Page 39
a light chapter for me, a good time to jump in for new readers, & a «weird one» for the freaks
Previously, Dolores accepted Pedro’s marriage proposal, which happened solely because he wanted to wipe away his family’s debt to her family’s. On the plus side, he’s straight up going to just murder some of the other rivals further down the line, so maybe she got off kinda light?
Page 39
Nothing much happens in this one. Fulgor knocks on Pedro’s door to tell him that Aldrete has successfully been intimidated into giving up land. Pedro says the next order of business concerns the Fregoso family, but “Right now, I’m busy with my ‘honeymoon’”, which is haunting, not the least because of the casual cruelty of his sham marriage, but also because of the implication that Pedro’s maybe just taking a break from screwing his wife to talk about screwing the town.
Pages 1–39
So let’s take this opportunity to take stock of some stuff. For instance, what’s even happened in this book so far?
Pedro Páramo’s estranged son (whose name we do not yet know) goes to the town of Comala after his mother (Dolores)’s dying wish is for him to seek out Pedro Páramo and “insist on what’s ours”. As he travels to and throughout the deserted town of Comala, he learns that nobody lives there anymore and that Pedro died years ago. The reader eventually learns that Comala is also literally a ghost town, and everyone Pedro’s son interacts with is already dead (Pedro’s son is either in denial or too dumb to figure this out himself).
He meets the ghost of Eduviges, a woman who tells him a little about being his mom’s friend, a little about almost boinking his dad on his mom’s wedding night because she was on her period and embarrassed (no really), and a bit about his half-brother Miguel Páramo who died while riding his horse. The ghost/memory of the priest who did Miguel’s funeral butts in to tell the reader that he refused to bless Miguel at his funeral because of his many, many crimes.
Also, ghosts can just interrupt the book when they feel like it without diagetically being introduced as narrators. Time has broken in this purgatorial town with loosened barriers between the living and the dead. I would say it’s giving Dark Souls, but I’m having a hard enough time figuring out who the audience is for a Pedro Páramo book recap blog without getting video games involved. It’s giving Dhalgren? That’ll solve the audience problem for sure.
Eventually the narrative shifts to the past to Pedro Páramo himself, first as a child in which he resents his family and neighbors expecting him to do work for free, and then as an adult after his father’s death (which was maybe a murder?) newly in charge of the failing family business. Apparently babysitting for no pay was Pedro’s villain origin story, because he immediately goes hard on a “can’t break the rules if there are no rules” strategy. In debt to one family? Marry into it – no more debt! Need to get rid of a rival? Tell them they’re on your land and sue them – the land will basically be yours by the time anyone can do anything about it, and they definitely can’t do anything about it if they’re dead now.
And thus, Pedro enters into a sham marriage with Dolores, and many years later their son returns to the ruins of a town Pedro gutted for personal gain, where the screams of the dead remain, for no one is at rest.
With somewhere between 80 and 90 pages of the book to go, we got a few questions we’re hoping to get answers for. Why is everyone who lived here condemned to a supernatural ghostly fate? What did Pedro do to this place? When will they tell us the narrator’s NAME?
2024
Last week, I drew some modern-day parallels with the events of this novel and with contemporary events. Pedro Páramo comes into power by blatantly ignoring rules and ransacking the place, and – since we already know from the nonlinear structure of the novel that his actions will leave this place a desolated ghost town – no one has any idea how to stop it. Maybe we never will. The Democrats ate a truly astonishing amount of shit this November to a party in the thrall of a man who has never let a single rule apply to him in his life, in the face of power grab after power grab that will result in generations of new signifiers of societal collapse traceable back to a few men born with everything and afraid to die.
The New York Times ran some dogshit by one Adam Jentleson proposing that the way Democrats can combat this is by not saying what their positions are anymore? So that Republicans can’t run against those positions? Chapo Trap House offered a rebuttal that this thinking is fully disconnected from reality because people kind of just make up what the other person said now. «People are just going to make them up. … They’re going to say you support whatever. That you support top surgery and bottom surgery for all prisoners. Mandatory. “All pregnancies should be aborted. That’s what she believes. I heard it on Facebook”». That «there are Republicans who campaigned on the idea that Joe Biden is an enemy of Israel. It doesn’t matter what you do or what you say.» The subtext of Jentleson’s piece of course being that «every interest group» – meaning marginalized communities or people who think that genocide or the fact that job security and buying a home don’t exist anymore or the world burning to a crisp is bad – «comes armed with polls of questionable quality showing their issue is popular» and thus Democrats’ woes would go away if they just didn’t «placate them» anymore. The joke, of course, being that Democrats actually held any positions that could be considered left of center. Post-truth era swinging every which way.
Now that we’re getting to the Pedro Páramo-y parts of Pedro Páramo, we can begin to see why this book from 1955 is worth the trouble of deciphering its postmodern dance of post-truth. None of this is new. We’re constantly learning over and over again that we’re – at a societal level – an easy mark. Will we ever learn? Comala is a purgatory of ghosts, described early on in the book as a place that «sits on the burning embers of the earth, at the very mouth of Hell. They say many of those who die there and go to Hell come back to fetch their blankets.» Every year is the new hottest year on record. The screams of the dead remain, for no one is at rest.
Everyone is trying to make sense of it. Everyone is making Content trying to make sense of it. Much of the Content is about Content. Ryan Broderick of the Garbage Day newsletter and Panic World podcast, both of which are publications deeply concerned with Content about Content, discussed how the Democrats so utterly ate shit in this era of Content eating its own tail:
the Republicans realized that they can throw shit at the wall and see if it sticks. And they’re much better about creating an environment where they can sort of all experiment and see what rises … the Republicans are much more comfortable – and this is why they’re constantly lying, constantly making stuff up, and constantly saying stuff that doesn’t really make any sense – because they don’t really care.
The title - and initial topic of discussion - of that episode, “The Joe Rogan we need isn’t so easy to create”, referred to the hot new post-failure topic of how the Democrats need a Joe Rogan of the Left, because when the Democrats aren’t blaming trans people for losing the election, the other boogeyman they’ve turned to is podcasts. It is generally an interesting episode about why podcasts affected the election, why other platforms possibly didn’t, and this does bring us around to wtf is pedro páramo’s other, meta-Pedro Páramo-y ghost story.
«where is the internet?»
The Old Blog started on «WordPress» partly because that was one of the major blogging Platforms in the early 2010s, but also partly because it was the option that a girl in high school used when i was learning what a blog was a few years before that so therefore i used it. promotion was crossposting to «Facebook», maybe «Twitter» if you were a real nerd. eventually «podcasts» became more so Where the internet was, possibly around the time the ad revenue you could get on the internet where words were dried up, but well before Where «podcasts» of 2024 have taken the internet. Where the internet was perhaps danced around to places it no longer is, at least meaningfully, like «Instagram» or «TikTok» or «X, the everything app,» the latter of which representing one of the precious few meaninfully destroyed old Wheres Where the internet is.
wtf is pedro páramo exists on «Substack» because email and newsletters are sufficiently in vogue at the moment, and this Platform is the classic combination of sufficiently critical mass and problematic, although one wonders how much of the «Substack» refusing to deplatform nazis lingers in the public mind, Where the public mind even is, is it on the internet anymore, Where is that–
where do i tell anyone i’m doing things now
where do i go to say that i’m alive
it’s silly, in a sense, to treat the enshittification of social media as a 21st century tragedy of the commons. community on the internet has existed before private interest–laden social media platforms, will exist after social media platforms, existed in parallel to social media platforms even. i was too baby to recall forums, too normie to recall «Tumblr», too old to care about «BlueSky». but i can recall when the internet felt like Where it was was in the comments at «The AV Club». i feel lucky enough to have found «Discord» community initially around a podcast around a common interest that has just become some pals who don’t actually know each others’ names, to have enough Where there that the zombified corpse of «X, the everything app,» didn’t register as much of a loss of Where anymore. just a loss to yet another pedro páramo.
where is the internet if not where the screams of the dead remain, for no one is at rest
No, there was simply no way to fathom the depth of the silence that followed in the wake of the scream. As if all the air had drained form the earth. Not a sound. Not of breathing, not of a beating heart, as if the very din of existence had ceased.
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