Ascent to Glory, by Álvaro Santana-Acuña (introduction)

INTRODUCTION

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n the summer of 1965, an unknown writer was driving from Mexico City to Acapulco for a vacation with his wife and two children when, suddenly, a cow crossed the road in front of his car. He stopped abruptly. What happened next was a Newtonian moment, a miracle of the imagination. Right there on the road, in a stroke of brilliant insight, the writer came up with the first sentence of a novel that would change world literature: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Knowing there was not a second to lose, he turned his car around and rushed back home to Mexico City. He quit his job and locked himself up in his studio until he finished the novel. Debts skyrocketed as he spent months writing. He fell behind on rent payments, lived on the generosity of his friends and neighbors, and ended up pawning his car, his wife’s dowry jewels, and even his typewriter. Nothing could stop him. Eighteen months later, he emerged from his studio with a completed manuscript. When he went to the post office to mail it to a possible publisher in Argentina, the bankrupt writer realized that he did not have enough money to send the whole manuscript. He had to divide it into two parts and mailed only one part. When he arrived home, he looked at the pages in his hands and discovered his mistake: he had just mailed the second part of the manuscript, not the first as he had intended. What a terrible way, he might have thought, of pitching the novel that took him so much effort to write! Luckily, the pages that he sent astonished the publisher, who knew that the novel would be a great success and hurried to offer the

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writer a publishing contract. The writer was Gabriel García Márquez and the novel was One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad).1 This story about how this Colombian author created One Hundred Years of Solitude is in reality a fascinating legend, now passed on from generation to generation. Parts of this legend are true and other parts are not, like Isaac Newton’s story about discovering the theory of gravity after an apple fell on his head. What is remarkable about these cases is how legends often find in the pages of famous books and in the minds of people the most fertile soil to take root and grow. Shared and reinvented again and again, legends eventually become myths. One such myth refers to the artist who, after a stroke of inspiration, has to struggle financially in order to create a work of art. Poverty loomed over Mozart while composing works that revolutionized music, over Edgar Allan Poe while writing short stories that transformed modern literature, over Picasso while striving to sell his first cubist paintings, and over García Márquez while writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yet this myth of the creative genius cornered by economic hardship is more than a familiar story: it is a social pattern that ends up magnifying the difficulties that artists faced while creating their work. And as myths of this kind grow over time, they also obscure important details about how a work of art was really conceived and hence make it more challenging to explain how it turned into a classic.

The story of how One Hundred Years of Solitude actually came into being is even more fascinating than the legends and myths that surround this novel.

When it was released in 1967, neither the publisher nor the author expected much of it. They knew, as publishing giant Alfred A. Knopf once said, “many a novel is dead the day it is published.”2 Yet something unexpected happened.

This novel did not die the day of its publication. Instead, it started to live what would prove to be a long life. The story of how this novel about a remote Caribbean town has become the most famous work of Latin American literature and a global classic is spellbinding. Ascent to Glory seeks to tell this story, using especially numerous new sources, including the ones kept in García Márquez’s personal archives.

At the heart of One Hundred Years of Solitude is the tale of the Buendía family and their town of Macondo, which was the scene of natural catastrophes, civil wars, and magical incidents. In the end, as prophesized by a manuscript that generations of Buendías tried to decipher, a biblical hurricane destroyed Macondo after the last Buendía was born with a pig’s tail. To readers familiar with the global success of the novel since its publication in 1967, choosing it as the subject of this book comes as no surprise. One Hundred Years of Solitude is the work of Latin American literature par excellence. It is also the most

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read literary work in Spanish after Don Quixote. It has been translated into forty-nine languages, has sold over fifty million copies, and is listed among the top thirty best-selling literary works of all time. A 2009 survey among international writers published in the British newspaper the Guardian ranked it as the novel that has most influenced world literature over the past three decades.

This influence still continues and is largely due to the novel’s association with magical realism, a style that mixes stories of ordinary life with magical events.

This style has now expanded into a global genre with its own art market.

Magical realism is present in award-winning works and international best sellers such as The House of the Spirits by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende; Pig Tales by the French author Marie Darrieussecq; Big Breasts and Wide Hips by the Chinese author and Nobel laureate Mo Yan; Midnight’s Children by the Indian Salman Rushdie; Illywhacker by the Australian Peter Carey; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by the Japanese Haruki Murakami; and Beloved by the American author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. The influence of magical realism has grown so vast in literature that scholars and common readers use the term to talk about literary works written in different countries and decades before the birth of One Hundred Years of Solitude, books such as The Master and Margarita by the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov; Their Eyes Were Watching God by the American Zora Neale Hurston; or Ficciones by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. The reach of magical realism extends beyond literature. In cinema, this style is present in Hollywood productions, international blockbusters, Oscar winners, and indie movies such as Life of Pi, Amen, Birdman, The Shape of Water, Amélie, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Beasts of the Southern Wild. In these and other works of art, One Hundred Years of Solitude is customarily (and incorrectly) credited as the founding work of magical realism, an attribution that helps to maintain the global visibility of this novel generation after generation.

The global impact of One Hundred Years of Solitude now extends beyond its magical realist style. One finds the presence of this novel in paintings, operas, ballets, plays, cartoons, video games, social media, web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, scholarly publications, songs, drinks, household objects, public parks, restaurants, peoples’ names, and even distant celestial bodies. The 2020s started with the announcement that Macondo is the name of the star HD 93083, located about ninety-one light years away from the Earth. Orbiting this star is the extrasolar planet HD 93083 b, also known as Melquíades, a character in the novel.

Not coincidentally, one of the most familiar characteristics of the classic is its unstoppable power to be a part of our lives, often without our permission

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and often in formats that are different from the one set by its creator. One Hundred Years of Solitude is linked to one of the worst environmental accidents in history: the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 took place in a prospect called Macondo. If a classic is a social institution that shapes the taste and actions of artists, art industry gatekeepers, influencers, and consumers across generations, nations, and cultures, then One Hundred Years of Solitude has become one. Its total number of readers forms a community that, if it were a country, would be among the thirty most populous in the world.

THIS BOOK AT A GLANCE I wrote Ascent to Glory for two kinds of readers: first, fans of One Hundred Years of Solitude and García Márquez in general and, second, sociologists, historians, and literary scholars. To both audiences, this book offers a study of the novel’s conception, best-selling success, and consecration as a classic. Fans will find detailed answers to many of their questions about how the novel was written and how it became so famous globally. Sociologists, historians, and literary scholars will find that this book throws new light on key issues in their disciplines, such as value and cultural brokerage, genius and the universal, and power and world literature. (For more details on these and other issues, see the appendix.)

Chapters 1 through 4 cover the years 1920 through 1967. Using rare and new evidence from the García Márquez archives and libraries in five countries, these chapters examine the four decades prior to the novel’s publication. They study the ideas, conventions, styles, objects, people, and organizations that made One Hundred Years of Solitude imaginable as a work of art in the first place.

When García Márquez was born, the artistic principles of Latin Americanism and cosmopolitanism were spreading in Latin America, and years later they compelled him and his contemporaries to imagine and write their works as region-spanning Latin American literature. These principles were central to imagine his novel but not enough to produce it. The fate of One Hundred Years of Solitude could have been completely different without the rapid modernization of the Spanish-language book industry in the 1960s. Due to this booming industry, the novel was part of an avalanche of literary works that began in 1962. Their success created a space of imagination, production, and reception; thanks to this space (or niche), One Hundred Years of Solitude easily entered the publishing market five years later as a best seller. But how did García Márquez

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actually write the novel? While struggling to put it on paper for seventeen years, he learned many professional skills and conventions over two decades of traveling in more than ten countries and after joining several groups of artists. Collaborators in Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain assisted him as he was writing it. When the novel was published, it became an instant hit. It was the new product of the modernizing Spanish-language book industry and of the successful trend known as the New Latin American Novel. And it was written by a skillful and well-connected Latin American author.

Yet being a best seller guarantees nothing long-term. A work of art, no matter how successful was at first, is not born a classic but rather becomes one. Chapters 5 through 7 show what happened to One Hundred Years of Solitude over the next six decades, from 1967 to 2020. These chapters analyze data from more than ninety countries and forty-five languages to explain its ascent to glory. For this ascent to happen, scores of cultural brokers had to intervene. They facilitate the circulation of the work of art from one culture, country, and generation to another. These brokers are more than the usual suspects, critics and scholars. They are a broader constellation of people, groups, objects, and organizations quite often unrelated to one another. Yet their individual actions yield a collective result: the consecration as a classic work of art.

Thousands of brokers have done so for One Hundred Years of Solitude.

These cultural brokers are, for example, the Chinese reader that despises this novel as a story about “a bunch of lunatics”; a private company that named one of its cargo ships after Macondo, a vessel that now sails under the flag of Panama; the Japanese company that manufactures a US$130 alcoholic drink called “One Hundred Years of Solitude”; or an African American father who recommends this novel to his daughter and just happens to be the president of the United States.

To further understand how a literary work becomes a classic, chapter 8 studies five literary works that met the conditions to become global classics but did not do so. Their trajectories show us that the making of a classic work of art is never simply a Newtonian moment but a social story. In the case of One Hundred Years of Solitude, this story spans over a century and includes millions of readers and thousands of cultural brokers on seven continents, including Antarctica, where a British explorer read the novel during the first circumpolar navigation of the Earth. More generally, the making of a classic is a social story that can help us understand why it is so difficult to imagine social life without classics. To preserve classics, we bury them deep down within the Earth and we even launch them into outer space. Digitized

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copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Edvard Munch’s The Scream are protected in the Doomsday Vault, constructed in the event of an apocalypse on our planet. In this vault, these and other classics are stored within the permafrost of an abandoned coal mine in Norway’s Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. And musical selections from classics such as Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony can be played from a golden record attached to the outside of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts, launched into the depths of space where no human has ever been.

“García Márquez’s novel used the writer’s own past to imagine, between the lines, a better future. As one of those sociologists who is a ‘historian of the present,’ Santana-Acuña has reflected the Colombian writer’s singular achievement. I believe his readers will be inspired to use this book, which is full of new ideas, to think more lucidly about the unusually challenging future that now lies before us, both in literature and in life.”

—Gerald Martin, author of Gabriel García Márquez: A Life

“I have been waiting for this book. One Hundred Years of Solitude is arguably the most influential novel of the last fifty years, but how did that happen? Santana-Acuña’s extraordinary feat is to lay bare the mechanisms through which a great work of fiction becomes a whole culture. He has probably given us the definitive account of that miracle.”

—Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Shape of the Ruins: A Novel

A S C N T T O G L O RY

—Michèle Lamont, past president of the American Sociological Association

How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic

“In this work of love and true scholarship, Santana-Acuña opens new vistas for how to make sense of world literature today. In beautifully crafted prose, his meticulous analysis delights and enlightens about how it happens that creative work first gets legs and goes on to take new life and meaning again and again, for different people across many contexts and times. Academics and the general public alike will emerge from Ascent to Glory with a sense of satisfaction and improved understanding. I recommend it to all those who appreciate global works of art, literary or otherwise, or literature tout court.”

SANTA NA-ACUÑA

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scent to Glory is a groundbreaking study of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, from the moment Gabriel García Márquez had the idea for it to its consecration worldwide. Álvaro Santana-Acuña goes beyond the legends that surround this book to explain how its author actually wrote it and to show how thousands of people and organizations have helped it to become a global classic.

A SC NT TO GLORY How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic

Álvaro Santana-Acuña is an assistant professor of sociology at Whitman College.

Cover design: Lisa Hamm Cover images: Canary shape: detail from “Gabriel García Márquez” by Wolf Gang, CC BY-SA 2.0. House shape: detail from the first page of typescript of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1966), Harry Ransom Center. Tree shape: detail from Vicente Rojo’s cover for One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Butterfly shape: detail from the cover of the first edition of Leaf Storm (1955).

ISBN: 978-0-231-18432-8

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

CO L U M B I A

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK cup.columbia.edu

ÁLVARO SANTANA-ACUÑA