One Hundred Years of Solitude gained even more visibility because it came out at the end of this period of literary effervescence, first known as the New Latin American Novel and later as the Latin American Boom. The avalanche of best-selling novels started in 1962 with the publication of Explosion in a Cathedral in Cuba, The Death of Artemio Cruz in Mexico, and Bomarzo in Argentina. It continued the following year with the release of The Time of the Hero in Spain and Hopscotch in Argentina. The avalanche of best-selling titles had just started. By 1967, these and other novels paved the way to label and market One Hundred Years of Solitude as a Latin American novel that could easily achieve regional and international success. Thus, the claim that this novel inaugurated the age of the New Latin American Novel or Latin American Boom is inaccurate.
Counterfactually, if One Hundred Years of Solitude had been published in the 1920s and 1930s, it would have passed as a work of regionalista literature, such as The Vortex by J. E. Rivera and Los Sangurimas by de la Cuadra. If García Márquez had written his novel in the 1940s and 1950s, it would have received little regional attention and no international acclaim, which occurred with Pedro Páramo, the modernist novella by Rulfo, and The Kingdom of This World, the magical realist novel by Carpentier. At best, readers and critics would have read One Hundred Years of Solitude as a precursor of the New Latin American Novel, just as they read Rulfo’s and Carpentier’s books.55
One Hundred Years of Solitude, however, came out in the 1960s, when a region-spanning literature was growing and attracting regional and international readers. Being at the center of this expansion was crucial to the novel’s early success. By April 1967, one month before its publication, critic Rodríguez Monegal wrote a note about it in Mundo Nuevo and said, “It does not represent the literature of a single Latin American nation, but of all Latin America,” like the work of Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Carpentier, and Sábato. A month later, the cover of Primera Plana magazine presented One Hundred Years of Solitude to its quarter of a million readers as “The Great Novel of America.”56
CONCLUSION
Latin American literature came into existence as a region-spanning tradition in a multiethnic, multilingual, and multinational niche. Its boundaries did not match those of the Latin American region or a national literary field. García Márquez imagined One Hundred Years of Solitude as a work of art inside this niche. Three generations of writers, critics, and publishers embraced the principles of cosmopolitanism and Latin Americanism, which helped imagine literary texts such as García Márquez’s novel. These generations’ collaboration started in earnest in the 1940s thanks to a cultural void that the Spanish Civil War and World War II left in the region. This void strengthened the region’s cultural autonomy by creating numerous regional and international organizations. With this cultural autonomy in full swing in the 1960s, attention to the region soared with the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. Latin America had had other moments of cultural effervescence that shaped the imagination of writers prior to the 1960s, such as modernismo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But unlike previous moments, the modernization of the Spanish-language publishing industry was a central factor that helped to move ideas for works of art beyond the stage of imagination into the stage of production. As the next chapter shows, One Hundred Years of Solitude was also a big beneficiary of this modernization.
THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY MODERNIZES
I waited for many years for a continental editor.
For me, it is like the achievement of an old dream.
—García Márquez after signing with Sudamericana Press1
When One Hundred Years of Solitude hit the market in 1967, the book industry in Spanish was booming. This situation was unimaginable for most writers and critics just a few years before. “How can literature exist,” writer Mario Vargas Llosa asked, “in countries where there are no publishing houses, where there are no literary publications, where if you want to publish a book you must finance it yourself?” Although he did not mention that book piracy was also rampant in these countries, his words describe well the situation of literary publishing in most of Latin America before the 1960s. Until then, the publishing industry was small and divided into national containers. For decades, low print runs weakened the circulation of literature in the region and beyond. In Mexico and Argentina, which published more titles than the rest of Latin American countries combined, the print run of most literary books was under five thousand copies. In Spain, it was three thousand.2
The standard literary book faced an even harsher reality on both sides of the Atlantic: print runs of one thousand copies. Of his first book, Los días enmascarados (The Masked Days), published in Mexico in 1954, Carlos Fuentes sold all five hundred copies printed. That number was “considered a wild success,” as he recalled on a TV interview with a smile on his face. “Today,” he added, “a novel easily sells fifty thousand copies.” This change in book sales described by Fuentes occurred abruptly in the 1960s, when García Márquez was a rising literary star. The modernization of the Spanish-language publishing industry turned the ideas and manuscripts of Latin American authors into commodities, mostly books, which consumers were eager to buy. No longer were these consumers a “lettered minority” of local educated elites and peer writers. As illiteracy rates dropped across the region, these new consumers were an expanding audience of university students and middle-class readers. And this modernization meant many authors were able to live off their writing. In comparison to the publishing boom in the 1960s, “Not even Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, or Miguel Ángel Asturias, giants from an earlier generation,” as scholar Gerald Martin puts it, “could have dreamed of such favorable terms of trade when they first came to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s.”3
What usually goes unsaid is that it would have been inconceivable for novels such as One Hundred Years Solitude to reach the stage of production if gatekeepers of the Spanish-language publishing industry—in particular literary agents, acquisition editors, and publishers—had not participated actively in the literary imagination that these writers believed in. Put differently, the organizational conditions in which gatekeepers made their decisions about what to publish mattered. And it also mattered a great deal how their decisions were influenced by writers’ aesthetic beliefs. Therefore, these gatekeepers were not simply profit seekers; they were also believers. They came to believe in their clients’ agenda for Latin American literature. And to help their clients move their literary works from the imagination stage into production and circulation, gatekeepers did two things effectively. They made sure, first, that these literary works were standardized and, second, that they circulated transnationally.
Regarding standardization, gatekeepers used their resources to market the works by writers of three generations as if they belonged to a single literary movement. By signing some writers (as opposed to others), gatekeepers helped to shape the literary mainstream in the region in the 1960s. This standardization of the publishing agenda began the creation of a literary tradition (and region-spanning nationalism) that complemented the agenda found in region-spanning periodicals. Yet gatekeepers did more than use their resources to publish Latin American writers. In searching for potential artists in the region, gatekeepers were transformed by the imagination of the writers, especially by the literary viewpoint of cosmopolitan Latin Americanism. Once gatekeepers believed in this viewpoint, they helped writers transform it into a commercial brand. In doing so, gatekeepers started to participate in (and influence) writers’ imaginations. Thanks to this convergence between writers and gatekeepers, the norms, principles, and conventions that writers had developed in the stage of imagination did not die, so to speak, in front of gatekeepers’ gates. Rather, such norms, principles, and conventions became part of the imagination of gatekeepers, who ought