ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts a comparative perspective in seeking to place an analysis of Rulfo's haunting, inscrutable novel Pedro Páramo alongside consideration of one of the classics of the Irish language tradition, Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Cré na Cille. It shows how the cacophony of voices present in both texts serves to undermine, unsettle and ultimately dismantle the various frames of authority, literary, national, historical, and metaphorical, that constrain them. The chapter examines the way in which the two central female characters in texts, Susana San Juan and Caitríona Pháidín, contribute to this process of deconstruction through their babbling, excessive femininity. It explores how ideas around community were eroded and interrogated. The lack of real dialogue between the characters is apparent throughout and the sense that these voices speak but only in parallel, never in support of or even in response to each other.
