(Mexico), José Donoso and Jorge Edwards (Chile), Vargas Llosa (Peru), Manuel Puig (Argentina), and Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba).
Previous research has stressed intra- and intergenerational conflict among these writers and overlooked the depth of their collaboration.20 Yet sustained cooperation across generations until the 1970s was key in putting Latin American literature on the map of world literature. The collaboration happened when the principles of cosmopolitanism and Latin Americanism circulated through an intricate network of strong and weak ties among generations that covered four decades and three continents. In committing to these principles, the three generations helped create an intellectual and professional space that made it possible for novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude to be imagined as a cosmopolitan, Latin American work of art, not as a local or regionalist one. (The modernizing publishing industry further strengthened this network, as the next chapter shows.)
A community of readers, including the budding writer García Márquez, was the first step to create a collaborative network among generations. Writers from the three generations, as critic Harss put it, “read and admired each other. That was the New Latin American Novel of those years. In reality, it had not existed before at a continental level.” A shared group of readings and favorite authors can help to unify professional literary practice. And these generations shared a cosmopolitan taste for international literature by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Scott Fitzgerald, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, and especially William Faulkner, as well as regional literature by Sarmiento, Martí, Rodó, and Darío in particular. They also read the same translations of foreign books and, collaboratively, regional authors managed these translations. Famously, Borges and his literary circle, which included Victoria Ocampo, José Bianco, and Bioy Casares, translated major modernist works of Faulkner, Woolf, and Kafka into Latin American Spanish.21
From the 1940s onward, informal gatherings and professional meetings strengthened ties across generations. Attending these reunions were writers as well as critics, scholars, and gatekeepers of the publishing industry. In traveling across the region, participants started to develop a common cultural agenda, and they connected it to their professional aspirations. Collaborating peers and gatekeepers also came from outside the region, in particular from Spain, the United States, and France. Mail correspondence was a site for networking, too. With the expansion of air travel, cheaper and faster airmail between major cities helped to maintain regional conversations in real time, as if they were happening in town. As an organizer of the 1962 Congress of Intellectuals in Chile, poet Gonzalo Rojas wrote, “Every week, every month I receive letters from Fuentes, Alegría, Benedetti, Bianco, Arguedas, and the others. . . . They send me magazines where the debates go on as in Siempre! of Mexico and others from Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Lima, and Montevideo.” In 1965, when he started One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez, like Rojas, was corresponding with other writers in Latin America and Europe. In their correspondence, writers exchanged ideas for new books and updates about their work in progress (including copies of their manuscripts). They made suggestions on how to solve a technical writing problem (such as how to find the tone of a novel), to improve writing habits, and to overcome the frightening writer’s block. They shared tips on how to find the best acquisitions editors and literary agents for their work and how to market it via mainstream media. Ultimately, the writers not only exchanged trade secrets, but also they became pen pals, lending lots of emotional support coupled with professional advice.22
What gave this collaboration among writers a greater advantage to promote their works was the support of three generations of critics and publishers. These included contemporaries of the Short Form Generation such as Enrique Anderson Imbert (Argentina), Mexicans Luis Leal and Antonio Castro Leal, Luis Alberto Sánchez (Peru), and Arturo Torres-Rioseco (Chile), contemporaries of the Hybrid Generation such as Emir Rodríguez Monegal (Uruguay) and Roger Caillois (France), and contemporaries of the Novel Generation such as Francisco Porrúa, Carmen Balcells, Carlos Barral, Víctor Seix, Neus Espresate Xirau, and Josep Maria Castellet (Spain), Emmanuel Carballo (Mexico), Tomás Eloy Martínez, Adolfo Prieto, and Ernesto Schoo (Argentina), Domingo Miliani (Venezuela), Harss (Chile), and Rama (Uruguay). Critics and publishers collaborated with writers to connect their works to the idea of Latin America and the Western tradition. Critics, in particular, helped to internationalize what writers in the region did. For this reason, three years before the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Rama confidently stated in a text that resonated with authors in the region: “Everything that is said about the Latin American writer concerns the writer from anywhere in the world.”23
In practical terms, critics helped writers in three ways. First, they wrote about Latin American writers in journals and books; second, they recommended these writers’ works to other writers, critics, and ordinary readers; and, third, they included these writers in courses on Latin American literature that they taught at universities in the region, the United States, and Europe. Critics Rodríguez Monegal and Rama did all three for the works of Donoso, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and García Márquez.
PARIS, A LITERARY MEETING POINT
In 1967, two popular Latin American writers, Chilean poet Neruda (of the Short Form Generation) and Mexican novelist Fuentes (of the Novel Generation) met in the fashionable Parisian restaurant La Coupole to talk, among other things, about a new Latin American novel: One Hundred Years of Solitude. Fuentes praised it and compared it to Don Quixote, inspiring Neruda’s growing interest in it. Uruguayan critic Rodríguez Monegal (of the Hybrid Generation) was also present at the meeting. He had already premiered two chapters of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Mundo Nuevo, the leading magazine of new Latin American literature, edited in Paris and distributed in over twenty countries. This literary summit of writers and critics from three different generations to talk about a Latin American best seller was unimaginable in the 1920s, when Neruda first visited Paris. Back then, most writers did not believe that Latin America had a region-spanning literature. But they believed that a stay in the city was a rite of passage for any aspiring writer. And in their exchanges with other artists, writers from the region discovered a common identity: “All Latin Americans, unanimously, found in the Paris of the twenties and thirties: their distant Latin America . . . what they have recovered in Paris is the originality of Latin America, its specificity, its accent, its unique reality.”24
It was in Paris where Uslar Pietri talked to Asturias and Carpentier about Roh’s essay on magical realism, and where they started to think of the mixture of realism and magic as the main ingredient of Latin American literature. They came to Paris inspired by what famous writers had accomplished from that city, especially Nicaraguan poet Darío, who lived there in the early twentieth century. Considered the first major regional literary figure, Darío acted as a broker of literary styles: he was a Paris-based cosmopolitan who reworked major literary trends and became a committed Latin American. After Darío’s success, the idea of the cosmopolitan American author in Paris entered the imagination of Latin American writers of the three generations. These included the already mentioned Neruda, Venezuelan Uslar Pietri, Cubans Carpentier and Guillén, and Guatemalan Asturias in the Short Form Generation; Argentines Cortázar and Sábato and Mexican Paz in the Hybrid Generation; and Peruvian Vargas Llosa, Mexican Fuentes, Chilean Edwards, and Colombian García Márquez in the Novel Generation.
Several of these writers also lived in Madrid, but they did not develop a Latin American identity there. For many of them, the capital of Spain was synonymous with colonial domination, which de Torre revived after publishing his incendiary essay on Madrid as the intellectual meridian of Spanish America. Paris, on the contrary, meant openness to other artistic traditions and the possibility to affirm the cultural autonomy of Latin America. Writers seeking admission to artistic circles in Paris had to move beyond their local literary traditions and convert to Latin Americanism. They did so by embracing a cosmopolitan cultural viewpoint, discussing current affairs about the region, and commenting on the latest international and regional literature. Cuban poet Guillén (of the Short Form Generation) led one of such groups, which García Márquez joined in 1955.25
CULTURAL
