ASCENT TO GLORY
ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA
ASCENT TO GLORY
How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2020 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54543-3
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Santana-Acuña, Álvaro, author.
Title: Ascent to glory : how One hundred years of solitude was written and became a global classic / Álvaro Santana-Acuña.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019056923 (print) | LCCN 2019056924 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231184328 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231184335 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231545433 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: García Márquez, Gabriel, 1927-2014. Cien años de soledad.
Classification: LCC PQ8180.17.A73 C5377 2020 (print) | LCC PQ8180.17.A73 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056923
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056924
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].
Cover design: Lisa Hamm
Canary shape: detail from “Gabriel García Márquez” by Wolf Gang, CC BY-SA 2.0.
House shape: detail from first page of typescript of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1966), Harry Ransom Center.
Tree shape: detail from Vicente Rojo’s cover for One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).
Butterfly shape: detail from cover of first edition of Leaf Storm (1955).
To Félix Álvaro Acuña Dorta
&
María Teresa Bennasar González
CONTENTS
PART I FROM THE IDEA TO THE BOOK
2 The Publishing Industry Modernizes
3 A Novel in Search of an Author
4 Networked Creativity and the Making of a Work of Art
PART II BECOMING A GLOBAL CLASSIC
5 Controversy, Conflict, Collapse
6 A Novel Without Borders
7 Indexing a Classic
8 Ascent to Glory for Few, Descent to Oblivion for Most
Conclusion
Appendix: Why and How to Study Classics?
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
In the summer of 1965, an unknown writer was driving from Mexico City to Acapulco for a vacation with his wife and two children when, suddenly, a cow crossed the road in front of his car. He stopped abruptly. What happened next was a Newtonian moment, a miracle of the imagination. Right there on the road, in a stroke of brilliant insight, the writer came up with the first sentence of a novel that would change world literature: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Knowing there was not a second to lose, he turned his car around and rushed back home to Mexico City. He quit his job and locked himself up in his studio until he finished the novel. Debts skyrocketed as he spent months writing. He fell behind on rent payments, lived on the generosity of his friends and neighbors, and ended up pawning his car, his wife’s dowry jewels, and even his typewriter. Nothing could stop him. Eighteen months later, he emerged from his studio with a completed manuscript. When he went to the post office to mail it to a possible publisher in Argentina, the bankrupt writer realized that he did not have enough money to send the whole manuscript. He had to divide it into two parts and mailed only one part. When he arrived home, he looked at the pages in his hands and discovered his mistake: he had just mailed the second part of the manuscript, not the first as he had intended. What a terrible way, he might have thought, of pitching the novel that took him so much effort to write! Luckily, the pages that he sent astonished the publisher, who knew that the novel would be a great success and hurried to offer the writer a publishing contract. The writer was Gabriel García Márquez and the novel was One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad).1
This story about how this Colombian author created One Hundred Years of Solitude is in reality a fascinating legend, now passed on from generation to generation. Parts of this legend are true and other parts are not, like Isaac Newton’s story about discovering the theory of gravity after an apple fell on his head. What is remarkable about these cases is how legends often find in the pages of famous books and in the minds of people the most fertile soil to take root and grow. Shared and reinvented again and again, legends eventually become myths. One such myth refers to the artist who, after a stroke of inspiration, has to struggle financially in order to create a work of art. Poverty loomed over Mozart while composing works that revolutionized music, over Edgar Allan Poe while writing short stories that transformed modern literature, over Picasso while striving to sell his first cubist paintings, and over García Márquez while writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yet this myth of the creative genius cornered by economic hardship is more than a familiar story: it is a social pattern that ends up magnifying the difficulties that artists faced while creating their work. And as myths of this kind grow over time, they also obscure important details about how a work of art was really conceived and hence make it more challenging to explain how it turned into a classic.
The story of how One Hundred Years of Solitude actually came into being is even more fascinating than the legends and myths that surround this novel. When it was released in 1967, neither the publisher nor the author expected much of it. They knew, as publishing giant Alfred A. Knopf