by Ilan Stavans
He added: “I think the critics ought to have gone on and searched two hundred other books to see where the rest of the characters come from. Besides which, I’m not at all afraid of the idea of plagiarism. If I had to write Romeo and Juliet tomorrow I would do it, and would feel it was marvelous to have the chance to write it again. I’ve talked a lot about the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, and I believe it has been the most important book of my life; ever since I first read it I’ve been astonished by its absolute perfection. Once, when I was at a place on the Colombian coast, I came across a very similar situation to that of the drama of Oedipus Rex, and I thought of writing something to be called Oedipus the Mayor. In this case I wouldn’t have been charged with plagiarism because I should have begun by calling him Oedipus. I think the idea of plagiarism is already finished. I can myself say where I find Cervantes or Rabelais in One Hundred Years of Solitude—not as to quality but because of things I’ve taken from them and put there. But I can also take the book line by line—and this is a point the critics will never be able to reach—and say what event or memory from real life each comes from. It’s a very curious experience to talk to my mother about such things; she remembers the origins of many of the episodes, and naturally describes them more faithfully than I do because she hasn’t elaborated them as literature.”19
The accusation of plagiarism ought to be read in context. García Márquez belongs to the generation of El Boom, which was defined by Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a short story structured as an essay that was first published in May 1939 in the Buenos Aires magazine Sur. In it, the protagonist, a nineteenth-century French symbolist, seeks to rewrite—not to copy word for word, but to rewrite without having access to the primary text—Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote of La Mancha, written four centuries prior and published in two parts, the first in 1605 and the second in 1615. The idea is ingenious: Borges offers a meditation on the art of reading and on the concept of plagiarism. Can an author “write” a book that belongs to someone else? In Borges’s story, that is the deliberate intention. In the end, although the versions by Cervantes and Menard are identical, their meaning varies because of the context in which the respective pieces were drafted.
Borges’s implicit statement is that anything produced by Latin American authors is, in some way, a recreation, a rewriting of a European model. García Márquez isn’t an exception. One Hundred Years of Solitude, while utterly original, fits within the Latin American literary tradition, which is heavily indebted to Europe. Without the European literary models, the Colombian author would never have been able to craft his Macondo saga. His contribution lies in his capacity to upset and expand that foreign tradition, that is, to renovate the novel as a literary genre, infusing it with ingredients indigenous to the Americas. In that sense, its embrace by writers of the so-called Third World is a form of appropriation, a theft. García Márquez’s rejection of the charge of plagiarism is a comment on the novel’s postcolonial nature.
During those eighteen months of writing, Mutis, Jomí García Ascot, and María Luisa Elío visited the García Márquez family frequently. When the three first chapters of the novel were ready, they began to circulate them among friends. García Márquez sent them to Fuentes, who was in Europe at the time and who wrote an ecstatic notice in the cultural supplement of Siempre!: “I have just read the first seventy-five pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude. They are absolutely magnificent . . . The entire ‘fictitious’ history coexists with the ‘real’ history, what has been dreamed with what has been documented, and thanks to the legends, the lies, the exaggerations, the myths . . . Macondo becomes a universal landscape, an almost biblical story about foundations and about generations and degenerations, in a story about origins and the fate of human time and dreams and desires with which men survive and destroy themselves.”20
Some sections of García Márquez’s novel were published as advance serials in periodicals such as Mundo Nuevo in Paris, edited by Emir Rodríguez Monegal; Amaru in Lima, edited by Adolfo Westphalen; and Eco in Bogotá, edited by Hernando Valencia Goekel. There were early pieces discussing the material in El Espectador. The buzz was intense. Mutis stated, “One Hundred Years of Solitude is everything except a novel according to the nineteenth-century literary canon, as established by the principal novelist of that time . . . it’s a masterful book, a book without limits, impossible to fit—happily! fortunately!—any preconceived classification.”21 After reading a section, Mario Vargas Llosa remarked, “If everything is like this fragment, the novel must be a marvel.”22
According to Tomás Eloy Martínez, García Márquez’s friend and a prominent Argentine journalist known for his novel Santa Evita, García Márquez had to sell a food processor “that was his most cherished wedding gift in order to be able to pay the postal charge to send the five hundred pages of the book from Mexico to Buenos Aires.” Yet the claim that García Márquez had barely enough money to send one copy is contradicted by the fact that, according to Germán Vargas Cantillo and Alfonso Fuenmayor, after he finished the manuscript, he sent a copy to his friends from El grupo de Barranquilla. It first went to Vargas Cantillo, along with a request from García Márquez: “I want you to tell me how you find the fact that I have involved people from real life inside the novel. After you both read it, talk to Alfonso and tell me about your discussion.” According to Heriberto Fiorillo, “both responded that they were very happy to be the friends of the last of the Buendías.”23
How many copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude existed? Apparently, there were four. In his article “La odisea literaria de un manuscrito,” García Márquez said that the manuscript he and Mercedes placed in the mail had 590 double-spaced typewritten pages. The paper he used was “ordinary.” He specifically stated that they put los originales [the originals] in the mail. The postage was eighty-two pesos, but the couple only had forty-three. The opened the package they had just prepared, divided the manuscript in two, and sent the first half by mail. Subsequently, they went to El monte de piedad, a pawn shop. They thought of pawning García Márquez’s typewriter but decided against it because it still could earn them money. So they sold some home appliances, returned to the post office, and mailed the second half to Buenos Aires.
Of the four copies, Mutis read the original, the same one the García Márquezes divided in two and sent to Argentina. Mutis had another copy, which he took with him to Buenos Aires on a trip not long after. The third copy circulated among García Márquez’s Mexican friends, and the fourth was sent to Barranquilla, to Alfonso Fuenmayor, Germán Vargas, and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, whose daughter Patricia, according to García Márquez, cherished it like a treasure.24 That fourth copy, by all accounts, is the only surviving manuscript.
The other three have vanished. And there are no galley proofs in existence. Amazingly, García Márquez told Rita Guibert that “I only changed one word [in them], although Paco Porrúa, editor of [Editorial] Sudamericana, told me to change as many as I liked.” He added: “I believe the ideal thing would be to write a book, have it printed, and correct it afterwards. When one sends something to the printers and then reads it in print one seems to have taken a step, whether forward or backward, of extreme importance.”25
The connection to Editorial Sudamericana was established at the beginning of 1966. Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, who had interviewed him for their book Into the Mainstream, recommended García Márquez to Francisco (Paco) Porrúa.26 García Márquez received a letter from Porrúa requesting permission to reprint his earlier books. He replied that he had already made arrangements with another house, Ediciones Era, for reprints, but he offered Porrúa the novel he was currently working on.
In any event, for the short time the manuscript was in transit, he and Mercedes felt at once a sense of freedom as well as a growing uncertainty. She wondered if the novel was good enough, if all the time he had invested those solitary months would pay off. For about two weeks the couple didn’t receive any news
. Could the book have been lost in the mail?
The book’s publication was inauspicious. Editorial Losada had rejected it. Carlos Barral, the padrino, the godfather of El Boom, had brushed it aside. Barral had discovered Mario Vargas Llosa and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, which in turn made his connection with García Márquez easy. Barral felt guilty about failing to recognize the quality of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Eventually, he explained that he had been on vacation when the manuscript arrived and the novel was dismissed by a member of his staff. He didn’t have enough time to get to it; Editorial Sudamericana had already sent it to the printer.
Gerald Martin had access to a letter García Márquez wrote to Apuleyo Mendoza during this period. In it, García Márquez says that after years of “working like an animal I feel overwhelmed with tiredness, without clear prospects, except in the only thing that I like but which doesn’t feed me: the novel.” He dreamed of spending quality time writing. He speaks of the early response to One Hundred Years of Solitude with excitement, but also feels that—as he said to Mendoza when he last saw him in Barranquilla—he “embarked on an adventure that could as easily be catastrophic as successful.” But he didn’t have much choice other than to embrace his dream. “My conclusion from all of this is that when you have a topic that pursues you it starts growing in your head for a long time and the day it explodes you have to sit down at the typewriter or run the risk of murdering your wife.”27
Chapter 8
Convergences
Just as García Márquez was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Latin American literary “Boom” was coalescing as a global phenomenon. Mario Vargas Llosa, the youngest of the group (born in 1936) but one of the most energetic, had published his collection of stories Los jefes in 1959. He followed that with two novels that established him as a major voice in the Spanish-speaking world: La ciudad y los perros (1963), known in English as The Time of the Hero, and The Green House (1966). Vargas Llosa had exchanged some correspondence with García Márquez prior to 1967. At this time, they still had not met.
In 1967, Carlos Fuentes published an important novel as well: A Change of Skin, an experimental exercise à la the French nouveau roman, in which a group of friends travel from Mexico City to Veracruz during Holy Week in a Volkswagen. The novel stirred interest among readers in Spain. It was Fuentes who served as a bridge between García Márquez and a number of other Latin American authors who would be the principal players of El Boom.
Its leading voice, who had heard about García Márquez from numerous sources but had not met him personally, was the exiled Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Born in Brussels in 1914, Cortázar wrote some of the best short stories of the twentieth century, including those in the collections Blow Up, End of the Game, and We Loved Glenda So Much. His experimental essays in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds and his translations (he rendered an enormous amount of Edgar Allan Poe’s oeuvre into Spanish) made him highly influential. His novels, especially Hopscotch, published in 1963—four years before One Hundred Years of Solitude—was an early cornerstone of El Boom and is said to have helped pave the way for the consolidation of Latin American literature worldwide as tradition of its own. Cortázar died in Paris in 1984 and is buried in Montparnasse.
Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and Cortázar, along with a loose cadre of others, including Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay, 1909– 1994), João Guimarães Rosa (Brazil, 1908–1967), José Lezama Lima (Cuba, 1910–1976), Adolfo Bioy Casares (Argentina, 1914–1999), Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguay, 1917–2005), José Donoso (Chile, 1924–1996), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba, 1929–2005), Manuel Puig (Argentina, 1932–1990), and, later, women such as Luisa Valenzuela (Argentina, born in 1938) and Isabel Allende (Chile, born in 1942), produced avant-garde work about Latin America that awakened readers beyond their national borders to the political, social, economic, and religious reality of a continent defined by the ghosts of colonialism centuries after it had entered modernity.1 El Boom was as much an aesthetic phenomenon as it was a commercial endeavor. From Barcelona—which considered itself the literary capital of the Spanish-speaking world, especially when it came to the acquisition, production, and distribution of commercial books—came an infusion of refreshing, provocative ideas that were ingrained on a heterogeneous yet hungry readership in the vast Hispanic world.
Bursting with references to García Márquez’s early literary influences, One Hundred Years of Solitude is filled with echoes of other Latin American writers and their fiction. In chapter ten, there is an outburst of rabbits, a clear homage to Julio Cortázar’s story “Letters to Mother.” Elsewhere, there are characters in Macondo who perform in front of a passing train, just as Cortázar’s protagonists had done in “End of Game.” The important Latin American figure, baroque Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, is mentioned, as are Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa.
In and of itself, the rezeptiongeschichte of García Márquez’s book is intriguing. Toward the middle of April 1967, Francisco Porrúa of Editorial Sudamericana phoned Tomás Eloy Martínez “in an exalted voice,” asking him to come immediately to his house and read an extraordinary book. Porrúa said: “It’s so exhilarant—in Spanish, delirante—that I don’t know if the author is a genius or is crazy.”2 Years later, Martínez recollected that it was raining heavily that day. “On the sidewalk of the street where Porrúa lived there were some loose pavers. Trying not to stumble, I got soaked. The long hallway that went from the apartment entrance to the studio was carpeted with rows of papers that appeared to be inviting the guest to clean his shoes. That’s what I did: I stepped on them. They were the originals of One Hundred Years of Solitude that Porrúa, excited with his reading, had left on the floor. Fortunately, the shoe prints didn’t erase any of those sentences that readers of García Márquez continue to repeat devotedly, as if they were prayers.”3
Martínez recalled that the following day he and Porrúa invited García Márquez to Buenos Aires to be part of a three-member committee that Editorial Sudamericana and the weekly Primera Plana, of which Martínez was in charge, organized annually to judge a literary prize. In the June issue, the cover of Primera Plana was dedicated to One Hundred Years of Solitude, which it described, interestingly, as “la gran novela de América,” the great American novel—not as the great Latin American novel but as the great novel of the Americas, regardless of language. The cover story was written by Martínez himself and is arguably the very first, or one of the first, enthusiastic reviews of the novel ever to appear.
The colophon of the Editorial Sudamericana edition, on page 352, contained the following information: the edición príncipe, first edition, was printed on May 30, 1967, by Talleres Gráficos de la Compañía Impresora Argentina, at Calle Alsina No. 2049, in Buenos Aires. A few days later, the novel appeared in bookstores and on newspaper stands throughout the city. It was placed alongside other titles published by Emecé and Minotauro, with whom Sundamericana shared distribution. The publishing house didn’t do any publicity, which makes its instant success all the more astonishing.
The publication day was set for May 30, but the original cover, which García Márquez had asked his friend the painter Vicente Rojo to design, was late. Rojo had not received the manuscript in time, so the first edition was printed with another cover. Ultimately, Rojo’s cover, which was used for a subsequent edition and became an icon in Latin America when the novel sold millions, would be as recognizable as the novel itself. It is a simple geometrical design that includes what appear to be lottery motifs (four bells, four moons, three stars within squarish octagons); according to some, the design approximates a children’s game played in the banana region of Colombia’s coast, where the novel takes place.4
Rojo’s design is in sharp contrast to the covers of the first edition and subsequent foreign editions, including the American translation published in 1970. These covers, awash in greens and yellows, showcase sunken boats in a jungle landscape or an assortment of parrots, prostitutes, and generals. The im
agery showcases the erotic, mythical nature of the plot as perceived outside Latin America. This type of design successfully marketed the novel and—especially for audiences in Europe—became synonymous with the literary themes of El Boom.
Rojo’s cover was somewhat controversial. Just like other prepublication readers, the artist fell in love with One Hundred Years of Solitude. Amazed by its baroque style, he had purposely taken the opposite approach in his design, which, in essence, was uncomplicated. He preferred for the reader to encounter the novel’s labyrinthine quality directly. The font he used for the author’s name, title (in a slightly larger point size), and publisher was in all capitals and appeared slightly distressed. At the last minute, Rojo opted to invert the E of SOLEDAD, for no apparent reason. That inversion generated much debate. The E looked as if perceived through a mirror. Did the design contain a hidden meaning through which one could unravel the mysteries in the storyline? According to one biographer, Editorial Sudamericana received a number of letters from booksellers complaining that it looked like a typographical error that needed to be corrected in a future edition. Some actually made the correction themselves.5
After much delay, the novel’s publication was rescheduled to Monday, June 5. The date didn’t carry the weight that it did in New York publishing: for publicity departments, it’s the target date for reviews and other media to come out. In Buenos Aires, it was simply the moment the book was made available to readers. On June 5, Argentine newspapers (including the principal ones, La Nación, Clarín, and La Razón) devoted their headlines to the conflict in the Middle East. The Israeli army, led by Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, had invaded the Sinai desert, which is Egyptian territory, through the Gaza Strip. There was enormous tension in the air. Jordan and Syria were ready to join other Arab countries in opposition to the Zionist attack.6