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McOndo"s infamous negative reception both commercially and in critical reviews might appear as incongruent with its currency in academic discourse on Latin American literature. On the one hand it has become a perpetually referenced watershed moment for this generation of Latin American authors, that for some critics represents the so-called "McOndo Generation." And on the other hand the immediate critical backlash in local (Bianchi; Olea) and international reviews (Echevarría), as well as in critical works (Palaversich, De Macondo a McOndo; Palaversich, "Rebeldes sin causa"), combined with its lack of commercial success, are perhaps the marks of a literary blunder.1 There is no denying that McOndo became a "dirty word" and to co-editor Alberto Fuguet was a clear commercial failure: "it was horribly received, as much in terms of criticism and sales" (le fue horrible, en cuanto a crítica y a venta) ("Interview"). Commenting on the unexpected critical reception to the anthology, Fuguet stated:
there appeared this storm of bitterness, of cruelty, of violence. But of course, it was one thing to receive bad criticism in Chile, but quite another was the international criticism. I decided to hide. It embarrassed me, it shocked me, I couldn't believe I was so badly misinterpreted. And then I got tired, I guess, as if to say, well, in those days I had a weird haircut and I don't anymore. I felt there wasn't any way to rein in the prejudice and the only way to rein it in was writing books and making movies. ("A Personal History of McOndo")
But as contributor and Cornell professor Edmundo Paz Soldán has highlighted, McOndo "has been left for dead a thousand times and still manages to reappear" (28).2 Over twenty-five years since its publication, McOndo has gradually undergone a process of paradoxical canonization. My use of the term canonization here, to be clear, has less to do with Harold Bloom's conceptualization tied to aesthetics and the immortality of texts. My meaning here is much closer to Pierre Bourdieu's, in accounting for how McOndo has been produced as canonical by those consecrating authorities-critics, editors, academics-and in this paper through the function of the anthology. McOndo" s abnormally long literary afterlife is especially exemplary of this process. This is especially apparent compared to the...