by Ilan Stavans
The emergence of new narrative voices forced readers to realize that the novel was a literary genre up for grabs. Writers from different countries could appropriate it and adapt it to their needs by employing a new language, a new style, a different way of telling stories.4 The concept of originality was redefined. It now included the infusion of folklore from other traditions. Equally important was the emergence of a new reader, for the novel was no longer European property. Nations all over the world used the genre to explore local motifs. Those explorations were targeted to a local audience as much as they were destined for a global readership.
It would be foolish to suggest that novels had not been published anywhere else but Europe until then. The opposite is true. In Latin America, the genre had made some headway in the nineteenth century with works such as José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s The Itching Parrot and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo: or, Civilization and Barbarism. Those novels were clearly designed as tools to meditate on individual and collective concerns, such as poverty in urban centers, the role of minorities, and gender relations. But these books were generally derivative in their approach, closely imitating European models. The new post-war literature was far less dependent on foreign ideas. Although it used universal archetypes, it had assimilated the European heritage in a way that allowed for freedom to create in accordance with the writer’s own milieu.
Two major factors in the success of El Boom, and of García Márquez in particular, were the introduction of literary agents to Latin America, and, through them, the idea of a continental literature that could reach far and wide through translation. It would be impossible to imagine García Márquez’s career without Carmen Balcells. A Catalan with offices in Barcelona, Balcells had worked as an unsuccessful theater administrator, among other jobs, before joining the exiled Hungarian novelist Vintil Horia when he opened a literary agency. It was doing quite poorly until Carlos Barral, a flamboyant literary editor at the publishing house Seix Barral, asked Balcells—also known, because of her large size, as Mamá Grande (Big Mama), after García Márquez’s character, and as Female Agent 007—to sell foreign rights for his authors. As Mario Vargas Llosa once put it in a tribute to Balcells in El País, it was a decisive moment not only for her but for the publishing industry in the Spanish-speaking world, and through negotiations, the industry on the international level. At various points, she represented Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, Camilo José Cela, Carlos Fuentes, and Alfredo Bryce Echenique.
According to Vargas Llosa, at the end of the sixties, when he was teaching at King’s College, part of the University of London, Balcells showed up one day in his London apartment and told him: “Quit your teaching immediately. You have to devote yourself exclusively to writing.” He replied that he had a wife and two children and didn’t want them to starve. Balcells asked what his yearly salary was. He responded that it was around five hundred dollars. “I will give you that amount, starting at the end of this month. Leave London and install yourself in Barcelona, which is cheaper.” Vargas Llosa followed her instructions to much success. He lived in Catalonia’s capital for the next few years, describing those as the happiest of his life.5
It was through Carmen Balcells’s agency that El Boom became a global phenomenon. Several authors (Vargas Llosa for The Green House and Guillermo Cabrera Infante for Three Trapped Tigers) won the Biblioteca Breve prize, which Barral managed. Through Balcells’s efforts, this translated into a huge publicity campaign in the Spanish-speaking world. Bookselling in Latin America was, until then, defined by national boundaries. The major literary capitals were, in order of importance, Buenos Aires and Mexico City. Buenos Aires was the home of publishing houses Editorial Losada and Editorial Sudamericana. Self-described as a European city in the Southern Cone, it prided itself on having a high-brow literary culture; its periodicals, such as La Nación and Sur—under the support and editorship of its founder, Victoria Ocampo—included literary supplements. It was in Sur where Borges published some of his most influential essays and stories and where national, continental, and foreign authors sought to have their work in print. Ocampo sponsored translations of Waldo Frank, Oscar Wilde, Ranbindranath Tagore, and Virginia Woolf. Exiles from the Spanish Civil War who had arrived in Buenos Aires contributed generously to maintaining a sophisticated literary discourse.
There was no transcontinental distribution strategy, so books published in Buenos Aires weren’t readily available in other parts of Latin America. Books that enjoyed good word of mouth were passed on from one person to another; that was the only way devotees of a particular author could get a copy of a recently published novel or collection of stories. The same was true in Mexico City. There were publishing houses such as Fondo de Cultura Económica, created by historian Daniel Cosío Villegas in 1934 as an inexpensive venture to make the nation’s classics available to the masses. There were elite houses such as Ediciones Era, founded by exiles of the Spanish Civil War. But Mexican books rarely traveled beyond the nation’s borders.
As a publishing center, Cuba was a distant third. The island was an intellectual hotbed during the nineteenth and early parts of the twentieth century, and attracted exiles from the Spanish Civil War who were involved in publishing. The island’s prime geographic location in the Caribbean Sea and its value as a commercial getaway for the Americas had earned it the nickname “the pearl of the Antilles.” It may have been smaller than those of Mexico and Argentina, but in the sixties Cuba’s publishing industry received the strong backing of Castro’s regime. It undertook a mammoth effort to make books available to everyone at cheap prices, a project that was burdened by heavy censorship; the Communist Party wanted only a certain type of material made available to the population. Cuban books didn’t travel abroad.
All this to say that the Spanish-speaking world, from the Iberian peninsula to the Pampas, was a fragmented market. Readers in one city didn’t have access to titles published in another. It was a reflection of the limited impact of books, and of the printed media, in the Spanish-speaking world. Balcells changed that. Through publicity and a trans-Atlantic marketing strategy, Balcells made the writers of El Boom a phenomenon throughout the Spanish-speaking world. This, in large part, was the result of her success in selling foreign rights to New York, Paris, Rome, and other cultural capitals.
In No One Writes to the Colonel, a curious dialogue about censorship takes place. The Colonel waits for the mail in front of his friend the doctor’s office, and the two have a conversation about Europe, its wellbeing, and how easy it is to get there by boat. At one point the postman opens the mailbag but finds nothing for the Colonel, only a bunch of newspapers addressed to the doctor. Disappointed, the Colonel doesn’t even bother to read the headlines. The passage reads: “He made an effort to control his stomach. ‘Ever since there’s been censorship, the newspapers talk only about Europe,’ he said. ‘The best thing would be for the Europeans to come over here and for us to go to Europe. That way everybody would know what’s happening in their own countries.’”6
Balcells achieved something along the same lines. By selling world rights to works by Latin American writers, she generated, in their respective countries, the feeling that they needed to be read because in the major cultural capitals they were being applauded as talented representatives of their respective national idiosyncrasies. Balcells had been García Márquez’s agent since November 1925. In 1965, Balcells and her husband, Luis Palomares, visited García Márquez in Mexico City. She had just come from a tour of the United States, where she had stopped in New York City to visit various publishers, including Cass Canfield Jr. at Harper & Row. Given the solid reviews García Márquez’s work had received everywhere, Balcells managed to get a four-book contract with Harper & Row for a total of $1,000. She was eager to meet García Márquez for the first time and give him the wonderful news. García Márquez greeted her with enthusiasm but told her: “Es un contrato de mierda.” He had worked intensively on those four books. Getting o
nly $1,000 was ridiculous to him. However, he did sign a contract, dated July 7, 1965, with Luis Vincens as a witness, authorizing Balcells’s agency to represent him in all foreign languages for 150 years.7
El Boom was greeted with an uproar in different corners of the Spanish-speaking world. Was it a legitimate showcase of talent? Or was it a publicity-driven campaign devised by a savvy Barcelona agent? Wherever they went, the writers became targets of debate. In his memoir, The Boom in Spanish-American Literature: A Personal History, first published in Spanish in 1972, José Donoso, the author of Coronation and The Obscene Bird of Night and himself a member of El Boom, describes how, in spite of the hoopla, no author that was part of the movement was able to make ends meet exclusively from the royalties. With the exception of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Donoso writes, “I do not believe that the author’s rights of any Latin American writer can justifiably be called ‘substantial.’ On the contrary, the life of El Boom writers is and has been rather difficult and their greatest struggle is to steal a few hours for writing from the work that grants them a modest subsistence.”8
El Boom attracted the most publicity not through García Márquez, who in spite of the critical accolades was a rather opaque author, but through Carlos Fuentes. It was thanks to Fuentes that the “legend of luxury” was born. Fuentes “embodied for the devouring eyes of the writers of an entire continent that triumph, that fame, that power, even that cosmopolitan ‘luxury’ which from the isolated Latin American capitals seemed impossible to obtain,” Donoso wrote. “He was the first to handle his works through literary agents, the first to have friendships with the important writers of Europe and North America—James Jones loans him his apartment in a famous hotel on the Ile-St. Louis; André Pieyre de Mandiargues and William Styron receive him as a friend—the first to be considered a novelist of the first rank by North American critics, the first to realize the magnitude of what was happening in the Spanish American novel of his generation, and, generously and chivalrously, the first to make it known. His flamboyant character colored and gave shape to the phenomenon itself as viewed by a growing public. But even for Fuentes, who, outside of having his own income, which he supplemented with his work for publishing houses and movie studios, things have not been as easy as it appears, not even in that first moment of the Boom, when he embodied it and really could say: ‘Le Boom c’est moi.’ He had never had the fame, the true fame of a popular novelist beyond the range of the Spanish language, despite Mademoiselle telling its readers: Hâtez-vous, Mesdames, connaissez Fuentes. When he arrived for the first time at the offices of Gallimard, his publisher in France, to ask to meet the director who had just bought his first novel, the secretary asked him for his name and he gave it to her. The secretary’s look continued to be inquisitive and disconcerted as if she were waiting for clarification which Fuentes hastened to provide: ‘Je suis un romancier mexicain.’ In the presence of something so incredible, the secretary could not restrain a ‘Sans blague . . .!’”9
The emergence of El Boom was immediately linked to the style of magic realism (also known as magical realism), which has since been in fashion globally. It wasn’t just that Latin American writers such as García Márquez were the new kids on the block, it was that their style appeared to be unique: a blend of exoticism, magical thinking, and sexual exuberance. They often set their plots in humid jungles.
The pressure on the writers of El Boom was enormous. The Yale critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal put it this way: “Jacques Vaché was right: ‘Nothing kills a man more than having to represent a country.’ With Latin American writers, the burden was even greater. It matters little in what part of the vast continent they were born. Their readers (foreign as well as national) expect them to represent Latin America. As they read their works they ask: Are they Latin American enough? Is it possible to detect in their works the pulse of the heart, the murmur of the plains, the creeping of ferocious tropical insects, or similar clichés? Why must they always talk about Paris, London, or New York (or Moscow or Peking) instead of talking about their quaint hamlets, their endemic dictators, their guerrillas?” Rodríguez Monegal added: “The Latin American writer has had to prove he is Latin American before proving he is a writer. Who would think of asking Pound to be more North American and less Provençal? Who would complain that Nabokov has left out the silence of the vast Russian steppes in his novels? Why doesn’t anyone attack Lawrence for having dared to write a novel called Kangaroo? But Latin American writers are always invited to prove their origin before they are asked to show their skills. In dealing with them, criticism seems more preoccupied with geographical and historical than with literary matters.”10
This argument developed by Rodríguez Monegal stresses the unevenness of global culture up until the sixties. Before the time, the sense was that only Europe, enamored with its own logocentrism, could produce literary works of high caliber. This resulted in a condescending approach to anything that came from other regions of the world. Art that came from anywhere else was seen as an anthropological artifact: an item reflecting the metabolism of a bizarre civilization. Rodríguez Monegal suggests “a new curiosity about forms of culture based on other assumptions and values; the awareness (rather late, to be sure) that even within the Western fold there had long existed minorities who did not share in whiteness of skin, the Christian faith, or capitalistic affluence; the related realization that from its very beginnings the West itself had survived and prospered through the assimilation of alien cultures; the reemergence of China and the Arab world as powers to be reckoned with—all these factors have helped to abolish the rather naïve image of a unified Western culture, happily autonomous and self-sufficient.”11
The term “magic realism” has attached itself to García Márquez like a parasite. The signature mix of exoticism, magic, and the grotesque that García Márquez employs doesn’t come from the world of soap operas. The category has achieved such ubiquity and elasticity as to become meaningless. For a while, it denoted an attempt to blur the boundary between fact and fiction, between the natural and the supernatural. But its current use is chaotic: it is as useful in cataloging García Márquez’s second-rate successors, such as Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, and others, as it is in understanding Franz Kafka’s exposé of the middle class in The Metamorphosis, Lewis Carroll’s perversely innocent Alice in Wonderland, Salman Rushdie’s baroque hodgepodge of dreams and nationalism in Midnight’s Children, Naguib Mahfouz’s labyrinthine novels about Cairo, and Toni Morrison’s phantasmagoric meditation on slavery in Beloved. They have all been linked to magic realism, with varying degrees of success.
The first to use the term “magic realism” was the German art critic Franz Roh in his book Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europäischen Malerei.12 He used it to refer to the pictorial output of the Postexpressionist period, beginning around 1925. Roh described the way the artists’ innovations pushed beyond the limits of Expressionism and showed “an exaggerated preference for fantastic, extraterrestrial, remote objects.” Roh’s essay was translated into Spanish and published in Madrid in 1927 in José Ortega y Gasset’s magazine Revista de Occidente. The impact of the piece in the Spanish-speaking world is subject to debate. It was certainly read by the intellectual elite on the Iberian peninsula, but Ortega y Gasset’s magazine had only a minuscule circulation across the Atlantic Ocean. To what extent it was read in cultural capitals like Mexico City and Buenos Aires is impossible to assess.
Alejo Carpentier, in the prologue to his novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949), which he also included in his collection Tientos y diferencias (Insinuations and Differences, 1964), wrote: “Toward the end of 1943, I had the good fortune to be able to visit the kingdom of Henri Christophe—the poetic ruins of Sans-Souci, the massive citadel of La Ferrière, impressively intact despite lightning bolts and earthquakes—and to acquaint myself with the still Norman-style Cap-Haitien (the Cap Français of the former colony) where the
street lined with long balconies leads to the cut-stone palace inhabited once upon a time by Pauline Bonaparte.” Carpentier attacked European artists for being unable to understand the complexity of the New World. “We should note that when André Masson tried to draw the forest on the island of Martinique, with the incredible entangling of its plants and the obscene promiscuity of certain fruits, the marvelous truth of the subject devoured the painter, leaving him virtually impotent before the empty page. And it had to be a painter from America, the Cuban Wilfredo Lam, who showed us the magic of tropical vegetation and the uncontrolled Creation of Forms in our nature—with all its metamorphosis and symbiosis—in monumental paintings whose expression is unique in contemporary art.”
Magic realism was perceived by critics to be a response to Europe’s realist literary mores, where the distinction between what is real and what is imagined, between day-to-day consciousness and madness, was at the core of the intellectual revolution known as the Enlightenment. Works like Don Quixote tested the limits of this view but did not dismantle it. For some historians, the impulse was “to reestablish contact with traditions temporarily eclipsed by the mimetic constraints of nineteenth- and twentieth-century realism.” For them, in a work of magic realism “the supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence—admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism. Magic is no longer quixotic madness, but normative and normalizing. It is a simple matter of the most complicated sort.”13
Carpentier described how, during his visit to Haiti, he stumbled upon something he called the real marvelous—lo real maravilloso. “But I also realized that the presence and authority of the real marvelous was not a privilege unique to Haiti but the patrimony of all the Americas, where, for example, a census of cosmogonies is still to be established. The real marvelous is found at each step in the lives of the men who inscribed dates on the history of the Continent and who left behind names still borne by the living: from the seekers after the Fountain of Youth or the golden city of Manoa to certain rebels of the early times or certain modern heroes of our wars of independence, those of such mythological stature as Colonel Juana Azurduy.” For Carpentier the break brought by lo real maravilloso was with religion. He wrote: “the sensation of the marvelous presupposes a faith. Those who do not believe in saints cannot be cured by the miracles of saints, in the same way that those who are not Quixotes cannot enter, body and soul, the world of Amadis de Gaula or Tirant lo Blanc.” Carpentier added: “Because of the virginity of its landscape, because of its formation, because of its ontology, because of the Faustian presence of the Indian and the Black, because of the Revelation its recent discovery constituted, because of the fertile racial mixtures it favored, the Americas are far from having used up their wealth of mythologies.”14