Interpretations of literature tend to hover in the space between form and content (or form and ‘meaning’). The question of balance is an immediate concern for literary critics and one looks to others for guidance. According to Susan Sontag, the analysis of form in a text is far more important than the pursuit of meaning: ‘the function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means’. Nonetheless, in many works of literary criticism, meaning is the very focus and it is easy to end up favouring meaning over form. Sontag argues that this can be avoided: ‘The best criticism, and it is uncommon […] dissolves considerations of content into those of form.’ With these words in mind, I aim to examine the content of Juan Rulfo's work through the form of irony, the discreet employment of which is one of the signs of what Sontag would (admiringly) call a ‘stubborn’ author. For Sontag, interpretation is made all too easy by those authors who are so uncomfortable with the rawness of their art as form that they insist on gifting to us its content: