I The Supreme part 2

(Note to teacher: I've finished all my blog entries, I The Supreme is just out of order...)

I think I might have had it wrong in my first post. Earlier I suggested that Bastos, in saying the memory was the stomach of the sole, he was saying the memory is really actual history in this chewed up messy form, and that the narration of the book itself was trying to reflect this messy nature of memory. But I’ve changed my mind. The dictator comments at one point how some one with a good memory remembers nothing because he forgets nothing. In what sense then can then can you have a good memory if you remember nothing? To make sense of this, there must be some kind of distinction between what the memories of someone with “good memory” consist of, and what normal bad memory is. I’m going to take a guess, but I imagine this bad memory is some how the translation of actual experience in some kind of story. With good memory, you never have bad memory because you never forget the actual experience.

But of course good memory, experience, can’t be communicated, it has to be translated in to words, and then in some sense the reality of it is lost. The memory becomes subject to the uncertainty of language. But more importantly it really undergoes a change in kind. The recall of an actual experience a different sort of thing than reading about it. And Bostos forces us to see the fragility of this written form of history as he notes how in this novel characters and facts earn “…through the fatality of the written language, the right to a fictitious and autonomous existence in the service of the no less fictitious and autonomous reader.” That is, when these history turns into written form, it becomes fake, something separate from reality.