SOURCE: Herrero-Olaizola, Alejandro. “Consuming Aesthetics: José Donoso in the Field of Latin American Literary Production.” Modern Language Notes 115, no. 2 (March 2000): 323-39.

[In the following essay, Herrero-Olaizola uses Donoso's novel El jardín de al lado as a commentary on the cultural production of the “Boom” period, with special attention to the influence of the Seix Barral publishing company.]

In spite of the disagreements on how to interpret and contextualize the publishing accomplishments of the “Boom” writers, almost everyone would acknowledge the need to ask how the institutions of literature—editors, literary agents, scholars, readers, publishing houses, authors, etc.—interacted in the production of contemporary Latin American narrative.¹ This essay evaluates the field of cultural production of the “Boom” through the interaction of Latin American writers (Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, José Donoso, Mauricio Wácquez, Jorge Edwards, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, among others) with the Barcelona intelligentsia of the 1960s and 1970s (writers like Juan and Luis Goytisolo, Juan Marsé, Esther Tusquets, Juan Benet; and editors such as Carlos Barral and José María Castellet), and looks at how this interaction benefited the prominent Catalan publishing industry as well as the diffusion of Latin American narrative internationally. In particular, this essay focuses on Seix Barral's editorial policies favoring the distribution of the literary works of many Latin American writers in the 1960s and 1970s. In this sense, the case of José Donoso (1924-1996) is particularly relevant to evaluate the interaction among “Boom” writers and the Barcelona intelligentsia since he was a member of this group whose production was mainly published by Seix Barral.² Despite his role as agent/reporter/writer of the “Boom” Donoso has disregarded the Latin American publishing success as “anecdotal,” and has insisted that “the Spanish American novel began to speak an international language” in a clear departure from “the regional taste and aesthetic values” (9-10) that dominated the novel before 1960.

In a recent essay on Seix Barral's publishing partner in Mexico, Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, Danny Anderson proposes to study the role of publishing houses as “cultural institutions” than “can provide a broader basis for understanding why and how texts become important works of literature” (34). “Rather than following changes in narrative trends,” he adds, “one can establish histories of publishing houses that promoted certain kinds of literature, and at various moments achieved qualified and temporary degrees of cultural hegemony” (35). What Anderson's analysis suggests is that by tracing the marketing strategies generated by the publishing houses that distributed the “Boom” one may well be in a position to decipher the aesthetic program behind it. In order to explain how such aesthetic program was marketed, one has to examine the strategies of publishing houses and how they may relate to the literary creation, success and distribution of Latin American literature.

In an attempt to contextualize the strategies used by Seix Barral, and how they may be understood within the aesthetic program of the nueva novela, I propose in this essay a two-fold analysis based upon Pierre Bourdieu's model of literary production as laid out in The Field of Cultural Production. First, I map out the aesthetic and marketing program behind Seix Barral in order to examine its role as an agent of cultural production for Latin America; and, secondly, I explore its literary ramifications through a close reading of José Donoso's 1981 novel El jardín de al lado as a case study of the cultural production of the “Boom” period and its publishing industry in the Spanish literary market of the 1970s and beyond. I situate the “Boom” and nueva novela as part of the larger framework of the field of cultural production by looking into the institutions of literature and the social structures in which they appear. Furthermore, I am interested in exploring how such a theoretical framework becomes not simply thematized but also problematized from the writer's point of view in the process of literary production in Donoso's novel.

In order to examine the “Boom's” literary success within the context of Barcelona's cultural milieu, it may be useful to refer to some of Bourdieu's notions pertaining to what he calls “the field of cultural production.” For Bourdieu the literary field, as any other social formation, is part of a hierarchical structure which consists of a series of fields (the economic field, the educational field, the political field, and the cultural field, etc.), “each of them with its own functioning and its own relations” (6). Whereas in the economic field agents battle for the acquisition of economic capital, in the cultural (or literary) field competition often concerns the acquisition of symbolic capital which is found in the accumulation of recognition, consecration and prestige (7). Bourdieu proposes that the field of cultural production is “an economic world reversed” where economic success (i.e., writing a best-seller) may impede consecration and symbolic power in the literary field. This distinction between economic and symbolic capital is paramount for the understanding of how the publishing industry operates within the literary field. Books have economic and symbolic value since they are priced according to their printing costs as well as other elements that cannot be measured in economic terms, such as the author's reputation, the critical reception, or the publisher's fame. For Bourdieu, “symbolic goods are a two-faced reality, a commodity and a symbolic object” whose cultural and commercial value “remain relatively independent” (113).

Whereas for Bourdieu the interaction of the symbolic and the economic becomes a key element to establish two sub-fields of production, restricted—that is, production for other producers such as museums, galleries, libraries, the educational system, etc.—and large-scale for the public at large, most publishing houses that distributed the works of the “Boom” appeared to have aimed at the field of restricted production and yet reached over the public at large. In a sense, the oscillatory movement between “Boom” and nueva novela present in these publishing houses would make this so-called “economic world reversed” take—yet another—turn or reversal, since their investment in symbolic capital (ie, creating a name, being identified as an avant-garde publisher, etc) ultimately provided economic returns produced from the consolidation of symbolic capital. Seix Barral's symbolic capital was based in part on the construction of Barcelona as a production site of the avant-garde, and its marketing depended on its annual literary prize Premio Biblioteca Breve. Editor Carlos Barral became an agent whose “symbolic investment” was to attract the Latin American writers to channel a more international distribution of their works. In this case, the “Boom” writers and Seix Barral become what Bourdieu would call “agents occupying the diverse available positions” in the field so that they can “engage in competition for control of their interests” (6-7): while the Latin American writers compete for the production and distribution of their works and of their names, Seix Barral aims at gaining financial benefits and literary acclaim in marketing them.

There seem to be two strategies that most clearly contributed to resituating the position of Seix Barral within the literary field: a new market identity and an international visibility. In the 1960s Carlos Barral, a co-owner of the publishing house with Víctor Seix and also a leader of the editorial review board, was interested in expanding toward the Latin America market, which had been a major source of income for the publishing house in the 1930s. In his memoirs Los años sin excusa (1977), Barral talks about his interest in changing the market identity of the publishing house: “it was a matter of building up a backlist with the most important and exotic new authors. Later, it would not take long to impose the contents of this literary period on the Spanish-speaking markets with an intelligent presentation” (139) [my translation].

To create a new market identity of his publishing house Barral followed the scope of French literary journals and publishers—such as NRF, Les Temps Modernes and Minuit—to make a list of international authors. As explained by Danny Anderson, this process “consists of the systematic use of a network of social relationships,” which, in Seix Barral's case, included members of the Barcelona intelligentsia as well as “published writers and prominent intellectuals who had already achieved prestige of their own” (10). Indeed, Barral looked for the validation of international editors and writers to establish Seix Barral's space for a select group of readers in order to make his publishing enterprise a sort of hybrid between what Bourdieu calls restricted and large-scale production. The new market identity would give the publishing house the cachet it needed to accumulate symbolic capital—mainly in the form of literary success and prestige—as well as economic capital which would then come from the large-scale production of some of the items in Seix Barral's backlist.

As Bourdieu reminds us the literary field is contained within the field of power, and Barral's new market identity had to “agree” with the political structure of the time. Despite the censorship of all printed materials under the Franco regime (1939-1975), Barral's project for an avant-garde readership went forward. Oddly enough, the process of changing Seix Barral's market identity coincided with the opening up that characterized the last phase of the regime (1959-75). From 1959 on, the new government of “technocrats” proposed economic reforms geared toward the creation of a consumer society in Spain (Dravasa 208-09). This expansion, based on the Planes de Desarrollo [Economic Development Plans], was designed to improve the infrastructures of the country by creating a “booming” tourist industry from which Spain could obtain an important source of revenue. As part of the new economic plan, they tried to break down Spain's international isolation by launching a massive campaign to export Spanish products world-wide. Indeed, the Latin American market was one of Franco's targets ever since Spain had lost its control of the publishing industry in Latin America after the fall of the Republic in 1939.³

Indeed, these changes in the configuration of “the field of cultural production” were not at odds with Barral's attempt to create a new and more international reputation of his publishing house. Even though it would seem a contradiction for Franco's government to allow and sponsor the distribution of Latin American writers who had sided with the Cuban Revolution, the field of power had been altered by the government's new international liberalism. As Bourdieu reminds us the relation between the field of power and the literary field is one of containment as well as autonomy since their relation operates in terms of “economic and political principles of hierarchization” (37). While Barral's change to a new market identity was geared toward gaining more symbolic capital for Seix Barral, the new printing law and the Economic Development Plans favored the consolidation of such autonomy.

It is from this point on that Seix Barral's image as an avant-garde publisher (or in Spanish as editorial cultural) begins to overlap with a strategy of international visibility due, on the one hand, to the economic reforms, and, on the other, to Barral's own network of international editors. While the strategy of a new market identity relies heavily on what Anderson calls “markers of prestige”—quality, openness to innovation, interest in international high culture, cosmopolitanism, etc. (13)—, Barral's project for international visibility was based on a greater distribution of Seix Barral's backlist thanks to the publicity generated by literary prizes. Through the combination of these two strategies, Seix Barral became what Bourdieu would call an “agent of consecration” competing in the field of restricted production for “the power to grant cultural consecration” (121). More specifically, an agent of consecration for the “Boom” writers as well as for Barcelona's avant-garde status within the field of cultural production.

In this sense, I would argue that the creation of three literary prizes by Carlos Barral—the Premio Biblioteca Breve, the Prix Formentor, and the Prix International de Litterature—may be seen as part of the agency of consecration.⁴ The idea behind these prizes had to do not only with consecration, but also with the internationalization of the publishing house and the reinforcement of its avant-garde readership. It is from this experience with the Formentor group of editors that Carlos Barral began his efforts to resituate Seix Barral's role within the field of literary production, and launched a strategy of international visibility for the Barcelona publishing house. As part of Barral's strategy to increase the visibility of his pro-Latin America enterprise, he convinced the Formentor group to award the 1961 Prix International to Jorge Luis Borges, undoubtedly the precursor of the “Boom” writers. The success of Borges's work in the international market was a key factor in the new direction of Seix Barral.

Once he had managed to convince his partners of this new direction, Barral orchestrated the creation of an annual literary prize which would be a springboard for the distribution of the Latin American Boom writers, the Premio Biblioteca Breve. Barral himself describes in his memoirs the prize as “an instrument of editorial strategy or maneuvering [which] ended up being a wonderful cultural toy … it began to gain prestige, especially all over the Americas … and became the cornerstone of a possible literary policy for the discovery of Spanish American literature” (1988:79-84). Indeed, the prestige or symbolic capital acquired by Seix Barral in the early 1960s was transformed into an economic success with the 1962 Premio Biblieteca Breve. That year the winner was La ciudad y los perros, written by an unknown young Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa. His book rapidly sold out, and by 1971 there had been 16 editions of the text and more than 135, 000 copies sold world-wide. This was quite an accomplishment for an avant-garde publishing house, since at the time most new titles in Spain sold an average of 3,000 copies. According to José Donoso this award launched Vargas Llosa internationally as well as Seix Barral; their names were linked from that moment on to the success of the Latin American novel of the 1960s (1977:72). Furthermore, Seix Barral's visibility derived also from the fact that while most books from Spanish publishers had something (as Donoso puts it) “suspiciously old” about them, this publishing house—in its quest for a new market identity and international visibility—made these novels appealing to the general public with “audacious, brilliant, and up-to-date” covers. For Donoso, Seix Barral's books became “the envy of all” Latin American writers who “had to put up with the total lack of style and the defective presentation of” their novels elsewhere (1977:73).⁵

The establishment of Seix Barral in the literary field of the “Boom”—through the strategies of a new market identity and international visibility—meant that contemporary Latin American novels were now largely distributed in Europe. Although Seix Barral at first aimed toward a restricted and more elitist production in line with the aesthetic renovation of the nueva novela, it was able soon to combine its symbolic investments with a rather large-scale distribution of Latin American fiction geared toward the general public. As Bourdieu points out, “these two fields of production [restricted and largescale], opposed as they are, coexist” (128). The terms “Boom” and nueva novela may be conceptualized revising this notion of coexistence: the marketing of an elitist aesthetics—such as the nueva novela—for popular consumption appears to go beyond the coexistence of restricted and large-scale production, and more in line with terms such as superimposition—or even—takeover. Therefore, one may argue that both terms, “Boom” and nueva novela, can be reconciled without discarding their complementary nature.

This dual concept of contemporary Latin American narrative as a commercial enterprise as well as an aesthetic renovation becomes part of José Donoso's fictions and essays. While he maintains that the crisis at Seix Barral “broke up the most influential agent for the internationalization of the Spanish American novel” (1977:108) during the 1960s, he acknowledges that the circle around the Barcelona intelligentsia continued to be associated with prestige and literary success. The literary success of Latin Americans in Barcelona did not end with the crisis at Seix Barral since Barral Editores—the new publishing house founded by Carlos Barral—maintained a similar market identity and international visibility of an avant-garde publisher from Barcelona.⁶

Indeed, by looking at my assessment of the “Boom” and nueva novela, it seems clear that markers of symbolic capital—like association with the avant-garde, being published by Seix Barral, belonging to the Barcelona intelligentsia—are key elements of economic as well as of literary success. It is precisely from this point of view, how aesthetics are “consumed” in the “Boom” that I wish to frame my reading of José Donoso's novel El jardín de al lado (1981). What I propose is to read Donoso's novel as a case study for the marketing of the aesthetic renovation of the nueva novela in the context of the Spanish publishing industry, that is, an analysis of the “consuming of aesthetics” to which the title of this essay refers.⁷

The novel tells a first-person account of an exiled Chilean author, Julio Méndez, in his quest for literary success among the “Boom” writers. After moving to Sitges—an enclave for Latin Americans as well as international expatriates (40km south of Barcelona)—with his wife Gloria, a translator and an article reviewer, Julio tries to publish his book manuscript, a fiction based on his 6-day imprisonment in Chile immediately after the 1973 coup d'etat against Salvador Allende. At the beginning of El jardín de al lado, we learn that Julio's novel—written between 1973 and 1980—has been rejected by his literary agent, Núria Monclús, whose powerful editorial network includes all major publishing houses and editors in Spain, as well as many writers associated with the “Boom.” Julio's fixation with the literary success mediated by Barcelona's publishing industry fuels his desire to rewrite the manuscript into what he calls “una obra maestra superior a esas literatura de consumo, hoy tan de moda, que ha encumbrado a falsos dioses como García Márquez, Marcelo Chiriboga, and Carlos Fuentes” (13). To help in the process of rewriting, a friend of the Mendez's, Chilean artist Pancho Salvatierra (literally, “Savior of the Land”), invites them to house-sit in Madrid for the summer so that Julio can peacefully work on his novel while Gloria devotes her time to translations and articles. While in Madrid, Julio will complete the revisions of the manuscript, partly inspired by his constant peeping into the neighbor's garden which resembles his mother's garden in Chile. In spite of the inspiration coming from “the garden next door,” Julio's revised manuscript is rejected again by Núria Monclús. Julio, confused and frustrated by his lack of literary success, sells one of Pancho's paintings and goes off to Morocco with his wife Gloria. Their experience in Tangier becomes a turning point for the couple's story as well as for the novel: while Julio decides to relocate in Morocco to look for new sources for his literary success, Gloria prefers to go back to their Barcelona environment. Julio's first person narration stops at this point, the end of the penultimate chapter, and gives way to Gloria's final account of the story in the sixth and last chapter of the novel. Gloria's takeover as a first person narrator relocates the novel back in Barcelona, and more specifically at a luncheon with Núria Monclús, where both women discuss the publication of Gloria's—and not Julio's—first novel. El jardín de al lado concludes with Núria's intriguing question to Gloria: “—¿Bueno no es éste el capítulo que falta, el que no has escrito … ? (264). Ultimately, there is no real ending to the story since the reader faces a sort of cliffhanger: Who is writing this “missing chapter”? From what exact manuscript does it come from, Julio's or Gloria's, or from a composite text? Has Gloria been the narrator all along? Is there also a missing chapter in Donoso's text?

El jardín de al lado can be read as Donoso's tongue-in-cheek recreation of his Historia personal del boom as well as a roman à clef of the Barcelona publishing industry (Julio and Gloria as José and María Pilar Donoso, Núria Monclús as Carmen Balcells, the real agent of the Boom writers in Barcelona, etc.). Indeed, Donoso fictionalizes the mechanisms of marketing literary success by an inversion of his own success into the failure of Julio, perhaps proposing that a new generation of Latin Americans writers, women in particular, are “taking over” the field of literary production. This is the new marketing model that Núria Monclús is looking for as she admits it to Gloria in the final chapter: “Se necesitan más novelistas como tú” (248). One may read the implications of the narratorial switch as constructing a particular gender-based theory of authority in the text—as suggested by Lucille Kerr and Priscilla Meléndez—, which would open up a possible discussion of the “Boom” in terms of male vs. female notoriety. What strikes me about the narratorial switch in regard to my earlier definition of “Boom” / nueva novela is that Donoso's novel is placed in a time frame which favors the marketing of Latin American women writers, the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this sense, Gloria's takeover might also be read as underscoring the literary success of writers like Isabel Allende, Luisa Valenzuela, Rosario Ferré, Elena Poniatowska or Cristina Peri Rossi whose notoriety as members of the “Boom” phenomenon came after that of male authors in the 1960s and early 1970s. As Montero points out, Donoso appears to fictionalize “a different model of the literary task” (451: [my translation]), one in which his position as a male author has been altered by changes in the literary field. Such changes are anticipated by Núria's remarks about the future of Gloria's career: “Esta novela es extraordinaria, pero la prueba de fuego es la segunda” (248).

Interestingly, the Méndez came to Barcelona in 1973, but the production of “their” literary work takes place around 1980, the time of the literary success of women in the “Boom” (and for some “post-Boom”) phenomenon. Within this literary field Julio constantly belittles—and yet envies—the literary success of exclusively male authors of the “Boom” like García Márquez, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar and the fictional Marcelo Chiriboga since they are part of “el insorpotable oropel de falsedades comerciales” (118) that have been become an integral part of the Barcelona publishing industry. For Julio, the “Boom” moved away from—what Bourdieu calls—the restricted into the large-scale production. The authors themselves have acquired star-like status and have started production for the public at large, rather than for other cultural producers. Julio's remarks seem to point toward Bourdieu's assessment that in the literary field, “the writer … writes not only for a public, but for a public of equals who are also competitors” in that field because “few people depend as much as artists do for their self-image upon the image of others, and particularly other writers and artists” (116). In this sense Julio is constantly measuring his image against that of the Boom writers. He is obsessively aware of this type of competition in the literary field: “¿Vería yo mi nombre allá arriba—pese a la contraria superagente mafiosa—entre los de Vargas Llosa, Roa Bastos, Marcelo Chiriboga, Carlos Fuentes y Ernesto Sábato?” (35). Indeed, Julio's rhetorical question ponders his ability to enter the literary field of the “Boom,” a field “ruled” in the fiction by the all-mighty Núria Monclús. Julio knows that in order to achieve literary success in the Barcelona milieu he needs to occupy—what Bourdieu calls—an “available position to engage in competition for control of the interests or resources which are specific” to the literary field (6). For Julio, the exclusion from that particular field translates into failure, and impedes his return to Chile: “No puedo volver. ¿Cómo? ¿Sin un libro publicado en España, con la cola entre las piernas … ?” (165).⁸

Furthermore, Núria's reputation in the text as the “legendaria capomafia del grupo de célebres novelistas lationoamericanos” (44) underscores that much of the literary success of the “Boom” revolves around her power figure. In Bourdieu's terms, Núria would be an agent of consecration who has already acquired the power to grant cultural consecration within the literary field of the “Boom.” Moreover, she is often identified as generator of economic capital, as a “catalana mercenaria que no era más que un mercader de literatura” (29). It is precisely Núria's capabilities as producer of symbolic as well as economic capital that Julio—and perhaps Gloria—pursue since they would also be competing in the literary field for symbolic capital, namely the literary success coming from the Barcelona publishing industry.

It is crucial to understand that in the literary field fictionalized in Donoso's novel, Núria dictates literary trends in the editorial industry in Barcelona but has also managed to control the economic capital upon which such industry is based: “se murmuraba que esta diosa tiránica era capaz de hacer y deshacer reputaciones, de fundir y fundar editoriales y colecciones, de levantar fortunas y hacer quebrar empresas” (44). Julio's exaggeration of Núria's powers does not correspond with the parameters of diffusion of Latin American literature of Seix Barral, Joaquín Mortiz or Sudamericana; rather, it presents a critique of the commercialization and business-like structures by which most publishers seem to function in the novel. In equivalent terms, Donoso describes in Historia personal the “real” literary agent of the Boom writers in Barcelona, Carmen Balcells, as a power figure who “seemed to have in her hands the strings that made us all dance like marionettes” (106).

Thanks to Núria's role the literary field of the Boom appears to have moved from the field of restricted into the field of large-scale production. For Gutiérrez Mouat, “the emergence of a culture industry in Latin America coincided with the modernization of the Latin American Novel, a revival that culminated in the boom of the 1960s” (67). This expansionary movement in Latin American narrative—against which Julio is determined to fight—has been framed by Jean Franco with the term “autores superestrella” [author-superstars], typical of the age of mass culture. Indeed, one of Núria's interest in the literary field is to promote the star status of Latin American writers. Julio's novel lacks the star qualities of other greats of the “Boom” since his revised manuscript—in Núria's words—is just “pura retórica, imitación de lo que está de moda entre los escritores latinoamericanos de hoy” (224).

By contrast, Núria seems to grant cultural consecration to the literary works of a fictional Ecuadorian writer who has become an autor superestrella of the Barcelona milieu, Marcelo Chiriboga. This super-star of the Latin American Boom assumes the role of the competitor of Julio within the literary field: Julio's self-image relies on the literary success of Chiriboga's masterpiece and best-seller La caja sin secreto [The Box Without Secret]. At first, Julio appears to despise Marcelo for being “el más insolentemente célebre de todos los integrantes del dudoso boom” (132). However, he later on succumbs to Chiriboga's literary success when, in the closing section of chapter 5, Julio admits:

Mi novela es una mierda. La prosa de Chiriboga, en cambio, tiene una simplicidad deceptiva que se disuelve bajo la lengua, embargando los pulmones y el ser entero con un aroma que la corteza de su lenguaje no hacía esperar … Quisiera escribir como Chiriboga. Pero no puedo.

(242)

Indeed, Julio—as a competitor of the literary field—is constantly measuring the quality of his own prose against Chiriboga's, and in so doing, he is proposing two models of writing which coincide with the trends of the commercial or editorial “boom” and aesthetic renovation (nueva novela). While Julio insists on the documentary nature of his novel, he appears to criticize the excessive formalism and linguistic experimentation in the works of Cortázar, Fuentes, or Vargas Llosa. Julio considers their works as excessively cosmopolitan, lacking the kind of political commitment he brings into his novel with his ordeal in a Chilean prison (46). Interestingly, Chiriboga's master-piece is literally an empty box, “a box without any secrets,” without any—let's say—political, testimonial or historical content, and yet shows great mastery of the language. The excessive formalism of Chiriboga's work, according to Julio, has become the key to marketing its literary success: “La obra de Chiriboga es una obra inerte, en el fondo una invención de esa bruja de las finanzas que es Núria Monclús” (139). Curiously, Chiriboga is the only fictional author of the Boom in El jardín de al lado, even though his literary persona has reappeared as a “real novelist” in Fuentes's El naranjo (1993), and as the subject of university research in Donoso's 1993 novel Donde van a morir los elefantes. One may read Chiriboga's presence, then, as the epitome of the marketing of Latin American fiction since his literary success in fiction appears to have surpassed the realm of the literary. The playfulness of his literary persona is also highlighted by the fact that his name is phonetically close to chirigota (Spanish for joke, laughing stock). Chiriboga's persona, therefore, appears to be in contrast with the literary persona of—what González calls—the “strong, male, politically committed figure,” and more in line with the “new public role of the Latin American writer” (109), which Jean Franco would call autor-superestrella.

In the end, all the writers in Donoso's novel appear to lack the literary qualities Julio claims to have: Chiriboga is more of a “laughing stock” and a puppet in Núria's marketing plots than an accomplished writer, Gloria—despite her success, or her “glory”—is not an accomplished writer since she does not have a second novel and her first one appears to be incomplete, and the many real Boom writers mentioned in the text—Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Roa Bastos, Sábato, Cortázar, etc—are also discarded because “desconocían la experiencia de primera mano como participantes en una tragedia colectiva” (46).

Moreover, it seems that one cannot study the “Boom” without addressing its own “awareness” of the field of cultural production in which its literary works appear. Many Boom writers, in this respect, enjoy autonomy with respect to the field by being critical of it. As Bourdieu points out, “the field of restricted production tends to develop its own criteria for the evaluation of its products, thus achieving the truly cultural recognition accorded by the peer group whose members are both privileged clients and competitors” (115). This is particularly true of the restricted production initially launched by Seix Barral, incidentally the kind of production Julio Méndez is looking for. While in Donoso's novel cultural legitimacy comes from the peer group of fictional and real characters—Fuentes, Cortázar, Chiriboga, García Márquez, Núria Monclús, etc—, Seix Barral's legitimacy for the distribution of Latin American culture is also based on the participation of the real peer group members—like García Márquez and Vargas Llosa—who became, for instance, participants in the evaluation process of the Premio Biblioteca Breve.

In closing, my reading of José Donoso's works underscores that the marketing of literary success of Latin American narrative after 1960s cannot be simply contextualized in economic terms since the marketing of an elitist aesthetics for popular consumption raises the question of how symbolic capital can become a commodity on the real economic market. In this sense, my reading of the “Boom” as a distinct—and yet concurrent—manifestation of the nueva novela helps to understand how this literary period oscillates from elitist to popular, from restricted to large-scale production, from the politically-committed author to the autor-superestrella, ultimately presenting a case of consuming aesthetics.

Notes

1. Ángel Rama sees the “Boom” as a movement toward the globalization of Latin America based on advertising strategies, and David Viñas as lacking any aesthetic common denominator among its writers. For Emir Rodríguez Monegal the initial link between the “Boom” writers' support for the Cuban revolution and their “revolutionary” use of language was transformed into “an editorial phenomenon”: “the result of a decision in the industry to launch a product they thought they could sell, the new Latin American prose fiction” (Mac Adam 30). Rodríguez Monegal refers to three factors that generated this oscillatory movement between a cultural revolution and an industrial boom: the role of Seix Barral, the creation of literary journals such as Marcha, Primera Plana, Mundo Nuevo and Libre, and the increasing number of translations and film adaptations of Latin American novels. Carlos Fuentes avoids the term “Boom” and focuses on nueva novela as defined by the modernization of Latin American fiction and its renovation of language, themes, and narrative structures.

2. Seix Barral has published eleven literary works by Donoso—Coronación (1958), Este domingo (1966), Cuentos (1971), El obsceno pájaro de la noche (1970), Tres novelitas burguesas (1973), El lugar sin límites (1976), Casa de campo (1978), La misteriosa desaparición de la marquesita de Loria (1980), El jardín de al lado (1981), Cuatro para Delfina, and La desesperanza (1986)—and two editions of his memoirs Historia personal del boom (1972, 1983). However, Donoso minimizes the importance of the marketing strategies by Seix Barral—and other publishing houses of the time, Joaquín Mortiz in Mexico, or Losada, Emecé, Jorge Álvarez and Sudamericana in Argentina—by pointing out that “the popularity of the contemporary Spanish American novel” goes beyond “the publicity mechanism.” He cites Sudamericana's modest launching of One Hundred Years of Solitude as an example of a novel that becomes a world-wide best-seller without such editorial support (69-70; [all English quotations are from The Spanish American Boom: A Personal History]).

3. To illustrate the successful expansion into the Latin American market supported by the government's policies, one can look at data from the Instituto Nacional del Libro Español (National Book Institute) in 1957 only 3,000 new titles were published in Spain, by 1969 the numbers went up to 13,000. Also in 1969, 900 publishers were registered, and more than 82٪ of the books printed in Spain were headed for the Latin American market, mainly Argentina (18٪), Mexico (13٪), Venezuela (10٪), and Chile (10٪) (Dravasa 212-16). During the last decade of the Franco regime, new regulations concerning printed materials took effect based on the Ley de Prensa e Imprenta [The Printing and Publishing Law] authored by Manuel Fraga Iribarne in 1966. With this new law the government claimed to put an end to the censorship of printed materials with its banner “la censura ya no existe” [censorship no longer exists]. Despite the government's claim, all printed material still had to receive the seal of approval of the Ministerio de Información y Turismo, and therefore censorship continued. Nonetheless, the new law did change the way in which manuscripts were evaluated by the censors. Manuel Abellán in “La censura franquista y los escritores latinoamericanos” argues that the law allowed for a larger distribution of Latin American texts, since many of their works were authorized for printing as long as they were not distributed in Spain. The government's expansion policies toward the Latin American market were also supported by the many restrictions on importing books from abroad, particularly from Cuba and Argentina, two of the most notable competitors for the literary distribution of the Latin American Boom. (see Abellán 1980, Cisquella, Santana 1992 and 1994, Sivona).

4. The Formentor and International Prizes were created by a consortium of six publishers from France (Gallimard), Spain (Seix Barral), Italy (Einaudi), England (Weidenfeld & Nicholson), Germany (Rowohlt Verlag), and the U.S. (Grove Press)—who were later joined by seven more editors from Portugal, Canada, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries. They met once a year at the Formentor Hotel in Majorca to award the Formentor Prize to the best unpublished manuscript, and the International Prize to recognize an established author of world stature. Each prize carried a ＄10,000 award and the publication of the author's work by the 13 publishers. The Premio Biblioteca Breve—which carried an award of less than ＄2,000 and the publication of the winning manuscript—was officially open to literary works from Spain and Latin America, but in reality the selection of manuscripts by members of the jury (Joan Petit, Jose María Castellet, Luis Goytisolo) was subject to internal recommendations as well as the editorial policies of Carlos Barral (see p. 80-on, Cuando las horas veloces). It is no surprise that Barral's supervision of the prize between 1959 and 1969 resulted in five Latin American winners and two finalists (see Appendix).

5. Seix Barral marketed Latin American texts in three different collections: Biblioteca Breve—with its foldable jacket that will turn into a paperback version called Biblieteca de Bolsillo—, Biblioteca Nueva Narrativa Hispánica—distributed through the publishing house outlets in Barcelona, Caracas, Mexico—and the lesser known Biblioteca Universal Formentor.

6. This, indeed, relates to my earlier assessment of Barral's investments in symbolic capital within the literary field of the “Boom.” In this sense, an ad for Barral Editores in the second issue of Libre, clearly showed the continuation of Carlos Barral's line of symbolic investment in literary success: “Manténganse en Vanguardia, siga a Barral [Keep up with the Avant-Garde, Follow Barral] (Libre 2, 1971-72).

7. I wish to thank Catherine Nickel for suggesting the phrase “consuming aesthetics” and for her kindness in reading an earlier version of this manuscript. My gratitude also goes to Ross Chambers for reading the first draft of this essay.

8. According to Flora Gónzalez, Julio's failure also suggests that the “androgynous” nature of Donoso's double narrator unveils “the image of the literary agent, Núria Monclús, as a castrating female” (105), without a single book published, Julio, literally, must hide his tail.

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