What a breath of fresh air this book is! I am liking the progression from Facundo to The President and now to this! I the Supreme is a difficult book to read but I am liking it thus far. It is quite different from the first two books we have read on so many levels. For one, I am really liking the fact that we get more access to the character of the dictator, and to his own perspective. Before I go on, I want to quickly go over some of the structural/stylistic aspects that I find so fascinating.
This book displays many of the characteristics of the modernist, experimental novel practiced by writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf in the early part of the 20th century. Indeed, this book reminds me a lot of Ulysses, with its puns, and various other play with language, the use of the stream of consciousness and of course, its inclusion of the profane and the colloquial. I have noted before that parts of The President are very Joycean but Roa Bastos's entire book could almost be dubbed the twin of Joyce's masterpiece. Some examples are the words raza and azar, the latter being the former spelled backwards, appearing in the same sentence (98) or the alliteration in "They finally formed the filigreed florets of malaria" (45).
Other aspects remind me of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, especially the metafictional elements like the passage about writing that we discussed in class ..."Don't you think that I could be made into a fabulous story?" the dictator asks (29). On one level, that is the exact meaning of his question but on the metafictional level, the fiction itself is asking the same thing. The talking skull story, as well as the talking stones etc. also remind me of the characters in O'Brien's book which leave their ontological plain...sort of. The gaps in the printed text is also something that occurs in At Swim. Of course, tracing all the various forms of intertextuality in I the Supreme would be a very difficult task.
While this is also a dark book on many levels, I find myself enjoying the humour in it. I will say it again, what a breath of fresh air compared to (mainly) Facundo but also to the more sobering novel by Asturias. I am not quite where I should be by now in terms of the reading but I am looking forward to reading the rest of this challenging book.
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2 comments:
i agree, the book loves to play with language....very challenging. Oh, and p29 is indeed a critical part of the book too. Great that u reminded me....i should go back and read it again. By the way, do you think he talks too much (El Supremo)? SOmetimes, I just feel like he is talking to himself and then starts imagining things ... so some of those stories could really had been told before, which makes the book more blurry between the lines of real and fake. aww, im beginning to think more complicately after reading this book. confusing! *Good luck with your reading!
Darja, absolutely. This is very much a modernist text on a par with Joyce. I'm interested also by your comparison with At Swim Two Birds (another book I love, by the way). What's different is that this is much more overtly political. It's as much about power as it is about language, or rather about the relations between language and power.
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