Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Form and Content, Text and Context
- 1 Juan Rulfo and Fictional Irony
- 2 Centripetal Irony in ‘Nos han dado la tierra’ and ‘El día del derrumbe’
- 3 Centrifugal Irony and ‘La Unidad Nacional’
- 4 Ambivalence and the Crisis of the Mimic Man: Irony and Context in ‘Luvina’
- 5 The Priest of Pedro Páramo: Fetishistic Stereotyping and Positive Iconography
- 6 Pedro Páramo: Irony and Caciquismo
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Centripetal Irony in ‘Nos han dado la tierra’ and ‘El día del derrumbe’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Form and Content, Text and Context
- 1 Juan Rulfo and Fictional Irony
- 2 Centripetal Irony in ‘Nos han dado la tierra’ and ‘El día del derrumbe’
- 3 Centrifugal Irony and ‘La Unidad Nacional’
- 4 Ambivalence and the Crisis of the Mimic Man: Irony and Context in ‘Luvina’
- 5 The Priest of Pedro Páramo: Fetishistic Stereotyping and Positive Iconography
- 6 Pedro Páramo: Irony and Caciquismo
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In Rulfo's fiction, there are few uncomplicated, linear narrative structures; the characters' lives are not dwelt upon, well-introduced or fully-drawn; sentences are kept to a syntactic minimum and dialogue, particularly, is given without much explanation. The result is an almost Borgesian disturbance of the reader's orientation which establishes, in turn, a certain aporia, or doubt, ensuring that we are alert to meanings beyond the literal. In many instances, these meanings are transparent, particularly where the ironic referent lies within the fiction itself (centripetally) but, as discussed in the previous chapter, Rulfo's irony also points to referents outside the scope of the fiction (centrifugally), chiefly the ‘rhetoric of revolution’ described later in the book. This referent is arguably more complex and inviting of critique but centripetal referents are just as important as they help to establish the ironic rapport of complicity between reader and writer which, in turn, facilitates the transfer of meaning in centrifugal irony. Therefore, in this chapter, I shall examine the operation of centripetal irony in two of Rulfo's short stories, particularly in their relationship with traditional modes of emplotment.
Hayden White argues that, on a ‘deep level of consciousness’, historians – as well as fiction writers – make use of four poetic modes of configuration (tropes) based on aesthetic or moral grounds with no epistemological basis: romance, comedy, tragedy and irony. Romance represents a victory of ‘good over evil, virtue over vice and light over darkness and of the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the Fall’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Fiction of Juan RulfoIrony, Revolution and Postcolonialism, pp. 27 - 42Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012