II Crisis, Fiction, Transformation

From a Marxist perspective, Ericka Beckman argues that there is an understudied correlation between economic life and Latin American literary production between 1870 and 1930, in what she calls the ‘Export Age’, the period in which the former colonies of the region began to integrate into global commercial associations as both exporters of commodities and importers of manufactured goods.1 Ericka Beckman, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Her argument is that, while critics such as Fredric Jameson have seen the intertwining of cultural and financial worlds as symptomatic of late capitalism, economic tropes were already producing ‘capital fictions’ in Latin America in the nineteenth century. That is to say, long before global-scale business organisations or computers and automation took hold of Latin American countries, their economic processes were already influencing and being influenced by literature, in an exchange whose roots could be traced back to the colonial era.

Colonial relationships and dependencies took a different shape after the ‘independence period, when nascent nations accorded their first loans with British bankers’ because – for critics such as Beckman – the political independence the new nations gained ‘was accompanied from the start by a condition of non-independence in the sphere of global market relations’.2 Beckman, p. xvii. Richard Rosa, whose work on finance and narrative proposes that the development of Latin American literary culture is closely related to the development of a financial culture, names the relationship between the newly independent Latin American nations and Europe, that is, between borrowers and creditors, a ‘neo-colonial relationship’ that was grounded on the ‘devaluation’ of Spanish American populations since the conquest.3 Rosa uses the term ‘devaluation’ in the sense the decolonial critic Walter Mignolo uses it when he refers to the process of capitalist accumulation, meaning that racism went hand in hand with the historical foundation of capitalism as we know it today. See Richard Rosa, ‘Finance and Literature in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America’, PMLA, 127.1 (2012), pp. 137–144 (p. 138). This relationship also developed in the literary field thanks to the Latin American letrados of the nineteenth century. As is well-known, these ‘men of letters’ did double duties for their nations as presidents and novelists, diplomats and historians. However, they also acted as architects of trade policies, often infusing their writings with their views on political economy. In this area, Beckman mentions the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, whose book of short stories and poems Azul (1888) ‘provides compelling insights into the fantasies inspired by commodity consumption in the late nineteenth-century Spanish America’.4 Beckman, p. 48. The commodities Darío imagines and endorses as desirable by Latin Americans come from nowhere else other than Europe, where he served as ambassador in Madrid.

With a long and loaded history to consider, it is safe to say that literature has played a key role in imagining and interpreting the effects of economic issues in Latin American nations. Ecuador, with its own influential letrados, has not been exempt from this phenomenon. Although Latin America’s export age is over, reflecting on how literature and economy keep engaging in continuous and reciprocal interactions can help us to comprehend contemporary Ecuador. In this chapter I argue that to understand the ways in which contemporary Ecuadorian literature engages with ideas of nation – and indeed to understand contemporary Ecuadorian literature – it is vital to bring to light the impacts of an economic phenomenon that drastically changed the nature of the nation and how it is understood by its inhabitants. Just as liberalism and modernisation mark Icaza’s writing, another economic occurrence, a financial crisis in the late 1990s, marks literary production in Ecuador at the turn of the millennium. However, the imprint of the crash, the biggest of its kind so far in the country’s republican history, is perceivable far beyond the final years of the twentieth century or the beginning of the 2000s. My proposal in this section rests on the idea that the Feriado Bancario – as I broadly refer to the crisis as a whole – functions as a re-foundational moment for the contemporary Ecuadorian nation, one that has a significant impact on Ecuadorian literary development today.

Often seen as a social catastrophe that affected Ecuadorian society as a whole, I propose to see the Feriado Bancario as an occurrence that creates a historical watershed, a sense of before and after. Prior to the crisis, as I explain in the previous chapter, dominant literary discourses reflect the Ecuadorian nation in limited and supposedly ‘originally national’ terms. For Icaza and other canonical writers of the 1930s, the nation is bound to and limited by its territory, an essentialist approach that frames the Ecuadorian nation in connection to a sense of ‘uniqueness’ to be found in land and history. That discourse, championed by the most influential writers in the history of Ecuadorian letters, is disrupted by the economic meltdown, as it is not only a financial crisis, but also a political, social and representational crisis.

In other words, the consequences of the Feriado Bancario are not limited to the wrecking of the banking system, the disappearance of Ecuador’s national currency and its subsequent replacement with the US dollar as legal tender, or more generally, to the collapse of the Ecuadorian economy. It is well-known that the crisis also caused a period of political instability that includes – but cannot be reduced to – a coup d’état in 2000. Moreover, it triggered a mass migration process unprecedented in the history of Ecuador. Nevertheless, I consider that it is necessary to expand the analysis of the consequences of the Feriado Bancario even further to see it as an event that disrupted frameworks traditionally relied on to represent, understand and imagine the Ecuadorian nation. My argument here is that with the dollarisation of the national economy and the migration phenomenon altering the fabric of the country, the Feriado Bancario drives us to see the Ecuadorian nation in a new transnational reality that cannot be ignored.

Literature engages in this transformational process, playing key roles as a means to understand the nature of cultural shifts and as a way to interrogate what comes after the crisis, what kind of nation and what kind of writing is possible once the devastating consequences of the Feriado Bancario are evident for the national community. Eliécer Cárdenas’ novel El oscuro final del Porvenir (2000) is an example of a type of writing that becomes involved in making sense of the economic disaster and its legacies. I propose a reading of Cárdenas’ work as a novel that seeks to represent the moment of the crisis but at the same time poses vital questions about further literary development in Ecuador.

El oscuro final del Porvenir responds to the crisis by creating a fictional reconstruction of its most emblematic moments, as its plot allegorises real events that happened in Ecuador between 1998 and 2000. The story depicts the breakdown of the fabric of society, making visible forces of transformation that dramatically alter the imagining of Ecuador. Likewise, the novel portrays the emergence of a new national consciousness articulated by the horizontality of the crisis and its significance for all Ecuadorians. Borrowing from Benedict Anderson’s theory on the nation as an imagined community that finds its roots in the emergence of a national consciousness, I consider that Cárdenas’ text allows us to see the Feriado Bancario as a re-foundational experience for the Ecuadorian nation. Nonetheless, it is an experience that exceeds the frameworks under which Anderson understood nations as limited imagined communities. The nation that emerges from the aftermath of the economic crash is not limited by territorial boundaries. Rather, it must be understood under transnational terms, simultaneously existing – and being imagined from – beyond its borders as well as within them.

The transformations forced by the Feriado Bancario, as reflected in Cárdenas’ novel, make us question what kind of nation – and what kind of writing – are possible after the crisis, once we have understood and come to terms with the fact that the country cannot continue to be the same it was before. I see El oscuro final del Porvenir as a novel that locates a turning point not just for the Ecuadorian nation, but also for Ecuadorian writing. The crisis constitutes a shift that defines what this book labels as contemporary Ecuadorian literature. That is, the crisis acts as a recognisable benchmark in Ecuadorian history, one that modifies the collective Ecuadorian self-understanding. These changes are not only reflected but also negotiated by the Ecuadorian literature published after the Feriado Bancario. This literature, I argue, is created under a new common ground of experience in which Ecuador not only has lost its currency and experiences dramatic demographic changes, but is also becoming more and more a transnational space.