In practical terms, the cultural void meant that neither Spain nor the rest of Europe could offer any worthy literary ideas to draw inspiration from. Western literature, as Fuentes wrote, “lost its universality.” Writers in the region decided to favor their own cultural trends. This inward look boosted the region’s aesthetic liberation among writers, critics, scholars, and publishers. Their liberation brought about a region-spanning Latin American literature. It was during the 1940s when writers such as Carpentier and Asturias deepened their commitment to free the novel from nineteenth-century realism, that is, from the viewpoint of the Western, bourgeois, third person, and omniscient narrator. Instead, they paid attention to local peoples—including indigenous peoples and slaves—and experimented with narrative techniques, such as mixing descriptions of reality with marvelous and fantastic stories.29 (The inward look during this decade coincided with a sudden growth of the Argentine publishing industry; see next chapter).
Not coincidentally, it was in the 1940s when two terms that came to define the region’s literature took off. The first term was magical realism, which Uslar Pietri and Carpentier started to apply to literature in 1948, as mentioned earlier. The second term was literatura latinoamericana. During this decade, references to this latter term as well as to literatura hispanoamericana and literatura iberoamericana grew in book publications, as figures 1.1 and 1.2 show. As a result of these region-spanning developments, scholars rightly claim that there was a mini boom of Latin American literature in the 1940s. (But they have not seen the robust connection between this early boom and the rise of these terms.) At that time, Eduardo Zalamea Borda, Uslar Pietri, Carpentier, Guimarães Rosa, Asturias, Onetti, Bioy Casares, and Borges published work that helped convince peers, critics, and common readers that “Latin America could produce great literature.”30
During this cultural void, the search for inspiration not only turned to Latin America but also to the United States. Back then, few writers were more favorably received than Faulkner, to the point that he became a Latin American author thanks to numerous translations into Latin American Spanish (even Brazilian writers read his works in these translations). Faulkner attracted many writers for his literary language. Critics in the United States, however, disliked his language. For example, critic Allen Tate called him, pejoratively, “a Dixie Gongorist.” By Gongorist, Tate referred to writer Luis de Góngora. He was active during the Spanish Golden Age and became one of Spain’s most influential poets of all time. Like Faulkner, Góngora achieved fame for his sophisticated baroque style known as Gongorism. It was an original style that used ostentatious language, embellished metaphors, and convoluted syntactical order. As Tate observed, Faulkner’s complex style was similar to Góngora’s. Translations of Faulkner’s works into Latin American Spanish brought this aesthetic connection to the surface. And in his complex prose, reminiscent of the baroque, several generations of Latin American writers found a literary model for their own works. These writers included Jorge Icaza, J. E. Rivera, C. Alegría, Gallegos, Carpentier, Fuentes, Borges, Onetti, Rulfo, and young García Márquez. For them, Faulkner’s Latin Americanized language was an alternative to Castilian Spanish. Such language was a true means of aesthetic liberation. As Fuentes put it, “the baroque, Alejo Carpentier once told me, is the language of the people who, unaware of the truth, seek it eagerly.”31
García Márquez imitated Faulkner’s style in his first novella, published in 1955, when he was twenty-eight. And a decade later, as he was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, Carpentier and Fuentes advised him on how to use Latin American neo-baroque. Even common readers first heard about García Márquez through his connection to Faulkner. The summer of 1965, when he decided to start this novel, the magazine Life en Español, sold in Latin America, the United States, and Spain, mentioned his books in an article about the influence of Faulkner on Latin American writers.
THE LETTERED REGION AND THE CULTURAL COLD WAR
During World War II, unlike Europe, Latin America lived a period of relative peace and expansion of social democracy, with Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo functioning as cultural centers. These favorable political conditions helped expand the means of cultural production, including publishing houses, translations, textbooks and anthologies, academic scholarship and literary criticism, institutes and foundations, conferences, awards, and periodicals. Under this new organizational umbrella, numerous literary publishers, critics, and scholars insisted on how unique the region’s literature was—it was something different from the sum of national literatures.32
New and refurbished institutes and foundations dedicated to the region’s culture and literature helped develop this regional literary identity. These included the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana and Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos. Growing international resources, including awards and fellowships, were key to removing writers’ regional isolation. Up until the 1950s, most writers knew few colleagues from other countries personally. Networks were mainly individual-based, as it was the case even for famous regional writers, such as Rodó and Darío. But regular professional meetings, symposia, seminars, and conferences started to create a transnational network of writers. And many of them would identify with the idea of a Latin American literature and tried to speak with a homogeneous voice. Starting in 1954 with the first International Congress of Ibero-American Literature, meetings brought together writers and critics from the three generations and most countries in the region. Donoso, then an unknown, young writer, commented on the 1962 Congress of Intellectuals in Chile: “The topic . . . that clearly prevailed was the general complaint that Latin Americans knew European and North American literature perfectly, along with that of our countries [but] we almost completely ignored the contemporary literatures of the other countries of the continent.” As part of the effort to end this regional separation, members of the three generations from twelve countries signed an open letter at the congress. “Overcoming our isolation, our mutual ignorance,” their letter stated, “is to find our common, united voice and grant it the strength, presence, and dissemination that our age—and the destiny of our peoples—demand.”33
The Cuban Revolution endorsed this idea of a region-spanning literature and offered a wealth of resources to promote it. As critic Harss said about the revolution, “The Latin American novelist is less interested in its political and economic ends than in its strength. [The revolution] is the realization of a deep socio-cultural transformation within a continent that finally begins to define itself.” Casa de las Américas (literally, the House of the Americas) was in charge of spreading the cultural ideals of the revolution in Latin America. This political and cultural organization opened four months after the triumph of the revolution. It sought to achieve the region’s cultural independence from outside forces and its unity according to the ideals of the revolution. To do so, it organized a regional literary award and published a magazine, Casa de las Américas. Already in its first issue, it featured works by members of the three generations. During the 1960s, it promoted the New Latin American Novel and it was mandatory reading for the region’s cultural establishment until the revolution started to purge critical intellectuals the following decade. Also, Casa de las Américas had a library that organized café-conversatorios (coffee-round tables), in which works by Alfonso Reyes, José Bianco, and García Márquez (Big Mama’s Funeral), among others, were read and promoted as Latin American literature. In 1968, this publisher released the first international edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude in its collection Literatura latinoamericana (including blurbs by Vargas Llosa, Rama, and the Times Literary Supplement). Soon, these and other cultural activities of the revolution attracted the world’s attention to Latin America. As Spanish literary critic Castellet said, “Through Cuba we began to understand the Latin American phenomena and Latin American literature much better, because, first, we began to understand what we could call this dynamic and militant unity of Latin American literature.” Casa de las Américas responded to this international interest by organizing big events such as the Congreso Cultural in Havana in 1968. It gathered five hundred delegates from seventy countries, such as Aimé Césaire, Italo Calvino, Carpentier, Cortázar, and Vargas Llosa.34
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