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.