Rewriting in Roa Bastos’s Late Fiction

Abstract

Roa Bastos’s practice of rewriting has been diversely viewed, with some critics regretting it and others applauding his efforts. Tomás Eloy Martinez’s stands out among the critics upholding a negative view.² In his 2005 obituary, entitled “Roa Bastos todavía está aquí,” [“Roa Bastos is Still Here”] this writer and old friend since the early days of Argentine exile was particularly blunt in this regard. He suggested Roa Bastos’s writing of recent years had diminished in quality, and he attributed it to the author’s return to Paraguay after decades of exile. Paraguay, the recovered home, was not a place of writing, but rather the last stage in Roa Bastos’s existential journey, a place of farewells and death. Martinez tells us he expressed his disappointment to the author in one of their intermittent telephone conversations: “Después del Supremo, me pareció que su camino de narrador navegaba con las velas caídas, y se lo dije” (After the Supreme, it seemed to me his writing had gone adrift, and I told him so).³ Martinez, however, judged very favourably as “otra de sus obras maestras” (another masterpice) a text that Roa Bastos had sent him in 2002. It was “Frente al frente argentino,” part of a larger text published in 2001 with three other writers and entitled Los conjumdos del Quilombo del Gran Chaco (2001) [The Conspirers of the Shanty of the Greater Chaco].⁴

My special thanks to Dr. Guillermo Renart for his careful reading of this paper and his many valuable suggestions.