Family as discourse and power in Western society: Marriage, family and epistemology in Juan Rulfo, Jose Donoso and Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Latin American authors may be more attuned to the debilitating structures of Western epistemology because their nations/cultures have often been on the non-privileged side of structural polarities, the brunt of social, political and economic forces at work in a structured world. Three authors in particular, Mexican Juan Rulfo, Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Chilean Jose Donoso, see clearly how these structuring forces work, starting at that most primary of all social levels, within the family.;In Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera we find that the old epistemology forces an unfeeling, ineffectual relationship between courtiers, between lovers and within married couples. In Donoso's A House in the Country we see the resultant toll of the epistemology upon the way parents deal with their children, making of them obligations, expectations and parental reflections, rather than the nurturing, caring role mythologized in society. And in Rulfo's Pedro Paramo we see how these family-based role-relationships are translated into the political arena, the political-boss Paramo acts as a father to his community, and so is able to exercise limitless control over his constituents, his "children.".;With these mythologized, structured family-based relationships in mind, it is clear to see how the author becomes a "father of his text," and would like to dictate the contents of his novel. In the case of our three authors, however, there has been a revelation of the limitations in this practice: Donoso, Rulfo and Garcia Marquez chose to divorce themselves from their texts in a liberating project. In doing so, we see that they relinquish the age-old desire for privileged position, they give up the desire to remain in power either as father, leader or author. In discovering how this desire works, we understand all the more fully what these authors relinquish, and we share with them the juissance of their texts that becomes available only in the sacrifice.;In debunking the family as a divinely ordained, natural institution, traditional authorities of all kinds becomes suspect. In the end, these attempts by these authors to lay open the family becomes an attempt to lay open the whole of Western epistemology for the categorizing, exacting and controlling force that it is.