periodicals rather than in books.45
As García Márquez and his peers realized, the main advantage of these magazines, journals, and literary supplements was twofold. First, they broadened the audience for regional literature. As critic Rama wrote, “The magazines were capital instruments of modernization and the hierarchy of literary activity: replacing specialized publications intended only for the restricted cultivated public, mainly formed by writers themselves; these magazines established communication with a larger audience.” Given the limited amount of space on their pages, they were the perfect vehicle to promote short literary works (poetry, short stories, and essays) as well as excerpts of forthcoming novels.46
Second, these periodicals reported what was really going on in literature all over the region and beyond. In these publications, regional readers could find essays about mainstream Latin American (including Brazilians), Spanish, and international writers. They published literary criticism about famous and best-selling works, news about meetings of writers, reviews of books and cultural events, news about recipients of regional and international literary awards, announcements of book releases, and letters from readers reacting to literary works. A regular section was the reportage on new and upcoming national writers and generations, and especially the interview. In these interviews, writers talked about their works and the craft of writing. The reporting also presented the writers as public figures, inserting them in the mass media commercial circuit, and sometimes portraying them as agents of social change in the region. Scores of writers embraced this promotion. Benedetti put in words what many of his colleagues thought at the time when he wrote, “The Latin American . . . writer cannot close the doors to reality.” Writers, he insisted, could not waste this opportunity to influence their readers.47
Primera Plana was one of the general interest magazines that allowed writers to influence readers across the region. Since its creation in 1962, Primera Plana conducted surveys to measure its penetration among highbrow readers. By 1964, it had a weekly print run of sixty thousand copies, with an average of two hundred and fifty thousand readers. The same year critic Tomás Eloy Martínez took over. Under his leadership, Primera Plana gave more space to literature, including covers featuring writers from the three generations: Borges, Lezama Lima, Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo, Leopoldo Marechal, and García Márquez. It also published their work and that of Sábato, Puig, Fuentes, Macedonio Fernández, Armonía Somers, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others. In October 1965, in the pages of this magazine, the term “Boom” appeared for the first time to report a “boom of the book” in Argentine literature. Nine months later, in August 1966, the term already applied to the region’s literature: “the famous ‘boom’—the rise—of the Latin American novel.” That same month, members of the three generations—J. Bianco, Rodríguez Monegal, Vargas Llosa, and Fuentes—awarded for the first time the Primera Plana Novel Prize, which was open to any novel written by a Latin American author. The committee received sixty-four submissions, which, for them, proved the “continental renaissance of the genre [and] alluvium” of new novels. In between October 1965 and August 1966, Primera Plana did something else to promote another novel that was part of this “alluvium.” It was the first periodical to announce in print (more than half a year before its publication) the title of García Márquez’s next novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.48
Another magazine that promoted this book as a New Latin American Novel was Mundo Nuevo; it did so because this highbrow literary magazine brought the sentiment of aesthetic liberation in Latin American literature to its peak. Indeed, the history of the region’s booming literature “at the time it presented its most compact appearance is written on the pages of Mundo Nuevo.” Since its creation in 1966, it called itself Revista de América Latina. With its headquarters in Paris and a print run of six thousand copies, this monthly magazine was for sale in twenty-three countries on three continents. “My intention,” its editor Rodríguez Monegal explained, was for “the magazine to be a guide for anyone seriously interested in following the development of the latest Latin American literature.”49
The publication of Mundo Nuevo had five important consequences. First, it endorsed the idea that Latin American literature was not limited to the works of a few popular writers. Second, it created a hierarchy of the good Latin American writers by publishing literary criticism on contemporary works from the region. Third, it favored the publication of texts that embraced cosmopolitanism and Latin Americanism. Fourth, it did not print texts by writers from Spain, except for the work of a few political exiles and outsiders. And fifth, it published mainstream international work with connections to “the Latin American reality” and was part of new trends in the novel in Europe and the United States, including works of Anglo-American modernism à la John Dos Passos or Joyce and French nouveau roman à la Nathalie Sarraute.50
Another outlet that writers and critics used to promote their agenda was the literary supplement of newspapers and magazines. The summer of 1964, Fuentes published “La nueva novela latinoamericana” (“The New Latin American Novel”) in La Cultura en México, the literary supplement of Siempre! (see figure 1.3). In this art manifesto, he studied the works of Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, and Carpentier. Each of them was a best-selling member of the Novel, Hybrid, and Short Form Generations. Fuentes singled them out as the leading voices of “La nueva novela latinoamericana,” which, for him, was inaugurating a new era for literature in the region. As the subtitle to his manifesto proclaimed, “Gentlemen, don’t be fooled: the old [writers] have died.” To prove it, Fuentes’s manifesto blurred the chronological boundaries between the three generations and exaggerated the differences between these generations and older writers such as Gallegos, J. E. Rivera, and Mariano Azuela. Fuentes also connected Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, and Carpentier to modernist authors such as Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, and Kafka. For him, these three Latin American writers were also cosmopolitan and offered an alternative to the so-called death of the European bourgeois novel. For him, key to this alternative was to put myths at the center of their works. This is why “our literature,” Fuentes concluded, “is truly revolutionary.”51
1.3 Cover of Carlos Fuentes’s major essay on the rise of the New Latin American Novel.
Source: La Cultura en México (July 29, 1964).
Critics like Rama and Rodríguez Monegal used region-spanning periodicals to make similar arguments. The fall of 1964, a few weeks after Fuentes’s manifesto, the journal Casa de las Américas published a special issue on the “Nueva novela latinoamericana.” It included excerpts of new work by Carpentier, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, and other writers of the three generations, plus eight articles authored by critics and writers about recent Latin American novels such as Explosion in a Cathedral and The Time of the Hero. The issue opened with a long article by Rama entitled “Diez problemas para el novelista latinoamericano” (“Ten Problems for the Latin American Novelist”). Throughout its forty pages, he diagnosed the obstacles that the region’s literature faced, especially its economic structure, the cultural elites, the public, and the publishing industry. At the same time, Rama celebrated that recent Latin American novels were helping overcome these obstacles and pushing regional literature toward independence.52
In 1965, Rodríguez Monegal, then a visiting professor of literature at Harvard University, published several articles on the rise of the New Latin American Novel. He wrote “The New Novelists” and “New Latin American Writers” for highbrow journals Encounter and Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And for the general interest magazine Life en Español, he wrote “La nueva novela de Latinoamérica” (“The New Novel of Latin America”) and “Un espejo de espejos entrecruzados” (“A Mirror of Intersecting Mirrors”). In these articles, he introduced general and educated readers to the works of three generations of cosmopolitan and Latin American writers, including a brief reference to García Márquez in the last
