Introduction

Narrative levels and approaches

Pedro Páramo is the story of the physical and spiritual death of Comala, a community in rural Jalisco, from the time of the porfiriato in the 1880s through the 1910 Revolution, the Cristero Rebellion of 1926 and up to the death of its initial narrator, probably in the 1940s. The structure of the society is feudal, but feudalism hollowed out in its centre and devoid of living and binding values (Franco 154). Its demise is largely the consequence of the abuse of power by the landowner and the priest, the cacique Pedro Páramo and padre Rentería, who are seen as the ‘last manifestations of a society in the process of extinction’ (Escalante, ‘Lectura’ 301–2), members of a ‘neo-feudal and patriarchal society crumbling from narcissistic inertia’ (Stanton 974). Pedro Páramo, who inherited a typical medium-sized Jalisco hacienda (Harss 81) after the murder of his father, has gained immense prosperity and power by dint of violence and cunning. The patriarchal violence embodied by the cacique is probably ultimately responsible for the tragic gulf between the all-consuming love of Pedro Páramo for his childhood sweetheart Susana, now middle-aged and ensconced in madness, and her obsessive memory of and sensually fierce desire for her long-dead husband Florencio. The reader's guide to Comala, Juan Preciado, travels to the town in search of his father, Pedro Páramo, who, he soon discovers, had died many years previously. The death of the father haunts many areas of the novel. Juan encounters a series of female figures including the incestuous sister of Donis, at the very centre of the novel, before dying and sharing with the last figure, Dorotea, the grave from which he recounts his experiences and listens to voices from neighbouring tombs. The form of the novel, which consists of sixty-nine fragments, is startlingly innovative and radical.

Given the richly diverse nature of the novel as I have outlined it here, it is not surprising that it has attracted a wide array of critical approaches: formal, mythical, archetypal or symbolic, anthropological, political or historical, and reception.