More importantly, the Barranquilla Group (and also his friends in Cartagena) advised García Márquez on how to draw inspiration at different levels from other writers. The plot, techniques, and contents of Leaf Storm, García Márquez’s first novella, show his assimilation of the group’s conventions about how to write literature. He started to write Leaf Storm in the late 1940s and published it in 1955. This novella combines the dramatic fact of an unburied corpse, taken from Sophocles’s Antigone, the Ancient Greek classic from the fifth century BC, and Faulkner’s modernist techniques and style in As I Lay Dying (1930).17 The choice of Antigone was not an accident. Multiple versions of this play were available in the region because, since the nineteenth century, major writers had imagined it as a Latin American tragedy.18 In 1951, when García Márquez was writing his novella, Argentine writer Leopoldo Marechal premiered a successful adaptation in Buenos Aires, entitled Antigone Vélez, which was set in the Argentine lowlands known as the Pampas. Whereas Antigone was a model of Latin Americanism, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying served as a model of cosmopolitanism. Thus, the choice of this novel was not an accident either. Faulkner’s story is set in the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County. The story is narrated from fifteen different points of view, using stream of consciousness and interior monologues, among other techniques. García Márquez’s Leaf Storm is his first book set in the imaginary village of Macondo (the center of most of his fiction until after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude). The story is narrated from three points of view and uses Faulknerian stream of consciousness and interior monologues.19
Regarding the novella’s style, group members helped García Márquez develop it. Its style, naturalist and descriptive, had to be different from the subjectivity narrative of writers like Marcel Proust or the omniscient narrator as in the works of Gustave Flaubert. Rather, García Márquez (and the group) followed Faulkner’s style. In one of his first interviews, he proudly stated that he wanted to do something “similar to Faulkner’s in his work As I Lay Dying.’ ”20 In reality, what he did was not so original. Faulkner was a highly acclaimed author in Latin America and winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. As shown in chapter 1, Faulkner not only influenced García Márquez’s local literary groups in Barranquilla and Cartagena but also shaped senior, mid-career, and emerging writers in the region that the young García Márquez read during his formative years: Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay), João Guimarães Rosa (Brazil), Ernesto Sábato (Argentina), Juan Rulfo (Mexico), Alejo Carpentier (Cuba), Fuentes (Mexico), and Vargas Llosa (Peru). By the time García Márquez started writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, he was friends with most of these writers or had met them at professional conferences. They, in return, praised how he had drawn from Faulkner’s style in his work.
García Márquez did not learn on his own how to follow Faulkner’s writing method; members of the Barranquilla Group used it in their own writing as well. “We were seeing a reality,” the writer recalled, “and we wanted to tell it and we knew that the European method did not work, nor the traditional Spanish method; and suddenly we find out that the most appropriate to tell this reality is the Faulknerian method. At the end, this is not very unusual because I don’t forget that Yoknapatawpha County has shores in the Caribbean Sea; so he is a Latin American writer somehow.”
Reframing Faulkner as a Latin American writer helped García Márquez understand at the onset of his career that local Latin American stories and cosmopolitanism were not opposites in literature. As he said after publishing Leaf Storm in 1955, “My novel es costumbrista,” a style that tells stories grounded in everyday life, customs, and manners. For him, “Don Quixote is costumbrista. . . . So, I can call costumbrista any work that has the same purpose, that is, one that makes the local known within the universal.” He added that he had just started writing a new novel, Los catorce días de la semana (The Fourteen Days of the Week), which would be also costumbrista in its universal dimension. Ten years later, in 1965, when he started writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, the idea of a universal costumbrismo was fully rooted in his literary imagination. As he then explained in an interview, every great novelist is “in a certain sense regionalist. And even more costumbrista.”21
For a young writer interested in rural realist fiction, the discovery of the Latin American Faulkner was crucial in his literary education. With the assistance of his friends in Cartagena and Barranquilla, García Márquez made the connection between the rural south of the United States in Faulkner’s work and his personal experience growing up in the rural village of Aracataca. To further understand these connections, he visited other parts of the Magdalena Department, the Valley of Upar, and La Guajira as an itinerant book salesman in 1953 and 1954. “These trips,” he indicated, “ended up revealing to me the magic of a world without which my novels would not have been possible today.” The importance of the rural in his literary imagination was quite clear in the titles and contents of his novellas at the time. A draft of Leaf Storm was supposedly called Ya cortamos el heno (We Already Cut the Hay) and his third novella, In Evil Hour, was first entitled En este pueblo de mierda (In This Shit-Heap of a Town).22
Along with Faulkner, Hemingway was another writer who helped García Márquez imagine life in a literary way. As he said, “Hemingway taught me that you can invent whatever you want, as long as you make people believe in it.” He learned from Hemingway that key to the creative process was the manner in which a story is told, not just the story itself.23 And again his friends in Barranquilla and Cartagena helped him to write like Hemingway, as he intended, for example, in “The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock.” He published this short story in 1950. But his friends were not convinced by it. They advised him to soften the pornographic tone and rework the dialogue and the ending. In their opinion, these changes were necessary if he wanted to achieve Hemingway’s objective style, which only describes the characters and their conduct as an observer would see them. To comply with how his collaborators interpreted Hemingway’s style, García Márquez could not write about the character’s interior world and subjectivity, something that he did in some of his early short stories inspired by Kafka’s style. The only thing that García Márquez could do was to stick to the facts that the writer could see, as if he were a news reporter. Following his friends’ feedback, he revised the short story and published it again two years later in the literary supplement of El Espectador. On the same page, he published “Auto-Crítica” (“Self-Criticism”).24 In this letter, he apologized to readers for writing dialogue that was too correct and whose style was more similar to Hemingway’s than to his. Therefore, the publication of “The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock” and “Auto-Crítica” was a pivotal moment in his education as a writer. With the help of his collaborators, he was learning how to apply the literary styles of different authors to his work. By 1952, he could combine Hemingway’s realism with the fantastic elements that appeared in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (which he read in Latin American Spanish). This combination of realism and fantasy became a key feature of the style of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Along with Hemingway and Faulkner, other writers were a part of García Márquez’s literary imagination: Woolf, Huxley, Caldwell, Dos Passos, Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, Teodoro Dreiser, Robert Ripley, and Curzio Malaparte.25 He read works by most of them in translations into Latin American Spanish. This detail is important because, like sculptors draw inspiration from live models, his friends recall that García Márquez copied by hand or memorized paragraphs from several of these literary works, such as Woolf’s Orlando and Joyce’s Ulysses, which inspired him for aesthetic and technical reasons. Passages from these and other works then lived in his literary imagination and in the imagination of his Latin American peers. The fact that these writers and their works inspired many of García Márquez’s peers secured his admission a decade later into literary circles that controlled the New Latin American Novel. These circles included Fuentes—a fan of Faulkner’s novels and whose style