On Wednesday, January 7, it was 40 years since the legendary Mexican writer Juan Rulfo (1917-1986) left this world that “has not evolved much” and in which his books are still valid, since the old despotism of the emblematic character Pedro Páramo lives on in political figures such as the president of the United States, Donald Trump, says his son, the filmmaker Juan Carlos Rulfo.
For the documentary filmmaker, the “occupation of the territories” and the famine in Gaza are an example of the “rotting of the system” and how “we are moving towards more primitive moments” than those his father lived through in the 1930s, a time in which Rulfo lost members of his family due to the violence of the Cristero War (1926-1929).
“You can’t believe that the world has not evolved, that politics, the UN and all these government structures in different countries are going in reverse,” the director of ‘Del olvido al no me remember’ (1999) tells EFE.
However, he explains that, from the darkness of this “modern realism,” works like ‘Pedro Páramo’ (1955)—written from the Rulfian genius of “knowing how to listen to others and contemplate their silences”—are “a ‘masterclass’” for new generations, as they describe in detail “the intimacy of power and dispossession.”
“What my father does is that he helps you listen, to understand ways of speaking, saying and thinking, and to understand that Mexico that, in essence, is the same as it was 40 years ago,” he says when reviewing the recesses of Rulfo’s memory in San Gabriel, Apulco and Sayula, towns in the state of Jalisco where the writer and photographer found inspiration for his work admired by authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa.
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Likewise, he highlights that it is in ‘Pedro Páramo’ and in the stories of ‘El llano en llamas’ (1953), the only two pieces of fiction by Rulfo, where those “timeless” characters live that allow new generations to get closer to the Mexico hidden by “the simplification or violence of the structure of current information.”
“It is a moment of learning: of listening, of seeing and of finding the echoes of my father in his characters and in his territory (…) of discovering that language and that narrative form, much richer and more complex than what we are used to seeing,” he emphasizes.
And, for his 61-year-old son, the greatest contribution of the winner of the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters (1983) was detecting the precise moments in which one must “keep silent and learn to see” the stories that have “a much richer and more complex language”, which, he affirms, “are found in the towns”, but also in the daily urban life of public transport.
The legacy of Juan Rulfo, who would be 108 years old today, is in the pages of his books, which revolutionized Mexican literature of the 20th century, but also in his collection of photographs, world maps and sacred music, which is kept in his personal library, located in the house of his late wife, Clara Aparicio Rulfo (1948-1986).
Regarding this repository that Rulfo “updated, migrated and remastered,” his son says that it is being organized by the family at a speed so slow that it is “almost Rulfian,” so the author’s treasured material still does not have a fixed destination.
“We are going slowly; it cost us a lot of work. It was very nice to be with my father’s things, but at some point we have to migrate them and leave them ready for the new generations,” he highlights.
In addition, he confesses that he plans to do a “transmedia exhibition” to bring together “all those possibilities of Mexican reality” through the work of the screenwriter, who is also a screenwriter.
Although he assures that he will not do so within the framework of this death anniversary, since he prefers to remember him on his date of birth, May 16, 1917.
With information from EFE
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