Ghostscripts

A study of Mexican modernity through the author Juan Rulfo.

From its very beginnings Latin American writing linked itself to public duty—to the constitution of symbolic kinship—in the hopes of holding in abeyance the question of its debt—that is, the problem posed by its production as economic expenditure. Indeed, while such demands were once made on literature as such (not coincidentally at a certain highpoint of the US academy), such a judgment was carried out with particular force on the body of a so-called Third World literature by metropolitan and Third World intellectuals alike. Juan Rulfo's work inhabits this peculiarly distanced and specular relation to historical event-as-allegory. Its effect in his writing grounds the book’s conception of the "ghostscript," as well as a broader critique of institutional norms of literary study. It is not that Rulfo's putative magical realist telling of Mexican (or, more broadly, Latin American) reality is more faithful to the difference and particularity of Mexican or Latin American reality. Rather, Rulfo's writing conveys the virtuality of Mexican history itself—its structurally phantasmal character—in order to unbind writing from its dutiful, allegorical support of the social.