Gabriel García Márquez (22 page)

Unsurprisingly, on a continent where success is a source of unveiled envy and resentment, García Márquez was accused of plagiarism. At a writer's conference in Bonn in 1970, Günther Lorenz leveled the accusation that
One Hundred Years of Solitude
was a veiled rewriting of Balzac's
La recherche de l'absolu.
In Paris, Marcelle Bargas compared the two novels and suggested that some elements of one appeared in the other. And in Honduras, the magazine
Ariel
ran an article by Luis Cova García entitled “Coincidence or Plagiarism?” García Márquez recalled that someone who had heard about the allegations sent Balzac's book to him. “I had never read [it],” he said. “Balzac doesn't interest me now, although he's sensational enough that I read what I could of him at one time—however, I glanced through it. It struck me that to say that one book derives from the other is pretty light and superficial. Also, even if I were prepared to accept that I had read it before and decided to plagiarize it, only some five pages of my book could possibly have come from
La Recherche,
and in the final analysis, just a single character, the alchemist.”

He added: “I think the critics ought to have gone on and searched two hundred other books to see where the rest of
the characters come from. Besides which, I'm not at all afraid of the idea of plagiarism. If I had to write
Romeo and Juliet
tomorrow I would do it, and would feel it was marvelous to have the chance to write it again. I've talked a lot about the
Oedipus Rex
of Sophocles, and I believe it has been the most important book of my life; ever since I first read it I've been astonished by its absolute perfection. Once, when I was at a place on the Colombian coast, I came across a very similar situation to that of the drama of
Oedipus Rex,
and I thought of writing something to be called
Oedipus the Mayor.
In this case I wouldn't have been charged with plagiarism because I should have begun by calling him Oedipus. I think the idea of plagiarism is already finished. I can myself say where I find Cervantes or Rabelais in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
—not as to quality but because of things I've taken from them and put there. But I can also take the book line by line—and this is a point the critics will never be able to reach—and say what event or memory from real life each comes from. It's a very curious experience to talk to my mother about such things; she remembers the origins of many of the episodes, and naturally describes them more faithfully than I do because she hasn't elaborated them as literature.”
¹⁹

The accusation of plagiarism ought to be read in context. García Márquez belongs to the generation of
El Boom,
which was defined by Borges's “Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote,
” a short story structured as an essay that was first published in May 1939 in the Buenos Aires magazine
Sur.
In it, the protagonist, a nineteenth-century French symbolist, seeks to rewrite—not to copy word for word, but to rewrite without having access to the primary text—Cervantes's masterpiece,
Don Quixote of La Mancha,
written four centuries prior and published in two parts, the first in 1605 and the second in 1615. The idea is ingenious: Borges offers a meditation on the art of reading and on the concept of plagiarism. Can an
author “write” a book that belongs to someone else? In Borges's story, that is the deliberate intention. In the end, although the versions by Cervantes and Menard are identical, their meaning varies because of the context in which the respective pieces were drafted.

Borges's implicit statement is that anything produced by Latin American authors is, in some way, a recreation, a rewriting of a European model. García Márquez isn't an exception.
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
while utterly original, fits within the Latin American literary tradition, which is heavily indebted to Europe. Without the European literary models, the Colombian author would never have been able to craft his Macondo saga. His contribution lies in his capacity to upset and expand that foreign tradition, that is, to renovate the novel as a literary genre, infusing it with ingredients indigenous to the Americas. In that sense, its embrace by writers of the so-called Third World is a form of appropriation, a theft. García Márquez's rejection of the charge of plagiarism is a comment on the novel's postcolonial nature.

During those eighteen months of writing, Mutis, Jomí García Ascot, and María Luisa Elío visited the García Márquez family frequently. When the three first chapters of the novel were ready, they began to circulate them among friends. García Márquez sent them to Fuentes, who was in Europe at the time and who wrote an ecstatic notice in the cultural supplement of
Siempre!
: “I have just read the first seventy-five pages of
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
They are absolutely magnificent . . . The entire ‘fictitious' history coexists with the ‘real' history, what has been dreamed with what has been documented, and thanks to the legends, the lies, the exaggerations, the myths . . . Macondo becomes a universal landscape, an almost biblical story about foundations and about generations and degenerations, in a story about origins and the fate of human time and dreams and desires with which men survive and destroy themselves.”
²⁰

Some sections of García Márquez's novel were published as advance serials in periodicals such as
Mundo Nuevo
in Paris, edited by Emir Rodríguez Monegal;
Amaru
in Lima, edited by Adolfo Westphalen; and
Eco
in Bogotá, edited by Hernando Valencia Goekel. There were early pieces discussing the material in
El Espectador.
The buzz was intense. Mutis stated, “
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is everything except a novel according to the nineteenth-century literary canon, as established by the principal novelist of that time . . . it's a masterful book, a book without limits, impossible to fit—happily! fortunately!—any preconceived classification.”
²¹
After reading a section, Mario Vargas Llosa remarked, “If everything is like this fragment, the novel must be a marvel.”
²²

According to Tomás Eloy Martínez, García Márquez's friend and a prominent Argentine journalist known for his novel
Santa Evita,
García Márquez had to sell a food processor “that was his most cherished wedding gift in order to be able to pay the postal charge to send the five hundred pages of the book from Mexico to Buenos Aires.” Yet the claim that García Márquez had barely enough money to send one copy is contradicted by the fact that, according to Germán Vargas Cantillo and Alfonso Fuenmayor, after he finished the manuscript, he sent a copy to his friends from
El grupo de Barranquilla.
It first went to Vargas Cantillo, along with a request from García Márquez: “I want you to tell me how you find the fact that I have involved people from real life inside the novel. After you both read it, talk to Alfonso and tell me about your discussion.” According to Heriberto Fiorillo, “both responded that they were very happy to be the friends of the last of the Buendías.”
²³

How many copies of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
existed? Apparently, there were four. In his article “
La odisea literaria de un manuscrito,
” García Márquez said that the manuscript he and Mercedes placed in the mail had 590 double-spaced typewritten
pages. The paper he used was “ordinary.” He specifically stated that they put
los originales
[the originals] in the mail. The postage was eighty-two pesos, but the couple only had forty-three. The opened the package they had just prepared, divided the manuscript in two, and sent the first half by mail. Subsequently, they went to
El monte de piedad,
a pawn shop. They thought of pawning García Márquez's typewriter but decided against it because it still could earn them money. So they sold some home appliances, returned to the post office, and mailed the second half to Buenos Aires.

Of the four copies, Mutis read the original, the same one the García Márquezes divided in two and sent to Argentina. Mutis had another copy, which he took with him to Buenos Aires on a trip not long after. The third copy circulated among García Márquez's Mexican friends, and the fourth was sent to Barranquilla, to Alfonso Fuenmayor, Germán Vargas, and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, whose daughter Patricia, according to García Márquez, cherished it like a treasure.
²⁴
That fourth copy, by all accounts, is the only surviving manuscript.

The other three have vanished. And there are no galley proofs in existence. Amazingly, García Márquez told Rita Guibert that “I only changed one word [in them], although Paco Porrúa, editor of [Editorial] Sudamericana, told me to change as many as I liked.” He added: “I believe the ideal thing would be to write a book, have it printed, and correct it afterwards. When one sends something to the printers and then reads it in print one seems to have taken a step, whether forward or backward, of extreme importance.”
²⁵

The connection to Editorial Sudamericana was established at the beginning of 1966. Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, who had interviewed him for their book
Into the Mainstream,
recommended García Márquez to Francisco (Paco) Porrúa.
²⁶
García Márquez received a letter from Porrúa requesting permission to reprint his earlier books. He replied that he had already made
arrangements with another house, Ediciones Era, for reprints, but he offered Porrúa the novel he was currently working on.

In any event, for the short time the manuscript was in transit, he and Mercedes felt at once a sense of freedom as well as a growing uncertainty. She wondered if the novel was good enough, if all the time he had invested those solitary months would pay off. For about two weeks the couple didn't receive any news. Could the book have been lost in the mail?

The book's publication was inauspicious. Editorial Losada had rejected it. Carlos Barral, the
padrino,
the godfather of
El Boom,
had brushed it aside. Barral had discovered Mario Vargas Llosa and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, which in turn made his connection with García Márquez easy. Barral felt guilty about failing to recognize the quality of
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Eventually, he explained that he had been on vacation when the manuscript arrived and the novel was dismissed by a member of his staff. He didn't have enough time to get to it; Editorial Sudamericana had already sent it to the printer.

Gerald Martin had access to a letter García Márquez wrote to Apuleyo Mendoza during this period. In it, García Márquez says that after years of “working like an animal I feel overwhelmed with tiredness, without clear prospects, except in the only thing that I like but which doesn't feed me: the novel.” He dreamed of spending quality time writing. He speaks of the early response to
One Hundred Years of Solitude
with excitement, but also feels that—as he said to Mendoza when he last saw him in Barranquilla—he “embarked on an adventure that could as easily be catastrophic as successful.” But he didn't have much choice other than to embrace his dream. “My conclusion from all of this is that when you have a topic that pursues you it starts growing in your head for a long time and the day it explodes you have to sit down at the typewriter or run the risk of murdering your wife.”
²⁷

Just as García Márquez was writing
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
the Latin American literary “Boom” was coalescing as a global phenomenon. Mario Vargas Llosa, the youngest of the group (born in 1936) but one of the most energetic, had published his collection of stories
Los jefes
in 1959. He followed that with two novels that established him as a major voice in the Spanish-speaking world:
La ciudad y los perros
(1963), known in English as
The Time of the Hero,
and
The Green House
(1966). Vargas Llosa had exchanged some correspondence with García Márquez prior to 1967. At this time, they still had not met.

In 1967, Carlos Fuentes published an important novel as well:
A Change of Skin,
an experimental exercise à la the French
nouveau roman,
in which a group of friends travel from Mexico City to Veracruz during Holy Week in a Volkswagen. The novel stirred interest among readers in Spain. It was Fuentes who served as a bridge between García Márquez and a number of other Latin American authors who would be the principal players of
El Boom.

Its leading voice, who had heard about García Márquez from numerous sources but had not met him personally, was the exiled Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Born in Brussels
in 1914, Cortázar wrote some of the best short stories of the twentieth century, including those in the collections
Blow Up, End of the Game,
and
We Loved Glenda So Much.
His experimental essays in
Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
and his translations (he rendered an enormous amount of Edgar Allan Poe's oeuvre into Spanish) made him highly influential. His novels, especially
Hopscotch,
published in 1963—four years before
One Hundred Years of Solitude
—was an early cornerstone of
El Boom
and is said to have helped pave the way for the consolidation of Latin American literature worldwide as tradition of its own. Cortázar died in Paris in 1984 and is buried in Montparnasse.