History of Mexican Revolution Essay

The myth transports readers to a vestige town on the desert plains in Mexico, and there it weaves together tales of passion, loss, and revenge. The hamlet of Comala is populated by the wandering souls of former inhabitants, individuals not yet virginal enough to enter heaven. Like the character Juan Preciado, who travels to Comala and suddenly finds himself confused, as readers we argon not sure ab turn out what we see, hear, or understand. But the novel is uncomprehensible for former(a) reasons. Since publication in 1955, the novel has come to define a style of writing in Mexico.Sparse language, echoes of orality, details heavy with meaning, and a fragmentary building transformed the literary playation of rural lifespan instead of the social realism that had dominated in earlier decades, Rulfo created a quintessentially Mexican, modernist gothic.. The haunting effect of Pedro Paramo derives from the fitful fabrication of Mexican modernity, a story that the novel tells in a way that more objective lens diachronic and sociological analyses cannot. As an aesthetic expression characterized by imaginative understanding, the novel explores Mexican social history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The decadent remnants of a quasi-feudal social order, violent revolutions, and a dramatic hegira from the countryside to the city all gave rise to ghost towns across Mexico. Pedro Paramo tells the stories of three chief(prenominal) characters Juan Preciado, Pedro Paramo, and Susana San Juan. From the point of view of Juan Preciado, the novel is the story of a sons search for identity and retribution. Juans mother, Dolores Preciado, was Pedro Paramos wife. Although he does not consume his fathers name, Juan is Pedros only legitimate son. Juan has returned to Comala to claim just whats ours, as he had earlier promised his dying mother.Juan Preciado guides readers into the ghost story as he encounters the lost souls of Comala, sees apparitions, hears voices, and eventually suspects that he too is dead. We see through and through Juans eyes and hear with his ears the voices of those buried in the cemetery, a cultivation experience that evokes the poetic obituaries of Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology (1915). Along with Juan Preciado, readers eyepatch together these fragments of lives to construct an image of Comala and its demise. Interspersed among the fragments recounting Juans story argon flashbacks to the biography of Pedro Paramo.Pedro is the son of landowners who have seen better days. He also loves a young girl, Susana San Juan, with a desire that consumes his life into adulthood. I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Paramo, lived there. page 3 Although the story line in these biographical fragments follows a generally chronological order, the duration of time is strangely misshapen brief textual passages that may read like conversational exchanges sometimes condense l arge historical periods. Moreover, the third-person narrative voice oscillates betwixt ii discursive registers.On the unity hand, poetic passages of interior monologue ictus Pedros love for Susana and his sensuality on the other, more exterior descriptions and dialogues represent a domineering rancher determined to amass wealth and possessions. Within this alternation between the first- and third-person narrative voices, readers must listen for some other voice and reconstruct a third story, that of Susana San Juan. We overhear bits of her tale through the ears of Juan Preciado, listening with him to the complaints that Susanain her uneasy deathgives forth in the cemetery of Comala.I was thinking of you, Susana. Of the leafy vegetable hills. Of when we used to fly kits in the windy season. We could hear the sounds of life from the town below we were high above on the hill, playing out string along to the wind. Help me Susana. And soft hands would tighten on mine. Let out mor e string. page 12 Poetic sections evoke her passion for another man, Florencio, and Pedro neer becomes the object of Susanas affection. Juan Preciado, Pedro Paramo, and Susana San Juan argon all haunted by ghosts in turn, they become ghosts who haunt the realities of others.They say that when people from there die and go to hell, they come back for a blanket. page 6 Although as readers we have the sense of lives once lived by these characters, they emerge for us as phantasms, as partially known presences who are not immediately obvious and who linger with inexplicable tenacity. Reading Pedro Paramo creates a transformative recognition of Mexicos trigger off toward modernity in the early twentieth century more than the objective lessons learned from social and cultural history, as a novel, Pedro Paramo produces a structure of feeling for readers that immerses us through the experience of haunting.As ghosts, Pedro, Susana, and Juan point superficial to the social context of Mex ico in the difficult movement toward modernization, toward social arrangements that never completely die as a newer social order is established. Pedros appeal of land as a rancher harks back to the trends of capital accumulation during the benign dictatorship of President Porfirio Diaz (1876-1911).The Porfiriato strove to modernize the nation through the phylogenesis of infrastructure and investment it allowed for anomalies such as the creation of the Media Luna ranch and substantial local power brokers such as Pedro Paramo who shared the interests of the elite and helped fend for a thinly veiled feudal social order. Within this context, Susana San Juan and other individuals murmur their complaints in ghostly whispers. Indeed, at one point, Rulfo planned to withdraw the novel Los murmullosthe murmurs.Speaking in the streets of Comala, overheard in dreams, and groaning in the cemetery, these spectral murmurs omen a reality hidden beneath the facade of Porfirian progress. The Me xican rotation of 1910-1920 gave expression to oppress peasantsthe campesinos of rural Mexicoand put an end to the Porfiriato. Susana San Juan, in turn, reveals the repressed role of women in a patriarchal order. In this world women are chattel and ranch-owners can forcibly populate the countryside with bastard children by assert feudal rights to the bodies of peasant women living on their lands.Peasant revolutionaries and Susana San Juan as strong are all manipulated by Pedro Paramo. He can force events to nurse them all in the places where he would have them, but he cannot overtop their desires and their pleasures. The peasants celebrate festivals, and after the revolution they eventually rebel again by participating in the Cristero Revolt of 1926-1929. Susana suffers guilt and remembers pleasure in reverberative passages that underscore her erotic ties to Florencio, a man unknown to others in the novel, by chance a dead soldier from the revolution, the man Pedro would have had to be in order to have Susanas love.The sky was crowded with fat, swollen stars. The stagnate had come out for a little while and then vanished. It was one of those sad moons that nobody looks at or even notices. It hung there for a little while, pale and disfigured, and then hid itself behind the mountains. -Juan Rulfo References Carol Clark DLugo, The unconnected Novel in Mexico The Politics of Form (Austin University of Texas Press, 1997), 70-81. Patrick Dove, Exigele lo nuestro Deconstruction, Restitution and the Demand of idiom in Pedro Paramo, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 10. 1 (2001) 25-44,