On some other occasion in this Blog we have devoted attention to the passage of time (see A matter of time) and today I return to the same subject with a suggestive pill from the incomparable prose of José Manuel Caballero Bonald.
I have taken it from his book Examen de ingenios. The work consists of a hundred or so literary portraits that Caballero Bonald makes of contemporary writers and artists with whom he came across in the course of his octogenarian life. Caballero Bonald’s plethoric prose, and his Cervantine irony (sometimes bordering on Quevedesque sarcasm) make Examen de ingenios a joyful and exhilarating reading.
One of the profiles is dedicated to Juan Rulfo (1917-1986): “A short novel,” writes Caballero Bonald, “and a few short stories were enough to make Rulfo a paradigm, a model writer in any Western literature”.
Rulfo’s short novel is the indispensable Pedro Páramo… spectral as well as striking. In Caballero Bonald’s inspiring analysis of Pedro Páramo, he does not shy away from algebraic suggestions: “If one reaches the conclusion that all the characters in Pedro Páramo are dead, one of the novel’s equations will have been solved”. Rulfo chose the lost geography of Comala as the setting for his novel. “There is no plot,” writes Caballero Bonald, “only fragments of reality barely glimpsed between the veils of unreality or non-reality”. And then Caballero Bonald composes an excellent pill about the passing of time in Comala (which is also, I would say, a wake-up call about the increasingly unbearable acceleration with which life in modern technological societies passes by):
The time of life is measured by a dead clock,
and continues: “there is only a vague present without a future, a history without reasonable continuity, a sepulchral space where dreams poetically articulate reality and dislodge it of all logical content”.
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