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Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was

Written and Became a Global Classic

Book · August 2020

DOI: 10.7312/sant18432

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 ÁLVARO
SANTANA-ACUÑA

ASCENT TO GLORY

How One Hundred Years of Solitude

Was Written and Became
a Global Classic

Columbia University Press

New York

© Columbia University Press

 Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2020 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Santana-Acuña, Álvaro, author.
Title: Ascent to glory : how One hundred years of solitude was written and became a
global classic / Álvaro Santana-Acuña.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019056923 (print) | LCCN 2019056924 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780231184328 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231184335 (trade paperback) |
ISBN 9780231545433 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: García Márquez, Gabriel, 1927-2014. Cien años de soledad.
Classification: LCC PQ8180.17.A73 C5377 2020 (print) |
LCC PQ8180.17.A73 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056923
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056924

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent

and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design: Lisa Hamm
Canary shape: detail from “Gabriel García Márquez” by Wolf Gang, CC BY-SA 2.0.
House shape: detail from 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 cover of first edition of Leaf Storm (1955).

© Columbia University Press

 CONTENTS

Introduction 1

PART I FROM THE IDEA TO THE BOOK 7

1 Imagining a Work of Art 11

2 The Publishing Industry Modernizes 40
3 A Novel in Search of an Author 73
4 Networked Creativity and the Making
of a Work of Art 113

PART II BECOMING A GLOBAL CLASSIC 173

5 Controversy, Conflict, Collapse 177

6 A Novel Without Borders 200
7 Indexing a Classic 229
8 Ascent to Glory for Few, Descent
to Oblivion for Most 254
Conclusion 278

Appendix: Why and How to Study Classics? 283

Acknowledgments 303
Notes 307
References 331
Index 351

© Columbia University Press

 INTRODUCTION

I
n the summer of 1965, an unknown writer was driving from Mex-
ico City to Acapulco for a vacation with his wife and two chil-
dren 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

© Columbia University Press

 2 Introduction

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 inspira-
tion, 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 cre-
ative 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 litera-
ture 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 fam-
ily 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

© Columbia University Press

 Introduction 3

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 inter-
national 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 mag-
ical realism has grown so vast in literature that scholars and common read-
ers 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, interna-
tional 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 real-
ism, 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 arti-
cles, 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

© Columbia University Press

 4 Introduction

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 pros-
pect 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 dis-
ciplines, 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 moderniza-
tion 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

© Columbia University Press

 Introduction 5

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 art-
ists. 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 Sol-
itude 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 sus-
pects, critics and scholars. They are a broader constellation of people, groups,
objects, and organizations quite often unrelated to one another. Yet their indi-
vidual 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 con-
tinents, 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

© Columbia University Press

 6 Introduction

copies of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Edvard Munch’s The Scream are pro-
tected 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.

© Columbia University Press

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