Fernando de Toro

1. Fernando de Toro • Roa Bastos: I the Supreme

2. Fernando de Toro • I believe that generalized writing is not just the idea of a system to be invented, an hypothetical characteristic or a future possibility. I think on the contrary that oral language already belongs to this writing. But that presupposes a modification of the concept of writing that we for the moment merely anticipate. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.

3. Fernando de Toro • I would wish to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one condition, that the “original,” “natural,” etc. language had never existed, never intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself always been a writing. An arche-writing whose necessity and new concept I wish to indicated and outline here; and which I continue to call writing only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing. The latter could not have imposed itself historically except by the dissimulation of the arche-writing, by the desire of a speech displacing its other and its double and working to reduce its difference.

4. Fernando de Toro • If I persist in calling that difference writing, it is because, within the work of historical repression, writing was, by its situation, destined to signify the most formidable difference. It threatened the desire for the living speech from the closest proximity, it breached living speech from within and from the very beginning. And as we shall begin to see, difference cannot be thought without the trace. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology.

5. Fernando de Toro • Plato maintains both the exteriority of writing and its power of maleficient penetration, its ability to affect or infect what lies deepest inside. The pharmakon is that dangerous supplement that breaks into the very thing that would have liked to do without it yet lets itself at once be breached, roughed up, fulfilled, and replaced, completed by the very trace through which the present increases itself in the act of disappearing. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination.

6. Fernando de Toro • 1. Preamble • I the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos was published in 1974, at the very moment that the theoretical and practical discussion of Post-Modernity was launched. • That is, when it was transformed in normal science after the rise of the paradigm of Post-Modernity, according to the notions introduced by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of the Scientific Revolutions (1979).

7. Fernando de Toro • Perhaps, together with the narrative of Manuel Puig, I am thinking of La Traición de Rita Hayworth (1968), Boquitas pintadas (1969), The Buenos Aires Affair (1973), El beso de la mujer araña (1976), I the Supreme is one of the first narratives that breaks with the paradigm of the so-called ‘Boom’ narrative of the 1960s in Latin America. • What I wish to underline is that Roa Bastos breaks away from this paradigm and introduces literary Post-Modernity at an international level with the publication of I the Supreme.

8. Fernando de Toro • First, I would like to make the following statement: I believe that to consider Roa Bastos as a writer of the ‘Boom’ is simply an error, particularly since in Latin America in the 1970s the discussion of the culture, theory and literature of Post-Modernity simply did not exist. • Alfonso de Toro has stated that “I the Supreme may be considered, from its linguistic renovation and intertextual form of dealing with history as fiction, as a monumental and decisive work of post-new novel, both within postmodernity and the fictions written in Spanish language”.

9. Fernando de Toro • In fact, the first academic that begins this discussion, in a detailed, documented and rigorous manner in Latin America was Alfonso de Toro in series of studies published during the 1990s. • Thus, it was impossible for the academic hispanist, that more often than not has followed new literary theories (at least with a ten year period delay), to think of I the Supreme from a different perspective.

10. Fernando de Toro • In fact, during those years in Latin America academics were still engaged in the discussion on semiotics and structuralism, at the very time that such paradigms were being deconstructed by poststructuralists such as Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Foucault, and so many others that followed. • Roa Bastos’ work is even contemporaneous or previous to the moment when the discussion on Post-Modernity was launched internationally by the publication of the Postmodern Condition by Françoise Lyotard in 1979.

11. Fernando de Toro • When this discussion began in earnest, I the Supreme was already written, and Roa Bastos had laid the foundations of Post-Modern literature, which epistemologically and from a literary perspective, started with Jorge Luis Borges. • I must pause here for a moment in order to reflect about this relationship between Borges, as the initiator of the paradigm, and Roa Bastos, the one who introduced the paradigm two decades later, and the one who transformed it in normal science.

12. Fernando de Toro • This reflection is necessary since it was Borges who initiated cultural and literary Post-Modernity towards the end of the 1930s. • I would also like to make a second statement: Roa Bastos is the direct heir of Jorge Luis Borges from the point of view of his textual practice with respect to writing, narration and the status of both the literature and the reader.

13. Fernando de Toro • Although the publication of I the Supreme was in 1974, the novel was finished by 1970 and it was in the workings since around 1962. • On the other hand, Derrida published Of grammatology in 1967 and Dissemination in 1972, that it is to say, at the very same time that Roa Bastos was writing I the Supreme (1962).

14. Fernando de Toro • The epistemological issues presented by Borges with respect to the paradigms of Modernity and Post-Modernity, that is, the radical a-chronicity which is evident in both writers and in the questioning of the linearity of historical events. • I propose that Post-Modern historiography is not subject to linearity but, rather, it deals with problems of form as they emerge, thus: • Rulfo’s work emerges when Western Modernity had concluded at least twenty five years before (if not earlier), and this is, in my opinion, the central reason why his work is beginning and end at once.

15. Fernando de Toro • Pedro Páramo/El llano en llamasintroduce narrative Modernity when this aesthetic practice had concluded at least twenty years before: as we indicated above, these texts open and close the modern narrative paradigm. • Borges does something similar, but from an exactly different temporal site: Ficciones introduces Post-Modernity and closes it at the same time. • After Ficciones, Borges himself states that writing is circular and that he only writes notes on what has been written.

16. Fernando de Toro • In fact, most of the metafictional comments found disseminated throughout his work address the double question of closure/re-writing. • Borges opted for isolation and rejected normal science as an operative form. • However, the decision to reject an existing paradigm automatically implies the introduction or adoption of a new paradigm.

17. Fernando de Toro • The necessity of a new paradigm was determined, in Borges case, by the exhaustion of the previous paradigm and his own awareness that a new form of writing was needed to replace the “vast and laborious books” of modernity. • In this sense Borges was contemporaneous to the sciences of his time, but not to the cultural paradigm, that of Modernity.

18. Fernando de Toro • Thus Borges initiated Post-Modernity towards the end of the 1930s, Rulfo introduced and closed Modernity towards the end of the 1940s, and Roa Boastos re-inscribed Post-Modernity and transformed it in normal science toward the beginning of the 1970s. • For traditional historians this is an aporia, an epistemological impossibility, but I would argue that a-chrony – or dis-chrony, or whatever one may call the non-chronicity of the cultural and aesthetic phenomena – constitutes the rule, and not the exception.

19. Fernando de Toro • We can find a possible explanation for this phenomenon in the philosophy of science. Kuhn points out that: “Each of the schools whose competition characterizes the earlier period is guided by something much like a paradigm; there are circumstances, though I think them rare, under which two paradigms can coexist peacefully in the later period”. • It is precisely this rare coexistence that explains the achronicity I am referring to.

20. Fernando de Toro • In what follows I will deal with three aspects that I believe to be central in I the Supreme beyond any other consideration regarding Roa Bastos’ literary technique: • a) the discussion about writing; • b) the discussion about the status of History and the questioning of the division between history and fiction; and • c) the obliteration of the plurality of texts and orality.

21. Fernando de Toro • Phonocentrism and Writing • Derrida, in Of Grammatology (1967) and in Dissemination (1972), introduced the Platonic discussion presented in Phaedrus about phonocentrism. • This discussion perceived phonocentrism as the guarantee of communication and truth, and writing as dangerous since it does not assure communication and truth.

22. Fernando de Toro • This notion is based on différance, that is, in the sliding of the signified under the signifier: the pharmakon as indistinguishable from its two meanings: medicine and poison. • Thus writing, from the Platonic point of view, is established, from the beginning, as suspect. • However, the tradition of the pharmakon has linked this notion only to its negative meaning of death, and this is the truth of the pharmakon as stated by Derrida.

23. Fernando de Toro • Thus, writing is pharmakon, death or, at best a supplement of orality. • This has been the Western tradition which is also restated by Saussure in his definition of the sign and the distinction between langue and parole. • In this manner, the discussion has always revolved between presence (phonation) and exteriority (writing), writing as a sign of a sign or phonetic writing.

24. Fernando de Toro • It is with Post-Structuralism that not only the opposition (language/parole) but also the very notion of the sign are deconstructed. • Roa Bastos deals with the topic of writing from the anti-structuralist position of the Supreme Dictator: this is the trap that Roa Bastos sets for the Supreme. • In I the Supreme this topic travels all through the text and constitutes one of the fundamental axes of the text.

25. Fernando de Toro • Writing always presents itself linked to memory and always as repetition, that is, as something already there, as a trace deposited in history and in the collective memory of humanity. • At the beginning of the text the Supreme states: “Do you know what memory is? • The stomach of the soul, someone wrongly called it. Though nobody is ever the first to give things a name. • There is nothing but an infinity of repeaters” (Roa Bastos, 1987: 5).

26. Fernando de Toro • And further down he adds: “memory is the cemetery of words” (1987: 6) and “The man of a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing” (1987: 7). • The contradiction of the Supreme resides in the fact that phonation always takes place in situ and therefore it cannot precede writing. • This is why there is no one to be “the first to give things a name”, since writing precedes phonation.

27. Fernando de Toro • This is an evident Post-Structuralist argument, and according to Derrida, the: • Science of “the arbitrariness of the sign”, science of the immotivation of the trace, science of writing before speech and in speech, grammatology would thus cover a vast field within which linguistics would, by abstraction, delineate its own area, with the limits that Saussure prescribes to its internal system and which must be carefully reexamined in each speech/writing system in the world and history.

28. Fernando de Toro • The Supreme emphasises orality and the independence of the signified with respect to the signifier, arguing for the instability of the signifier when he says: • There would have to be words in our language that had a voice. Free space. A memory of their own. Words that subsisted alone, that brought place with them. A place. Their place. Their own material. A space where the word would happen the way an event does. As in the language of certain animals, of certain birds, or certain very old insects. But does what is not exist? (Roa Bastos, 1987: 11).

29. Fernando de Toro • This is a topic is present throughout I the Supreme as it becomes evident in the quotations provided below: • […] the dictionary is an osuary of empty words (Roa Bastos, 1987: 11) • All I can do is write; that is to say, deny what is alive. Kill what is dead even deader. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 92) • Whoever you are, insolent corrector of my pen, you are beginning to annoy me. You don’t understand what I write. You don’t understand that the law is symbolic. Twisted minds are unable to grasp this.

30. Fernando de Toro • They interpret the symbols literally. And so you make mistakes and fill my margins with your scoffing self-importance. At least read me correctly. The are clear symbols/obscure symbols. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 100) • You place all your faith in scraps of paper. In writing. In bad faith. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 108) • Very shortly there won’t be anything left but this tyrannosaurian hand, which will go on writing, writing, already a fossil writing. Its scales flying off. Its sking falling off. Going on writing. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 122)

31. Fernando de Toro • Such is the curse of words; and accursed game that obscures what it is seeking to express. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 207) • I’m going to have a go at it another way: by way of supreme weakness; by way of the dead end of the written word. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 320) • 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. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 376)

32. Fernando de Toro • Go on writing. It has no importance, in any event. When all is said and done, what is prodigious, fearful, unknown in the human being has never yet been put into words or books, and never will be. At least so long as the malediction of language does not disappear, in the way that irregular condemnations eventually evaporate. So go ahead and write. Bury your self in letters. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 392) • This is the same position that Derrida will underline when establishing the connection between writing and pharmakon: “The truth - the original truth - about writing as a pharmakon will at first be left up to a myth. The myth of Truth, to which we now turn” (1983: 73).

33. Fernando de Toro • I should point out that the notion of sign was criticized by Voloshinov in his book Marxism and Philosophy of Language (1973) at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, that is at the very same time that Saussure was developing his notion of the sign. • The Supreme proposes a partial aspect of memory since he links it to writing, to death. • However, there is another possibility to articulate memory, that is, a dead (the one the Supreme refers to) and a living memory.

34. Fernando de Toro • This is the position that Derrida criticises when mapping the tradition of the notion of memory with respect to the pharmakon, a position clearly shared by the Supreme. Derrida states: • Now, it is precisely by pointing out, as we shall see, that the pharmakon of writing is good for hupomnēsis (re-memoration, recollection, consignation) and not for the mnēmē (living, knowing memory) that Hamus, in the Phaedrus, condemns it as being of little worth.

35. Fernando de Toro • Such will be, in its logical outlines, the objection the king raises to writing: under pretext of supplementing memory, writing makes one even more forgetful; far from increasing knowledge, it diminishes it. Writing does not answer the needs of memory, it aims to the side, does not reinforce the mnēmē, but only hupomnēsis. • Thus, for the Supreme, memory is only hupomnēsis lacking mnēmē. Throughout the text this position isstrengthened:

36. Fernando de Toro • It’s possible that you’ll lose the use of words. Lose the faculty of speech? Bha, it’s not a bad thing to lose what’s bad. No; you won’t lose the faculty of speech properly speaking, but rather the memory of words. Memory pure and simple, you probably mean; that’s what I have Patiño for. (Roa Bastos, 1974: 417) • Thus, the Supreme states that the phonation (“voice”) and the signifier must be set free from the Saussurian relationship between the signified and the signifier in order to allow a floating signifier open to multiple meanings.

37. Fernando de Toro • This is precisely one of the fundamental features with respect to the deconstruction of the Saussurian notion of sign, a type of deconstruction which we also find in Borges’ texts, such as “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1962) or “Brodie’s Report” (2000) or “The Immortal” (1962). For instance, in “Doctor Brodie’s Report”, we read: • The word nrz for example, suggests dispersion or spots of on kind or another: it may mean the starry sky, a leopard, a flock of birds, smallpox, something splattered with water or mud, the act of scattering, or the flight that follows a defeat.

38. Fernando de Toro • Hrl, on the other hand, indicates what which is compact, dense, or tightly squeezed together; it may mean the tribe, the trunk of a tree, a stone, a pile of rocks, the act of piling them up, a meeting of the four witch doctors, sexual congress, or a forest. Pronounced in another way, or with other facial expressions, it may mean the opposite. We should not be overly surprised at this: in our own tongue, the verb to cleave means to rend and to adhere. Of course, there are no sentences, even incomplete ones. (Borges, 2000: 406) • The independence of the signified with respect to the signifier is radical in this text, and it is to this radicalisation that the Supreme refers when he states:

39. Fernando de Toro • A space where the word would happen the way an event does. As in the language of certain animals, of certain birds, or certain very old insects. But does what is not exist? (Roa Bastos, 1987: 11). • At the same time, he underlines that it is the orality of the word (“its voice”) that is first, and this must impact writing, contradicting, then, the instability of the signifier which the text quoted above points to. • This becomes clear when the Supreme states:

40. Fernando de Toro • It costs Patiño an effort not to allow himself merely to coast downhill, to follow instead the uphill path of the telling and write at the same time; to hear the disparision of what he writes; to trace the sign of what his ear is taking in. To attune words to the sound of thought, which is never a solitary murmur, however intimate it may be; less still if it is the speech, the thought involved in dictating. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 18) • It is clear then that the Supreme’s ambivalent position is, on the one hand a Platonic one, and on the other hand, a Derridian one.

41. Fernando de Toro • The point I am attempting to underline is that écriture, in the meaning that Derrida gives to this notion, precedes language as graph and phonation. • Thus, both oral and written language are forms of écriture, since in both there is a transformation that functions from thought to phonation and writing. The Supreme links these two forms of meaning and, from there, their ambiguity. • Derrida states, regarding this point, that:

42. Fernando de Toro • […] language had never existed, never intact and untouched by writing, that it had itself always been a writing. An arche-writing whose necessity and new concept I wish to indicate and outline here; and which I continue to call writing only because it essentially communicates with the vulgar concept of writing. The latter could not have imposed itself historically except by the dissimulation of the arche-writing, by the desire of a speech displacing its other and its double and working to reduce its difference. If I persist in calling that difference writing, it is because, within the work of historical repression, writing was, by its situation, destined to signify the most formidable difference.

43. Fernando de Toro • It threatened the desire for the living speech from the closest proximity, it breached living speech from within and from the very beginning. And as we shall begin to see, difference cannot be thought without the trace. (1974: 57) • The Supreme’s statement is echoed in “The Immortal” by Borges, when he clearly suggests that writing is not écriture and provides the following example upon discovering the man, who had followed him to the City of the Immortals, writing on the sand:

44. Fernando de Toro • He was stretched out on the sand, where he was tracing clumsily and erasing a string of signs that, like the letters in our dreams, seem on the verge of being understood and then dissolve. At first, I thought it was some kind of primitive writing; then I saw it was absurd to imagine that men who have not attained to the spoken word could attain to writing. Besides, none of the forms was equal to another, which excluded or lessened the possibility thatthey were symbolic. (1964: 111)

45. Fernando de Toro • It is precisely this capacity to arrive “first” (“attained”) to writing that indicates its anteriority with respect to phonation, to the spoken word, to speech, to the presence of the spoken word, and this, simply because there is no distinction between the two pertaining to écriture; between phonation and graph. • However, the Supreme maintains this ambivalence throughout the narration, that is, qualifying writing as death, as supplement, as pharmakon. The Supreme categorically inscribes ambiguity when he states:

46. Fernando de Toro • As I dictate to you, you write. Whereas I read what I dictate to you so as later to reread what you write. In the end the two of us disappear in what is read/written. Use the appropriate term of address only in the presence of third parties. For, I grant you, we must observe the formalities, save the appearances, so long as we are visible figures. Everyday words of ordinary language. (1987: 29-30)

47. Fernando de Toro • Sir, with your permission, let me say, in a manner of speaking, I feel that your words, however, poorly copied they may be by these hands that the earth is going to swallow up, I feel that they copy what Your Grace dictates to me, letter by letter, word by word. You haven’t understood me. Open your good eye and close the bad one. Keep your ears open for the meaning of what I say to you: However, much you may surpass animals in brute memory, in brute power of speech, you’ll never know anything if you don’t penetrate to the innermost depths of things. (1987: ??)

48. Fernando de Toro • Words are dirty by nature. Filth, excrementicity, base and ignoble thoughts exist in the mind of literati; not in words that are speakable. I apply the strategy of repetition to these notes, I have told myself: The only thing that cancels itself out is what is endlessly repeated down to the last detail. Besides, what a bunch of shit! I do and write whatever I please and however I please, since I’m writing only for myself. Why all this mirror business, all these stiff, starch hieroglyphic texts then? Literatology of antiphonies and counterantiphonies. Of front sides and backsides. Copulation of male and female metaphors. (1987: 52)

49. Fernando de Toro • You feed on the carrion of books. You have not yet destroyed oral tradition only because it is the only language that cannot be sacked, robbed, repeated, plagiarized, copied. What is spoken remains alive, sustained by the tone, the gestures, the facial expression, the gaze, the accents, the breath of the speaker. (1987: 57)

50. Fernando de Toro • When I dictate to you, the words have a meaning; when you write them, another. So that we speak two different languages. One feels more at home in the company of a familiar dog than in that of a man speaking a language unknown to us. False language is much less sociable than silence. Even my dog Sultan took the secret to what he said to the grave with him. What I beg you, my dear Sancho, is that you not try, when I dictate to you, to artificialize the nature of the matter being dealt with, but rather to naturalize the artificiality of words. You are my ex-creative secretary. You write what I dictate to you as though you yourself were speaking in my place in secret on the paper. I am not dictating a quanticle of claptrap to you. Mere bibble-babble. (Roa Bastos, 1987: 57)