Juan Rulfo (1917-1986)
Mexican novelist and short story writer Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez Vizcaíno Rulfo (Juan Rulfo) was born into a family of landowners in Sayula, Jalisco in May 1917. The region was the scene of war and political unrest and it would later on serve as the setting for some of the author's fictional works.
As a consequence of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and the Cristero Rebellion Rulfo's family was ruined and his father and two uncles were murdered. His mother died in 1927 when young Juan was sent to the Luis Silva school for orphans in Guadalajara.
During his years in San Gabriel, Juan had access to a library, which was going to become the base of his literary formation. After Luis Silva School, he went to seminary (the equivalent of secondary school) from 1932 to 1934. He could not attend to university afterwards because he had not taken preparatory school and because the Universidad de Guadalajara closed due to a strike. He then moved to Mexico City, where he attended the National Military Academy and later on studied law for a short time in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Rulfo worked for the next two decades as an immigration agent in Mexico City (where he was able to audit courses in literature) Tampico, Guadalajara, and Veracruz. He began writing under the tutelage of a friend and co-worker, Efrén Hernández, and published his short stories in two magazines; in Mexico City's América and Guadalajara's Pan, which he co-founded.
He soon advanced in his position and travelled through the country as an immigration officer, a job that allowed him to learn to take pictures that he would also publish in América. In 1946 he started as a foreman in a tire manufacture, a year later, in 1947 he married Clara Aparicio and had one daughter and three sons.
In 1952 Rulfo obtained the first of two consecutive fellowships at the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. As a result, he published in 1953 El Llano en llamas and, in 1955 Pedro Páramo. El Llano en llamas is a collection of short stories about rural Mexico during the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion. Pedro Páramo is a short novel about a man who travels to Comala, his mother's hometown, looking for his father to find it is literally, a ghost town.
After the publication of these two renowned books, he ceased writing narrative fiction and began writing screenplays for film and television, remaining a major figure of the Mexican literary world. Among his admirers are Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Susan Sontag, etc. In his new endeavor as a screenwriter he collaborated with Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes on, for example, El gallo de oro (Mexico, Roberto Gavaldón, 1964).
Besides his activity as a photographer, he served as the director and head editor of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenist Institute), where he was responsible for editing one of the most important collections of contemporary anthropology of Mexico. In 1970 he was awarded with the Premio Nacional de las Letras (National Prize for Letters), and a decade later he was elected to be a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua (Mexican Academy of Letters, an organization which principal function is to ensure the purity of the Spanish language with the help of many of the leading figures in Mexican letters, including philologists, grammarians, philosophers, novelists, poets, historians and humanists). In 1983 he won the Premio Príncipe de Asturias (Prince of Asturias Award) for his achievements in literature. Rulfo died in 1986.
Pedro Páramo
Novel
Pedro Páramo is the author's only novel and his second book, published in 1955. As he confesses, his short story titled "Luvina" was the origin of the novel. Other previous titles include Una estrella junto a la luna and Los murmullos (a clear reference to the influence of William Faulkner's The Wild Palms or If I Forget Thee Jerusalem). It is the story of Juan Preciado, who travels to his dying mother's hometown, Comala, to discover who is Pedro Páramo and to recover what is rightfully his. Comala is deserted; Juan soon learns people he meets are really the wandering souls of former inhabitants. It is through these ghosts that Juan Preciado, as the principal narrator, reveals the history of the town's end.
Pedro Páramo tells the stories of its three main characters: Juan Preciado, Pedro Páramo and Susana San Juan. From Juan's point of view, the novel is a story of a son's search for identity and retribution. Weaved in Juan's story the reader grasps fragments of Pedro's life, so the two storylines alternate distinct narrative voices. In various fragments Juan Preciado narrates his journey to Comala, his search for his father and his own death. Later on in the novel, a more traditional third-person narrative voice appears and mixes with poetic passages of interior monologue of Pedro's love for Susana. Finally, within this alternation between the first- and third-person narrative voices, readers find another voice and reconstruct a third story, that of Susana San Juan.
The novel became one of the landmarks of Latin American literature of the past century. At first, it did not receive unanimous support, even though it was critically applauded. Some rejected it due to its complexity and structure which were not very popular. It is now considered one of the literary summits, not only Latin American but globally. It also has been very influential for many authors.
Due to the obvious difficulty of the text, I will develop a substantial detailed Power Point presentation including structures, characters, quotes, themes, etc, so students will be fully familiarized with the novel by the time we watch a few of the 1967 adaptation scenes and hopefully the new Mateo Gil one.
Film Adaptations
Pedro Páramo (Mexico, Carlos Velo, 1967)
The complexity of the novel due to its fragmentary structure, poetic style, and enigmatic plot makes it very difficult to adapt to the big screen. With a screenplay written by Manuel Barbachano Ponce and Carlos Fuentes, this is highly symbolic and allegorical adaptation with the Mexican Revolution as a background. It depicts some of the early Mexican cinema archetypical characters. It might be difficult for non-Mexican viewers since it relies in many historical and cultural details.
For the unit, we will use only fragments of the film, since it contains sexual situations, nudity, and violence.
Pedro Páramo (Spain-Mexico, Mateo Gil, in development-2010?)
Spanish filmmaker, screen writer and one of Almenabar's frequent collaborators, Mateo Gil, is working on an adaptation of Pedro Páramo. The shooting of the movie was supposed to start in Fall 2007 with a budget of six million Euros and a crew that included the cinematographer of El bosque del Fauno (Pan's Laberynth).
Apparently the project is paralyzed as a result of lack of funding. According to IMDb (Internet Movie Data Base) the movie is in development and expected to be finished in 2010. Other facts about the movie are that Mexican film star Gael García Bernal would participate in the movie as an actor and the film would be supported by Canana Films, the production company owned by Diego Luna and Gael. So there remains much hope that the adaptation will be completed and at a higher budget than before. Different media now talk about a 7.5 million Euro budget.
The possible apparition of this adaptation would be perfect for the development of my unit, since we could work with parts of the novel and fragments of the other 1967 one to end up speculating about our expectations of the new adaptation with the unique help of the press book Mateo Gil distributed in Cannes Film Festival 2007, when he thought he was going to be able to complete the project.
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