When Gabriel García Márquez’s archive was sold
to the University of Texas two years ago, some decried the fact that
the literary remains of Latin America’s foremost novelist — and a fierce
critic of American imperialism — had come to rest in the United States.
But
now, the university’s Harry Ransom Center has digitized and made freely
available about half of the collection, making some 27,000 page scans
and other images visible to anyone in the world with an internet
connection.
The online archive,
which is cataloged both in English and in Spanish, includes drafts and
other material relating to all of García Márquez’s major books,
including “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which turned the
Colombia-born writer into a global figure. There are also previously
unseen photographs, notebooks, scrapbooks, screenplays and personal
ephemera, like a collection of his passports.
Many
archives are digitizing their holdings. But to make so much material
from a writer whose work is still under copyright freely available
online is unusual.
“Often
estates take a restrictive view of their intellectual property,
believing scholarly use threatens or diminishes commercial interests,”
Steve Enniss, the director of the Ransom Center, said. “We are grateful
to Gabo’s family for unlocking his archive and recognizing this work as
another form of service to his readers everywhere.”
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Seeing some items in the archive, which the Ransom Center bought
for $2.2 million, will still require a trip to Texas. The digital
collection does not include any of the 10 drafts of García Márquez’s final, unfinished novel,
“We’ll See Each Other in August.” (One chapter of the novel was
published in the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia in 2014, shortly after
García Márquez’s death at age 87; the estate said via email that it has
no further plans for publication.)
But
online readers can access a 32-page draft section of the projected
second volume of García Márquez’s memoirs, which would have covered the
years after he moved to Europe and then Mexico City, where he wrote “One
Hundred Years of Solitude” and lived until his death. They can also use
a special viewer to make side-by-side comparisons of different drafts of various works as they evolved.
Alvaro
Santana-Acuña, a sociologist at Whitman College who is working on a
book about the history of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” said the
archive was already helping to explode some of the legends surrounding
the novel, many of which were carefully crafted by García Márquez
himself.
The novelist, who won the Nobel Prize
in 1982, had often spoken of the book as pouring out in a kind of
magical trance. “I did not get up for 18 months,” he later said.
But
in fact, Mr. Santana-Acuña said, correspondence in the archive shows
that he regularly sent out sections for reactions from friends and
literary critics. He also published about a third of the chapters in
newspapers around the world before the book’s publication, and sometimes
made adjustments according to audience reaction, much as 19th-century
writers like Charles Dickens would.
“He
published the most important chapters, to make sure he knew what
different audiences — ordinary readers, literary critics, the
intelligentsia — thought,” Mr. Santana-Acuña said.
García
Márquez, like many writers, claimed not to bother much with reviews,
especially negative ones. But the archive includes a number of scrapbooks which carefully compile — and sometimes privately respond to — reviews of his work in many different languages.
Mr.
Santana-Acuña said he was particularly amused by a notation on a second
review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” that appeared in the
conservative Colombia newspaper El Tiempo, which had initially dismissed
the novel as badly written left-wing propaganda.
“Al
menos por larga y entusiasta!” García Márquez (who in the 1950s had
written for a rival Colombian newspaper) wrote of the second effort —
“At least it’s long and enthusiastic!”
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