ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a Juan Rulfo's short story collection El Llano en llamas through its limits, its points of rupture — fault lines that are manifested metafictionally within his highly self-conscious, introspective texts. It explores the ways in which Rulfo's short stories situate themselves at the limits of storytelling through their depiction of the death of the traditional storyteller and the corresponding decay of communicable meaning. The chapter also explores the ways in which formal limits, cuts and breaks are posited not only as the symptom of residuality, loss and decay; but also as a point of departure, of lyrical and narrative openings onto new forms and paths. It examines the tales' rupture from narrative, that is, the point at which Rulfo's short story threatens to overspill its literary medium into the medium of photography. Because of the presentness of the narrative and its isolation from any linear historical context, it can be recontextualized and transculturated in new contexts.
