I the Supreme

Roa Bastos's dense, experimental masterpiece is the monologue of El Supremo, Dr José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the dictator who ruled Paraguay in absolute isolation from 1814 to 1840, dictating and raving to his secretary as he dies. The setting is his sealed capital: the government palace from which he rules by decree, the closed city of Asunción cut off from the world, the prisons of his repression, and the old colonial centre around the cathedral where his omnipresent power is felt.

El Supremo (Dr Francia)

The government palace

The dictation

From his chamber the dying dictator pours out a torrent of decree, memory, invective and self-justification, dictating to his secretary the account of a life that is also the life of a nation. The palace, from which for decades every order in Paraguay issued, is the closed centre of a book that never really leaves the tyrant's absolute, solitary power.

The framing monologue

inferred El Supremo rules and dictates from the seat of government in Asunción; the specific chamber is sited in the historic centre of the real capital, the exact building the novel's own.

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