Juan Rulfo’s River

Abstract

The anecdote of an encounter between two consecrated writers allows us to identify certain features of Juan Rulfo’s writing and authorial figure, such as the use of a foreign perspective to perceive what is his own and the strategy of producing a masterpiece that is extremely bounded in order to avoid eventual failure. The calibrated use of foreign voices in Rulfo’s narrative gives way to the recognition of fatal responsibilities and to a speech of defeated and dead people who never cease to confess, whose bodies adjust to the drifts of a silent river.