Pedro Páramo and Images
Oh hello
I’m back, sitting in bed, looking out of my window at a sky bordered by grey house roofs, grey-with-dust window ledges, and full, itself, of soft grey clouds, the greys enclosing greys, reminding me less of what grey tends to (boredom, depression) but instead of smoke, of ash, of Cordelia, who I met in France, on my perfume course, who is building a range of perfumes around turpentine - a smell that reminds her of paint and half finished canvases in her grandad’s studio, and reminds me of camping as a child, after walking through heather, reminds me, ultimately, of her, Cordelia, blotting samples of her perfumes onto my wrist and ushering: smell, what do you think, smell again, is it better, do you like it, smell, again, closer.
But I’m back, back here now and returning to the regularity of my life, but with, inevitably, a residue of being in France, where I finally had time to think seriously about my life, to let a sense of myself build and build, while my longing for Cord too grew alongside. Devoted as me and her are to smells, we remain also committed in our life to things disappearing and returning only later as a haunting. So, we’re not talking. We have no plans to see each other. But I can’t think about much else at the moment. Every night I drop small amounts of turpentine onto my pillow. And then sleep.
I want to tell you so much about France and what I think now about my life, but I think it is more satisfying for us both to let that leak in over time so, instead, I’ll just say that at a party last night with a lot of tall whispering strangers in bouncy jackets, skinny jeans and clown shoes, my friend Sam, handed me a black velvet and said: “Darling, you and I, our problem and charm is that we are both impatient and decisive. If we are unhappy, we make changes and hold onto those changes dearly. But maybe,” he paused to tie his shoe and sip from his rum and coke, “maybe, in this moment of goals and resolutions and planning, we should explore the tantalising stress and unrest of indecision, maybe, as every therapist has told us, we should consider letting our impatience wash over us, and press in on us, and clutch instead to the endless fragmented possibilities of our future. Maybe instead of thinking when you will see Cord again, you should hold your breath to the infinite whens and wheres that could be.” Sam added: “See, I told you I’m becoming more thoughtful.”
This week I’m writing about Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and Images by Robert Altman. Both coyly play with time and perspective, flickering between what is real and what is not, what is in your skull and what is happening in front of you. I’m excited to be back and writing to you. I’d love to hear from you as well xx
Pedro Páramo (1955) by Juan Rulfo
Pedro Páramo begins like many stories of our lives do. A child is in search of his father. The child, Pedro’s son, entered a town to find him, entering on a road that rises or falls depending on whether you are leaving or entering, equipped only with his mother’s “nostalgia of tattered sighs” about what he should expect. He finds his father has been dead for years. And again, like many stories do, Pedro’s son’s story continues, despite and because of his father’s death. He stays in the town. But Pedro Páramo, the novel, doesn’t linger on the son, but swirls, as you would expect from a work pitched by its publisher as “probably the most important novel in Mexican literature”, swirls between the son, the father, and other people living and dead in the town. We’re told: “This town is full of echoes. It’s as if they were trapped in the gaps of the walls or beneath the cobblestones.” As a consequence, this is a novel to get lost in, deliberately puzzling, straying, without signposts or breath from one perspective to the next. “Through the hole in the roof, I watched flocks of thrushes pass overhead” and sometimes passages in the novel feel the same: like we are looking up from our bed at a world that is obscured, whose start and end is not clear, like people are just moving through their lives, “as if life were a passing murmur, as if it were nothing more than a soft murmuring”.
There is a lot of dust. A lot of heat. A lot of sweat and mud. Dirt too. And the inhabitants of the town seem, collectively, to be united in private griefs, mourning people disappearing, leaving them behind in the town. One character asks close to the end: “What am I to do with my lips now when I don’t have his mouth to occupy them? What am I to do with my aching lips?”
So, yes, the novel moves away from its quest for a son to meet his father, it never really returns to that plot, or reminds us that it was the plan. There is, instead, too much life and death in the way, too many memories, building up images and images, too much dust to offer a clear, precise narrative arc. The narrator says, of Páramo, the father, close to the end: “His eyes barely moved, but they jumped from one memory to another, obscuring the present.” And in that mess of memories, we, as readers, experience a novel that feels totally contemporary, despite the absence of iPhones, very 2023, in its over saturation, its distractions, its spilling vomit of sadness.
Images (1972) by Robert Altman
In Images, Altman focusses on the mind of a children’s book author, writing a book, and being visited by her husband, her dead ex and another ex who lives nearby. The film cuts between the eerie rural outdoors and the cramped interior of the cottage she is staying in, full of mirrors and eyes and doors closing. People come and go from the house: sometimes, seemingly, they exist; other times, they are only in Cathryn’s mind. Cathryn becomes increasingly convinced that everyone she meets at the house is simply an image, a ghost; that no one is real.
Where Pedro Páramo builds a fragmented world from different peoples’ eyes, here Altman creates a chilling, taut story, full again of confusion and gaps from the eyes of one. The result is a story that is claustrophobic, that can never escape Cathryn’s panic. All we have is Cathryn and her insecurity, her unreliable vision. And there is the book that Cathryn is writing, which she narrates to us throughout the story. There is a lovely blending of the world of that book, and the one Cathryn thinks she’s inhabiting. Altman captures the magical bleeding that occurs when lost in writing a story. The edges of the two stories grow weak, limp, leaning into each other.
Images is spooky! The rural gothic is a scary place. Like Cathryn, we want out, but there seems no clear way forward. The story remains, like a damp knotted bed sheet, looping on itself tighter. There are just way too many knocks at the door for a girl to handle. How many empty fields can there be?
Love
Anne