PEDRO PARAMO by Juan Rulfo Rulfo suggested you read his MASTERPIECE three times if you want to get it.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Listeners. Readers, welcome to the Fox Page, where we dive
deep into the very best books. You'll come away with
a richer understanding of the text at hand, all while
learning to read everything a little better. I'm kimberly Ford,
one time adjunct professor at Berkeley, best selling author and
PhD in Spanish and French literature. As you longtime listeners know,

(00:24):
sometimes that PhD in Spanish literature comes in more handy
than other times, and today, as we dive into Bero
by Juan Rulfo, it will come into maximum handiness. Quick
note to interject here that if the audio isn't quite
what it usually is, I apologize for that microphone difficulties
here at the Fox Page HQ. So we always begin

(00:46):
these lectures with this question of why read this book.
I have loved Pedro Barramo for a long, long time,
ever since I read it in graduate school, and I've
thought about doing it a few times for these lectures,
but was really spurred into action by a review that
I read the new translation. So this review was by
Valeria Luiseli, whose Lost Children Archive is just an unbelievably

(01:06):
great piece of literature. We absolutely must take a long
look at that book. But when Luise Eli was weighing
in on this new translation, and really I think was
putting her stamp of approval on it, I realized that
this is the perfect moment to go back to the book.
I'm also laughing a little bit because I think that
was like last year. I think I read the thing,
you know, gosh, maybe in the fall, but maybe in

(01:28):
the spring, but honestly, it could have been twenty twenty four.
I was spurred then, but not quite enough. Now I've
finally been spurred, and now we are actually doing the lecture.
So this is one of those foundational texts. It's so
important to the entire body of literature in Spanish and
certainly in terms of Mexican history, that it's one of

(01:48):
these things where I'm really concerned about doing the book justice.
As we tackle some titles, I feel a little bit
more pressure than others. Part of that is because this
is a very challenging text in many ways, but also
it's just because it's so incredibly important and it is
so good that I want to be sure to cover
all of the very important things to say about it
and also hopefully add a little something new to the conversation.

(02:10):
The thing I think I'm going to add, which is new,
is that a lot of people think of Betterro Barramos
as an example of magic realism. We are going to
talk at the very end about Gabriel Garcia Marquez and
his use the influence of Betero Barramo on one hundred
Years of Solitude. We're not going to talk about that
until the end because I really actually don't want to
link Garcia Marquez together with Juan Rulfo too early, because

(02:33):
I really want Juan Rulfo to stand on his own.
I want him to be inocus the focus of our conversation.
What I'm going to argue is that, yes, in many
ways this is a precursor to magic realism. But for me,
the most salient aspect about the text is that it
is a modernist text. And don't worry, We're not going
to get like really in the weeds with this whole
idea of classifying literature. But when you think of modernism,

(02:56):
you just think of these texts like Virginia Woolf ts
Eli or James Joyce. Later we have Faulkner in the
United States. These are texts that are fragmented they're trying
to do something new. They're often in response to a
very difficult time in England. It was after the First
World War. In the case of Ruufau, in large part
it is a response to the Mexican Revolution. So I

(03:17):
am going to argue throughout the lecture today that a
lot of the aspects of this book, the things that
make it challenging and also very rewarding, are very much
in the vein of modernism. It's a book that I
do not think has gotten its due in English. That
is in part due to the fact that it is
a challenging text. If you're someone who has read Pedro Barramo,
if you love this book, then you should really feel

(03:37):
good about yourself as a reader, because it is not
an easy text to handle. We're going to talk at
the end about why I think one hundred Years of
Solitude is actually much easier to approach. Look here I
was saying that I wasn't going to talk about Garcia
Marcz until the end, but now we're kind of dipping in.
But that is a book that I will argue is
actually much easier to read because it is a little

(03:58):
more in the realist, whereas this modernist text that we
have with Betrobarramo is very fragmented. It is dealing with
the interior thoughts and feelings of people, not their actions.
It is playing with time, it's playing with all sorts
of different narrators, different voices. It's like reading Virginia Wolf
in Spanish, which to me is just like the most incredible,

(04:20):
most fun thing to do. But it is that kind
of challenge. So this is a book that was published
in nineteen fifty five. Again, it's hugely important in terms
of the canon the body of Mexican literature, and it
has sold a million copies in English, but as you
might imagine, I think it deserves many more. For those
of you who like an agenda, here's what we're going
to get up to today. We're going to talk a

(04:42):
little bit in the beginning about the difficulty of the text,
what makes it so challenging, also, of course, so rewarding.
We're going to do a very very brief bio of
Juan Roufo. We're going to talk then about the idea
of this modernist text as being kind of a bridge
between modernism and magic realism. At that point we'll talk
a bit about why one hundred Years of Solitude, I

(05:03):
think is the easier text to approach. We're then going
to dive in a little closer to this addition to
the text. We're going to talk about the prose itself,
a little bit about the narrator. Then we're going to
talk about the translation. We're going to take a step
back and just like figure out for a second, what
is actually happening in this book, what is going on,
which is not the most important thing about the book,

(05:24):
but I think for many people it's very satisfying and
very grounding to take a step back and think, like,
what is it, what is the mechanics of what is
happening in Gomala. We're then going to talk about Gomala
and all of the people in this book as these
kind of mythological archetypal figures, and spend a little bit
of time on why the book feels so timeless and
why it feels like something that could be applied to many,

(05:45):
many different cultures, but then in the end, how it
feels distinctly Mexican. We're going to talk about a bunch
of the textual things. We're just going to touch on
all these amazing things that he is doing without diving
too deeply into them. But I think as I kind
of list them off, you'll recognize a lot of these
different aspects from your own reading. We're then going to
talk about Gabriel Darcia Marquez a couple of the actual

(06:06):
things that he literally like lifted from Pedro Barramo. In
many ways, they should be read as kind of a tribute,
as like a little bit of a revelation to the
reader that he, in fact is very deeply affected by
this novel and that there really, like literally could not
have been one hundred years of solitude without Pedro Barramo.
And then we're going to talk about the close of

(06:27):
this very slim novella. This is a good place to
let you know, are there spoilers? I mean kind of
kind of insofar as this book has spoilers. I mean,
I guess the answer to that is, yes, there are
going to be spoilers. I will let you know before
we dive into those things that I'm about to spoil something,

(06:47):
so that if you haven't read the book yet, you'll
you know, you can fast forward a bit. But I
do think, I mean it's a very slim little novella.
It might be best for you to just take take
a minute here and trust me that this is an
insanely great novel novella, and that you should take the
afternoon to read it and then come back. But I
also think that this lecture might actually be very helpful
in terms of understanding what is going on. Very famously,

(07:11):
Quan Rulfo said that this is a book that needs
to be read three times in order to be understood, which, honestly,
there is nothing more modernist. The modernist esthetic, this idea
of these modernist pieces of literature, so we're talking from
nineteen ten roughly until nineteen sixty. Part of what makes
them modernist works is that they're really challenging the form

(07:31):
of the novel. It is a text that does not
read like other novels, and in some ways it's very
purposefully difficult. I mean, he's not doing this just to
frustrate the reader. In fact, he's doing it to engage
the reader. But more importantly, he's doing it in order
to express a reality that has everything to do with
revolution and injustice and corruption and death and love. Really

(07:54):
very large themes that I imagine Rulefu doesn't think that
he could tackle in the normal form of the No
and that is where we end up with Pedro Barramo.
So we're going to do just like a very ultra
quick bio here of Juan Rulfau. He was born in Sayula,
which is a little town in Jalisco. Sayula is a
town that is referred to often throughout Peder Barramo, so

(08:16):
we have this sense and Comala in the book is
actually kind of a mythic town. It does not exist.
Apparently there is another Comala in Mexico and a lot
of people like make a pilgrimage there, but that is
in fact not the pueblon that Juan Rulefau is thinking about.
His Comala is a totally made up version of many
towns in Mexico. He was born in nineteen seventeen, which

(08:38):
is really important. So the Mexican Revolution begins in nineteen ten,
you have the Pristero uprising in like nineteen twenty six
to twenty nine, so he would have been at the
time at the beginning of that conflict. He would have
been about nine years old. One of the interviews that
I listened to talked about the fact that his father
was killed in these revolutions. He in fact was a

(09:01):
he was orphaned when he was young. He went to
live for a while with his grandmother and then I
think was at an orphanage, which was like very militaristic
and I think really shaped a lot of his life
and actually a bunch of his writing. He wanted to
go to a certain university, but it was on strike.
It was not available for him, so he went elsewhere.
He was a tire salesman, and that is one of

(09:21):
those times when he was able to not able. But
he was traveling all over Mexico into these small towns
while he was selling tires. He then later became an
editor for this was so interesting to me. It was
like an arm of the Mexican government and they it
was like a publishing arm. And what he was publishing

(09:41):
and what he was sort of overseeing was like the
official version of the Native peoples. So it would be
like in history textbooks, there would be stuff about the
Native peoples, and he was kind of editing that. He
died in nineteen eighty six, I believe in Mexico City.
He was also an incredible photographer. I think he had
some issues with Alco. I did not dive deep into

(10:02):
other aspects of his biography, but it is very important
to realize that the Mexican Revolution was essentially happening along
with his childhood, and that he was deeply affected by
all of this. Okay, we are going to kick things
off by talking about the difficulty of this text. Why
it is that bet Robarramo feels challenging. I mentioned this briefly,

(10:24):
The fact that this is a very fragmented novel. You
can even see it the way that it is formatted
on the page. We have paragraphs of text and then
we have white space and then more paragraphs. You can
tell because we have italics, We have all sorts of
different symbols that are signaling dialogue. We have MDASH, we
have double quotation marks, we have single quotation marks. We
have ume, which are those little like arrow things that

(10:46):
they use in France. All of that is to speak
to the fact that Rulefo is doing something unusual. This
is not just sort of your normal novel. The text
is very polyphonic, so that simply means that it has
many voices. A lot of times people think that one Yado,
who is our narrator at the very beginning, who speaks
in a first person narration. A lot of people call
him the narrator, and I think in the beginning you

(11:08):
can believe he is the narrator. And I'm not going
to spoil anything yet, but i can tell you we
do have one narrating his experience in the first person,
but right from the beginning, we have all of these
other voices that are entering in the text. So it's
polyphonic in the sense that we're hearing all of these
different voices, and in some ways that is so revolutionary.
I mean you really if you compare this to Virginia Wolf,

(11:30):
where we have this narrator that is entering into the
minds of all of these different characters and we're seeing
their thoughts and we're seeing them quoted but ruthful. In
some ways, it is taking that even further because we're
hearing long chunks of the voices of these people, what
they are saying, what they are also, of course what
they're feeling. That the idea of hearing all of those
voices quoted verbatim is extraordinary. Along with this polyphonic notion

(11:54):
comes the idea of dialect. So we have a bunch
of dialect here, and in fact, a lot of it
is sort of our k. We talked a minute ago
about how Juan Ruffo spent a lot of time traveling
through many of these small towns throughout Mexico and was
really I mean, you know, he as an author, was
someone who was very attuned to language, and so he
incorporated a lot of these different voices and in doing

(12:17):
so also a lot of different dialects. I'm gonna just
like bust out with something really sort of difficult here,
which is something very important in my opinion. Some of
this language hearkens all the way back to sort of
colonial Spanish. Hearkens all the way back to the Spanish
colonial era. There's this very interesting linguistic thing that, for
the most part, language evolves from the center. So if

(12:41):
we are going to consider Madrid the center of the
Spanish speaking world, language will evolve, It will change in Madrid,
and then it will move outward. This is all before
social media and all of this globalization. I mean, who
knows what's happening now. Actually linguists probably know. I do
not know. My linguistic training, which still holds held for
many centuries, is that language does change from the center.

(13:04):
So what's fascinating is that you would find you could
find not too long ago, at least in the middle
of the twentieth century in Mexico, Central and South America,
you could find these pockets of language that was like
sixteenth century Spanish, because it simply wasn't evolving at that time.
Of course, you have to think about the pressure of
the indigenous languages, which is really important. But one Rufo's

(13:26):
use of some of this archaic language is speaking to
something very important, which is the Spanish colonial era. So
if you imagine all of the native peoples of Mexico,
Central America and South America as being invaded by these
Catholic Spanish conquistavores, you can think then of all of
the violence that was wrought on this country or this

(13:47):
series of countries by the Spanish colonialist forces. What's interesting,
of course, is that Spanish then becomes the dominant language.
I mean, that's not that interesting. That's just like how
colonialism works. But it's interesting to me to think about
the ways that most people who are living in Mexico,
Central and South America have ancestors who are both, you know,

(14:08):
at some point indigenous people's and also colonial people, which
in many ways makes things very complicated. But One of
the things that Rulfo is pointing to with his use
of this archaic Spanish is that colonial era. So he's
evoking in some ways the violence of colonialism, and he's
setting that in very subtle ways, largely through this use

(14:30):
of archaic language here and there. He's setting that against
the background of the Mexican Revolution. So we have the
present violence of the twentieth century of the Mexican Revolution,
but it's kind of layered on top of this idea.
I mean, the book is written in Spanish that that
in itself should be speaking about the idea of colonialism.
So we have a text that's fragmented, one that's polyphonic,

(14:52):
one that has a lot of dialect. It's also totally nonlinear,
so he plays a lot with time. We move back
and forward in time, just just like constantly, in a
way that is very unmooring for the reader. There's also
a lot of figurative language. It's such beautiful prose. It's
just I mean, we could open to any page and
spend hours dissecting just the absolute beauty of the language

(15:16):
that he uses. But I will be the first to
say that it's not necessarily all clear what we are
talking about, but there's a huge amount of figurative language,
metaphor symbolism. Similarly, the birds are really symbolic, the trees,
the rain, I mean, all of these different things stand
for what they are, but they also stand in for
other forces. We also another aspect that makes the book

(15:39):
difficult is this idea of kind of the mythic quality.
In many ways, it's sort of timeless. It has this
sort of epic feel to it, and it's not until
we reach, you know, sort of three quarters of the
way through, and then at the very end of the
novel that's when it becomes kind of more grounded in time.
We have mentioned of the Guia Tristeira, the Cristero upright,

(16:00):
and then at the end we have a mentioned of
Villa and Caranza, so we know then that we are
firmly in the twentieth century. The Mexican Revolution, I believe
in nineteen eleven. I'm always so happy to hear I mean,
I've listened to many different lectures and read lots and
lots of stuff about this book over time, and at
first I was like, Okay, I'm going to really have
to like study up and understand the Mexican Revolution and

(16:22):
did attempt to do that, and was very happy when
I realized that even scholars of the Mexican Revolution are
at times confused by the Mexican Revolution. So we have
the confusion of the Mexican Revolution at the end, but
up until then we have this very sort of mythic quality,
and in some ways I think that does make it
feel sort of difficult for the reader, because we're not

(16:43):
grounded in the way we would be in your sort
of typical novel, which is to say, your typical realist novel.
So those are kind of aspects of the text that
make the text challenging and as I said, rewarding. But
I will also argue that there's an extra layer of
difficulty if you are someone who is American and who
is reading this in English. The reason why I think

(17:04):
it's difficult in part is simply the conception of death
in Mexico. So you know, the Spaniards come in, They're
a Catholic country. Mexico is very Catholic in many ways.
But if you are someone who knows about like the
altars that people build or via de lortos, you know
that there is this sense in Mexico that even when
people die, they are still you know, somewhat accessible to us.

(17:26):
There is the feeling that if people die violently that
they can't rest and they will kind of come back
to haunt you. But more so than that, there is
this feeling that we can still be in touch with
these people, and that on these altars you leave little
things for them, things that they like, foods that they like,
because in fact, they are still in many ways with us.
And you know, there's so many, like really appealing ideas

(17:48):
about that, and RULEFO is really leaning into that idea.
So we have all of these different voices, many of
whom are people who are speaking to us beyond the grave.
But it's important to note if you are an American
reader of this, that that is not it's not like
some Edgar Allan Poe thing where we are being haunted
by I mean, I guess it kind of is like that,
but in the ways that Americans look at death, you know,

(18:12):
Edgar Allan Poe is writing horror. It's a thing of
horror if you have someone haunting you. As far as
I can speak to Mexican culture, which is not very far,
but through literature and through my exposure as a Californian
and as someone who spent quite a bit of time
in Mexico with her grandparents when she was young, I
can say that it is not a horror thing. This
is not a horror film. This is simply a different

(18:33):
conception of what happens when people die. So this is
very important in the text because a lot of what
feels kind of normal and accepted about these voices of
the dead is very much a part of the culture.
It's not something that should be thought of as like
magic realism, because in fact, this is largely the way
that death is conceived of. So before we move off

(18:55):
the idea of like what makes the text difficult, I
want to share this amazing insight that was given to
me by a very close friend and graduate school And
in fact, it was this book that we were talking
about at the time. So I was kind of trying
to piece together the whole thing and trying to understand
this and trying to understand that, and this very smart
graduate school friend was like, maybe that's not the point.

(19:18):
Maybe the point is not that we should be sort
of trying to piece together a chronology, and we should
try and and we should like, figure out the plot,
and we should figure out who the narrator is and
who he's talking to at any given moment. The contention
of this graduate school friend, and I absolutely think it's true.
Is that that kind of confusion, Like when you're reading
something and you're confused and you're like, wait, I don't

(19:39):
know which generation we're talking about. I don't know who
Don Lucas is compared to Don Pedro compared to Don Miguel.
If you have those three generations kind of mixed in
your head and you're not really sure who they are,
then you should take a little step back and think, like,
why is it that an author would want me to
feel confused about this? And the answer is very clear,
which is that in those three generations, we have this

(20:01):
repetition of really important key aspects of those people, which
is corruption and violence and horrible attitudes toward women and greed.
So all of these things are repeated generation to generation.
So essentially, when he's making us confused about which is
the grandfather and which is the grandson, that is much

(20:21):
less relevant then the idea that nothing is changing, that
these people are interchangeable. I'm going to have to bring
up Garcia Marquez again in one Hundred Years of Solitude.
This is the classic example of this kind of confusion,
which is that you know, everyone is named like Aureliano
or everyone is Jos Ergado. There's so many different people,
and man, people have done some really elaborate family trees

(20:44):
to try to kind of comprehend what is happening with
these generations, when in fact that's not really the point.
The point is that if there are fourteen Aureos, you're
not supposed to be keeping track of like who's who.
You're supposed to be thinking about the fact that this
one generation is prol for reading this same sort of person.
So this is an excellent tip for all your readers

(21:05):
out there, your readers of difficult texts, because basically you
can let yourself off the hook. You can be like, wait,
I'm super confused about the time here. You just take
a step back and think, like, why am I being
confused about the time, which is very pertinent here. The
reason why you're confused about which time we are in
in Pedro Barramo. You don't know if we're with Juan
Priciado or we're with his mother when she's a child.

(21:28):
Maybe even if we're with Pedro Barramo when he is
a child, which you know, then you're going back to
the late nineteenth century, you know, eighteen seventy or eighty.
If we don't know what era we are in, if
we can't figure out the year, you just take a
step back and you think, okay, that is because not
enough is changing. That is because in many ways it
is the same reality for Juan Priciado as it is

(21:49):
for Pedro Barramo. So in some ways, I don't think
he sat back and I was like, okay, let me
think of all the ways I can confuse these people
in ways that are significant. My sense is that, you know,
when he went to write about the Mexican Revolution and
the state of Mexico in the middle of the twentieth century,
to him, it felt like no time had passed, and
it felt like everything was fragmented, and it felt like

(22:10):
he was hearing many, many voices of many generations. So
in this text we do, in fact have this question
of like, which of the Baramos is which, So we
have that confusion. We do have this idea of time
as being very elastic. We also, of course have this
polyphony all of these different voices that we are hearing
all in the same plane, they're kind of happening all

(22:31):
in the same instance. In many ways, we also have
all those murmurs and all those echoes and all the shadows,
all of which are kind of confusing. But again, you
need to think that this is a place that in
many ways is haunted, and it is haunted because of
the violence of Bedro Barramo, because of corruption, because of revolution.
So when you're a little bit confused by like why

(22:51):
are there no trees, Like it seems weird that there
are no trees in this town, especially because Dolores, who
was Juan's mother, had talked about it as being this
kind of paradise. Then now there are no trees. That's
kind of an extreme and in some ways it feels
deliberate and you're like, wait what. But when you're doing that,
when you're asking yourself like wait, I can't figure out,
like why Juan Breciado is having such a different experience,

(23:13):
that kind of confusion should help you step back and
think a little bit more about what the confusion is
trying to do. Okay, now that we've talked a little
bit about the challenges of the text. We're going to
move on to talk about this addition. So the Spanish
edition that I have has a cover that I love.
Those of you on the YouTube can see I'm showing
you the cover here. There are two dogs, kind of

(23:35):
wild savage dogs running along on a cream background with
a typeface that I really am enjoying, and it simply
says and J this latest edition that came out in
twenty twenty four. I'm actually checking, no, it was twenty
twenty three. So this idea that Valeria luis Eli had
really spurred me on that literally could have been at
the very end of twenty twenty three. One of the

(23:56):
things that I love so much about this cover is
that the photograph on the front of it is taken
by Roufau himself. He was an incredible photographer. This was
somewhere in Wahaka, and I really I just think it's excellent.
I mean you have to look at the back and
look at the photo credit in order to know that,
but it's excellent. So of course, the importance of this
is that this is a new translation by a guy

(24:16):
named Douglas Weatherford. I have to say part of me
was like, okay, if his name is Douglas, then he's
going to be very old school. He's going to be,
first of all, like an old dude. I don't actually
know how old he is, but I was a little
bit worried that we were going to have kind of
an old and stuffy translation, which some of you were like, wait,
how could you have an old and stuffy translation. It's
simply going to be what it's going to be. But

(24:36):
of course any novel in anyone's hands is going to
be translated differently, and we're going to discuss the translation
in one minute. But I think the first thing you
notice is not actually the Douglas Weatherford thing at the bottom,
but the fact that underneath Juan Rulfo we have in
fairly large letters. Again, if you're on the YouTube, you're
seeing it in front of either it says Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

(24:57):
So I understand that reason for put that on the
cover of the book. I mean, that's a very good
marketing thing in the sense that people are drawn by
that name, people want to hear what he has to say.
But the bummer is that that this is the same
forward that he wrote in nineteen eighty and it drove
me crazy when I read it earlier, because it is
all about Garcia Marquez. I really wanted to hear something

(25:19):
about Juan Rulfo. And there's even one point when Garcia
Marquez says, for that reason, it would be impossible for
me to write about him without it seeming that I'm
writing about myself, and in the margin, I'm like, uh yeah,
because really the whole thing is about him. So he
tells the story about how he's in Mexico City, he's
having writer's block, he really needs to be writing, and

(25:40):
that someone tosses him a slim book and it is
better Barramo, And before you know it, Garcia Marquez can
like do the whole entire novel by heart, Like he
can simply sit down and recite the whole entire thing
with no errors, which I mean, I have my doubts
about that, But what is important is that he's really
acknowledging the influences that Rulefo has on his work. So

(26:02):
I do appreciate that. But I also think, my god,
since nineteen eighty, don't we have some really important, incredible
people saying incredible things about Pedro Barramo. I was a
little bit disappointed to have yet more of this same
introduction by Garcia Marcuz. And don't get me wrong, I
mean I'm kind of shooting on Garcia Mardcaz here, and
I really don't mean to be. I love his work.

(26:22):
In fact, we have foxed page lectures on one hundred
years of Solitude. In fact, that is literally the thing
that has been most downloaded. Sixty five thousand people have
listened to that episode, many of them in Columbia, which
made me very happy. But I also really feel like,
in many ways I want Rulefou to step out of
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's shadow. So this translator has Douglas, our friend.

(26:45):
Douglas has his note at the back as well, and
I always love to hear what translators have to say
about their work. And I thought it was so funny
because basically what he makes the big deal of is
that he has reincorporated all the ways that one Ruleful
originally was marking dialogue. So again mdash and the M
dash is typical in terms of Spanish writing, writing in

(27:06):
the Spanish language and in terms of French writing, so
lots of times, instead of quotation marks, you'll simply have
an M dash and then you'll have whatever the person
is saying. I personally really like that very much. But
he also has all of these other ways that I've
talked about before, double quotation marks, single quotation marks, the
little guillome double arrow things that they use in France,

(27:28):
and it's very important. And Douglas talks about this. I
don't know why I'm so chummy with him. I should
probably be saying Weatherford. Weatherford talks about the fact that
for the reader it's actually much easier because when you
have italics, which is another way that we know that
someone is speaking almost always, almost always when it is italics,
it is one. But I see those mother who is speaking,

(27:51):
and a lot of those different quotation marks, not actual
quotation marks, but marks around quotation. A lot of those
signal different people speaking. So in many ways, in the
past translations into English, where they have made everything standard
was just the standard quotation marks. It's actually more difficult
for the reader because you've lost some of this context

(28:12):
that you get with all of these different marks of quotation.
It's also very well known there was an English translation
I don't even have the guy's name. It came out
in nineteen fifty nine. So four years after Roulfou published
by Robarramo in Spanish, and in that one, apparently the
guy like because things were really confusing, he just was
chopping out whole sections. One of the interviews I've listened

(28:34):
to said that you can find that those editions, but
they cost like twenty five hundred dollars, which is ironic
because I think they're probably really bad. It was really
bugging me that I didn't know the name of that translator.
His name is Lysander Kemp, which actually that's kind of
an amazing name, Lysander Kemp. But then in the mid nineties,
I think it's nineteen ninety four, we have a woman
named Margaret Sayers Peden and she does her translation, which

(28:55):
I think was superior to Lysander Kemp's. But what she
did was in her attempts to make things more clear
to people, which I mean, there's your problem right there,
like you shouldn't be trying to make things more clear,
But she took that upon herself and added a bunch
of stuff. So Valeria Luiseli speaks to these different sort
of translations, one of them being too stripped down, one

(29:15):
of them being a bit overdone, and she comes down
with the idea that the Weatherford translation is the best
of them. It's actually very clever. It's the end of
her review, and she says, if Rudefu says that you
need to be at reading this book three times to
understand it, then apparently maybe we also need three different
translations in order to be able to understand it. Leave
it to Luise Eli to be incredibly clever. Okay, we're

(29:38):
going to take a quick second and we're going to
take a look at this ultra famous first line of Barramo.
We're going to read it in Spanish and then read
both of the translations. I do not have the Lysander
Kemp version because apparently it costs twenty five hundred dollars
and it's trash. But we're going to look at the
other two. So part of this is just an exercise
and translation to realize that the subtle teas in a

(29:59):
work like this really need to be conveyed, and it
just speaks to the difficulty of the job. So in
this is something I hadn't realized. Apparently in Mexico, you
read this, you read po or at least some of
the short stories of Juan Rufol. It's a part of
the cannon, so you read it in this kind of
compulsory way, and apparently the first sentence is something that

(30:20):
like many many Mexicans have have sort of memorized. So
we have this ultra famous first line that reads this Themala.
And in the Margaret series Pete and we have this,
I came to Komala because I had been told that
my father, a man named Pedro Barramo, lived there. So

(30:42):
you can hear it's a little bit clunky. My eyeballs
are like looking all around the screen if you're on
the YouTube, So it's a little clunky because what she
does is she interjects a phrase a man named Pedro Barramo,
and then she has the phrase lived there. At the end,
she also does this interesting thing. She says she had
been told and in Spanish it's the predator el breto

(31:03):
medicheron they told me or I was told it was
not I had been told. So she puts it into
the plut squam perfecto, which makes it into it's like
the past of the past. So in some ways, yes,
you know, she can think that that he had been
told this before he left, before he came to Kumala.
But it's actually not, in my opinion, it's not as

(31:25):
faithful to the text. And then in the text when
it has undal Baramo, she says a man named Pedro Baramo,
and then we end with this idea of that he
had lived there in Weatherford, we have a couple of
very important changes that I really liked. So our friend
Douglas has the following, I came to Komala because I
was told my father lived here, a man named Pedro Baramo.

(31:48):
So some really important differences here. One is that we
have that we have the the preterat the simple past
here I was told, not I had been told, So
that feels to me much more faithful. Dichern, I was
told my father lived here, so aka in Spanish, I
most certainly think of it as here that Sayer's Pedin

(32:09):
has it as lived there. So what this is doing
right from the beginning, and this is the kind of
subtlety that I think the book really deserves. It's it's
putting us right into the place of Coomala. So when
when when Sayer's pede and says I came to Komala
because my father lived there, it is there, So we
have this idea of distance between the reader and the place,

(32:29):
whereas with the Douglas Weatherford it's much closer to this
aka Akabi villa. I was told my father lived here,
so we have this sense of being much more anchored
in the place. And then it's very important to me
that Weatherford ends the sentence the same way that Ruleefo does.
He says a man named Bedro Paramo. It's crucial. I mean,
we've talked a lot on the on the Fox page

(32:51):
about paying attention to what words come last. You should
pay very careful attention to the last sentence in a paragraph,
the last paragraph in a chapter, and even the last
word of a sentence. So we have all of this
momentum of this first sentence, which is crucial, and we
end with this very important I think it is very
much to weather for its credit that he is restoring that.

(33:12):
And one of the things that I was kind of
bummed out about. There isn't really a way or at
least these two haven't found it to capture that idea
of it's kind of like this guy, this guy p
I mean that is my my like English speaking kind
of very loose translation, but un it's like it's very
sort of casual, and it's like, it's sort of to me,

(33:33):
it feels kind of like this guy. I think this
guy might have been a little bit informal for mister Weatherford.
But a man named pro Baramo is fairly different to
my ear than und All of this is to say
that those of you who are lucky enough to be
able to read Peter Baramo in Spanish, you should count

(33:53):
yourselves very fortunate. I have to say, if you are
someone who has quite a bit of Spanish or not
a ton of Spanish, I'm not sure that I think
you should dive right into the original Spanish with this one.
There are a lot of books that I would recommend
that you read to kind of like, you know, get
the Spanish back up and rolling. This is maybe not
one of them. You might consider com there's a lecture

(34:14):
on that, and that is a book that is much
more straightforward in many different ways. Okay, so I told
you that one of the things that's I think very satisfying,
and it totally flies in the face of what I
said earlier about just like accepting the confusing nature of
this book, which is to just sort of like take
a step back and look at what is happening to
try to kind of recreate what it is that is happening.

(34:36):
And in many ways we have a fairly simple plot
which I am going to outline here. And what's interesting
is the ways that Jean Juan Rulefot has really complicated
the whole thing. So in the very beginning we have
Juan Breciado who has come into town. By the way,
you should hang on until the end of this lecture
because I'm going to do a thing at the end
about the names. The names in this book are incredible

(34:58):
when an author names a character with his own name.
If Juan Rulfo is naming Juan Preciado that name, then
then you should, you know, maybe just take a step
back and think, like, Okay, this is someone who who
rulefo maybe identifies with this idea of someone who is
searching for answers about his Mexican past. And I mean again,
like the idea of him as as a ware fund

(35:19):
as an orphan really speaks to this idea maybe of
also wanting to find his father. So we have the
idea of Jue Preciado. His mother dies, and her dying
wish is that he go back to Comala and get
what they owe him. So we find out a little
bit later that pro Baramo, who is one Preciado's father,
he married the mother Dolores in a kind of a

(35:40):
land grab, and it's interesting to me that she somehow escapes.
I mean, she is someone who leaves the town, and
in fact leaves with one of his sons. So as
one is walking in, he's walking toward Comala, he runs
into this guy who is like a mule driver. And
this guy's name is Abundo Martinez. So here we are
starting with some oilers. People. This is in fact, these

(36:01):
are like the big ones. So maybe like zip forward,
maybe like two minutes or something in the lecture. If
you're not wanting to hear these spoilers, you're actually gonna
want to skip ahead eleven minutes. I kept track of it.
It took me eleven minutes to kind of run through
what's actually happening in the text. If you're someone who
doesn't want the spoilers, just you know, catapult yourself eleven
minutes into the future of this lecture. So at the

(36:23):
beginning of the book, we have this Abundo Martinez, which
of course means abundance. She starts walking with one and
telling him that, in fact, Pedro Barramo is dead. But
Abundu is very important because we find out at the
very end of the book that he is another son
of Perro Barramo, and in fact that Abundo is the
person who is going to murder his father. We don't
know that in the beginning. Juan keeps moving. He gets

(36:44):
to Komala, he meets a woman named Eduijes. He goes
into her house, He hears all of these different echoes,
all of these murmers. He has some you know, different
conversations with ed wigs. Then he dies, which I mean spoiler.
I think it's about eighty pages in. It's like, you know,
sort of three quarters of the way through the book,
two thirds, which is so important because we have this

(37:05):
first person narrator who ends up kind of he's suffocating.
We get the sense that he is being buried alive
in some ways, and then in his coffin with him,
he also has this woman Dorodea. So he is hearing
all of these voices now in the graveyard. So this
is when the polyphony really gets rolling. We have all
of these different voices, and through all of these voices

(37:25):
which we've heard bits and pieces of them beforehand, but
we start piecing together this story. So we have Jue
who is like our outsider who is coming in and
he is sort of our conduit. He's the way that
we are making our way into the town and beginning
to appreciate the story of Po Barramo. So the title
of the book is very important. Obviously, you should always

(37:47):
pay attention to the title, and the title of this
book in particular is really shaping our focus. We are
really meant to focus on this guy, Pe Barramo. We
learn that his father Lucas Barramo, which is very confused
in the beginning, because first we hear about Miguel who's
the son, and then we hear about Lucas who's the father.
Lucas Baramo is killed at a wedding by mistake, and

(38:08):
then Pedro is like sort of a sends and is
like the big leader of the Maria Luna. And what
he starts doing is very corruptly. You know, these all
these land grabs. He becomes the kasike, the like strong man,
the landholder, and he's just taking all of this land
from all of these different people. He's raping a lot
of people. He has all of these different sons that

(38:28):
he does not recognize as legitimate. He has one son, Miguel,
who he does recognize as legitimate, and Miguel is a
total ass. He is like a crazy rapist. To see
the ways that this corruption and violence increases in each generation,
Miguel actually dies, which is important. He is not the
only son of Peterro Barramo, but in many ways, because

(38:49):
he has the last name, this is kind of the
end of the line, which actually has quite a bit
to do with one hundred years of Solitude, which really
has a lot to do with this notion of the
end of a certain line. The est so right from
the start, intermixed with the idea of Juan story, we
hear a little bit about the backstory of Juan, bit
of Pedro Barramo, and we find out that when he

(39:11):
was a young young lad, he fell in love with
Susana San Juan. And what's interesting is throughout the entire book,
Susana san Juan is resisting Peder Barramo. She marries someone else, Florencio,
and after he dies. I should know this, but I'm
not totally sure whether or not he was killed by Permo,
it makes sense that he would have been don't quote
me on that, but he does take her afterward. Parmo

(39:34):
takes Susanna after Florentio had died, and even after that
she resists. So she resists him in the sense that
that she she's insane, she goes mad. So in many
ways she is someone who does resist him very effectively,
which is in stark contrast to all of the women
he has raped along the way. At the toward the

(39:55):
end of the book, we have mentioned of the Gristeo
uprising that comes in about page so we are well
into the book before we have this historical marker that
situates us in time and in space. And then at
the very end, as I mentioned, we have Villa and
Carranza who enter. They themselves don't but all of the
people who are essentially working for pro Baramo join the revolution.

(40:18):
A little further along at the very end of the
book also Susana dies and be Barramo is so angry
because the town has kind of a celebration but is
not in fact mourning her appropriately. And in the final
pages of the book we have Blo Barramo like crossing
his arms and cursing the town and saying they will
starve to death, and that is exactly what happens. It's

(40:39):
also crazy because he is essentially, I mean, the town
is his. He essentially owns all of the land, and
he owns everything that's happening. So when he is doing this,
when he curses the town in this very kind of
petty and spiteful way, he's actually also harming himself. So
if we look at him as a as an example

(41:00):
of the Mexican landholder of this era, we see them
as corrupt, we see them as greedy. We see them
also as doing all sorts of things that are really
contrary to their best interests. Then at the very end
of the book we have Beabadamo killed by Abundio, which
that in many ways just crushed me, because Abundo's wife
has just died, his Kuka he calls her, that's the nickname,

(41:23):
and just the day before we have one of the
only really beautiful visions of marriage and of passion when
Abundo and his wife, just the very day before she dies,
they have sex, and it's this kind of she's I
think frisky as a Philly, which I should look that up.
But if I start looking things up. In the original,
we literally will be here forever. But we have this
kind of beautiful and uncomplicated vision of people who are

(41:45):
happy together and passionate and in love. And then the
very next day she dies, he does not have enough
money to carry her. He goes to Paramo, who refuses
him the money, and Abundio kills him. So it's very important.
I mean, I've just laid out this whole thing, but
it's important that we begin with Peter Bramo and we
end with be and our Juan, but Isiado, who in

(42:06):
the beginning is our narrator, he kind of falls to
the wayside, and we have all of these different voices
who are telling us this story, which ultimately is a
story about patricide. It's about killing your father. It's also
about greed and lust and poverty and wealth and corruption.
And when you lay it out like that, it's fairly simple,
and it's also very I mean, there's obviously a lot

(42:26):
of subplots that are happening here, but it's very moving.
It is in many ways a love story, but it
is one that is couched in this idea of incredible
corruption and violence and negativity. So I mentioned a couple
of times so far, this idea that this book is
very kind of archetypal. This is a book that is
speaking to really large questions. I mean, these are the
things that you know, like classic tragedy meaning like classical

(42:49):
meaning the classics meaning Greek and Roman. It feels like that,
and in many ways, I think that kind of timeless feel,
the kind of mythic nature of the whole thing is
what makes it so enduring. In many ways, it could
be any town in Mexico. It could also be any
town where we have this kind of disparity between the
very rich and the very poor. So I wanted to

(43:10):
kind of just like zip through a few of these
like big archetypal elements that we have that add to
that feeling. So we have this idea of the quest
of a son trying to find his father. You think
of Telemachus, this idea of needing to find your father.
We also have just the quest story. This is someone
who we have Juan Priciado very clearly heading out on

(43:31):
this kind of quest. It is also a revenge story,
so what he is hoping for is to take back
what they are owed. So it's not revenge and the
sense of violent revenge, but it's the sense of kind
of avenging his mother, getting back what it is that
pro Bramo stole from them. It's a story of the underworld.
So I was kind of convinced that Gomala was meant

(43:53):
to be Hell. It has everything to do with heat.
There's all kinds of heat. Gomal is like the it's
like a frying pan, and so the idea of Gomala
is really speaking to the idea of heat, of things
being heated up and cooked. So I was kind of like, Okay,
I'm going to read this as the underworld as Hell.
But there's some very specific times where he is talking
about Hell and it is not synonymous with Gomala. So

(44:15):
there's one part where he's talking about how all of
the things that are left in the house of Donia eluiges,
all of the stuff that she has, a lot of
people leave their stuff with her as they move on,
and there's a mention of some people coming back to
Gomala from Hell in order to get their blankets. So
if they're mentioning, you know they're coming back from Hell,

(44:36):
then clearly Gomala is not Hell. But it is a
kind of purgatory so this also goes back to this idea,
this kind of the Mexican idea of things being that
things of dead people being kind of undead and being
able to sort of revisit our world. And I suspect that,
as an American and someone who grew up in a
very like Judaeo Christian kind of moment, that I am

(44:57):
missing some of the nuance of. But we're in very
much like a like a purgatory sort of situation. It
is very obviously a story about power, and by agents
of power, we have a lot of corruption. So and
more specifically, this is the power of greed, the power
of land holding over the people, the power of people
who have things over the power of people who have nothing.

(45:21):
So we have this idea of, like you know, absolute
power corrupts absolutely. We have this idea that this kind
of greed can only lead to someone's downfall. We also, though,
have this story about love. I mean, from the very
beginning we see by Robaramo and this very kind of
innocent and pure love that he has for Susanna, and
that love never it never works. In fact, love on

(45:42):
every single level throughout this book is either thwarted or
kind of perverted. We have one couple who lives in
the town who are who are brother and sister, but
who are having sex. So we have this idea of incest,
which is clearly very taboo. So even when we see
like something that looks like a marriage, it is in
fact perverted. And like the very first night when Dolores

(46:03):
is supposed to go with pro Baramo, it is their
wedding night. They're supposed to go off and consummate their marriage,
and it turns out she's having her period. One of
the interviews I listened to made the point that that
was actually a very daring thing to talk about in
Mexico in nineteen fifty five, the fact that she was
having her period and that it would be unlucky for
her to consummate her marriage, so she sends eduches instead.

(46:26):
So even when we have these ideas of marriage, what
we have what we see here is actually ed Eduviks
also does not consummate the marriage with Paramo because he's
had too much to drink and he cannot consummate anything.
But the point is that even when we have images
of marriage and love and partnership, they end up being
kind of perverted in some ways. I mean that in
the broadest term of perverted, and ultimately, of course, again

(46:48):
we have this idea of patricide. I love the idea
that we begin with Abundio. He's in the beginning of
the book, and then he is also at the end
of the book, and he is the one, our kind
of lowly mule driver who really writes up in many
ways as the one person in the town who can
sort of stand up against him. He's kind of every man,
and he is the one who avenges. It's one of

(47:09):
the sons. It's just kind of one of many of
these poverty stricken sons who comes and kills Pedro Barramo.
It's also very important, and I think people sleep on
this a little bit. It's important to recognize that when
we have this first person narrator, when Juan Preciado is
coming into the town and we very much identify with
him because we're hearing his thoughts and we're kind of

(47:30):
like right with him, and we're figuring things out at
the same time he's figuring them out. Lots of people
just think that he is the narrator the whole entire time,
which is not the case. He is one of many narrators.
He's the first person narrator for lots of third person narrators.
But this idea of the reader as being fairly like
closely aligned with Juan Preciado is really important because we

(47:51):
are aligning ourselves with one of the many sons of
po and the fact that we have a name, which
we're about to get to the names, which is amazing,
but we have a name, and we have an individual,
and we are sympathetic to this individual who is confused
and who's being like led through this weird house with
all of this stuff in it by eduikes and he's
left in this empty room which is full of whispers

(48:14):
and murmurs and whatnot of the undead. Partially because people
were tortured in that room, which is a whole other
strain of the novel. But our association with one Priciado
is so important, and I think one of the reasons
one of the ways that we can think about this
naming of Juan Preciado and Juan Rulfo is the idea
that Juan Rulfo is is you know, he's the author

(48:34):
of the book, but he is creating all of these
different narrators, but he's giving himself kind of like an
extension into the book in the form of Juan Priciado.
So as a narrator, like Juan Ruefau in many ways
is the third person narrator who's telling us the whole
entire story, but we also have Juan Priciado, who is
another first person narrator. So it's almost as if Juan

(48:56):
Preciado is kind of like a stand in in some
ways for Okay, we're going to dive on in to
the name part. So if you are someone who is
listening to the Fox Page because you want to like
become a better reader, which I'm doing my quotation oh
my gosh, if you're on the YouTube, every time I
do quotation marks on the YouTube, all these all these

(49:17):
balloons come up. I think it's because it looks like
the peace sign or something. Always totally startling to me.
But if you want to become a better reader, one
of the things that you can do is simply pay
more attention. And one of the things you should pay
attention to are the names. So I was struck in
this reading of Better I've read it many times by
the number of names. So many names are accumulating, which

(49:39):
makes sense because we're hearing all of these different voices,
and of course each one of those voices comes with
a name, so we have we have this sense of
this proliferation of names, but every single one of them
is also so significant, and in a book that's kind
of spare, everything seems kind of barren. We have some description,
although a lot of it is of the old Gomala

(50:01):
when it was raining and fertile and had beautiful fields,
as Delotes remembers it. Everything has been kind of stripped down,
so we don't have a lot of landmarks and we
don't have like a lot of description. There's there's some,
but not tons. So names are one of the ways
that we can really like situate ourselves in time and
in space. So there really important. And Juan Rulfau is

(50:23):
such a genius that of course he's not giving them
a names willy nilly. This is like a very specific
exercise in significance of names. So of course we have
p Pro means rock, like piedra or stone. It comes
from the Greek meaning stone. Peter, of course is the
apostle that apparently I did not know this. I got

(50:44):
this out of like literally like baby names dot com,
no it wasn't that, but something like that, that that
Peter was the apostle, that that Jesus said, like, you
are the apostle, Peter, you are the rock upon which
I will build the church. So you have this idea
of Peter as all being an apostle. And Barramo is
like a it's like a baron. It's kind of like

(51:05):
a mesa. From what I understand, somebody translated as waste land,
and I think that's a bit extreme, but it is
a land that that's kind of open and somewhat barren,
but also is a little bit high, which I think
is interesting. Then we have one, of course, in many ways,
the idea of Juan just you know, being John is
kind of a stand in for kind of every man

(51:26):
because it is such a common name. But we also
of course have John the Baptist. Is that even right,
John the Baptist. I think that's right. But I Seattle
is important because of course it means like valued or esteemed,
and it is not precioso like it's not it's not precious.
It's not something that just inherently is valued or is precious.
It's but I siato is more like it's being valued

(51:48):
by someone else, so we have this idea of him
as being valued. We have the lotus, which of course
means like sorrows or pains. It's important that Juan's mother
is called the lorus. We have, we have Dolores, we
have Pedro, we have Miguel, who is the son of
Perro Barramo. Miguel apparently means who is God question mark
and this is from Wikipedia. But it is an interesting

(52:10):
question that Miguel would be someone who is questioning God
because he is not a great dude and is certainly
putting a lot of things to the test. Lucas comes
from Luke, which comes from lucere in Latin, which means
to shine, which is interesting only because the grandfather figure
of them all is not someone who's actually shining it. Also,

(52:31):
I did not know this, but Lucas can be like
a like a word like wacky, or it can be
like someone's crazy. The etymology there, I guess, is because
it's kind of close to Loco. And what's interesting is
Bato Lucas is like daffy duck, like this idea of
like kind of a silly daffy person. And I looked
because I was like, I wonder if Daffy Duck even
existed around the time of Juan rule for writing Baramo,

(52:54):
And sure enough, Daffy Duck and Pato Lucas were invented
in nineteen thirty seven, So it is possible, in fact,
that that Juan Rulfo is using Lucas in a sense
of kind of like Daffy silly, like not very intelligent,
which is interesting, you know, the root of the entire
family tree. We then have Eduviques, which is a German word,

(53:16):
and it's very interesting to think about. In Mexico in
the middle of the twentieth century, you have this very
strange situation where you have this upper crust of people,
this like very like a lot of the wealth being
held in the in the hands of very few, and
those people really wanting to live in very European ways.
So if we give eduvichs this this kind of German name,

(53:38):
it speaks maybe a little bit to that. It also
eduviks means one who is willing to fight for a battle,
fighter and edukees as one of the last people standing here,
really is someone who we think of as a fighter.
We then have ful Gore Sano. He's kind of like
Betrobatama's right hand man, fulgor meaning like something that is refulgent,

(53:58):
like like like that has a lot of splendor and brightness,
which is somewhat ironic because he's really like the henchmen
of this greedy, like terrible person. I thought it was
so interesting. Rendia is a Basque word. It's a Basque name,
and it means to rent or a renter, which if
it's baddia, it's very interesting to say that the priest

(54:19):
has things kind of like on lease, that he's not
really like owning his religion. And we could talk for
although I'm not really qualified to talk a lot about this,
but the idea of the Catholicism and the failures of
the Church are hugely important in the book. Then we
have Susanna. So Susanna is from the Hebrew, so you're

(54:40):
pushing here a little against the Catholicism. And it's a
it's it's a version of Shoshana and it means lily
or rose, so this is kind of an it's it's
the name of something beautiful and something that can perish,
something that is somewhat fragile, and it is a name
that works well in Spanish it's not quite as odd
as ed Riques, but to me it sound like like

(55:00):
kind of your typical. It wasn't like Maria, so it
had a little bit of like a fraison of some
kind of like like strangeness to it that seems absolutely perfect.
Of course, her last name is San Juan. So here
we have the idea of Saint John the Baptist, and
we have that association with both Juan Bresciado and also
with Juan Rufo. We then have Dorothea, who is the

(55:22):
woman who she's mentally ill, and she has the little
bundle that she thinks is her baby, and her dootea
means gift of God, which is so sad because she
has this baby who might you know, have been her
gift from God, but it never she was never able
to have a baby. And she is the one at
the end who is in the coffin with Juan Preciado.

(55:43):
We have Bonice, who is the brother of the incestuous
couple that comes from Dionysus from the Greek who is
the goddess of wine and debauchery, which makes some sense
because in fact he is, you know, in an incestuous
relationship and it certainly sounds like his is not really
like happy about it, so you have the idea of
him as being cruel. But it's interesting to me that

(56:06):
this is a name. It's an unusual name in Spanish certainly,
and it harkens all the way back in fact, to
the Greek, which is important because that's kind of this
like timeless error that the whole text has. We then
have Abundio, which is abundant or plentiful, which is ironic
because at the end, what makes him so angry at
the end of the book. I'm not going to spoil
I'm not going to repeat what he does, but he

(56:28):
doesn't have he doesn't have the money for what he
needs to do, and that leads to a terrible chain
of events. Also significantly, his last name is Martinez, which
is the son of Martin Martine of course being associated
with Mars and the god of war, so this is
someone who has violence in him. It's like part of
his name. It's also interesting to me that he would

(56:48):
have the name Martinez, presumably that is his mother's last name.
We do not have a lot of like Abundio Baramo
running around, because in fact, only Miguel is the one
as far as I know who is acknowledged by Pedro.
But as I mentioned before, there's so many names we
have Gusman, Damiana, sixteen, Anna, Barbolo, like tons and tons

(57:09):
of names, which again speaks to this proliferation. And I'm
sure we could, you know, look into the etymologies of
all of these, and we would be very impressed. But
we're not going to do that. I'm going to end
with this last name, which is Melchiades. So those of
you who know Garcia Marcus, well, if you're reading through
Peder Paramo, you would be like, oh my gosh, it's Melchiades.
Melchiades ends up being a crucial, crucial character in one

(57:31):
hundred Years of Solitude, and when Garcia Marquez names him that,
it's like a nice little kind of nod to p
It's like he's acknowledging his debt to Juan Rulfo. And
what I like about it is Melchiades. It's it's it's
it's Greek origins and it means God is my light.
It comes from the sophony, it comes from the Greek Melchiades.

(57:53):
So if you were reading one hundred Years of Solitude
and you're like, what's up with this weird Melchiades name.
Maybe it's Melchiades in fact comes from the Greek via
Pedro Baramo, who was in fact evoking in many ways
these epic storylines. But one thing I like about it
is Melchia. This is one of the very few people
who survive in Gomala and have kind of I think

(58:14):
he has left, but he has survived. He is still living,
at least at a certain point in the novel. So
it's nice that Garcia Marquez chose someone whose name is
very distinct so we recognize it, but also someone who
kind of survives Gomala and then goes on to have
this next life in one hundred Years of Solitude, which
is a good time actually to talk about some of
the debts that Gabriel Garcia Marquez acknowledges, but also how

(58:36):
we can think about magic realism and Pedro Barramo. And
then after that we're going to look at the close
of the novel. So the first thing that I will
say about one hundred Years of Solitude, it is magic realism.
It's kind of the your archetypal example of magic realism.
And because it has so much of a debt to
p Baramo, people are tempted to lump Pero Barramo in

(58:58):
with the magic realism, and the rationale that they give
is that a lot of what happens is one of
the hallmarks of magic realism, and that is this that
in the world of magic realism you have all of
these unnatural things that are happening, supernatural things. The example
I give is in one hundred Years of Solitude when
they drag the magnet through town and all of the

(59:18):
hinges and all of the nails are coming out of
the houses and are zipping on to the magnet like
that is not something that's going to happen. So it's
a supernatural event. But when it happens, the people in
the town are not particularly wowed by it. They're definitely
wowed by the idea of progress. This is a book
One hundred Years of Solitude is definitely problematizing the question

(59:40):
of progress, whether or not it is always good. But
when these different things happen in the novel that are supernatural,
people are not that surprised. The surprising thing is not
that all the nails are flying out of their houses.
So in Piro Paramo, we also have a lot of
things happening that are unusual, and people are not particularly
noticing them or not remarking upon them. They don't seem

(01:00:02):
that unusual to people. But what I would argue is
that most of what is happening in that is unusual
is is people sort of being in these different planes.
So you have dead people who are speaking with live people,
and that is not remarked upon as unusual. But what
I would but I would say is that that that
has to do with this idea that that dead people

(01:00:23):
are still sort of with us and they can still
communicate to us. It is not like the stuff that
we have in one hundred years of Solitude, Like when
when one of Ursula's sons is killed, the little rivulet
of blood like goes from that son all the way
through town, is jumping over curbs and it's you know,
crossing the street, and it arrives to Ursula and she's like,
oh my gosh, one of my sons has died. She's

(01:00:45):
not like struck by the fact that this rivulet of
blood has made its way all across town. She just
is struck by the death of her child. So we
don't have little rivulets of blood that are you know,
crossing the street and jumping over little curbs in Probaama.
What we have instead are things that almost always have
to do with death and dying. So at the beginning

(01:01:06):
I argued that bet Robatramo is a modernist text because
it's fragmented and time is elastic in it, and we
have a lot of different voices, and we enter into
the psychology of a lot of different people. All of
those things make it feel very modernist to me. But
what happens with one hundred Years of Solitude is that
this is a realist novel. That's why it's called magic realism.

(01:01:29):
So the realist novel is just like your average novel.
I think that's the best way to think about it.
It really begins with Madame Bovarie in eighteen fifty one,
maybe a little before that, depending on how you're going
to categorize it. But the realist novel has an omniscient
third person narrator, and it's pretty linear, and it's seeking
to show us this whole world, So there are lots
of details, and the reader is very anchored in that

(01:01:52):
world and very well situated. There's a lot of verisimilitude,
which means that the world of the novel feels very
much like the world of a person. That is not
the case with the Robaramo. In fact, the world is
very shadowy and hard to even begin to picture. But
when you have one hundred Years of Solitude, yes, strange
things are happening, but you're very anchored in that world.

(01:02:15):
When Orsula is in her home and the rivulet of
blood is making its way across town, the town is
very identifiable. You can really feel you know, in fact,
how it's laid out, and how they built it, and
what the houses look like, and you know what Orsula
is up to, and you know what the inside of
her house looks like, in her clothing, and so we
have this very realist novel, one that feels very comfortable

(01:02:37):
for us, feels very real, it feels very visual. We
can really understand what's happening. I mean, there's a lot
of confusing stuff happening with the generations and with the war,
which very much like the Mexican Revolution. It's very hard
to figure out what is happening with the war, but
that's very purposeful. So my ultimate argument is that the

(01:02:58):
reason why one hundred Years of Solitude it is so
much more accessible than be Barramo is because it's magic realism,
but it is also realism. It is a book that
has difficult aspects and surprising aspects and new aspects, but
for the most part it reads like like kind of
like a normal novel. Bebramo, on the other hand, is like,

(01:03:19):
it's not Ulysses exactly, but it is very much like
reading It's it's not even like to the Lighthouse. It's
more like reading like The Waves by Virginia Wolf. So
when people are like, I don't know why Pedrobarramo was
not read as widely as one hundred Years of Solitude,
I think that's kind of a silly question because Berobarramo
is a much more difficult text to access, whereas one
hundred Years of Solitude is tricky in some ways, but

(01:03:41):
in fact it's very easy to inhabit. So we're going
to close to day by looking at some of this
amazing prose. We're going to look at the very end
of the book. If you have not finished the book,
maybe you want to sign off at this point. And
if that is the case, thank you very much for
tuning in. But for the rest of you, I'm going
to go ahead and read just a few pair. We're
going to discuss them very lightly, but mostly I just

(01:04:03):
want to treat you to this amazing prose in what
I think is a very solid translation. So on page
one sixteen of the Douglas translation, we have this. The
media Luna stood alone in silence, everyone walking around barefoot
and speaking in hushed voices. They buried Susana, San Juan
and few and Comala noticed they were celebrating. There were

(01:04:25):
cockfights and music and shouting from drunkards and people playing
games of chance. The lights from town reached all the
way out here and appeared as a halo above the
gray sky. Those were gray days, sad ones for the media.
Luna don Pedro didn't say a word, he didn't leave
his room. He vowed to take revenge on Comala. I'll

(01:04:46):
cross my arms and Gomala will die of hunger. And
that's what he did. A couple of quick things here.
The idea of the media, Luna, I mean, part of that,
like the moon is very much associated with women, which
is ma making it kind of ironic here. But the
idea of a half moon, I mean, there's probably a
lot I'm missing there, but it's this idea too, of

(01:05:07):
things being half like he's not ever fully in control.
He's grasping all the time, but never has things, he's
never satisfied. We also, very importantly here have the Media
Luna stood alone, so at the end is very much
alone in the midst of a town that is absolutely
full of spirits and voices and presences. Very importantly, here

(01:05:30):
we have the Media Luna stood alone in silence. So
there is so much in this book about silence and noise.
There are lots of different sounds. The evocation here of
silence is really important also because it also because it
comes right after a time where lots of sounds, celebratory
sounds are read. So then we have this idea of

(01:05:51):
they buried Susana San Juan. So there we have this distance.
The reader has a distance from the Media Luna. But
then we have this interesting thing. The lights town reached
all the way out here, so that here is very
much like the here at the beginning, where it is
anchoring the reader. We are both in town because the
lights are reaching from there, but it's to hear, so

(01:06:12):
we have this separation. So you get a sense that
you're far from the Media Luna. But then you're also
anchored there, so in some ways the reader gets to
be everywhere at once. Then we have this idea that
in silence, Don Peterro is he says, right here, Don
Petro didn't say a word, and then essentially to himself,
he says, I'll cross my arms and go Maala will
die of hunger, and that is what he did. So

(01:06:34):
we have this very forceful thing, and yet there is
very little voice given to it. So then we're going
to move to the very end of the book, page
one twenty two. Behind them, still sitting in his equipal
Perro Barramo watched us the procession made its way toward town.
As he tried to get up, he felt his left
hand fall lifeless to his knees, but he thought nothing

(01:06:56):
of it. He was accustomed to seeing a new part
of his body die with each passing day. He watched
as the paradise tree trembled, shaking off its leaves. They
all choose the same path, they all leave. Then he
returned to the place where he had left his thoughts. Susanna,
he said. He closed his eyes, I asked you to

(01:07:16):
come back, and then we have this very interesting We
have some of the Guillome with the little French you
know double arrows that designate speaking, And we have this
beautiful thing and Immen's moon hung over the world. I
stared at you until my vision seemed to fade. What
we have there is this really beautiful slippage into just
the words of Pedro Barramo. So when we have the

(01:07:39):
m dash and he says, Susanna, I asked you to
come back, we have it feels like he has been
quoted like formally to some narrator. But then we slip
into his actual thoughts, and it's so beautiful there because
we have an immense moon hung over the world. There
we have the full moon. The meydia a luna is
never full. He doesn't ever get what he wants, but
here we have a sense of what that is. And

(01:08:02):
then on the top of one twenty three, he tried
to raise his hand to reinforce the image in his mind,
but his hand, heavy as if made of stone, would
not lift off his legs. He tried to raise his
other hand, but it dropped slowly down to his side
until it rested on the ground like a crutch, providing
support for a shoulder that had gone limp. This is

(01:08:23):
my death, he said. The sun began to cascade over
all the things covering the earth, giving them back their shape.
The lands spread out before him, empty and in ruins.
The heat warmed his body. His eyes barely moved, but
they jumped from one memory to another, obscuring the present.
Suddenly his heart stopped, and it seemed as if time

(01:08:45):
as well had come to an end, and the breath
of life with it. A couple of things very quickly.
This is dawn. It's so interesting to me the way
that time works. And part of it is that often
it is at dawn that things are ending. So you
have the sense of things as being illogical, but also
as even like the dawning of a new day is
not positive. We also have again this kind of mythical

(01:09:08):
feeling here the sun began to cascade over all the
things covering the earth. We're pulling way back, and we're
looking at this story as if it is a universal
story that can relate to anyone anywhere on earth. So
we have his breath of life stopping. As long as
this is not just another night, he thought. He dreaded
the nights that filled the dark with ghosts, that locked

(01:09:29):
him in with his phantoms. That's what he feared. I'm
sure Abundia will be back within a few hours with
his blood soaked hands to ask again for the help.
I refused him, and my hands won't be able to
shield my eyes to keep from seeing him. I'll be
forced to listen to him until his voice fades with
the light of day, until his voice dies out. He

(01:09:50):
felt hands on his shoulders and he straightened up, becoming stiff.
It's me, don, Pedro said, Damiana, would you like me
to bring out your breakfast? Pedro Paramo replied, I'm coming.
I'm coming now. He supported himself on Da Miana Cisnero's
arms and tried to walk. After a few steps, he fell,
pleading on the inside, but without saying a word. He

(01:10:13):
hit the ground with a hollow thud, crumbling as if
he were a pile of rocks. It's so beautiful. So
here we have I mean, it's very interesting, and I
actually want to read very briefly that last line in
Spanish as well, Dio ungla there's moronandos. So here we

(01:10:36):
have piedras, which, together with Pedro we're beginning with this
idea of Pedro with a stone and then we have
this idea of Rocks that essentially he is he is
falling apart, So we have the disintegration of this casique
and of this kind of patriarch, but we also have
him kind of falling into many different parts. You could
imagine that each one of those piedras is a part

(01:10:57):
of Pedro. He essentially is prolifery. We also have the
sense that in the end, because he is turning into stone,
that he's kind of fulfilling this prophecy, He's fulfilling what
he is meant to be, which is in fact his name,
which is Stone. Mostly though, you have the idea here
that you have this man, this landholder, who has been

(01:11:18):
in charge of everything, and that really truly everything is
coming to an end. It is so haunting and so beautiful.
So I really hope that this discussion of Feedrobaramo, I mean, gosh,
I think you wut pretty well. I'm feeling pretty good
about the idea of that as being at least one
more voice that is speaking to the genius of Juan Rouffo.
And I'm hoping that you've got something out of it

(01:11:39):
that was new and a little different and that helped
you understand this masterpiece a little more fully, so thank
you so much for tuning in. Happy reading,