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81 u 5 The New Capital of Spanish Literature: The Best Sellers Maarten Steenmeijer “Nosotros no somos nada en el mundo, y las voces que aquí damos, por mucho que quieran elevarse, no salen de la estrechez de esta pobre casa” (84) (We are nothing in this world, and whatever we say here, as much as we want to elevate our voices, does not leave the narrowness of this poor house). With this sentence taken from Benito Pérez Galdós’ prologue to Clarín’s 1901 edition of La Regenta, the author laments the marginal position occupied by Spanish literature in what Pascale Casanova was to call “the world republic of letters” in a book by the same title. In this excellent study, the French critic and sociologist revitalizes this concept in relation to the imaginary of the Enlightenment, redefining it as a “literary universe relatively independent of the everyday world and its political divisions” (xxi). Echoing Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas, Casanova views the world republic of letters not as an open space of intellectual exchange, but as a closed one dominated by power relations, processes, and mechanisms: This world republic of letters has its own mode of operation: its own economy, which produces hierarchies and various forms of violence; and, above all, its own history, which, long obscured by the quasi-systemic national (and therefore political) appropriation of literary stature, has never really been chronicled. Its geography is based on the opposition between a capital, on the one hand, and peripheral dependencies whose relationship to this center is defined by their aesthetic distance from it. (11–12) For many centuries, as Pérez Galdós implies in the quote registered above, Spain’s position in the international literary space has been marginal at best. This is further illustrated by the fact that the author’s magnum opus, Fortunata y Jacinta, which embodied nineteenth-century Spanish realism, took more than 100 years to be translated into French (1980) and English (1986).1 Moreover, Galdós’ 1901 observation did not lose its currency in the course of the twentieth century. With few exceptions, 82 MAARTEN STEENMEIJER notably Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, and Federico García Lorca, contemporary Spanish literature was widely unknown overseas, and was even less known during the Franco era. Julia L. Ortiz-Griffin and William D. Griffin observed that “for most of the world, the history of Spanish literature began with Cervantes and ended with Lorca” (78). During the ostracizing, retrogressive, and nationalist Franco regime that propagandized isolationism with impunity, little was done to conceal the insignificant position of Spanish literature within the international literary arena. Having published Los cipreses creen en Dios (The Cypresses Believe in God), the beginnings of a trilogy that would become an authentic best seller, in 1955 José María Gironella wrote an article whose title expressed an unmistakable diagnosis: “Why Is the World Unfamiliar with the Spanish Novel?” In 1964, Antonio Iglesias Laguna prepared a study whose title also synthesized the lack of prestige that Spanish literature held in the world: Why Is Spanish Literature Not Translated? In 1963 a young Peruvian’s first novel, written in Paris, had been published in Spain after receiving the prestigious Biblioteca Breve Prize in the previous year. I refer to Mario Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros (The City and the Dogs), which made history with the advent of the Spanish American boom novel. The spectacular phenomenon of this new Spanish American literature was to occupy a primordial space in the center of the literary world thanks to Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, and other major figures like Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Octavio Paz, and Pablo Neruda. Casanova maintains that, In the twentieth century they managed to achieve an international existence and reputation that conferred on their national literary spaces (and, more generally, the Latin American space as a whole) a standing and an influence in the larger literary world that were incommensurate with those of their native countries in the international world of politics. (38–39) As is well known, Spain—and Barcelona in particular—had a decisive role in the inception of the boom. During the height of the Franco period, a literary climate had developed in Barcelona thanks in part to the infrastructure established by editor Carlos Barral and literary agent Carmen Balcells (among others), one which enabled the new Spanish American literature to be published, distributed...

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