dove--reflections on the origin

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Une mimesis ouvre la fiction du ton. CÕest la

tragdie du ÒViensÓ qui doit tre rptable (apriori rpt en lui-mme) pour rsonner. Rienne garantit la bonne intonation, celle-ci reste ˆla disposition et sous la responsabilit delÕautre. [A mimesis opens the fiction of tone.It is the tragedy of ÒComeÓ that it must berepeatable (a priori repeated in itself) in orderto resonate. Nothing guarantees good intona-tion, which remains at the disposal and as theresponsibility of the other.]

Jacques Derrida, Les Fins de lÕhomme,eds. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 480

Although his oeuvre consists by and large of only two published works Ð a collection of

short stories (El llano en llamas [The Burning Plain], 1953) and a novella (Pedro P‡ramo,1955) Ð the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo has beengenerally recognized as one of the major figuresin Latin American letters. In a famous assess-ment, Carlos Fuentes describes RulfoÕs work asÒnot only the highest expression achieved so farin the Mexican novel É [but where] we also finda thread that leads us into the new LatinAmerican novel, and to its relation with the so-called international crisis of the novelÓ (La nuevanovela hispanoamericana 17). RulfoÕs consider-able influence upon Latin American culturalproduction during the Boom period (of the 1960s

and 1970s) and beyond is only in part a reflectionof a set of formal innovations constituting one of the most distinctive breaks with the naturalisttradition in Latin America, which is widely seento have prepared the way for the proliferation of the Ònew novelÓ (Ònueva novelaÓ) and a stylizedÒmagical realism.Ó At the same time, and asFuentesÕ remarks only begin to indicate, themark left by RulfoÕs work upon Latin

Americanist reflection also announces thecollapse of the aesthetic ideology through whichthe value of literature has traditionally beenupheld by the Western philosophical tradition.

At the precise moment and through the verysuccession whereby Latin American literaturelays claim to the unique and authentic expressionof a singular, Latin American truth Ð and thus byextension to a place in the global cultural marketthat is no longer relegated to producing badcopies of European works Ð this very literary act

exposes a crisis situation in which the possibilityof literature, or of its redemptive capacity, isradically unsettled.

The genealogical fil conducteur identified inFuentesÕ homage to Rulfo alludes simultaneouslyto a rupture and to the promise of an absolutelynew beginning: RulfoÕs oeuvre, while reproducingsome of the thematic concerns of the naturalisttradition, introduces within this citational space

the force of a formal expression that shatters theframework of realism.1 Octavio Paz, meanwhile,has suggested that the singular status of Rulfo isdue to a kind of poetic vision: while virtually

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patrick dove

REFLECTIONS ON THE

ORIGIN

transculturation and

tragedy in pedro páramo

A N G E L A K I jo ur na l of the theor et ical humani ties

volume 6 number 1 april 2001

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/01/010091-20 © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of AngelakiDOI: 10.1080/0969725012005679 2



reflections on the origin

every twentieth-century Mexican writer produceda commentary upon national character and on theconditions of the revolution, Rulfo was the firstto have provided what Paz nominates as anÒimageÓ for the ongoing interrogation of what it

means to be Mexican Ð and modern. The exem-plarity of the Rulfian oeuvre in many LatinAmericanist circles is indebted to the idea thatthese two texts, while comprising a finite andexhaustible corpus, also constitute a successfulcombination Ð and it may well be the first LatinAmerican work to receive this title Ð of universalor Western themes with an autochthonous,regional style. RulfoÕs contribution to the exper-

imentation with popularized forms of speech (orÒvoz popular Ó) that was initiated in the earlyworks of the novelist Mariano Azuela has oftenbeen understood as indicating that a properMexican or Latin American form Ð in contradis-tinction to the relations of dependency whichcharacterized nineteenth-century Latin Americanliterature Ð has been won in RulfoÕs culminationand exhaustion of the revolutionary novel. On asimilar note, RulfoÕs readers have acknowledgeda doubly critical endeavor in his literary project:it seeks on the one hand to dispel the supremeillusion of European universalism by affirmingthe existence of an alternative tradition andperhaps of a different form of knowledge; and atthe same time it underscores a contradictionwithin the very projection of universality Ð andthus RulfoÕs work undertakes a demystificationof the stateÕs own claim upon universality vis-ˆ-

vis the nation. According to these fairly standardreadings, RulfoÕs work can be grasped as a cele-bration of the particular, and of particular sitesof resistance to the homogenizing effects of global capital.2

The complexity that marks the question of modernity in Rulfo can be elucidated by contrastwith one of his contemporaries, the essayist andpoet Octavio Paz. In his famous study of Mexican

character (El laberinto de soledad [TheLabyrinth of Solitude], 1950), Paz poses thequestion of what it means to be both modern and Mexican. A scene of allegorical reflection servesas the threshold for this inquiry, in which Pazattempts to frame the Mexican Revolution withinan essentially modern movement: he compares

the emergent nation, which has suddenly under-gone a catastrophic transition from oligarchy tobourgeois democracy, to an adolescent facing arite of passage into adulthood. This time of tran-sition and radical uncertainty is both a philo-

sophical and an ethical moment, and it presentsthe nascent nation with a two-fold question:ÒWhat are we, and how can we fulfill our obliga-tions to ourselves as we are?Ó (Laberinto desoledad 9). A new dimension opens up throughthe asking of this question: it introduces a uniquenetwork of relations, in which the nation findsitself to have entered into an array of affiliationsand responsibilities that could not have been

anticipated before Ð and which at once passthrough, bypass, and exceed the geo-politicalboundaries that make it one nation-state amongmany Ð while at the same time it raises thepromise of a certain freedom in the synthesis of authentic cultural expression with the overcom-ing of the historical experience of debt, depen-dency, and tyranny. PazÕs two-fold questionpresupposes the Idea of Modernity as anabsolutely new beginning. But Paz also indicatesthat the Revolution has in many ways failed tolive up to this promise of a total renewal and asecond origin, and that modern Mexico remainscaught within a contradiction: ÒWe have anexuberant modernism with a deficient modern-izationÓ names one of the central themes of TheLabyrinth of Solitude. Modernity, the reflectionof a complete and self-identical national auton-omy Ð or of a project of self-realization culminat-

ing in the nationÕs identification with (andidentity to) its Idea Ð remains only partiallyimprinted in the case of Mexico: the flourishingof modernism, of a newly instituted culturalproduction which has brought MexicoÕs historicaldependency upon imported (French) culturalcapital to a close and initiated a new period of innovation and formal expression which takesÒMexicoÓ as its stated object, exists in stark

contrast to the withering of modernization andthe disastrous failure of post-revolutionaryreform measures such as the state-sponsored landreform program.

I would like to suggest, by way of turning backto Rulfo, that the diagnosis of an incompletemodernity masks another Pazian supposition,

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one that would place Paz well within the conflicthe attempts to describe: the notion of a partial,bad modernity underway but not yet accom-plished is governed by the unstated premise thatartistic production, under the terms of

modernism and via the assertion of a freedom of form which Paz discusses elsewhere as a poeticuse of analogy, can somehow make up for, rectifyor redeem the disaster of modernization inMexico.3 But it is precisely the assignation of aredemptive or corrective potential to art whichRulfoÕs text can be seen to challenge in itsrenewal of the question of culture vis-ˆ-vis thelocal and the regional.4 RulfoÕs Pedro P‡ramo,

written five years after PazÕs Labyrinth of Solitude, likewise composes an allegorical treat-ment of the Mexican Revolution. Like Paz, Rulfocalls our attention to the contradictory nature of Mexican modernity, to the dissymmetries arisingbetween chronic underdevelopment and a prolificartistic and literary tradition. Likewise, Rulfo hasbeen widely recognized as one of the principleinfluences in the twentieth-century discourse of mexicanidad (Mexican-ness), and has served asan important point of reference in various discus-sions of the question of Mexican culture andcharacter, and of the divisions that divide thesequestions at the origin. However, the comparisonbetween Paz and Rulfo and their respectivenotions of modernity also runs up against a limit:whereas Paz conceives of modernity as the End(conclusion or telos) of a process in which Mexicohas yet to fully realize itself, RulfoÕs work

conveys an understanding of modernity as anantinomial relation between the process of modernization and modernist poetics, andbetween images of cosmopolitan modernity andsubaltern underdevelopment. With Rulfo, then,modernism cannot be adequately grasped as anevent taking place despite a problematic modern-ization process; it must, on the contrary, be seento occur alongside and as another facet of this

problem. What Paz attempted to describe as thearrested result of an incomplete process is shownin Rulfo to constitute the two faces of a complete

paradox. What remains to be shown, then, is howthe recognition of an antinomy between modern-ization and modernism produces a shift within amodern understanding of the place and potential

of art, and gives shape to RulfoÕs writing as anattempt to both remark and intervene in thisdissymmetrical and contradictory relation.5

On the other hand, a number of recent stud-ies, following çngel RamaÕs influential analysis

of transculturation in subaltern Latin Americanliterature, have argued that the Rulfian oeuvre isin fact an attempt to mediate between traditions,to strike some sort of reconciliation or alternativebetween the apparently ineluctable forces of modernization and the desire to check thehomogenizing effects of global capital andretain a space from which it might be possibleto think the difference of any given cultural

domain. (See, for instance, Neil LarsenÕs chapteron Rulfo in Modernism and Hegemony andAlberto MoreirasÕs response to Larsen inÒTransculturaci—n y prdida del sentidoÓ[ÒTransculturation and the Loss of MeaningÓ].)It should be noted that what is perhaps toohastily termed a movement toward reconciliationin Rulfo is not the same as an attempt to upholdthe semblance of a seamless transition betweencultures and epochs, or to produce a happyending to the modernization narrative. On thecontrary, the mediatory function identifiable inRulfoÕs work has the effect of destabilizing someof the basic premises of ÒnarrativeÓ itself Ð understood as the projection of a continuous andcausal chronology, and, not infrequently, as theproject of (re)colonizing difference as such.

the exigency of lo nuestro:deconstruction, restitution, andthe limits of the question

Pedro P‡ramo stages a scene strikingly reminis-cent of the Pazian analogue between nascentnation and adolescent. The narrative begins withJuan PreciadoÕs first-person recollection of his

journey to Comala Ð the town in which he wasconceived, but from which he was exiled along

with his mother prior to his birth Ð as a return toa primal scene. The narrator has promised hisdying mother that he will seek out his father,whom he has never met, and Ð in the words of her final injunction Ð ex’gele lo nuestro, orÒexact from him what is ours.Ó This specularreflection upon the origin assumes the form of an

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allegorical treatment of the Revolution andMexican modernity, as we gradually discover anuncanny homology between the cacique (or localÒchiefÓ) and the post-revolutionary state. Thespeculative relation to the arche-origin likewise

installs the issue of birthright, of culture andidentity, within a tragic frame: the sonÕs passageinto adulthood, in which he seeks to found aconnection between the conflicting and mutuallyannihilating demands of maternal and paternallineages, will also take shape as an aporeticencounter with an originary absence or silence.The tragic account of the origin in Rulfo preparessomething akin to the knowledge confronting

SophoclesÕs Oedipus in his attempt to master theoracle: the hermeneutic will to mastery (whichcould be ascribed, mutatis mutandis, to bothOedipus and the discourse of positivism thatinforms much of Mexicanist self-examination)seeks to include itself within its own field of vision by encompassing or inserting itself at itsown origin; this will to knowledge is ultimatelyconfronted with the limit of its project Ð whatmight be called Òfate,Ó ÒdesireÓ or a certainÒagencyÓ Ð as that which is neither proper to thesubject (in the sense of falling under his domin-ion) nor improper (as what could be dismissed ordisowned). Hermeneutics must seek to reconcileitself and its projection of modern self-knowledgewith an errant destiny which both is and is notits own, or through which the designation of ÒoneÕs ownÓ suffers a cut that gives it to itsfundamental possibilities while remaining out of

reach or in a certain sense impossible and inac-cessible to knowledge. The quest for paternalrecognition will thus be obligated to identify withan originary crime.

the temporality of transition: epochalsuspension and transculturativemodernity

RulfoÕs text is informed by a tenuous connectionbetween tone and temporality, and between anostalgic-depressive narrative and a thematicemphasis upon an arrested temporality. Together,these indices underscore a differend at workbetween periphery and center and in the experi-ence of transition. Such a ÒcommunicationÓ

between textual registers has provided criticismwith the impetus for conceiving of a Rulfiancounter-narrative which would oppose itself tothe discourse of modernization even as it enactssome of the more revolutionary formal innova-

tions in Latin American letters. Little has beensaid in this regard, however, of the relationbetween disillusionment with the complicitideologies of revolutionary nationalism andmodernization, the disastrous effects of whichRulfoÕs text never ceases to document, and thefacets of Rulfian poetics that have borne repeatedcomparisons to the European avant-garde. What,then, is the meaning of this odd juxtaposition

between a work of delimiting universalizingclaims of modernization and what could bedescribed as a stylized modernist poetics?Between the corresponding affiliations and nega-tions that Rulfo might share with modernist andavant-garde poetics; between, for instance, acritique of the ideological apparatus of modern-ization projects and an affirmation of formalautonomy in literary production, the assertion of a democratized space of literature in which it is,at least in principle, possible to say anything ? Itis conceivable that the dynamics of the particularMexican and Latin American literary relationswithin which RulfoÕs oeuvre becomes legible havethe effect of destabilizing the very (modernist)notion of freedom that the narrative performancewould, viewed in isolation, seem to have claimedfor itself. The relation between the competingstrands of regionalism and cosmopolitanism in

Rulfo raises the possibility of a rupture withinthe concept of authorial agency Ð understood asthe ideal basis upon which meaning has tradi-tionally been conceived in metaphysics. In re-marking a fundamental difference betweenmodernization and modernism, the issues of meaning, artistic expression, and agency are like-wise implicated in the aporia they seek todescribe. In this context, we can begin to see how

RulfoÕs work can be elucidated by reference toçngel RamaÕs theory of transculturation Ð orhow, at the same time, the Rulfian text andRamaÕs thesis can be seen to implicate oneanother.6

In order to see how transculturation mightprovide a response to the contradictory space of

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cultural collision, let us first refer to what Rulfocritics have identified as one of the principalformal indices of regionalism in El llano andPedro P‡ramo: a somewhat stylized mode of discourse often referred to as a Òvoz popular Ó (or

Òpopular idiomÓ) which Rulfo himself hasdescribed as an attempt to expose written, liter-ary language to the oral tradition of the Jaliscoregion. Of particular interest in this formal juxta-position is the inflection it imparts to the literary.While criticism has frequently dealt with Rulfounder the premises of false (universal literature)versus true (local speech) mimesis, and with aneffort to redress local culture in the face of

universal Culture, there is an equally important formal maneuver being carried out in this substi-tution of the spoken for the written, and of thepopular for the cultivated. If we attend to thedifferential character of these comparisons Ð andit can be shown that RulfoÕs commentary itself invites this attention Ð it should be possible tosee how an understanding of literature as a spaceof poiesis and intervention takes shape. Anasymptotic convergence of form and content inPedro P‡ramo Ð which also produces the unset-tling of one by the other, or what could bedescribed as an insistent stammering withinRulfian literary language Ð lends shape to thetranscultural event as an encounter with thesignifier.

The fault line of a sustained fabrication liesbeneath the Rulfian text. In an often-cited inter-view with Joseph Sommers, Rulfo describes his

prose as an attempt to convey Òel lenguaje delpueblo,Ó the idiom of the people, for what it is:a spoken rather than written expression.7 Inparticular, he claims to introduce an economy of speech which presided in this rural area at thetime of the Revolution (and which, according toRulfo, still reflected much of the traditionprevailing at the time of the Conquest, when theregion was populated by Spaniards and its indige-

nous populations displaced or destroyed) into hisliterary work, and to allow this spoken idiom toguide the composition of the written work.Elsewhere, Rulfo meditates on the orality he hasattempted to transpose into writing, describing itin somewhat surprising terms: as a reserve oreven a miserliness which extends beyond speech

and affects the social and economic patterns of the community (and perhaps the very structureof relationality): ÒThe people are hermetic.Maybe itÕs because not only donÕt they trust thosecoming and going, but they donÕt even trust one

another. They donÕt want to talk about what theydo. One never knows how they make a living.There are entire villages that dedicate themselvesexclusively to usury. The people donÕt talk aboutanything thereÓ (Roff, 43).8

In his essay ÒTransculturaci—n y prdida delsentido,Ó Alberto Moreiras proposes an interpre-tation of the negativity or emptiness which char-acterizes the Rulfian landscape (and, most

immediately, regarding the governmentÕs landreform program) as a transcultural signifier of what he terms Òpure loss,Ó an absence which onemust somehow reconcile Ð and not simply makeup for Ð with subjective or cultural agency. Theambiguous status of the Òloss of meaningÓ (likethe English Òsense,Ó the Spanish word for mean-ing, Òsentido,Ó also bears an experiential andsensuous connotation, and is thus not necessarilyreducible to the realm of logic and reason) inMoreirasÕ essay suggests that loss and meaningare not simply and always opposed to one anotherin this scenario. It seems to me that this readingof Rulfian ÒdeterritorializationÓ can and must beextended to a broad conception of language orlinguistic relationality. While the question of land and property/propriety remain fundamentalindices for understanding the conflictual andparadoxical nature of Mexican identity following

the Revolution, RulfoÕs own attempts to thinkcultural transition (whether we understand this asa meditation on history, national destiny, orpraxis and poiesis) begin by taking up the func-tion of address. The ethico-political concerns of this modern experience of deterritorialization areposed in the vicissitudes of spoken praxis, of thespeech act, and by the glimmering offer passedbetween speech and action. The peculiar econ-

omy of speech which Rulfo here attributes torural Jalisco Ð it stakes its claim to particularityby way of a pure resistance Ð finds its mirrorimage in his description of his own literaryendeavors. While characterizing regional dialectas the object of his work, he also confesses thatthe literary process of transcription or translation

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is always somehow imperfect: ÒWhat I didnÕtwant was to speak like a written book. I wantednot to speak as one writes, but to write as onespeaks. É To arrive at the form of treatment Ihad assigned myself. Something is always left

over, really: thereÕs an extra what or when,thereÕs a surplus of or plus, or something likethatÓ (in Roff, 55; emphasis in original). Toarrive at the form of treatment I had assignedmyself: is this anticipated arrival not the funda-mental circuit and impossible task of writing?The arrival at that point where one has assignedand signified (oneself): this is to indicate theenunciative force of a futurity and a potentiality

which acts from within and underwrites theprocess of naming or writing; to name somethingis to give it an unspecified (and perhaps unspeci-fiable) value, to hollow out a space within thetotality of a diction in which the thing will havefound its meaning. The value writing gives to theregional idiom in RulfoÕs estimation is thus radi-cally differential: it is derived not from its corre-spondence to an ideal and ahistorical referent butrather from its relation to other values, other(as)sign(ation)s. The limitation of this project of naming does not reside in misrepresentation, inthe inadequate support lent to this or that trait,so much as it entails an over-production within(oral) production itself. It remains ambiguous towhich realm of representation this ÒsomethingÓthat is Òalways left overÓ (Òsiempre sobranÓ)refers (is it subaltern speech or transcultural writ-ing?). The point remains, however, that media-

tion is fabricated here through the momentaryappearance of representation itself, as the surplusor remainder from which the subaltern Òlanguageas it is spokenÓ will have been registered in itswritten re-marking and its graphic supplementa-tion. The description of a tradition facing anni-hilation at the threshold of modernity, and of anorality which must be polemically opposed to theWestern (written) tradition, reiterates the doubly

catastrophic structure of the origin: of a newbeginning which is already a radical loss. Whatis brought to the fore in the most exigentmanner through orality, in Rulfo and elsewhere,is both Mexico itself (as an entity that takesshape in juxtaposition to the Western tradition)and the other of Mexico (or the subaltern

topos which is both engendered Ð precisely asdetritus Ð and endangered within the modernprocess of nation-building). Speech, we mightsay, marks the difference of ÒMexicoÓ fromitself.

The antinomy which takes shape around thequestion of modernity in RulfoÕs work records atenuous experience of encounter betweencultures and between epochs. The notion of tran-sition provides a dynamic register for examiningboth the movement of synthesis and that of effacement Ð for instance, an array of class-based,ethnic, communal and regional alliances, divi-sions, etc. Ð in the project of nation-building and

modernization; and it thereby anticipates thereproduction of dissymmetry and loss withinthese transformative processes.9 The antinomialrelation between modernism and modernizationin Latin America compels us to look beyondprogressive or sequential models for describinghow change both takes place and is (or is not)recorded. Transition, by contrast, describes anaccumulation or sedimentation of epistemologicalframes, of epochal designs or types that are notnecessarily compatible or reconcilable with oneanother. Following RulfoÕs lead, we coulddescribe epochal transition in Latin America as akind of arrest or suspension: it is not simply thatMexico presents a Òdifferent perspectiveÓ withregard to historical conditions of production;indeed, the difference often axiomatically attrib-uted to Latin America must be understood on theuncertain basis of a suspension between epochs

(the Greek epokhe precisely means a suspensionbetween). Transition thus gives us to think bothan originary coalescence of forces and an equallyfundamental dissemination of effects. A cumula-tive sequence of events Ð for example, leading inMexico from the War of Independence to theLiberal reforms of 1857, through the Porfiriatoand culminating in the Revolution Ð is in turncomplicated by what has failed to take shape and

so remains unregistered in this sequential experi-ence of history. And thus, whereas the Pazianhero emerges from the Revolution with an eyetoward the possibilities of the future, RulfoÕspassage into modernity is articulated otherwise:by turning back toward the past, toward thedifference of filiation and inheritance (from)

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itself, and toward what remains to be thought inthe chance encounter and contingency of thenationÕs destiny.

figures of transition: caciquismo asallegory of the state

RulfoÕs transculturating allegory is informed by aseries of figurations and displacements thattogether attempt to provide an image and atexture for the contradictory nature of the revo-lutionary project and its claim upon a certainmodernity, and thereby also to give shape to anunthought which haunts the process of reform

and renewed modernization. RulfoÕs allegorysuggests that the post-revolutionary stateÕsprojection of a unified national subject bearsa profound complicity with the phenomenonof neo-caciquismo as a counter-revolutionaryforce.10 The state seeks to sublimate, to defineand then cancel out or raise to a higher value, theinternal differences Ð of ethnicity, region, idiom,class, sex, and so on Ð that mark the nation priorto its unification under the very sign of the state;in so doing it aims to represent the nation asmodern, as speaking with one voice and in onelanguage within the confines of a single space orproperty. Likewise, in the Rulfian caciqueÕsoutright denial of borders resonates the modernstateÕs attempt to be All. Pedro P‡ramo inaugu-rates a space of primitive accumulation by deny-ing the very existence of boundaries: ÒTherewonÕt be any boundaries. The land wonÕt be

dividedÓ (35; translation modified). This renun-ciation of limits echoes the ironic circumstancesin which the revolutionary caudillo VenustianoCarranza sought to dispel the radical demands of the Southern agrarian movement led by Zapata(ÒThis business of dividing the land is ridicu-lousÓ: see Womack 47). What becomes apparentin the Rulfian repetition of revolution Ð as revo-lution within revolution or counter-revolution Ð

is an absolute identity, always already disavowed,between Law and its other. The structuring of caciquismo as an attempt to incorporate andappropriate (seize and make proper) all bound-aries suggests that the founding of the state uponthe difference between Law and Crime is itself the crime; or that, in other words, the law

(whether it is the informal rule of the cacique orthe formal domain of the state) emerges as aparticular (crime) in the process of passing itself off as universal (Law).

The homology between state and cacique in

Rulfo runs the course of a platonic sequence inwhich the state simultaneously justifies andeffaces its existence as necessity: it legitimates itsown existence as well as the dissymmetries itpermits and propagates on the dual basis of apast to be recovered and a future to be realized;and it effaces itself Ð as a particular discourse andinterest Ð by passing itself off as an instance of universal and unimpeachable law taking shape

beneath the projected image of a colossal andunified tradition. Statist mythology is thearchivization of Òwhat must have been,Ó of whatwill have been necessary, yet as a destiny unfold-ing under the sign of a radical alterity: what musthave been Ð the naming of necessity Ð also takeson the form of what exceeds the capacity of understanding, for which the state is a conceptualsupplement. Finite experience Ð the losses, lacks,uncertainties and contingencies which are part of a national history Ð is thus passed off as a merelytemporary, accidental occurrence from which thenation, through the uplifting power of the stateand in the nomination of a national destiny, willone day recover. By way of its organization of cultural production, the state enables the being of the nation to be posited as off-stage, as areserve Ð and thus as removed from the transi-tory passing of history.

As the phenomenon of caciquismo reveals, thenotion of an epochal suspension is not merelyanother way of describing a secondary theoreticalmodel, a ÒhybridÓ mixture of modern andarchaic forms. It is itself the invisible source of akind of production, of a generation of new formsfrom the juxtaposition of these repeated contra-dictions. In her study of agrarian societies in thePuebla region of Mexico, Luisa Par (see Bartra,

ed.) notes that the encounters between capitalistand non-capitalist modes of production in ruralareas frequently call for the introduction of anagent of mediation, a third term which wouldnegotiate between systems and through whichtheir conflicting demands could pass. For ruralMexico, one such figure is the cacique: at once a

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reservoir of tradition and a facilitator of modern-ization, the cacique could be said, ideally, tosuture a radically disjunctive and discontinuoussocial field. The cacique is undoubtedly at theforefront of capitalÕs incursions into rural sectors,

as one who facilitates and enjoys the benefits of capitalist development. In this manner, thecaciqueÕs estate typically organizes a large shareof local production, and likewise initiates muchof the economic contact with the outside. At thesame time, the phenomenon of caciquismo is alsodeeply invested in an economy of traditionalism.The term ÒcaciqueÓ is derived from kassiquan, aCarib term which means Òto keep house.Ó

Caciquismo renews or pretends to restore a tradi-tion of filiation, personalism, and familiaritywhich can easily appear to counter the threatposed by the process of modernization andbureaucratization. As such, the cacique presentstranscultural analyses with a fundamental irre-ducibility. Akin to the sovereign in medievalEurope, the cacique could be said to possess twobodies: but whereas the prince negotiatesbetween the transcendent and material realms,the cacique facilitates relations between theÒworldsÓ of capital and tradition, metropolis andperiphery, in such a way that these domains areprevented from collapsing in upon each other. Inlight of this mediating factor, the term ÒcaciqueÓis perhaps rigorously untranslatable. This is tosay that it is a figure of translation itself .

death and knowledge, dissolution andtestimony: the unpresentable limits of community

Despite RulfoÕs declared intentions to allowan economy of simplicity to govern his work,Pedro P‡ramo is widely held to be one of themost difficult texts in the Latin American canon.Many of the interpretive problems arising duringan initial reading of RulfoÕs novella can be

attributed to the fragmentary orchestration of thetext. Crucial shifts in time, place and narrativevoice are frequently unannounced and must bereconstructed after the fact, and context mustgenerally be pieced together by the readerretroactively. At the same time, the imagistic orvisual dimensions of the text remain shrouded in

darkness. Given the extreme poverty of theRulfian landscape and the myriad hermeneuticproblems which engulf the reading of the text,approaching Pedro P‡ramo could be described asundergoing an experience with blindness. The

problematic of visibility also functions metaphor-ically: the opacity of images and the hollowingout of the visible field testify jointly to the reve-lation of a tragic connection between sight andblindness, between self-reflection and the limitsof knowledge. The foreclosure of the imageÕsplenitude gives rise to uneasy premonitionsregarding the imminence of the unknowable andunpresentable, which Juan Preciado himself faces

in relation to his search for the paternal basis of identity and birthright. In a certain sense, theabsolute reduction of the visible picks up wherewe left off in the opening passage, in which thenarrator was charged to Òdemand from [thefather] what is ours.Ó The uncertainty surround-ing this ÒoursÓ gives us over to the experience of a kind of responsibility which precedes any possi-ble knowledge of exactly Òto whomÓ or Òto whatÓone is answerable: it names a pure and incalcula-ble opening which inaugurates the search for areply, and which places one in a field of relation-ality even prior to the assumption of a properplace. This blindness arises at the site of anaporetic encounter within the search for self-knowledge, and can eventually be situated in thenarratorÕs ironic, postmortem testimony: ÒThemurmurs killed me.Ó Occurring approximately atthe midpoint of the narrative, this confession or

recognition is spoken from the grave he shareswith Dorotea Ð formerly one of his guides inComala. The prevailing sense of blindness, bywhich the reader cannot help but have beenstruck from the very beginning, is thus suddenlyshown to have a ÒliteralÓ basis Ð which, here, isalso its basis in the real . The discovery of thenarratorÕs own death, arriving on the heels of aseries of recognitions of the other as dead and

perhaps of a universal disaster that seems to havetaken place at some indeterminate point in thepast, compels us to return to the beginning of thetext (its first words are spoken by the narrator asan attempt to justify his actions and perhaps hisvery existence: ÒI came to Comala because É Ó(1)), and to confront therein the realization that

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this testimonial account has all the while beendirected toward another Ð and not to the reader atall (the narratorÕs testimony to his dying amidstthe murmurs also reveals retroactively thatDorotea has likely been the addressee throughout

the first half of the narrative). Thus the readerÕsrecognition also calls attention to a level of misrecognition Ð the groundless act of appropria-tion and self-insertion through which we supposeourselves as addressees Ð at which it was possibleto begin reading in the first place. This startlingdiegetic reversal Ð that juxtaposes a number of important issues: testimony and memory withdeath; reading and recognition with misrecogni-

tion and violence Ð is structured similarly to aHšlderlinian ÒcaesuraÓ: a rupture in the rhythmof poetic verse coinciding with a radical transfor-mation in our understanding of the text, or withan aporetic moment in its development. RulfoÕstext could likewise be said to function propheti-cally, in a sense similar to the one described byEnrico Mario Sant’ (see his Pablo Neruda: ThePoetics of Prophecy): it hinges upon and makesapparent a conflation of address and intention, asubreption which can only be recognized after thefact and on the basis of what it has produced, anerrancy inseparable from the dynamic characterof the legibility it founds. The creative act of poiesis thus emerges as an event: our glimpse of an impropriety that accompanies the founding of communication, meaning, and address opens ontoa thought of an anarchic basis of political agency,or an errant destiny that haunts communication

prior to intentional consciousness.The peripeteia or reversal embedded in the

Rulfian narrative also has important ramifica-tions for post-revolutionary reflection. If thesubject of RulfoÕs text is introduced initially asthe nascent individual subject of the bourgeoisRevolution, Juan PreciadoÕs assumption of themortal place of witness signals the death of the subject of positivist metaphysics and the

advent of a radically different topos. RulfoÕsstatements to the effect that the pueblo (theÒpeopleÓ) constitutes the true protagonist of Pedro P‡ramo could be understood as indicatinga heteronomous subject informed both by a seriesof contradictions and a multiplicity (rather thana simple plurality) of expression. The diegetic

shift from Juan PreciadoÕs nearly univocal narra-tion to a composite of fragmented relatos orrecollections (all of the speakers in the secondhalf of the novella are dead) thus gives shape toa reversal of form and genre, from a tragic-alle-

gorical account to what could be termed a formof testimonial document.

I am thinking of the relatively recent emer-gence of testimonio (ÒtestimonialÓ) writing as adistinctively Latin American phenomenon, andof the possibility that RulfoÕs text might havesomething important to say on the question of testimony.11 The testimonial ethos is indebted tothe famous gesture enacted by Pablo Neruda in

his 1945 epic Latin Americanist poem, ÒLasAlturas de Macchu PicchuÓ (ÒThe Heights of Macchu PicchuÓ). In Canto XII, the poet invokesthe spirit of an unknown Andean slave throughprosopopeia, a rhetorical gesture of figuration ormasking which is carried forth in the unmarkeddifference between the multiple uses of por (meaning either ÒthroughÓ or Òfor,Ó and thusseeking to affirm a solidarity linking instrumen-tality and transcendence): ÒRise up to be bornwith me, my brother / É IÕve come to speakthrough [or for Ð Ò por Ó] your dead mouths / ÉSpeak through [ por ] my words and my bloodÓ(Canto General 41Ð42). What the poet is hereproposing lays bare the exorbitant weight of testi-mony: whether it entails speaking for oneself orfor the other, prosopopeic speech claims torender an account of an experience for whichthere was no witness, and of which there were

perhaps no survivors. The premise of the testi-monio mode announces a self-distancing fromclassical mimesis, as can be glimpsed in the vari-ety of means by which it seeks to distinguishitself from other modes of representation, and inparticular from what it designates as ÒliteratureÓ(which might be seen by contrast to remainwithin the framework of an aesthetic ideologythat testimonio specifically renounces). This

inaugural gesture of the negation of mere litera-ture also precisely enacts the literary basis of afamily romance Ð in the broader sense, let us say,that Paul de Man would describe as ÒallegoricalÓ:that is, literatureÕs attempt to establish itself asits own outside, as a departure from whatprecedes it on the order of bad mimesis. The

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ethical proposition of testimonio arises throughthe promise of a mimetic restitution, of a redressthrough the gift of figure. The promise of resti-tution is sustained between two moments: thefirst remarks the site of a fall, of a prior lapsing

on the part of the other into muteness; while thesecond pledges its own voice in exchange forwhat has been (and remains to be demonstratedas Ð that is, it will have been) lost. Prosopopeicrestitution seeks to define and repair an injusticeby Ògiving voice toÓ or Òspeaking forÓ an otherwho is absent or silent, who has not beenadequately represented or who has been Òmisrep-resented,Ó and who has thus fallen out of being

and truth. It gives voice to a silent other; and sothis trope in fact figures the first principle of mimesis: a representation which brings the truthinto view (Plato). Testimonio seeks to be thesettling of an account that remains in arrears Ð and it must therefore reappear as symptom of thevery deficiency it describes.

It would be possible to describe Rulfian alle-gory, in its documentation of a pattern of histor-ical violence, schisms, contradictions, andeffacements, as a restitutive mode of representa-tion. However, what is underway in RulfoÕs textis not only a redistribution and reformation of representation Ð from, for instance, the discourseof the master to those who continue to suffer theeffects of dissymmetrical modernization Ð butlikewise an intervention within the very symbolicor ideological system which, for instance,describes the politics of representation as a

polemic between Òindividuals,Ó and betweengood and bad mimesis. Whatever the manner inwhich we choose to resolve the generic questionsan anachronistic reading of Rulfo might provoke(Is Pedro P‡ramo a testimonial text? Is it ÒlikeÓa testimonial text, in the sense of enacting keyelements of a testimonio form or type? Is there atestimonial type?), there remains another order of distinction which the text could be said, retro-

spectively, to bring to theorizations of testimo-nio. If we begin to trace some of these keydifferences, we see that RulfoÕs text bearswitness, through language and writing, to anevent significantly more unsettling than testimo-nio theory would generally care to acknowledge.

Damiana Cisneros, one of the remaining

inhabitants of Comala, characterizes Comala toJuan Preciado as a place full of echoes (39). Asshe describes it, the experience of place and of home is one of being entombed: literally, it is tobe enclosed within hollowed-out walls or beneath

the foundations. (The term she uses, las piedrasor Òthe stones,Ó also bears a close etymologicalrelation to ÒPedro,Ó the name of the cacique; of course, Òlas piedrasÓ can also evoke headstonesor a crypt.) The figure of the sepulcher, as thesite from which a link between memory and testi-mony is posited here, also bears the possibility of forgetting and annihilation: as we are graduallydiscovering, to be buried beneath the edifice of

caciquismo (and the caciqueÕs own death isdescribed in the final fragment as the toppling of a mountain of piedras) is to have run the risk of being reduced to nothing. DamianaÕs sketch of Comala attempts to fill itself in by tracing asomewhat disconcerting pattern of acousticdistortions. The place is haunted by sounds thatborder on being impossible to identify: murmursand rustlings, the echoing of footsteps behindone as one walks, the laughter of old voicesÒworn away through use.Ó But she, a venerableresident, has long since become accustomed tothese acoustic aberrations. Indeed, the soleimpression she has been unable to habituateissues from the thought of a fissure, throughwhich voices seem to address her: ÒAnd the worstthing of all is when you hear people talking, as if their voice came out of some crack in the streetor the walls, although theyÕre so clear you can

even recognize themÓ (40). Disembodiment of voice and testimony Ð the antithetical momentfor prosopopeic restitution, against which itposits testimonio as an antidote Ð here coincideswith its strange proximity to stone, wall andfissure, and to a certain prospect of immurementwhich could be understood as (a threat of) theabsolute impossibility of memory or testimony.12

It is difficult to judge once and for all what is

being affirmed in this poetic image of speech andrupture, or to say exactly where it ends up.DamianaÕs tale has taken us through an entireloop of frightening transpositions and figura-tions: first, we are entombed as we speak; then,voice somehow continues despite this experienceof absolute destitution and interment; and finally,

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something in the act of entombment itself seemsto speak, producing in the listener a terror thatmight easily be described as petrification. Paulde Man has described a similarly vertiginousrelation between prosopopeia and petrification in

his essay ÒAutobiography as De-Facement.ÓThese two tropes ostensibly represent diametri-cally opposed possibilities for representation:figuration promises to lend voice to Ð and thusrevive or redeem Ð the fallen being of what hasturned to stone, or of what has been subjectedto a deprivation of voice and spirit, for whichstone becomes the intermediate figure. It isimportant to note that the promise issued through

prosopopeia remains thoroughly pedagogical innature: despite what the pathos of the scene mightappear to enforce concerning the absolute value of the other, poetryÕs resurrection of the dead is notonly carried out for the sake of the departed. Onthe contrary, mimesis as a pneumatic graft is herethe restitution of the living to the living. Itpromises to redress (and this word should beheard with more than one accent: it also pledgesto re-dress, to provide a mask to cover over) themark of death which we the living have alreadysuffered. And thus we could say that, in theprosopopeic scene, stone Ð as the antithesis of voice, as what calls for prosthetic figuring Ð isitself already entangled in the web of masking andfiguration, is itself a kind of mask for a mark thatmust not appear at any cost. At a certain point,then, the mimetic exchange between voice andstone runs the risk of losing sight of which is

which: the epitaphic project, of bringing theghostly trace of the other back to life through acorpus of rhetoric which could hardly be any lessephemeral itself, gives rise to a convergence andre-inflection of voice and spirit that might wellprovoke a terrifying collapse of the distinction itseeks to repair. The line of communicationbetween the living and the dead also acts as ademarcation, over which pneuma is to be passed

from animate to inanimate; but this momentcannot avoid placing the end that gives in orderto have received at the risk of a certain contagionemanating from the other side.

Posing itself from within the negative figureof the rift, voice issues in DamianaÕs evocation asthe pure difference of encryption: as a memorial

and a signifier, the crypt or tombstone does notstand for any existing thing, either actual orpossible. Rather, it holds the place of somethingremoved from the realm of being. But in sodoing it also marks this realm as a not-all. We

might say that this rift-mark brings absence assuch into the world, as the materialization of areal. The sepulcher is always more than areminder of or substitute for the deceased,always more than a hollowed-out re-presence: itmarks a site that wavers between presence andabsence, strictly irreducible to either. In a sense,the stone holds the place of relationality itself: of a shadow which accompanies our existence,

through which our words, deeds and memoryoften continue to produce effects in our absenceand after our death. It could even be said to indi-cate the necessary status of absence for a certainconception of agency. One thinks, for instance,of LacanÕs reference to the sepulcher Ð whichlends support to the structure of the unconsciousas both linguistic (structured Òlike a language,Ói.e., by the signifier) and heterotopic, absolutelyirreducible to the register of (re)presence Ð asthe originary human artifact (on the ethical andpragmatic relation between death, burial andlanguage see both ÒThe Field and Function of SpeechÓ in ƒcrits and the sections dealing withSophoclesÕs Antigone in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis ).

A grammatical movement distinctive toRulfoÕs work can help us to explore further thefate of voice, representation, and testimony in

Pedro P‡ramo. There appears both in RulfoÕsshort stories and Pedro P‡ramo a proliferation of the conditional subjunctive mood, typicallyfound in the comparative combination: Òcomo siÓ+ conditional subjunctive, or Ò(X was) as if itwere (Y).Ó Although the frequency of this usagemakes it unfeasible to provide a completeaccount of its circumstances and effects here (fora broader sample of these occurrences see Ortega

Galindo, 149Ð66), it should be sufficient to indi-cate that the grammatical, signifying basis of theÒas ifÓ structure is consistently strained by thecharacter of the combinatory relations them-selves. Instead of providing a richer descriptionand an added dimension to the Rulfian topogra-phy (as one might expect from the frequent repe-

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tition of this trope of paradigmatic substitution),the emphasis in these formal juxtapositions fallsupon an extreme distortion or dissolution of formal cohesiveness and context: in the substitu-tion of one term for another, a face becomes

stretched leather or a translucent, bloodlesssurface; voice becomes hebras humanas (humanfiber, thread or hair); and so on.13 One possiblestrategy for interpreting this tendency would beto read it as the manifestation of a semiotic trans-position Ð for instance, as marking a movementbetween signification and affect.14 In manyinstances in Pedro P‡ramo a proximity appearsbetween this grammatically situated movement

of distortion Ð which effectively suspends thedialectic of signification, refusing to convertnegation into meaning Ð and various possiblesignifiers of affect, of a corporeal and somaticÒlanguageÓ which is strictly irreducible to thedialectics of negation and recuperation thatgoverns sign-based systems of meaning. Thissemiotic rupture of the symbolic transfer bears asimilarity to what is known in the visual arts asanamorphosis: viewed from a right angle, theanamorphic spot or ÒstainÓ is apparently nothingmore than a meaningless, amorphous blobsurrounded by integrated form and meaning; atan oblique angle, however, the stain suddenlyemerges as intelligible, and precisely as the restof the scene loses its proper perspective. Thehermeneutic effect is to have produced twoincommensurable registers of visibility and intel-ligibility Ð each of which, in both form and

ideation, spells the dissolution or unintelligibilityof the other (for instance, we encounter in Rulfothe uneasy superimposition of state and cacique).In other words, the relation between these regis-ters is a non-relation insofar as the ÒperspectiveÓof one level necessarily rules out the intelligibil-ity of the other. But this non-relation in factproves to be a real relation when we consider thatthe juxtaposition is never purely accidental or

unmotivated (in the classical form of HolbeinÕsThe Ambassadors, for instance, anamorphosisoften signals the dissolution of the vanitasaround the emerging form of a deathÕs head). Wecan begin to attend to a material dimension of this diegetic phenomenon with regard to what Ihave just indicated as the site of an intensified

and distorted expression (such as sinewy voiceand leathery face).

One of the most dramatic instances of thistendency occurs immediately prior to the narra-torÕs death, when he sees (or imagines) a woman

ÒdecomposingÓ before his very eyes: ÒThe heatmade me wake up. It was midnight. The heat andthe sweat. Her body was made of earth, wascovered in crusts of earth, and now it was melt-ing [Òse desbaratabaÓ] into a pool of mud. I feltas if I were swimming in the sweat that flowed off her, and I couldnÕt get enough air to breatheÓ(55; translation modified). This description of corporeal and somatic dissolution is striking in

the way it brings together a certain corporealproximity (of a sexual encounter heavilyburdened with connotations of incest, immedi-ately prior to Juan PreciadoÕs own death) with anunheimlich dissolution that ultimately cannot beseparated from the vicissitudes of the language inwhich it is described. It is as if the anamorphicturn we have just discussed were being playedout to the letter of the law: what could bedescribed as the ÒphallicÓ structuring of diegeticperspective (the narrative projection of being byway of a scopic metaphor: the ÒzoomÓ focus thattraces its own approach to this site simulates anasymptotic approach toward the place of truth)encounters its own limit in this very movement,as a dissimulation or dissolution of being. Theaffective cadence given to the anamorphic move-ment in Rulfo is underscored by the emergenceof a polysemic and translational difficulty: in the

reflexive desbaratarse (Òto fall apart,Ó Òto go topiecesÓ), which for Juan PreciadoÕs testimonydescribes the im-mediate shattering of his rela-tion to the other, we can also hear one of theintransitive forms of desbaratar : Òto speaknonsense,Ó as opposed to the voice of reason. Thebody of the other performs a double function inorganizing the presentation of catastrophic disso-lution. With the allegorical presentation of horror

vacui, the somatic body indicates a site that hasbeen evacuated of a former transcendence andwhich, thus hollowed out, appears to collapseunder the weight of its own nothingness. At thesame time, however, the body performs a secondfunction that is perhaps antithetical to the first,negated possibility: while its capacity to function

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as a sign (and, in the onto-theological tradition,this is the essential capacity of the body: it housessoul or spirit and, by extension, its logical dispo-sition is a pointing-beyond-itself) is arrested, itbegins nonetheless to insist as the material of a

different sort of signifying production. Here thenexus of somatic-corporeal dissolution ÒspeaksÓits own Òlanguage,Ó or rather it speaks preciselyas it exhausts itself in the desolation of itsÒthere.Ó Literal and figurative meanings herebecome intertwined and confused; the actualdecomposition of the other in this passage opensonto a tortured expression.

The encounter with the other does not avail

the narrative subject of anything substantial ordeterminate Ð such as a reflection or a recogniz-able difference Ð with and against which it couldconstitute itself as being similarly recognizable.On the contrary, the other presents this subjectwith absolute difference, with decline and disso-lution, through which recognition by the otherfails to arrive. But as we see in the exchangebetween appropriation and misrecognition thatboth grounds and un-grounds the narrative in itsvery legibility, this exposure to the other is infact the condition of possibility for relation, andfor the polyphony of relatos (accounts) thatfollow from the narratorÕs death. We can attemptto understand this ÒexposureÓ by reference to thelogic of iterability (see, for instance, JacquesDerridaÕs ÒSignature, Event, ContextÓ). Thespeaking of truth presupposes the repeatability of its statement, by another and in the speakerÕs

absence. And hence truth is originarily subject toan incalculable possibility of misunderstanding;communication always and already entails therisk of its own failure, and thus spaces theÒdeathÓ of its subject. However, I am interestedin pursuing a sense in which the Rulfian medita-tion on language has to do with more than a clar-ification of logical propositions. We could say,without hoping to fully unravel the enigmatic

knot of this relation, that RulfoÕs text attests to acertain kind of speaking, a praxis and a poiesis,that begins at the site of a radical and an-archicloss. The ÒdeathÓ which Juan Preciado ascribesto the murmurs thus re-marks a dying intolanguage, in the sense of an originary fall intothe finite structure of relationality in which both

communication and misrecognition (which is alsoprecisely the limit and undoing of this structur-ing relation itself) happen. Diegetic death is therupture of the narrative of communion withwhich the narrator initiated his journey; it gives

rise to a manifestation of memory which is nolonger the dream of recovering presence throughabsence or redeeming life through the memorial-ization of a death. The texture of memory whichemerges following the death of the narrator iscomprised of a network of discrete, fragmentaryand interwoven narratives, which bear witnessfirst and foremost to the impossibility of everrendering a complete and total account of the

past (and this impossibility is also the limit of thecaciqueÕs or the stateÕs memorializing projects).The experience with language upon which textualknowledge hinges in Rulfo is carried forth as adisorienting event, and as a speaking frombeyond the grave, from a heterotopic site thatcannot be fully integrated into the subjectÕsworld, and which might instead be considered asa kind of ÒafterlifeÓ that language itself bringsthe subject by unsettling it.

A clarification is needed concerning the vicis-situdes of testimonial discourse in Rulfo, andparticularly as this mode traces a movement fromthe anamorphic sequences forming the dominantmotif of the first half of the text to a melancholictone of fragmentary testimony that organizes thesecond part. A substantial number of the discreteaccounts of caciquismoÕs filial histories, whichtogether comprise the second half of the novella

as they filter into the principle narratorÕs ear, arecentered around the melancholic figure of thecaciqueÕs childhood beloved, Susana San Juan.The complexity of her figure, and of the relationshe presents to the cacique, cannot be adequatelyaddressed here. But it is important at least toindicate the specific limit her discourse brings tothe hegemonic process, and the crucial role itplays in the production of a tragic knowledge in

the text. It is ultimately Susana San Juan who,arising as a radiant apparition within a field of dissolution, provides the cipher over and againstwhich caciquismo must be read.15

Vacillation between figure and disfiguration,which we see transformed during the course of the narrative from a stylized performance (again,

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the ÒdesbaratarseÓ passage upon which thistransformation hinges has been received by Rulfocriticism as an exemplary appropriation of anavant-garde poetics) to a question of testimony,receives what is perhaps its most brilliant expres-

sion in the textÕs final passage, in which thecacique has just been mortally wounded by oneof his unacknowledged, illegitimate sons,Abundio. Let us recall the argument with whichwe began, that the modernist turn Ð or, to bemore exact, the break with naturalism Ð in Rulfoposes serious problems for Octavio PazÕs treatiseon Mexican culture, and for the inaugural rolethat Paz would like to establish for artistic

modernism in Mexico, as a prosthetic supplementfor deficient modernization and as the possiblelegislator of a new national unity and freedom.16

With Rulfo, the opposition between an Òexuber-ant modernismÓ versus or despite a ÒdeficientmodernizationÓ is transformed to demonstrate aparadoxical identity between these dissymmetri-cal poles, to the extent that the force of theformer cannot be separated from the deficienciesor ruptures of the latter. Modernist freedom as ittakes shape in Rulfo is indissociable from theexpression of this rupture as a fundamentalcontradiction, a contradiction that the text itself helps to realize. Through this concludingpassage, then, we encounter the engendering of arecognition akin to what Aristotle describes, forclassical tragedy, as anagnorisis. The caciqueÕsdying gaze, lifted skyward, is confronted by theimage of Susana San Juan, who has recently

preceded him in death. The belovedÕs radiantsplendor is localized around the region of the lipsand mouth, as a topos of affect and arrested Ð and, we must now add, arresting Ð expression:

There was a full moon overhead. My eyes lostthemselves looking at you [Òse me perd’an losojosÓ could also render poetically an experi-ence of being blinded], at the moonbeamspouring over your face. I looked and looked at

the vision that you were. Soft, caressed by themoonlight; your embullioned mouth humidand iridescent with stars; your body turningtransparent in the dew. Susana. Susana SanJuan. (122; translation modified)

A redemptive reading would here understandRulfo to have restored to subaltern experience,

via the uplifted figure of Susana San Juan, some-thing that had previously been lost (or of whichshe had been deprived): something on the orderof identity and essence, whose return and redressis often rendered metaphorically when one

speaks of Ògiving voice to the other.Ó I amsuggesting, however, that the elevation of thepoetic figure has to do with a kind of dignity thatis not reducible to or exchangeable with theterms of an individual or collective essence: thatis, it does not return the other to a previous stateof wholeness or self-identity (and thereby renderfinitude a merely contingent state, as the redemp-tive discourse would seem to have it); on the

contrary, it ushers forth an experience of finitudeas a constitutive moment in identity and commu-nality. The poetic presentation of the sublimeimage is supplemented by the figure of the Òbocaembullonada,Ó an Òembullioned mouth.Ó17 Itwould seem that Rulfo has conceived thisepiphanic moment and this relation to theother Ð or, more precisely, to the otherÕs death Ð as a space of reading : it consists in an addressthat is also the retracing of a mark, a repetitionof what is only now seen to have marked theother for death before her time. Sublimation hereis not the representation of anything which theother might once have held, only to lose. In this,the final denouement, the bullion materializes asthe testimonial image par excellence (I am think-ing here of the Òdialectical imageÓ described byWalter Benjamin: Òan image is that in which thepast and the now flash into a constellation. In

other words: image is dialectic at a standstill.Ó(ÒConvolut NÓ: N 2a, 3)). The bullion marks andguards the testimonial secret, the (perhapsdivine) Mystery of pueblo memory whichcaciquismo is finally unable to appropriate andconsume; but it does so by guarding itself at thesame time, by keeping itself secret and refusingto confirm the existence of the secret. In what issimultaneously an address and a concealment,

the bullion re-marks a heterotopic place, unlocat-able within representation. But it also cites atragic conception of finite relationality, in whichfinitude, mortality and transcendence areglimpsed only by way of a relation to the absolutealterity of the other: that is, to this otherÕs expe-rience of mortality, via an exposure to which the


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cacique is suddenly both perpetrator andwitness.18 The other, we might say, reveals me tomy limits by showing me the existence of thatplace from which I cannot see myself. It is notthat the cacique has found, by turning to the

other, what he lacked in and of himself: on thecontrary, it is through a relation of repetition Ð that is, through a kind of reading, the reiterationof a mark that is itself already a citation Ð thatone is perhaps able to witness(as what precisely does notreturn or reflect) a certain limitwithin the economy of exchange and recognition that

sustains the master discourse.

notes

1 The studies of Rulfo’s formal innovations are toonumerous to list here. Among the most influentialare a group of relatively early readings: CarlosBlanco Aguinaga (“Realidad y estilo de JuanRulfo”), Hugo Rodríguez Alcalá (El arte de JuanRulfo), and Nila Gutiérrez Marrone (El estilo de Juan

Rulfo). The realist-naturalist tradition with whichRulfo decisively breaks is exemplified in the post-revolutionary novels of Mariano Azuela; the“novel of the revolution” is characterized bypseudo-journalistic narration of events as well as atendency to replace the cultivated language of literature with the popular language or spokenidiom specific to a certain region (in the case of Azuela and Rulfo, the district of Jalisco).

2 Fuentes’s treatment of Rulfo at the beginning of his study of the Latin American “nueva novela”exemplifies this tendency, and is cited ubiquitouslyas proof of Rulfo’s efforts to transplant theWestern tradition into a local context or idiom.Fuentes suggests that Rulfo has set out to re-engender Greek mythology in a Mexican context,and he thereby casts the principal narrator of Pedro Páramo first as a “young Telemachus”in search of his father, and then as

“Oedipus/Orpheus,” a lover/son hybrid; hismother as “Jocasta/Eurydice”; and so on ad infini-tum. However, Fuentes also indicates that thistransposition entails a kind of negation: by disrupt-ing the mythic claim to completion or closure,Rulfo seeks to preserve what Fuentes calls the“ambiguity” of the Mexican scene (notably theevents of the Revolution and caciquismo). Latin

American identity consists, at least in part, in itsinability to cloak this ambiguity. When all is saidand done, Fuentes’s reading of Rulfo remainsconventional insofar as it conceives of Rulfo asintroducing a cultural translation strategy basedon the identification and preservation of differ-ences. I will be suggesting, meanwhile, that thenotion of transculturation advanced by ÁngelRama presents Rulfo’s work in the context of asomewhat more rigorous demand: in appropriat-ing translation as an interpretive key for Rulfo, itattempts to think the movement between culturaldomains as a production rather than a safeguardingof difference. At stake in this distinction is anontologizing of differences versus the differenceof ontology, the difference which divides an

ontological statement (for instance, a thesis onmexicanidad ) from itself.

3 For a discussion of modernism as an expressionand realization of cultural autonomy, see Paz’s Loshijos del limo. While I am singling out Paz here asthe avatar of modernism, it should be noted thatsimilar suppositions about the redemptive value of literature are also prominent – despite some cleardifferences in ideological frameworks – in a

number of twentieth-century Latin American liter-ary discourses (including the “marvelous realism”promoted by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentieras well as more recent theorizations of testimonioor testimonial writing as a literary or “post-liter-ary” discourse).

4 The question orienting Paz’s inquiry, of what itmeans to be modern, is subject to an originarydivision (what we might today call a tension

between performative and constative valences of the enunciation “we moderns”) that reproducesitself in the historical antagonism between culturalmodernism (presupposing an essential distinctionbetween “high” and “popular” culture, where theformer comes to stand for an autonomous domaingoverned by the freedom of formal innovation andfreedom from external constraints and determina-tions, and represents a standing reserve of human-ism in opposition to the homogenizing forces of

globalization: that is, “high” culture is conceived asa reservoir of Spirit, and so on) and a process of social modernization. Of course, Latin America isnot unique in manifesting a chronic disequilibriumbetween cultural modernism and socio-economicmodernization. What is often taken to constitutethe “original event” of European modernity is infact multiple and heteroclite, divided between an

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industrializing process which begins in England andonly later takes root on the Continent and acultural modernism initiated at various sites on theContinent. For a sustained discussion of theseconflicts, see Néstor García Canclini’s Hybrid Cultures. With Latin America, the differendbetween modernism and modernization has to bethought out along at least two potentially conflict-ing lines of analysis: modernism as a reflection of (or on) an incomplete modernization process;and modernism as a site of strategic resistance tothe total project of modernization. GarcíaCanclini’s clarification of the ambivalent stakes of modernism and the paradoxical character of LatinAmerican modernity also functions as a critiqueof Paz’s framing of Mexican culture. The demon-

stration of a strategic necessity at work in thedisparity between modernism and modernization(where Paz, in García Canclini’s view, indicatesonly a contingent and temporary failure) serves tounmask the privilege that Paz uncritically accordsto “high” art, and it highlights what might beconsidered an unstated premise of manymodernist aesthetic ideologies, including Paz’s: bypitting modernism as a compensation for (a lack of) modernization, high culture veils its interest in

recreating the dissymmetrical conditions in whichit is produced.

5 Critical studies of Mexican literature have gener-ally sought to ground post-revolutionary expres-sion in a dyadic ontology: following theRevolution, the novel is based either on a region-alist or a universalist perspective (see, for instance, John Brushwood’s studies, Mexico in its Novel andNarrative Innovation and Political Change in Mexico).

Ultimately, this is more than one thesis amongmany about the Mexican novel. It is a thesis on thenature of culture itself: a given form of expressionor perspective belongs either to the Westerntradition (and, by extension, to the European claimupon this tradition as its own, or as the first avatarof a proper, Latin American place in the Westerncanon), or it belongs to an “other” tradition(which, in Latin America, is frequently conceivedas a recovered or an invented tradition, an indige-nous or nascent autochthonous tradition). Whatthis either/or thesis neglects to consider is thatthe concept of the Other (of) tradition – or theOther (of) culture, as autochthony is in many casesanother name for “nature” – is itself a perpetualby-product of (Western) culture, and that everyattempt to conceptualize or verify the existence of “the Western tradition” – of a self-identity

expressing itself as the tradition – has invariablytaken its first step by positing the Other (whetherthis Other is ultimately something to be overcomeor to be recovered). In view of this perpetual slip-page within the determination of tradition andculture, the work of Rulfo provides a crucial turnand the possibility of drawing out an elaboration.

6 Rama’s Transculturación narrativa en AméricaLatina provides an important basis for examiningthe relation between regionalism and universalismin an author such as Rulfo. The crucial point forour purposes here pertains to the specific lessonthat Rulfo’s oeuvre brings to Rama’s theorization of subaltern literature as an attempt to mediatebetween cultures. Contrary to what one might

expect, Rama does not argue that the task of thetransculturating writer lies simply in preserving aspecific cultural difference that precedes the work.Rather, transculturation, as a departure fromtheories of acculturation, describes a production of difference via a kind of repetition (the dynamics of transculturation are in fact reminiscent of WalterBenjamin’s description of translation as laying barewhat was only latent in the original while re-marking a certain finitude that always inhabits the

original already). Rather than performing a conser-vative or redemptive function, transculturatingwriting thus harbors a strategic potential thatcannot be separated from its assault upon itsengagement and critique of the onto-theologicalconception of culture.

7 Rulfo couches this conception of writing incontrast to his early (and unpublished) literaryefforts, which he describes as “a bit academic” and

“more or less false.” As he puts it, the function of his mature work is to bear witness to and conveythe oral character of local tradition and language:“So the system I finally implemented, first in theshort stories, and then in the novel, was that of using the idiom of the people, language as it is spoken[el lenguaje del pueblo, el lenguaje hablado], as I hadheard it from my elders, but which continues to beused even today” (Sommers 18; my emphasis).Speech here establishes a distinction betweentheories of culture: between an Enlightenmentconception of Culture as a universal (and peda-gogically transferable) substance, and culture as adiscrete and local phenomenon whose intelligibil-ity to outsiders remains in question. Rulfo’s ownattempt to clarify this difference, which is also thatof an “academic” exercise versus an “authentic”testimony, can be seen to invite precisely the


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misconception that Rama warns us away from: inother words, that Rulfo conceives of culturalmediation in terms of a strictly Platonic model, of the good versus the more or less bad copy of anoriginal. In order to see why classical mimesis isultimately inadequate for what is at stake in Rulfo’sattempt to think cultural difference, we must payclose attention to a generic tension that arisesbetween Rulfian self-criticism and the literaryworks.

8 Rama notes the critical tendency to conflateRulfo’s allusions to an oral tradition specific to theregion of Jalisco with a full-blown endorsement of ethnological essentialism (for example, the touris-tic fantasies of the indolent, melancholic peasant

or of an authentic tradition not yet contaminatedby the transitory and contingent character of modern life). By way of a counterpoint, Ramarefers to Jean Meyer’s influential study of the oraltraditions of Jalisco, which identifies a rich andcontradictory relation to the literary (see Meyer,especially 182–83). The apparent contradictionbetween Rulfo’s and Meyer’s accounts of a subal-tern, regional ethos proper to Jalisco could befurther elaborated through reference to some of

the critiques of Rama’s study.

9 We could begin to identify a topos of transcul-turation in Pedro Páramo by situating this textwithin a long tradition of conceiving of Mexico asa site of encounter between cultures or worlds, oras a crossroads. Or, similarly, we could read Rulfoalongside the essayistic tradition that commencesshortly after the Revolution, which introduces aseries of meditations on mexicanidad as a condition

of cultural or ethnic hybridity, of dual identities, of melancholia and mourning, and the like. But aquestion of transition can also be underscoredthrough an elaboration of the implicit historicaland socio-political context of Juan Preciado’snarrative act. The allegorical passage, descent or“death” through which Juan Preciado ostensiblygains access to the communal referent of Comalacontains one such transitional allusion. In thenarrator’s initial exchange with his first “guide,”the mule driver Abundio, we encounter a subtleyet sustained tension between conflicting idioms,narratives, and socio-cultural frames. The dialogueis marked by an increasing dissymmetry anddiscontinuity, through which we glimpse the struc-ture of a certain social antagonism, correspondingperhaps to the unequal relation of transition andmodernization. See María Luisa Bastos, “Clichés

lingüísticos y ambigüedad en Pedro Páramo” for adetailed discussion of the semantic composition of this exchange.

10 For a discussion of neo-caciquismo as a counter-revolutionary tendency, see Bartra’s collection,

Caciquismo y poder político en el México rural .

11 The popularization of the testimonial mode inLatin America has multiple points of origin. For adiscussion of the history of testimonio, seeSklodowska’s Testimonio hispanoamericano. For anexcellent sample of contemporary debatesconcerning the status of testimonio, see GeorgGugelberger, ed., The Real Thing . The biographicalnarratives of Rigoberta Menchú and AliciaPartnoy are examples of the increasingly popularphenomenon in which survivors of counter-insur-gency, dictatorship, and authoritarianism inCentral and South America produce written (ordictated and later transcribed), pseudo-journalis-tic accounts of individual and collective traumaticexperiences. The generic use of the term was firstsuggested by Miguel Barnet in 1968 when hepublished the Biografía de un cimarrón, an autobio-graphical chronicle narrated by a former Cubanslave.

12 The threat that burial represents to memoryand testimony is clarified in the second half of thenovella, when we encounter the melancholicnarrative of Susana San Juan. There, intermentfunctions as a metaphor of abjection: not of herbeing subjugated by the will of another, but ratherof and by herself: the crypt provides a figure forher own internalization of the other (in the nameof her dead husband Florencio) in an attempt to

preserve or recover the loss of a primordial Thingand the image of a lost unity. (See, for instance,when she ironically admonishes the PadreRentería not to mourn for her, and rather to look after himself: “Your heart is dying. … You’ve comehere to tell me that Florencio is dead, but I alreadyknow. Don’t worry about me. I’ve got my sorrowput away in a safe place. Don’t let your heart burnout” (91).) In Freud’s terms, the internalization of what has been lost, as described by Susana in

reference to a lugar seguro (a “safe” or “certain”place), signals a refusal at a certain level to registerthis object’s passing, or to come to terms with lossor death by delimiting loss and returning it to aplace within one’s history.

13 Ortega Galindo claims to have provided arepresentative sampling of the occurrences of this

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sequence in Pedro Páramo. Be that as it may, thedistinction he attempts to draw between the“descriptive” and “conjectural” uses and effects of this combination strikes me as misleading, in thatthe effect of this “paradigmatic” combination isfrequently the very decline of signification.Likewise, his attempts – exemplary of a dominanttendency in Rulfo criticism – to link such a formalevent to a surrealistic ethos (i.e., of producingsurprising developments through discordantcombinations of images) runs the risk of effacingthe historicity or historical contradictions thatconcern both Bretonian surrealism and Rulfianallegory, and of reinstating the symbolic and hier-archical positionality (between European and LatinAmerican, cosmopolitan and subaltern) of which

Rulfo’s work is precisely a destabilization.

14 While I am thinking specifically of JuliaKristeva’s work on the affective dimension of discourse, one might also address the importanceof affect in Rulfo in terms of Gayatri Spivak’sdiscussion of the fetishization of affective value(see Outside in the Teaching Machine). Rulfo’s treat-ment of affect as a site calling for demythificationcan be glimpsed in a number of the short stories.

Neil Larsen astutely identifies such a tendency inthe short story “La Cuesta de Comadres,” inwhich a peasant narrator begins to recall the disas-trous effects of post-revolutionary land reform ina rural community still dominated by a caciquefamily. While the description tends toward socialrealism rather than romanticization, Larsen notesthat the effect of subaltern voice upon the reader(presumed to be an outsider, an inquisitive intel-lectual rather than a fellow peasant: and thus

subaltern voice bears an implicit affective andanthropological value) is likely to foster a roman-ticized conception of the peasant narrator despiteitself: it is as if we are unable to recognize thislong-awaited testimony of the other in anythingbut a touristic mode, of seeking out or inventingdifference – and subaltern authenticity – as thenew basis of exchange. But there is also a cata-strophic turning point in the narrative, which thusseems to have anticipated its own reading and tothen begin to disrupt or subvert it, preventing thefetishistic exchange from being completed.Toward the end of the story, the narratorconfesses to having slain a member of the caciquefamily in cold blood, in a manner precisely linkinghim to the prototypical violence and ethos of vengeance made famous by the cacique. At thispoint, however, the trap has been sprung, the

reader has already fatally identified him- or herself with the subaltern narrator – whose being, Larsensuggests, is shown to be a mere (negative) reflec-tion of the cacique’s will to power. And thus wediscover the story is not about the meaning of subaltern existence at all: rather, it is an allegory of the projection of this meaning from within the domi-nant discourse, and of the First World reader’sdisquieting recognition of his or her own desireand its complicity in this process of encounteringthe other.

15 The ambivalent character of Susana San Juan issustained in the dual function of her affective value,as pretext and limit of the cumulative project of knowledge-consumption that is caciquismo. The

gendered relation between Susana and the caciquecould be elaborated by way of a reference tothe discussion of gender and sexual difference inPaz.

16 Let us also recall that Paz’s argument situatesitself within a long and hallowed Western traditionof aesthetic theory, for which art has in one formor another been thought of as a mode of possibleredemption: to name only two examples, art as itis thought of as the perfection of physis inAristotle, and for us moderns as an autonomousdomain in which the utopia which was formerlythe dominion of religion comes to be preservedagainst the relentless onslaught of history,modernization, and globalization – or, in otherwords, art is that mode whereby we hope toawake from the nightmare of history.

17 A bullion is the metallic, ornamental knob orboss that sometimes shows up on the cover of old

books, appearing to hold it together and/or fastenit shut, to figuratively guard its threshold.

18 The Derridean thesis of iterability can thus bedemonstrated to bear a thought of the tragic: thehermeneutic engagement of the other must berepeatable in order to be possible in the firstplace, and repetition here cannot secure itself against the possibility of errancy. On a differentnote, however, it should be clear that what I havedescribed as Rulfo’s ongoing citations of a tragicdynamic does not mean that tragedy itself assumesthe empty place of the master discourse in hisconception of Mexican modernity. The allegoricaland testimonial modes which are likewise graftedinto Rulfo’s text would mark the limit of thetragedy’s monumentalizing representation of cata-strophe.


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