Augusto Roa Bastos
Augusto Roa Bastos (born 1917) is widely considered to be the finest Paraguayan author of the 20th century. He published his first work, "El ruisenor de la aurora, y otras poemas", in 1942, but his work was not well known outside his native Paraguay until the 1960s, when the increased attention paid to Latin-American literature highlighted his talent. Although he began by writing poetry, Roa Bastos eventually found that the genre did not allow him to express his social concerns, so he turned to prose. His work, mostly novels, is notable for its blending of myth, fantasy, and realism, and its focus on Paraguay's tur bulent military and social history.
Born in Asuncion, Paraguay on June 13, 1917, Roa Bastos grew up in Iturbe, a provincial city east of Asuncion where his father, Lucio Roa, worked as a manager on a sugar plantation. Lucio Roa was a severe, strict man who came from a old-time Spanish family. Perhaps in response to his father's authoritarian rule over the household, Roa Bastos became preoccupied with thinking about the evils that could result from power, totalitarianism, and authority; these themes have reoccurred throughout his life's work. He later told Caleb Bach in Americas that this theme appeared "whether it manifests itself politically, in a religious form, or in a parental or familial context. Power is a tremendous stigma, a kind of human pride that needs to have control of the will of another. It's an antilogical condition that produces a sick society.… Ever since I was very little I felt a need to oppose power, the fierce punishment for little things the basis of which was never conveyed."
Roa Bastos's mother, Lucia Bastos, was of Portuguese descent, and unlike her husband, was cultured and calm. She enjoyed singing and had a small library of books, including a Spanish translation of the tales of English playwright William Shakespeare. This book provided Roa Bastos with his first experience of literature.
When Roa Bastos was eight years old, he was sent to live with his paternal uncle, a priest named Hermenegildo Roa, in Asuncion. He later told Bach, "For me, he was my real father." Hermenegildo Roa paid for the education of all his nephews and nieces, and like Roa Bastos's mother, he had a library of books, including many volumes of philosophy by such authors as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which were normally forbidden to children. However, the elderly priest told his nephew, "I want you to read these with great care." Roa Bastos's reading of these authors taught him that some ideas, and writers were considered subversive, and that these writers and ideas were the most powerful. For the rest of his life, he would remain interested in French literature, particularly the writers of the Enlightenment era.
Began Writing
In 1932, when Roa Bastos was 13 years old, war broke out between Paraguay and Bolivia regarding control of the barren Chaco region between the two nations. Roa Bastos enlisted as a field hospital orderly. Although he was not involved in combat, the wounded and dying soldiers he saw made a deep emotional impression on him. When the war ended he began working as an apprentice journalist for El País, an Asuncion newspaper. When he was not working, the young man wrote his own short stories and poetry. His first novel, which he completed in 1941, was titled Fulgencio Miranda; although it was never published, it won a local literary prize. During this period, Roa Bastos read widely among European authors: Rilke, Valery, Cocteau, Eluard, Breton, and Aragon. He also read the work of North American authors such as Faulkner, Hemingway, Hawthorne, and Melville. Roa Bastos told Bach that reading these authors "helped liberate [Latin American writers] from the heaviness of the Hispanic style."
As his work became known, Roa Bastos began to receive recognition. In 1945 he received a travel fellowship from the British Council to travel throughout England and develop program materials on Latin America for the British Broadcasting Corporation. While in England, he continued to write for El Pais, focusing on the liberation of France at the close of World War II. Writer Andre Malraux invited Roa Bastos to France, where the journalist managed to get a personal interview with French president Charles de Gaulle. As someone who came from a small town in Paraguay, Roa Bastos looked upon this as an impressive accomplishment.
During this period, Roa Bastos became interested in the history of World War II, particularly the role of the resistance movement in France, in which local people fought against the invasion and rule of their country by Nazi Germany. This was typical of his preoccupation with totalitarianism and rebellion against it. According to Bach, "he came away with the conclusion that the human world is driven by oppositions."
A Life in Exile
In 1946 Roa Bastos returned to Paraguay, but because he had written articles critical of two military governments, he was considered a threat and was forced into exile soon after his return. He fled to the Brazilian embassy, where he hid until he could leave for Buenos Aires, Argentina. There he began a new life.
In Argentina, he worked at various odd jobs: waiter, door-to-door salesperson, proofreader, and insurance salesperson. He also worked for a music publisher, where he translated Guarani folk music into Spanish. Roa Bastos told Bach, "Exile was a permanent school that taught me to see things with greater seriousness. It was also pain, like a death, a state of mourning." He spent the first four or five years in exile enduring depression, and turned to writing, he told Bach, "as a vehicle to recover my human condition, my dignity as an individual."
Roa Bastos wrote a collection of 17 short stories during this period, and it was eventually published as El trueño entre las hojas ("Thunder among the Leaves"). The stories, set in Paraguay, deal with themes of political oppression, conflicts between native and foreign cultures, and the human struggle to survive wars and other catastrophes. Argentine director Armando Bo was impressed by the stories, and wanted to make a film based on them. Roa Bastos wrote the script, the first of many screenplays he would write during his career.
Roa Bastos's first novel, Hijo de hombre ("Son of Man"), was published in 1960. The novel, set during a time of war, depicts the ruthless exploitation of peasants in the sugar-cane fields and tea plantations. The main character, a peasant, is depicted as a Christlike figure, in opposition to another character, a military officer who is depicted as a Judas. Roa Bastos wrote a film adaptation of one of the novel's chapters. The novel and the film, both of which won awards, attracted wide attention and cemented Roa Bastos's reputation as a fine writer in Buenos Aires. By the mid-1960s he began teaching literature courses at the National University of Rosario, and he was invited to attend international literary conferences in the company of other Latin-American writers. One of these writers was Jorge Luis Borges. Roa Bastos told Bach, "You know, among each people there is an exceptional being who makes up for the deficiencies of the rest. In those moments, when humanity collectively is in a state of decadence, nonetheless there remain those exceptional individuals as a point of reference. Borges was such an individual."
Published Yo el supremo
In 1967 Roa Bastos began writing a book about Paraguayan dictator Gaspar de Francia. However, he never completed it, but instead began work on Yo el supremo ("I the Supreme"), a complex, many-layered work of fiction that explores the life of a dictator based on Francia. The narrative of the novel reads like pieces of private notebooks written by the dictator, historical fragments, a logbook of his family history, transcriptions of dictations to a secretary, and pieces by an unknown commentator. Composed of many voices and cemented by quasi-academic footnotes that quote invented and real texts, the novel moves through the present, past, and future; the dictator at times even speaks from his grave. Roa Bastos told Bach that the book "reflects a certain insanity I couldn't repeat, and don't want to repeat." He added, "Francia was a terrible dictator, but he had an ambiguous personality. I wanted to show him in his own setting, the dark and the light." He also noted that the structure of the book, with its many voices, reflected the culture of Paraguay, particularly that of the Guarani people, for whom oral history and storytelling are paramount. "My necessity, my defiance as a writer was to rise up against established accounts [of the dictator's life]."
During the six years it took him to write Yo el supremo Roa Bastos was supported by a Guggenheim fellowship and by his scriptwriting. Upon its 1974 publication the novel immediately received critical acclaim, and was widely translated, although the English-language version did not appear until 1986. Carlos Fuentes wrote in the New York Times Book Review that the novel is "a richly textured, brilliant book - an impressive portrait, not only of El Supremo, but of a whole colonial society in the throes of learning how to swim, or how best to drown in the seas of national independence." Fuentes also called Yo el supremo "one of the milestones of the Latin American novel."
In 1976 Roa Bastos's father died at the age of 95; in that same year, the author suffered a mild heart attack. In addition, the military dictatorship then in power in Argentina put Yo el supreme on its list of books banned because they were subversive. Roa Bastos was in danger of being arrested at home, but in France was invited to teach at the University of Toulouse le Mirail. However, one week after he arrived in France, the Argentine police arrived at his apartment in Buenos Aires, intending to arrest him.
In 1980, after being divorced twice, Roa Bastos married Iris Gimenez, another professor at the university who was a specialist in the ancient languages and cultures of Mexico. The couple eventually had a son and two daughters, and his children inspired Roa Bastos to write numerous stories for young people that have been collected in illustrated editions. Also continuing his work for adult readers, in 1984 he published the novel El Sonambulo ("The Sleep Walker"), which is about another Paraguayan dictator, Francisco Solano Lopez. Roa Bastos later expanded this into a full-length novel, El Fiscal ("The Public Prosecutor"), which was published in 1993. He then published La vigilia del almirante (The Admiral's Vigil) a novel about Christopher Columbus. In 1994 he published Contravida and in 1996 Madama Sui.
Received Cervantes Prize
In 1989, the same year democracy returned to Paraguay, Roa Bastos received the Cervantes Prize, the highest award for literature in the Spanish language. He donated most of the prize money to support impoverished schools in Paraguay and to encourage the publication and distribution of affordable books to poor areas in the interior of the country. He noted that in Paraguay, the cost of a book typically equaled an entire month's pay for a poor agricultural worker.
By the mid-1990s Roa Bastos was able to return to Paraguay one or two times per year, and he began teaching courses for young people during these visits. Although he retired from teaching at the University of Toulouse, he continued to stay in touch with his old colleagues, and he remained in his apartment near the university. He also continued to write. He told Bach, "If there is no room for hope, for anything, for optimism, then the most honest response is suicide. I don't believe in anything more than that I am alive. I think the only way to live is to establish a sense of responsibility. The least I can do is contribute."
Books
Dictionary of Hispanic Biography, Gale, 1996.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 113: Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers, Gale, 1992.
Foster, David, Augusto Roa Bastos, Twayne, 1978.
Latin American Writers, Volume 3, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989.
Periodicals
Americas, November-December, 1996; September-October, 1997.
New Republic, June 15, 1987.
New York Times Book Review, April 6, 1986.
