El laberinto espacio-temporal en dos relatos de El llano en llamas de Juan Rulfo

Abstract

The pattern of Latin American Boom criticism developed by Donald L. Shaw established that Juan Rulfo's protagonists are universal, not regional. In this interpretative mode, espoused by Graciela B. Coulson and others, Rulfo's characters are viewed as powerless to alter their own destinies. Humans are dominated and doomed by the hostile natural world that surrounds them. However, through a detailed analysis of Rulfo's technique and the internal and external structure of two of Rulfo's short stories in El llano en llamas—“No oyes ladrar a los perros” and “Es que somos muy pobres”—a new theoretical framework emerges for the study of Rulfo's work. In these two stories, Rulfo imagines the llano as a space that individuals control through their personal choices and actions. This article proposes, therefore, that Rulfo's protagonists are not victims of their environment, but rather the perpetrators of its violence.

Keywords:

• Boom
• El llano en llamas
• “Es que somos muy pobres,”
• “No oyes ladrar a los perros,”
• Juan Rulfo

Notes

1. Coddou recoge la siguiente sentencia que ofrece Rulfo en una entrevista aparecida en Cormorán: “La vida es caótica. No tiene una secuencia lógica. La narrativa actual no es consecuencia … , sino es una vida que va a saltos, en etapas (5)” (67).

2. Shaw en A Companion to Modern Spanish American Fiction propone una serie de características que definen al movimiento literario que denomina como Boom y que se cumplen en ambos relatos “No oyes ladrar a los perros” y “Es que somos muy pobres”, cito textualmente:

• the replacement of the old Regionalist novel with the new Indigenism of Asturias and Arguedas; a turn away from the “Americanista” civic novel of protest, to a more universalist or cosmopolitan novel of exploration of the human condition generally; a tendency away from “observed” reality, towards “created” reality and myth; absence of love as a source of existential support and emphasis on sexual activity as a means to overcome solitude and the “otherness” of a partner; a strong element of pessimism; and emphasis on the mystery, irrationality and ambiguity of the personality and the absurdity of life. At the technical level, we observe a tendency to abandon linear plot-structure, and chronological arrangement, both of which suggest intelligibility and predictable causality; the decline of the omniscient third-person narrator; the more frequent incorporation of humour, satire and parody; and a more prominent use of symbolic elements. To these we must add a visible shift in the presentation of fictional characters with greater stress on the mystery of the human personality and its many-facetedness. (109)