Second Writing Assignment Spanish 300

7/29/2019 Second Writing Assignment Spanish 300

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Second writing assignment Spanish 300 / Lit 400 Pedro Pramo

Below is a compilation of readers comments on Pedro Pramo, taken from theAmazon.com readers forum. Read through these critical responses and find theone which best exemplifies your response to the novel, and one with which youmost disagree. For the one with which you disagree, Id like you to write a

response, pointing out the critics misperceptions, faulty logic, or whatever elsecaused you to be of a divergent opinion [1 page or so]. For the response withwhich you agree, Id like you to elaborate on the critics ideas, combining themwith your own [and possibly those of other critics who make points with which youagree] to formulate an essay convincing people who have never read the book thatthey need to do so [2-3 pages].

1.

Nothing in literature can prepare you for the impact of Pedro Paramo for nothing in

literature compares to this novel from Mexican author Juan Rulfo. Published in 1955, andRulfo's only novel, Pedro Paramo is the story of Juan Preciado's quest to find both his rootsand his father. Fulfilling his mother's dying wish, Juan sets out for the rural Mexican villageof Comala, the village of his mother's memories, the village where "she sighed aboutgoing back," and where Pedro Paramo, lover, overlord and murderer, spent his childhoodand his youth. What Juan finds in Comala is something very different from what heexpected, something very different from what the reader expects, for Comala is truly avillage of the damned, a hell that one literally descends into, never to return. As JuanPreciado meets first one, then another of the inhabitants of Comala, he comes to anastonishing revelation--everyone in Comala, including his father, is dead. The second halfof Pedro Paramo concerns itself with the reasons why Comala became a village of thedead and the emphasis then shifts to the enigmatic character of Susana San Juan, the only

woman Pedro Pramo ever truly loved and the one who was forever denied him. Althoughfew details are provided about Susana San Juan, we come to see her as the epitome of twoarchetypes: the heavenly goddess and the overtly sexual madwoman. When she dies andascends into heaven, in front of Pedro Paramo's own eyes, the fate of Comala and itsresidents becomes forever sealed. Although this small book may seem to lack structure(there are no chapter breaks), it is highly structured. It is, however, a structure of silences,hanging threads, truncated scenes, and even non-time. Rulfo moves backwards andforewards between the past (the Comala of the living) and the present (the Comala of thedead). The author moves seamlessly between first person and third person; scenes cutinto one another and move effortlessly from one location to another and yet nothing is

jarring, nothing is out of place. Although more horrifying than any other book I have everread, Pedro Paramo does not "fit" into any genre and Rulfo uses none of the usual writer's

techniques to enhance his story. Rulfo simply uses straightforward narration, moving fromconscious thought to memory, from the world of the living to the world of the dead. In aninterview in 1980, Rulfo, himself, said that he wanted to allow the reader to participate inthe telling of the story, in the filling in of the blanks. Pedro Paramo is a shadowy, eerie,haunting work, and one whose impact on literature cannot be over-emphasized. GabrielGarcia Marquez has called this book the most influential reading of his early writing yearsand has admitted to memorizing the entire text. Yet Pedro Paramo completely lacks thehumor of Garcia Marquez (in fact, its bleakness is entirely unrelieved) and it is definitelynot magical realism. Although this book defies classification, it is most definitely amasterpiece and most definitely one-of-a kind.


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2. In this 1955 Mexican novella, a young man, Juan Preciado, promises hisdying mother that he will find his father, the Pedro Pramo of the title, andclaim his birthright. Juan has no independent memories of his father. Hismother fled her abusive and loveless marriage shortly after Juan's birth andraised him by herself in a city far away from his father's ranch.

After burying his mother, Juan sets off for Comal where his father'sranch is located. When he reaches his destination, he finds an eerie,nightmarish town, inhabited entirely by ghosts. Comal is a veritablegraveyard where the dead relive their intolerable memories. All of thosememories revolve around Pedro Pramo, the corrupt local boss, who turnedComal into a hell on earth.

Juan Rulfo's writing is surreal and dreamlike. This novel reads as if themain character is experiencing a nightmare. The narrative contains manyabrupt shifts in time and frame of reference. These rapid shifts are

disorienting, and greatly enhance the novel's disturbing effect. There is onememorable passage, where Juan is wandering the deserted streets andhouses of Comal, when suddenly the whole town fills up with water andJuan experiences the sensations of drowning. I could swear that passage isright out of one of my own nightmares.

This book is far more than a ghost story. Like Toni Morrison's Beloved,Pedro Pramo is a social allegory in the form of a ghost story. The novel isfilled with symbols and double-meanings. For example, Pramo meanswasteland in Spanish (in fact, the Mexican edition of T. S. Eliot's TheWasteland is titled El Pramo). Juan Preciado is on a quest for his legacy.

Instead, he finds a hellish wasteland, populated by ghosts. The novel is asocial allegory of mid-twentieth century Mexico. From 1910 through the1940s, Mexican society endured civil unrest, a revolutionary war, the anti-clerical purges of the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship and increased urbanization.An urban Mexican,seeking his roots, finds a bleak legacy of war, rampantpoverty, destroyed haciendas and disbanded monasteries. Author Juan Rulfowas born to an upper class Mexican family. By the end of the MexicanRevolution, Rulfo's parents were dead and Rulfo himself was in anorphanage. Rulfo experienced firsthand the losses symbolically portrayed inhis only novel, Pedro Pramo.

Although this short novel is difficult to follow, it contains some of themost surreal and imaginative writing I've ever read. Margaret SayersPeden's English translation keeps all of the beauty, imagery, symbolism andwordplay intact. The book is both remarkably beautiful and remarkablydisturbing. I recommend reading it through once and then skimmingthrough it a second time in order to put it into context and perspective. Thisnovel is particularly worthwhile for readers with a Spanish languagebackground and an interest in Latin America.


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3.Pedro Pramo, published in 1955, employed many of the techniques

that would be used in the novels of the 1960s Latin American "boom":withdrawal of the narrator, multiple viewpoints, interior monologues, and theemphasis on complexity through structural fragmentation and inversion of

time. Its author and this work can thus be considered one of the boom'sprecursors.

Those who enjoy writing created from such techniques used to thisextent -- where often it didn't become unclear until the third or fourth readwhat was happening, who was speaking, who was listening, who was doingwhat, how most of the characters were related to each other, and how theevents described were related to each other in time -- would enjoy thisnovel. Otherwise, like me, they might not be able to appreciate it.

Mainly what I could grasp was that a man was looking for his father ina village that was a purgatory for dead sinners, where time turned

backward. The father was the local landowner and a tyrant who'd committedmany crimes. Eventually the searcher faded from the story. The historicalbackground supplied by other readers was valuable and enlightening, butwas immeasurably clearer in their descriptions than in the novel itself.

The novel consisted mostly of dialogue, with the features describedabove. There were also descriptions of the village and its surroundings. Theatmosphere of the hot, bleak land and death and of the hopelessness of thecharacters was powerful. But for this reader, the book didn't need tocontinue for 120 pages. I might've been able to appreciate this masterpieceof illogic and obscurity if it had been something closer in form to a short

story, like some of the works in the same author's The Burning Plain, such as"Tell Them Not to Kill Me!" or "The Man."

4.If in the contemporary literature there are so many writers dealing with

the magical realism, we must be grateful to Juan Rulfo and his masterpiece"Pedro Paramo" that brought this kind of narrative to us. The experience ofreading this short book can be very difficult to most of us at first, but, oncewe get used to the magical ideas and the writer's style the narrative flowssmoothly.

Juan Preciado returns to a town called Comala, a place his mother leftwhen he was just a baby. That is literally a ghost town -- there are manydead walking people. On arriving there he finds out that his father, alandlord, was a tyrant and people didn't like him. Preciado is taken by somespirits and guide through the story of the city and its death, brought on byParamo.

Evil and chaos arise from Paramo's hand in the story. That's whyComala has been destroyed. In the early days, the landlord, with theassistance of the church, leads the whole town to corruption, philandering


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and decay. As a consequence violence suffuses the city. Miguel, Paramo'sson, is the personification of that. He is a serial rapist and ends up killed byhis horse. When Susana, Pedro's love interest dies, he shuts the entire citydown mandating that the farm become dead and funding revolutionaries.

For most, what maked "Pedro Paramo" a difficult book is the style ofnarrative chosen by Rulfo. His text reads like the hopscotch. Narrative swifts

time and place easily -- and to understand the changes and new narratives,the reading of this novel requires double attention. The story can jumpwhich jumps between Juan's dealings with the residential ghosts of the town,his channeling of the non-ghost souls those departed who exist in a mentallimbo, and non-linear retelling or straight narration of the past.

In his narrative, the author is dealing with the tragedy -- in anexperienced level rather than in a viewed level. The effect intended by thewriter is a simple one -- with that he brings his readers closer to hisnarrative. Contemporary authors try to dead with that, but not many are assuccessful as Rulfo -- one of the best positive examples is Gabriel Garcia

Marquez that with charm and style mastered his own narrative having withbasis Rulfo's proposition.

"Pedro Paramo" is a highly recommended book. It is difficult andinteresting. But don't let the size fool you. It is short but complex andprofound -- and, for many people, disturbing.

5.This book is the most boring and confusing book I've ever read. God, whatthe hell was Juan Rulfo thinking when he wrote this book? I mean The storyis great, but it doesn't have flow. I mean I like it because it reminds me so of

the other novels I've read a while ago. I'm thinking about reading it again. Imight change my mind when I read it again.

6.I do not find Pedro Paramo to be a very well-written piece of literature. ... itis definitely not worth a spot on the International Baccalaureate curriculum.

The main problem I have with it is that the author cannot finish a thought;he writes in the descriptive detail that everyone raves about, and thenleaves everything up to the reader, and I find this to be an awful style ofwriting.

The 'flowing tangents of possibility' created by the writer are merelyunfinished thoughts with a million answers...was that really the goal? Itmakes the task of analysis very difficult if there is no right answer toANYTHING. Sure, this is acceptable for a few parts of the book, but if theauthor can't finish a thought, it becomes a puzzle of guessing, similar to oneof those books that you read as a little kid where you skipped pagesdepending on the choice you made, and went back if you made the "wrong"choice. Unfortunately for us, however, we don't have the luxury of knowingwhen the choice was wrong. You could go a solid 60 pages thinking that a


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character was dead, only to have him/her come back and do something thata proves that he/she was alive the whole. Or maybe, he/she came back tolife? You never know! I won't deny that if you are bored, this book willstimulate you; however, the lack of a positive answer makes it a randomassortment of thoughts that any writer with half a mind could assemble, andnot the critically acclaimed book that the IB Program loves. The constant

lack of a firm answer makes it a frustrating piece of literature full of randomcomplexities that I, as a publisher, would never have let out of the draftingstage.

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Second Writing Assignment Spanish 300