EMIR RODRIGUEZ MONEGAL
43
To read Rulfo,
to
decode him, one must begin by facing the enigma
proposed by the linguistic code of his novel.
The case of Guimaraes Rosa is even more extraordinary. While Rulfo
compresses, with majestic economy, the destiny of Pedro Paramo in a
relatively brief though complex structure, Guimaraes Rosa expands over
the loose plot of an immense monologue the narration of a destiny that is
also allegorical. If Rulfo uses the dialogue of the dead, with its parallel
lamentations, its evocations, its secret allegories,
to
stress the final in–
communication in which his protagonists are frozen, Guimaraes Rosa uses
and abuses the protagonist's monologue
to
a silent listener, to postulate that
final lack of communication.
In a manner more Joycean than Faulknerian (the North American
writer is a recognized influence on Rulfo), Guimaraes Rosa situates the
first level of access
to
his novel in even more demanding circumstances
than Rulfo's. While in Rulfo all is transparent at the level of language, in
Rosa, the narrative line is simple and can be told in a few words, but the
language is opaque, almost inaccessible, even for the Brazilians them–
selves. Because Rosa here has followed more the Joyce of
Finnegans Wake
than that of
Ulysses .
The protagonist, Riobaldo, takes advantage of the
idiosyncracies of the oral monologue, its loose grammatical structure, its
idioms and barbarisms, to pour into a language which is, on the other
hand, strongly regionalist, that endless thread of evocation of his adoles–
cence and first youth, of the search for his identity through the search for a
father and of a love which cannot be accepted because it is condemned by
the machistic code of a warrior's sword.
A very Rulfian theme, of couse, because it is one of the great
topoi
of
all literarure. But a theme which Rosa develops in a more explicitly
religious way than Rulfo. The center of the protagonist's moral conflict
appears allegorized by a diabolic temptation and by the encounter with a
disembodied voice which tempts him in the desert. That seduction and
the other diabolical temptation which is the love for Diadorim, one of his
comrades-in-arms, will allow Rosa the minimal plot required by the
novel. But in his work, as in Rulfo's, it is not the adventure that centers
or monopolizes its interest but rather the mythical design which that
adventure reveals. Again, the linguistic structure built by the narrative to
bring
to
fruition the search for a new language for the Brazilian novel, and
the mythical structure which makes the other search explicit, are insepar–
able, like the two sides of a glove .
From Rulfo, the new Latin American novel branches out: one
line follows the exploration of those national realities, going deeper into
circumstances (as in the early novels of Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, and
