Spotlight on … Juan Rulfo The Plain in Flames (1953)

‘Born in the Mexican state of Jalisco, a region acutely affected by the violence of the Mexican Revolution, Juan Rulfo (1917-1986) was an unlikely candidate to become one of his nation’s most significant writers of fiction. At six he witnessed his father’s body laid out in the family home after an assassin’s bullet took his life. He was only ten and living in a boarding school in Guadalajara when he received the delayed news that his mother had died—perhaps out of sadness—and had already been placed in the ground. If Rulfo’s familial circumstances were truncated, his academic career fared little better.

‘He entered and abandoned a seminary, was unable to register at the university, and took a short-lived job that he despised as a foreman at one of tire-giant Goodrich-Euzkadi’s production factories. Through it all, Rulfo was nurturing a creative spirit that would burst onto the literary scene when he published a collection of short stories (The Plain in Flames, 1953) and a novel (Pedro Páramo, 1955) that would help usher in the so-called boom of Latin American literature that included Nobel laureates Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia) and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru).

‘Rulfo’s rise to the top of Mexico’s literary scene in the 1950s was as startling as the writer’s silence that followed. Critics and aficionados waited for further publications that seemed never to arrive as a myth was born—never accurate—that Rulfo’s expressive output was limited to two books of fiction. The reality is more complex: Rulfo was a talented photographer, for example, and explored creative opportunities in Mexico’s film industry. Surprisingly, the author’s second novel, The Golden Cockerel, was largely overlooked when it appeared belatedly in 1980 and was misidentified as a “film text” (it was penned between 1956 and 1957 and adapted to film in 1964).

‘Through the years, Rulfo has emerged as one of Latin America’s most beloved and iconic writers, having created one of the more distinctive literary representations of Mexico’s land and people. The Golden Cockerel and Other Writings provides a unique opportunity to look beyond Rulfo’s established volumes. The Golden Cockerel anchors the collection, and it appears in English for the first time. This short novel revels in the world of fairs and festivals that dot the Bajío region of Mexico without succumbing to a folkloric veneration of that domain. The “other writings” of the anthology are an eclectic mix of 14 short texts, including one with a poetic structure, a travel narrative, stories not anthologized in The Plain in Flames, story-like fragments of three novels (two never published), and a letter that Rulfo wrote to his fiancee. All of these items are unique explorations that fit well into Rulfo’s literary oeuvre and often reflect the personal tragedies the author endured as a young child.’ — Douglas J. Weatherford, from Lit Hub

‘The human element is a particle lost in the depths of time, in Rulfo’s work. It contains more than what is apparent: at every given moment, we carry around the weight of our origins and the weight of our mistakes. Perhaps that is why Rulfo’s main ideas deal with where we came from, what kind of fortune has been dealt to us, and how we can attempt to take revenge on all that.

‘Juan Rulfo does not run away from darkness, he embraces our obscure spot in the universe, conscious that it contains everything: the geometry of the world of senses and the disquiet of the ineffable. He traveled around Mexico as a tire salesman and as a public servant with the Instituto Nacional Indigenista. He used the textures of the country, his understanding of history, and the disillusionment and rage at history to become a storyteller, but his art is not a simple “representation” or (worse) a “reflection” of reality. Rulfo’s “realism” reveals a finely tuned ear and a great talent for observation, but mainly the capacity to put forward the connotations of silence. “Reality” is not the core of his literature, but what allows for the emergence of broader truths.

‘Juan Rulfo is our most important author. Although he wrote several pieces for film and multiple texts as part of his work as an editor, the base of his work consists of a novel and a book of short stories. They were enough to establish a matrix that keeps illuminating our present-day drama. His characters and stories are not dated, but in fact function as a metonymy of Mexico and of the universal tragedy that art endeavors to illuminate.’ — Yuri Herrera, from Lit Hub

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Further

Juan Rulfo @ Wikipedia
Juan Rulfo @ goodreads
Juan Rulfo | Databases Explored
Why Juan Rulfo’s fiction of fear is still revered in Latin America
Juan Rulfo: The great Latin writer you may want to know about
ON THE BEAUTY OF NOT WRITING… A RELUCTANT HOMAGE TO JUAN RULFO
Thirty-five years without Juan Rulfo
Juan Rulfo, Rediscovering a Literary Giant
In Praise of Juan Rulfo
A brief survey of the short story part 52: Juan Rulfo

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Extras

Interview with Juan Rulfo on Spanish Television (English Subtitles)

Interview with Juan Rulfo, Spanish TV, 1983

Interview with Juan Rulfo in T. V. program “Espejo de Escritores”

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Photographer

Though he was best known as a writer, Rulfo also took more than six thousand photographs in and around Jalisco.

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Interview

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Book

Juan Rulfo The Plain in Flames
University of Texas Press

‘Juan Rulfo is one of the most important writers of twentieth-century Mexico, though he wrote only two books—the novel Pedro Páramo (1955) and the short story collection El llano en llamas (1953). First translated into English in 1967 as The Burning Plain, these starkly realistic stories create a psychologically acute portrait of poverty and dignity in the countryside at a time when Mexico was undergoing rapid industrialization following the upheavals of the Revolution. According to Ilan Stavans, the stories’ “depth seems almost inexhaustible: with a few strokes, Rulfo creates a complex human landscape defined by desolation. These stories are lessons in morality. . . . They are also astonishing examples of artistic distillation.”

‘To introduce a new generation of readers to Rulfo’s unsurpassable literary talents, this new translation repositions the collection as a classic of world literature. Working from the definitive Spanish edition of El llano en llamas established by the Fundación Juan Rulfo, Ilan Stavans and co-translator Harold Augenbram present fresh translations of the original fifteen stories, as well as two more stories that have not appeared in English before—“The Legacy of Matilde Arcángel” and “The Day of the Collapse.” The translators have artfully preserved the author’s “peasantisms,” in appreciation of the distinctive voices of his characters. Such careful, elegiac rendering of the stories perfectly suits Rulfo’s Mexico, in which people on the edge of despair nonetheless retain a sense of self, of integrity that will not be taken away.’ — UoTP

Excerpt

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p.s. Hey. ** Charalampos, Hi. I haven’t read Curtis Harrington’s biography, but I’d like to. I’d like his films too. No, I like sci-fi movies. I just grip the arms of my chair and duck until the outer space scenes are over. It’s really the scenes where characters are doing spacewalks or stranded in space outside of a spaceship that really freak me out. I look forward to reading your sentences as soon as I get some mental breathing space. Everyone, Do go read Charalampos Tzanakis’s ‘Sentences – Metamorphosis’ on the Do Not Submit site. They look terrific. Go here. Cheers back from Paris. ** Cody Goodnight, Hi, Cody. I’m goodish. I’m glad the clouds soothed. ‘Jackie Brown’ seems to be the one Tarantino film that Tarantino dislikers like, so maybe try it. My power went out in a big storm last weekend. I had the windows open, and it just suddenly started pounding rain which flew inside and shorted out a power bar into which about half of my apartment’s electrical things are plugged, and darkness fell. Charles Mingus, very nice. Have you had your make-up date for ‘The Servant’ yet? Sparkling day and night to you. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh, ouch, on the heat. We just cooled down here, hopefully for a few days at least. I think if you’re something of a realist and an optimist as well, anxiety is in the cards. People I know really liked ‘Atlanta’ too. I never watch TV series, so I don’t know if I’ll ever know for myself. I used my day off to mostly start to catch up on all the stuff I’m behind on, nothing very entertaining. Right, the ultimate Cupid. Smut and love can coexist, maybe not very often, ha ha. Love emptying a hundred boxes of Corn Flakes on his floor and picking up a bottle of glue and thinking, ‘Hm, what now?’, G. ** Darbz 🐳🐳, Are those whales? They’re so chubby. I don’t fully understand people who spend all their money on clothes. But I wait until my shirts and pants are so on are more holes than fabric before I replace them, so I guess I’m the weird one. How’s the draft going? Nothing is greater than a failed but very ambitious haunted house. It’s so weird that people who aren’t gay think gays have magic powers. If only. Ha ha, so they are whales! And chubby enough for you to fit inside them. Goodbye from underneath hair that really needs to be shampooed. ** David Ehrenstein, I can’t stand Joni Mitchell, but Judy Collins doing Joni Mitchell is okay. ** _Black_Acrylic, Me too! Aren’t those paintings amazing? I’d never seen them before I did my hunt for the post fodder. ** Bill, The best things are things whose ambitions exceed the skills of their makers. Or let’s say I count on that being true. The Honore film played here when I was in LA working on the film, so I haven’t seen it. I honestly haven’t liked any of his most recent films very much. ** tomk, Hi, T. I saw one of Peter Alexander’s Cloud Boxes, and the photo just doesn’t do them justice whatsoever, as you can undoubtedly imagine. ** Steve Erickson, I must admit I’m surprised you got the refund. What do you know. I keep intending to crease the Lemon Twigs album, but not yet. Its alley is one that I’m not not up. We’re editing the film at Zac’s apartment. We’ll probably start working with a pro editor in the next couple of weeks, although I don’t really know how much help we’ll need from him. Our edit is pretty detailed and full of our confidence. But then we’ll need pro help for sure, probably next with special effects for the ghost camera sections, which do really need some expertise. ** Nasir, Hi. Good, they meant well. Yeah, I’m not very interested in content in my work much either. I just let that part happen. Your fiction piece sounds extremely interesting. A little escapist is okay, I think? Wow, I hope I’ll get to read it somehow at some point. Exciting. You know, France has pretty good espresso if you know which cafe to sit at. It was good. It made me sit up straight and talk too much for a couple of minutes. What do you have going on this week? ** Right. I was reading Juan Rulfo’s ‘The Plain in Flames’ recently, and I thought the stories were so good and strong that I thought I’d share the discovery with you. Hence … See you tomorrow.