Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ghost Town

The Communion of Saints is a somewhat arcane Christian doctrine proclaiming that all of us, the living and the dead, are in this together. ‘This’ being the trek toward ultimate salvation. This is the theme that permeates Pedro Paramo. I think it accounts for the frequent appearances of the dead in helpful and discursive roles. But also for the devastation of the community itself which has never pulled its weight, as it were, by battling the forces of evil, namely the un-faithful. Continuity is thus invariably lost - in individual personalities, in communal cohesion, and even in civilisation.

The sort of cosmic fellowship of the Communion was worked out late in the 5th century and is included in the so-called Apostles Creed. For Christians its significance is clear: the communion that is shared in the Spirit transcends space, time and even earthly life. Yep, it includes what is more commonly known as ghosts, a group that is celebrated on November 1st throughout the Christian world. The point, unmissable by all believers, is that souls are very real things that can wander around without material bodies, and that just such a thing is to be expected from time to time. Hence events like Halloween and the Day of the Dead.

Christianity inherited much of its ideology of death from Ancient Greece. For the Greeks, the rituals of death were thought to create the polis, the community itself. This was part of a complex ideology that distinguished between the heroic death of a warrior and the so-called Tame Death (by accident or illness) of the average person. Only the former had social as well as ritual significance. It was the strength and determination of the warrior in death that built and held the polis together. The warrior’s death was a sacrifice for the community.

The early Christian community coopted this idea of the heroic death, explicitly for its martyrs, and implicitly for all its faithful members. The Communion of Saints was neatly divided in appropriate categories: the Church Militant (those still fighting for their faith on earth), the Church Penitent (souls spending time in Purgatory after they had fought well but atoning for their sins unrelated to faith), and the Church Triumphant (those who having fought the good fight find themselves in heaven). Those who hadn’t fought the fight of faith successfully were in Hell and no longer members of the Communion.

The fictional location of Rulfo’s novel is the village of Comala somewhere in Southwestern Mexico. Its literary location, however, is really metaphysical: “That town sits on the coals of the earth, at the very mouth of hell. They say that when people from there die and go to hell, they come back for a blanket.” The place had clearly lost its battle for faith. Stray ghosts are loose everywhere. The village clearly is no longer a part of the Communion of Saints. As one of the residents says: “Nights around here are filled with ghosts. You should see all the spirits walking through the streets… There's so many of them and so few of us that we don't even make the effort to pray for them anymore.” The link between the living and the dead has been decisively broken.

The bishop came by some years ago but didn’t linger, declaring an anathema on the place as he rode away on his burro. The place is described as a virtual desert with no significant vegetation. Yet it is “A town that smelled like spilled honey.” Honey was an embalming fluid, confirming the pervasiveness of death rather than the presence of honey bees. The name of the estancia where Pedro lives is the Media Luna, The Half Moon, often a symbol of death. The protagonist is Juan Preciado, John Valuable. Is it a literary bridge too far to suggest that this is a reference to John the Beloved Disciple, purported author of the Apocalypse? This last book of the Bible has the striking image of a woman, traditionally interpreted as the Virgin Mary, standing in triumph on the moon. She does not triumph in Comala but is overwhelmed by the evil emanating from Media Luna.

Comala is forlorn, not just abandoned but part of another order of being entirely. The residents scoff at the very idea of faith: “What has their faith won them? Heaven? Or the purification of their souls? And why purify their souls anyway, when at the last moment…” A lifetime of valiant effort could be wiped out on account some minor doubt at the end. Why engage in this sort of endless struggle therefore? Faith is a mug’s game. Comala is a concentration camp for the souls of those who have given up the fight of the faithful.

Hope is what drew Juan to Comala, and a promise to his dying mother about getting revenge on his father. What he finds is a Communion of Sinners. No, that’s not quite right; we are all sinners. This is a Communion of Resigned Sinners. Juan’s father is long dead but tells about his life through his ghost. The locals have been beaten down by the corruption that surrounds them - by the land-owner and his agent and family, by the church and its demands for tithes and its claimed control over their eternal fate, and by each other as they pimped their own daughters and failed to stand up for their friends and family members. Even the priest cannot be shriven by his colleagues. They are without Hope and can’t provide Juan’s Hope any encouragement.

Without the Communion of Saints, those living in Hell look for alternative means of social cohesion. Revolution is an attractive alternative, but is rarely satisfying since there are heroic dead on each side. And those who have not chosen a side die a tame death of no significance whatsoever. Unlike in the Dickens A Christmas Carol, the ghosts have no effect whatsoever except to confirm the obdurate evil in which they continue to exist. They cannot escape and they cannot end their existence. They can only repeat events in their lives and testify to their regrets forever - among themselves and to whoever happens to be passing by. But the living are of no use to them and vice versa..

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