SOURCE: "Inframundo: Juan Rulfo's Photographic Companion to El llano en llamas," in Chasqui, Vol. XVII, No. 2, November, 1988, pp. 56-74.

In the following essay, Fraser explores Rulfo's photographic vision of Mexico, contending that it underlies the visual qualities of the stories collected in The Burning Plain.

How do readers perceive literature, given the intricate linguistic process of encoding and decoding that occurs once the author places words on the printed page? It is evident that much of the "meaning" of this process, the affective value of literature, depends in large part on the visual interpretation of images and linguistic symbols. Especially during the past century, the advent of photography and cinema has served to expand the repertoire of visual stimuli in literature as well as to educate readers in the literary values of the visual medía. We need only to consider the wealth of critical terms derived from...