Celestino antes del alba by Reinaldo Arenas: An All-Encompassing Rewriting of Juan Rulfo’s Masterpiece Pedro Páramo

Abstract

This article explores the rewriting relations between Reinaldo Arenas’s Celestino antes del alba (1967) and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955) through a two-step analysis. First, a short passage from an essay by Arenas will serve to examine the general analogies between the two novels. Second, the article will focus on three particular scenes from Pedro Páramo that were possibly rewritten by Arenas into three parallel scenes in Celestino antes del alba. The goal is to unveil the implicit presence of Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece in every aspect of Arenas’s work, ranging from themes and character construction to language, structure, representation of time and space, and narrative techniques.