Juan Rulfo: A Unique Voice, A Unique Eye

It is always fascinating for me to listen to the recordings of authors reading their own work.  Juan Rulfo, the esteemed Mexican author, had an entrancing reading voice that seems to me to capture the ebb and flow of his writing: it is itself almost a force of nature, but an understated, quiet one.  You can listen to him reading his story, "Luvina," here.

When we read Rulfo's work, it is sometimes difficult not to place him within a distinctly national context: he was known, first, as a Mexican writer.  But his voice echoes across national borders in the work of  Gabriel García Márquez (Columbia), Roberto Bolaño (Chile, Mexico, El Salvador, France, Spain), and Sandra Cisneros (U.S.A.).  Each of these writers has found something in Rulfo that resonates: a hyperreal sense of place, an unsettling sense of time arrested and continuous at once, a respect for unpresuming voices-- those voices barely heard elsewhere. 

Rulfo was not only a great writer: he was an accomplished photographer as well.  His distinctive literary voice-- lyrical, simple, haunting-- finds its corrollary in his beautiful images of rural Mexico.  Here are a few:

The Problem of Speaking for Others

Here we have a cartoon, drawn by Ashcan artist John Sloan, which indicates his interest in a political aesthetic of Anarchism and a critical stance toward bourgeois commercial consumption.  In this image, titled "Indian Detour," we see tourists avoiding what D.H. Lawrence described as the trap of "making the Indian and his 'religion'... a sort of public pet."  At the same time, we can visually comprehend the "problem of speaking for others" that Linda Alcoff discusses in her groundbreaking 1991 essay, "The Problem of Speaking for Others."  What is being learned or experienced here?  Who even cares?  Consider this image in the light of Edward Said's claim that "far more than they fight, cultures coexist and interact fruitfully with each other."