In his 1994 Nuevas lecciones de histeria de Colombia [sic], journalist and comedian Daniel Samper Pizano describes la Violencia in the following terms: "Vino una ?poca tan violenta, pero tan violenta, que en la larga historia de la violencia colombiana se la conoce como La Violencia" (160).1 Such a remark echoes the difficulties in establishing continuities and discontinuities between la Violencia and the rest of Colombian history, if not of delimitating such a period of time to begin with, issues that have preoccupied historians, social scientists and laypeople alike. There is a widespread view that comprehending la Violencia represents a key to the better under? standing of contemporary Colombia, but there is no easy way of developing this basic conviction, and extensive?if insufficient?historiographical revisions bear witness to this. Samper's remark also attests to the "blurredness" that la Violencia has acquired in a country where violence seems omnipresent. Thinking about Colombian violence is both appealing and elusive, and perhaps even more so in the case of la Violencia. The prologue of the first academic study of the phenomenon by Guzman, Fais Borda, and Uma?a, La Violencia en Colombia (1962) stated that "la naci?n carece de la noci?n exacta de lo que fue la Violencia" (14). Surprisingly, this has not significantly changed since then, and the general public remains largely unenlightened in this respect despite the progress in scholarly research. This paper thus begins with a caveat. Although we will not deal directly with la Violencia as a social phenomenon, some of the "slippery" nature of studying la Violencia will transfer onto our very own subject of study: the fixation of the canon of so-called "literatura de la Violencia" and the role that Garc?a M?rquez played in this process, along with the consequences of such a fixation for the later study and development of Colombian literature and its participation in a national coming to terms with la Violencia. The main goal of this paper is to elucidate Garcia M?rquez's relation to literatura de la Violencia and to put forward the hypothesis that under the light of this complex relation one can better understand the "eclipse of the rest of Colombian literature," that is, its negation and exclusion from both national and international mainstream reception. Literary historiography of literatura de la Violencia parallels some of the main ques