Studium and Punctum in Juan Rulfo's ‘Puerta del cementerio de Janitzio’ [Gate of Janitzio Cemetery]

This chapter traces the connections between Noh and the two writers, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and the Mexican author Juan Rulfo, under discussion, primarily through the way in which ideas of place are foregrounded and aesthetically. It explores the relationship between land and history and to then forge a link with the Noh tradition. The chapter looks at the relationship between land and memory, focusing on Rulfo's 'Castillo de Teayo' while comparing it to the structure of Noh. It examines the way in which the figure of the ghost, as envisioned in the Noh tradition, is re-imagined through these differing texts by Yeats and Rulfo. A similar vision of purgatory may be detected in Rulfo's Comala as in Pedro Páramo, everyone to whom Juan Preciado speaks is already dead. Both Yeats and Rulfo wrote dramas that arose from the land and in the opening lines of 'The Dreaming of the Bones', a musician sings.