Whereas Porrúa saw in this novel a Latin American family saga full of fantasy, Barral might have seen García Márquez as a rural, regionalist writer and not as an urban novelist. Barral preferred publishing stories centered in cities.73
Even if Seix Barral did not publish One Hundred Years of Solitude, the company did something essential for its success: it set the conditions for its diffusion in Spain as a New Latin American Novel. As such, this novel easily bypassed censorship and was marketed to middle-class and college audiences. For the past seven years, the reading public had steadily developed a taste for books marketed as New Latin American Novels, many of which Barral published. The commercial success of One Hundred Years of Solitude overseas further sped up censors’ approval. The Spanish government did not like the idea that best-selling books from the Latin American market would leave small profits to the national book industry. As a result, EDHASA, Sudamericana’s branch in Spain, started to print and sell García Márquez’s works in the country.
Under the new guidelines set by the printing and publishing law of 1966, censors found nothing that was ideologically punishable in One Hundred Years of Solitude. According to them, “it does not defend a thesis but . . . simply describes unsuitable situations without approving or condemning them.” Censors, in fact, praised its objective storytelling. It pleased them that One Hundred Years of Solitude did not contain the kind of Creole jargon they had to correct. Rather, the novel used a classic and even archaic language that adapted to censors’ taste for good Castilian Spanish. Thus, the censor concluded, “As a novel, it is very good.” It is worth pointing out that censors framed One Hundred Years of Solitude neither as fantasy literature (as it was originally received, see chapter 4) nor as magical realism (as it was labeled later, see chapter 6). Instead, they referred to it as a realist novel. As the censor wrote in a report, it offers “the most exact idea possible of the low and middle-class Spanish-American society.”74 Furthermore, censors did not pay attention to magical events in the novel at all. This is important because it shows that a preexisting cultural framework influenced the evaluation of censors. And they evaluated the novel based on the literary style that dominated their cultural framework: Spain’s down-to-earth social realism.75 Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, this novel attracted the attention of Sudamericana’s acquisitions editor because it reminded him of fantasy literature. In sum, the opposite reactions of gatekeepers to this novel are a telling example of how aesthetic interpretation can be in the eye of the beholder and not automatically be present in the text itself.
One Hundred Years of Solitude bypassed official censorship in Spain, but not that of self-appointed censors. José Vernet Mateu, a resident of Barcelona, wrote a harsh letter to the Francoist Minister of Information. He complained about the popularity of this “repugnant . . . disgusting book.” His letter reveals the obstacles that this novel would have faced if it had been published in Spain before the printing and publishing law of 1966. “I wonder,” Mr. Vernet wrote, “in my ignorance as a simple man in the street, how is it possible for a book so filthy, so destructive of Christian morality, so brutalizing to have found an expedite path toward publication in Spain?” And he added that he did not understand that this book “could serve as a required textbook for sixteen-year-old boys, to whom it literally corrupts and brutalizes.”76 So he urged Francoist censors to sequester the book. Mr. Vernet was not off target. One Hundred Years of Solitude contains sexually explicit passages, critical comments about the Catholic Church, and descriptions of incest, authoritarian military actions, and violence that astonished readers. (Communist censors deleted incestuous passages in the Soviet Union, but not in Francoist Spain.) Counterfactually, if this novel were published in Spain before the law of 1966, it would have faced tougher censorship. At that time, as in the case of Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers and Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night, its publication could have been delayed and One Hundred Years of Solitude could have lost the momentum of the New Latin American Novel. Instead, this book fully benefited from it.
CONCLUSION
Government officials (censors included), publishers, literary agents, book distributors, and booksellers in Latin American and Spain collaborated in the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude. They helped to produce this novel from multiple centers, especially Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. In other words, they were agents of transatlantic print capitalism whose boundaries did not match those of a Latin American field of cultural production, a national publishing industry, or the conventions of a single art world. Rather, these agents repeatedly crossed regional, national, and local boundaries. Their fluid transnational circulation is key to understanding the production of One Hundred Years of Solitude and its immediate success—not just regionally, something materially impossible for most novels before the 1960s, but also internationally. For this reason, no single field, cultural industry, or art world could control the production of this novel or any major New Latin American Novel. Instead, One Hundred Years of Solitude arose in a transnational niche in which the cosmopolitan Latin Americanism of his peer writers shaped the imagination (and hence the taste) of gatekeepers such as publishers Sudamericana and Seix Barral and literary agent Carmen Balcells. This cosmopolitan and Latin American viewpoint adapted perfectly to the demands of the modernizing Spanish-language publishing industry and its growing audience of students and middle-class readers. One Hundred Years of Solitude proved to be the most exact of matches for this industry.
A NOVEL IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR
The book was not coming out, I couldn’t do it.
—García Márquez on One Hundred Years of Solitude1
García Márquez first imagined One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1950. He struggled to finish it for the next seventeen years. Conceiving a work of art, included this novel, is hardly the offspring of a solitary act of inspiration. Conception in art is a collaborative venture—no artist imagines a work of art alone. García Márquez imagined the novel that would become One Hundred Years of Solitude over the course of almost two decades and during that time he joined groups of artists in Colombia, France, Venezuela, and Mexico, plus short stays in the United States, England, and Italy.2 Yet having an idea for a work of art and discussing it with collaborators does not ensure that it will come into being one day. As the previous chapters showed, the passage of One Hundred Years of Solitude from an idea to a book, from the stage of imagination to the stage of production, happened as Latin American literature grew into a region-spanning movement and the modernizing Spanish-language book industry created a market of best sellers for Latin American novels. For these reasons, One Hundred Years of Solitude is the work of García Márquez as much as the novel and its author are the work of a booming Latin American literature and publishing industry.
This chapter shows how García Márquez’s imagination took form, especially from 1950 to 1965, that is, from when he conceived the idea for a novel about a family and its house in a village to when he had the professional tools to turn this idea into a publishable book. During those years, he learned vital skills from his work in journalism, cinema, advertising, and literature. In the meantime, he also wrote several drafts of “The House,” the story that evolved into One Hundred Years of Solitude, and he published three novellas, one book of short stories, and over five hundred journalistic pieces. He created professional ties in six countries that nurtured his creative vision, gave him firsthand experiences for stories, and granted him privileged access to influential gatekeepers in publishing. But he also worked hard to become a professional writer. For years, fiction writing was a part-time endeavor for which he received no royalties. By 1965, after years of learning and setbacks, leading peers finally recognized him as an “integrated professional [with the skills] necessary to make it easy to make art.”3 An international network of collaborators was central to achieve this recognition.
