1. “Illusion? That is expensive. It costed me to live
more than it should have been.” –Juan Rulfo

2. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
Background
● Born Juan Nepomuceno Carlos
Pé rez Rulfo Vizcaíno on May 16,
1917 in Jalisco, Mexico.
● As a child, he lived in the small
population of San Gabriel.
● A rural village dominated by cult to
the dead and superstition,
impoverished after the revolution.
● During his childhood, he was
witness of the violent religious
conflict "Guerra de los Cristeros" or
Cristero War that had the country
in turmoil.
● He would spend his time devouring
books from the library of a priest.

3. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
Family
● It was during the armed
conflict that his father was
killed in 1923.
● Four years later his mother
died in 1927.
● Rulfo was forever marked
by his tragic childhood that
would later become a
critical source of inspiration
for his works.
“Then I lived in an area of devastation. Not only human
devastation, but geographical devastation. I never found nor
have I found to date, the logic of it all. It cannot be attributed to
the Revolution. It was rather an atavistic thing, a thing of
destiny, something illogical.” –Juan Rulfo

4. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
Before The Artist
● Rulfo's remaining family sent him to study at an internship.
● In 1933 he was continuing his studies at a seminary.
● In 1934 he moved to the capital but could not get into the
university.
● His influential uncle gets him a
job as an Immigration agent for
the Secretariat of Interior.
● In 1938, Rulfo traveled around the
country on commission of service.
● It is when he got in contact with
isolated ethnic groups that still
maintained their old traditions that
he began his first literary works.

5. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
Becoming The Writer
● In 1945, Rulfo publishes his first story “La vida no es muy seria en
sus cosas”(“Life is not very serious in its things”) in the magazine
América.
● During the same year he publishes two more stories in the
magazine Pan, “Nos han dado la tierra”(“They have given us the
land”) and “Macario”.
“Nos han dado la tierra” is the story of a group
of four traveling towards a land in the plains
handed over by the government. But the plains
are dry and infertile, they tried to convince the
delegate without success.
In a way, it is Rulfo's criticism of the
government after the revolution, who did poor
management of land distribution.
“One talks here and words are heated in the mouth with the
heat outside, and they get dry in ones tongue until they end
with ones breath. Things are this way here. That's why no one
feels like talking.” –Excerpt from “Nos han dado la tierra”

6. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
Becoming The Writer
● In 1946 Rulfo gets established in Mexico City working for the
Goodrich Euzkadi tire company, but he didn't like living in the
city.
● Rulfo was attracted by the villages and peasant communities in
Mexico, held in the marginality and oblivion. A recurrent theme
in his stories.
● In 1947 “Es que somos muy pobres”(“It's
because we are very poor”) is published in
América. Yet another story of the hardships
that haunted poor communities. It narrates
the story of a poor family that had already
lost two daughters to prostitution. The third,
who had a chance of staying away from
that life, loses what seems to be her only
opportunity with the death of her cow, her
only source of capital taken away by the
river.

7. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
Becoming The Writer
● In 1948 “La Cuesta de las Comadres”(“The Hill of the Kinswomen”)
is published in América. A story about the Torrico brothers, a pair
of rascals who killed and stole from the inhabitants of the Cuesta
de las Comadres, a population of peasants and ranches near the
town of Zapotlá The protagonist, unlike everyone else in the
n.
Cuesta de las Comadres, was close with the Torricos, and even
helped them in some of their wicked doings.
One of the brothers, Odiló n had a
misadventure in Zapotlá were he spit
n,
liquor in the face of one of the
Alcaraces. They were all drunk, and
the Alcaraces took their knives out
and killed Odiló n. However, Remigio,
the brother of Odiló n didn't know
about this and blamed the
protagonist, who happened to be in
Zapotlá when he was killed. As
n
Remigio was about to go for the kill, the protagonist stabs him with
a needle and kills him, then goes on to tell him the facts.
Vengeance and tragedy, echo in the stories of Rulfo.

8. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
The Lover
● In 1948 Rulfo ● Letters formed part
marries Clara of their relationship
Aparicio Reyes. since early on, which
Whom he had in its early years was
exchanged love mainly of an
letters since 1945. epistolary character.
● The letters were later published in 2000, in
Aire De Las Colinas. Cartas a Clara.(Air of
the hills. Letters to Clara).
“...I thought of how good I would be if I were to
find the way towards the peach of your heart;
of how soon it would end the evil of my soul."
–Excerpt from Aire De Las Colinas

9. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
● Rulfo then
becomes a
The Photographer
salesman and
travels around
the country once
again.
● He was an avid
photographer
and lover of
scenery and the
indigenous
culture.
● Several of his
photos were
published in
travel guides.
● His legacy
includes
approximately
six thousand
photographic
negatives.

10. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
The Writer
● In 1950 he publishes in
América the story “Talpa”.
● Already, his trademark style of
tragic magic realism is apparent
in this story when a ghost haunts
his wife, who conspired to his
death along with her brother-in-
law, who she had an affair with.
By taking him to see the virgin of
Talpa on foot, far from their town,
who was thought to make
miracles and cure the disease of
the dying man. But the brother and wife push him too far with
the hidden intention of making him die from exhaustion. Like
Rulfo's other stories, the reader is left feeling a paradoxical or
ambiguous moral position about the characters relationships
and the validity of their acts.

11. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
The Writer
● In 1951 “¡Diles que no me
maten!”(“Tell them not to kill
me!”) is published in América.
● It tells the story of the peasant
Juvencio, who killed greedy Don
Lupe who would not share his
pasture with Juvencio's starving
animals. Juvencio would break
through the fence so his animals
would feed. After much arguing,
Don Lupe warned of killing the
next animal invading his
pasture. But Juvencio replied that he would have to pay for that.
And so, Don Lupe killed an animal and Juvencio killed Don Lupe.
Many years after that, one of Don Lupe's sons, now a colonel,
sends his men after the old Juvencio, and orders him be fussilladed.
Juvencio makes a leitmotif throughout the story by asking “Tell them
not to kill me!”. It proposes a paradoxical sense of who is the victim
and portrays the violence after the revolution.

12. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
The Writer
● In 1952 Rulfo becomes a
scholarship holder from the
Mexican Center of Writers,
founded by Margaret Shedd, a
key player in making possible
Rulfo's next publication.
● In 1953 he publishes the popular
El Llano en Llamas(The Burning
Plain) with 15 stories.
Rulfo gave with succinct and
expressive prose, an internalization
of the reality of the peasants and
their land, in stories that transcended
mere social anecdote.

13. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
The Writer
● In 1955 Rulfo finally publishes the novel Pedro Páramo, his
most celebrated work.
Considered by critics a masterpiece of world literature. In it,
Rulfo created a universe were the real and the mysterious
cohabit.
● Using an innovative structure, the
novel is narrated by the dead
inhabitants of the mythical village of
Comalá .
● His literary work shows life in rural
Mexico with their backwardness, and
their miseries with a mixture of
myths, obsessions and fantasies of
Mexican chiefdom,and its huge
socio-cultural problems.

14. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
The Style
● Pedro Pá ramo takes off in multiple
directions, breaking time, confusing
reality and hallucination, done using
chopped scenes, use of silences,
and hanging lines that involve the
reader in the story.
● In his stories, landscapes are
always the same, a vast plain
where it never rains, scorched
valleys, distant mountains and
villages inhabited by lonely people.
"The indigenous people of our American countries are
stalked by a scourge of various kinds: the delay of their
cultures from customs not stimulated by technique; illiteracy;
the snatching of their lands; their own internal power
struggles by holding permanence of chiefdom." –Juan Rulfo

15. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
After The Writer
● In 1958 Rulfo finishes writing his second
and final novel, El gallo de oro which is
not published until 1980.
● In 1959, Rulfo makes with Antonio
Reynoso, the short film “El Despojo”(“The
dispossession”), filmed in the state of
Hidalgo.
● In 1962 he began his last job at the
Instituto Nacional Indigenista (National
Indigenous Institute).
● In 1963 he wrote the screenplay for
Paloma herida and Gallo de oro.

16. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
After The Writer
● Despite the brevity of his work, he has exerted a decisive
influence on Latin American literature of the last half
●
century.
After publishing his first two titles, Rulfo
became the most recognized writer in
Mexico and abroad. Some of his
admirers include Carlos Fuentes,
Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Gao Xingjian, Susan Sontag,
and many more.
● Rulfo's works are considered part of
“The Boom” of the sixities and
seventies, when Pedro Páramo
actually gained recognition, although
he himself belongs to the past
generation of writers.

17. The Magical Realism Of Juan Rulfo:
Recognition and Final Years
● in 1957 Rulfo won the Xavier Villaurrutia
Award.
● In 1970 he is awarded Mexico's National
Prize for Literature.
● In 1980 he was elected to the Mexican
Academy of Language.
● In 1983 he received the Prince of Asturias
Award.
● In 1985 he received the Cervantes Prize from
Spain. And the Manuel Gamio Award.
● Rulfo suffered from lung cancer during his
final years.
● On January 7, 1986, he dies of a heart attack
in Mexico City.