To meet Susan Sontag's challenge of identifying first what a text is, rather than what it means, as discussed in the introduction, this chapter will approach Rulfo's work through fictional irony: its philosophical development, its purposes and its operation. The best starting point for this study is the author whose work inspired my interest in Rulfo's use of irony, Hayden White. I will return to his work in further chapters but, for now, I should mention that it provides a vital philosophical background to our subject. For White, the irony and scepticism of late Enlightenment thought had been contested by Rousseau, Hegel and Comte with what he calls ‘naïve’ conceptualisations of the world, creating ‘the self-confident tone of early nineteenth-century historiography’. Between 1830 and 1870, historians and novelists consequently aimed at objectivity and realism but ‘succeeded only in producing as many different species of “realism” as there were modalities for construing the world in figurative discourse’. An ironic posture towards truth was then invited by Marx's ‘revealing the ideological implications of every conception of history’ (emphasis added), the philosophical expression of which is Nietzsche's idea that all is potentially truth or fiction, thus creating the ‘ironic condition’ in historiography and art. By the early twentieth century, the epistemological grounds for realism had been thrown into doubt, making the fictional writer question what one can actually ‘know’ except the chaos of the world.