Latin American novel,” writer Vargas Llosa said in 1966, “is now on an equal footing with any other.” He could make such a statement thanks to the aesthetic liberation among artists in the region from the 1940s onward. “In Latin America,” as Francisco Porrúa, acquisitions editor of One Hundred Years of Solitude, put it, “it was considered that we were a kind of Europe and that the reputable literary models came from there. This changed suddenly . . . what happened then was a kind of awareness of a literary identity. . . . People began to consider that we had a literature here, a proper Latin American literature.”26 Two world events channeled this “awareness”: the Spanish Civil War and World War II. They caused a cultural void in the region that lasted about fifteen years. This void consolidated Latin American literature as a transnational phenomenon with its epicenter in America not in Europe.
In 1936, as the Civil War was ravaging Spain and fascism was rising in Europe, Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes claimed, “Arrived late to the banquet of European civilization, [in America] we have reached our full age. Very soon, you will get used to counting with us.” Reyes delivered this message to the Latin American and European attendees of an international meeting of intellectuals in Buenos Aires. His speech was immediately published by the literary magazine Sur, with readers across the region and Europe.27
Then, in 1942, two years after the Nazi invasion of France and when the Allies were losing World War II, Asturias dedicated a poem to France written from Latin America: “I sing to you, France, near the tropical blast furnaces / Where sweat flows along the skin like lizards. / I sing to you before your dead rise with resolution / In the somnambulist battle of those who are not defeated.” For writers and former residents of Paris such as Asturias, World War II had a deep moral impact. For the second time in less than three decades, Europe was fighting a fratricide war. The situation was not better in Spain; the victory of fascism in the Civil War led to Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. To members of the Latin American cultural establishment, World War II and the Spanish Civil War proved that the Old Continent, with its colonial legacy falling apart, no longer was a moral compass on the issues of progress and civilization. Barbarism—the same problem writers in Latin America had frequently complained about since the nineteenth century—was now rampant throughout Europe.28
In practical terms, the cultural void meant that neither Spain nor the rest of Europe could offer any worthy literary ideas to draw inspiration from. Western literature, as Fuentes wrote, “lost its universality.” Writers in the region decided to favor their own cultural trends. This inward look boosted the region’s aesthetic liberation among writers, critics, scholars, and publishers. Their liberation brought about a region-spanning Latin American literature. It was during the 1940s when writers such as Carpentier and Asturias deepened their commitment to free the novel from nineteenth-century realism, that is, from the viewpoint of the Western, bourgeois, third person, and omniscient narrator. Instead, they paid attention to local peoples—including indigenous peoples and slaves—and experimented with narrative techniques, such as mixing descriptions of reality with marvelous and fantastic stories.29 (The inward look during this decade coincided with a sudden growth of the Argentine publishing industry; see next chapter).
Not coincidentally, it was in the 1940s when two terms that came to define the region’s literature took off. The first term was magical realism, which Uslar Pietri and Carpentier started to apply to literature in 1948, as mentioned earlier. The second term was literatura latinoamericana. During this decade, references to this latter term as well as to literatura hispanoamericana and literatura iberoamericana grew in book publications, as figures 1.1 and 1.2 show. As a result of these region-spanning developments, scholars rightly claim that there was a mini boom of Latin American literature in the 1940s. (But they have not seen the robust connection between this early boom and the rise of these terms.) At that time, Eduardo Zalamea Borda, Uslar Pietri, Carpentier, Guimarães Rosa, Asturias, Onetti, Bioy Casares, and Borges published work that helped convince peers, critics, and common readers that “Latin America could produce great literature.”30
During this cultural void, the search for inspiration not only turned to Latin America but also to the United States. Back then, few writers were more favorably received than Faulkner, to the point that he became a Latin American author thanks to numerous translations into Latin American Spanish (even Brazilian writers read his works in these translations). Faulkner attracted many writers for his literary language. Critics in the United States, however, disliked his language. For example, critic Allen Tate called him, pejoratively, “a Dixie Gongorist.” By Gongorist, Tate referred to writer Luis de Góngora. He was active during the Spanish Golden Age and became one of Spain’s most influential poets of all time. Like Faulkner, Góngora achieved fame for his sophisticated baroque style known as Gongorism. It was an original style that used ostentatious language, embellished metaphors, and convoluted syntactical order. As Tate observed, Faulkner’s complex style was similar to Góngora’s. Translations of Faulkner’s works into Latin American Spanish brought this aesthetic connection to the surface. And in his complex prose, reminiscent of the baroque, several generations of Latin American writers found a literary model for their own works. These writers included Jorge Icaza, J. E. Rivera, C. Alegría, Gallegos, Carpentier, Fuentes, Borges, Onetti, Rulfo, and young García Márquez. For them, Faulkner’s Latin Americanized language was an alternative to Castilian Spanish. Such language was a true means of aesthetic liberation. As Fuentes put it, “the baroque, Alejo Carpentier once told me, is the language of the people who, unaware of the truth, seek it eagerly.”31
García Márquez imitated Faulkner’s style in his first novella, published in 1955, when he was twenty-eight. And a decade later, as he was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, Carpentier and Fuentes advised him on how to use Latin American neo-baroque. Even common readers first heard about García Márquez through his connection to Faulkner. The summer of 1965, when he decided to start this novel, the magazine Life en Español, sold in Latin America, the United States, and Spain, mentioned his books in an article about the influence of Faulkner on Latin American writers.
THE LETTERED REGION AND THE CULTURAL COLD WAR
During World War II, unlike Europe, Latin America lived a period of relative peace and expansion of social democracy, with Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo functioning as cultural centers. These favorable political conditions helped expand the means of cultural production, including publishing houses, translations, textbooks and anthologies, academic scholarship and literary criticism, institutes and foundations, conferences, awards, and periodicals. Under this new organizational umbrella, numerous literary publishers, critics, and scholars insisted on how unique the region’s literature was—it was something different from the sum of national literatures.32
New and refurbished institutes and foundations dedicated to the region’s culture and literature helped develop this regional literary identity. These included the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana and Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos. Growing international resources, including awards and fellowships, were key to removing writers’ regional isolation. Up until the 1950s, most writers knew few colleagues from other countries personally. Networks were mainly individual-based, as it was the case even for famous regional writers, such as Rodó and Darío. But regular professional meetings, symposia, seminars, and conferences started to create a transnational network of writers. And many of them would identify with the idea of a Latin American literature and tried to speak with a homogeneous voice. Starting in 1954 with the first International Congress of Ibero-American Literature, meetings brought together writers and critics from the three generations and most countries in the region. Donoso, then an unknown, young writer, commented on the 1962 Congress of Intellectuals in Chile: “The topic . . . that clearly prevailed was the general complaint that Latin Americans knew European and North American literature perfectly, along with that of our countries [but] we almost completely ignored the contemporary literatures of the other countries of the continent.” As part of the effort to end this regional separation, members of the three generations from
