IL VIAGGIO A COMALA. IL “ROMANCE OF THE SOUL” IN PEDRO PÁRAMO DI JUAN RULFO

Abstract

From the fin de siècle to the High Modernist aesthetics, the image of the afterworld is largely represented in the European, North American and Latin American context. In the essay Rape and Revelation. The Descent to the Underworld in Modernism (1990), Evans Lansing Smith defines the literary representation of the afterlife as a “romance of the soul”, referring to works such as Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (1945), Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) and the works by Thomas Mann Joseph und seine Brüder (1933-1943) and Doktor Faustus (1951) (Smith 1990, p. 75). Following Smith’s studies, this proposal will focus on the analysis of the “romance of the soul” in the novel Pedro Páramo (1955) by the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo. In a Faulknerian vein, Rulfo elaborates the Mexican cultural heritage of Día de muertos through an expressionist style that aims at the defamiliarization of the artistic material. Comala, the city of spirits crossed by the main character Juan Preciado, is described by Rulfo as a metaphor of a political and cultural limbo. In these terms, Weinberg’s theory of Pedro Páramo as a narrative centered on a “geografía del alma” will help us define Rulfo’s spatial and cultural representation of the afterworld. (Weinberg 2008, pp. 331-332).