Pedro Páramo and Negative Space

Years ago I read a fascinating book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. One of the concepts the author used to teach people to draw more accurately was a well-known technique in art called “negative space.”  The classic example of this is the drawing below:

 

Looking at the “positive space” you see a goblet. But if you study the “negative” or black space, you will observe the silhouettes of two faces.  By concentrating on the background, or the “filler” spaces that surround the subject of a drawing or painting, we often see an entirely different facet of something that we would not have noticed otherwise.

It struck me, in learning that Rulfo eliminated so much of the content of his original version of Pedro Páramo, that his massive pruning of the novel was a way of using negative space in writing.  By removing the guiding authorial voice, as well as countless detailed explanations, he gives readers the license to fill in the gaps with what they imagine might lie among the shadows of the living and the dead, what might be grasped from peering underneath or behind the voices and events that fill this enigmatic work. Whatever the reader comes up with, it seems fair to assume that Rulfo wanted to encourage individual interpretations by not spelling everything out.

One clear example is Padre Rentería. In an article by Julio Moguel in La Jornada Semanal, I discovered that Rulfo eliminated over 100 pages related to Rentería. An interesting fact that disappeared was that Rentería was actually (one of) Pedro Páramo’s illegitimate children.  One more bit of juicy gossip?  Yes.  But had Rulfo left that in his novel, readers might have focused too strongly on the symbolism of the village priest being the illegitimate son of its patricarchal despotic ruler (the “goblet” in the picture) and less on other more personal facets of his character, such as the mental anguish that Rentería suffered in trying to reconcile his religious beliefs with the behavior of his parishioners and vice-versa (the ”silhouettes” in the picture.) What is not said in Pedro Páramo is often more intriguing (and more useful) in constructing this complex story in our minds, and trying to decide where it is leading us. If indeed it even wants to lead us. Perhaps it just wants us to sense the essence of what was, is, and might be within the myriad of negative spaces it offers.  

Endgame and Bomb Shelters

 

Random thoughts on this week’s reading…

*I started reading Endgame during Spring Break.  The fact that I was violently ill with a stomach virus did not help matters any; reading existentialist writing is about as uplifting as stepping in dog poop.  Sorry. 

*Cogito ergo sum. If we take Descartes’ famous statement, “I think, therefore I am,” and existentialize it, perhaps it could be “I don’t think; I simply am.”  Or perhaps “I don’t think, but I want to think that I can think, because otherwise I would shoot myself in the foot.”

*Even though I found Endgame immensely depressing in its overall message, I love that Beckett loved language. I enjoy reading authors who enjoy playing with words.  Beckett’s economy with words makes the impact of what he writes even greater. 

*Favorite repetitive lines:  (Clov, p. 73) ‘Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right mind. Then it passes over and I’m as lucid as before.’  (…)  Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right senses. Then it passes and I’m as intelligent as ever.’ 

*NAGG and NELL:  Regardless of whether they are the nails getting hammered by Hamm, they are more alive in their decrepit senile state, living in the dustbins, than Hamm and Clov could ever be.  I think that was on purpose.  Beckett’s little glimmer of hope (irony?) in a sea of  disillusionment.  Consider this:

                 NELL:  I am going to leave you.

                NAGG:  Could you give me a scratch before you go?

                NELL:  No.  (pause) Where?

That was Beckett defining marriage in three lines.  (O.K., just kidding.) But those two are the dearest to my heart in this theatre of the absurd because, while they emit absurd, contradictory thoughts, there is an underlying sentiment of… sentiment.  Nagg and Nell are, symbolically, that little candle in the darkness.  Their relationship is no longer functional: they live in separate dustbins.  But they continue trying to revive a time when there was some sort of meaning to their lives. Nell is the most realistic, acknowledging that there is no longer any point in carrying on as a couple: “I am going to leave you.”  But even she seems to cling to the need for a human relationship, expressed so wonderfully in two words when she responds to Nagg’s request for a scratch: “No.” … “Where?”  What will she find if she abandons him and goes off into the unknown?  The human need to feel “needed” is difficult to escape. 

*What is outside those windows?  Maybe this?   

The summer that I turned ten, my father built a bomb shelter in our basement.  This was right before the Cuban Missile Crisis was about to erupt.  (Alas, I am that old.) We lived fairly close to Washington, D.C.  and we were not the only people in the neighborhood building a bomb shelter.  I remember helping stock the shelter with canned food, blankets, etc. My brothers and sister and I “played house” in the bomb shelter when it was finished. I think we did this partly because it seemed fun, like a little toy house that was all ours.  I also think we did it because it was too awful to think of the real purpose of that bomb shelter. I never talked about it, but in the back of my mind, I began having horribly depressing thoughts about what the world outside that bomb shelter would look like if we ever did have to use it.  A bleak grey image of barren wasteland, much like the illustration above, crept into a corner of my brain and it has been there ever since.  That image kept resurfacing over and over again as I read Endgame.  Maybe it would have helped me when I was a kid if I had just said to myself, “Isn’t life absurd?”  If I had been more mentally prepared to accept the fact that the human race had achieved the technological means to wipe itself off the face of the map in one fell swoop, I probably would have accepted that fact as the ultimate absurdity of life.  But I am an incurable optimist.  And so I say to you, “Where do you want me to scratch?”  Or as the popular saying goes, “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”