Ciudad Guzman native, author Juan Jose Arreola Zuñiga (born Ciudad Guzman, September 21, 1918; died Guadalajara December 3, 2001 ), will be memorialized at Guadalajara’s Rotunda of Illustrious Citizens, the Jalisco State Congress has announced.
That announcement might bring a rascally grin from the deceased Arreola, whose piquant sense of humor was well-known, if not always appreciated. Some of his “projects,” both humorous and outrageously blunt, dealt with inconvenient truths about the hard times of Mexico’s millions of poor. They were victims of the long-ruling autocracy, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), and his reference to this circumstance often uncomfortably puzzled Mexico’s ruling elite. In 1945, greatly influenced by French intellectuals, Arreola was invited to Paris by French director, actor and theatre director, Louis Jouvet. There he became friends with frontier geniuses Jean-Louis Barrault, French actor, director and mime, and internationally famed stage and film actor, Pierre Renoir,
To many of his friends and admirers, Arreola seems to have been born with a heart made for the “magic-realism” that became part of the Latin American literary “boom” of the 1960s. He seemed to have always appreciated the ridiculous side of human behavior, which he saw with keener eyes than almost anyone else – except the French directors and performers that he so enthusiastically admired.
“There are about thirty thousand of us,” he wrote in 1963. “Some say more, some say less. We have always been thirty thousand. Ever since Fray Juan de Padilla came to teach us the catechism, when Don Alonso de Avalos made this land tremble. Fray Juan was a good man. He went around ... putting up crosses and little churches. He saw that we loved music and sent for Juan Montes to teach us music. He was very fond of us people of Tlayolan. But then something went wrong, and they say we killed him. Some say it happened here, some say it was somewhere else. If it as in Tuxpan, they made cuachala (stew) out of him. If it was here we ate him in pozole. All lies. They shot him full of arrows in Cibola. God’s will be done.”
That’s the dramatic, Indian-flavored beginning of his 1963 novel, “La Feria” (The Fair) published in 1963, and translated by Ajijic resident John Upton for the University of Texas Press English language version in 1977.
Tlayolan is the original name of the nearby Jalisco town that was later called Zapotlan El Grande, then changed twice more, and is now Ciudad Guzman again. An inexplicable cluster of contradictory behavior that fits Arreola’s vision of Mexican society. And despite the switches, with a stubborn bit of Arreoloian obstinacy, he called his home town Ciudad Orozco, for it is the birthplace of that giant muralist, Jose Clemente Orozco.
“The Fair” and the oddly hilarious (to the inexperienced, surreal) short story ”El Guardagujas” (The Switchman) are among Arreola’s most well-known bafflingly humorous work. So say serious English-speaking readers of Mexican literature. “The Switchman” is included in Arreola’s short story collection, “Confabulario and Other Inventions,” also published by the University of Texas Press.
Both the novel and the short story are displays of a keen satirist working close to his slyest. This is “magic realism” based on what all Mexicans were sourly familiar with: well-rooted government realism. He teaches that life may indeed be absurd as existentialists suggest, yet it’s better to climb on the literary train of daft possibility than fall into bleak worry about its brain-twisting destination.
When the story’s train comes to an abyss passengers get out, take apart the engine and cars, carry them to the other side and reassemble them, then continue on their way. Arreola inventively presented a keen, amusing –and thematically accurate – description of Mexico’s inefficient government railway (and by implication other agencies), as always late, always in junked condition, just like the police department, the mayor’s office, and a plethora of similarly lame “official” services.
Arreola’s only true novel, “The Fair,” fluidly translated by Upton, is a theater of varied but interconnected – and often contradictory – voices providing a series of comments, tart evaluations, tales of error, hubris and quirky misapprehensions, all of it possessing surprising momentum. Most of all for alert foreign visitors and residents who have paid intelligent attention to their south-of-the-border encounters with Mexicans and their reactions, this is an instructive novel concerning Mexico’s very different culture, particularly its rural culture. “The Fair” is still considered one of Arreola’s most successful accomplishments,
A useful note on translations and translators: Besides “The Fair,” Upton translated a number of exceptional Spanish-language books for the the University of Texas Press, including “San Jose de Gracia,” a socio-anthropological study of a nearby town (just over the state line in Michoacan) by Luis Gonzalez. One only has to read one bad translation – some say a number of the translations of B. Traven’s work – to know what skill and artistry were rendered by Upton.
Arreola became well known as a popular, individualistic professor at Mexico’s National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He continued writing short stories, becoming nationally recognized for his literary originality. He was awarded numerous prizes, including the National Prize of Letters. In 1999, on his eightieth birthday, he was crowned favorite son of Guadalajara.