Exigele Lo Nuestro

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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2001

Exṍgele lo nuestro: Deconstruction, Restitution and the

Demand of Speech in Pedro Páramo

PATRICK DOVE

Although his published literary works are limited to a collection of short stories(El llano en llamas, 1953) and a novella (Pedro Páramo, 1955), the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo is generally recognized as one of the major gures in twentieth-cen-tury Latin American letters. The formal innovations brought about by Rulfo arewidely seen as crucial steps in preparing the way for the distinctive forms of the‘new novel’ and of ‘magical realism’ in writers such as Carlos Fuentes andGabriel Garcṍa Márquez. Rulfo’s writing makes its mark in part by breakingforcefully with naturalism, which had comprised one of the dominant frame-works of the Mexican and Latin American novel during the rst half of thetwentieth century. Or, more precisely, his text produces a rupture within, andnot simply a departure from, the poetic and ideological precepts of naturalism,and specically within prevailing theoretical distinctions between writing andspeech, lettered and oral culture.1 But the considerable inuence that this workholds for Latin American cultural production during the ‘boom’ period and beyond is only partially explained by references to the distinctiveness of style.At the same time, Rulfo’s work constitutes one of the rst attempts to think of Latin American cultural production as a site of irreducible difference: not as onedeterminate identity opposed to another (for instance, between Latin Americaand the Western tradition), but rather as a difference pertaining to tradition as

such.The shattering of the naturalist mirror in Rulfo is prepared by a return to theclassical tradition. Most notably in the novella Pedro Páramo, we nd an ongoingcitation of tragedy and allegory. For Rulfo, these classical forms comprise a stageupon which the origin of modern Mexico takes shape as an encounter betweentwo worlds.2 But these allusions to the classical tradition, which promptedCarlos Fuentes to declare that Rulfo has set out to re-engender Greek mythologyin a Mexican context (La nueva novela hispanoamericana), are also involved in atwofold task of naming the past. To name the past is to both give (or return) to

the past its meaning and to delimit its encroachment upon the present. In morethan one sense, then, it is death that calls for naming in Rulfo’s reection ontradition. On one hand, death imparts to speech its exigency, in the direcircumstances of a gift or inheritance found to be in danger of lapsing intooblivion. But, at the same time, it is the act of naming which allows death to takeplace as death. Naming the past also serves to place it within a network of relations in which it can at best represent a partial account of the real.

In what follows, I examine Pedro Páramo as a documentation of the problemof peripheral modernity in Mexico. Through a close reading of a selection of

ISSN 1356-9325 print/ISSN 1469-9575 online/01/010025–20Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/13569320020030033


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passages in this novella, I will suggest that Rulfo frames the event of modernityin Mexico in terms of a tenuous relation to language, and as the experience of an aporia. To a certain extent, this text comprises a critique of the modernizationprocess that began in the nineteenth century under the doctrine of Liberalpositivism and the authoritarian administration of Porrio Dṍaz, and whichcontinues, albeit under a different code, following the bourgeois revolution of 1910–20. While tracing a history of exclusions and silences, Rulfo’s text alsoposes a challenge to the logic on the basis of which certain postcolonialdiscourses have sought to redress the violence of colonialist and imperialistrepresentations. The passage from lettered tradition to oral tradition in Rulfo’swriting also profoundly unsettles the Platonic conception of representation as amimesis of the eidos, and as procuring a more or less adequate relation to thetruth.3 Rulfo thinks Latin American cultural production a site of irreducibledifference. This is also to say that the literary work is marked by conictingdemands, which together create a rift within the work itself. Rulfo’s text isdivided between the exigency of redressing the violence of peripheral existenceand an acute awareness of the limits of the very logos of restitution.

A measure of what is at stake in the problem of Mexican modernity can beelucidated by contrasting its presentation in Pedro Páramo with the work of oneof Rulfo’s contemporaries, the renowned essayist and poet Octavio Paz. In hisfamous study of Mexican character (El laberinto de soledad, 1950), Paz poses thequestion of what it means to be both modern and Mexican through a scene of allegorical reection. Framing the Mexican Revolution as an essentially modernevent, Paz likens the emergent nation, which has recently undergone a cata-strophic transition from oligarchic society to what is ostensibly a bourgeoisdemocracy, to an adolescent facing a rite of passage into adulthood. Pazunderstands the experience of peripheral modernity as a time of transition andof radical uncertainty, as bearing witness to a philosophical and ethical question:‘What are we, and how can we fulll our obligations to ourselves as we are?’(Laberinto de soledad, 9). Paz’s view of the revolution is shaped by his belief in anessence of modernity that would remain available to the nation. The catastrophicviolence of revolution presupposes, and is in turn justied by, the idea of modernity as an absolutely new beginning. Paz’s twofold question, which linksthe possibility of determining the being of Mexico to an ethical register of responsibility and autonomy, nds itself caught within a circular movement: inorder to resolve the problem of being (what is it to be Mexican now?), it willhave been necessary to answer the question of obligation (what we are is secured by the knowledge of to whom or to what we are responsible). But this ethicalvalue is itself located within a general question about essence (‘as we are’). Thedilemma facing Paz as he inquires into the status of mexicanidad or ‘Mexicanness’

could also be described in terms of a conict arising within the very conceptu-alization of modernity: concealed within this questioning of the present (‘Whoare we?’) is a negation of the past, or of particular facets of the past (‘We are notthat’), and the afrmation of a seeming paradox (we are not what we seem; wemust become what we already are).

Pedro Páramo, written ve years after Paz’s text, similarly offers an allegoricaltreatment of revolution. However, the comparison between Paz and Rulfo andtheir respective notions of modernity also runs up against a limit. While Pazconceives of modernity as the End (conclusion and telos) of a process in which


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28 P. Dove

already been conceded to be the curator, protector and guarantor of thisinheritance.5 Through the invention of tradition, then, the state emerges aspurveyor of certitude, as the holder of a master discourse whose meaning lies beyond question. In one of its predominant forms, post-revolutionary culturalproduction serves the state in the latter’s attempt to legitimize its own appropri-ation of power and to consolidate its legitimacy. The state’s role as fabulistserves to hollow out a space of legibility in which the failures of the presentmoment can more easily be passed off as merely temporary and epiphenomenal,a necessary collective sacrice in view of what Héctor Á guilar Camṍn describesas the image of a true modernity that is always to come: ‘the true Mexico wasthe one that had not yet appeared and was to be conquered in the future’(Á guilar Camṍn, 1993, p. 159).

The synthesizing role that characterizes the modern state is relevant on anadjacent level for caciquismo. The state’s regulation of the country’s interior andorganization of its myriad divisions is sustained in part through representation:in the work of documenting, archiving and displaying the myriad differencesthat constitute the nation. The state organizes and makes visible linguisticpatterns, migratory trends, ethnographic and demographic traits. Rulfo’s caciquelikewise projects a kind of totalizing force, a capacity to seize the communal landand possess it is a seamless whole. Pedro Páramo’s appropriation begins with adenial of limits as such: in reference to a neighbour’s objections over thecacique’s interpretation of shared property lines, he responds: ‘There won’t beany walls. The land has no divisions’ (20).6 The refusal of divisions or boundaries constitutes an attempt to identify what is particular to the caciquewith the All—and hence to deny the nite nature of particularity. This negationof the particular is structured by a logic similar to that of the post-revolutionarystate as the dream of recovering an originary national wholeness. The state notonly auto-reexively nominates itself as the sovereign guardian of a now-uniedtierra; at the same time, it adopts the ironic title of ‘Institutional RevolutionaryParty’, through which it stakes an impossible claim upon the catastrophicmovement of revolution or transition itself. Through a ‘propriation’ (seizing andmaking proper), the state would take ownership not only of the name (‘Revol-ution’), but of the very act of naming that attains its gure in this event. In thecontradictory assignation ‘Institutional Revolutionary Party’ can be heard theechoing of an anxiety that arises alongside the difcult thought of revolution: asa radical break, a turn announcing an absolute suspension of history, progress,law and rationality, revolution portends the collapse of the nite into the innite.

For Rulfo, the state is site of a simultaneous justication and self-effacement,or what could be described as the emergence of being from mere necessity. Thestate legitimizes its own existence as well as the dissymmetries it permits and

propagates on the dual basis of a past to be recovered and a future to berealized. At the same time, it effaces itself as function of particular discourses andinterests, by passing itself off as an instance of the universal and unimpeachablelaw of necessity. Through the projection of a colossal and unied tradition, thestate emerges as the archive of the past as necessity. But necessity, or what musthave been, also exceeds the limited capacity of the understanding. And thus—acrucial sleight of hand—experiences of the negative, of the moments of loss, lack,uncertainty and contingency that are part of any national history, are passed off as a merely accidental occurrence from which the nation, via the uplifting power


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Exṍgele lo nuestro 29

of the state, will one day recover. Through its organization of cultural pro-duction the state enables the being of the nation to be posited as off-stage, as areserve—and thus it ‘preserves’ this being as something removed from thetransitory character of history. Cultural production in Mexico during the 1920sand 1930s was, whether intentionally or not, frequently complicit in these ritualsof legitimization. One might look to the meteoric rise of Muralism in the 1920s,which often appeared to produce a synthesis of pre-Columbian, revolutionaryand modernizing images; or to the essay tradition founded by Samuel Ramos, José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes and Paz, which took Mexican character oridentity as an object of inquiry and celebration; and also to the literary traditionof the novela de la revolución, which frequently cast the revolution as a heroicfable from which the state draws symbolic support.7

A close reading of the rst two ‘fragments’ of Pedro Páramo will enable us tosee how Rulfo’s text reects upon this process of identication and legitimiza-tion, allowing us to understand it as a dyadic narrative: Mexican modernity as both an emergence from the prolonged violence of the revolution and as a returnto a semblance of unity and permanence. Recalling the rst pages of Paz’sLabyrinth of Solitude for their paradigmatic presentation of post-revolutionaryMexican reection, we see that the act of narration, understood as the capacityto give an account of one’s situation and one’s origin, is a necessary and indeedconstitutive moment in the self-presentation of the national subject. The dis-course of mexicanidad, as an attempt to identify an essence that would lend creditto the post-revolutionary articulation of national unity (we Mexicans are unitedin so far as we can tell ourselves who we are), produces a redoubling of lomexicano, into a reecting subject and a reected object. With Rulfo, however,reection on the condition of modernity will bring with it a series of interwovenand unsettling questions about the nation-building process. A certain narrativeof national destiny has already given shape, in the rst fragment of Rulfo’s text,to a question of justice. A demand for restitution is inscribed in the mother’sdying words. As we shall see, this demand also articulates the time and spaceof solidarity as at once excessive and lacking, or as always and already ‘out of joint’. This

lapsus is also the errancy

of community and shared meaning, and

cannot be grasped and comprehended once and for all, by either a nationaldiscourse or a particular reading.

Early on in the account given by the principal narrator, Juan Preciado, of his journey to Comala, we are confronted with a dual question of agency and desire.We encounter, parallel to the narrator’s own speech, the interwoven strands of maternal and paternal relations, each of which functions as a metaphor, as acondensation of various demands and identications. The parental traces in thenarrative are ‘metaphors’ not only because they set in motion distinct and often

conicting familial and sociological registers (for instance, the distinction be-tween patriarchal and matriarchal traditions and lineages might also designatean encounter between Spanish and Amerindian traditions), but also because, atthe level of the national subject, these gures embody some of the conictingdemands which go into the constitution of identity as such. Juan Preciado’sreturn to Comala following his mother’s death is staged as a reection on aprimal scene. In the rst passage, the narrator vacillates between a recollectionof his arrival in search of a father he had never met, and in the same breathreturning us to the even earlier scene of his mother’s death, when he had rst


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30 P. Dove

promised to seek this father out. He goes to some length to dissociate himself and his own volition or desire from this venture, attributing it instead to thedemands made by his mother, Dolores: ‘I squeezed her hands as a sign that Iwould do it; she was on the verge of dying and I would have promised heranything … . All I could do was to tell her that I would do exactly what sheasked, and from saying it so often I continued saying it to her even after I hadfreed my hands from her dead hands’ (1).

Here a negation bares its double edge. On one hand, the narrator’s renunci-ation of his own interest in deference to the desire of the other functions as arejection or postponement of something that remains to be named. In the face of both the mother’s impending death and the (mother/son) couple’s banishmentfrom the father’s domain, the effacement of (the narrator’s) desire signalssomething akin to an imagined ight from mortality and nite existence. It is asif by removing a part of himself from this account, and specically through hisrefusal to recognize himself in the mother’s charge, the narrator could somehowpreserve himself beyond it. ‘I am not involved’, he seems to say, ‘there is nothingof me in what you ask, I guard myself elsewhere.’ At the same time, JuanPreciado’s strategic negation of his own investment in this paternal birthrightactually allows interest to sustain itself, albeit as repressed, postponed ordistorted. And thus this refusal to be implicated must be distinguished from anact of disavowal. One might imagine that, beyond the overt, intentional messageof ‘it’s not me’ lies the sole possible means of giving form, through thissupplementary sign of negativity, to what is otherwise a shapeless, and henceterrifying relation to the unknown: in this case, to the father in so far as his name bespeaks absence, and to the extent that he has yet to fully assume his place inthe narrative. This interpretation is supported by the narrator’s assessment of thetenuous pact established through speech and touch: ‘I never meant to keep mypromise. But before I knew it [Hasta que ahora pronto] my head began to swimwith dreams and my imagination took ight. Little by little I began to build aworld around a hope centered on the man called Pedro Páramo, the man whohad been my mother’s husband. That was why I had come to Comala’ (1; Rulfo,1994, p. 3).8

This passage sustains the aforementioned ambiguity of narrative agency,which is formulated via a lackadaisical, dream-like process coupled with thesudden, unexpected appearance of image and world. Simultaneity is under-scored by the phrase qualifying this dream-work, ‘hasta que ahora pronto’,which evokes the suddenness and disproportion of appearance. What remainsundecided here is the ontological status of this ‘world’, which perhaps namesnothing other than the text itself. (Is it a rejection of and substitute for an eventthat cannot be allowed to see the light of day? Or, to borrow from the paradox

that underlies Bartra’s notion of ‘national culture’, does it have to do with realeffects stemming from a ctive cause?) Here we can see negation as areafrmation of desire, which, in order to be negated, must at some level alreadyhave been inscribed. As ‘negation of negation’, the negative sign is not the mereopposite of the negation with which we began. It arises as a moment within aprocess of ‘working-through’, whereby the narrator forges connections andformulates a place for himself within the larger array of signs that Juan Preciadoevocatively describes as ‘un mundo alrededor de la esperanza’. The narrator’saccount of his return to Comala will be seen to have been, quite literally, an


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analytical account of the subject, of how he came to be where he is—and to diethere. The ambiguity of this ‘accounting’ for the unaccountable—death itself—can be elucidated with reference to what psychoanalysis has to say aboutnegation (see Freud’s essay ‘Negation’). For Freud, negation is the constitutivemoment of desire: on the basis of a certain signier of negativity, the subjectintroduces into its discourse a supplementary dimension that must be dis-tinguished from the register of signication or meaning, or from what we cancall the ‘content’ of a statement. The not of the prototypical negative statement(‘it’s not my mother’) hollows out or wrenches open a space in which desire canarticulate itself through (but not as identical to) the content of the subject’sdiscourse. Hence the Lacanian distinction between the content of discourse andthe truth of speech. With regard to Juan Preciado’s recollections, I am attemptingto indicate a necessary connection between signication and limits: the price onepays for access to shared, relational meaning is that one must (repeatedly)sacrice the primordial universe, the paradise without limits in which rules thatmajestic and tyrannical gure (the infans, not the cacique), undifferentiated fromits surroundings. In Rulfo, this paradisiacal universe bears a number of associa-tive and contradictory meanings. It is both a projection functioning in service of the state’s hegemonic representation of tradition (‘paradise’ is the narcoticfuture/promise which serves to justify the contingencies of the present) and it isan image of maternal nostalgia or fantasy, a marker of an absolute differencevis-à-vis the present and the dominant patriarchal discourse. The ‘overdetermi-nation’ of this space is indicated by the prospect that the phantasmatic gure of paradise also holds open a space in which it is possible to articulate a sharedproperty (‘lo nuestro’). But the importance of negation for interpretation, andlikewise of what the narrator refers to as ‘hope’, should not obscure the fact thatthis is ultimately a tragic vision of a world that has been annihilated (if indeedit ever existed).

In its fundamental ambivalence, negation affords support to both deferral andarticulation, allowing desire to sustain itself—but as precisely its own deferral,as a kind of repeated slippage in the pursuit of satisfaction. The sense in whichthis object must be

sought can only be registered in so far as it has already been

found. More can be said of difculty surrounding this object of desire, whichstrictly speaking is an impossible object, through further reference to theconditions inveighed by the dying mother. Her demand is simultaneouslyproscriptive and prescriptive. On one hand it conveys exigency while on theother it retains a fundamental opacity: ‘Don’t ask him for anything. Demandfrom him what is ours [Ex ṍgele lo nuestro]. What he was obliged to give me andnever did … The oblivion into which he let us fall [literally: into which he tookus], charge him dearly, my son’ (1). These dying words constitute a threshold

and a cipher for the text. The juxtaposition between prohibition (do not plead;do not demean us any further and thereby elevate him all the more) andinjunction (exact from him what is ours) give some indication of the degree towhich the restitutive demand suffers from an excess and a split in its veryenunciation. The tonality of this charge points at once toward the necessary andthe impossible, or perhaps in the direction of something both exigent andincapable of full articulation.

One could situate this demand within a long tradition of popular struggle inMexico over land usage and ownership. In that context, ‘lo nuestro’ would not


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32 P. Dove

evoke a possession, past or present, but rather an ought, an injustice that remainsto be redressed (symbolized). The ethical and political force of the injunctionpertains to the signier and not the signied. That is, the possessive phrasepoints beyond the usurpation or re-appropriation of a good, a property or aright. The structure of this demand does not allow us to think that we will havealleviated its singular weight with the restoration of some particular: what iscalled for, we might hypothesize, is not just a symbolic restitution of a name, atitle or a particular good, but instead an intervention in the symbolic domainitself. This latter constitutes one of the radical claims made upon the revolution:for instance, in the Zapatista faction, which sought not just a redistribution of goods but also a reconceptualization of property as such. If we are to takepopular, collective struggle as one likely index for this claim, the enunciation of an ‘ours’ would be found to have immediately redoubled as a question about thevery principles of ownership and right. And thus it would deect any easysupposition that what is called for is simply the return of the same.

I will return to the issue of restitution shortly. For the moment, the point isthat the content of this pronouncement of lo nuestro remains indeterminate and,in the present situation, perhaps undeterminable. This phrase holds the place of a hiatus, while sustaining a palpable tension between urgency and ambiguity,the insistent and the indenite. The semantic emptiness of lo nuestro at the pointwhen it becomes possible to speak it suggests that the exigency put intocirculation by this phrase regards something other than an exchange or a return.Indeed, one might ask whether this demand does not mark the very limit of thegood and its circulation, and whether the thought of redress does not also bringforth the possibility of the impossibility of its representation, the seeming futilityor impropriety of attempting to provide this ‘ours’ with a denitive content. Thetext’s prolonged silence over the specicity of lo nuestro leaves us within anambiguity and a certain theoretical unease: is its content strictly singular,incapable of being translated into the general terms of exchange value ordistributive justice? Or does its silence portend a more radical experience of emptiness, to which this demand or claim must therefore be said to belong?Does this speech, which issues from a site of destitution, somehow turn over andallow us to pose or remark on a philosophical question of community, identityand the limits of restitution? Or does its urgency bring us to the very limit of philosophical reection? Perhaps the radical demand resonating in this maternalinjunction is that we are to read its letter (‘exact from him what is ours’) not asa metaphor for something abstract, esoteric, eeting or otherwise resistant toarticulation. What if, on the contrary, it insists upon being read absolutelyliterally, in the sense of nding (out) what it is that is ours?

What I am proposing as the literality of the mother’s speech also points to an

interpretive problem underlying the entire diegetic presentation in Rulfo’s text.It is a problem that must be addressed along with the presumed intent behindits expression. In other words, what is dramatized in this passage is not only thepathos and gravity of a mother’s dying words to her son, but also the processof interpretation itself, through which the weight and meaning of these wordsare registered—or not. What is at stake in this speech is not the meaning behindit but rather the relation it both remarks upon and puts into play. The entirenovella could read as a kind of response to this injunction at the threshold: a‘response’, that is, in the sense of a sustained working through and a ceaseless


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reinterpretation. The distinction operating here is between the ideality of mean-ing and what might be termed the force of an expression. But this ‘force’ shouldnot be dissociated too hastily from what precisely remains to be heard in thisspeech. ‘Force’ would describe the degree to which the demand holds somethingof itself back, though not to say in reserve; rather, force relates the sense inwhich the demand presents itself as remains.9 This rethinking of force in relationto withdrawal gains further support when, in the following passage, the narratorrecalls having borne the only existing photographic portrait of his now-deadmother. This passage is worth citing at some length:

It was an old portrait [retrato], worn around the edges; but it was theonly one of her that I knew. I had found it in the kitchen safe, insidea clay pot lled with herbs: dried lemon balm, castilla blossoms, sprigsof rue. I kept it with me ever since. It was the only one. My mother wasa sworn enemy of portraits. She said they were a thing of witchcraft.And so it seemed, because hers was lled with tiny holes that were likepinpricks, and in the area of the heart there was a hole so big you couldstick your nger through it (2).

We have here an image of considerable density. If we hope to unpack it, wemust begin by recognizing that it is not a simple representation of the mother perse. More exactly, it is the memory of a child’s reection upon the mother in juxtaposition with an imagined surplus that would ll a lack residing betweenthe two. In the restitutive search, this ‘excess’ is named as having been impartedfrom the past. The portrait, most likely a photograph, is a metaphor of memory.And so we have to do with an image of imagistic reproduction, introducingitself via a question of mimesis and likeness, of the one and the many, theoriginal and the copy. The portrait recalls the mother from her death and to theworld of the living. But it would also seem to have marked her for death beforeher time. The untimeliness of this mark of eventuality—a mark which is alreadya vestigial re-mark—is precisely hers, her time and ours. It seems that mimesiscan only appear within the framework of a proliferating problematic, a problemof proliferation. The mother does not like it. In her traditional ways, sheadamantly resists the duplicity of the doubling process. But, at the same time,her refusal of this technique of duplication is itself the site of a mimetic conict:following the revolution, the nation must shed its archaic skin, sacrice all tracesof pre-modern existence and adopt the codes of modernity. The mother’s dyingwords, which only become available to us through the narrator’s later recollec-tions while in Comala, form a site around which multiple meanings and desiresaccumulate. The two pretexts we have been discussing, of the subject in relation

to its conception and the nation in relation to its modern origin, are interwovenand connected by a deferral and a negation of an object (‘lo nuestro’) that canonly be approached via circumlocution.

It has already been suggested that the rst half of the novella, into which thenarrator’s memory of the face-to-face encounter with the mother will lead, isstructured by a tragic dynamic. The narrator’s speculative venture, his pursuit of a father he has never met, is as much a performance of identity as it is arecovery. Rather than discovering a condition that is or has been actual, it seeksto bring about a certain occurrence through the very act of articulating it. In this


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34 P. Dove

regard, the protagonist is a gure for the nation as this latter effectively promisesitself to its modernity. The staging of this promissory modernity in Rulfoamounts to a citation or reiteration of the nationalist project. It suggests thatmodernity is constituted as return to and recuperation of a point that is in fact beyond or prior to the nation’s origin, whose appropriation would allow thenational subject to have been there at the origin and to thus have comprehendedit, dispelling or deciphering its enigmatic navel. In Rulfo’s allegorical scene,however, the specular return is disrupted by the very knowledge it produces(this is what Rulfo demonstrates in rewriting the history of the revolution asallegory of caciquismo), and thus the tragic pretext—entailing a desire to presentthe origin to oneself, a hermeneutic drive toward totality akin to what Nietzschedescribes as the tragic hero’s Apollinian will to power—is mirrored by a secondmovement, likewise tragic, which displaces the premise of the rst. The initialreturn on Juan Preciado’s search for his father arrives when he learns that hisfather, Pedro Páramo, was in fact a tyrant, and that he is now dead.10 The lialquest consists in projecting an eventual paternal identication that would thenserve as its pretext and its telos: in effect, the narrator must already haveidentied with the (Name of the) Father in order to identify with (the notion of identifying with) this particular father. But the actual identity of Pedro Páramo,a cacique who, we gather from the words of the narrator’s rst guide, has in factfathered a majority of the town, will indicate that this desired identication is infact every bit as impossible as it is necessary. In looking for paternal recognition,the narrator will be obliged to identify with an originary crime.

The tragic dynamic in Rulfo’s text is carried through to a highly opaqueaccount of the narrator’s death at the midway point in the novella, at whichpoint the textual production of knowledge is seen to have undergone a funda-mental shift. The text’s enunciative position undergoes a pronounced shift,revealing a different understanding of allegory as locus of modern identity andself-consciousness.11 Prior to this moment, and indeed from the moment he setsfoot in Comala, the narrator is caught up in a series of uncanny discoveries, inwhich the various residents of the village he encounters are subsequentlydiscovered to have been phantasms. The spectral appearance and dissolution of the pueblo culminates in his and our discovery that the narrator too is in factalready dead. His ironic, post-mortem testimony—me mataron los murmullos, themurmurs killed me—at once repeats and displaces the tragic topos. It reports aconfrontation with the limits of knowledge, and with the sublime (and perhapsobscene) existence of what cannot be made present, of what can be neitherdeduced nor elucidated under the light of being and the patronymic logos. Butthis confession or recognition, spoken from the grave he shares with one of hisformer guides in Comala, also effects a shift within the relation between text and

reader. And it thereby produces a secondary, retroactive disturbance in theliminal passage we have been examining. The brilliance of Rulfo’s images is setoff against the tremendous poverty of his landscapes: it is as if the Rulan worldhad been evacuated of its fullness and subjected to a near-total dissolution of formal denition.12 Here, however, the prevailing sense of opacity or blindness by which the reader cannot help but have been struck from the very beginningis suddenly shown to have a ‘literal’ basis—which, here, is also its basis in thereal. The discovery of the narrator’s own death, coming in the wake of a seriesof phantasmatic apparitions, compels us to return to the beginning of the text (its


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rst words are spoken by the narrator himself: “I came to Comala because …’),and to recognize now that this testimonial account has all the while beendirected to another, and not to the reader at all. The narrator’s testimony to hisdying amidst the murmurs of a different language is carried forth in a conver-sation with Dorotea. This address reveals retroactively that Dorotea has been theaddressee throughout the rst half of the narrative. Our eventual recognitionthus manifests a level of misrecognition, a groundless act of appropriation andself-insertion, at which it became possible to begin reading in the rst place. Thisstartling diegetic reversal juxtaposes a number of important issues: testimonyand memory with death; reading and recognition with misrecognition andviolence. It bears a structural resemblance to what the German poet and thinkerFriedrich Hölderlin terms ‘caesura’: a rupture in the rhythm of poetic verse thatcoincides with a transformation in our understanding of the text, or with anaporetic moment in its development. (For Hölderlin, caesura is both what impelsthe tragic reversal and what ensures against the possibility of the text’s resol-ution or closure: as tragedy’s ‘third term’, caesura determines that beginning andconclusion do not ‘rhyme’.) The text makes apparent a conation of address andintention. This errancy, only recognizable after the fact and on the basis of whatit has produced, is inseparable from the dynamic character of its own legibility.We might say that this hermeneutic lapsus becomes recognizable only to thedegree that its origin, as onset, act or decision, has receded and its course become irrevocable. The act of poi‘sis thus emerges with political ramications:this fundamental ‘impropriety’, which accompanies the founding of communi-cation, meaning and address, opens onto a thought of the anarchic basis of political agency, of a groundless act of decision through which we enter intorelations with others. Reading is inscribed by a decision carried out prior to theappearance of choice and options.

But here it is also possible to anticipate a counterpoint. I will suggestmomentarily that decision is in a certain way always already ‘grounded’. Orrather, decision cannot not be grounded: that is, it necessarily receives itsresponsibility and is called into deciding prior to the time of representation, before the self-certain knowledge of

to whom or

to what one is responsible. The

decision to act is already ‘responsible’ (founded in something that exceeds it), inthe sense that it must always already have been decided—claimed and incised,rendered possible yet never guaranteed—in order to become what it is: adecision. An originary cut or incision, prior to any decision, accompaniesdetermination at every point here. The posing of a proposition or a question (letus say, concerning the determination and deliverance of ‘what is ours’, of ashared birthright or destiny) presupposes a breach, which is also however anappeal, prior to any determination of the proper. This cut both precedes and

allows for the possibility of interrogating the claim of ‘what is (ours)’, whileremaining irreducible to any single determination of this claim.Let us now return to the site of the maternal demand. It is a space which, as

we are still discovering, functions as threshold to the book. Not only does thisinjunction hold an interpretive key for the plurality of narrative voices, each of which could be said to contain a cipher of this lo nuestro (Rulfo was known toinsist that the pueblo itself is the true protagonist of the work) but this phraseoffers a further elaboration on the complexity of the position Rulfo has stakedout here in relation to the questions of modernity and autonomy in Mexico. By


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36 P. Dove

re-enacting within the narrator’s journey to Comala the condensed remainder of a national performative scene, Rulfo’s text could be said to initiate the labour of a deconstruction, which would engage the discourses of mexicanidad (or treatiseson Mexican character or essence) and nationalism in their various forms, andthereby bring to light an unremarked difference that haunts these specularinterrogations of national origin and destiny. At a certain point, the image of anarchaic paradise that continues to make its way into Rulfo’s narrative at variouspoints gives way to or transforms itself into a scene of modern disillusionmentand dystopia. One could argue that the dissolution here of nationalism’s archaicimage in its paradisiacal fullness repeats to a certain extent the nationalist mythof decline from pure origin. But in so doing it also underscores the complicitythis mythologeme shares with the self-afrmation project of the modern state. If the movement between two tragic threads in Rulfo’s text initiates a deconstruc-tion of the nationalist claim upon tradition, Rulfo in this sense sets his sights ona mystery, the story of a crime at the origin of the law.

But the apparent ease of this concordance between Rulfo’s text and a decon-struction of the reason of state must itself become an object of scrutiny. If sucha labour of re-marking and demystication provides much of the critical thrustfor Rulfo’s project, interpretation must also nd itself implicated in the verymovement of delimitation it attempts to map. If the nexus of tragedy andallegory allows us to track in Rulfo the limits of the nationalist appropriation of mexicanidad, the interpretive paradigm that lends this reading its force must notremain deaf to the lesson it imparts. That is to say, this reading must not forgetthat the enunciation of a ‘lo nuestro’ is also linked to the awareness that nodiscourse, including deconstruction, can provide a total and conclusive accountof national origins without at the same time displacing or regenerating the verylimit for which it attempts to account. And thus, to take only one instance, thetragic dynamic that helps articulate a critique of systematic authority (be it thatof the state, of nationalism or of positivism) also gives rise through the maternalinjunction to a demand for restitution. The issue of collective identity functionsstrategically here, allowing for an articulation of solidarity under the banner of the proper name (

lo nuestro). In so doing, identity also asserts a kind of

‘ineluctability’. The legitimacy and veracity of identity are not reducible to theconditions in which it is uttered, nor are they exhausted by the particular contentof any discrete expression. On the basis of a particular (nite and contingent)articulation, however, a call for restitution or a demand for justice is madepossible. It has already been suggested that the maternal injunction namessomething foreign or irreducible to the genus of systematic organization. And itis thus strictly speaking undeconstructable. An articulation of identity resonateswithin the demand by producing a redoubling of the demand itself: it calls for

a restitution which, if we take the act of narration seriously, must be seen asindissociable from the act of giving an account. It demands that there be ademand. And so a tension arises, here at the threshold, between a pair of conicting discourses, which we have tentatively labelled deconstruction andthe politics of restitution.13

Between two possible readings of Rulfo, each of which could be described inits own right as inevitable and irrefutable, and between two discourses that byall appearances are fundamentally at odds with one another, a limit emerges.The real exigency is handed down and transferred from mother to son, from text


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to its possible reading, each time by virtue of what cannot be brought into theframework of the present. This urgency concerns the limit that makes each of these discourses (and this is perhaps ultimately to say, reading itself) possible,only to re-emerge as the impossibility of each discourse—or of reading itself. And,let us be clear, this is the impossibility of deconstruction, its inability to fullycome to terms with its own scene of production, and thus to have had the lastword over, for instance, the politics of identity and restitution. Deconstructionremains in a position of indebtedness with regard to this exigency of the limit.The reading set in motion here at the threshold remains responsible to thisliminal passage, which it cannot outstrip by forgetting and moving beyond it or by accounting for it once and for all. And thus it nds itself repeating the verygesture it set out to re-mark. Deconstruction seizes an injunction such as thispronouncement over lo nuestro, and in working it over demonstrates the para-doxical structure and undecidable kernel of the discourse of restitution. What is brought forth in the space and time of this reading is an impasse or an aporia,a limit that is and is not proper to language: the ‘we’ that has been evoked asthe subject of this exacting demand is not yet a we, it is not a being incommunion with itself—such as the subject posited by nationalism or by acertain subaltern identity politics. But in underscoring the textuality and perfor-mative character of this injunction, deconstruction itself has already becomecaught up in the very demand upon which it would seek to comment. Thedeconstructive reading owes itself to this limit; it passes it over repeatedlywithout getting any closer to relinquishing it.

The mother’s dying words to her son introduce issues of memory, justice andrestitution as the possible terms and conditions of a proper (future) identity. Torecall the mother is to confront the impossible weight of this restitutive injunc-tion. And, as we see from the recurrent interpolations of maternal desire andnostalgia into Juan Preciado’s narrative, his journey to Comala, despite allpaternal pretenses, never ceases to do precisely that: this narrative is also amonumental gesture constructed to a nexus of archaic unity and originary loss.How might one demand of or from the father, one-knows-not-what (only that itis ‘ours’), and in a language which is precisely that of the—dead—Father? Thediscursive threads have rapidly become entangled here. If the pretext of return,or of a recollection and recovery of the maternal-communal ‘thing’, mustproceed by way of this impossible demand, is it not also the case that this chargecalls for precisely breaking the maternal bond? Does it not expose itself to thetravail of naming, and to what is thus ours, though not in the form of a property?If the narrator is to live up to his mother’s dying words, which contain nothingless than the truth of her desire, then he must also take leave of the mother, puther in the ground or kill her once again, and enter into the world of the Name.

As we know, this world is that of the (always already dead) Father. Does thisdemand correspond to what Hegel would allocate to the movement of a(national) spirit? Does it remark the locus of a paternal and speculative birth-right which must be supposed on the basis of a ‘rational faith’ of sorts, overagainst the empirical evidence of maternal liation? What exactly is being saidin this redoubled demand? (To demand what is ours? To demand what is ours?To demand, what is ours!??)

There is a temptation to read within this enigmatic phrase an echo of theHeideggerian motif concerning the origin of philosophical thinking in the poetic


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38 P. Dove

and destabilizing force of questioning. Let us say once again, and for the sake of another argument, that Rulfo has engaged the discourse of mexicanidad with theforce of a deconstruktion. Right here, in a statement calling for an almostinterminable re-reading, he counters the regional ontologies of Mexican post-revolutionary cultural production with the interrogative edge of a more funda-mental questioning. What would be afrmed is neither an object to bedemanded and returned, nor a subject to whom this restitution would bedirected. In fact, the subject–object relation is itself shaken at the brink of thisopen-ended statement. At stake here would be the question itself, the question(of the) as such, in that and as what this question demands for thinking. Akin toPaz, Rulfo’s position on the revolution would thus hinge on the elucidation of a question of Mexico, and the work would take shape as an attempt to allow thisquestion to come forth. For instance: as modern moment par excellence, revol-ution brings forth something on the order of a new world or epoch; but, at thesame time, this creative or disclosive force is experienced as an interminabledissolution and a suspension (epokh’). What Juan Preciado encounters in theworld to which he ‘returns’ is not the same. It is not the paradise promised bythe other’s recollections, but rather the absolute destitution and desolation of world. For Heidegger, a questioning and philosophical disposition emerges inthe course of what he names somewhat enigmatically the ‘darkening of world’.The statements concerning modern alienation serve as masks in Heidegger’sthought for an evanescence that always aficts the appearance of world already.Entschlossenheit, the apex of world and the resolute and spiritual opening towhat Heidegger calls the ‘essence of being’, also marks the beginning as (alwaysalready) a decline. Entschlossenheit brings together, at the site or opening atwhich Heidegger attempts to think ‘world’, two sides or slopes of what couldsomewhat hastily be called resolution and dissolution. ‘World’ nominates alocus that is always already in retreat, an experience in which the self-evidenceof the ‘question of being’ suddenly begins to waver and lapses into crisis. Couldit be that ‘world’ is exactly that which thought runs up against when it seeks itsown basis, its own cause? Is not world something that takes on breadth anddepth only when viewed obliquely and awry, and which dissipates so soon asthought attempts to interrogate it head on? Is not the work of Führung, whichHeidegger describes in An Introduction to Metaphysics as the guiding and trans-ferential spirit of worldly production, itself already a form of darkening, aloosening of the relation to the thought that sustains it? Does not the passageand handing-over of tradition, indicating the interest returned upon an incom-mensurable debt (traditio as a surrender or delivery), also presuppose anirreducible opacity, without which the transfer (which is itself always double: amovement to and fro; and a passage across a gap) could not take place? This

opacity, if the line of thinking that takes us from Rulfo to Heidegger and backagain is sustainable, would appear in the form of a haunting that marks thedifference of Comala from itself in Juan Preciado’s endeavour to live up to thematernal injunction.

But this philosophical engagement of the question of world also bears a limit.14

In Heidegger’s thought, the discussions of world, spirit and language settle fora time on the primacy of the question in the foreclosure of representationalthinking. The reciprocal relation between world and human is both unsettledand renewed by the question, ‘Why are there beings [Seiendes] rather than


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nothing?’ (Introduction to Metaphysics, 1). Heidegger suggests that, in its nearsuperuity, the supplemental clause (‘rather than nothing’) that punctuates thisquestion and brings it to term also produces a kind of trembling within thequery itself. We have been suggesting that a similar tone might be located inthe maternal pronunciation of a lo nuestro in Rulfo. For, it is precisely in so faras the content of the injunction remains uncertain or even manifestly empty thatwe can begin to ask after what is truly ours. This trembling, we might say,establishes a material basis for thinking. But an elaboration of the priority of thequestion in its strong, Heideggerian resonance, and of the force it lends tothinking, still has not answered what prompts the restitutive demand in Rulfo.Nor does it fully account for the conditions in which a statement can beproduced as utterance. In fact, the mother’s injunction seems to point, in its verypossibility, back to a domain or a register irreducible to the structure of thequestion as understood by Heideggerian deconstruktion. (Though, again, this isnot to say that these spaces have nothing in common: on the contrary, theyshare—and are divided by—two facets of a fundamental concern.) It wouldseem, nally (though this is no longer exactly to speculate), that the maternaldemand for redress issues not from a question at all, but from what could only be described as a kind of ‘certainty’. This certitude is perhaps not far removedfrom what Heidegger, in the ‘Die Wesen der Sprache’ essay, calls a promise. The‘certainty’ of the promise arrives from across an abyss. Or rather, certaintynames that sense in which the promise ‘arrives at its address’ (an address whichis not One) ahead of itself. In so far as it is enunciated, the promise has alwaysalready arrived, though this is also not far from saying that the promise is alsoalways at risk: nothing guarantees it from falling into oblivion. Certainty alwaysremains to be demonstrated here in the liminal scene at issue in Rulfo’s text. Infact, it presupposes this demonstration. What is named in this certitude canneither be brought forth, nor can it be represented: it is not, for example, acertitude regarding what this ‘we’ is owed. It is the limit of the evident and theself-disclosing, which is also to say that this ‘we’ is always already in debt.‘Exṍgele lo nuestro’, as a call for justice, is spoken on the basis of what remainsout of joint. It speaks both

of and

from this lack of jointure, of what has been

foreclosed in and from the present. The basis of the statement has been describedas irrefutable and undeconstructable. If deconstruction would call attention tothe ab-grund which haunts this phraseology, the praxis of restitution wouldcounter by declaring that this statement cannot not be grounded. It is uttered onthe basis of a relation to what cannot be brought forth, with regard to a speakingrelation that is itself a limit. An experience of the incontrovertible here providesthe basis of this uttering of lo nuestro, as an enunciation which issues from aprior obligatedness. Language, says Heidegger, promises itself to itself (‘Die

Wesen der Sprache’). In a similar fashion, what will have been the question of ‘what is ours’ begins with a passage across a line that is neither empiricallyveriable nor theorizable as transcendental. At the moment of speaking, thislimit is what has already called for and what opens itself as speech: it is anoriginary echo to which speech would emerge as a response. Until now, thisexigency has been named only in absentia, as what was owed but never given,and as what has lapsed into oblivion. As such, deconstruction rightly calls thisdemand ‘groundless’. But, at the same time, and in a time that is never quite thesame as deconstruction’s, the injunction is always already ‘grounded’. The


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40 P. Dove

injunction must be understood at once as a demand for what remains un-fullled, and as a response to (and the expression of a kind of knowledge of) alimit that can only make its appearance as having been lost. And thus we mightsay that this demand always knows more than it lets on, more than deconstruc-tion accredits it.

Let us now leap ahead to the conclusion of Rulfo’s novella. In so doing we will be passing over the series of fragmentary testimonies that, beginning with JuanPreciado’s post-mortem testimony, work to orchestrate the second part of thetext as a rejoinder to the text’s liminal injunction. The rst half comprises JuanPreciado’s account of his journey to Comala in its double exigency. It narrateswhat we have been describing as the demand of a demand, or that there be ademand of the Father: in his language, no doubt, but only in so far as somethingheretofore unheard in this language remains to be redressed. In the wake of thenarrator’s death there emerges a collective and polyphonic testimony from thedead of Comala. These accounts sketch the discrete instances of tyranny thathave paved the way for modernization in Mexico. But, at the same time, thegesture of a restitution of and to collective voice and memory signals a refusalof the old dream of a total and more or less adequate account of the origin. 15 Oneof the principal voices of this discontinuous ‘collective memory’ is found in themelancholic narrative of Susana San Juan, the cacique’s childhood beloved. Thecomplexity she presents for Rulfo’s text as a restitutive document cannot beadequately addressed here. However, it is what the reappearance of her gureopens up, following her death and just after the cacique himself has been dealta fatal blow, that can and must be addressed here.

In the concluding passage of Rulfo’s text we witness the engendering of arecognition akin to what Aristotle describes, for classical tragedy, as anagnorisis.16

The cacique’s dying gaze, lifted skyward, is confronted by the sublime gure of Susana San Juan. The enigmatic presentation of the sublime here not onlyprepares us for the death of Pedro Páramo, it likewise coincides with anotherinstance of an impossible testimony which issues from the cacique: “ ‘This is mydeath,” he said’ (70). This recognition recalls and corresponds to a certain degreewith Juan Preciado’s ironic and abyssal confession to Dorotea (‘the murmurskilled me’). However, the time and space of reading (approximately half of thenovella) that separates these two speech acts also allows an interpretive differ-ence to emerge. What has become apparent between these moments of recogni-tion is the logical structure of caciquismo as an attempt to appropriate orannihilate all limits—and to thereby abolish death itself. But, as we see from therelation between cacique and pueblo, the relentless abolition of limits is itself already a kind of death: this endeavour to outstrip nitude produces nothingother than a death without end. The lesson offered in this mortal enunciation,

which is at once a recognition and an accomplishment of death, is contained inthe enigma of its own limit: it is necessary to die in order to have lived.17 Thusthe nal enunciation is at once a recognition (‘this is my death’) and a promise(‘this is my death’). The utterance, in so far as it places a limit upon itself asdesire, as intention, or as Idea, promises itself via death to the living. In a strangeway, the enunciative act prepares the way for death: it does not ‘describe’ thereality of what is about to happen so much as it produces the space of thishappening. It is in the space that speech opens between itself and its death—adeath that could not arrive before or without the imparting address of speech,


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but which also signals the limit of every address, its inability to be present at itsown reception—that the maternal demand also offers itself to be heard in adifferent register. Lo nuestro, spoken from out of the oblivion of forgetting, couldhere be said to resonate as the property of a plural ‘we’. Only this is a ‘we’ whichis not One, and whose dimensions and parameters cannot be xed or decidedonce and for all (just as the testimonial voices composing much of the secondhalf of the novella are not only plural in number but also heterogeneous,constituting an excess ‘within’ the work as totality). The structure of thiscommunal relationality attains its crucial dimension from the double movementof enunciation, which, as an originary incision delimiting the plenitude andpermanence of the One, thereby opens itself to the incalculable possibility of shared, future meaning.

Notes1. Rulfo has often characterized his writing in terms resembling those of naturalism; for instance,

he describes his intent as to ‘speak not as one writes, but rather to write as one speaks’ (Roffé,p. 55). But I have suggested elsewhere that the effect of Rulfo’s transposition of writing andorality is anything but a simple afrmation of a naturalist aesthetic (which, at least in one of itsforms, would take orality or spoken diction–as opposed to written discourse–to constitute thetrue expression of subaltern existence). Rather, what emerges from this attempt to ‘redress’ thespoken word in Rulfo’s text is a question of difference–of a difference arising between culturesand worlds, and moreover of a difference already at work at the origin of culture and languageitself. ‘To write as one speaks’ is to symbolize a conict that goes unrecognized or is disowned

by the dominant discourse.2. The most widely discussed instance of this is the allegorical motif of poetic descent, throughwhich the primary narrator in the rst half, Juan Preciado, recounts his journey to Comala. Ona similar note, the denouement–which is in fact a regression, from the time of Juan Preciado’sarrival to a time prior to his birth, in which his father (Pedro Páramo) rst imposed histyrannical rule upon the town–can be likened to the anagnorisis of Greek tragedy. In one sense,

Juan Preciado could be described as the ‘reader’ of his origin in paternal tragedy. Regarding theconnection to Greek tragedy, I will not be alluding to a specic tragic text or to the theatricalspecicity of Greek tragedy, but will instead conne my remarks to a certain reading of tragedy,which nds its most salient expression in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. For Hegel, and formuch of the philosophical tradition in his wake, tragedy comprises two moments. The rst

stages an encounter between two antagonistic forces, claims or ‘worlds’. In the wake of catastrophic encounter, the tragic text offers itself as a synthesis, drawing upon and retainingcertain formal aspects of each axis. For Hegel, the synthetic moment of classical tragedy isembodied by the emergence of a new political form: the modern state. In Rulfo, on the otherhand, the importance of the tragic form will have less to do with the Hegelian promise of reconciliation, and more to do with an attempt to think the limit of aesthetic and politicalsynthesis.

3. As a critique of colonial and neo-colonial projects, Edward Said’s Orientalism has provided thecanonical statement regarding (neo)colonialism as a process of misrepresenting the (non-West-ern) other. In Latin America, a possible remedy is found in Pablo Neruda’s 1945 epic poem, ‘LasAlturas de Macchu Picchu’, which culminates in a poetic gesture of restitution, of returning to

the pre-Columbian other his or her voice–or, more precisely, of presenting poetry as proso-popeic ‘mouthpiece’ for the silenced other. While it is certainly possible to maintain that Rulfosimilarly envisions Latin Americanist writing as engaging a process of restitution, a keydifference must be marked here: where Neruda attempts to invert the colonialist misuse of representation (and his project therefore reafrms the Platonic conception of truth even as itseeks to invert its prior colonizing function), for Rulfo the thought of restitution does not leavethe Platonic connection between truth and eidos intact.

4. Translations of Rulfo are my own, unless otherwise specied. Instead of relying on thepagination of a particular edition, I will refer to the fragment numbers which GonzálezBoixo assigns in the Catedra edition. González Boixo counts 70 of these units; Margaret Sayers


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Peden, one of Rulfo’s English language translators, counts 68. The difference can be attributed

to variations in printing between editions. (On this discrepancy, see Narciso Costa Ros, 1976.)As for the context in which this maternal demand is made, fragments 9 and 20 give an indication

of the history of Dolores and Pedro Páramo. After his father’s death (which, in the allegorical

framework I am arguing for, would coincide with the demise of the oligarchy and the end of

ownership of the land by the few circa the time of the Revolution), Pedro inherits his father’sdebts (the family of Dolores is owed the most), which have nearly bankrupted the family estate.Pedro’s marriage proposal to Dolores thus conceals a dual strategy: liquidation of this debt and

appropriation of one of the larger estates in the community. Here one might speculate at some

length concerning Rulfo’s characterization of caciquismo (a phenomenon in rural, pre-revolution-

ary Mexico in which the cacique governed by informal, authoritarian rule) and neo-caciquismo (the

somewhat paradoxical return of caciquismo following the Revolution), which assumes the form

of a ‘primitive accumulation’ of land, capital and women. Furthermore, a historical point of reference for the mother’s demand can be situated in the state-sponsored reparto programme,

which–according to one’s position–was to have returned the oligarchy’s landholdings or

latifundios either to small, individually owned plots (this is the bourgeois position) or to the

communal structures of ownership practised by indigenous groups prior to the Liberal reforms(this is the position of the radicalized peasantry in southern Mexico). The catastrophic failure of the reparto and the return of caciquismo in rural, post-revolutionary Mexico is one of the sites on

which Rulan allegory xes its gaze.

5. The state’s self-appointed role as guardian, organizer and purveyor of ‘tradition’ is in fact an

invention; it constitutes the projection of an imaginary ground that never in fact existed–or at

least not in the unied, continuous and self-comprehending way it is presented. And this is alsoto say that the content of tradition perhaps only begins to function as a locus of collective

identication in the present of modernity. Garcṍa Canclini’s analysis of the relation between

modernity and tradition develops out of an important insight into the status of cultural

production itself: rather than conning his study to the space in which cultural artefacts areproduced, his analysis addresses the history of reception and distribution these objects receive,

i.e. of the ways in which they are organized and represented. And thus–the crucial point–theprimary production is not one of objects at all, but rather of meaning.

6. John Womack attributes a similar statement to the revolutionary caudillo Venustiano Carranza

(see Zapata). The Carranza faction, which ultimately turns against the other factions of the

Constitutionalist alliance and triumphs over them, is seen by many as embodying the force of

institutionalization and corruption that eventually prevails over the popular movements repre-sented by Zapata and, to a lesser degree, Pancho Villa.

7. The relation between cultural production and the state following the revolution is of course

more complex than I am able to indicate here. Perhaps a comparative analysis, of the imaginary

identicatory processes described by both Garcṍa Canclini and Roger Bartra (‘Culture andPolitical Power in Mexico’) on the one hand, and the reciprocal link between state and culture(as domain of disinterested aesthetic experience) as it is examined by David Lloyd and Paul

Thomas in Culture and the State on the other, could help to shed light on the complex and often

antithetical dimensions of this relation.

8. Margaret Sayers Peden’s translation manages to convey both the gradual pacing of this

imaginary production and the sudden and unexpected emergence of this world as gure. Herewe have an early indication of the complex interrelation in Rulfo between cultural imaginary

and event as something that precisely exceeds the will, intent or agency of this national subject.

9. The connection between force and withdrawal or withholding receives an addition inection in

the description of caciquismo as process of ‘propriation’, and in the accounts of Pedro Páramoas he takes over the communities’ holdings. Rather than inserting himself directly in a

confrontation with the pueblo, the cacique operates by removing himself from the public domainand inserting a lieutenant, Fulgor Sedano, in his stead. It is Sedano who will then issue the

various threats and carry out the myriad and exemplary acts of violence that together constitute

caciquismo as a phenomenon of terror. We see, through the introduction of the cacique’s

lieutenant, that the effects of caciquismo can only be gauged in the absence of the cacique himself,

as one who shows that he does not show (all). The master’s enjoyment-without-limits dependsupon his capacity not to appear, to maintain the appearance of keeping (a part of) himself in

reserve.


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10. Abundio, the narrator’s rst ‘guide’ in the allegorical descent to Comala, also pronounces uponone of the text’s most poignant jokes: as cacique, Pedro Páramo is at once the father of all andfather to none. Juan Preciado is in fact his sole ‘legitimate’ heir, though the issue of legitimationis precisely what Rulfo’s text casts into doubt. This universal impropriety of the ‘sovereignexception’ is also an allusion to a key moment in the Conquest: Cortés’s abduction of LaMalinche, or her consent to being his mistress. It recalls a ‘scandal’ that has since been embraced

by national culture, according to a sardonic logic of solidarity that Paz summarizes in thephrase, ‘we are all sons and daughters of la Chingada’.

11. The formal sequence I am arguing for is a movement from a traditional conception of allegory(or an ‘allegory of ideas’) to tragedy (in which the questions of agency and specular knowledgerun up against a limit from which they cannot detach themselves) and back to allegory again.Only this time, allegory appears as something closer to the twentieth-century readings of allegory offered by Walter Benjamin (The Origin of German Trauerspiel) and Paul de Man (‘TheRhetoric of Temporality’). That is, allegory as underscoring the internal difference of signication, and as a renewal of the tone of mourning initiated in tragedy. At the same time,allegory departs from tragedy in that mourning must now be approached as an impossible or

interminable endeavour. In the passage from mythos to history, mute nature mourns its moderndesolation. Yet nature’s silence also informs the peculiar language of this travail: even if it couldspeak, nature’s language would be a kind of silence. Following the death of Juan Preciado, thenarrative gives evidence of yet another formal shift. The second half of the text is composed of

the discontinuous and fragmentary memories of Comala’s dead. It seems to me that this diegeticturn anticipates some of the fundamental principles of what has since come to be known as

testimonio literature.12. Many critics have sought to explain the extreme distortions of Rulfo’s narrative as evidence of

the inuence of the European avant-garde, suggesting that they be read as a somewhat stylizedrepetition of surrealist, absurdist and expressionist poetics. It seems to me that such attempts tosituate Rulfo’s text within a general avant garde project (and thereby to ‘familiarize’ its

expression at the level of a supposed iterability) is only another way of avoiding the problemof its specic address or locus. By this I mean that the vanguardist reading ignores an importantsense in which aesthetic production seeks to problematize self-identity rather than reproduce aspace removed from ideology and particularity, as aesthetic ideology from Schiller through Pazwould have it. I have addressed the problematic of the Rulan landscape and its myriadcontortions elsewhere by identifying, at the level of both image and grammar, an ‘anamorphic’movement that situates formal innovation alongside a thought of the crisis of Mexican

modernity.13. The assertion that no discourse can provide a total account of or fully organize the scenario at

issue here also applies to my own reading, and to my provisional suggestion that an antinomy

arises in Rulfo’s text, reected in a tension between ‘deconstructive’ and ‘restitutive’ registers.Of course, there is no reason that a deconstructive reading could not also understand itself aspart and parcel of a project of restitution, or vice versa (though not to say the nal restitutionor a truer restitution).

14. On the relation between questioning, world and spirit in Heidegger, see Jacques Derrida’s Of Spirit. Of course the political differences between Heidegger and Rulfo form another importantdifference, and we should not forget the disastrous consequences of Heidegger’s early attemptsto link his meditations on ‘world’ to a political project.

15. This renunciation of narrative teleology understood as immanence or closure, and likewise of the truth relation implied by the phrase ‘giving voice to the other’, marks a fundamentalmoment in Rulfo’s conception of allegory. If a vestigial messianism can be identied in Rulfo’s

writing, and I believe that it can, this sense of a justice or communion to come must be thoughtfrom the absolute evacuation of its content, and with a view to the temporality or difference thatthis structure makes visible at its limit.

16. In the text’s nal passage we have been brought, chronologically speaking, to a point at whichthe death of Susana San Juan has prompted the cacique to effectively condemn the pueblo to itsdeath. Following the patriarch’s imposition of absolute silence, and yet for reasons that are neverentirely clear, Abundio (the narrator’s guide into Comala and one of the cacique’s manyillegitimate sons) deals the tyrant a mortal blow with his machete. The narration of this act ismarked by a profound irony that would seem to reect Rulfo’s understanding of the revolution:the patricidal blow that Abundio strikes against tyranny can be interpreted either as a more or


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44 P. Dove

less random occurrence brought about by one in the midst of a drunken stupor, or it can betaken as a kind of passage into the absolute of revolutionary action, echoing of one of therallying cries of the Revolution: ‘iMueran los caciques!’ [‘Death to the caciques!’]).

17. This also raises an interesting question concerning the status of the tragic form in Rulfo. In acertain sense, we could say that the cacique, in order to occupy the place of tyrant and tragichero, must precisely break the pact of silence that links the Greek experience of nitude andfreedom. In Schelling’s tragic theory, it is the hero’s silence in the face of an unjustiablepunishment imposed by divine decision (e.g. Oedipus held responsible, despite everything, forpatricide and incest) that serves as the avatar of a human freedom beyond dik’. Ancient tragedyattests to human freedom in the face of its impossibility, or in so far as the hero’s silence, as amode of deance, assumes and takes upon itself what can be neither justied nor outstripped.Rulfo’s version of Mexican modernity is thus both a tragic account and a staging of tragedy’sown death.

References

Á guilar Camõ´n, Héctor and Lorenzo Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1993).

Roger Bartra, ‘Culture and Power in Mexico’, trans. by Susana Casal-Sánchez, Latin AmericanPerspectives (Spring 1989), pp. 61–69.

Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (New York: New LeftBooks, 1977).

Narciso Costa Ros, ‘Estructura de Pedro Páramo’, Revista Chilena de Literatura, 7 (December 1976),pp. 117–142.

Paul De Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel

Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).Sigmund Freud, ‘Negation’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund

Freud, v. XIX (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74).Néstor Garc ṍa Canclini, Culturas hṍbridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico:

Grijalbo, 1989).Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. by Ralph Mannheim (New York: Doubleday,

1961).Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Wessen der Sprache’, in On the Way to Language, trans. by Peter Hertz (New

York: Harper, 1971).Octavio Paz, Laberinto de soledad (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959).Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974).Reina Roffé, Juan Rulfo: Autobiograf ṍa armada (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1973).

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (Madrid: Catedra, 1993). Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo , trans. by Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Grove, 1994). John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1969).

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