Hispanic Research Journal, 2018

VOL. 19, NO. 1, 72–88

https://doi.org/10.1080/14682737.2018.1419000

Heterotopic Enclosures: Mexican National Spaces in Luis

Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo
Ivan Kenny
NUI Galway, Ireland

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article analyses the subversive depiction of Mexican ‘national Mexico; Buñuel; Rulfo; space;
spaces’, such as homes, churches, and cemeteries, in Luis Buñuel’s national
El ángel exterminador (1962) and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955).
PALABRAS CLAVE
Although both of these artists have been studied in considerable México; Buñuel; Rulfo;
depth, a detailed comparison of their works remains to be carried out, espacio; nacional
particularly with respect to their innovative approach to spatiality. Both
Buñuel’s film and Rulfo’s novel feature key physical and conceptual
spaces which enclose and imprison their characters and I seek to link
this sense of entrapment to a critique of nationalist cultural hegemony.
The analysis will be carried out by applying Foucault’s (1986) concept
of the heterotopia along with Lefebvre’s (1991) idea of ‘national space’.
This new research will contribute towards a deeper understanding of
spatiality in mid-twentieth century Mexican Modernism and a greater
awareness of the myriad links between these two experimental artists.

RESUMEN
Este artículo analiza la representación subversiva de los ‘espacios
nacionales mexicanos’, como los hogares, las iglesias y los cementerios,
en El ángel exterminador (1962) de Luis Buñuel y Pedro Páramo (1955)
de Juan Rulfo. Aunque se han realizado muchos estudios sobre
ambos artistas todavía falta una investigación comparativa sobre
su uso innovador del espacio. La película de Buñuel y la novela de
Rulfo contienen espacios físicos y conceptuales que envuelven y
encarcelan a sus personajes. Propongo vincular este sentido de
encerramiento con la crítica hacia la hegemonía cultural nacionalista.
El análisis aplica el concepto de ‘heterotopía’ de Foucault (1986) y la
idea de ‘espacio nacional’ de Lefebvre (1991). Esta nueva investigación
amplía el conocimiento del espacio en el modernismo mexicano a
mediados del siglo veinte y explora los vínculos entre ambos artistas
experimentales.

Introduction
All fictional narratives involve the creation of a particular story world, that is, the generation
of a series of spatial coordinates like that of a cartographer’s map. In this article, I examine

CONTACT Ivan Kenny ivan.kenny@nuigalway.ie, ivan-kenny@hotmail.com Spanish Department, Arts Millennium

Building, NUI Galway, Galway, Ireland.
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL  73

the issue of spatiality in El ángel exterminador (1962) by Luis Buñuel and Pedro Páramo
(1955) by Juan Rulfo, two crucial works in the development of experimental modernist
Mexican narrative. These works emerged in a context of mid-twentieth century international
modernist artistic expression and state-sponsored discourses of cultural nationalism in
post-Revolutionary Mexico. Both artists have received a considerable amount of scholarly
attention and yet a detailed comparative study of their works remains to be carried out.
Fuentes (2004) maintains that Buñuel’s Los olvidados (1950) went on to influence Rulfo’s
Pedro Páramo and also suggests that El ángel exterminador may well have been influenced
by Pedro Páramo. I aim to show how the later film and Rulfo’s novel can be linked by an
examination of the innovative approaches to spatiality that are evident in them. Specifically,
I contend that both narratives subvert discourses of state-sponsored Mexican cultural
nationalism precisely through their depiction of ‘national spaces’, such as the Mexican
family home, the church and the cemetery, reified sites which over time have come to be
identified with the post-Revolutionary Mexican nation.
Lefebvre (1991, 23) rightly suggests that the modern state ‘promotes and imposes itself
as the stable centre […] of (national) societies and spaces’. The spaces1 represented in earlier
state-sponsored post-Revolutionary cultural production, particularly those in novels from
La Narrativa de la Revolución, Mexican national cinema and the Muralist movement, dating
from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, served to reinforce the hierarchal structure, unity and
stability of the Mexican nation: for instance, domestic spaces such as the family home were
often tacitly equated with patriarchy, prosperity and stability. Indeed, the home was often
presented as a metaphor for the state. Mora (1989, 57) argues that the ideological framework
of the Golden Age Mexican cinematic melodrama revolved around the traditional trinity
of ‘God, Nation, and Home’.
It can be argued that the construction of religious buildings has been coterminous
with the growth and propagation of religious ideology. Lefebvre (1991, 44) underlines the
importance of the fundamental link between space and religion/ideology when he poses
the following questions: ‘What is ideology without a space to which it refers? […] What
would remain of the Church if there were no churches?’. In Mexico, pyramids were central
to religious worship for many pre-Hispanic cultures. The subsequent building of Catholic
churches directly on top of many of these sites, as part of the process of colonisation,
placed a syncretic fusion of pre-Hispanic and Catholic ideology at the core of the Mexican
national imaginary.2 In state-sponsored Mexican cultural production, from the 1920s to
the 1940s, churches functioned as sacred spaces which united the predominantly Catholic
congregation. García Canclini suggests that in Mexico ‘[h]istoric sites and squares, palaces
and churches, serve as the stage for representing the national destiny, traced from the
beginning of time’ (2005, 110).
Often located in Church grounds, the sacred space of the cemetery serves to commemorate
both loved ones and fallen heroes in a culture where death has become elevated to the level of

1
The assumption being made here is that symbolic expression and cultural production are both intrinsically bound up
with questions of spatiality, whether we are dealing with literature, cinema, music, or the plastic arts. Richardson (2015,
2) suggests that ‘no account of our capacity to express ourselves symbolically can avoid addressing the multiple ways in
which spatiality informs our relationships with others’.
2
This process can be seen in the case of the Great Pyramid of Cholula (Tlachihualteptl) in Puebla. Symbolically, the Church
physically and figuratively occupies a higher level, supplanting the social and ritual function of the former indigenous
beliefs. The church in Cholula now houses the ‘Virgin of the Remedies’, a figure who replaced Chiconauhquiauhitl (Goddess
of the Nine Rains) (McCafferty 1996).
74  I. KENNY

a symbol for Mexican national identity. Indeed, Lomnitz maintains that ‘the nationalization
of death is a singularly Mexican strategy’ (2008, 20). The skeletal caricatures created by
Mexican printmaker and satirist José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913) played an instrumental
role in this process. The influence of Posada’s death imagery is to be found in Diego Rivera’s
Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central (1946–1947), a foundational work
which unites the distinct timelines of Mexican history in one panoramic artistic space,
with the national symbol of death, the Calavera Catrina, at the centre. Despite the fact that
this national celebration of death, along with Posada’s imagery, contains elements which
might be described as subversive, ironic, and blackly humorous, it can be argued that by the
mid-twentieth century this form of humour had evolved into a kind of ‘collective laughter’
which tended to reinforce the ideology of the state, given that it had become part of the
national imaginary through representation. In relation to the decline of Posada’s images as
political satire, Lomnitz suggests that:
[t]he image of the skull as an equalizer, and of death as an ironic trope, was captivating for
citizens of nineteenth-century Mexico, but the bite had been taken out of these images in the
1950s and 1960s, when the various uses and displays of death imagery were abstracted into
general qualities of ‘the Mexican’ and lo nuestro. (2008, 439)
Consequently, the mirth associated with this national festival can be seen as tacitly sanctioned
by both Church and state, via the syncretic link to All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, and
reinforced by mainstream national cultural production.
The ways in which space is represented in artistic cultural production can thus reinforce
or undermine these conventional ideas of national space. Here we will see how Buñuel’s
and Rulfo’s textual worlds can be seen as occupying a position that stands in contrast to
the utopian worlds articulated in the state’s discourses of cultural nationalism, especially
those pertaining to social and religious rituals. The unconventional use of space in El ángel
exterminador and Pedro Páramo contributes to a darkly humorous unearthing of many of
the ideological contradictions and subterranean power structures inherent in social and
religious rituals, beliefs, practices, and cultural texts which form a central part of the Mexican
national imaginary.3 The acute sense of entrapment of the characters portrayed can be
directly linked to a subversive critique of nationalist hegemony.
Central to my analysis is the distinction between physical and perceptual space as outlined
in Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia, a liminal or ‘in-between’ space. To clarify the
curious relationship between the categories of physical and perceptual space Foucault (1986)
employs the analogy of a person looking at their own reflection in a mirror. The reflected
image appears to extend behind the surface of the mirror but does not exist in reality.
Consequently, it can be described as a utopia, an illusory reflection of reality. However, the
mirror also exists as part of the material world, so the place where the person stands is at
once completely real and unreal, in other words, a heterotopia, a space with multiple layers
of meaning. As we shall see, the enigmatic story worlds of El ángel exterminador and Pedro
Páramo evince this particular fusion of abstract and concrete perception, offering a delusion
of domestic entrapment in the former, and a parodic rendering of Catholic purgatory in the
latter. We will firstly examine the subversive treatment of space in El ángel exterminador.

Stott (2005, 9) makes reference to ‘the disparity between place and self that is continually used in comedy, stories in which
3

people are geographically, linguistically, or, in some profound existential way, misplaced’ (my emphasis).
 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL  75

Buñuel, El ángel exterminador

The satire of national spaces in the film is evident from the opening sequence. The title
of the film is suggestive of the supernatural, and is an allusion to the biblical angel sent
to destroy Jerusalem (2 Samuel 24:16). The opening credits reinforce this perception by
showing the imposing image of a dark Gothic cathedral accompanied by religious choral
music. The religious theme is echoed by the image of the ironic name of the street on which
the family home is located, la Calle de la Providencia. Fuentes notes the film’s wry inversion
of this Christian concept, describing the portrayal as ‘la providencia como fatalidad’ (2000,
107). The title can also be read as a parodic rendering of the public monument, El Ángel
de la Independencia, in Mexico City, inaugurated by Porfirio Díaz in 1910, and which
commemorates Mexico’s War of Independence (1810). The national ideal of independence is
displaced by extermination, a barbed reference perhaps to the inevitable loss of life involved
in the patriotic struggle for independence. Religion and ideas of nation converge and are
thus parodically referenced in the same image.
The entrapment of the guests in their host’s home in the film can be seen as an allegory
of how the Mexican bourgeoisie have effectively sealed themselves off from the rest of
society, enclosing themselves in large imposing mansions surrounded by high railings.
The normally ‘safe’ space of the family home takes on a more sinister aspect through an
irruption of a palpable sense of the uncanny. Ripley suggests that the space of the home in
Buñuel’s film is ‘emptied of its familiarity and turned into an uncanny shell as a botched
dwelling’ (2016, 684).
The demarcation between the Nobiles’ stately residence and the rest of the outside world
is firmly established in the opening sequence. Indeed, for the majority of the film, the
external world, in a sense, ceases to exist, with the exception of the scenes with the curious
crowd gathering outside the stricken house. With their elegant homes, the bourgeoisie
arguably set out to create what could be described as a ‘utopian space’ of refinement and
pleasure: evenings at the opera followed by dinner, a recital, and polite conversation; in other
words, all the trappings of wealth, civilization, and modernity. Through ritual performance
of these activities these characters’ identity is continuously reaffirmed, and yet they are
simultaneously constrained by these repetitive practices, as Kinder suggests: ‘Buñuel regards
the upper middle class as a caste that has no choice but to repeat its rituals; it cannot survive
without them, but it is imprisoned within them’ (1999, 65).
The guests’ inability to leave the room appears to start out as an excessive bourgeois desire
to preserve propriety and not be the first to leave. The film can thus be read as a comical
exaggeration of the stifling social experience of being at a boring party, where everybody
would like to leave but lacks either the will or the courage to do so (Stam 1989). Later, this
rather absurd ‘politeness’ seems to morph into the irrational idea that they cannot leave.
This notion is quickly given legitimacy by the whole group, and serves as a wry commentary
on the ways in which superstitions take hold in religious discourses. The film thus links
knowledge and space, that is, the abstract nature of thought and how it impinges on our
material existence. As Richardson suggests, ‘the key factor is not the size of the space one
is in but rather the attitude one assumes to whatever space one is in, and that attitude is a
function of our individual imaginative powers’ (2015, 7). In this case, the guests seem to
be spatially imprisoned by their own thoughts, that is, their own attitude to the space that
they occupy. The extreme circumstances engendered by this mass delusion transform this
76  I. KENNY

Figure 1. The spatial enclosure of the guests (El ángel exterminador (1962) by permission of EGEDA and
Mercury Films S.A.).

particular social space from a restful oasis of calm in which to enjoy a piano sonata into
communal, and indeed squalid, living quarters, with toilet facilities in the cupboards, cut
off from the rest of society (Figure 1).
The predicament of the guests in the room can be seen as analogous to that of a ship adrift,
lacking any direction or guidance, cut off from dry land, and at the mercy of the wind and
tide, a situation echoing the fate of the survivors in The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819),
by the French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault. This work depicts the tragedy and the
resultant collapse in conventional morality and ethics which accompanied the shipwreck of
the naval vessel Méduse in 1816, where some survivors reportedly resorted to cannibalism
in order to survive. According to Buñuel (2012), the original title for the film was to be Los
náufragos de la calle Providencia, a fact which resonates with the idea of the room as a ship or
raft. The difference resides in the fact that the shipwrecked survivors are physically trapped
on a raft while the guests in the film are apparently imprisoned by their own imaginations.
Foucault sees the ship as the perfect example of a heterotopia: ‘The boat is a floating piece
of space […] that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over
to the infinity of the sea […] The ship is the heterotopia par excellence’ (1986, 27).
In the film, the utopian temple of high bourgeois culture thus becomes a heterotopia
of deviation,4 a place of ‘otherness’, both physical and psychological, where the hegemonic
norms of appropriate behaviour in society break down. While the guests are constrained
precisely because of their inability to deviate from certain customs, the resultant entrapment
brings about their deviant behaviour and degeneration into savagery.

4
According to Foucault (1986, 25), ‘heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced by […] heterotopias
of deviation: those in which individuals whose behaviour is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed’.
He suggests that prisons and cemeteries are prime examples of these liminal spaces.
 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL  77

The ‘ship’ containing the agitated guests seems destined to go nowhere and so it becomes
a stagnated heterotopia, an allegory of a nation and class system in crisis, closed off from
the world, consuming itself from within, and degrading in an entropic process. O’Neill
considers entropy to be ‘a metaphor for the crumbling of ordered systems, the breakdown
of traditional perceptions of reality, and the erosion of certainty’ (1990, 8). In this vein, the
film can be read as a dark parody of previous traditional and Romantic representations
of tragedy and disaster, especially Mexican melodrama,5 given that the absurd scenario
unfolds in the supposedly secure and innocuous surroundings of the family home — which,
as mentioned earlier, was a central unifying space in the Mexican national imaginary —
precipitated by an excess of manners and decorum, and far from the perceived chaos and
danger of the natural world. The film is particularly critical of an elite social class which
arguably appropriated the images and ideology of the Mexican Revolution only to recreate
the utopian excesses of the Porfiriato in another guise.
The signs of social decay begin in a very subtle and almost imperceptible manner with
the guests’ unusual and often ‘inappropriate’ dialogue. One can argue that the ‘appropriate’
type of speech in any given situation is governed to a large extent by the spatial location of
the discursive practice, for instance, the more intimate, informal, conversational genres at
home, and the more guarded polite and formal genres of the workplace. By playing with
the spatial location of specific speech genres, the film parodies certain types of speech
associated with specific social contexts, what Stam terms the ‘normatively structured clusters
of formal, contextual, and thematic features having to do with ways of speaking in particular
situations’ (1989, 65). The formal register associated with the conventions of the bourgeois
dinner party in the film, is juxtaposed humorously with the more intimate speech genres
of the domestic space.
After dinner, Raúl introduces Cristián to Leandro, a meeting which precipitates a parody of
the ‘introduction’ speech genre. The two men look at each other briefly, murmur ‘encantado’
and then move away. A few moments later, they greet each other warmly as though they were
old friends. They are then introduced to each other for a second time by Sr. Roc and this
time they react in a hostile manner. All these encounters are witnessed by Sr. Russell who
describes their malfunctioning social scripts as ‘jerigonzas’. The ‘inappropriate’ nature of the
conversations in the formal space of the bourgeois dinner party can be directly related to
the collapse of social etiquette in El ángel exterminador, as Stam suggests: ‘Buñuel seems to
be offering linguistic-discursive evidence of grave ruptures in the fabric of a pathologically
polite society’ (1989, 67).
The film is also peppered with deliberate repetitions that draw attention to its constructed
nature as a cinematic space. Repetition occurs on three levels: those of action, discourse, and
theme. These techniques impede or displace the diegetic development of the narrative by
inserting circular or lateral associations. On a thematic level, the motif of repetition in the
film echoes the social rituals which permeate the cosy, comfortable and ordered world of
the bourgeoisie, as Edwards suggests: ‘[i]f repetition […] is part and parcel of the everyday
lives of ordinary human beings, Buñuel transforms it, when practised by the bourgeois,
into pure ritual […]’ (2005, 96). For instance, Edmundo makes a toast which is warmly
received by his guests. Inexplicably, after a few moments, he rises again to make the same

This genre often extolled traditional ideas of nationhood and morality. Cuando los hijos se van (1941) directed by Juan
5

Bustillo Oro is a notable example. Monsiváis (2013, 318) refers to it as ‘la auditoría del orden familiar’.
78  I. KENNY

toast and, to his own apparent bewilderment, is ignored on this occasion. This repetition
can be seen as forgetfulness on the part of the character; however, it can also be seen as a
deliberate repetition of the scene on the plane of discourse, perhaps a ‘re-take’ ordered by
the director, as when the guests are shown entering the hallway twice, from two slightly
different angles, further underlining the repetitive nature of their shallow social lives. This
metafictional comment draws attention to the discursive plane of the film narrative, where
the director, as a rather whimsical godlike figure, plays games with his characters.
As the narrative unfolds, the spatial and psychological confinement, lack of food, water,
and proper toilet facilities, begin to aggravate the situation to such an extent that it quickly
spirals out of control. Consequently, the bourgeois dinner party, emblematic of civilization,
sophistication, and modernity, degenerates into an orgy of human savagery. Faced with a
situation beyond their understanding, the terrified guests try to break the ‘spell’ by resorting
to myth, superstition and assorted fetish objects: religion, chicken’s claws, the Kabbalah, and
a ‘washable rubber Virgin’. Ana tells Blanca and Silvia that before going to the opera she heard
a voice in her head telling her to bring the ‘keys’, and makes a tenuous connection to the
Kabbalah. She takes some chicken feet out of her handbag and begins to intone mysterious
prayers under her breath; later, she solemnly throws a handful of white feathers in the air.
No matter how the characters try to change it, however, the situation remains the same,
and the level of frustration ratchets up a further notch. The incongruous juxtaposition of
bizarre objects (chicken feet) in unlikely places (handbag), which was a noted characteristic
of Surrealist art and humour,6 can also be linked to the concept of the heterotopia, a liminal
site which breaks up the logical association of objects and their conventional contexts.
When some of the guests, spurred on by Raúl, want to sacrifice their host, in the belief
that this might allow them to escape their psychological prison, Edmundo, taking bourgeois
etiquette to the extreme, intimates that he will ‘politely’ commit suicide to avoid any
potential confrontation. This darkly humorous episode can be read as a satirical reference
to the idea of death as a marker for Mexican national identity. Bartra maintains that the
apparently ironic and careless attitude towards death in Mexico, ‘La muerte fácil’, is an
artificial construct, tacitly reinforced by representation in national cultural production
(1987, 78–79). With respect to the pre-Hispanic aspects of this mythology, in particular
the value that the Aztecs ascribed to human sacrifice, Paz suggests that ‘[l]a vida no tenía
función más alta que desembocar en la muerte, su contrario y complemento’ ([1950] 2002,
59). By invoking this pre-Hispanic narrative through Edmundo’s altruistic offer of self-
sacrifice, the film thus satirizes the constructed nature of attitudes towards death in Mexican
national cultural production.
At the precise moment when all is about to descend into total chaos and Edmundo
has gone for a gun to commit ritual suicide, Leticia has a sudden revelation. She realises
that they are all in similar spatial positions around the piano as they had been just before
they were trapped. Convinced that this is no mere coincidence, she suggests a ritualistic
re-enactment of the piano recital, perhaps in order to appease the mysterious power or deity
which she believes is holding them in the room. Another characteristic of a heterotopia is
the regulation of access, that is, the existence of a portal, which may be opened or closed.
Foucault links this rite of passage to the performance of religious ritual:

Buñuel was heavily influenced by the Surrealist movement, most notably in Un chien andalou (1929). In El ángel
6

exterminador, the collective dream sequence and the episode with the severed hand are further evidence of the Spanish
director’s debt to Surrealism.
 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL  79

Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and
makes them penetrable […] To get in one must have certain permission and make certain
gestures. Moreover, there are heterotopias that are entirely consecrated to these activities of
purification — purification that is partly religious and partly hygienic. (1986, 26) (my emphasis)
Music, combined with spatial arrangement, appears to be the talismanic key to their
entrapment and indeed to their apparent release, given that the mass delusion of enclosure
begins soon after the recital. Tuan suggests that music ‘can negate a person’s awareness of
directional time and space. Rhythmic sound that synchronizes with body movement cancels
one’s sense of purposeful action, of moving through historical time and space towards a
goal’ (1977, 128). The music thus plays a crucial part in the enigmatic inertia of the guests.
Indeed, the structural form of the piano sonata, Sonata No. 6, by Pietro Domenico Paradisi,
played by Blanca, itself suggests circular repetition: introduction, exposition, development,
and recapitulation, the last part of which is an altered repeat of the exposition.7 It can be
argued that the form of the sonata mirrors the structure of the dinner party. However, in
the case of the film, the recapitulation section is prolonged in a textual aporia. This narrative
device can be read as a ‘broken record’, a repeating fragment of time, which metaphorically
illustrates the film’s jaundiced view of the stagnated nature of bourgeois Mexican culture.
However, it is evident that some of the characters (Russell, Eduardo, and Beatriz) have
since died, so Leticia’s observation that they are all in the same positions in the music
room cannot be true (Kinder 1999). Nevertheless, despite this textual inaccuracy, through
a shared belief in the power of this ritual repetition, they are ‘magically’ able to leave the
room. The viewer is also implicated in this communal display of superstitious faith, through
unconscious association with the semiotic structures and conventions of socio-realist
classical Mexican film narrative. According to these conventions, there is a sense that all
problems raised in a narrative must somehow be resolved. In this particular scene, it can
be argued that the viewer is seeking the same improbable answers as the guests, and willing
them to be true. These traditional narrative structures are also characteristic of classical
Hollywood film with its over-reliance on linear narratives and tendency to neatly resolve
thematic problems at the end. Bordwell makes the following reference to the linearity and
predictability of this particular style of filmmaking:
In the Hollywood style, the systems [logic, space, and time] do not play equal roles: space and
time are almost invariably made vehicles for narrative causality […] the ending becomes the
culmination of the spectator’s absorption, as all the causal gaps get filled. (1996, 6, 18)
As many scholars have shown, classical Hollywood film was itself a blueprint for classical
Mexican cinema (Acevedo-Muñoz 2003; Revueltas 1981). Regarding Los olvidados (1950)
and its break with cinematic tradition in 1950s Mexico, Gutiérrez-Albilla suggests that
‘[c]lassical Mexican cinema had become politically alienating because of its association
with melodrama and its imitation of the Hollywood paradigm’ (2008, 21). In contrast,
Buñuel’s approach can be considered as the antithesis to the ‘continuity method’ favoured
by Hollywood and Mexican national cinema, given the constant subversion of narrative
causality through a fusion of black humour and the cinematic ‘gag’. Fuentes summarizes
this subversive approach of Luis Buñuel as follows:
Su carácter [that of the visual gag] de elipsis visual y su capacidad para manifestarse con
plena independencia de la lógica causal tradicional, subvirtiéndola o parodiándola, encaja a

7
See Ockelford (2005, 74–118) on the musical structure of the piano sonata.
80  I. KENNY

Figure 2. Leticia prepares to cross the threshold (El ángel exterminador (1962) by permission of EGEDA
and Mercury Films S.A.).

la perfección con el carácter libre y anticonvencional que Buñuel logra infiltrar en el relato
narrativo convencional. (2000, 79)
There is a strong meta-cinematic aspect to this theatrical ‘re-staging’8 of the earlier piano
recital. It evidently influences the progression of the story by cancelling the effect of the
narrative aporia and indicates that the actors are going to attempt another ‘take’ of the scene,
despite the ‘continuity’ errors due to the deaths of three of the guests. The focus seems to
be on placing them like chess pieces in the set/board/music room, with no one character
being of any special importance. This frame-breaking manoeuvre can also be compared to
Brecht’s alienation effect, since it breaks down the illusion of reality generated by the film
narrative. With reference to the comic and metafictional aspects of Buñuel’s films, Russell
maintains that ‘a gag in film is a momentary interruption of the viewer’s immersion in the
story world and an awareness of the hand behind the screen’ (2009, 45). On this particular
occasion, once the music ends, and to the great relief of the trapped guests, the ‘spell’ appears
to be broken (Figure 2). Ritual seems to be the key to their release, but it is also the cause
of their entrapment. Fuentes suggests that: ‘La repetición, tan frecuente a lo largo de la
película, adquiere ahora un papel mágico […] talismánico: anula el tiempo y el espacio del
encierro –dentro de la concepción mítica del eterno retorno’ (2000, 108).
The film’s ridicule of an irrational delusion where redemption is attained through ritual
indicates a strong satirical critique of superstitious belief and religious faith. This idea is
further explored when the guests go from the family home to the sacred space of the Catholic
Church, another key unifying location in the Mexican national imaginary, to give thanks
to God for their liberation. After the service, in a second narrative aporia which the film

8
The representational space of the theatre, that is, a single space which juxtaposes a variety of seemingly incompatible spaces
and locations, can also be described as a heterotopia (Foucault 1986). The second ‘performance’ of the guests can be said
to transform the space of the music room into a theatrical space.
 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL  81

refuses to resolve, the assembled congregation in the Church (which includes the dinner
guests from earlier in the film) now seem to be inexplicably imprisoned. They seem to be
doomed to repeat interminably the same absurd cycle. Consequently, one can argue that
dark humour and experimental narration function in tandem, as Kinder suggests: ‘This
is the first of several Buñuel films in which humor depends on a serious engagement with
narrative theory. Buñuel plays with the subversive potential of repetition and its paradoxical
ability to avoid narrative closure while appearing to fulfil it’ (1999, 10).
Buñuel’s satirical and enigmatic narrative thus employs an innovative approach to
spatiality in order to deconstruct the habitual social and religious rituals of the Mexican
bourgeoisie. The stable and comforting spaces of the home and the Church in the Mexican
national imaginary are subversively rendered as mental prisons.

Rulfo, Pedro Páramo

We will now examine spatiality in Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and draw some parallels and
distinctions between the novel and El ángel exterminador. The ghostly village of Comala, as
a mysterious, ephemeral, and transient place which disorients Juan Preciado, is mirrored on
a textual level with the unsettling of the reader by the enigmatic and fragmented structure
of the novel itself. As he sets out in search of paternal legitimacy, the narrator’s subjective
construction and interpretation of space is evident from fragment one: ‘Hasta que ahora
pronto comencé a llenarme de sueños, a darle vuelo a las ilusiones. Y de este modo se me fue
formando un mundo alrededor de la esperanza que era aquel señor llamado Pedro Páramo’
(my emphasis) (PP, 65).9 Like the guests in El ángel exterminador who are imprisoned by
their own subjective attitude towards the space which they occupy, in a sense, the space of
the story world in Pedro Páramo can be said to come into being around the figure of Juan
Preciado: ‘se me fue formando un mundo’. In essence, he seems to allow the otherworldly
space of Comala to come into existence, the underworld which imprisons him and
ultimately proves fatal. This underworld now occupies the spaces of power represented
by the tyrannical regime of Pedro Páramo, the former ‘architect’ of the boundaries and
systems of social control in Comala. Since the figure of the cacique is emblematic within the
discourses of the post-Revolutionary Mexican state, Rulfo’s novel can thus be seen as tacitly
countering national narratives which tended to celebrate the exploits of these local land
chieftains. Novels such as Los de abajo (1915) by Mariano Azuela and Martín Luis Guzmán’s
El águila y la serpiente (1928) were suffused with costumbrismo, paying elegiac tribute to the
heroes of the Revolution, leaders like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa (Monsiváis 2013).
These features are also evident in the Golden Age Mexican films Flor silvestre (1943) and
Enamorada (1946) by Emilio Fernández.
Through its innovative representation of physical and perceptual space, the narrative
conjures up a heterotopia of deviation, a dark parody of Catholic ideas of purgatory, as
imagined and codified in Dante’s Divine Comedy as a mountain, an allegory of the soul’s
passage towards redemption.10 Like their counterparts in El ángel exterminador, the ghostly
denizens of Comala are trapped in an enigmatic space which can be described as physical

9
Hereafter all references to Pedro Páramo will take the form: PP plus page number, and come from Rulfo (2010).
10
Eckert suggests that ‘the text [Pedro Páramo] gains clarity and religious meaning once Comala is understood as a Christian
purgatory with an indeterminate geography, physicality, and time […]’ (2011, 73).
82  I. KENNY

and perceptual in equal measure: a fusion of the concrete spatial reality of a village cemetery
with a type of abstract metaphysical netherworld. According to Catholic discourses, the
connection between the terrestrial earth and this metaphysical space is made possible from
the sacred space of the church or cemetery. As part of his analysis of the early Church and
the metaphysical ‘space of Christendom’, Lefebvre suggests that ‘[t]his underworld broke
through here and there — wherever the Church had a “seat” […] and wherever it thus
pierced the earth’s surface, the [metaphysical] “world” emerged’ (1991, 255).
The subversive representation of the national space of the village cemetery is particularly
important in the novel and can be linked to a subtle critique of the idea of death as a
marker for Mexican national identity. The cemetery is described by Foucault (1986) as a
prime example of a heterotopia of deviance. It is certainly a space of ‘otherness’, outside the
normative world, and yet it is also a national space intimately connected to the community
of the living, since most families bury their relatives there. Christian burial is also closely
linked with the consecrated national space of the church, with some tombs located within
its walls. In Mexico, the space of the cemetery is also closely linked to the space of the
family home. Lomnitz states that on the national festival the Days of the Dead ‘there is a
twin celebration on the grave and in the home altar […] both the grave and the domestic
altar are decorated with cempasúchil [marigold], and trails of its yellow petals help the souls
find their way from the cemetery to the home’ (2008, 245).
The character of Dorotea (la ‘Cuarraca’) plays a crucial role in the novel and acts as one
of Juan Preciado’s guides through the underworld. In fragment 36, the reader discovers that
both Dorotea and Juan are spatially united in the same grave, as they are in the narrative, the
level of story space echoing that of discourse space. Indeed, the space where their dialogue
takes place is difficult for the reader to imagine: is it actually occurring in the earth itself
or in some form of afterlife, purgatory, or perhaps a combination of both? The space can
be described as metaphysical, and yet it still exists as part of the ‘real’ story world of the
novel, which would suggest the idea of a heterotopia, an indeterminate location somewhere
between physical and perceptual space. The fusion of earth and spirit in this passage gives
rise to a unique form of situational irony: the darkly humorous notion that two dead bodies
can converse in the grave. The text thus ridicules the belief-system which allows for this
bathetic post-mortem dialogue, transpiring in a Dantean purgatory where ‘impure’ souls
are condemned to live until their sins are forgiven. González Boixo maintains that Rulfo’s
novel ‘señala el carácter supersticioso y primitivo de esa religión, al mismo tiempo que
su ineficacia’ (1980, 76). This passage also highlights some of the key differences between
verbal and cinematic story-space, as Chatman suggests:
[…] verbal narratives can be completely non-scenic, ‘nowhere in particular’, transpiring in a
realm of ideas rather than place. The movies have difficulty evoking this kind of non-place.
Even a pure black or gray or white backdrop will suggest night, or a fogged-in area, or heaven,
or an over-illuminated room, but rarely ‘nowhere’. (1978, 106)
This narrative technique is used to great effect in Pedro Páramo, disorienting the reader
through a lack of concrete spatial references. These ‘living-dead’ characters thus exist in the
physical space of the ‘real’ world, that is, in their individual coffins, or communal graves,
in the case of Juan Preciado and Dorotea, and also in the psychic realm, where their souls
roam the world of the living in order to persuade people to pray for them.
The novel’s use of dark humour in the space of the cemetery can be said to operate at one
remove from the ironic attitudes towards death found in earlier state-sponsored Mexican
 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL  83

national cultural production.11 In fragment 38, Dorotea makes an ironic reference to the
tripartite structure which, according to Catholic discourses, separates the body, mind, and
soul,12 while wearily renouncing the eternal salvation promised in the afterlife:
—El Cielo para mí, Juan Preciado, está aquí donde estoy ahora.

—¿Y tu alma? ¿Dónde crees que haya ido?

—Debe andar vagando por la tierra como tantas otras; buscando vivos que recen por ella. Tal
vez me odie por el mal trato que le di; pero eso ya no me preocupa. (PP, 124)
Her calm recollection of the rather humorous ‘argument’ with her soul, which she surmises
left her body due to its sinfulness, seems to be a sign that she has purged herself of religious
guilt: ‘ya no me preocupa’. It also leaves a tiny drop of blood on her hands suggesting that
like a string it was somehow physically attached to her heart: ‘Sentí cuando cayó en mis
manos el hilito de sangre con que estaba amarrada a mi corazón’ (PP, 125). Although it is
an emotive and poetic image, Dorotea’s jaded references to the ‘plight’ of her wandering
soul undermine its ostensibly tragic import. By positing an absurd attachment between
the concrete and the abstract, a type of fleshy bond between her heart and soul, the novel
thus parodically undermines the distinctions between the body, the soul, and the mind/
spirit. Along with signifying the moment of Dorotea’s own death, the detachment of her
soul from her body can be read as a symbolic break, experienced in her rational mind, with
the penitential discourses associated with the Catholic Church.
Through its macabre caricature of the nature of mind, body, and soul, the text thus
deconstructs the ideological framework underpinning the repressive Catholic discourses
which form part of the Mexican national imaginary. From the national space of the graveyard,
and as a character emblematic of marginality, Dorotea’s dark, weary, and resigned humour
therefore constructs a liminal site of resistance to the dominant hegemonic discourses
which have governed her life, and left her riddled with guilt. The utopian idea of Heaven is
finally seen as merely an illusion which is reconciled with her position in the heterotopic
space of the grave. This can be read as Dorotea’s outright rejection of the discourses of
Catholic salvation. Hernández-Rodríguez suggests that ‘[d]e todos los habitantes de Comala
sólo en Dorotea se vislumbra cierta conciencia de finitud y renuncia a cualquier tipo de
trascendencia’ (2001, 626).
The novel frequently exploits the conjunction of space and time for subversive effect.
The multiple timelines in the novel are situated within the single story space of the village
cemetery, a place with a strange, disorientating sense of time. When a person dies and is
buried, chronological time for that particular individual can be said to cease; instead, one
can argue that time seems to stretch out in a kind of ‘eternity’, where the body decays in
an entropic process. In Catholic discourses, this eternity is represented by the afterlife,
where the soul travels to Heaven or hell; or in the case of Comala, remains trapped in the
strange netherworld known as purgatory. As bodies are continually being added to the
cemetery, time can thus be said to accumulate in a central archive or macabre national

11
See Lomnitz 2008, 439.
This structure is mentioned in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians: ‘May he [the God] of peace himself also sanctify
12

you in all things so that your whole spirit and soul and body […]’. This passage is cited in Phelan (2011, 13) as part of an
analysis of the contentious nature (which Rulfo’s text parodically references) of scholastic interpretations of this distinction.
84  I. KENNY

‘museum’ of the past, a record of the past history of the community. Foucault states this
in the following terms: ‘the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the
individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with
this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance’ (1986,
26) (my emphasis). The novel’s depiction of these isolated individuals highlights how many
rural villages and communities have been elided in favour of a singular national narrative.
In Pedro Páramo, the incongruous juxtaposition of timelines occurs both within the
fictional story-space of the novel, and also on the level of discourse-space, that is, in the
arrangement of the individual fragments in the text itself. The novel frequently exploits this
feature for darkly humorous effect, where characters buried in different eras can humorously
eavesdrop and interact with each other. The text highlights the eerie and amusing aspects
of the indeterminate passage of time after death, such as the ‘risas ya muy viejas, como
cansadas de reír’ (PP, 101). In fragment 42, Juan Preciado and Dorotea overhear Susana
San Juan speaking in a nearby grave, even though, within the story world of the novel, the
latter died in a different era. Consequently, Juan Preciado and Dorotea belong to a different
timeline to that of Susana San Juan:
—Oí a alguien que hablaba. Una voz de mujer. Creí que eras tú.

—Voz de mujer? Creíste que era yo? Ha de ser la que habla sola. La de la sepultura grande.
Doña Susanita. Está aquí enterrada a nuestro lado. Le ha de haber llegado la humedad y estará
removiéndose entre el sueño. (PP, 135)
Death, therefore, seems to erase distinctions of time as either past or present, creating what
could be described as an ‘eternal present’. Indeed, Cohn suggests that ‘Rulfo obviates time
altogether by situating his novel in the realm of the dead’ (1996, 257). The fragmented
structure of the novel achieves this same effect in the reader as the various voices, episodes,
and memories, past and present, coalesce through their spatial juxtaposition on the discourse
plane. It should be noted that Susana is also textually located in the preceding fragment,
from where she enunciates her monologue; she is also in a larger tomb which illustrates
her elevated social role within the cacique’s system of power relations. Dorotea attributes
Susana’s restlessness to the rather quotidian influence of dampness reaching as far as her
coffin, a statement which undermines the previous reference to Susana’s higher social status
in the ‘sepultura grande’. Their irreverent bathetic dialogue thus undermines the reified
death tropes associated with ‘official’ state festivals and culture.
In the end, Pedro Páramo is a broken man, figuratively shattered into a pile of rubble:
‘Dio un golpe seco contra la tierra y se fue desmoronando como si fuera un montón de
piedras’ (PP, 178). With this entropic image, the novel seems to suggest that the cacique
will leave behind no commemorative statue with which to celebrate his patrimony. It can
be argued that this subversive depiction of Pedro Páramo’s death undermines the use of
death as a marker for Mexican national identity and tacitly critiques the tendency towards
the glorification of past heroes of the nation. Segre maintains that ‘Rulfo elides the death
mask altogether, dismantling the legacy of post-Revolutionary hagiography and historicism’
(2013, 11).
Like Buñuel’s unfortunate guests, the ghosts of Comala seem to be condemned to live
through a series of temporal repetitions, trapped in a single heterotopic space, either by
discourses of social conformity and guilt, or as the helpless victims of the cacique’s violence,
continuously agonising over the traumatic events of their lives.
 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL  85

The space of the cemetery and the domestic space of the home are also linked in the
case of Toribio Aldrete. His restless spirit clamours in vain for justice, entombed within
the walls of Eduviges’ house. In fragment 17, Juan Preciado hears a tortured cry while he
is trying to sleep: ‘Era un grito arrastrado como el alarido de algún borracho: “¡Ay vida, no
me mereces!”’ (PP, 93). Toribio’s tortured spirit makes an ironic reference to the cruel nature
of life itself, or rather addresses his complaint to an impassive universe: ‘no me mereces’.
The reference to life is doubly ironic since he is already dead, and yet it illustrates his strong
will and sense of self-worth. The sound seems to come from the spatial structure of the
very walls of the room: ‘Me enderecé de prisa porque casi lo oí aquí, untado a las paredes
de mi cuarto’ (PP, 93). Through this use of poetic synaesthesia (audio waves taking on the
malleable qualities of butter), the text suggests that Juan Preciado’s faculties of perception
are becoming confused, indicating psychological delusion, such as the symptoms of
schizophrenia. Cosgrove notes that in Pedro Páramo ‘[a]cts of dissolubility and the erosion
of form seem endemic’ (1991, 80).
The silence that follows the cry is described thus: ‘No, no era posible calcular la hondura
del silencio que produjo aquel grito. Como si la tierra se hubiera vaciado de su aire. Ningún
sonido; ni de resuello, ni el del latir del corazón; como si se detuviera el mismo ruido de
la conciencia’ (PP, 93). The otherworldly atmosphere in this fragment is generated by the
depiction of empty space and absence: shadow instead of light, and silence in place of sound.
This sculpting of textual form by removing sound and light gives the narrative a very stark
and expressionistic quality.
After a brief pause, Juan Preciado hears the cry again: ‘¡Déjenme aunque sea el derecho
de pataleo que tienen los ahorcados!’ (PP, 93). The reference to the condemned man being
allowed a few last words is suffused with grim irony, since the idiomatic expression also refers
to the way a person’s legs twitch when they are hanged. We finally hear an explanation of the
source of the sound from Damiana Cisneros: ‘Tal vez sea algún eco que está aquí encerrado.
En este cuarto ahorcaron a Toribio Aldrete hace mucho tiempo. Luego condenaron la
puerta, hasta que él se secara; para que su cuerpo no encontrara reposo’ (PP, 94). Like the
recurring entrapment of the guests in El ángel exterminador, from the space of the home to
the church, this particular fragment of the past seems to repeat itself like a looped film clip.
Toribio’s disembodied voice is spatialised in the novel and is thus situated outside the flow
of conventional time. Drawing on the ideas of Bachelard (1994), particularly with respect
to the inner spaces of the mind and imagination, Tally argues that ‘the experience of time is
actually frozen in discrete moments in our memory, photographic or spatial arrangements,
such that space assumes a greater importance than temporality that is no longer understood
as a fluvial metaphor’ (2013, 116).
On a structural level, the spatialisation of Toribio’s voice within the walls of the home
mirrors the self-contained textual fragments in the novel, with each fragment existing
independently of a determined linear chronology. As such, the spatial orientation of each
fragment in the text can be said closely to resemble the way in which we actually remember
the past, that is, not so much in a chronological fashion, but as an interconnected collection
of spatialised images. In conversation with Fernando Benítez, Rulfo himself stated:
Debo decirte que mi primera novela estaba escrita en secuencias, pero advertí que la vida
no es una secuencia. Pueden pasar los años sin que nada ocurra y de pronto se desencadena
una multitud de hechos. A cualquier hombre no le suceden cosas de manera constante y yo
86  I. KENNY

pretendí contar una historia con hechos muy espaciados, rompiendo el tiempo y el espacio.
(1983, 6) (my emphasis)
When a fragment of the past is deprived of its specific temporality, as evinced in the
experimental structure of Pedro Páramo, it becomes eternal, somehow outside chronological
time, in other words, a ‘living’ spatialised memory. Memories from different times are stored
in the same space, existing alongside each other (Bachelard 1994). Carlos Fuentes describes
this idea as ‘un pasado contiguo, adyacente, como el imaginado por Coleridge: no atrás sino
al lado, detrás de esa puerta, al abrir esa ventana’ (1983, 11). In the case of Comala, these
memories are epitomised by the multiple voices in the village cemetery. A more concrete
example would be the storage of memorabilia in an attic space, or in a museum: artefacts
from different timelines existing in the same heterotopic space.

Conclusion
We have seen how Buñuel’s and Rulfo’s distinctive approach to spatiality forms a central part
of their critique of discourses of cultural nationalism. In contrast to the cultural ‘mapping’
of national spaces (Lefebvre 1991), both artists create bizarre, and at times irrational,
story worlds which have the effect of destabilizing national spaces in Mexico. In El ángel
exterminador, the comforting surroundings of the luxury family home are transmogrified
through mass psychosis to become a terrifying threat which consumes the Mexican
bourgeoisie from within. The village cemetery in Pedro Páramo constitutes a dark parody
of Catholic ideas of purgatory, a heterotopia of deviation where condemned bodies and
spirits from different timelines struggle to liberate themselves from the repressive dictates
of the faith. The resultant dark self-reflexive humour in these works satirizes excessive
religious belief and repetitive social ritual, unmasking the subterranean power relations
which underpin these pervasive ideologies and social practices in Mexico. They went on
to influence many subsequent Mexican writers and film-makers such as Carlos Fuentes
and Arturo Ripstein.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Professor Bill Richardson for his comments and suggestions during the writing
of this article. Special thanks also go to Victoria Bernal and Oscar Berrendo of (EGEDA) and Mercury
Films S.A. for granting permission to reproduce images from El ángel exterminador.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor
Ivan Kenny is a part-time lecturer in Spanish at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His
research interests are broadly focussed on mid-twentieth century Mexican cultural production,
with a particular emphasis on the works of Luis Buñuel and Juan Rulfo. He is currently preparing
a monograph on spatiality and the post-Revolutionary Mexican state in the works of Luis Buñuel
and Juan Rulfo.
 HISPANIC RESEARCH JOURNAL  87

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Filmography
Cuando los hijos se van. 1941. Directed by Juan Bustillo Oro. Production: Jesús Grovas and Ricardo
Beltri.
El ángel exterminador. 1962. Directed by Luis Buñuel. Producer: UNINCI, S.A., and Films 59 (Gustavo
Alatriste, Mexico/Spain).
Enamorada. 1946. Directed by Emilio Fernández. Production: Panamerican Films (Benito Alazraki).
Flor silvestre. 1943. Directed by Emilio Fernández. Production: Films Mundiales (Augustín Fink).
Los olvidados. 1950. Directed by Luis Buñuel. Producer: Ultramar Films (Óscar Dancigers, México).
Un chien andalou. 1929. Directed by Luis Buñuel. Producer: Luis Buñuel (France).
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