“The farmer reads what he knows – and García Márquez” (Der Bauer liest, was er kennt – und García Márquez): that was what the writer Ilija Trojanow (2017) said as he looked through the canonical lists that had been published in Western media such as the BBC or The Guardian on the topic of world literature, and it is symptomatic, underscoring the paradigmatic character of Latin America in the context of questions of world literature. But the Latin American literatures are not only significant, in this context, as forerunners or representatives of literatures from the Global South in the traditional centers of denomination. In the last decades it has proven true again and again, even long after writers like Jorge Volpi or Alberto Fuguet brought out their manifestos rejecting the expectations of a specifically Latin American kind of writing: whenever there is a demand for a reorientation of world literary concepts in the practice of the business of literature, Latin America is never far away as a guide. One need only think of the wave of reception in the United States of Roberto Bolaño as a brilliant commentator on the derailed processes of globalization, focused on his novel 2666; of the metaphysics of writing outside the motherland, formulated by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, producing a programmatic connection with writers like Cortázar, García Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa; or of the enthusiastic reception of the young Aura Xilonen by Western publishers after she made her debut in 2015 with a novel that drives linguistic and national borders to the point of absurdity.
The aim of this study has been to draft a coherent picture of Latin American literatures with regard to the question of how world literature is actually “made” – using material evidence in order to make the very concrete processes of construction visible. From a literary-historical perspective, I have been able to show how strongly the concepts of detachment from traditional dynamics of center and periphery, and of following transnational perspectives, which are highly relevant today in the course of the debates over world literature in cultural studies, are anchored in Latin American literary production.
Using the example of the Suhrkamp publishing house, I was able to demonstrate, with regard to the paradigmatic character of Latin American literatures, how a Latin American writer was able to become a publishing benchmark, so to speak, for “world literature” from other linguistic regions: for the publisher Siegfried Unseld, Octavio Paz embodied the ideal world literary figure from the “Latin American Far West.” By examining worldwide processes of circulation, we were able to trace (continuing with this example) how Paz, later to become a Nobel laureate, was canonized in the United States, Europe, and finally also in parts of Asia through the staging of his persona as a cosmopolitan intellectual who was in a position to comment on and act as a guide through the massive upheavals in the West in 1989 and 1990, while in other regions he was not accessible in that way.
The picture that has emerged over the course of this analysis of such processes of selection and circulation, using the example of Latin American writers, is also valuable in that it captures not only what is typical but also the unpredictable and less representative. It is only when we have constructed a context that can be bounded and derived from literary history but that is also not limited to individual writers that we can also address phenomena that would otherwise remain invisible. In other words: what is valuable here is also, and in particular, what I called the “resistant potential of the material” at the outset.
For one thing, there is the question of the political commitment of the writers, or the political aspects of their work, and the influence of that commitment or those aspects on the translation in other countries, the circulation, and the reception of their work. In many European countries, leftist intellectuals, for whom the Suhrkamp Verlag functioned in Germany as a forge for theories, definitely harbored literary sympathies for the literatures of the Latin American continent out of political interest, as can be seen, for instance, in the case of Darcy Ribeiro. But which of the Latin American writers in the Suhrkamp Verlag’s program actually fulfilled these expectations, and in what way? First off, the image of Paz as a model world literary figure was, to begin with, a projection of his publisher’s. Second, Elena Poniatowska, who could have been interesting, was initially not published at all or only very hesitantly. Finally, Julio Cortázar, who was highly valued by left-wing intellectuals particularly in the post-1968 period, must be recognized, in the final analysis, for an attitude and a poetics that were not very accessible – especially since the great literary prizes of the West and the honors of the Spanish-speaking world were denied to him.
To what extent, then, using concretely verifiable processes of circulation, also within the Global South, can we speak of a remapping of world literature in the sense of current positions in the debate over world literature that look critically at globalization? For the writers we have discussed here, we can say that, in spite of a global differentiation, the current model still involves phases in which Barcelona, Paris, and New York must be passed through in order to reach Mumbai, Beijing, or Casablanca. The denominating centers of the West and North continue to wield enormous power. This finding is also confirmed by the fact that the reception of García Márquez, for example, was intensified worldwide after he was awarded the Nobel Prize, and then again after his death. At the same time, new axes, such as the examination of South-South dynamics and associated modes of reading, are indispensable as supplements to the traditional perspectives. In the process, this study has also shown how complex it is to explore contexts that have so far been studied either not at all or very little, for instance with regard to China. Nevertheless, it is necessary to continue to open up such paths, some of which we were only able to explore partially here. In order to achieve that, a great deal more, and more comprehensive, material must be acquired, in order to p...
