"Pedro Páramo" by Juan Rulfo

Pedro Páramo is regarded among many scholars as a foundational work of magical realism. It’s a confusing text with a nonlinear narrative and dialogue without tags so the reader is not always certain who is speaking, and to whom. And then there’s the small matter that the dead talk to the living, and time skips forward and backward, and at times the reader can’t be quite sure whether the person speaking is alive (and thus the scene is in the past) or dead (and thus the scene in the present). Of course, such a structure makes the concepts of past and present fluid and open to debate.

What I found particularly interesting is that, despite the presence of the supernatural throughout, the novel also functions as a mystery, perhaps even as a detective novel. Pedro Páramo's son has traveled to Comala, obeying the deathbed wish of his mother to seek out his father and claim what is rightfully his. He discovers that Comala is purgatory-like, populated with the dead who all have some explicit connection with Pedro Páramo. The first person narration is subsumed by a series of different viewpoints of people in the town, from the women Páramo married to obtain their lands, to the men Páramo swindled and strong-armed into submission, to Pedro Páramo himself. Often, a character enters the text with his/her fate already revealed; such is the case of Toribio Aldrete, where the reader first sees the name in connection with the room in which he was hanged. This prompts the question: who was he and what did he did he do to deserve the hanging?

Unlike a potboiler murder mystery that invites the reader to reconstruct clues in order to establish a linear time line and ultimately assign guilt to a specific party, Pedro Páramo works very differently. The reader knows from the start that Páramo is guilty of many atrocities, and the work to piece together the narrative is much more difficult given the nonlinear telling and the hazy distinction between life and death, between the "actual" and the supernatural.

To me, this seems to point directly to McHale's thesis that the modernist novel is about epistemology, and it's metaphorical vehicle is the detective story where the protagonist is on a search for meaning, whereas the postmodernist novel has to do with the experiential nature of "knowledge" and how we construct meaning. Pedro Páramo is a novel that interrogates the hows and whys of constructed knowledge, and by the end of the novel the reader can hardly remember what mystery was being unraveled, and there is no definitive "meaning" to have been gleaned.

Pedro Páramo bears all the hallmarks of a transgressive literature: it has multiple competing viewpoints; it plays with time; it mixes supernatural events with the mundane; it interrogates how we construct knowledge rather than focusing on the knowledge itself; it crosses through multiple genres including the literary novel and the fantastic, as well as satisfying most definitional requirements of the magically real.