I The Supreme

I want to understand what his ranting about memory means. In general kind of way, I suppose he’s simply allowing himself to undermine the legitimacy of the memory of those who oppose him. “Memory is the soul of the stomach”…Memory then, is like chewed up actual history, all cut up and mashed together sitting inside you. This image, of memory being reality scrambled sitting in your stomach, sort of captures what the whole book is about too. We have all these different historical sources, and they’re all meshed together to create a memory. Ironically, he mentions “the memory of one person is useless.” But the book is a bunch of different people’s memories, and it seems to be as much of a mess as an individuals memory(based on how he describes a persons memory.)

“Madness is memory in reverse that forgets its way as it retraces it path.” But the thing is, given this scrambled nature of memory, how can we ever accurately retrace it to reality. How can we ever know what actually happened? All memory then, all attempts to look at the past result in madness.

I also think Bastos is sort of mocking the dictator novel genre. He mentions how you can’t really make him dead by writing it, in response to the poster. That is, words don’t have the power to kill him or stop him. Writers then, in trying to expose dictators are really just waiting their time. But at the same time he’s obviously extremely bothered by the words, they really even seem to drive him mad. Words then, perhaps don’t stop dictators, but make them paranoid and more brutal. Maybe the writers are doing a bad thing…