The father-figure motif in the worlds of Pedro Páramo and Páscoa Feliz
1977; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/1475382772000354029
ISSN1469-3550
Autores Tópico(s)Psychology and Mental Health
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: HOMER/HOMERO (fl. 9th/8th cent. BC)MIGUÉIS, JOSÉ RODRIGUES(1901–1980)PÁSCOA FELIZ [J. MIGUÉIS]PEDRO PÁRAMO [J. RULFO]RULFO, JUAN (1917?–1986) Notes 1. See L. Joseph Church and Joseph Stone, Childhood and Adolescence: A Psychology of the Growing Person (New York 1957), 168–69, 276–77, 368; Sigmund Freud, The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, tr.James Strachey (New York 1966), 527–29, 533–55. 2. I shall refer to volumes from several printings and re-editions of ‘The Collected Works of C. G. Jung’. All were translated into English by R. F. C. Hull. For a treatment of the archetypes and their relationship to conscious activity, see Psychological Types, VI (London 1971), 427–33; Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, VII (London 1953), 121–69; The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche,VIII (New York I960), 67–91, 281–97, 372–74; The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd ed., IX, Part 1 (Princeton 1968), 280–89; The Development of Personality, XVII (London 1954), 45–46. And see Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949; rpt. Cleveland 1956), 136. For a treatment of the attributes and rôle of the father archetype, see Jung, Archetypes, 214–15; Symbols of Transformation, 2nd ed., V (London 1967), 261. And see Campbell, 126–30,136–37,148. 3. Escape from Freedom (1941; rpt. New York 1965), 39–40, 153–56. 4. The Politics of Experience (New York 1967). 5. See George Ronald Freeman, Paradise and Fall in Rulfo's ‘Pedro Páramo’; Archetype and Structural Unity (Cuernavaca 1970), esp. Ch. 1, p. 37; Carlos Fuentes, ‘La novela latinoamericana’, La Cultura en México (supplement to Siempre [Mexico City]), 128 (29 July 1964), iii; Julio Ortega, ‘Pedro Páramo’, Boletín de la comunidad latinoamericana de escritores (Mexico City), 2 (Oct. 1968), 3, 4, 6. For an analysis that takes up elements of the motif for purposes that bear upon mine, see José de Colina, ‘Susana San Juan (El mito femenino en Pedro Páramo)’, in La narrativa de Juan Rulfo: Interpretaciones críticas, ed. Joseph Sommers (Mexico City 1974), 60–66. 6. Freeman's study of Rulfo has such implications; for Miguéis, see John Austin Kerr, Jr., ‘Aspects of Time, Place, and Thematic Content in the Prose Fiction of José Rodrigues Miguéis as Indications of the Artist's Weltansicht’, Diss. University of Wisconsin 1970, the only detailed treatment to date of Miguéis' work. 7. Work on Rulfo from this perspective has been done by Jean Franco, ‘El viaje al país de los muertos’, in La narrativa de Juan Rulfo, 117–40, and by Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, ‘Realidad y estilo de Juan Rulfo’, ibid., 88–116. To my knowledge, nothing similar exists for Miguéis. 8. Cf. C. Enrique Pupo-Walker, ‘Personajes y ambiente en Pedro Páramo’, CA, 167, No. 6 (1969), 195–96. 9. For Jung's characterization of the father archetype, see the references in n. 2, above. For his attributing to the mother archetype of the qualities of emotionality and instinctuality, see Archetypes, 81–82. 10. Pedro Páramo, 10th ed. (Mexico City 1969), 7. 11. Alan S. Bell, ‘Rulfo's Pedro Páramo: A Vision of Hope’, MLN, LXXXI (1966), 238–43, with whose interpretation of the novelette I disagree in most other respects, suggests that the hallucinatory appearance of Comala results from Juan's skewed perception of it. 12. A central feature of the novelette is Rulfo's creation of a monomythic structure in which specifically-portrayed interpersonal violence, with allusions to Mexican society and history, is identified with natural processes and with the force of time. The forces that Juan encounters therefore represent simultaneously both the general conditions of human mortality and, as well, specific social conditions. Hence my use, here and later, of the phrase ‘violence and mortality’, in which elements that at first glance would seem irreconcilable are in fact all but equated. Mariana Frenk, ‘Pedro Páramo’, in La narrativa de Juan Rulfo, 31–43, at p. 42, comments on the monomythic structure in explicit terms, while Jean Franco, 137–38, alludes to it implicitly in her treatment of Rulfo's use of the memento mori topos. 13. Both Bell, 238, and Ortega, 8, deal with some of the implications of characters' names; those implications go far beyond what I can suggest here. 14. I accept William York Tindall's view—which is not shared by all—that Stephen Dedalus' union with Leopold Bloom is a fruitful one, psychologically, for both, and that Ulysses represents a celebration of man's capacity to find creative individuality in himself and value in life. See Tindall, James Joyce: His Way of Interpreting the Modern World (New York 1950), 24–30; and A Reader's Guide to James Joyce (New York 1959), esp. 123–24. 15. In his analysis, Blanco Aguinaga, 103, 114–15, observes that Pedro Páramo himself represents a mixture of an external brutality and an internal childlike sentimentality connected with the figure of Susana San Juan, and that he therefore is a tragic figure. And Franco, 126–27, 131, speaks of the association of the mother figure and the image of paradise. The textural contrast between sea and stone sums up the duality. Further, I suggest that what Juan seeks is the hidden internal aspect of his father, while what he finds is the external ‘stone’, to which he cannot adapt. 16. Páscoa Feliz, 3rd ed. (Lisbon 1965), 17–18, 21–22, 29, 157. 17. When I speak of the clinical nature of Páscoa Feliz, I bear in mind that before it was published Miguéis had completed two of the three years of study in Brussels that would train him as a professional in the field of the education of abnormal and disadvantaged children. See Kerr, 44, 121–22. 18. João Maia, ‘Dois Livros de Ficção’, Brotéria, LXVIII (1959), 198–99, analyses what he refers to as Renato's ‘deficient upbringing’ [translation mine]. 19. Kerr, 107, 109, points out the recurrence of the pattern. He also notes, on pp. 178–79, the importance of the father figure in Páscoa Feliz and comments on its recurrence in some of Miguéis' later works (see, e.g., p. 368). Nevertheless, he neither relates those two observations to each other nor attempts to analyse the pattern's significance in psychological terms. I should say, from Renato's behaviour, that he can probably be classified as an adolescent schizophrenic—a person who, feeling that the world does not respond to him as an individual, has been unable to take the step from childhood to adulthood (see Church and Stone, 369–71). Miguéis, in his Author's Note (to the 2nd ed. of Páscoa Feliz) calls him an ‘esquizofrénico paranóide’. To so judge him is not, however, to deny the reality of socio-political isolating factors that may have gone into producing that condition in him. 20. For a treatment of the conflation of God and father figure, see Freud, 627–28. For a discussion of the relationship between communion and the son's finding of the father, see Campbell, 139–40, 143. 21. In his Author's Note, p. 170, Miguéis recalls that as a teenager he was an avid reader of the Bible and related texts and that he even wrote commentaries on the Bible. 22. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York 1961), 429–609.
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