Among Latin American Letters and Address Books

Contributions to Reflections on Writers’ Archives

Abstract

Abstract: As our aim is to formulate reflections on self-writing and the archives of the writers, our article does more than answering questions, it raises some of their own. Our task is two-pronged: on the one hand, we have the correspondence between Gabriel García Márquez and journalist and writer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, from 1961 to 1971. On the other, an extra-literary object found in Carlos Heitor Cony’s archives: the address book which he took to Cuba in 1968. This presented us with a dilemma. How should such an object be analyzed and what contributions if any could it bring? The connection between such different writers may sound strange but what brought them together was the shared life experiences of exception, bitterly encountered at home and abroad, in their journalistic and literary militancy in newspapers, where they worked as chroniclers, reporters, and columnists and in their work as novelists. Moreover, there is the need to establish links between research that is being conducted simultaneously and that is part of a more intimate and private genre. This has enabled us to broaden our views and re-open a discussion: whether these objects – the address book and the correspondence – could be considered literary.

Keywords: correspondences; archive of writers; self-writing; Gabriel García Márquez; Carlos Heitor Cony.