One of the main aspects to consider in the analysis of
Huasipungo’s influence on Ecuadorian literary life is the critical attention it has received. The commercial success of Icaza’s work has been accompanied by an amount of critical attention still unmatched in the literary scene of Ecuador. The novel has been widely recognised by critics both internally and externally, making it not just a bestseller but also a representative piece of Latin American literary history. For many scholars,
Huasipungo is the most important – if not the sole – contribution of Ecuador to the taxonomy of Latin American literature. It is often the only work present throughout different surveys overviewing the literary production of the region in the twentieth century. In their ‘introductions’ and ‘companions’ to Latin American literature, critics like Jean Franco, Philip Swanson and Stephen Hart talk about Ecuadorian literature primarily in reference to the social realist writing of the 1930s, placing the production of this generation among the most substantial Latin American novels of the early twentieth century.
1 See An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, ed. by Jean Franco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Philip Swanson, Latin American Fiction. A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); and Stephen M. Hart, A Companion to Latin American Literature (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2007). Although there are some mentions to earlier Ecuadorian writing – most notably including works by Juan Montalvo and Juan León Mera –
Huasipungo remains the quintessential piece of the twentieth century, being the only Ecuadorian novel that often ‘deserves special mention’ in this period.
The attention received by Icaza’s work in Latin American studies has only been partially matched in scholarship with a broader scope. In his exploration of the ‘distrusted’ category of World Literature, which will be analysed in the final chapter of this book, Michael Denning recognises
Huasipungo – alongside César Vallejo’s
El Tungsteno – as exemplars of proletarian writing, in his view, one of the first narrative trends to be examined when the main concern is the study of so-called ‘world novels’.
2 Michael Denning, ‘The Novelist International’, in The Novel Volume 1 History, Geography, and Culture, ed. by Franco Moretti (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 703–726 (p. 716). Nevertheless, in the same extensive collection where Denning’s essay is included – an ambitious edition by Franco Moretti that attempts to make a global understanding of the novel as a literary form – the section devoted to Latin America places its focus crucially on the literary Boom of the 1960s, the most celebrated phenomenon of Latin American literature, and importantly, a phenomenon that did not have Ecuadorian representation.
3 Gerald Martin, ‘The Novel of a Continent: Latin America’, in The Novel Volume 1 History, Geography, and Culture, ed. by Franco Moretti (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 632–667. The ambivalent position of
Huasipungo in Moretti’s book – mentioned in an essay about proletarian writing, yet ignored in the essay specifically about Latin American narrative – lets us begin to grasp the position Ecuador occupies in the broader literary panorama. Its literature is mostly ignored when it comes to discussions about Latin American literature, in which the Boom remains paramount, but when it does receive a cursory mention, Icaza’s
Huasipungo is the go-to title to refer to Ecuadorian letters. The majority of scholarship on Latin American literature that does mention Ecuadorian writing renders almost invisible anything that came after Icaza and his generation.
The recognition the novel has found beyond Ecuadorian frontiers has been matched by the praise it has received internally. Two of the most influential national commentators – Jorge Enrique Adoum in 1984 and Miguel Donoso Pareja one year later – agreed on the ‘greatness’ of Icaza’s generation by devoting prolific studies to their production.
4 See Jorge Enrique Adoum, La gran literatura ecuatoriana del 30 (Quito: El Conejo, 1984); and Miguel Donoso Pareja, Los grandes de la década del 30 (Quito: El Conejo, 1985). To this date, as the Ecuadorian scholar Fernando Iturburu argues, it has been generally accepted that while names such as Eugenio Espejo, Juan Montalvo and Juan León Mera may be familiar to readers of pre-twentieth-century Latin American literature, ‘the so-called
Generación del 30 remains the most powerful phenomenon of Ecuadorian letters’.
5 Fernando Iturburu, ‘Una bibliografía crítica sobre la Generación del 30’, Literatura y otros asuntos (2013) <http://fernandoiturburu.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/una-bibliografia-critica-sobre-la.html> [accessed 9 October 2017]. Icaza was, of course, a prominent member of this 1930s generation of writers that, as I have already explained, focused their production on the description of the inner realities of Ecuador mainly using the aesthetics of social realism.
With its commercial success and the backing of national and international commentators,
Huasipungo has had an important influence in Ecuador’s literary life. Iturburu notes that – alongside his generational peers – Icaza has been established as the ‘national canon’ by the Ecuadorian schooling system. Indeed,
Huasipungo is an inevitable reference in national public education. In textbooks from the secondary education Literature curriculum, it is introduced with adjectives such as ‘valiente’ as well as ‘fundamental’ and it is described as a trend-setting book for future generations of Ecuadorian novelists.
6 Ministerio de Educación del Ecuador, Lengua y Literatura. 2do curso. Texto del estudiante (Quito: Editorial Don Bosco, 2016), p. 41. In the same fashion, high school students also hear about
Huasipungo in their History and Civic Education lessons, where the novel is positioned as a resource to learn about the conditions in which indigenous communities lived in Ecuador during the early twentieth century.
7 Ministerio de Educación del Ecuador, Educación para la ciudadanía. 1er curso. Texto del estudiante (Quito: Maya Ediciones, 2016), p. 86.With these credentials in its favour, not just the inclusion in the official education programme but also its commercial success and critical recognition, I consider
Huasipungo to be Ecuador’s national novel. However, Doris Sommer overlooks it in her study of novels written in Latin America during the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Rather, she sees Juan León Mera’s
Cumandá (1879) as the Ecuadorian example of a national novel.
8 Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 237. It is true that
Cumandá illustrates better her point on the correlation between romance and politics in Latin America, as the story proposes a romantic tension between a
criollo and an indigenous girl, in a union that could be read as allegorical aspiration for the establishment of a modern nation. In that sense, it is easy to see why Mera’s work can be considered a ‘foundational fiction’, especially since it is one of the first novels ever written in Ecuador. However,
Cumandá’s impact remains far inferior to that of
Huasipungo. It is not only that Icaza’s work is better known nationally and internationally, but also that, more than any other, his novel seems to represent a source of literary pride and local history for Ecuadorian people. So much is evidenced by its inclusion in national education both as a literary and historic reference.
Despite not having an allegorical romance at the centre of its plot, I believe that
Huasipungo relates to Sommer’s classification in its own way. Sommer argues that, in Latin American national novels, the romantic union of a heterosexual couple (usually two lovers representing different ‘worlds’ in need of unification for the sake of the national project) is to be read as ‘a wish-fulfilling projection of national consolidation and growth’.
9 Sommer, p. 7. Huasipungo lacks the romantic element. Nevertheless, there is a unifying desire at the core of its proposal that links back to Sommer’s idea of national consolidation. Icaza’s novel, commonly seen as a realistic denunciation of the extreme conditions the indigenous peasants of the Ecuadorian highlands endured at the beginning of the twentieth century, is a call for the integration of the indigenous people into the modern society that was under development at the time of its writing and first publication. Icaza seeks the ultimate goal of national consolidation and growth by calling into question the exploitative practices of white and
mestizo elites against indigenous people. In doing so, he argues for a change in the indigenous’ position in society. In early twentieth-century Ecuador, that change was related to converting indigenous peoples into common workers by bringing their labour force into the modernised market.
Icaza sees the consolidation of a modern Ecuadorian nation through the lens of indigenismo, an ideology whose many iterations – literature was just one of them – were focused on making the indigenous populations modern useful citizens. The complex implications of the indigenista project appear at various different points in my work. For now, in regard to nation-building purposes, something else is in operation in Huasipungo and the construction that an elite mestizo writer makes of indigenous subjects is at the centre of the matter. The place the novel holds as a source of literary pride can be attributed to its frequent characterisation as exemplary and ‘deeply Ecuadorian’ writing. That is to say, its recognition is linked to being considered by many readers – both national and foreign – a text that is ‘Ecuadorian’ in its essence for depicting what is supposed to be the country’s inner and untamed reality, even when, as we will see, it is far from that. Behind the notion of this ‘Ecuadorian essence’, I believe we can find in the novel an attempt to depict the foundation of a national subject through a selective characterisation of the indigenous man. Politically constructed from the outside, this mestizo-fiction of the indigeneity is expected to lay the basis for the Ecuadorian nation and its identity. Consequently, my argument here is that the ideal of modern nationhood that Huasipungo tries to consolidate depends on two correlated purposes: demanding the integration of indigenous people into modern society while, at the same time, attempting to create a myth of national-collective identification based on the selective idealisation of the indigenous figure.