Life of Juan Rulfo
Did you know this Mexican writer lived through two civil wars?
I always discover writers from Latin America through weird chains of event. Juan Rulfo, for instance, I discovered through my uncle’s passing. This a paper about what you can get out of a relative’s death, I guess. One more.
Thematically, it fits, though. For Juan Rulfo was born in 1917 either in Sayula (according to his birth certificate), in Apulco — where his mom’s hacienda stood — or San gabriel (his favourite town). Problem is, Rulfo lied most of his life, saying he was born in 1918, a lie he had carried in order to enter a military academy.
Having lived from 1917 to 1986, Rulfo had to survive two wars: the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Wars. In 1923, mere weeks after his sixth birthday, the son of his village chief shot his dad in the back. Four years later, Rulfo would bury his mom. Thinking about that, there’s really no surprise the young writer attempted forgery in order to enter a school presided by his uncle.
Most biographies you could stumble upon online will state that Juan Rulfo came from a wealthy family that lost everything throughout the war. A life changing experience which would permeate the writer’s books.
And then there is the violence, for the war did not stop with his father’s passing. According to Rulfo, as a kid he would drown himself in books in order to not be on the street where bullets flew by. Oddly modern, for someone born in the 1910s, don’t you think?
French biographs like to point out his messy education path, meaning he attended a bunch of schools. Or that he never graduated. Because of some school strikes, or because the government prevented him, allegedly. Somehow building the legend of some self-made author.
In 1936, Juan Rulfo would become an immigration agent. It is said that through the years he would go on to meet Juan Rosé Arreola, another famous Mexican writer, circa 1941. This may be what steered Rulfo towards writing in the end. Still, Rulfo would first become a foreman, and then a salesman before he obtained a grant in 1952 from the Centro Mexicano des Escritores.
It’s thanks to those two grants that Rulfo had the time to write El Llano en Llamas. A short story collection whom grittiness and style enabled to become a classic. See, Rulfo decided to implement common language in his work, sorta like how Louis-Ferdinand Céline did, here in France. I’m sure, Rulfo’s past which made the stories centered mostly around death and little folks in rural part of Mexico might also have played a part. Reading through El Llano en Llamas, I could not not realize how violence seems intertwined with Mexican history.
Rulfo’s style is not crude. Actually it’s quite the contrary but all his tales seems to center about revenge, prostitutes, destitution and death. One stories that marked me particularly was about a man admitting to the police that he had killed a fleeing criminal he had fed for days. ¡Diles que no me maten! which would prove a Mexican cult classic speaks of a man pleading for his life to a general before realizing he had killed the officer’s father in previous years.
Rulfo would then write his most important and sole novel Pedro Paramo. In the book, a character walks to his hometown, because of a promise made to his mom, to try and find his father. Through magic realism, Rulfo stacks the past and the present, making our protagonist speak to ghosts and lost souls, slowly piecing together not the history of his blood, but the history of the whole village.
It’s really no surprise that both books gained a cult following. I mean, even Gabriel Garcia Marquez stated, Pedro Paramo was an influence while writing his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude.
More interesting is that after 1953, most sources would claim that Rulfo stopped writing. As if the Mexican writer was some precursor to Koushun Takami. In France, the small biography you’d find in his book simply states that from 53 to his death in 86, Rulfo turned towards the movie industry, but seemed eager to write one last book before his passing.
Truth is, Rulfo wrote a third book named the Golden Cockerel which was mis-labelled as a film adaptation. This book which adresses the impossibility to make it through sole work in modern society was written by 56 and 57 but appears to have been totally forgotten outside of Mexicos.
It may be due to the fact that such a disappearance enabled scholars to speak of the man as some self-made legend. Or maybe this was due to happen in a pre-internet world, where fact were not that easy to distinguish from fiction.
And isn’t it how legends are born? Myths like Pedro Paramo, by intertwining reality and imagination ?
