In this unprecedented state of sustained exchange and encounters with experiences from beyond Ecuadorian borders, the traditional discourse that ties up the nation with roots, memories and territories is inadequate, as it is unable to capture the transnational reality of the contemporary nation. Nonetheless, it still resists change. To this day, schools nationwide teach that the most important writers of the country’s history are those of the
Generación de 30, and that most of what was written thereafter followed their model. Current textbooks reflect this type of thinking, which is also backed by the highest-ranked cultural office in the Ecuadorian state. In 2018, the Ministry of Culture was still arguing – in national and international contexts – that the writers of the 1930s established ‘los derroteros de casi toda la literatura posterior’.
1 In October 2018, during the 41st edition of the Feria Internacional del Libro de Montevideo, which had Ecuador as the invited country, the Ecuadorian Minister of Culture – the Quiteño writer Raúl Pérez Torres – gave a speech in which he made a ‘brief’ survey of Ecuador’s literary history. He traced the beginnings of Ecuadorian writing back to the days of the colony and the Independence campaigns, highlighting the influential role of the 1930s for Ecuadorian letters throughout the twentieth century. Interestingly, his survey ended with the late 1990s, that is, before the literature produced after the Feriado Bancario. See Raúl Pérez Torres, ‘Breves apuntes sobre la literatura ecuatoriana’, Cultura y Patrimonio, 2018 <https://www.culturaypatrimonio.gob.ec/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2018/10/BREVES-APUNTES-SOBRE-LA-LITERATURA-ECUATORIANA-URUGUAY-2-DE-OCTUBRE.pdf> [accessed 23 October 2018]. Should that be the case, it would be arguable that the ways in which Jorge Icaza and his generation reflected upon the nation are still the blueprints that the subsequent generations use to think and write about national issues. However, that is not the case.
By focusing on El oscuro final del Porvenir, this chapter has demonstrated that Ecuadorian literature responds to the state of national transformations that followed the economic upheaval of 1998. As such, Cárdenas’ novel is key for arguing that literature denotes the existence of a nation that differs from the one normatively envisioned in the 1930s. Post-crisis Ecuadorian narrative plays a fundamental role in understanding Ecuador as a transnational space, as it engages with – and negotiates – the transformations triggered by the Feriado Bancario: it help us to see a nation that manifests the diverse faces of transnationalism in the everyday experiences of its inhabitants. I propose that the Feriado Bancario constitutes a shift that defines what is to be named as – or labelled as – contemporary Ecuadorian literature. My point is that after the crisis, Ecuadorian literature must be created under a different common ground of experience in which Ecuador not only has lost its currency and is experiencing dramatic demographic changes but is also more consistently affected by transnational encounters. Ecuadorian contemporary literature is then defined as a kind of writing that – even when it does not engage with the motif of the nation directly or even consciously – is still deeply marked by the experience of the crisis and its long-lasting consequences and, as such, intentionally or not, it is reflective of a transnational nation.
Defining contemporary Ecuadorian literature in relation to a specific historical event that happened just two decades ago presents many challenges. For instance, there are several writers who started their careers before the crisis and continue publishing their work until today. As such, any classification attempt could prove ambiguous. Nevertheless, following Elisabeth Herrmann’s argument on how transnationalism redefines contemporary writing, I believe that in Ecuador there is a ‘correlation between literary writing and the reception of the historical, political and social world we live in, which cannot be ignored when labelling literature as contemporary’.
2 Elisabeth Hermman, ‘How Does Transnationalism Redefine Contemporary Literature’, in Transnationalism in Contemporary German-Language Literature, ed. by Elisabeth Hermman, Carrie Smith-Prei and Stuart Taberner (New York: Camden House, 2015), pp. 19–43 (p. 22). This is especially true when we consider that literary fiction is in many ways informed by real-life experience. For its nationwide nature, the crisis created social, economic and cultural conditions that enabled a common ground of experience on which contemporary literature develops. Since the late 1990s, Ecuadorians share a context in which the migration process and the dollarisation redefine the frameworks through which they understand and reflect upon their nation and its limitations. The
Feriado Bancario is a benchmark that, in shaping Ecuador’s present, shapes Ecuadorian literature.
Real-life experience feeds literature, but it works the other way around as well. Real life is also informed by literature: ‘as literary – and all sorts of other – texts assist in circulating
lebenswissen (knowledge on life)’.
3 Hermman, p. 20. In this sense, contemporary literature produces a discourse that – even when it tries to avoid referencing the nation as a topic – can help us to understand the current shape of the Ecuadorian nation. In the analysis of contemporary narrative, we can see how authors engage in transnationalism by choosing themes that reflect on an individually and collectively experienced transnational reality. In doing so, they articulate a coherent body of work for Ecuadorian literature that not only denotes a shared sense of contemporaneity, but also counters the essentialist national discourse represented by the
Generación del 30. As I set out to demonstrate in the next chapter, in the texts of contemporary Ecuadorian writers, we can see the many ways in which, in twenty-first century Ecuador, the national becomes the transnational.