I, the Supreme (orig. Spanish Yo el Supremo) is a historical novel written by exiled Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos. It is a fictionalized account of the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who was also known as "Dr. Francia". The book's title derives from the fact that Francia referred to himself as "El Supremo" or "the Supreme". The first in a long line of dictators, the Supreme was a severe, calculating despot. The central themes of the novel are power and language and the relation between the two. The Supreme believes himself to be above all power and history: "I don't write history. I make it. I can remake it as I please, adjusting, stressing, enriching its meaning and truth." Yet this assertion is constantly challenged by the very fact that while he achieves power by means of writing and dictating, these very same methods can be used by others to dispute his authority. Not even his own identity, represented by the personal pronoun I, is safe and can easily be usurped as is demonstrated by the incident of the pasquinade. Language, as powerful as it is, can never be controlled and can just as easily be used as an instrument of coercion as an instrument of resistance.
During the time the book was written, Paraguay was under the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, who went on to rule the country even longer than Francia did. Many consider the book to be at least in part a thinly disguised attack on Stroessner who used methods similar to Francia's to achieve and maintain the effective control of the country, including the swift elimination of opposition, the employment of torture, and intolerance of dissent. In its portrayal of Francia and criticism of Stroessner, I, the Supreme belongs to the genre of novelas de dictadores or dictator novels, and also to the Latin American Boom, a literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The book was first published in Spanish in 1974, and in English (translation by Helen Lane) in 1986.
Like many other works of the Latin American Boom, the book never became an international best-seller. It was, however, highly regarded by critics, with Gerald Martin claiming that it was "an exceptional cultural phenomenon". Martin goes on to suggest that it was "more immediately and unanimously acclaimed than any novel since One Hundred Years of Solitude, [and its] strictly historical importance [may] be even greater than that of García Márquez's fabulously successful creation." The book's handling of the themes of power and language was also praised. Still, the novel was not well received by Stroessner's government and Roa Bastos became "one of the three citizens forbidden to return" to Paraguay as a result.
Historical context After declaring independence from colonial Spain in May 1811, landlocked Paraguay established itself as the first Republic of South America. Dr. Francia was elected by the junta (or congress) to office, and he established himself as dictator for life, until his death in 1840. He ruled with a despotic populism in which the ideals he had drawn from the philosophers of the French Enlightenment were tempered by his aristocratic insistence on absolute rule. As John T. Deiner explains, he "created an army in which all citizens were required to serve. He confiscated property from the upper classes and used the state's coercive power to direct the working of that land by the army". He also isolated the country from the outside world, restricting foreign trade and mobility. Political opposition was not tolerated.
Francia's rule was the beginning of a long line of dictators, including Carlos Antonio López (who was president of Paraguay with dictatorial powers from 1844 to 1862) and López's son, Francisco Solano López (who ruled between 1862 and 1870). It was Solano López who unwisely initiated the Paraguayan War (1864–70), which crippled Paraguay, reduced its population by half, and forced many others into exile, creating a Paraguay that Roa Bastos described as "the land without men of the men without land".
In the twentieth century, Paraguay was dominated by the dictatorial figure of Alfredo Stroessner who ruled the country for thirty-five years (from 1954 to 1989) and was in power at the time at which Roa Bastos was writing I, the Supreme. Roa Bastos's novel can be perceived as in part a thinly disguised attack on Stroessner, who ruled Paraguay even longer than Francia. He came to power after the 1947 Civil War, which had destroyed all parties of the centre and the left and drove more than a third of Paraguay's population into exile. He assumed presidency after a series of coups in 1954. He gained complete control of the military, eliminated potential rivals, and closely monitored and participated in allocations of national resources. As Deiner argues, "[T]he novel's El Supremo (Francia) and Stroessner in the twentieth century used similar methods for dominating national politics. Neither tolerated effective opposition. Both rulers were extremely suspicious of any potential opponents, quickly acting to imprison and torture anyone suspected. Both were ruthless in their intolerance of dissent." As Rowe and Whitfield describe Stroessner's rule, "he inherited all Francia's despotism, but none of his populism he rule[d] over a country where human and civil rights are honored only in their breach".
Influences Literary critic Todd Garth argues that I, the Supreme is influenced by twentieth-century Argentine writer Macedonio Fernández, as well as other avant garde artists such as Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. Garth suggests that Macedonio and Roa Bastos are similar in use of metaphysical language and techniques used to reconstruct reality, as Dr. Francia does in his dictated creation of the Supreme, the ruler of all reality. Macedonio's writing utilized characters that did not fit the archetype of Western fiction, each only having meaning through their interaction with others in a collective and often never experiencing growth or development in order to construct atemporal spaces of mythmaking that challenge reality. Roa Bastos borrows from these ideas yet situates them in existing political and social history to challenge perceived conceptions of the past's factuality. He dismantles national Paraguayan mythology, which is so intimately intertwined with the life of Dr. Francia, elucidating the distinctions between mythic and mythological. The novel can only accomplish this task within the metaphysical space of mythmaking. Whereas Macedonio attacks the concept of the individual as subject while admitting the fact that to write makes oneself a subject, Roa Bastos recognizes this paradox and exploits it, utilizing it in concerns of political and social nature.
Themes from Plato and his influence on Western political philosophy are also prevalent in the novel. Mainly, the debate over the nature of "Good Society" and how to achieve it are seen in the positions of the Supreme. He argues that it is the ruler's role, as well as his duty and obligation, to bring about the good society, and this can only be done by the imposition of absolute order from above. The dictator's job is to bring about the Good Society, to impose the needed order, and the people's job is to obey the dictator, thereby enjoying the fruits of the good society. The result of such behavior by both the ruler and the ruled will be good for everyone.
The novel is also clearly influenced by earlier writing on dictatorship, predominantly Domingo Sarmiento's Facundo. The similarities can be seen in how both novels are written by exiles, in their thinly veiled attacks on their homeland's current dictator, and in their authors' shared use of "pasquinade/hand-written message" devices to begin both novels. Francia's "Perpetual Circular" also contains several allusions to the Argentine gaucho in Juan Facundo Quiroga's work, as well as to the dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas, both of whom were the object of Sarmiento's critique.
Genre I, the Supreme is a good example of the dictator novel, a genre of Latin American literature that challenges the role of the dictator in Latin American society. The dictator novel draws upon the relationship between power, writing, and dictatorship, and so is an allegory of the role of the Latin American writer in society.
The goal of the dictator novel is not to dissect and to analyze the rule of particular dictators with a focus on historical accuracy, but rather to examine the more abstract nature of authority figures and to question the idea of authority in general. To be considered a dictator novel, a book must have strong political themes that draw upon historical accounts, while critically examining the power held by an authoritarian figure, allowing the specific to explain the general. Although mostly associated with the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, "all fictional depictions of the Latin American 'strong-man' have an important antecedent in Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo, a work written as a sociological treatise".
Many dictator novels, including I, the Supreme, belong to the Latin American Boom, a literary movement which began in the 1960s and 1970s, when the work of a group of relatively young Latin American novelists became widely circulated in Europe and throughout the world. The Boom novels were essentially modernist novels, which according to Pope, relied on superposition of different points of view, blurring time and linearity. He further notes, "linguistically self-assured, it used the vernacular without apologies". Other notable characteristics of the Boom include the treatment of both "rural and urban settings", internationalism (an emphasis on both the historical and the political), as well as "questioning of regional as well as, or more than, national identity; awareness of hemisphereic as well as worldwide economic and ideological issues; polemicism; and timeliness".
This is not the first fictional biographical work tied to Dr. Francia and his dictatorship. The American novelist Edward Lucas White published his El Supremo in 1916. As his extensive "selected bibliography on the history of Paraguay during the days of 'El Supremo', José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia" and brief preface point out, White took great pains to make his historical novel quite realistic and historically accurate. The 1967 reprint has an additional brief, six page introduction to set the work in context. White's novel covers the period from 1816 to 1817.
Synopsis
As critic John King notes, "it is impossible to summarize this extraordinary novel in a few lines. It incorporates the latest developments in linguistic theory and practice, talks of the arbitrariness and unreliability of language that purports to describe reality, rereads and comments upon the various histories and travelers' accounts of Paraguay, ranges across the breadth of Latin American history, implicitly condemning Stroessner and debating with Fidel Castro, and exploring once again the gap between writer and reader."
The book does, however, start by promising a linear narrative. It opens with the title words, set in a font designed to look like handwriting, heralding what appears to be an official order:
I the Supreme Dictator of the Republic Order that on the occasion of my death my corpse be beheaded; my head placed on a pike for three days in the Plaza de la República, to which the people are to be summoned by the sounding of a full peal of bells...