There is not enough evidence to fully explain why Seix Barral did not publish this novel, especially since Balcells was aware of the publisher’s promotion of Latin American writers. García Márquez certainly offered the novel to Seix Barral. In a letter to Fuentes in November 1965, García Márquez asked for his advice: Should he opt for Sudamericana or Barral? Fuentes had no doubts: Barral. “Sudamericana,” he explained to García Márquez, “puts your work to circulate only in the Latin American world . . . with Barral you have already made your way to translations and presence in Europe and the United States.” García Márquez asked for Fuentes’s recommendation because he was already in conversations with both publishers and wanted to make the best decision. But Seix Barral finally declined to publish it. According to Carlos Barral, he did so “because of a misunderstanding. I did not answer a telegram punctually, and neither because of an editorial error nor because of a clumsy reading of the manuscript—which I never saw—as has been maliciously claimed.”72
This statement agrees with the available evidence. In the fall of 1965 and under Balcells’s watch, Barral probably received a telegram or letter from García Márquez offering One Hundred Years of Solitude to him. So, the writer approached Barral—as he did with Sudamericana—when he had just started the novel, not with a full manuscript in hand. In October, he was already talking with Barral. But that ceased by February 1966, the same month he asked Fuentes to send three chapters of the book to Sudamericana (after first giving them to Fuentes to know his opinion). Nowhere in this or other letters did García Márquez mention anything else about conversations with Seix Barral. By then, Sudamericana was his preferred publisher. Why? García Márquez was not only interested in finding a publisher for his novel in progress. He wanted to sign with one publisher that could reunite all his books, currently scattered among local publishers. Sudamericana accepted this condition by March 1966. Indeed, two months before, Guillermo Schavelzon, acquisitions editor of the Argentine publisher Jorge Álvarez, traveled to Mexico City. Looking for new clients, he met with García Márquez, who told Schavelzon that he was working on a “long-term project.” The writer offered Schavelzon the rights of Big Mama’s Funeral. They signed a publishing agreement. But sometime in March, the writer asked Jorge Álvarez to cancel the agreement. He had already reached a better deal with Sudamericana, which would publish all his works, including One Hundred Years of Solitude. Thus, this evidence suggests that the novel was not finished when Sudamericana decided to publish it. And Barral’s practice, moreover, was to look at full manuscripts, not book proposals or advance chapters. More fundamentally, in terms of aesthetics and commercial impact, Barral did not know García Márquez’s work that well in 1966. (His wife, Yvonne Hortet, who was a literary agent, apparently did.) And also, García Márquez did not fit Barral’s taste, which was quite different from Porrúa’s. Whereas Porrúa saw in this novel a Latin American family saga full of fantasy, Barral might have seen García Márquez as a rural, regionalist writer and not as an urban novelist. Barral preferred publishing stories centered in cities.73
Even if Seix Barral did not publish One Hundred Years of Solitude, the company did something essential for its success: it set the conditions for its diffusion in Spain as a New Latin American Novel. As such, this novel easily bypassed censorship and was marketed to middle-class and college audiences. For the past seven years, the reading public had steadily developed a taste for books marketed as New Latin American Novels, many of which Barral published. The commercial success of One Hundred Years of Solitude overseas further sped up censors’ approval. The Spanish government did not like the idea that best-selling books from the Latin American market would leave small profits to the national book industry. As a result, EDHASA, Sudamericana’s branch in Spain, started to print and sell García Márquez’s works in the country.
Under the new guidelines set by the printing and publishing law of 1966, censors found nothing that was ideologically punishable in One Hundred Years of Solitude. According to them, “it does not defend a thesis but . . . simply describes unsuitable situations without approving or condemning them.” Censors, in fact, praised its objective storytelling. It pleased them that One Hundred Years of Solitude did not contain the kind of Creole jargon they had to correct. Rather, the novel used a classic and even archaic language that adapted to censors’ taste for good Castilian Spanish. Thus, the censor concluded, “As a novel, it is very good.” It is worth pointing out that censors framed One Hundred Years of Solitude neither as fantasy literature (as it was originally received, see chapter 4) nor as magical realism (as it was labeled later, see chapter 6). Instead, they referred to it as a realist novel. As the censor wrote in a report, it offers “the most exact idea possible of the low and middle-class Spanish-American society.”74 Furthermore, censors did not pay attention to magical events in the novel at all. This is important because it shows that a preexisting cultural framework influenced the evaluation of censors. And they evaluated the novel based on the literary style that dominated their cultural framework: Spain’s down-to-earth social realism.75 Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, this novel attracted the attention of Sudamericana’s acquisitions editor because it reminded him of fantasy literature. In sum, the opposite reactions of gatekeepers to this novel are a telling example of how aesthetic interpretation can be in the eye of the beholder and not automatically be present in the text itself.
One Hundred Years of Solitude bypassed official censorship in Spain, but not that of self-appointed censors. José Vernet Mateu, a resident of Barcelona, wrote a harsh letter to the Francoist Minister of Information. He complained about the popularity of this “repugnant . . . disgusting book.” His letter reveals the obstacles that this novel would have faced if it had been published in Spain before the printing and publishing law of 1966. “I wonder,” Mr. Vernet wrote, “in my ignorance as a simple man in the street, how is it possible for a book so filthy, so destructive of Christian morality, so brutalizing to have found an expedite path toward publication in Spain?” And he added that he did not understand that this book “could serve as a required textbook for sixteen-year-old boys, to whom it literally corrupts and brutalizes.”76 So he urged Francoist censors to sequester the book. Mr. Vernet was not off target. One Hundred Years of Solitude contains sexually explicit passages, critical comments about the Catholic Church, and descriptions of incest, authoritarian military actions, and violence that astonished readers. (Communist censors deleted incestuous passages in the Soviet Union, but not in Francoist Spain.) Counterfactually, if this novel were published in Spain before the law of 1966, it would have faced tougher censorship. At that time, as in the case of Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers and Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night, its publication could have been delayed and One Hundred Years of Solitude could have lost the momentum of the New Latin American Novel. Instead, this book fully benefited from it.
CONCLUSION
Government officials (censors included), publishers, literary agents, book distributors, and booksellers in Latin American and Spain collaborated in the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude. They helped to produce this novel from multiple centers, especially Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. In other words, they were agents of transatlantic print capitalism whose boundaries did not match those of a Latin American field of cultural production, a national publishing industry, or the conventions of a single art world. Rather, these agents repeatedly crossed regional, national, and local boundaries. Their fluid transnational circulation is key to understanding the production of One Hundred Years of Solitude and its immediate success—not just regionally, something materially impossible for most novels