believed that this region’s literature was no more than the sum of its national literatures: Peruvian, Venezuelan, Cuban, and so on. But from the 1920s onward, in the pages of journals such as the ones mentioned above, writers and critics started to imagine the region’s literature as different from the sum of national traditions. This collective enterprise paid off. By the 1960s, Latin American literature was an entity of its own and no longer occupied a peripheral position in the international market. Rather, as highbrow journals and mass media agreed, “the literature now coming out of Latin America is of the first importance.”7
TOWARD A REGIONAL LITERATURE
Geographic labels that designate peoples, territories, and continents are not neutral terms but deeply political ones. So are aesthetic labels. In April 1927, a few days after García Márquez’s birth, Spanish critic Guillermo de Torre—who two decades later rejected for publication the writer’s first novella—wrote “Madrid, Intellectual Meridian of Spanish America.” His essay caused an intellectual tsunami in the region. It attacked the name Latin America for being “false and unjustified” and despised the word “Latin Americanism.” For him, the right name for the region could only be “Spanish America.” Since he knew that Paris was also attracting a growing number of artists and students from the region, de Torre defended Madrid “as the most authentic line of intersection between America and Spain.” And he concluded, “The American intellectual area [is] an extension of the Spanish area.” In the following months, over thirty writers from six countries in the region united in their rejection of de Torre’s arguments. Carpentier summarized the disapproval of many of his colleagues in stating, “The only aspiration of America is America itself.” De Torre, though, was right about something; the now popular name of Latin America was invented in Paris. In the 1850s, expat writers Chilean Francisco Bilbao and Colombian José María Torres Caicedo first used it. The latter also coined the label literatura latinoamericana in 1879 to argue that the region “does not have a literature of its own” and that it lacked originality because “our literature imitates all others.”8
The situation described by Torres Caicedo changed in the first decades of the twentieth century. Then, a region-spanning intellectual class started to emerge, including full-time writers such as José Enrique Rodó, Rubén Darío, José Martí, and Eugenio María de Hostos and literary critics and scholars such as Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Alfonso Reyes, Arturo Torres-Rioseco, and Alberto Zum Felde. Although they set the foundations of what was to come, the label literatura latinoamericana “had little usage in our own America during the first half of the century.” As figures 1.1 and 1.2 show, growth in its usage was part of a process of nationalism in the region that gained acceptance during and after World War II, accelerated with the decolonization of Third World countries, and flourished in the 1960s after the Cuban Revolution in 1959.9
1.1 Frequency of labels in Spanish used to name the region’s literature (1860–2008).
Source: Google Ngram Viewer.
1.2 Frequency of labels in English used to name the region’s literature (1860–2008).
Source: Google Ngram Viewer.
By the 1960s, most writers, critics, and literary scholars could easily embrace the idea of a Latin American literature. They did precisely that during the decade of One Hundred Years of Solitude’s publication. By then, the ideas of Latin America and Latin American literature were inseparable components of the imagination that made this novel conceivable as a work of art.
LATIN AMERICANISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM
At the time of García Márquez’s birth, when critics and readers referred to literatura latinoamericana, they had in mind a fragmented territory of over sixty languages, twenty nations, and their corresponding national literatures. Writers more readily pledged allegiance to a nation or a literary style rather than to the idea of Latin America. For this reason, there were Argentine and Uruguayan realists, Mexican and Peruvian indigenists, Colombian and Ecuadorian regionalists, and so on. But there were no writers regarded as, say, Latin American realists. In fact, most writers were not committed to imagining works that transcended the boundaries of their national literature. So how did the region’s literature become more than the sum of its different national literatures? Writers and critics started to develop uniforming principles in the 1880s. But it took four decades before they spread beyond national borders. Two principles in particular, despite variations of each, came to dominate the idea of a region-spanning Latin American literary tradition: Latin Americanism and cosmopolitanism.
Latin Americanism aimed at rethinking the region’s common indigenous roots and its shared history as a whole, rather than emphasizing the singular trajectory of each country in the region. Contrary to the provincial styles of regionalismo and indigenismo, followers of Latin Americanism had to imagine in their writing that a common history and culture united all countries of Latin America. And they had to believe that this common legacy made the region unique in literary terms when compared to the rest of the world. As Uruguayan literary critic Ángel Rama put it, “Latin Americanism facilitates the mediation between regionalism and external modernity.” If practitioners of Latin Americanism imagined the region as a whole, their literary works would connect with the experiences of most of its peoples, regardless of their nationality. If written this way, readers would read their works as truly Latin American. This transformation of the collective imagination did not occur suddenly. In the 1940s and 1950s, Latin Americanism was still a conversation among a small group of “isolated creators,” among whom was Carpentier. Only in the 1960s, when creators like García Márquez and Carpentier had more opportunities to meet and talk about their works regularly, did Latin Americanism become a widely shared regional conversation and literary agenda.10
The second principle, cosmopolitanism, sought to connect Latin America with foreign cultural traditions and to understand the region as part of the world. The cosmopolitan view consisted of inserting the region’s literature within the larger cultural tradition of the West. For writers, this insertion meant that they should imagine their works as if they were written for readers in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Cosmopolitanism did not seek to simply imitate the West but to create a friendly dialogue with works of Western literature. The diffusion of this cosmopolitan viewpoint changed writers’ imaginations. A telling case, given the author’s influence on the region’s literature, was that of Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. In the 1930s, he went from being a local poet inspired by the beauty of Buenos Aires to a fiction writer interested in “universal” themes such as identity, time, and memory. Not all writers welcomed his cosmopolitanism. Argentine nationalists attacked Borges, accusing him of being “foreignizing or Europeanist.” But over the years, he found ample support in the region for his cosmopolitan agenda, which he continued to develop. In 1951, in his famous lecture “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” he said, “I believe that our tradition is the whole of Western culture, and I also believe that we have a right to this tradition, a greater right than that which the inhabitants of one Western nation or another may have.” By 1966, in Into the Mainstream, a best-selling volume of interviews with Latin American writers, Borges went a step further in defending the region’s right to “discove[r] the universality of our tradition,” and he added “we no longer have to deny any one part of it.”11
In the 1920s, when writers like Borges started their writing careers, other fellow writers and critics saw Latin Americanism and cosmopolitanism as incompatible. But in many works published from this decade onward, there was a growing desire to abandon these “Manichaean attitudes,” as Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa put it. His colleague Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes defended that these two principles
