ABSTRACT GESTURES AND ELEMENTAL PRESSURES
earth, and fire. Other counterpointing energies are in evidence: sound and silence, the abrasive verbal gesturing against the void of madness or death, and the literally ineffable 'heap of broken images' to borrow Eliot's words from The Waste Land, that this novel finally is. The symmetries of Pedro Paramo ensure its poeticity, and this article will attempt to limn the powerful vaguenesses of what must be one of the most evocative fictional works of the twentieth century. The initial dialogue betweenJuan Preciado, son of Pedro Paramo, and his mother Dolores hypostatizes four abstractions that have some claim to be the presiding fateful presences, or, better, absences of the novel. For these abstractions can only reap their full significance in terms of their poignant 'elsewhereness' El olvido en que nos tuvo, mi hijo, c6braselo caro. Asi lo hare madre. Pero no pense cumplir mi promesa. Hasta ahora pronto que comence a llenarme de suenos, a darle vuelo a las ilusiones. Y de este modo se me fue formando un mundo alrededor de la esperanza que era aquel sefior llamado Pedro Paramo, el marido de mi madre. (my italics)1 The association of'wingedness' in the phrase 'darle vuelo a' closely connects with the novel's elemental undertow that will be examined later. But even at this most early stage of the novel we witness the cancellation of the present and the hegemonic control of future 'suefios' 'ilusiones' 'esperanza' and past 'olvido' as presiding instances of deferral. Pedro Paramo is a novel that is immediately centrifugal, unma'king itself at every turn by its flight from the concrete and its gesturing towards absence and abstraction. Juan Preciado's reflection on his mother's instruction is nothing if not ethereal. Pedro Paramo is coincident with the abstract quality 'esperanza' invested in him. In like manner, when the muleteer Abundio, who is taking Juan Preciado to Comala, is asked who Paramo is, he responds, 'Un rencor vivo' (p. io) Pedro Paramo is not a spiteful man but the living instance of spite itself. There is a denudation of circumstantial description. It is as though particularized detail would interfere with the unmitigated fullness of the abstract quality. Even though the metaphor of hell is summoned up to evoke for us the ardent depths of Comala: 'Aquello esta sobre las brasas de la tierra, en la mera boca del infierno' (p. 9) it is nowhere as engulfing or complete as in the earlier more abstract description of horrific descent: 'Habiamos dejado el aire caliente alla arriba y nos ibamos hundiendo en el puro calor sin aire' (p. 9) The inverted symmetry of progression from 'aire caliente' to 'calor sin aire' is already alerting us to the dialectical operation of colliding elemental imagery in the text. Similarly, negative identification will 1Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo, twelfth edition (Mexico, D.F. 1973) p. 7. All further textual references to Pedro Pdramo are to this edition.