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Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a copy of his book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, on his head in 1975. Photograph: Isabel Steva Hernandez/Colita/CORBIS
Gabriel Garcia Marquez with a copy of his book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, on his head in 1975. Photograph: Isabel Steva Hernandez/Colita/CORBIS

Archive of Colombian literary great Gabriel García Márquez goes to Texas

This article is more than 9 years old

Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas wins celebrated author’s papers, including unfinished novel, as scholars in his native country Colombia express disappointment

The Harry Ransom Center has a coup. The University of Texas at Austin’s deep-pocketed modern literature archive announced today that after almost a year of negotiation, it has acquired the papers of the prizewinning Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who died in April aged 87. Neither the author’s family nor the Ransom Center will disclose the amount of money that changed hands in the deal, but the Center, and the dealer it worked with, New York’s Glenn Horowitz, are well known for the substantial prices they pay for the work of 20th-century writers. In May this year, the center acquired the novelist Ian McEwan’s archive for a reported $2m.

In addition to personal correspondence and photo albums, the collection includes two typewriters, five computers and an estimated 2,000 letters from correspondents such as Julio Cortázar, Milan Kundera and Graham Greene.

Stephen Enniss, the director of the Ransom Center, sounded jubilant today as he described García Márquez’s literary significance, which he considers comparable to James Joyce’s.

Although García Márquez did not like to keep early drafts of his work, the collection includes later typescripts that he corrected by hand. The exception is his unfinished, unpublished final novel, We’ll See Each Other in August, which exists in around 10 drafts. “We’re interested in the writer’s creative process,” says Enniss. “We want to better understand how he accomplished these great works.”

The Ransom Center’s emphasis on the purely literary value of the archive plays down the writer’s political activism and his vocal opposition to United States policies on Cuba — García Márquez was barred from entering the US for some three decades before President Clinton lifted his travel ban in 1995. This makes it surprising that the archive ended up in this country, rather than at an institution in Colombia, where the writer is a national hero. Today, senior cultural figures in Colombia expressed regret that the archive had not come home. Colombia’s minister of culture, Mariana Garcés, told RCN radio that it would have been an honor to have housed the archives in the country’s National Library, and added, “It’s a great pity for Colombia to not have them.”

Colombian academic Eduardo Márceles put it more bluntly, claiming that the sale was akin to stripping away part of the country’s history and culture. “The archives should have been put to an international auction so that Colombians could have at least had the opportunity to try to keep the archives,” he told RCN Radio. “This is an incredibly important part of our heritage. The university of Texas has managed to get its hands on a priceless treasure.”

However, Gonzalo García Barcha, one of García Márquez’s two sons, said that Colombia never made any attempt to obtain the archives. “The government of Colombia was never interested,” he told Colombia’s Blu Radio. “They didn’t make any offer.” But Consuelo Gaitán, the director of the National Library of Colombia, denied that claim. “The government did show interest,” she insisted to Blu Radio. “[The family] never spoke to us about any kind of economic offer.” Her stance was echoed on Twitter by the country’s ministry of culture. “They said it was too soon after his death to speak about this. Colombia didn’t receive any proposal,” the ministry tweeted.

Enniss said that a representative of the writer’s family first contacted the center at the end of 2013, before García Márquez’s death, and that his was the first institution to be approached. In July this year Enniss traveled to the writer’s home in Mexico City with his colleague Jose Montelongo, a Latin American literature specialist, to, he says, “assess the research value of the collection for the students and scholars that the institution serves.” Enniss stresses, however, that the acquisition will benefit scholars beyond UT. “There’s nothing local about the institution,” he says, noting that scholars from 24 countries visited the Center last year.

The process of selling a writer’s archive is lengthy and delicate. According to Frances Negrón-Muntaner, director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University in New York, “financial, preservation, and access considerations often trump ideological ones.” In her own experience negotiating acquisitions for Columbia’s Latino Arts and Activism archive, relationships and trust matter just as much. “Families will gravitate to places that care about the work,” she says. “This is such an emotional decision. It’s about trust — you’re giving your family member’s history and legacy to strangers.” Money is just one among several important considerations.

“Families need a lot of reassurance about both preservation and access,” she says. “Many times, it is not the writer that makes the decision to sell or donate the papers to a particular library or site.”

Negrón-Muntaner points out, too, that although García Márquez wrote often about his native country, “his creative life largely unfolded outside of Colombia. He was also influenced by American writers and had personal ties to the US” (his son Rodrigo lives in California.) National concerns, therefore, may have been secondary to the question as to whether the archive will still be in good shape, and accessible, in a hundred years.

“You can argue about where it should go, but there needs to be something to argue about,” says Negrón-Muntaner. “Once you lose these types of materials, certain types of inquiry become impossible. We need to preserve them so that we can ask more and more complex questions about our past—that’s the bottom line.”

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