Limited as it is, the national vision discussed above has an unprecedented importance for the ways in which the Ecuadorian nation is thought of, not only in literature, but more broadly in the public sphere. Icaza’s portrayal of national culture became a normative idea of the Ecuadorian nation, that is, a portrayal of the nation that gained acceptance and endured through several generations, despite being a fiction created and promoted by an elite intelligentsia whose views were conditioned by political projects. This happened, as Hall explains, because ‘national identities have tended to win out over other, more particularistic sources of cultural identification’.
1 Hall, ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, p. 299. But to look more deeply into the subject is to see that – in early twentieth-century Ecuador – the mechanisms by which the national culture proposed by Icaza achieved national recognition were fostered and promoted by intellectuals, who have prominent roles in creating the nation by narration.
Latin American nations have an important link with narratives that signify a sense of ‘nationness’. Many of the approaches analysing this relationship – including Doris Sommer’s notion of national romances – draw from Benedict Anderson’s theory of nations as imagined communities, where he 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.
2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 2006), p. 46. For Anderson, 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 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’.
3 Anderson, p. 46.Anderson’s theory proposes the existence of a community of fellow-readers that in their ‘visible invisibility’ helped to form the ‘embryo of the nationally imagined community’.
4 Anderson, p. 46. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine such an impactful reading community in the Ecuadorian scenario of the 1930s, when Icaza and his peers were actively publishing their works, since Ecuador – along with the rest of Latin America – still struggled with an illiterate majority well into the twentieth century.
5 García Canclini, p. 66. Internal readership in Icaza’s time was notoriously scarce. Even though there are no concrete statistics in this regard, Manuel Corrales argues that ‘podemos sospechar, por una serie de indicios, que la gente con posibilidades de leer libros en esa época era realmente una minoría de cierto nivel en la escala social’.
6 Manuel Corrales, ‘Estudio introductorio’, in El Chulla Romero y Flores. Jorge Icaza, ed. by Manuel Corrales (Quito: Libresa, 2014), pp. 14–38 (p. 18). One of the indications mentioned by Corrales is the testimony of the Ecuadorian writer Ángel Felicísimo Rojas, who lived and worked in Icaza’s time:
El mercado del libro casi no existía entre nosotros. En Guayaquil, una ciudad de más de cien mil habitantes, hubo durante largos años una sola librería, y esa, extranjera. Y en Quito, una también. Del mercado del libro nacional, ni qué hablar. Había algún interés por los libros de Montalvo, por la Geografía y Geología del Ecuador de Wolf […] Lo demás apenas contaba.
7 Corrales, p. 19. Although during the 1930s Ecuador lived a prolific period of literary development, and up to 41 novels were published in the country between 1930 and 1940 according to Corrales’ account, the national readership was still minimal, especially considering that by the 1950s almost half of the country’s total population remained illiterate.
8 UNESCO, ‘La alfabetización en el Ecuador’, UNESCO Digital Library <http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001851/185161s.pdf> [accessed 5 February 2018] (p. 21). Such limitations in the reading market makes it difficult for an imagined community to emerge from the communal notion of fellow-readers Anderson proposes. But, considering the specificity of the Latin American case, he argues that the decisive historic role in developing early conceptions of ‘nationness’ in this region was played by what he calls ‘creole pioneers’, that is, Spaniards born in the Americas who were ‘consigned to subordination’ even though in terms of language, religion, ancestry or manners they were largely indistinguishable from Europe-born Spaniards.
9 Anderson, p. 58. Anderson believes that a consciousness of national connectedness was created in the journeys (‘pilgrimages’) creole functionaries made around their administrative units in the colonial organisation of the territories of the Spanish American empire. These were politico-administrative units that would end up becoming new South American republics. But first, their territorial stretches were imagined as nations thanks to the arrival of print-capitalism in the form of the first local newspapers, as for Anderson ‘the very conception of the newspaper implies the refraction of even “world events” into a specific imagined world of vernacular readers’.
10 Anderson, p. 63.The readers Anderson refers to were, of course, creoles educated enough to read. In other words, it was the local elites who imagined and shaped Latin American nations. The argument of elites being the groups that coined the nation is of vital importance to understand how Icaza’s Huasipungo managed to become the quintessential novel to signify the nation, achieving a place no other has ever held. That role, I argue, was not built upon nation-wide readership, but rather it was cemented upon the influence of an elite intelligentsia that – as we have seen by Icaza’s own testimony – was convinced that the nation’s essence was to be found in indigeneity and territorial heritage, and it needed to be expressed through a unique literature narrating national experiences. A key aspect for the solidification of these views is the role of intellectuals in Latin America. In the introduction of his volume on the history of intellectuals in the region, Carlos Altamirano notes that cultural elites have played a major role in Latin American development, influencing not only cultural, but also political history:
Si se piensa en el siglo XIX, no podrían describirse adecuadamente ni el proceso de la independencia, ni el drama de nuestras guerras civiles, ni la construcción de los estados nacionales, sin referencia al punto de vista de los hombres de saber, a los letrados, idóneos en la cultura escrita y en el arte de discutir y argumentar. Según las circunstancias, juristas y escritores pusieron sus conocimientos y competencias literarias al servicio de los combates políticos, tanto en las polémicas como en el curso de las guerras, a la hora de redactar proclamas o concebir constituciones, actuar de consejeros de quienes ejercían el poder político o ejercerlo en persona.
11 Altamirano, p. 9. In line with Altamirano’s argument, I argue that the prominent role of
Huasipungo and the endurance of its vision of ‘nationness’ must be explained by factoring in the cultural conditions from which it emerged and gained recognition. To do so, it is paramount to mention another prominent Ecuadorian intellectual contemporary to Icaza: Benjamín Carrión (1897–1979). Carrión’s work in cultural and political scenarios has a massive influence in Ecuadorian history and, as we will see, played a decisive role in the canonisation of
Huasipungo. Carrión was a writer, critic, academic and politician who became so relevant for the Ecuadorian cultural scenario that his ideas and personal projects often developed into public policies. His institutional positions ranged extensively from the Ministry of Education (importantly at a time when the Ecuadorian constitution considered education and culture under similar terms and thus were administered under one ministry), to several embassies in Latin America and Europe. However, his most important role – the one for which he is mostly remembered – is the foundation of the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana (CCE) in 1944, an institution that was born ‘orientada a fortalecer el devenir histórico de la patria y cuyo fundamental propósito busca dirigir la cultura con espíritu esencialmente nacional’.
12 Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, ‘Breve historia de la Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana Benjamín Carrión’, CCE Benjamín Carrión <http://www.casadelacultura.gob.ec/?ar_id=10&ge_id=18> [accessed 6 February 2018]. Carrión served as the first president of the ‘House of Ecuadorian Culture’ he created from scratch and, from this office, he often managed to transform his personal cultural projects, including his views on literature, into the official views of the Ecuadorian state.
Carrión’s figure and influence is crucial not only because he was close to Icaza, who himself was one of the founding members of the CCE and also served in several public offices, but more importantly because his views regarding the nation were similarly focused on the search for ‘lo esencialmente nacional’, as reflected in the CCE’s statute. Carrión saw Ecuador’s future in a unified
mestizo population whose identity was marked by indigenous ancestry and the geography of the country.
13 Martha Rodríguez, Cultura y política en Ecuador: estudio sobre la creación de la Casa de la Cultura (Quito: Flacso Ecuador, 2015), p. 98. Significantly, this way of thinking ‘calzaba a la perfección con los proyectos modernizadores y desarrollistas […] que en lo político estaban ya tocando a las puertas del país y de Latinoamérica’.
14 Rodríguez, p. 122. That is to say, Carrión’s views regarding the essence and future of the nation coincided with those of Icaza’s
Huasipungo, for he also argued for a national project that, while modernising, would keep the indigenous origins of a nation conditioned by its territory.
The endorsement of Carrión directly contributed to the canonisation of Icaza’s novel, as the founder of the CCE considered that the future of the Ecuadorian nation needed to be guided so its essence was not lost. That guidance, in Carrion’s view, was a vertical process in which intellectuals were called to ‘civilizar y gobernar’.
15 Rodríguez, p. 121. Consequently, he believed it was his duty to promote and direct literary development in Ecuador, which he did personally and institutionally, in so far as the works he was to promote were in line with his views. From a personal standpoint, Carrión was an internationally respected critic: ‘en 1937, el crítico peruano Luis Alberto Sánchez proclamaba que Carríon era sin disputa, el crítico más autorizado del Ecuador actual’, whose words ‘podía[n] construir o truncar una carrera literaria’.
16 Rodríguez, p. 150, 174. Thanks to his personal recognition, he helped to position Ecuadorian social realist narrative in Europe. A well-known anecdote has Carrión introducing and praising the collection of short stories that started the production of the
Generación del 30,
Los que se van (1930), in the literary circles of Paris where he gathered with the likes of Gabriela Mistral, Miguel de Unamuno and José María Arguedas. Institutionally, Carrión embodied the CCE, an institution that dominated the development of cultural polices for decades thanks to an unprecedented power grip on the cultural field: ‘tenía alcance nacional, imprenta propía y recursos financieros desligados por primera vez del mecenazgo de la aristrocracia o de la iglesia’.
17 Rodríguez, p. 174. From this platform, Carrión helped to institutionalise an idea of nation that promoted modernisation, but at the same time referred back to an ancestral essence deeply linked to indigenous populations and locality.
It is in a context conditioned by Carrión’s understanding of literary production driving the cultural policies of the Ecuadorian state that
Huasipungo – and more broadly, social realist narratives – became the most important literature being produced in the country during the first half of the twentieth century, rendering almost invisible any other type of production, especially those interested in anything other than describing the country’s social reality.
18 Pablo Palacio is probably the most frequent example of the literature marginalised during the height of social realism in Ecuador. Considered one of the first avant-garde writers in Ecuador and in Latin America, his work has been ‘discovered’ and ‘rediscovered’ many times in several anthologies and studies after his death. His short stories and novels, rather than assimilating and reproducing the social reality of the inhabitants of the country, were focused on expressing the ways in which subjective perception can be the motif of creation. See Teresa Mauro Castellarín, ‘Pablo Palacio: precursor de la nueva novela’, Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, 26.2 (1997), pp. 381–394. It is important to remark that, of course, this was not the only reason for the commercial success of
Huasipungo. The regional context also contributed, as Icaza’s novel was published during a time in which Latin American narrative was heavily dominated by the so-called ‘novelas de la tierra’, a type of narrative predominantly focused on describing the ‘uniqueness’ of each country. It was a time when, in Mario Vargas Llosa’s words:
La novela se ha vuelto censo, dato geográfico, descripción de usos y costumbres, atestado etnológico, feria regional, muestrario folklórico. Se ha poblado de indios, cholos, negros y mulatos; de comuneros, gauchos, campesinos y pongos; de alpacas, llamas vicuñas y caballos […] Seres, objetos y paisajes desempeñan en estas ficciones una función parecida, casi indiferenciable: están allí no por lo que son sino por lo que representan. ¿Y qué representan? Los valores ”autóctonos” o “telúricos” de América.
19 Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘Novela primitiva y novela de la creación en América Latina’, Revista de la Universidad de México, 10 (1969), pp. 26–36 (p. 29).Although these novels went through a harsh scrutiny by the next generation of Latin American writers – as reflected in Vargas Llosa’s criticism – when Icaza first published
Huasipungo he was in line with a regional trend and his work became, as he himself described, something that readers in other countries could say of: ‘esto es ecuatoriano’. Such a notion of
Huasipungo being reflective of a true ‘Ecuadorianess’ helped it to thrive in the international market: Corrales estimates that in 1957, in the III Festival del Libro Latinoamericano that took place in Lima, 50,000 copies of
Huasipungo were sold.
20 Corrales, p. 56. In this way, its recognition within Ecuador only increased, as Ecuadorian commentators saw in the commercial success of Icaza’s novel a sign of an unmatched ‘universal’ reach of national literature. Agustín Cueva argues:
Porque, seamos justos: ¿qué otra cosa es la ‘universalidad’ literaria si no la capacidad de elaborar un mensaje artístico que por su intensidad expresiva llegue a las más amplias latitudes, difundido y traducido como efectivamente fue el de nuestra ‘generación del 30’? Y seamos además francos: sin nombres como el de Jorge Icaza en la narrativa o el de Oswaldo Guayasamín en la pintura, es decir, sin los grandes indigenistas, nuestra proyección universal se vería harto mermada.
21 Cueva, p. 155. The interplays of national and international recognition were a decisive factor that helped
Huasipungo to become the Ecuadorian national novel
par excellence, and to achieve what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘cultural consecration’ when he defines the market of symbolic goods in which literature develops as a scene of competition.
22 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Market of Symbolic Goods’, Poetics, 14.1–2 (1985), pp. 13–44. Icaza’s
Huasipungo – alongside the writings of the
Generación del 30 – achieved cultural consecration as institutions such as the critic, academia and the education system invested them with institutionalised legitimacy. This designation had important repercussions for the ways in which the Ecuadorian nation is imagined as
Huasipungo’s proposals of nation and national identity – that as we have seen are limited and politically biased – became normative, imposing constraints on future literary development and, hence, on later literary imaginings of the nation.
The constraints imposed by the legitimacy granted to Icaza and his peers translated into an institutionalised control over the value given or denied to literary works. In other words, in Ecuador, from the 1930s to the 1990s, whoever tried to defy the models imposed by the
Generación del 30 risked being considered an outsider. This logic finds an explanation in Bourdieu, as he argues that the agents of consecration granting or denying legitimacy in the cultural field also fulfil a function homologous to that of the Church, that is, defending cultural orthodoxy against competing, schismatic or heretical messages.
23 Bourdieu, p. 25. Since the consecration of
Huasipungo and other novels of the period, cultural value has been given in comparative measures: granted to those works resembling the project and ideals of the 1930s, while contested or denied to those works bearing no resemblance with the 1930s project. This practice has been extended throughout the twentieth century in Ecuadorian literature because, in Bourdieu’s view, when fully legitimised institutions like the education system grant cultural legitimacy there is a ‘structural inertia’ that protects the given legitimacy against changes with an ‘extremely slow rate of evolution’.
24 Bourdieu, p. 26. That is to say, when a work – or the complete oeuvre of a generation of writers – is legitimised by cultural consecration, its status as ‘consecrated’ and a role model takes a long time to change, if it ever does.
Supported by a type of inertia that protects its consecrated cultural position, the long-reaching influence of
Huasipungo and its national model has impacted and conditioned further developments of Ecuadorian literature, predominantly, until the end of the century. Leonardo Valencia, whose own literary work will be examined later, has defined the issue as a weight upon the shoulders of Ecuadorian writers: the weight of the tradition constraining the work of later generations. Valencia argues that later generations of Ecuadorian writers have been judged depending on the resemblance their works bear with the ideals promulgated by the social realist writing of the 1930s.
25 Leonardo Valencia, El síndrome de Falcón (Quito: Paradiso Editores, 2008), p. 171. Valencia’s is an argument hard to refute, especially when Ecuadorian textbooks published well into the 2000s say that with
Huasipungo ‘la novela ecuatoriana entra de lleno en la tendencia del compromiso social de la novelística actual’.
26 Ministerio de Educación del Ecuador, Lengua y Literatura, p. 41. That is to say, for the education system, one important agent of consecration, all Ecuadorian narrative until the present is no more than an extension of
Huasipungo and its ideals. But it is not only in national education where this idea is present. As I explain in the next chapter, until 2018, representatives of the Ministry of Culture were still arguing in international book fairs that Ecuadorian narrative is exclusively following the course set by Icaza’s generation.
Since the 1930s, the engagement with political aims and the seeking for the nation’s identity have been taken as imperatives in Ecuadorian literature. Thus, the legitimacy of any work not related with these issues has been questioned, limiting not only literary production, but also the frameworks under which we understand the Ecuadorian nation. The representation of indigenous ancestry and territoriality have hardly moved from the seminal place social realist writers like Icaza placed them in the imagining of the nation. Only in the new millennium would a structural change in society shake the ground from under these concepts, and irremediably expand the imagining of the Ecuadorian nation. The economic crisis the country went through by the end of the 1990s allowed the literature of Ecuador to challenge the normative influence of Huasipungo by undeniably disrupting the relation between nation and territory. Ecuadorian literature, as we will see, expanded well beyond national borders. And, with it, the nation it imagines in its pages.