being unique, his imagination in reality was becoming more and more similar to that of three generations of writers, critics, and publishers that had started to believe that Latin American literature existed and that its moment had finally arrived. What followed the collaboration across these generations was the rise of the New Latin American Novel in the 1960s, also known as the Latin American Boom. García Márquez saw this boom unfold firsthand and soon was one of the writers at the center of this international literary movement. By then, he knew that works of the New Latin American Novel were instant best sellers and award-winning books in Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Like several of his peers, he realized that his moment had come. Between 1965 and 1967, he committed all his time and energy to writing a story that he had struggled to finish for more than a decade. The result was One Hundred Years of Solitude.
García Márquez wrote a book about solitude in the company of many collaborators. They lived in eleven countries on three continents. From their locations, they helped him to imagine the novel and gave him feedback on his writing from beginning to end. Even when he felt alone writing, he could say so to his collaborators in person, over the phone, and by mail, and they listened and sought to relieve him. Never before had the solitary writer been so accompanied as a creator. Some of his collaborators even worked as his research assistants, gathering information that he added to the manuscript. His collaborators also played an active role in the novel’s production and early reception. Several of them published reviews of the novel when García Márquez was still months away from finishing the manuscript and over a year away from its publication. This networked creativity, which moved the novel from an idea to a book, from imagination to production, was the true genius behind the making of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The Great Novel of America.
Main line on cover of Primera Plana magazine on One Hundred Years of Solitude, 19671
In 1927, the year Gabriel García Márquez was born, Revista de Occidente, a popular Spanish journal among artists and intellectuals, published the article “After Expressionism: Magical Realism,” written by German art critic Franz Roh. His piece had nothing to do with literature. It was about the present and future of European painting. Roh ended it with a vague but prophetic statement, “Someday man too will be able to recreate himself in the perfection of this concept.”2 Little could he suspect that magical realism, the concept he just coined, would become synonymous with the literature of Latin America and, especially, with the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. For this to happen, magical realism had to migrate from Europe to Latin America and then to the rest of world.
The newborn García Márquez, of course, did not know that magical realism would influence his literary imagination so much. It took four decades and the participation of dozens of people for this influence to take form in One Hundred Years of Solitude. One of these people was Arturo Uslar Pietri, a Venezuelan writer living in Paris in the late 1920s. There, he read the article by Roh and mentioned it on the terrace of a Parisian café to two fellow writers, Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias and Cuban Alejo Carpentier. The three were then under the spell of French surrealism. Two decades of writing had to pass before they realized that magical realism could work in literature. In 1948, Uslar Pietri was the first to use this term to make sense of literary works. The same year, Carpentier wrote that the mixture of reality and the marvelous was “the heritage of all of America.” And he concluded that the writer’s job was to turn this mixture into a literary style.3
Fourteen years later, in 1962, Carpentier published the novel Explosion in a Cathedral. García Márquez read it and confessed in a letter to a friend, “It is a masterpiece of universal literature.” Admiration turned into influence and influence shaped the imagination of a book. In Explosion in a Cathedral, García Márquez found numerous ideas and techniques to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel he had struggled to imagine for more than a decade. Along the way, he even gave up on it. Tormented, he said in an interview in 1963, “The biography of Colonel Aureliano Buendía [the novel’s main character] will never be written.” But the following year García Márquez saw Carpentier several times, who advised him on style, language, use of time in fiction, and how to write as a Latin American author. Carpentier’s help proved decisive. Three years later, in 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude took the world by storm. The same year, the third member of the Parisian group, Asturias, became the first Latin American novelist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award consecrated his literary portrayal of the magical legends and traditions of the peoples of Latin America. The next Latin American novelist to win this award was García Márquez in 1982. He received it for a similar reason: “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.” By then, many readers and critics called him the creator of magical realism and praised One Hundred Years of Solitude as the novel that put Latin America on the map of world literature. But none of these statements are correct.4
The origins of magical realism and its transformation into a literary style was, in reality, part of a larger transformation in aesthetic ideas, intellectual principles, professional values, and social expectations that shaped the imagination of García Márquez and many other writers in the region. This transformation started in earnest in the 1920s. In Peru, writer José Carlos Mariátegui launched his literary journal Amauta, in which he aimed to combine ideas from Marxism, European avant-garde art, and the indigenous cultures of Peru. This publishing venture was not unique. Asturias published the literary journal Nuevos Tiempos and, in collaboration with Carpentier, Imán. The pages of these short-lived journals, along with those of Proa and Repertorio Americano, tell the story of a major intellectual change underway during the 1920s: the invention of a region-spanning literary tradition, literatura latinoamericana (Latin American literature). Its invention is key to understanding how, four decades later, One Hundred Years of Solitude became imaginable as a work of art.5
Imagination is the first and often overlooked stage that an artist goes through in order for the work of art to move to the stage of production. In the arts, imagination hardly runs free and unstrained. The so-called muses that inspire artists are, at a closer look, ideas, principles, rules, values, and expectations that guide what artists can imagine. These “social” muses enable or restrict an artist’s choices during the creative process. Imagination is, simply put, the first gatekeeper. This is why the study of cultural production is incomplete without explaining what goes on in the stage of imagination—that is, during the coming into being of the work of art when it is just an impulse, intuition, or idea that is worth pursuing. And what occurs during this stage, of course, goes beyond understanding what happens in the artist’s head. One of the obstacles that García Márquez had to face in order to imagine One Hundred Years of Solitude was the absence of a region-spanning Latin American literature. He was not the only one in the region aware of this obstacle. Primera Plana, a popular magazine of current affairs, reminded its quarter of a million readers in August 1966, exactly when García Márquez was about to finish writing his novel, that things were changing. Now there was a “sense of a constituted, autonomous literature, at a level of achievement comparable to that of other literatures of the world.”6
How did imagination take the form of concrete aesthetics, conventions, creators, organizations, objects, and audiences that shaped García Márquez’s creativity for four decades before he finished One Hundred Years of Solitude? This novel exemplifies the power that imagination has over creators’ choices. Having taken the form of ideas, people, and works, this imagination that molds creators’ artistic choices can often develop decades before they start creating art. Ever since its publication, One Hundred Years of Solitude has
