Along with nature, language was the second ingredient of the literary imagination of cosmopolitanism and Latin Americanism. Literary texts needed to have a common language in order to make these two principles concrete. The Spanish language turned out to be an obstacle. In the decades prior to the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a growing number of writers were frustrated about having to write in Spanish from Spain. As Fuentes denounced, “The Spanish American does not feel that he owns a language, he suffers a foreign language, that of the conqueror, that of the lord, that of the academies. . . . The history of Latin America is that of a dis-possession of language.” Likewise, critic Rama said, “The cultivated American man [feels] that he speaks, applies, manifests, exists, in a language he has not invented and that, for the same reason, does not belong entirely to him.”14
Writers such as Peruvian José María Arguedas and Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos sought to overcome the obstacle of this colonial language by drawing from indigenous words, metaphors, sayings, and narrative structures. But in a region with over fifty indigenous languages, one of them could not help to build the region’s literary tradition. By the late 1950s, it was clear to writers that the region’s own literary language had to be Spanish but a different kind of Spanish: neo-baroque. The roots of this alternative language were in the seventeenth-century Spanish of the so-called Golden Age. Back then, Miguel de Cervantes, Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo, and Lope de Vega, among other writers, published their classic works. In Latin America, the baroque was the first regional cultural movement during the colonial era, with authors such as Fray Juan de Barrenechea y Albis, Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Latin American writers from Borges to Octavio Paz to García Márquez read and admired the baroque language of their counterparts from the Golden Age. Three centuries later, writers like Fuentes praised “the [b]aroque [as] the language of our great literary tradition.” Fuentes himself, Carpentier, and other writers and critics relabeled this language as neo-baroque to distinguish the Spanish of Latin American literature from the Spanish of Spain’s literature. In this distinctive kind of Spanish, writers started to find a stronger Latin American identity than in their nationality. As critic Luis Harss said, referring to what some Latin American authors were trying to achieve in the 1950s and 1960s, “All these people lived more in the language than in the country.” (In the 1960s censors in Spain belittled this Latin American Spanish of literary works as “Creole jargon” and tried to repress the political and cultural agenda behind this language.)15
Unlike mainstream literature in Spain, Latin America’s neo-baroque paid attention to adjective usage (adjectivación) and reverie (ensoñación). In the 1940s it gave birth to literatura fantástica and “the marvelous real” (an effort to reconcile the region’s realism with the marvelous in its everyday life). This language started to appear in the mid-career works of Asturias, Borges, Carpentier, Uslar Pietri, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Pablo Neruda. Their literary language spread among the region’s cultural establishment and budding writers in Julio Cortázar’s and García Márquez’s generations. And the diffusion of this language among them favored the success of literatura latinoamericana in the 1960s. (As the next chapter shows, readers, too, developed a taste for this Latin American language, which mainstream publishers favored.)
By the late 1950s, regional support for Latin Americanism and cosmopolitanism grew. The result was the collective imagination of literary works that shared an interest for “the historical formation of Latin America, the relation between that history and other mythical versions, and the contributions of both to contemporary Latin American identity.”16 These principles of cosmopolitanism and Latin Americanism permeate One Hundred Years of Solitude, with its synthesis of exuberant Latin American nature, neo-baroque language, and countless cosmopolitan references, from the Bible to Don Quixote to Faulkner’s modernism.
THREE GENERATIONS COLLABORATE
Intellectual principles such as cosmopolitanism and Latin Americanism do not function automatically; they need loyal users.17 The successful application of these principles to literary texts was the achievement of neither a group of talented authors nor of a single generation. It was the result of an unprecedented collaboration among three consecutive generations of writers, critics, and publishing industry gatekeepers. They were born between 1895 and 1936 and worked in over fifteen countries on three continents. With the assistance of critics and publishers, writers collaborated in magazines, organizations, and meetings. These platforms brought together, as if they were part of a single region-spanning tradition, literary works published in twenty countries, four centuries, and two major languages, Spanish and Portuguese. This collaboration caused a “synchronous flattening of the history of American narrative,” to use the words of critic Rama. Of a similar opinion was writer Carpentier, who referred to “the coincidence at a given time, in the span of about twenty years, of a group of almost contemporary novelists.”18 Readers also started to consume the works of three generations.
A basic consensus about what counted as true Latin American literature united what I call the Short Form, Hybrid, and Novel Generations. Each generation is named after the literary format that defined the works of its most influential members.19 The Short Form Generation was born between 1895 and 1910. Its members mostly wrote poetry and short stories. Among its key members were Borges (Argentina), Asturias (Guatemala), Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, and Carpentier (Cuba), Neruda (Chile), Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay), and João Guimarães Rosa (Brazil). The Hybrid Generation was born between 1911 and 1921. Its members combined the writing of short forms of literature (poetry and short stories) with long forms (books of essays and novels). This generation included Cortázar, Ernesto Sábato, and Bioy Casares (Argentina), Rulfo and Paz (Mexico), Mario Benedetti (Uruguay), and Jorge Amado (Brazil). The Novel Generation was born between 1922 and 1936. Its writers’ main works were novels. The novel format defined this generation’s professional identity and how readers and critics first and foremost remember these writers, who included García Márquez (Colombia), Fuentes (Mexico), José Donoso and Jorge Edwards (Chile), Vargas Llosa (Peru), Manuel Puig (Argentina), and Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba).
Previous research has stressed intra- and intergenerational conflict among these writers and overlooked the depth of their collaboration.20 Yet sustained cooperation across generations until the 1970s was key in putting Latin American literature on the map of world literature. The collaboration happened when the principles of cosmopolitanism and Latin Americanism circulated through an intricate network of strong and weak ties among generations that covered four decades and three continents. In committing to these principles, the three generations helped create an intellectual and professional space that made it possible for novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude to be imagined as a cosmopolitan, Latin American work of art, not as a local or regionalist one. (The modernizing publishing industry further strengthened this network, as the next chapter shows.)
A community of readers, including the budding writer García Márquez, was the first step to create a collaborative network among generations. Writers from the three generations, as critic Harss put it, “read and admired each other. That was the New Latin American Novel of those years. In reality, it had not existed before at a continental level.” A shared group of readings and favorite authors can help to unify professional literary practice. And these generations shared a cosmopolitan taste for international literature by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Scott Fitzgerald, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, and especially William Faulkner, as well as regional literature by Sarmiento, Martí, Rodó, and Darío in particular. They also read the same translations of foreign books and, collaboratively, regional authors managed these translations. Famously, Borges and his literary circle, which included Victoria Ocampo, José Bianco, and Bioy Casares, translated major modernist works of Faulkner, Woolf, and Kafka into Latin American Spanish.21