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Gabriel García Márquez and the Remaking of the World Canon

Given the central role played by One Hundred Years of Solitude in determining what today is understood as postcolonial literature, it may surprise readers of his memoirs or, for that matter, of his early journalism, to discover that Gabriel García Márquez’s literary role models were almost exclusively European or North American. For the young García Márquez, authors who today constitute the core of the modernist canon, in particular Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner, shaped his vision of what narrative should be like. However, in this admiration and appropriation of modernism, García Márquez was not alone. For instance, his younger contemporary Mario Vargas Llosa has also acknowledged the central influence of Faulkner on his works. As Pascale Casanova has noted, both García Márquez and Vargas Llosa belong to the myriad of twentieth-century novelists who found in modernist writers and, in particular, Faulkner, a “temporal accelerator” that made their novels seem contemporaneous to those produced in Europe and North America and therefore understandable by critics and general readers in those countries. However, in a twist that serves as proof of García Márquez’s literary success, his particular reinterpretation of Faulkner’s and other modernists’ writings in turn served as a model for many other writers from the so-called Global South. This article studies the manner in which García Márquez’s “magical realism,” derived from his readings of the modernist canon, became a new “temporal accelerator” that made the experiences of the Global South understandable by readers in the North.