Another magazine that promoted this book as a New Latin American Novel was Mundo Nuevo; it did so because this highbrow literary magazine brought the sentiment of aesthetic liberation in Latin American literature to its peak. Indeed, the history of the region’s booming literature “at the time it presented its most compact appearance is written on the pages of Mundo Nuevo.” Since its creation in 1966, it called itself Revista de América Latina. With its headquarters in Paris and a print run of six thousand copies, this monthly magazine was for sale in twenty-three countries on three continents. “My intention,” its editor Rodríguez Monegal explained, was for “the magazine to be a guide for anyone seriously interested in following the development of the latest Latin American literature.”49
The publication of Mundo Nuevo had five important consequences. First, it endorsed the idea that Latin American literature was not limited to the works of a few popular writers. Second, it created a hierarchy of the good Latin American writers by publishing literary criticism on contemporary works from the region. Third, it favored the publication of texts that embraced cosmopolitanism and Latin Americanism. Fourth, it did not print texts by writers from Spain, except for the work of a few political exiles and outsiders. And fifth, it published mainstream international work with connections to “the Latin American reality” and was part of new trends in the novel in Europe and the United States, including works of Anglo-American modernism à la John Dos Passos or Joyce and French nouveau roman à la Nathalie Sarraute.50
Another outlet that writers and critics used to promote their agenda was the literary supplement of newspapers and magazines. The summer of 1964, Fuentes published “La nueva novela latinoamericana” (“The New Latin American Novel”) in La Cultura en México, the literary supplement of Siempre! (see figure 1.3). In this art manifesto, he studied the works of Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, and Carpentier. Each of them was a best-selling member of the Novel, Hybrid, and Short Form Generations. Fuentes singled them out as the leading voices of “La nueva novela latinoamericana,” which, for him, was inaugurating a new era for literature in the region. As the subtitle to his manifesto proclaimed, “Gentlemen, don’t be fooled: the old [writers] have died.” To prove it, Fuentes’s manifesto blurred the chronological boundaries between the three generations and exaggerated the differences between these generations and older writers such as Gallegos, J. E. Rivera, and Mariano Azuela. Fuentes also connected Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, and Carpentier to modernist authors such as Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, and Kafka. For him, these three Latin American writers were also cosmopolitan and offered an alternative to the so-called death of the European bourgeois novel. For him, key to this alternative was to put myths at the center of their works. This is why “our literature,” Fuentes concluded, “is truly revolutionary.”51
1.3 Cover of Carlos Fuentes’s major essay on the rise of the New Latin American Novel.
Source: La Cultura en México (July 29, 1964).
Critics like Rama and Rodríguez Monegal used region-spanning periodicals to make similar arguments. The fall of 1964, a few weeks after Fuentes’s manifesto, the journal Casa de las Américas published a special issue on the “Nueva novela latinoamericana.” It included excerpts of new work by Carpentier, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, and other writers of the three generations, plus eight articles authored by critics and writers about recent Latin American novels such as Explosion in a Cathedral and The Time of the Hero. The issue opened with a long article by Rama entitled “Diez problemas para el novelista latinoamericano” (“Ten Problems for the Latin American Novelist”). Throughout its forty pages, he diagnosed the obstacles that the region’s literature faced, especially its economic structure, the cultural elites, the public, and the publishing industry. At the same time, Rama celebrated that recent Latin American novels were helping overcome these obstacles and pushing regional literature toward independence.52
In 1965, Rodríguez Monegal, then a visiting professor of literature at Harvard University, published several articles on the rise of the New Latin American Novel. He wrote “The New Novelists” and “New Latin American Writers” for highbrow journals Encounter and Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And for the general interest magazine Life en Español, he wrote “La nueva novela de Latinoamérica” (“The New Novel of Latin America”) and “Un espejo de espejos entrecruzados” (“A Mirror of Intersecting Mirrors”). In these articles, he introduced general and educated readers to the works of three generations of cosmopolitan and Latin American writers, including a brief reference to García Márquez in the last piece. The message of the critic could not be stronger: “A revolution . . . is happening in the world. For the first time in history, Latin American literature is starting to be acclaimed beyond the continental sphere.” And he added, “Thanks to Carpentier and Guimarães Rosa, to Onetti and Rulfo, as to Fuentes, Cortázar, and Vargas Llosa, the Latin American novel is beginning to take wing beyond its present linguistic limits. It is being translated, discovered, and discussed, as one hears, in Europe and the United States; the prizes and the editions are beginning to multiply. . . . Perhaps not since the introduction of the Russian novelists to nineteenth-century France, or of the modern Americans into postwar Europe, have similar potentialities existed, both for Latin American writers and for their potential readers overseas.”53
French critic Caillois expressed a similar opinion that year in an interview published in the world-famous newspaper Le Monde. “Latin American literature will be the great literature of tomorrow,” he said, “as Russian literature was the great literature at the end of the last century, [and] the literature of North America that of the years 25–40[;] now it is the time for Latin American literature. It is the one called to give us the masterpieces that we expect.” Months later, another prestigious periodical, the Times Literary Supplement, published an essay by English translator J. M. Cohen on the New Latin American Novel. Its opening statement stressed how much the novel in the region had changed: “Until the present decade [it was] at its best, provincial.” According to Cohen, writers from multiple generations were at the center of its transformation, such as Elena Garro, Vicente Leñero, Rulfo, Carpentier, Vargas Llosa, Onetti, Fuentes, Benedetti, García Márquez, and Cortázar, author of Hopscotch, “the first great novel of Spanish America.”54
Compared to what a handful of poorly distributed periodicals imagined in the 1920s, Latin American literature had traveled a long way by 1965. That year, when García Márquez started One Hundred Years of Solitude, the statements of writers and critics in periodicals read in more than twenty countries on three continents further convinced him that it was possible to imagine his ideas for a Caribbean story as something greater: a New Latin American Novel.
A COSMOPOLITAN AND LATIN AMERICAN NOVEL
The four decades during which literatura latinoamericana was imagined as a region-spanning literary tradition coincided with García Márquez’s birth, literary education, publication of his early works, and release of One Hundred Years of Solitude. As he was growing up, three generations of writers, critics, and gatekeepers of the publishing industry collaborated to create an audience for New Latin American Novels. One Hundred Years of Solitude benefited from this collaboration. Over two decades of compromise across generations with the principles of Latin Americanism and cosmopolitanism made it possible for a