Thinking the Good without the True with Pedro P·ramo.

Abstract

This dissertation presents a reading of Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo in relation to the Mexican Revolution. Exploring its narrative construction of a fictional world of supernatural life forms, I argue that these life stories serve to denounce the Christian worldview regarding the nature of life dominant in pre-revolutionary Mexico and to equally reject the post-revolutionary secular conception of the world that replaced it as the authoritative narrative on the reality of life and basis for social organization. I show that the novel’s invented, supernatural perspectives denaturalize both definitions of reality to reframe them as en/gendered social narratives contending for conflicting vested interests. I explore the novel’s invitation to reconsider the question of life’s meaning and value – the question of the good in relation to life and its social organization – outside all truth-claims and the violence they justify in the name of the common good. Contextualizing the novel’s emphasis on fictionality in relation to indigenous mythical worldviews as well as recent theories on the nature of life in contemporary life sciences, I read the novel’s engagement with the question of co-existence outside of the logic of representation. I rely on contemporary Latin American cultural theory for the critique of modernity as a hegemonic worldview but suggest that the novel moves beyond the political impasse that characterizes representational politics, which delimit culturally specific representational claims to truth without undoing either the category of truth or of representation. Situating this view of culture as a representational system relative to an external world within the context of its emergence through scientific and cultural revolutions in modern Europe, I relativize this meaning of culture as one historico-cultural invention serving a particular value system. I argue that the novel moves beyond both competing truth-claims between different value systems and the ethical impasse in cultural theory through a denunciation of the category of truth itself as the most dangerous fiction, in turn inviting the invention of empowering fictions as the basis for nonviolent co-existence. In the process I discuss how the novel enables a revaluation of the critical potentials of magical realist narratives.