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Once García Márquez settled in Barcelona, however, Barral embraced him, not only as one of the leading Boom authors whom he wished to publish, but also as a key member of the colony of Latin American expatriates who had settled in and around Barcelona and were to participate in Barral’s new editorial venture, Barral Editores, where García Márquez’s Eréndira appeared in 1972. The savvy editor had made a blunder in 1966 but after the success of Cien años de soledad on the international market, he clearly wised up and even befriended Gabo. By all accounts their relationship was close and lasted for years.9 Barral, however, never made it up to García Márquez, and Cien años de soledad was not to appear with any of the publishing firms he was to direct after leaving Seix Barral. 2. GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ AND HIS “FAMILIAR” CENSORS One of the most significant features of García Márquez’s literary career (and one of the least studied) is his familiarity with censorship and the masterly skills with which he circumvented it. Early in his career and during the years of La Violencia that followed the social unrest triggered by the assassination of Liberal Party presidential candidate Gaitán in 1948, he worked as a journalist. At El Universal in Cartagena, where the newspaper room received the daily visit of an official censor, he grew thoroughly accustomed to government censorship . In his memoirs, García Márquez recalls that in addition to this censor he also had to deal with Zabala (the editor in chief of the newspaper ), who sometimes acted as censoriously as the official censor. So censorship became part of his everyday life at the paper, to the point that its presence was like an unwanted family visit one has to endure: “un censor del gobierno que se instalaba en un escritorio de la redacci ón como en casa propia desde la seis de la tarde, con voluntad y mando para no autorizar ni una letra que pudiera rozar el orden público” [“beginning at six o’clock in the evening, a government censor installed himself at a desk in the newsroom as if he were in his own house, with the intention and power not to authorize a single letter that might interfere with public order”] (Vivir 387–8/Living 322–3). This anecdote, which he reiterates in his latest novel Memoria de mis putas tristes [Memories of My Melancholy Whores] (2004), can serve as a striking exemplification of his familiarity with censorship (“the censor in his own house”). It suggests too that many Boom writers must have similarly internalized relations with censorship as a normal negotiation that formed part of their creative process. From Melquíades to Vernet 125 For us, García Márquez’s case is peculiar, however, in that his daily interaction with the censor was quite different from what his fellow Boom writers experienced in Spain. In his case the immediacy of the censorial act, in situ at the newsroom, left very little room for the kind of negotiation Boom writers engaged in with their Spanish censors. Another important distinction is that he was first exposed to censorship of the press, which operates under different rules than the censorship of literary works. Authoritarian regimes are wary of the press’s power to call for immediate political activism and to generate antigovernment mass movements and protests on the spot. In the case of literary works, there seems to be more opportunity for maneuver, in part because circulation figures are usually smaller and the political impact is not as immediate as printed news can be. (It can also be less ephemeral, of course.) Furthermore, in Franco’s Spain the censors of literary works, while concerned with the political agenda of a particular work or writer, tended to focus more stringently on material they saw as indecent and sexually explicit (a focus that, of course, was part of the regime’s own political agenda). This difference was important in the case of García Márquez because his training as a journalist took place under the supervision of government censors while for the most part his literary writing in Colombia was freed from censorship. Equally important is that his “familiar” relationship with the government censor resulted in what he calls “a creative challenge.” This took the form of finding ways to adhere to the censor’s requests...

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