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The Fear of Solitude: How Marketing Makes Real Magic

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The Global Histories of Books

Part of the book series: New Directions in Book History ((NDBH))

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Abstract

Holgate explores how a book from the geographical and cultural margins can achieve an international readership and canonical status by re-tracing the journeys of two magical realist novels, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and New Zealand Maori author Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1984). He investigates the mechanics by which a global audience is attained, and what is won and lost in the process, building on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production. He concludes that international recognition depends not only on the artistic qualities of the author and their text, but also other factors like the actions of the author’s various agents, subnational literature’s capacity to transcend its local audience, prestige consecrated by major literary prizes, and luck.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    However, according to Pascale Casanova’s theory of ‘the world republic of letters’, all writers and literary works ultimately compete in an international literary space, struggling to achieve recognition. Consecration is endowed from a literary centre, which, in Casanova’s view, is Paris. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) pp. 3–4, 24.

  2. 2.

    Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 56.

  3. 3.

    Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1993) pp. 42, 76–78.

  4. 4.

    I use the term postcolonial in the sense of Robert Young’s definition, ‘coming after colonialism and imperialism, in their original meaning of direct-rule domination, but still positioned within imperialism in its later sense of the global market system of hegemonic economic power’. Of course, much Latin American fiction, especially that of García Márquez, is postcolonial, too, in that it critiques Spanish colonialism of the Americas as well as military and economic incursions by the region’s powerful northern neighbour, the United States. Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), p. 57.

  5. 5.

    Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, ‘Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s’, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 3.

  6. 6.

    Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 3.

  7. 7.

    Anne Hegerfeldt, Lies that Tell the Truth: Magic Realism Seen through Contemporary Fiction from Britain (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005), p. 51.

  8. 8.

    Ato Quayson, ‘Magical Realism and the African Novel’, in The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, ed. Abiola Irele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 164.

  9. 9.

    Paul Elie, ‘The Secret History of One Hundred Years of Solitude’, Vanity Fair, 31 December 2015. http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/12/gabriel-garcia-marquez-one-hundred-years-of-solitude-history.

  10. 10.

    Gene H. Bell-Villada, ‘García Márquez: Life and Times’, in The Cambridge Companion to García Márquez, ed. Philip Swanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 14.

  11. 11.

    García Márquez’s archive at the University of Texas at Austin opened in late 2015. Jim Vertuno, ‘University of Texas paid $2.2M for Garcia Marquez archive’, The Dallas Morning News, 25 February 2015. http://www.dallasnews.com/news/state/headlines/20150225-university-of-texas-paid-2.2m-for-garcia-marquez-archive.ece.

  12. 12.

    Mariano Siskind, ‘Magical Realism’, in Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, vol. 2, ed. Ato Quayson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 859.

  13. 13.

    Alejo Carpentier, ‘On the Marvelous Real in America’, trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 84, 87. Although Carpentier is often credited as a key theorist in the development of magical realist fiction, he did not actually use the term magical realism. Indeed, his theory relates to a cultural context, whereas magical realism is a textually based narrative mode.

  14. 14.

    Donald Shaw, ‘The Critical Reception of García Márquez’, in The Cambridge Companion to García Márquez, ed. Philip Swanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 26. Shaw refers to Tomás Eloy Martínez, ‘América: la gran novela – Gabriel García Márquez’, Primera Plana, 5: 234 (1967), pp. 54–55.

  15. 15.

    Siskind, p. 859.

  16. 16.

    Elie, n.p.

  17. 17.

    John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), p. 4.

  18. 18.

    Siskind, p. 860.

  19. 19.

    Casanova, p. 135.

  20. 20.

    Elie, n.p.

  21. 21.

    Bell-Villada, p. 16.

  22. 22.

    Shaw, p. 28.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., p. 33. George McMurray, Gabriel García Márquez (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977).

  24. 24.

    Salman Rushdie, ‘Inverted Realism’, PEN America 6: Metamorphosis, 23 January 2007. http://www.pen.org/nonfiction-transcript/inverted-realism.

  25. 25.

    Peter Carey, ‘Like Joyce, García Márquez gave us a light to follow into the unknown’, The Guardian, 18 April 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/18/joyce-garcia-marquez-peter-carey/print.

  26. 26.

    English, p. 313.

  27. 27.

    C.K. Stead, ‘Keri Hulme’s “The Bone People,” and the Pegasus Award for Maori Literature’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 16: 4 (October 1985), pp. 101–102.

  28. 28.

    James F. English, The Economy of Prestige (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 312–313.

  29. 29.

    Stead, p. 102.

  30. 30.

    Bourdieu, pp. 53, 115.

  31. 31.

    English, p. 314.

  32. 32.

    Stead, p. 103.

  33. 33.

    English, p. 318.

  34. 34.

    Keri Hulme, The Bone People (London: SPIRAL in association with Hodder and Stoughton, [1984] 1985), p. 62.

  35. 35.

    John Bryson, ‘Interview with Keri Hulme’, Antipodes, 8:2 (1994), p. 131.

  36. 36.

    Stead, pp. 103–104.

  37. 37.

    Margery Fee, ‘Why C.K. Stead didn’t like Keri Hulme’s the bone people: Who can write as Other?’ Australian & New Zealand Studies in Canada, 1 (1989), pp. 12, 14.

  38. 38.

    Antje M. Rauwerda, ‘The White Whipping Boy: Simon in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40 (2003), p. 39, footnote 13.

  39. 39.

    Simon During, ‘Postmodernism or Postcolonialism?’ Landfall, 39:3 (1985), p. 374.

  40. 40.

    Stead, pp. 105, 107.

  41. 41.

    English, p. 313.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., p. 317.

  43. 43.

    Merritt Modeley, ‘Britain’s Booker Prize’, The Sewanee Review, 101: 4 (1993), pp. 613, 615.

  44. 44.

    Richard Todd, Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p. 64.

  45. 45.

    English, p. 319.

  46. 46.

    Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 99, 210.

  47. 47.

    Bryson, p. 134.

  48. 48.

    Thompson, pp. 19, 21. Thompson’s other five key functions of the publisher are: content acquisition and list-building; financial investment and risk-taking; content development; quality control; management and coordination.

  49. 49.

    Elie, n.p.

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  1. Independent Scholar, Oxford, UK

    Ben Holgate

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  1. Ben Holgate
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  1. University of Oxford , Oxford, United Kingdom

    Elleke Boehmer

  2. University of Oxford , Oxford, United Kingdom

    Rouven Kunstmann

  3. Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

  4. University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    Asha Rogers

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Holgate, B. (2017). The Fear of Solitude: How Marketing Makes Real Magic. In: Boehmer, E., Kunstmann, R., Mukhopadhyay, P., Rogers, A. (eds) The Global Histories of Books. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51334-8_12

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