I
Land, History, Nation
Without a doubt, Jorge Icaza’s
Huasipungo (1934) is one of the most famous Ecuadorian novels of all time. It is, in fact, one of the few recognisable examples of Ecuadorian writing that has transcended the limits of national and regional circulation, reaching not only Spanish-speaking audiences but also readers beyond the Hispanic world: it has been translated into and published in several languages, including English, French and Japanese.
1 There are two available English translations of Huasipungo. The first one kept the original title and was published in England by Mervyn Savill in 1962, while the second one was published in the US by Bernard Dulsey in 1964, under the title The Villagers. The timing of these translations coincides with two historical events that could have boosted the international interest in the novel. The first was the victory of the Cuban revolution in 1959 and the subsequent growing influence of leftist politics in Latin America. Huasipungo is largely seen as an example of proletarian writing, and as such, its imprint could have been easily linked to, and have benefited from, socialist enthusiasms in the region and beyond. The second event was the emergence of the 1960s Latin American Boom. Boom writers, widely published in the region and abroad, reached audiences larger than those of their predecessors. The translation of Latin American literature became more common than ever before. Huasipungo could have also benefited from the growing interest in translating Latin American writing, even though it belongs to an earlier period openly criticised by prominent Boom writers. Cecilia Mafla published an extensive study comparing and evaluating the two English translations of Huasipungo, focusing on the linguistic challenges of translating a text that heavily relies on Kichwa words and Ecuadorian Spanish. See Cecilia Mafla, Arí – Sí – Yes. Análisis lingüístico y evaluación de las traducciones de Huasipungo al inglés (Quito: Abya Yala, 2004). Proof of the widespread reach of the novel is the multiple reeditions it has undergone since its original publication in 1934, not to mention that it has also been adapted for theatre and into children’s literature.
The national and international attention that Icaza’s novel has managed to attract makes it a unique case study for Ecuadorian literature. Not only because it is an early example of literary success from a country that is often invisible in terms of literary recognition and circulation, but also because of the effects of this success on the development of Ecuadorian literature and – more broadly – its impact on the ways in which the Ecuadorian nation is imagined in narrative. In this chapter, I argue that to discuss how the Ecuadorian nation is thought of in contemporary fiction, it is first necessary to revisit Huasipungo in order to challenge some supposedly solved questions raised by Icaza’s seminal work. To do so, I revise the critical attention received by Huasipungo, attention that helped it in its positioning as the non plus ultra of Ecuadorian writing and the national novel of Ecuador. My argument is that, from a normative position in the cultural field, attained thanks to a consecrated status granted by institutions including literary criticism and the education system, Icaza and other writers from his generation established a national model that conditioned further developments of Ecuadorian literature and limited the frameworks under which we understand what the Ecuadorian nation is.
The national model I identify in Huasipungo frames the Ecuadorian nation in connection to a sense of ‘uniqueness’ to be found in history and territory. That is to say, it imagines Ecuador in connection to place and time, an essentialist approach that – rather than being the product of an accurate representation of reality – is a construct outlined by Icaza’s views. My reading of his novel – and the context from which it emerged and at the same time helped to shape – considers that its ideas of nation and national identity served the primary goals of liberal politics at the beginning of the twentieth century, that is, the economic modernisation of Ecuador and the consolidation of a myth of nationhood. As such, Huasipungo’s ideas of nation and national identity are naturally selective: they select and curate what aspects of society are to be represented in literature, while at the same time they ignore others, no matter how constitutive of a national experience they might be. Yet Icaza’s proposal is supposed to be representative of a ‘national essence’ or ‘definitive national spirit’ for Ecuadorian literary creation as well as the Ecuadorian nation. I propose here to use a transnational lens to challenge that view. I advocate to see beyond the national by identifying and thinking through the multiple interactions and exchanges with other nations that make part of the fabric of Ecuador. By doing so, I argue, it is possible to see the many contradictions Icaza’s approach gives rise to: the essentialist political and cultural aspirations of Huasipungo are misconceptions in a national field already marked by the cultural encounters and hybridisation that transnationalism entails. Those contradictions transpire through the novel, allowing us to reflect on how an economic and cultural disruption – such as the modernisation process – has a significant impact on the portrayal of the nation.
Finally, I argue that, although it is a fiction limited by its essentialism, the national proposal of Huasipungo became normative through the consecration it gained in the cultural field. I revise the factors that helped it to reach its consecrated status and the structural inertia that kept it in place to argue that, until another disruption comes to alter society drastically, the proposals of nation and national identity championed by Icaza and his generational peers occupy a dominant space in literature. This is a position that has constrained the understanding of the Ecuadorian nation to a fictional and politically biased vision of national authenticity to be found inside hard territorial borders, and that will be challenged only in the new millennium by another economic and cultural phenomenon that radically changes the national imaginary. Only then will the imagining of Ecuador come to terms with its transnational reality.