JUAN RULFO

'Juan Rulfo' (16 May 1917^[1] – 7 January 1986) was a Mexican novelist, short story writer, and photographer. One of Latin America's most esteemed authors, Rulfo's reputation rests on two slim books, the novel ''Pedro Páramo'' (1955), and ''El llano en llamas'' (1953, ''The Burning Plain''), a collection of short stories that includes his admired tale "¡Diles que no me maten!" ("Tell Them Not to Kill Me!"). He was named alongside Jorge Luis Borges as the best Spanish-language writer of the 20th century in a poll conducted by Editorial Alfaguara in 1999. He is the father of director Juan Carlos Rulfo.

Contents

Early life

Major works

Later life

Books by Juan Rulfo

Critical bibliography

References

Early life

Rulfo was born Juan Nepomuceno Carlos Pérez-Rulfo Vizcaíno in Sayula, Jalisco, Mexico, on 16 May 1917. He was born in the home of his paternal grandfather; after the death of his father in 1928, his grandmother raised him in the town of San Gabriel. Rulfo's extended family consisted of landowners whose fortunes were ruined by the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War of 1926 - 1928, a religiously inspired revolt against the revolutionary government of Mexico that followed the Revolution.
Rulfo's mother died from a heart attack in November of 1927, when he was ten; his father and two uncles died tragically in 1928. Rulfo had just been sent to a study in the Luis Silva School, where he lived from 1928 to 1932. He completed six years of elementary school and a special seventh year from which he graduated as a bookkeeper, though he never practiced that profession. Rulfo attended a seminary (analogous to a secondary school) from 1932 to 1934, but did not attend a university afterwards both because the University of Guadalajara was closed due to a strike and because he had not taken preparatory school courses. Instead, Rulfo moved to Mexico City, where he first entered the National Military Academy, which he left after three months, and then he hoped to study law at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In 1936, Rulfo was able to audit courses in literature there because he obtained a job as an immigration file clerk through his uncle, David Pérez Rulfo, a colonel working for the government.

Major works

It was there that Rulfo first began writing under the tutelage of a co-worker, Efrén Hernández. In 1944 Rulfo had co-founded the literary journal ''Pan''. Later he was able to advance in his position, and he traveled Mexico as an immigration agent. In 1946 he started as a foreman for Goodrich Euzkadi, but his mild temperament led him to prefer working as a wholesale agent, which led him to travel throughout all of southern Mexico, until he was fired in 1952 for asking for a radio for his company car. He had married Clara Aparicio in Guadalajara in April, 1948, and by then he had two children, Claudia and Juan Francisco. He obtained a fellowship in the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, and there, between 1952 and 1954, he was able to write the two books that would make him famous.
The first book was a collection of harshly realistic short stories titled ''El llano en llamas'' (1953). The stories centered around life in rural Mexico around the time of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero Rebellion. Among the best-known stories are "¡Diles que no me maten!" ("Tell Them Not To Kill Me!"), about an old man, set to be executed, whose prison guard happens to be his son, and "¿No oyes ladrar los perros?" ("Don't You Hear the Dogs Bark?"), about a man carrying his estranged, adult, wounded son on his back to find a doctor.
The second book was ''Pedro Páramo'' (1955) a short novel about a man named Juan Preciado who travels to his dying mother's hometown, Comala, to find his father, only to come across a literal ghost town - populated, that is, by spectral figures. Initially, the novel met with cool critical reception and sold only two thousand copies during the first four years; later, however, the book became highly acclaimed. ''Páramo'' was a key influence of Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and became one of the seminal works of magical realism.
Gabriel García Márquez has said that he felt blocked as a novelist after writing his first four books, and that it was only his life-changing discovery of ''Pedro Páramo'' in 1961 that opened his way to the composition of his masterpiece, ''One Hundred Years of Solitude.'' He noted that all of Rulfo's published writing, put together, "add up to no more than 300 pages; but that is almost as many, and I believe they are as durable, as the pages that have come down to us from Sophocles."

Later life

After the publication of his two famous books, Rulfo virtually ceased writing narrative fiction, but in other ways he remained a major figure in the Mexican literary world. He began writing screenplays for film and television in 1956; he collaborated with Carlos Fuentes and García Márquez on one of his best-known screenplays, which was made into the classic Mexican film "El gallo de oro" (1964). Rulfo even tried his hand at acting in one film, ''En este pueblo no hay ladrones'' (1965). He was also an accomplished photographer, though few of his photographs were published in his lifetime. He had shown an exhibition in Guadalajara in 1960, but it was not until 1980, when his photographs were shown during his Homage in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, that his fame increased. Currently there are many books of his photographs, which are also shown in exhibitions around the world by the Rulfo Foundation. In addition, from 1962 until his death, Rulfo served as the director and head editor of the publishing department of INI, the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National Indigenist Institute), a Mexican government agency. Under Rulfo, INI published a remarkable series of photography books documenting the lives of contemporary Mexican indigenous communities.
In the 1960s Rulfo claimed to be working on a second novel entitled ''La cordillera'', which dealt with the Cristero Revolt in the state of Jalisco, but he said he destroyed it without ever having published it or shown it to anyone else. Only a few passages and an outline of the book remain, published posthumously in his transcribed notebooks.
In 1970, Rulfo was awarded Mexico's National Prize for Letters. In 1980, he was elected to the Mexican Academy of Letters and honored with the Homenaje in the Bellas Artes Palace, as well as having a book of his photographs published. In 1983, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for literature. Due to his heavy smoking Rulfo died at age 68 of lung cancer in Mexico City in 1986. Rulfo's son, filmmaker Juan Carlos Rulfo (born 1964), dedicated his 1999 film ''Del olvido al no me acuerdo'' (English title: ''Juan, I Forgot I Don't Remember'') to a search for his father's memory.

Books by Juan Rulfo

★ ''El llano en llamas'' (1953, ''The Burning Plain''), short stories

★ ''Pedro Páramo'' (1955), novel

★ ''Antología personal'' (1978), contains the two earlier books plus two new short stories

★ ''El gallo de oro y otros textos para cine'' (1980), screenplays

★ ''Juan Rulfo'' (The 1980 Homenaje / Homage, republished in part as ''Inframundo, el México de Juan Rulfo'', 1983), photographs by Rulfo, texts by Fernando Benítez, José Emilio Pacheco, and others

★ ''Los cuadernos de Juan Rulfo'' (1994), transcriptions of his writing notebooks

★ ''Aire de las colinas'' (2000), a collection of Rulfo's letters to Clara Aparicio (both before and after their marriage).

Critical bibliography

★ Brotherston, Gordon. ''The emergence of the Latin American novel''. New York: Cambridge, 1977. ISBN 0521214785

★ Detjens, Wilma. ''Home as creation: early childhood experience in the literary creation of Márquez, Yáñez, Rulfo''. New York: P. Lang, 1993 ISBN 0820420557

★ Freeman, G[eorge] Ronald. ''Paradise and fall in Rulfo's Pedro Páramo; archetype and structural unity''. Cuernavaca, Mexico: Centro Intercultural de Documentación, 1970

★ Harss, Luis and Barbara Dohmann. ''Into the mainstream; conversations with Latin-American writers''. New York: Harper & Row, 1967

★ Kristal, Efraín. ''The Cambridge companion to the Latin American novel''. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005 ISBN 0521825334 (hbk.) ISBN 0521532191 (pbk.)

★ Langford, Walter M. ''The Mexican novel comes of age''. Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Damee Press, 1971 ISBN 0268004501

★ Leal, Luis. ''Juan Rulfo''. New York: Twayne (World Authors Series, 692), 1983. ISBN 0-8057-6539-5

★ Luis, William. ''Modern Latin-American fiction writers: First series''. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992 ISBN 0810375907

★ Peavler, Terry J. ''Structures of power: Essays on twentieth-century Spanish-American fiction''. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996 ISBN 0791428397

★ Rulfo, Juan / Pacheco, José Emilio, et al. ''Inframundo: the México of Juan Rulfo''. 1983 ISBN 0910061149

★ Vital, Alberto, ''Juan Rulfo'', Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, México: Tercer Milenio, 1998. ISBN 970-18149-91

★ Vital, Alberto. ''Noticias sobre Juan Rulfo (1784-2003)''. Editorial RM, México, 2003. ISBN 968-85208-27

★ Vogt, Wolfgang. ''Juan Rulfo and the south of Jalisco: Aspectos de su vida y obra''. GuadalajaraÑ Editorial Agata, 1994 ISBN 9687310502

★ Zepeda, Jorge. ''La recepción inicial de Pedro Páramo: (1955-63)''. México: Editorial RM / Fundación Juan Rulfo, 2005. ISBN 84-933036-7-4
BOOKS OF PHOTOGRAPHS:

★ ''Juan Rulfo's Mexico''. Articles by Carlos Fuentes et al. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Washington & London: Smithsonian Institution Press / Barcelona: Lunweg Editores, 2002 English version: ISBN 1-58834-0997-X

★ ''México: Juan Rulfo, fotógrafo'' / Fuentes, Carlos, et al. Barcelona: Lunweg Editores, 2001 Spanish version: ISBN 84-7782-772-9

★ ''Juan Rulfo: Letras e imágenes''. Ed. Víctor Jiménez. México: Editorial RM, 2002

★ ''Tríptico para Juan Rulfo: Poesía, fotografía, crítica / coord. Jiménez, Víctor. México: Editorial RM, 2006
OUTSIDE LINKS:
Official Juan Rulfo page in ClubCultura, from Barcelona:
http://clubcultura.com/clubliteratura/clubescritores/juanrulfo/home.htm

References

1. Rulfo's date of birth is under dispute. His official web site gives his year of birth as 1917; after 1937, however, it was often listed as 1918 [1] [2] [3].


★ "Asombro por Juan Rulfo" - Transcription of a speech given by Gabriel García Márquez on the 50th anniversary of ''El llano en llamas,'' 18 September 2002.