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A Conversation with Álvaro Santana-Acuña, author of Ascent to Glory

Cover of Ascent to Glory by Álvaro Santana-Acuña

I learned about Álvaro Santana-Acuña’s new book, Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic, from Michael Orthofer’s review on his Complete Review site, and immediately purchased a copy. What attracted me was that Santana-Acuña doesn’t just describe the uncertain process by which García Márquez’s 1967 novel became a classic recognized around the world: he also explores why five other Latin American novels—powerful novels, novels of substantial literary merit—failed to achieve the same status. He refers to these examples as “literary counterfactuals”—the classics that might have been, if you will. His point is that looking at both the success (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and the “might have beens”, demonstrates that it’s often factors beyond the text’s quality, sometimes factors beyond the author’s control, that make or break a book’s longevity.

This resonated with what I’ve seen in my years of studying neglected books and writers and especially in this last year, when I’ve dug deep into the stories of forgotten writers as part of my graduate program at the University of East Anglia. So much, indeed, that I contacted Álvaro, who teaches sociology at Whitman College and asked if he’d be willing to participate in a discussion about what leads to one book becoming a classic and another little-known, little-read relic. I was delighted when he agreed, and what follows is a distillation of what was, as we both later agreed, the fastest 90 minutes we’ve spent since lockdown.

Brad: Congratulations on the book! For the sake of readers who are learning about it here, can you give a quick overview of what you cover?

Álvaro Santana-Acuña
Dr. Álvaro Santana-Acuña

Álvaro: Thank you. What I wanted to show in Ascent to Glory was that the road to the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude was actually very bumpy and that there were other books that for different reasons were expected to be more successful—or were already successful and then disappeared from view. And the same thing happens to authors. Critics and readers were expecting, for example, José Donoso, to be the real major Latin American Boom writer and his The Obscene Bird of Night the best Latin American Boom novel. What happened was that García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude took that place and instead, Donoso’s novel is now becoming a neglected literary work. No one could have predicted how things would turn out. Of course, the quality of the work matters, but as much or more that what happens afterwards. I wanted to show that the making of a classic is a social process, and that we need to look into the social, economic, and cultural context as well as the literary content, that is, the text, to understand why—and in the case of others like Donoso, why not.

Brad: Yes! I’ve seen that with so many writers I’ve looked at. The difference between the writer who continues to be read and the one who loses his or her readers in the space of a few years so often just seems to be a matter of dumb luck. I particularly see that now that I’m back in the university and I can see that the conventions of academic study tend to lead scholars to write about the writers that other people write about. It creates the effect that a few writers — Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, for example — get intensely studied. That every year, their library sections get bigger and bigger and bigger, while a few feet away you find some old copies of James Hanley’s books, say, that haven’t been read, let alone studied or written about. And the reactions of most academics when I approach them about someone like G. E. Trevelyan — an amazing writer whose books are almost impossible to find, who’s been completely forgotten in literary history—is complete disinterest. It’s like they can’t afford to become pigeonholed as a champion of the oddballs.

Covers of Los Sangurimas by Jose de la Cuadra

Álvaro: I must say that unfortunately, I had the same experience. One of the authors I study in Ascent to Glory, José de la Cuadra, was first mentioned to me by a colleague with a tremendous thirst for literature. He was always recommending books to me. I remember vividly the day he said, “Oh, you like One Hundred Years of Solitude? Read Los Sangurimas by de la Cuadra, and you tell me whether you think García Márquez actually found inspiration for his novel in that little book.” And the fact is that there are so many similarities between them that it’s very hard not to claim that García Márquez built on Los Sangurimas to write his own novel.

The truth is that One Hundred Years of Solitude was so successful because it built on themes that were already prevalent in other regional literatures of Latin America, as in Ecuador, where de la Cuadra wrote his works. That’s the reason why, when people had One Hundred Years of Solitude in their hands, they could immediately see connections with other books that they’d read. And that’s one of García Márquez’s merits: he was really interested in other peoples’ experiences, in other people’s works, in other literary traditions. That’s something that literary critics often don’t take into account. When they look at influences on famous writers, they tend to focus on other celebrated writers—to the point that nowadays, the prevailing narrative is that García Márquez wrote in the tradition of high modernism: especially, Woolf, Hemingway, Joyce, and Faulkner.

Covers of La Casa Grande by Álvaro Cepeda Samudio

But the reality is that García Márquez was omnivorous in his reading. He read those classic authors, but there were others like Curzio Malaparte from Italy. His style and themes had a big impact on García Márquez’s early writing. In Colombia, there were local writers such as Héctor Rojas Herazo, Eduardo Caballero Calderón, and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, all of whom García Márquez knew personally. And if you read what these Colombians were writing at the time, you see that they were all on the same page. The case of Cepeda Samudio is even more interesting because, as I show in Ascent, García Márquez and other friends regarded him as an extraordinarily talented writer—and indeed, his masterpiece La casa grande is praised by scholars today even if it’s neglected by most readers. So, there are legitimately major classic writers like Faulkner and Woolf that influenced García Márquez, but there are also less well-known writers who arguably had as much or more of an impact on him.

Brad: A point that I found particularly interesting in your book was the distinction between a classic and a canonical book. What is that difference, and how can it help with looking at a text?

Álvaro: One of the reasons I wrote Ascent to Glory was to offer my colleagues in literary studies a different perspective on the question of what’s a classic. What struck me in looking at the examples of the counterfactuals I discuss is that a classic is a work that can survive on its own. Hamlet will survive whether or not the Royal Shakespeare Company continues to exist, for example. If anything, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s reputation can be damaged if there is popular and critical backlash against one of their productions of Hamlet.

Hamlet is also a canonical book: you have the Royal Shakespeare Company’s edition of the plays edited by Shakespeare scholars, you have the Folger Library, you have academics constantly working on new studies and interpretations. Similarly, Madame Bovary is a classic that thousands read every year in cheap paperback editions at the same time that you have the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade edition and annotated critical editions, plus dozens of film and TV adaptations.

There are other works that are canonical but not classics. They have literary merit, but they cannot survive in the wild, so to speak. They need support from institutions—academics, publishers, national governments. I give a couple of examples in the book. One of them is Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, which depends on French publisher Gallimard to maintain its canonical status. And there are books that are classics but not canonical. Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, for example. People all over the world still buy it and read it, but the academy in general refuses to recognize it as a literary text worth studying and teaching. Of course, a canonical book can be become recognized as a classic.

Brad: Like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, for example? It was out of print for years, but once it was reissued and started to be written about, it got put onto course reading lists and started to take off through word of mouth until now we could say it’s able to survive in the wild.

Álvaro: Right, there are classics like The Prophet that can never become canonical unless some institution decides it’s going to stake its reputation on supporting it. The point is that when we talk about a text as canonical, we’re talking about a relationship based on dependencies. The canonical work that’s not a classic depends on the support of an institution—Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, for example, would probably not stay in print if there wasn’t an academic press to support it. But the press that publishes Epicoene also stakes something of its reputation when it chooses to publish that text.

This kind of dependency extends beyond literature. Let’s think about art museums. We know the Louvre, for example, has classics like the Mona Lisa but it also owns many other lesser known works displayed on its walls and stored in facilities underground.

Mona Lisa crowd at the Louvre

Brad: Yes! The vast majority of the works on display in the Louvre are not classics: there is only one Mona Lisa, there is only one Raft of the Medusa. And most art museums can’t aspire to only have classics because then most of them would be empty. That’s what I love about art museums, in fact: you can almost always count on seeing something you’re not familiar with. Here in Norwich, in the museum at the Castle, for example, there’s a wing devoted to the Norwich school of painters, who were around the time of J. M. W. Turner, who knew him, who inspired him and were inspired by him—but who weren’t Turner. So, it’s full of works that are amazing—but that aren’t the few classics people associate with Turner. Certainly, some of my favorite painters are artists I wouldn’t have known unless I’d seen their work hanging in a gallery or museum.

Covers of The Obscene Bird of Night by Jose Donoso

Álvaro: That’s a good example, because it helps us understand why Turner became the pinnacle of this form of artistic expression: he was building upon a whole school, a whole aesthetic movement. Going back to One Hundred Years of Solitude, when we talk about the style known as magical realism, the perception is that García Márquez invented it. But the reality is that, when he wrote the novel, the term magical realism itself had been around for at least twenty years, and there were already people like Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, who were also writing in this style. So, when One Hundred Years of Solitude’s came out, it was building on that magical realist tradition.

But something happened: a dislocation of the tradition. When a book becomes an exceptional success, like One Hundred Years of Solitude’s, it tends to overshadow what came before. If you think about it, Shakespeare managed to kill his predecessors—and for decades after also managed to kill his successors. And that’s what classic books and classic authors do. García Márquez’s and One Hundred Years of Solitude’s success makes it seem like there’s nothing in Colombian literature before or after this writer and his novel.

Covers of The Fox Up Above and the Fox Down below by  José María Arguedas

In reality, Latin American literature was far more diverse than just magical realism. I point to the example of the Peruvian writer José María Arguedas, who had a different conception of what being Latin American meant. He was a supporter of indigenism. He wrote the superb but neglected novel The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below. Arguedas was proud to say, “I am a provincial writer!” And he wasn’t alone. But all these alternatives disappeared, and we only have that pinnacle—García Márquez and a few others—representing Latin American literature.

Now, if you do some digging, you find all these other writers and ideas that were active at the same time. Unfortunately, a lot of my academic colleagues say, “Yeah, but I’m not really interested in those minor writers,” while for me, it’s a passion. It really gives you a better and deeper understanding of what goes into making a Turner or a García Márquez.

Highway map

Brad: Absolutely. It’s all part of what makes literature. Literature is not just the classics. I like to use the analogy of a landscape. Today, the fastest route between two places usually involves driving on some freeway—which in the American West is often practically a straight line. But there’s so much to be seen if you get off the freeway, if you follow the two-lane roads that wind around a little more, that take you through the smaller towns, that show you features of the landscape that nobody taking the freeway ever knows about. The landscape is not just that strip you see as you rush along the freeway—in fact, most of the landscape is what you can’t see from the freeway.

And literature is like that. The works and the writers that people were reading at the same time that García Márquez was becoming known worldwide are part of Latin American literature even if now most people have forgotten them. One reason your distinction between a classic and a canonical book intrigued me is that it opens up ways to rebalance the situation, to bring the forgotten parts of literature into the discussion.

I have to confess that until I read Ascent to Glory, I always associated the idea of a canonical book with things like Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: that the canon was limited to 50 or 100 books—the pinnacles, as you put it—and that anything that wasn’t in the canon was, in effect, second class, not worth bothering about. Your interpretation, on the other hand, says that we can bring forgotten books back into the discussion—but they will need some support: a publisher willing to keep them in print, academics willing to study and write about them.

Covers of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Álvaro: You’re right. Ascent to Glory is an anti-reductionist book. That’s in part because I’m a social scientist, and one of the things I like about the social sciences is that they give you the tools to offer multi-layered understandings of how society works. Something as simple and concrete as a book requires the collaboration of so many people, not just the labor of the writer. Whether it’s a classic or a canonical book, that collaboration continues and can become highly complex. And this multi-layered perspective makes it impossible to take a reductionist view and claim that the fame of a classic rests only on the quality of the text.

Because this is not true. And I’m sure people reading our conversation now can remember reading a book written in absolutely amazing prose and asking themselves, “How is it possible that this book is not better known?” That’s what happened to me when I read Los Sangurimas. I said to myself, “This is a gem and nobody knows about it.”

That’s why I talk about it in Ascent to Glory: I wanted to make the story about One Hundred Years of Solitude a little more complex. I wanted to show all the obstacles that the book faced—in order to show that it wasn’t just magic. García Márquez took 15 years to write the book. At the same time, Latin American literature was emerging after decades of facing its own obstacles. And the book wasn’t expected to be a bestseller. In fact, as I show, the novel met all the conditions to be a complete failure. That’s why I quote publisher Alfred Knopf in the Introduction: “Many a novel is dead the day it is published.” Because that’s the truth.

Ascent to Glory aims to show that the road to any artwork’s attaining the status of a classic is not straight, that it depends on a lot of factors, and any one of them can easily go wrong. Actually, when an artwork becomes a classic, it’s more like an alignment of planets, where each planet is a different factor. The skills of the creator matter, of course, but also his or her professional connections of the creator, the support of peers, the quality of the artwork, the precise historical moment, the gatekeepers, the distribution channels, and the market—and when you put all these factors together, you understand how one book—One Hundred Years of Solitude—became a classic where another—say, José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso—didn’t.

This doesn’t mean that the planets can’t align in future for a neglected book. As a matter of fact, we often see rediscoveries in art, works that have been forgotten, come back to life, and even become classics.

Brad: Like Their Eyes Were Watching God

Álvaro: Right. Another one is The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov. Due to the political conditions in the Soviet Union when it was written, this novel couldn’t even be published during Bulgakov’s lifetime. But when it was published outside the Soviet Union in the 1960s, you had an audience ready to praise it as one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature.

Mural in the Bulgakov Museum in Moscow

Brad: And, according to something I read recently, the most popular book in Russian prisons today.

Álvaro: It’s incredible. I didn’t know that. This would have been impossible fifty years ago. And that confirms the idea that there are factors that can be obstacles—the political environment in the Soviet Union, for example—but not forever. One factor I talk about in Ascent to Glory is gatekeepers like literary agents. Carmen Balcells was a Spanish agent who got to know Vargas Llosa and García Márquez when they were living in Barcelona and played a major role in their careers. Another of her clients, José Donoso, on the other hand, came to resent and even attack her, and she was not supportive in return. But gatekeepers like agents and agencies come and go, and when they do, things can suddenly become possible. It would have been hard to envision a TV or film adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude just a few years ago because of the influence of García Márquez’s agent. Netflix is now working on the first adaptation.

Let’s not forget that books are social objects. Their production follows social patterns. And what I’m trying to show in Ascent is that the transformation of the social object we call a book into the social institution that we call the classic needs a social explanation. We cannot limit the explanation to talking about the quality of the text. And there are social patterns we can see when we look at numerous classics—the Mona Lisa, War and Peace, Shakespeare’s plays, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn—that are like the freeways, to use your example.

Brad: Right. It’s not just that the freeway is the fastest, most direct route. It’s also that the freeway has rest stops, has places where you can refuel, get food, spend the night. In the same way that the classics have reproductions and adaptations and Cliff’s Notes and other things that make them more accessible.

Álvaro: Exactly. And I’m offering some ways in which we can understand these patterns. One is the imagination of the author—how the work is envisioned by its creator. Another is the production process—the way the work gets produced and marketed. And the third is the distribution process—how a book, for example, gets circulated, translated, reprinted, and adapted into other formats.

Even imagination is a social activity. García Márquez had colleagues he talked with as he was imagining the book, even before he started writing it. He had the works of other writers to inspire and guide him. And even as he was writing the novel, which after all took him over a decade in the end, he was talking about it, he was reading new things. Even though it was his hand putting the words on the page, in some ways it was more like a mural—the work of many hands.

In my book, I try to disassemble this collective process, which I call “networked creativity,” to identify the elements that fed into García Márquez’s imagining One Hundred Years of Solitude. And what I try to show in Chapter 7—“Indexing a Classic”—is that this social collaboration in the imagination stage continues in the circulation stage. Over the decades, as different people approach the book, at different times, languages, and social and political contexts, they find units of significance—indexicals, I call them—that become reinforced. Like the opening line of the novel…

Brad: “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.”

Álvaro: See! You know it by heart, too. You also run into people comparing their own experiences to that discovery of ice, people pointing to the impact of the words, different critics coming up with different interpretations—Freudian, semiotic, religious, etc.—of those words, until that line becomes something that even people who’ve never read the book can recognize and even memorize parts of it.

Covers of One Hundred Years of Solitude

Brad: I found your model of the process—imagination, production, circulation—striking for a number of reasons. One is that it seems as if only the first stage ever gets discussed in traditional literature courses. I mean, I took an undergraduate degree in English literature and we never talked about two thirds of this process. And yet now that I’ve been studying and writing about neglected books for years, I’ve come to appreciate how much of an impact things like the design of the cover or the prestige of the publisher or whether it was easy to translate and appealed to readers in other languages can have on whether a book succeeds or fails in the long run.

In Ascent to Glory you show, for example, how publishers in Spain dominated the development of Latin American literature for years because especially publishers in Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina operated on a more limited local or national basis.

Álvaro: Yes. The control of the production and circulation of books on a wider basis throughout Latin America was in the hands of a small number of Spanish publishers. And because they had such control, they exercised a homogenizing, standardizing influence over the kind of books that Latin American readers—including writers—read.

Things have now changed. With the rise of the Internet, readers all over the world can learn about books, can buy and download books, and can start up their own discussions through everything from Goodreads to Twitter to blogs like yours. And that means that no single agent or critic or broker can have the impact that someone like Harold Bloom had just 20-30 years ago. The age of literary criticism as this sort of global religion is over.

Brad: I spoke with a number of publishers earlier this year and it was striking how many of them reported that attracting social media influencers were as or more important than getting reviews in major trade journals in how they marketed books. So, some publishers will routinely push free copies to Amazon “Top One Hundred” reviewers because those early five-star reviews can be as critical as a good review in the New York Times.

Álvaro: It doesn’t surprise me. Compare this to how readers would communicate about a book before the Internet. What would they do? They’d only know a handful of other readers and they’d have to write letters to them, or they’d write letters to newspapers or magazines. And the editors of those newspapers or magazines would choose what letters did or didn’t get published and then control the conversation about newly published books. Whereas now, with Goodreads and other social media platforms and even the comments section at the end of many online newspaper articles, we see a plurality of voices, even about neglected books. And those voices are reinforcing the idea that there are thousands of good books and thousands of good writers—and not just living writers and in-print books.

To go back to your landscape analogy, these social media discussion platforms are acting as avenues that open up the landscape, that encourage us to discover the diversity of writers and perspectives that exists beyond the narrow and straight lines of the “Western Canon.” For example, new platforms are helping to make more visible the literary works of female Latin American writers from the 1960s, some of which, such as Elena Garro’s Recollections of Things to Come, are said to have influenced the works of their more famous male peers, including García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. But there are still obstacles, and some are in academia.

Brad: Publish or perish.

Álvaro: Correct. There is a risk-averse atmosphere in academia and especially in some disciplines at present, which I think explains some of the responses you got when you approached academics about several neglected works and authors. This atmosphere makes it difficult to undertake long-term writing projects like Ascent to Glory. It took me eleven years to write this book. When I started it, I knew that it was a risky move from an early career standpoint, which demands from raising scholars shorter writing projects and a fast publishing turnaround. I’m happy to say that this is the book that I wanted to write. And it makes me even happier that Ascent is finding its way to readers with a passion for neglected authors and works, because, let’s not forget it, the prestige of classics stands not only on the shoulders of giants but also on the shoulders of neglected creators and neglected works of art.

The Five “Literary Counterfactuals of Ascent to Glory:

1 thought on “A Conversation with Álvaro Santana-Acuña, author of <em>Ascent to Glory</em>”

  1. I’ sure I’m not the first to draw to your attention that section of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan which makes the point about the process by which artistic “genius” is recognised (or not – the latter being more often the case)

    More than four centuries ago, the English essayist Francis Bacon had a very simple intuition. The idea is so trivial that he puts to shame almost all empirical thinkers who came after him until very recently….. Bacon mentioned a man who, upon being shown the pictures of those worshipers who paid their vows then subsequently escaped shipwreck, wondered where were the pictures of those who happened to drown after their vows.

    The lack of effectiveness of their prayers did not seem to be taken into account by the supporters of the handy rewards of religious practice. “And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like”, he wrote in his Novum Organum, written in 1620.

    This is a potent insight: the drowned worshippers, being dead, do not advertise their experiences. They are invisible and will be missed by the casual observer who will be led to believe in miracles.

    Not just in miracles, as Taleb goes onto argue…..it is also the process which decides whether an artist is remembered. For every artist of genius, there have been many more with the same talent but whose profile, somehow, was submerged….

    Art, of course, is the subject of high fashion – reputations ebb and flow…..we are vaguely aware of this…but it is money that speaks in the art “market” and it is the din of the cash register to which the ears of most art critics and dealers are attuned……

    Someone else who celebrates unknown or, rather, forgotten artists is Jonathan in Wales who runs a great blog called My Daily Art Display which fleshes out the detail of the lives of long-forgotten but superb artists…..

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