Bosque quemado

Bosque quemado (Random House Mondadori, 2008)
por Roberto Brodsky
Chile, 2007

Bosque quemado, al parecer una obra de carácter fuertemente autobiográfico, se trata de la relación padre-hijo tensa entre un cardiólogo comunista chileno y su hijo adolescente después del golpe de Estado de 1973 que provocó sus huidas al exilio.  Dado que el narrador sin nombre y su padre Moisés están obligados a dejar la Argentina después de dejar de Chile ("Para entonces ya sonaba la alerta roja en la comunidad de los exiliados.  En las semanas precedentes, los cuerpos quemados y sin vida de chilenos, uruguayos y argentinos reconocidamente izquierdistas habían sido encontrados en los alrededores del aeropuerto de Ezeiza" [54]), también se trata de las peripecias involucradas en mantener una identidad cultural y/o nacional como parte de una diáspora porque casi todos los vínculos con el pasado de los dos hombres se han sido cortados.  Una ironía histórica terrible en el caso del padre, un hombre de ascendencia judía y él mismo el hijo de inmigrantes europeos.  O como el narrador lo explica al llegar a Venezuela, su padre "había salvado el pellejo huyendo de Buenos Aires a Caracas como antes lo hiciera  la corajuda Ana desde el progromo ucranio, y con eso bastaba.  En cuanto a mí, no había mayor novedad: mi padre era mi país, mi patria portátil.  Yo sería del lugar donde estuviese él" (70).  Un buen plan lo de quedarse con el padre, tal vez, pero desgraciadamente para el personaje un plan que no esté destinado a durar a lo largo de un exilio que eventualmente durará una década y que verá el "doctor Chile" en Venezuela y el narrador en España aguantando la desilusión y las noticias de las desaparencias y las muertes de sus amigos y familiares.  A pesar de unos momentos poco interesantes relacionados con una aventura amorosa del narrador después de su regreso a Chile, Bosque quemado a mí me pareció ser una muy buena novela, impactante y sutil, en su totalidad.  Hay una muy bien escrita escena hacia el final, por ejemplo, en que el narrador dice a su mujer que él está escribiendo algo que es "una mezcla" en términos del género de la obra: "ni puramenta novela ni tampoco biografía, en sentido estricto.  Es ficción, en el fondo" (197).  ¿Está el personaje describiendo la novela de Brodsky?  Quizá, pero lo interesante de la descripción no es su aspecto de metaficción dentro de un libro que es empapado en un realismo duro sino la reflexión introspectiva que la precede en el texto: "una obra literaria no es un ajuste de cuentas", escribe el narrador, "no había revancha que tomar" (196).  El éxito de Brodsky, me parece, proviene de justo esta paradoja argumental: en un libro cargado de un indecible tristeza  --y en un libro en que el propio título viene de una descripción de la enfermedad de Alzheimer, la aflicción que arrasará los "recuerdos, referencias, memoria, todo" (124) del cardiológo Moisés como otro robo de su identidad después de su regreso a su país natal-- el novelista ha escrito algo que produce honda emoción y que es fiel a la idea que el exilio está lleno de una "tristeza chejoviana" (130) al mismo tiempo que ha escrito algo que no se parece a un ajuste de cuentas.  Un logro eso, ¿no?  En todo caso, Ignacio Echevarría, en su comentario sobre Bosque quemado en la página 132 de Los libros esenciales de la literatura en español: narrativa de 1950 a nuestros días, elogia la obra con aun más entusiasmo: "Ninguna otra novela, hasta el momento, ha acertado a ilustrar mejor el drama de quienes, empujados al exilio por las feroces dictaduras que asolaron Latinoamérica en los años setenta, permanecieron fieles a una memoria y a unos idearios que los dueños y usuarios de las restauradas democracias obviaron, en un ejercicio de amnesia colectiva que hizo de ciertos ideales también un bosque quemado".

Roberto Brodsky

El burlador de Sevilla [The Trickster of Seville] Group Read

El burlador de Sevilla [The Trickster of Seville], a c. 1630 play usually attributed to Tirso de Molina, is June's 2014 Caravana de recuerdos Ibero-American Readalong selection coming to you direct from the lands of LA FURIA ROJA.  I'd apologize for announcing this group read selection so late, but the work's barely 100 pages long and shouldn't be too hard to get a hold of for those interested in reading along with "us" during the last few days of the month (note: since this is currently an, ahem, "one-man group read," I'd be happy to read the play with you during the first few days of the Spanish Lit Month festivities in July if that sounds more appealing to you--first of you to commit gets to decide the late June or early July thing).  So why El burlador de Sevilla?  Seduction.  Swordplay.  Revenge from beyond the grave.  Its status as one of the first (if not the first) works to introduce Don Juan, the infamous seducer of women and "el personaje más universal del teatro español" ["the most universal character in Spanish theater"] according to the copy on the back of my edition, and one of the undisputed highlights of Spanish literature from the time of Cervantes means relatively little to me.  Just like in real life, I'm all about the seduction and the swordplay and the revenge.  How about you?

With

Amanda, Simpler Pastimes
Tom, Wuthering Expectations 

"Yo el Supremo" vs. "Yo el Supremo"

Yo el Supremo (Cátedra, 2005)
by Augusto Roa Bastos
Argentina, 1974

If you'll pardon the effrontery of me shamelessly quoting from my own intro post on Yo el Supremo, I'd like to reformulate a question that I'd thought at the time might be best for us to save/savor/save for later: what's the point of spending several hundred pages with Yo el Supremo just to witness the title character eventually entombing himself in a mausoleum of words?  To start with, the novelty or the entertainment value of Roa Bastos' storytelling should be clear enough from the fact that I haven't even had time to talk about things like either a) the blanket--"más blanda que la seda, el terciopelo, el tafetán o la holanda era" ["softer than silk, velvet, taffeta, or fine Dutch linen it was"]--that Don Mateo Fleitas, an early Supremo/Supreme scribe discusses with Policarpo Patiño (?-1840), the current Supremo/Supreme scribe according to the main timeline in the novel, and which he says he fashioned out of the skin of innumerable long-eared bats: "Va a ser una manta única en el mundo.  Suave, ya la ha tocado usté mismo.  La más liviana.  Si la tiro al aire en este momento, usté y yo podemos envejecer esperando que vuelva a caer.  La más abrigada" ["There will never be a blanket like it in this world.  Soft, you've already touched it yourself.  Couldn't be lighter.  If I toss it in the air at this moment, you and I will become old and gray as we wait for it to fall back down.  Couldn't be better insulation"] (121 in the original, 26-27 in Helen Lane's translation) or b) the Supreme's occasional anthropological disquisitions on Guaraní culture like the one where he claims that in Paraguay, "donde el demonio es hembra para los nativos, algunos tribus rinden culto a este súcubo" ["where the devil is a woman for the natives, certain tribes worship this succubus"] in the form of "la vulva-con-dientes" ["the vulva-with-teeth"]: "¿No caen esos dientes, Excelencia, a la vejez de la hembra?  No, mi estimado don Juan.  Se vuelven cada vez más filosos y duros.  ¿Teme algo?  ¿Le ha sucedido algo desagradable?" ["Don't those teeth fall out, Excellency, when the woman grows old?  No, my dear Don Juan.  They become harder, even sharper.  Is there something you're afraid of?  Has something unpleasant happened to you?"] (258 in the original, 138 in the translation).  A less racy comment by the perpetual dictator suggesting that the natives' conception of male/female types as essentially hermaphroditic is responsible for having "anularon la distinción de los sexos, tan cara e indispensable al pensamiento occidental, que únicamente sabe manejarse por pares" [canceled out "the difference between the sexes, so dear and so indispensable to Western thought, which can operate only by pairs"] induces the Compiler to namedrop Jorge Luis Borges' Historia de la eternidad [History of Eternity] in a footnote, which in turn leads to a mention of Leopoldo Lugones' El Imperio Jesuítico [The Jesuit Empire] and etc. and etc. and on to infinity (249-250 in the original, 132 in the translation).  Roa Bastos, who claimed that Borges and Juan Rulfo were two of his favorite writers in an interview I came across recently but can't find at the moment, finds another way to riff on the Borgesian dimensions of time here: the Compiler claims that el Supremo solved a riddle posed by Nietzsche and written about by Borges in yet another work of his!

Structurally and thematically, Yo el Supremo rewards time spent with it for the way it invites the reader's active participation, debate and even dissent.  On the first point, note that even though the subjectivity of the protean, fictional force of nature who is the title character often seems to dominate the proceedings via the character's spluttering insults and his claustrophobic interior monologues about his political legacy and the power of words ("Se escribe cuando ya no se puede obrar" ["One writes when one can no longer act"], he says at one point, inadvertently insulting bloggers everywhere [143 in the original, 45 in the translation]), in reality--if you'll pardon the expression--this domineering first-person POV is constantly challenged by a metaphorical verbal dictatorship of the proletariat represented by the compiler character as well as the various historians and literary figures whose own voices of anti-authoritarian authority hold a mirror up to el Supremo's distorted version of "reality" as if in protest.  Yo el Supremo vs. Yo el Supremo, dig?  To give you an idea of just how intricate and juicy this can be from an unreliable narrator standpoint, I need only point to the sequence where the Supreme mentions sending his envoy Amadís Cantero to a meeting with a Brazilian diplomat named Correia da Cámara over a proposed Brazilian/Paraguayan alliance against Argentina.  Keep in mind that at least the Supreme and Correia da Cámara (1783-1848) are historical figures.  The Supreme: "Correia da Cámara lo denigrará más tarde en sus informes y memoriales.  Será la única vez que diga la verdad" ["Correia da Cámara will later denigrate [Cantero] in his reports and memoranda.  It will be the one and only time he tells the truth"] (509 in the original, 347 in the translation).  A fragment of a report allegedly lifted from Correa da Cámara's Anais follows in the form of a footnote, but it's not at all clear whether the change in spelling from Correia to Correa is a result of the hispanicization of the name, a switch from archaic spelling to modern spelling, or a hint that this author's Anais is an imaginary set of "annals" written by a pseudo-Correia.  Whatever the case may be, Amadís Cantero, probably at the expense of his über chivalric first name, is indeed denigrated as a "lector de novelas de caballería" ["reader of novels of chivalry"], a "escritor él mismo de bodrios insoportables" ["writer himself of unbearable tripe"], and "el más vil sabandija que he conocido en todos los años de mi vida.  Su fuerte es la historia, pero muchas veces hace actuar a Zoroastro en China, a Tamerlán en Suecia, a Hermes Trimegisto en Francia" ["the vilest vermin I have ever known in all the years of my life.  His forte is history, but many times he has Zoroaster acting in China, Tamerlane in Sweden, Hermes Trimegistus in France"].  The metafictional insults get more incestuous as the commentary continues.  Correa da Cámara: "Noche a noche, me ha estado leyendo algo vagamente parecido a una biografía novelada del Supremo del Paraguay.  Abyecto epinicio en el que pone al atrabiliaro Dictador por los cuernos de la luna...  ¡Es el tormento, la humillación más atroz, que se me han infligido jamás" ["Night after night he has been reading me something vaguely resembling a novelized biography of El Supremo of Paraguay.  An abject dithryamb in which he sets the misanthropic Dictator on the horns of the moon...  It is torture, the worst humiliation to which I have ever been subjected!"] (Ibid., ellipses added).  The icing on the storytelling cake?  A page or two later, Correa da Cámara mentions a senhor Roa in the course of a diatribe against the Paraguayans' diplomatic tactics.  At this point, the unnamed compiler steps in with a footnote of his own regarding the identification of this 19th century "senhor Roa": "El Compilador desea aclarar que el lapsus y la mención no le corresponden; el informe confidencial de Correa menciona textualmente este apellido, según puede consultarse en el tomo IV de Anais, pág. 60 (N. del C.)" ["The compiler wishes to point out that this lapsus and mention are not attributable to him: Correa's confidential report mentions this name textually, as can be verified in Anais, Volume IV, p. 60.  (Compiler's Note.)"] (511 in the original, 348 in the translation).

Given the multiplicity of perspectives on display in Yo el Supremo, it shouldn't be surprising to hear that the end of the novel is equally open-ended in terms of the closure--or the lack thereof--that readers can expect to encounter within its final pages.  With this in mind, let's take a look how Roa Bastos deals with the legacy of his protagonist.  There are, first of all, a succession of endings to the novel rather than just one.*  In the first, a particularly gruesome one, the deceased tyrant holds forth on the various types of  "cadaverófilas" ["cadaverophile"] insects which will feast on his rotting corpse (592 in the original, 421 in the translation).  The manuscript trails off, and we are told that the following ten folios are unable to be read.  Milagros Ezquerro, in a footnote to this passage in the Cátedra edition of the novel, points out that "con esta descripción de las fases de la putrefacción del cadáver se extingue el discurso de El Supremo.  Otra voz narradora cierra el espacio textual dirigiéndose a El Supremo y pronunciando su condenación eterna" ["with this description of the stages of putrefaction of the cadaver, El Supremo's discourse is extinguished.  Another narrative voice seals the narrative space by addressing El Supremo and pronouncing his eternal condemnation"] (493).  The second ending, as we have already noted, is a three page denunciation of the Supreme by an unknown writer who starts by telling the Supreme that "te alucinaste y alucinaste a los demás fabulando que tu poder era absoluto.  ¡Perdiste tu aceite, viejo ex teólogo metido a repúblico!" ["you fooled yourself and fooled others by pretending that your power was absolute.  You lost your oil, you old ex theologian passing yourself off as a statesman"].  Later, the Supreme-like chastising continues with my favorite impertinences being the ones where he/she tells the deceased, "No, pequeña momia; la verdadera Revolución no devora a sus hijos" ["No, little mummy; true Revolution does not devour its children"] (594-595 in the original, 423 in the translation) and, working in a bald joke, "las larvas seguirán pastando en tus despojos tranquilmente.  Con sus largos pelos tejerán una peluca a tu calvicie, de modo que tu mondo cráneo no sufra mucho frío" ["the larvae will go on peacefully feeding on your remains.  They will weave a wig from its long hairs to cover your baldness, so that your bare skull will not suffer too much from the cold" (596 in the original, 424 in the translation).  One subtlety that's unfortunately lost in the English translation of the passage is that the Supreme is addressed throughout with the informal rather than the formal form of the Spanish term for "you" as an additional measure of disrespect.  For those keeping score, the beginning of this folio is burned and the ending is illegible and otherwise unable to be found.

Before moving on to the third and the fourth endings to the novel, I think it might be useful for anybody who's only experienced the novel secondhand to know that one of the recurring motifs in Yo el Supremo is the allegation that either the dictator's skull or a skull believed to belong to the dictator was dug up and decapitated after his death as an act of desecration by his enemies.  In one variant of the story, in fact, the skull is said to be stored in a noodle box by a virulent non-fan of the Supreme.  Although the Supreme himself makes reference to the story in this post about his post-mortem friendship with the Argentinean general Belgrano, I decided not to write about the continuation of the scene until now.  The Supreme is already dead, of course (403-404 in the original, 256 in the translation):

En cuanto a mí veo ya el pasado confundido con el futuro.  La falsa mitad de mi cráneo guardado por mis enemigos durante veinte años en una caja de fideos, entre los desechos de un desván.

Cómo se verá en el Apéndice, también esta predicción de El Supremo se cumplió en todo sus alcances.  (N. del Compilador.)

Los restos del cráneo, id est, no serán míos.  Más, qué cráneo despedazado a martillazos por los enemigos de la patria; qué partícula de ppensamiento; qué resto de gente viva o muerta quedará en el país, que no lleve en adelante mi marca.  La marca al rojo de YO-ÉL.  Enteros.  Inextinguibles.  Postergados en la nada diferida de la raza a quien el destino ha brindado el sufrimiento como diversión, la vida no-vivida como vida, la irrealidad como realidad.  Nuestra marca quedará en ella.

As for me, I see the past now confused with the future.  The false half of my skull kept by my enemies for thirty years in a box of noodles, amid the junk piled in an attic.

As will be seen in the Appendix, this prediction of El Supremo's was also fulfilled down to the last detail.  (Compiler's Note.)

The remains of the cranium, id est, will not be mine.  But then, what skull hammered to pieces by the enemies of the fatherland; what particle of thought, what people, living or dead, will there be left in the country who do not henceforward bear my mark?  The red-hot brand of I-HE.  Entire.  Inextinguishable.  Left behind in the protracted nothingness of the race to whom destiny has offered suffering as a diversion, non-lived life as life, unreality as reality.  Our mark will remain on it.

Still with me?  The Appendix referred to above constitutes the third of four endings in Roa Bastos' novel and is the main one encouraging debate concerning the Supreme's legacy (an earlier fragment, in which schoolchildren answer the question of "cómo ven ellos la imagen sacrosanta de nuestro Supremo Gobierno Nacional" ["how they see the sacrosanct image of our Supreme National Government"] also addresses the question in an often humorous fashion) (570 in the original, 403 in the translation).  In the Appendix, though, a number of historians and other interested parties weigh in on the specific topics of 1) Los restos de El Supremo [The Remains of EL SUPREMO] and 2) Migración de los restos de El Supremo [Migration of the Remains of EL SUPREMO].  The introduction by an unknown person (the compiler?  Roa Bastos? Roa Bastos as the compiler?) states that "el 31 de enero de 1961, una circular oficial convocó a los historiadores nacionales a un cónclave con el fin de 'iniciar las gestiones tendientes a recuperar los restos mortales del Supremo Dictador y restituir al patrimonio nacional esas sagradas reliquias'" ["on January 31, 1961, an official circular invited historians of the nation to a conclave, in order to 'initiate steps leading to the recovery of the mortal remains of the Supreme Dictator and the restoration of these sacred relics to the natural patrimony'"] (597 in the original, 425 in the translation).  In a mocking tone, the unnamed writer goes on to note that "las opiniones se dividen; los historiadores se contradicen, discuten, disputan ardorosa, vocingleramente.  Es que --como cumpliéndose otra de las predicciones de El Supremo-- esta iniciativa de unión natural se convierte en terreno donde apunta el brote de una diminuta guerra civil, afortunadamente incruenta, puesto que se trata sólo de un enfrentamiento 'papelario'" ["opinion is divided; the historians contradict each other, engage in heated exchanges, argue vociferously.  As if in fulfillment of El Supremo's predictions, this epic national undertaking turns into a small-scale civil war, fortunately a bloodless one, since the confrontation takes place 'only on paper'" (Ibid.).  Since Milagros Ezquerro reassures us that "los textos citados en el Apéndice son auténticos y no han sido modificados.  Se notará que muchos de los hechos aquí evocados han sido aludidos han sido en el discurso de El Supremo" ["the texts cited in the Appendix are authentic and have not been altered.  It will be noted that many of the events evoked here have been alluded to in El Supremo's discourse"] (597), I'll take the liberty of mentioning a lone nugget from Julio César Chaves' comment on the mood in Paraguay the year after the controversial Karaí-Guasú's death: "Es conveniente recordar que poco tiempo después apareció una mañana en la puerta del templo un cartel que se decía enviado por él, desde el infierno, suplicando se lo removiese de aquel lugar santo para alivio de sus pecados" ["We may here remind the reader that a short time later a placard appeared on the door of the church, stating that it had been sent by him from hell and begging that he be removed from that sacred place in order to lessen his burden of sin"] (601 in the original, 428 in the translation).

Whatever censure or praise the real life José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia deserves for the perpetual dictatorship role he played on the stage of 19th century Paraguayan history--he has been hailed as both the Robespierre of America and a terrible despot made crueler by mental illness--his polemical fictionalization by Roa Bastos is so artistically successful and entertaining that the recent real life historians' debate about the father of the Paraguayan revolution seems like just another chapter in our exiled novelist's master plan to novelize his country of birth.  It is to be lamented that Roa Bastos' planned follow-up to Yo el Supremo, a "contrapunto picaresco" ["picaresque counterpoint"] to this work in the words of Milagros Ezquerro with the title Mi reino, el terror [Terror: My Kingdom], was eventually abandoned (16).  On the other hand, Yo el Supremo is so thoroughly satisfying in its exploration of the intersections between history and literature that it feels a little wrong to complain about never being able to hold that unwritten book with the tantalizing title in my hands.  On that note, I guess it's finally time to mention the ultimate ending of Yo el Supremo, a "Nota final del Compilador" [Final Compiler's note] in which we are told that "esta compilación ha sido entresacada" ["this compilation has been culled"] from a staggering number of other written sources, oral interviews and etc. (608 in the original, 435 in the translation).  In a twist, we then read that "ya habrá advertido el lector que, al revés de los textos usuales, éste ha sido leído primero y escrito después.  En lugar de decir y escribir cosa nueva, no ha hecho más que copiar fielmente lo ya dicho y compuesto por otros" ["the reader will already have noted that, unlike ordinary texts, this one was read first and written later.  Instead of saying and writing something new, it merely faithfully copies what has already been said and composed by others"] (Ibid.).  In other words, once again we are confronted with the notion of a collective as opposed to an individual authorship although expounded in such an ironic way that it undermines the authority of its own words.  And in the final paragraph of the final ending to Yo el Supremo, the compiler gets one last chance to aggressively blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction and manages to make the most of it with an unexpected but perfectly fitting reference to another expanding universe of a novel, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.  I hope you enjoy it because this is the last I'll have to say about Yo el Supremo for a while (609 in the original, 435 in the translation):

Así, imitando una vez más al Dictador (los dictadores cumplen precisamente esta función: reemplazar a los escritores, historiadores, artistas, pensadores, etc.), el a-copiador declara, con palabras de un autor contemporáneo, que la historia encerrada en estos Apuntes se reduce al hecho de que la historia que en ella debió ser narrada no ha sido narrada.  En consecuencia, los personajes y hechos que figuran en ellos, han ganado, por fatalidad del lenguaje escrito, el derecho a una existencia ficticia y autónoma al servicio del no menos ficticio y autónomo lector.

Hence, imitating the Dictator once again (dictators fulfill precisely this function: replacing writers, historians, artists, thinkers, etc.), the re-scriptor declares, in the words of a contemporary author, that the history contained in these Notes is reduced to the fact that the story that should have been told in them has not been told.  As a consequence, the characters and facts that figure in them have earned, through the fatality of the written language, the right to a fictitious and anonymous existence in the service of the no less fictitious and autonomous reader.

Bravo, senhor/señor Roa, bravo.

  

*In hindsight, a fairly clear anticipation of these endings and another approach to the dictator's legacy can be found in the extended passages where the Supreme's dog Sultán/Sultan abuses his former master: "¡Bah, Supremo!  ¡No sabes aún qué alegría, qué alivio sentirás bajo tierra!  La alucinación en que yaces te hace tragar los últimos sorbos de ese amargo elixir que llamas vida, mientras vas cavando tu propia fosa en el cementerio de la letra escrita" ["Bah, Supreme!  You don't know yet what happiness, what relief you'll feel below earth!  The delusion in whose toils you lie is making you swallow the dregs of that bitter elixir you call life, as you finish digging your own grave in the cemetery of the written word"] (542 in the original, 376 in the translation).

José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia strikes a dictatorial pose.

Thanks very much to Séamus of Vapour Trails for reading Augusto Roa Bastos' fantastic novel with me.  Séamus' rousing post on I the Supreme/Yo el Supremo can be found here.

"Yo el Supremo": Historical Fictions II

Yo el Supremo (Cátedra, 2005)
by Augusto Roa Bastos
Argentina, 1974

So what else is Yo el Supremo [a/k/a I the Supreme] if it "no es una narración histórica, ni menos una biografía novelada" ["is not a historical narrative, nor even less a novelized biography"] according to its author?  If you can pardon the unfortunate analogy, I'd argue that it's in effect a mirror of/on Paraguayan history--part and parcel of what I've claimed is Augusto Roa Bastos' mission to "novelize" his home country--written in such a way that it appears that the writer has taken a hammer to the glass before lending you said mirror.  Why would anybody, much less the rather serious-looking man in that totally uncool fucking turtleneck sweater below (far, far below--Compiler's Note.), want to do such a thing beyond Duchampian large glass shits and giggles!?!  One answer, a sort of political one if you will, is that highlighting the fragmentary nature of a people's history collectivizes it in such a way that it exposes the lie behind the idea that there is a sort of monolithic state history "owned" by the fictionalized Supremo/Supreme in the novel or by the many 20th century military dictatorships in Roa Bastos' lifetime.  Another answer, more literary in nature but also political in at least one important sense, is that many novelists over the centuries have derived subversive value and/or just provided amusement from undermining the "authority" of their own texts.  Roa Bastos wouldn't be alone in that regard.  In any case, in an old interview with the Spanish TV arts and entertainment host Joaquín Soler Serrano, the Paraguayan seemed to privilege the first of these two explanations regarding the guiding principles of his authorial intent by revealing that, "para mí el Paraguay es como un gran espejo muy luminoso que se ha roto en muchos fragmentos.  He tratado en mis libros de reunir estos fragmentos" ["for me Paraguay is like a large, very luminous mirror which has shattered into many pieces.  I've tried in my books to put these pieces back together"].*  A very illuminating comment--marred only by the fact that Roa Bastos never once mentions taking a hammer to that large, very luminous mirror.

The seriousness of this artistic endeavor aside, Roa Bastos is of course quite nuts in the way he goes about achieving it here--as is perhaps most evident in the six- or seven-page frame tale near the midway point of the novel where the French avant-gardist Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) of Impressions d'Afrique and Locus Solus fame worms his way into the Yo el Supremo universe almost César Aira style.  Historical fictions?  Check this shit out!  The intertextual fun and games begin with the Supreme having a typical political heart to heart with himself in his private notebook: "Yo soy el árbitro.  Puedo decidir la cosa.  Fraguar los hechos.  Inventar los acontecimientos" ["I am the final judge.  I can decide how things will go.  Contrive the facts.  Invent the events"] (329 in the original, 196 in the translation).  More mutterings of that nature.  And then: "El tiempo está lleno de grietas.  Hace agua por todas partes" ["Time is full of cracks.  It leaks everywhere"], the mere thought of which leads the Supreme to reflect upon the "pluma con el lente-recuerdo incrustado en el pomo" ["pen with the memory-lens imbedded in the pommel"] that he's using to record his vaguely Nixonian ramblings (329 in the original, 197 in the translation).  What the hell kind of pen is that?  Funny you should ask because it's at precisely this point that the compiler hijacks the text to leave a "note" several pages in length.  For our purposes, it's enough to know that the apparatus isn't a Bic or a Mont Blanc or even a Pilot Precise Rolling Ball, one of the pens of choice favored here in Caravanalandia, but "una pluma cilíndrica" ["a cylindrical pen"] in which "engastado en el hueco del tubo cilíndrico, apenas más extenso que un punto brillante, está el lente-recuerdo que lo convierte en un insólito utensilio con dos diferentes aunque coordinadas funciones: Escribir al mismo tiempo que visualizar las formas de otro lenguaje compuesto exclusivamente con imágenes, por decirlo así, de metáforas ópticas" ["mounted in the hollow of the cylindrical tube, scarcely larger than a very bright point, is the memory-lens that turns it into a most unusual instrument with two different yet coordinated functions: writing while at the same time visualizing the forms of another language composed exclusively of images, of optical metaphors, so to speak"] (329-330 in the original, 197 in the translation).

Whether the detailed description of the magical optical metaphorical lens pen that follows appeals to you or not, the more salient matter is that the "pluma-recuerdo" ["souvenir pen"] or "pluma memoria" ["memory pen"] ends up in the hands of the compiler "por obra del azar" ["through the workings of chance"].  Chance, that deus ex machina of real life of all things!  The compiler tells us, in fact, that "me la dio Raimundo, apodado Loco-Solo, chozno de uno de los amanuenses de El Supremo" ["it was given to me by Raimundo, nicknamed Loco-Solo, great-great-great-grandson of one of El Supremo's amanuenses" (331 in the original, 198 in the translation).  Since most of what little I know about Raymond Roussel's work can be found in the two great posts that Scott from seraillon penned about Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus in recent months, I hope it won't be impertinent for me to turn to Milagros Ezquerro for some more assistance regarding this "brandy and narcotic herb"-ingesting Raimundo fellow (198 in the translation); she helpfully explains, for example, that Locus Solus was "expresión latina que significa 'lugar solitario' que Roa Bastos transforma en 'Loco-Solo'" ["a Latin expression that signifies 'solitary place' and which Roa Bastos transforms into 'Loco-Solo'"].  She also adds that Roussel was "un autor predilecto de Roa, en particular a causa de su afición por los juegos de palabras que tienen mucho que ver con los de Yo el Supremo" ["a favorite author of Roa's, in particular because of his love of the puns that have so much to do with those found in I the Supreme"].  Roussel, unsurprisingly given what occurs to his fictional counterpart in Roa Bastos' novel, didn't have a pretty end: "murió alcohólico y drogado" ["he died an alcoholic and of a drug overdose"] (331).

But back to our story.  In what follows, the compiler relates that he and Raimundo met as classmates at the República de Francia Primary School in 1932.  A pun on José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia or a tip of the beret to Raymond Roussel's native country?  Who can say?  In any event, 1932 was the first year of the Chaco War waged between Paraguay and Bolivia when "comenzó la movilización que se llevó al frente hasta a los enanos" ["the mobilization that took even dwarfs to the front began"].  However, Roussel--I mean, Raimundo--had other plans: "Pero a mí no me van a llevar al Chaco, ni aunque vengan a pedirme a rodillas!  ¡Voy a irme a África!  ¿Por qué al África, Loco-Solo?  Porque quiero impresiones fuertes, no esta mierda de guerrita con los bolís.  ¡Qué se jodan!" ["But they're not going to ship me off to the Chaco, even though they come begging me on their knees.  I'm going to take off for Africa!  Why Africa, Loco-Solo?  Because I want strong impressions, not that shitty little war with the Bolis.  Balls on that!"] (332 in the original, 199 in the translation; by the way, "balls on that!" is a much tamer translation than what appears in the Spanish).  One truly Rabelaisian school examination pun later--"Rendí por él los orales, los anales.  Todo" ["I took the orals, the anals for him.  The whole works"]--the compiler shifts gears, saying that "en vísperas del Éxodo que comenzó en marzo de 1947, fui a visitar por penúltima vez a Raimundo" ["on the eve of the Exodus that began in March of 1947, I went to visit Raimundo for the penultimate time"] (Ibid.).  What exodus of 1947 could this be referring to?  Ezquerro, one more time: 1947 was the year of the "salida hacia el exilio de muchos paraguayos como consecuencia de acontecimientos insurrecionales.  Entonces fue cuando salió Roa Bastos hacia Buenos Aires" ["departure into exile of many Paraguyans as a consequence of insurrection-related events.  That was when Roa Bastos left for Buenos Aires"] (333).

As if to punctuate this x marks the spot intersection between Roa Bastos' reading tastes (Roussel), his fiction (Yo el Supremo), his personal history, and his future home in Argentina, in the discussion  that follows Raimundo addresses the compiler as Carpincho--one of Roa Bastos' nicknames--and starts speaking a form of Spanish that's clearly from the Río de la Plata region rather than from Paraguay (this linguistic in-joke is one of many flourishes that get lost in translation).   Raimundo, who is described as possessing "ojos de degollado que parpadeaban sanguinolentos en las bolsas de los párpados" ["the bloodshot eyes of a man with his throat slit, blinking in the swollen pockets of his eyelids"], then tells the compiler that he knows that "lo único que querés es la pluma de El Supremo...  Se te derrite el seso y tus manos tiemblan más que mis manos de borracho, de epiléptico, de bebedor de polvos de güembé y de cocaína que me dan las enfermeras, que me traés vos mismo" ["the only thing you want is the Pen of El Supremo...  It melts your brain and your hands tremble more than my hands of a drunkard, of an epileptic, of a taker of güembé powders and the cocaine that the nurses give me, that you yourself bring me" (334 in the original, 200 in the translation).  Raimundo then adds: "Te esperan muy malos tiempos, Carpincho.  Te vas a convertir en migrante, en traidor, en desertor.  Te van a declarar infame traidor a la patria" ["Very bad times await you, Carpincho.  You're going to become a migrant, a traitor, a deserter.  They're going to declare you an infamous traitor to the country"].  Pausing to spit up blood, he continues: "Va a llover por lo menos otro siglo dfe mala suerte sobre este país.  Eso ya se huele luego.  Va a morir mucha gente.  Mucha gente se va a ir para no volver más, lo que es peor que morirse.  Lo que no importa tanta porque las gentes como las plantas vuelven a crecer en esta tierra donde vos pegás una patada y por uno que falta salen quienientos" ["At least another century of bad luck is going to rain down on this country.  You can smell it in the air already.  Many people are going to die.  Many people are going to go away and never come back, which is worse than dying.  Though it doesn't matter all that much because people are like plants in this country.  You kick the dust and for every one that isn't there any more five hundred others spring up in the same spot" (Ibid.).  In a sort of coda, the compiler explains why Raimundo gave him the memory-pen prior to passing away and how Raimundo was said to have been buried either in the Military Hospital cemetery or had his corpse thrown into the river a la the story about the Supreme.  The whole thing is a fun, inspired piece of writing if rather startling in the way it transitions from the loony to the morbid on a dime.

*The interview quote comes from Joaquín Soler Serrano's Escritores a fondo (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1986, 241).

Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005)

"Yo el Supremo": Historical Fictions I

Yo el Supremo (Cátedra, 2005)
by Augusto Roa Bastos
Argentina, 1974

"You, a Jesuit in Paraguay?  I must confess this is a strange world that we live in."
(Voltaire, Candide)

Ahora debo dictar/escribir; anotarlo en alguna parte.  Es el único modo que tengo de comprobar que existo aún.  Aunque estar enterrado en las letras ¿no es acaso la más completa manera de morir?  ¿No?  ¿Sí?  ¿Y entonces?

[Now I must dictate/write; note it down somewhere.  That is the only way I have of proving that I still exist.  But isn't being buried in writing perhaps the most complete way of dying?  No?  Yes?  Well then?]

(Yo el Supremo, 143; I the Supreme, 45)

Having already admitted on Friday that I'd failed you in at least three key respects re: my initial description of Yo el Supremo, I'd like to subject you to two follow-up posts to at least touch on the novel's humor, its war on language, and its curious approach to history (note: those who can recognize the Supremo style captatio benevolentiae in the words "subject you" should feel free to skip ahead to the next post).  Hell, maybe we can even finally find a little time to discuss what the novel is "about."  On that note, I'd like to draw your attention to some of the incredibly rich, unusually complex historical fictions at play in the work.  About three-quarters of the way into the novel, for example, the Supremo/Supreme, in a rare meditative mood, suddenly confesses that "tengo pocos amigos" ["I have few friends"] (400 in the original, 253 in Helen Lane's translation).  No real big revelation from a tyrant, of course, except for the fact that this confession appears to take place from somewhere within the historical echo chamber of his resting place--the Supreme is dead.  One of the friends who comes to visit him on occasion in the afterlife, though, is General Manuel Belgrano (1770-1820, i.e. another dead man), the Argentinean independence leader who had a complicated relationship with the Paraguayan supreme dictator during his lifetime due to the usual invasions, wars, and failed alliances that made the two men regional antagonists.  However, death is nothing if not the great equalizer and the Paraguayan host tells his Argentinean guest--whom he refers to as "la nebulosa-persona" ["the nebula-person"]--that "sumergidos en esta obscuridad, no nos distinguimos el uno del otro.  Entre los no-vivos reina igualdad absoluta" ["submerged in this darkness, we are indistinguishable.  Among the non-living absolute equality reigns"] (Ibid.).  A brief but psychologically penetrating/convincing for phantasms passage follows in which the dead Belgrano tries to console the dead and despondent Supreme by quoting Horace to which the Supreme in turn recounts Belgrano's satisfying end where, despite suffering the horrible effects of the dropsy, the general managed to stave off death long enough to return to Buenos Aires to die as a state hero with a funeral and other fanfare fit to mark his passing.  "Lo mío sucede al revés" ["My fate has turned out to be precisely the opposite"], the Supreme tells Belgrano on pp. 402-403/255:

No he tenido sino que revolearme en mi agujero de albañal.  Traicionado por los que más me temen y son los más abyectos y desleales.  A mí me hacen las exiquias, primero.  Luego me entierran.  Vuelven a desenterrarme.  Arrojan mis cenizas al río, murmiran algunos; otros, que uno de mís cráneos guarda en su casa un triunviro traidor; lo llevan después a Buenos Aires.  Mi segundo cráneo queda en Asunción, alegan los que se creen más avisados.  Todo esto muchos años después.

[All I have had to do to occupy my time is flop about in my sewer-hole.  Betrayed by those who fear me most and are the most abject and disloyal.  In my case they offer me funeral rites first.  Then they bury me.  After that they dig me up again.  They throw my ashes into the river, some people claim; others, that one of my craniums is kept in his house by a traitorous triumvir, and then later brought to Buenos Aires.  My second cranium remains in Asunción, according to those who think they know all the answers.  All this many years later.]

For those weaned on the Kristin Lavransdatter school of historical fiction in which the tired and sleep-inducing raison d'être would seem to be to deliver a dopey "medieval" costume drama-cum-soap opera and jazz it up with a period detail like the bubonic plague, the hallucinatory qualities and the surrealistic telescoping of time evident in this excerpt from Yo el Supremo must seem like quite an envelope-pushing departure from the rules of the game.  However, as Milagros Ezquerro points out in her introduction to the work, Roa Bastos declared in a 1974 interview that his novel "no es una narración histórica, ni menos una biografía novelada" ["is not a historical narrative, nor even less a novelized biography"] (70).  So what is it?

At the possible risk of disagreeing with Roa Bastos himself, I think that one of the most ambitious things that Yo el Supremo does is to attempt to novelize Paraguay itself.  The polyphonic text, as others have pointed out before me, isn't limited to a blow-by-blow of events occurring in the dictator's reign, and the presence of so much guaraní alongside the expected español is probably less a stylistic tic than an effort to pay homage to Paraguay's bilingual culture.  Another thing that Yo el Supremo does with its mosaic presentation of texts literally offset by other texts is to raise an objection to the idea of objective reality by dismantling the barriers between novel and commentary and between history and literature.  And yet another thing--well, more on that later.  In any event, fictionalizing the real life José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia--who, as Milagros Ezquerro notes, is never mentioned by name in the novel (71)--is just the starting point and not the end game.  How does Roa Bastos go about all this?  To start with an example in somewhat dubious Suetonian taste, let's take a look at the Supreme's Neronian firing squad humor as applied to a slave who had displeased him.  The set-up?  The sight of a black kid frolicking in the Kará-kará river leads the Supreme to reminisce about the slave servant named José María Pilar who had once betrayed him: "Tuve que hacerle curar sus llagas ladronicidas bajo el naranjo.  La pólvora es siempre buen remedio para los enfermos sin remedio" ["I was obliged to send him to the orange tree to cure him of his ladronicidal ills.  Gunpowder is always a good remedy for those whose ills are irremediable" (201 in the original, 91 in the translation; the character's pun on "buen remedio/sin remedio" loses a little something in translation, but I'm pleased to note that our translator's neologism for "ladronicidal" will yield quite vanity-producing results for me if you try punching it into Google).  Not so funny a remark from the Supreme?  That's OK, there's no accounting for taste.  However, the real reason I wanted to include the quip is for its ensuing illustration of the strange ways that humor and history go hand in hand in the novel.  As it turns out, the "traidor ayuda de cámara" ["traitorous valet de chambre"] José María Pilar had a son named Macario who became the Supreme's godchild and was eventually freed only to disappear.  In the following paragraph, we hear about his fate (201-202 in the original, 92 in the translation):

Macario niño desapareció.  Se esfumó.  Más enteramente que si lo hubiese tragado la tierra.  Desapareció como ser vivo, como ser real.  Tiempos después reapareció en una es esas innobles noveletas que publican en el extranjero los escribas migrantes.  Raptaron a Macario de la realidad, lo despojaron de su buen natural para convertirlo en la irrealidad de lo escrito en un nuevo traidor.

[Macario disappeared as a child.  Vanished.  More completely than if the earth had swallowed him up.  He disappeared in one of those ignoble cheap novels that migrant scribes publish abroad.  Macario was abducted from reality, stripped of his good nature so as turn him into another traitor in the unreality of the written word.]

As a trope, the reality or, here, the unreality of the written word is a rich vein of gold in this novel.  On the one hand, in this scene it serves as an introduction to the Supreme's recognition that written words themselves are a poor substitution for the true reality that can only be found in oral culture or in nature.  "Madrasta-naturaleza, más hábil que los más hábiles pasquinistas" ["Stepmother-nature, more cunning than the most cunning pasquinaders"], he intones.  "Tu imaginación no necesita del instinto de la imitación; hasta cuando imitas creas algo nuevo.  Encerrado en este agujero, yo no puedo sino copiarte" ["Your imagination does not need the instinct of imitation.  Even when you imitate you create something new. Shut up in this hole, I can but copy you"], he laments after seeing the sun go down (202 in the original, 92 in the translation).  And on the other hand?  This is where we return to what I was getting at about novelizing Paraguay.  As befits a work in which Candide's visit to Paraguay is treated as an actual historical event as real as the longtime presence of Jesuits in the country, I chuckled with OULIPO-like delight when I discovered Milagros Ezquerro's footnote explaining that Macario Francia, the son of the executed slave who went missing as a child, isn't just any character but is a character straight out of Roa Bastos' 1960 novel Hijo de hombre.  In other words, that earlier novel, which deals with the aftermath of the Paraguayan/Bolivian Chaco War of the 1930s, has been stealthily inserted into the very fabric of this novel by the "migrant scribe"--Roa Bastos during an earlier exile from Paraguay--in an act that in effect adds his story to the history of his country.  When you consider the Supreme's allegation that our exiled novelist had "abducted" the Macario character from reality "so as to turn him into another traitor in the unreality of the written word" all for the sake of "one of those ignoble cheap novels," the Cervantean parallels become almost impossible to ignore.  In other words, it's a strange world that we live in indeed, Candide!