Imagining and reimagining Ecuador in fiction

The literary imagining of the nation is key to understanding Ecuador because, from the beginning of their postcolonial history, Latin American nations have been constructed in the pages of their literature. During the late 1800s and the first half of the twentieth century, after most of the region gained independence from colonial powers, novels became a way to build nationalistic imaginaries for the newly created nations. Doris Sommer discusses the ‘inextricability’ of politics from fiction in the history of nation-building in Latin America by arguing that national novels are often romances in which the stories of star-crossed lovers are exhortations to be fruitful and multiply.2 Sommer, p. 6. These fictions, Sommer argues, spread desire for a state where love is possible, portraying the happy union of the lovers as a ‘wish-fulfilling project of national consolidation and growth’.3 Sommer, pp. 6–7. With such arguments, literary criticism connects nations to narration in the republican history of Latin America.

This relationship, however, is not exclusive to the region. Postcolonial theorists around the world have documented the connections between nation and narration. Homi Bhabha argues that narratives and discourses that signify a sense of ‘nationness’ have been found and analysed throughout different latitudes, from ‘old’ post-imperialist nations to ‘new’ independent nations.4 Homi Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’, in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi Bhabha (Abingdon: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1–8 (p. 4). Bhabha holds that narrations are capable of exploring what he calls the ‘ambivalent’ and ‘Janus-faced’ nature of the nation, that is to say, addressing the ‘heimlich pleasures of the hearth’ and ‘the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other’, ‘the comfort of social belonging’ as well as the ‘hidden injuries of class’ that coexist in national spaces.5 Bhabha, p. 2. In his study on the subject, Bhabha reviews these topics mainly through North American and European experiences, but he also shows us that the same perspectives have been applied to African and Asian traditions, making a case for nations related to narrations as cultural representations of modernity.

These approaches – as Bhabha and Sommer themselves acknowledge in their works – are informed by Benedict Anderson’s seminal account of nationalism, which proposes the idea that nation-building is linked to novels and newspapers. In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, first published in 1983, Anderson argues that the modern idea of a nation is based on the imaginary that resulted from the dissemination of print-languages via novels and newspapers.6 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 2006), p. 25. According to his analysis, these printed documents laid the basis for a national consciousness – that is, an awareness of the existence of a group of people that form a national community – because they allowed people to read about others, and in fact comprehend others, in their same language field. By doing so, they ‘gradually became aware of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged’.7 Anderson, p. 44. Novels helped to raise awareness about a group of fellow-readers that through their ‘visible invisibility’ formed the ‘embryo of the nationally imagined community’.8 Anderson, p. 44.

As this book explains, Anderson’s theory has been discussed considering the specificities of the Latin American context, where the conditions of illiteracy in the region throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century make the argument of a national community based on readership much less viable than in other latitudes. My work draws from Anderson’s understanding of nations as ‘imagined’ communities that emerge from a shared national consciousness, but it also takes a critical stance towards its proposals regarding the limitations of nations. I argue that, as reflected by the case of Ecuador, the limitations Anderson described in his imagined communities are regularly exceeded, as nations cannot be contained nor limited by borders. Similarly, this book engages with the idea of the nation as an imagined community by exploring who is behind such imagining. That is, following the implications of Anderson’s theory, if the nation is imagined, one must ask: imagined by whom?

By questioning who is behind a nation’s imagining, I explore the role of writers in the creation of discourses regarding what the nation is and what it represents. In this sense, my research resonates with Carlos Altamirano’s ideas on the role of letrados in the making of Latin American nations. Altamirano argues that it is impossible to ignore the presence and influence of men of letters if we are to adequately describe and reflect on the republican history of the region in the nineteenth century.9 Carlos Altamirano, Historia de los intelectuales en América Latina: I. La ciudad letrada, de la conquista al modernismo, ed. by Jorge Myers (Buenos Aires: Katz Editores, 2008), p. 9. His comment relies on the fact that, in the early republican years of Latin American countries, writers were often close to the political powers of the time. In many cases they were also politicians themselves, serving as presidents, ambassadors or holders a myriad of public offices. Doris Sommer’s analysis of Latin America’s national novels is marked by figures illustrating the duality writer/politician signalled by Altamirano. For instance, she studies the work of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Rómulo Gallegos, former presidents of Argentina and Venezuela respectively, who also became canonical authors of their countries. As such, they were writers who sought to build their nations in their writing by reflecting their own political views for the future.

This book is in conversation with the vein of criticism that explores the role of writers in imagining nations, arguing that their literary imaginings of the nation are capable of creating normative discourses that become institutionalised and consecrated through time. As such, they can condition the ways in which the nation is understood by generations beyond their own, as Jorge Icaza’s Huasipungo does in the Ecuadorian case studied here. Icaza’s work showcases the intimate connection between nation-building processes through narrative and the ideas of elite intelligentsias in Latin America. Moreover, it also demonstrates how the literary imaginings of nations can endure until they are disrupted by nation-transforming events, such as the Feriado Bancario narrated by Eliécer Cárdenas in El oscuro final del Porvenir. This book argues that Cárdenas’ novel signals the need to reimagine Ecuador after the economic crisis of 1998, a task that is later carried out by contemporary Ecuadorian writing. Although taking distance from the letrados of the past in that they are not explicitly aligned to political projects, the contemporary authors examined in this research reimagine Ecuador in their fiction. They do so by laying bare the transnational experiences taking place every day in the post-crisis Ecuadorian society their work engages with and emerges from.