On the selection

The novels by Valencia, Arcos and Alemán examined here are selected because they all consciously and critically engage with the issues referred to above and contribute to reimagining Ecuador in its transnationality. They offer multiple perspectives into a common ground of experience, that is, into a historical context where the everyday life of contemporary Ecuador daily interacts with the world at large. Their stories acknowledge – and invite their readers to acknowledge – that Ecuador is both influencing and being influenced by such a world. In this sense, my readings of Kazbek, Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga and Humo aim to add key elements for grasping how fiction reflects on contemporary Ecuador at a time when – as I explain in the previous chapter – the national education system, as well as the Ministry of Culture, are still arguing in favour of the nation-defining relevance of the Ecuadorian literary canon, regardless of how outdated its proposals may seem for the twenty-first century. In this sense, my selection of novels stands as a challenge to the Ecuadorian literary tradition. However, and perhaps more importantly, it also demonstrates that contemporary Ecuadorian writers are questioning the nature of national boundaries, creating stories and characters that counter notions of uniqueness and, in doing so, enabling alternative paths to understand Ecuador.

The experience of traversing borders is at the core of the novels I study. Valencia’s Kazbek follows the multiple journeys of a young Ecuadorian author living in Spain who, after giving up on trying to write a major work, or what he calls his ‘Gran Novela’, focuses on writing a short and illustrated book that is also capable of movement. In Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga, Arcos takes an indigenous hero of the Ecuadorian canon – Huasipungo‘s Andrés Chiliquinga – and places him in twenty-first century New York, on a doctoral course on Latin American literature at Columbia University. Finally, Alemán uses Humo to explore Paraguay’s recent history through the stories of two characters whose destinies are marked by the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner as much as by a voyage from Europe to Latin America and from Argentina to Paraguay through the chaos of the Chaco War. I do not suggest that these novels are a representative sample of the whole literary production of present-day Ecuador. However, I do believe that, together, they showcase some of the common preoccupations of a body of work that, just as contemporary Ecuador, is deeply marked by the legacies of the Feriado Bancario. They illuminate the nuances of what I have previously labelled as ‘contemporary’ Ecuadorian literature.

Kazbek, Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga and Humo tap into the tendency towards the transgression of borders in Latin American literature that Brignole identifies. They do so not only by laying bare transnational encounters in their pages, but also by being authored by writers who are recognised for engaging with issues of displacement in their writing. Considering their biographies, Leonardo Valencia and Gabriela Alemán are compelling examples of writers who travel. Valencia, for instance, was born in Guayaquil to an Ecuadorian father and an Italian mother. After spending his early life constantly travelling between Italy and Ecuador, where he attended an American-Ecuadorian school, he lived and published his first book in Lima in the early 1990s before moving to Barcelona. After almost two decades of living in Spain and publishing most of his work from there, Valencia returned to Ecuador to settle in Quito to teach at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar.

Similarly, before returning to Ecuador, Alemán spent long periods in Paraguay, Europe and the US. These spells away from Ecuador contribute to the confusion about her origins and national affiliation many readers have when they look at Alemán’s biography. It is not only that her last name translates as ‘German’, but also that she was born in Rio de Janeiro and, as such, it is not uncommon to see her mentioned as a Brazilian writer ‘naturalised’ as Ecuadorian. To complicate it even further there is the fact that Humo, which is her most recent novel, explores the recent history of yet a third Latin American country. In a 2017 interview, Alemán declared that her interest in writing about Paraguay had provoked different reactions. An Argentinean editor, for instance, rejected one of her early drafts for Humo by merely asking ‘¿qué hace una escritora ecuatoriana escribiendo sobre Paraguay?’; on the other hand, and much to Alemán’s delight, after reading her work, a Paraguayan writer included her name on a list of Paraguayan’s authors for the bibliography of a literary workshop he runs in the country.1 Nicolás Licata, ‘Detrás de la cortina de Humo: entrevista a Gabriela Alemán’, Liège Université, September 2017 <https://orbi.uliege.be/bitstream/2268/220185/1/EntrevistaGAlemán_Licata_Revisado.pdf> [accessed 21 June 2019].

Of the three authors revised in this section, Arcos is the only one who is not immediately associated with travelling. Although he has also spent time abroad – mostly in Chile and Mexico in the 1970s – his biography is mainly rooted in his native Quito and, unlike Valencia or Alemán, his name does not automatically pop up in catalogues of displaced writers. Nonetheless, Arcos has tested the limits of Ecuador in his writing. He has published novels that are set in Ecuador and investigate Ecuadorian history (Un asunto de familia, 1997; Vientos de agosto, 2003), but he has also expanded the scope of his fiction beyond the borders of the country. In El invitado (2007), for example, Arcos explores the violence that Peruvian society lived in the 1980s and 1990s during the internal conflicts with Sendero Luminoso and the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru. However, more important for this book is the fact that in Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga, Arcos engages in an explicit dialogue with the Ecuadorian literary tradition to call it into question in the context of post-Feriado Bancario Ecuador. The most relevant aspect of this challenge, which will be analysed shortly, is that it questions what happens when a character representative of a novela de la tierra such as Huasipungo is taken beyond the land that he is supposed to represent. That is to say, what happens when Andrés Chiliquinga, one of the most recognisable figures of Ecuadorian literature, is taken to New York City to be transformed into Andrés Chiliqüinga (with emphasis on the ü to highlight a mispronunciation of a Kichwa surname to make it sound closer to English).

The biographies of the authors selected here certainly play a role in the ways in which their writing is received. After all, both Valencia and Alemán are often seen and promoted by journalists and critics alike as travelling writers, whose fictions are informed by their personal experiences abroad. There is some merit in arguing that, since Valencia lived in Europe for so long, it is no coincidence that the European cities he knows so well appear in his fictions; or, similarly, that as Alemán studied in New Orleans, it is self-explanatory that her novel Body Time features a PhD candidate in the same city. Nonetheless, as post-structuralist thought has long posited, the relationship between the ‘I’ who travels, the ‘I’ who writes and the ‘I’ who speaks in the narrative is not as straightforward as one may think. Addressing the issues behind the notion of authorship, Roland Barthes begins his famous 1967 essay The Death of the Author by saying that literature is the invention of a voice to which we cannot assign a specific origin: ‘literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes’.2 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. by Stephen Heat (London: FontanaPress, 1977), pp. 142–149 (p. 142). In this sense, the travels of Valencia’s and Alemán’s characters may resemble some of the journeys of their creators; nevertheless, the characters do not speak the voices of the creators, as Barthes also reminds us that ‘the one who speaks (in the narrative) is not the one who writes (in real life) and the one who writes is not the one who is’.3 Roland Barthes and Lionel Duisit, ‘An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’, New Literary History, 6.2 (1975), pp. 237–272 (p. 261).

In light of Barthes’ conception of authorship, for my analysis, more important than the personal experiences of the writers is that ‘the need to narrate the details of a daily experience in a world where daily experience increasingly frustrates existing associations of territory with identity’ is central to the work of Arcos, Alemán and Valencia.4 John Riofrio, ‘When the First World Becomes the Third: The Paradox of Collapsed Borders in Two Novels by Gabriela Alemán’, MELUS, 35.1 (2010), pp. 13–34 (p. 19). John Riofrio makes this remark in an essay where, prior to analysing Gabriela Alemán’s narrative, he acknowledges that his observations are framed in the context of her connection with the Bogotá 39 group, that also includes Valencia. Los 39, as Riofrio calls them, are a selection of authors who were chosen as the 39 ‘most influential Latin American writers under the age of forty’ in 2007 at the 20th Bogota International Book Fair.5 The Bogotá 39 list was remade in 2017. With a similar idea to that of 2007, that is, to identify the most promising Latin American writers under the age of 40, it once again included two Ecuadorians: Mónica Ojeda and Mauro Javier Cárdenas. Ojeda’s work has received broad recognition since the publication of her first novel La desfiguración Silva (2015) and her name is frequently mentioned in the cultural sections of Ecuadorian newspapers. The work of Cárdenas, who resides in the US, has been less advertised in his native Ecuador. The fact that he writes in English contributes to this lack of publicity in the Ecuadorian cultural scene. However, between 2016 and 2018, after the publication of his first novel The Revolutionaries Try Again (2016), Cárdenas took part in literary festivals across Canada and the US. The selection was made by a ‘panel of experts’ formed by three Colombian writers (Piedad Bonnett, Héctor Abad Faciolince and Óscar Collazos). Alongside Alemán and Valencia, the list included widely recognised names, such as the MacArthur Fellow Dominican-American author Junot Díaz and the Biblioteca Breve Prize winner of 1999, the Mexican writer Jorge Volpi. In Riofrio’s view, one of the particularities of the B39 group of 2007 is that, for them, the stories to tell ‘emerge from their experience of a moment in world history when the practical realities of global interconnectedness cannot be ignored’.6 Riofrio, p. 18. Indeed, neither Valencia nor Alemán ignore such ‘interconnectedness’ in their fictions.

Alemán’s work is comprised of novels and short stories that take place in diverse latitudes and engage with cultural traditions and narratives that are not always linked to Ecuador. Her collection of short stories La muerte silba un blues (2014) is built as a homage to the horror and exploitation films made by the cult Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco. One of her most anthologised stories, Jam session (2007), takes a hard look at the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the city where Alemán completed her doctoral studies on cinema.7 Jam Session is Gabriela Alemán’s story published in the 2007’s Bogotá 39 anthology. The same story was later selected as part of a collection edited by Luis Fernando Afanador to showcase the state of Latin American short story writing in 2009. See El nuevo cuento Latinoamericano, ed. by Luis Fernando Afanador (Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2009). New Orleans is also the scenario of her first novel, Body Time (2003), which, similarly to Jam Session, bears an English title even though it is written in Spanish. Despite her proximity to the English-speaking world, most of her work is yet to appear in English, although some significant progress has been made in this area in the last couple of years: a translation of Poso Wells (2007), a dark comical tale about a secret society of blind people living in hiding in the underbelly of Guayaquil and Alemán’s second novel, appeared in 2018 as her first full-length work in English. It was published by the American independent publisher City Lights, which also released Family Album: Stories (2022), a translation of Alemán’s short story collection Album de familia (2010).

In terms of fiction, the oeuvre of Valencia encompasses novels that explore issues of displacement (El desterrado, 2000; El libro flotante de Caytran Dölphin, 2006) and short stories that problematise the notion of writing and authorship (La luna nómada, 1995). His experiences away from Ecuador inform his work and, because of that, he is often labelled as a nomadic writer by journalists and critics. His writing, however, goes beyond fiction. Valencia is also a prolific essayist who has reflected on diverse literary topics, ranging from the state of Ecuadorian literature (El síndrome de Falcón, 2008) to the dynamics of reading and the role of the critic in the literary market (Moneda al aire: sobre la novela y la crítica, 2018). El síndrome de Falcón remains by far Valencia’s most commented essay. In that text, he argues that Ecuadorian and Latin American writers are typically expected to ‘represent’ their countries for others. The burden to represent, he says, has often restricted them to ‘un localismo y un folklorismo mal entendido’ that impose limits to their fictional worlds: ‘debíamos mantenernos en las zonas o en los retratos nostálgicos de mundos que tienen proyectos históricos y patrióticos’.8 Leonardo Valencia, El síndrome de Falcón (Quito: Paradiso Editores, 2008), p. 186. Framed by these reflections, Valencia’s writing mirrors the author’s need to liberate himself from what he sees as cultural and literary conditionings that form part of what representative regional literature is supposed to be. In his work, to transgress is to explore and to write about the world, stepping away from the ‘requirement’ that an Ecuadorian writer must write about Ecuador, and a Latin American writer must map onto the ‘Latin American experience’.

In Valencia’s desire for escaping from localismos and folklorismos it is possible to identify some proximity to the well-known Jorge Luis Borges’ essay El escritor argentino y la tradición (1953), where Borges famously argues that – just as it is possible for the Quran to be an Arab book without ever referring to camels – to be Argentinean writer one does not need to write about Argentina’s local particularities. Borges’ remark that ‘no podemos concretarnos a lo argentino para ser argentinos’ is also applicable to the work of Arcos and Alemán, for they too expand their fictional worlds beyond the frontiers of Ecuador and remain Ecuadorian in the process.9 It is worth noting the time difference between Borges’ words and the writing of Valencia, Alemán and Arcos. Borges’ essay is originally dated in 1953. By then, however, Argentina had already experienced a vast migration process involving hundreds of thousands of European migrants settling in Buenos Aires and other large cities at the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s. The Ecuadorian case is significantly different: the biggest and most relevant migration process the country experienced occurred in the late 1990s, after the Feriado Bancario. Before the 1990s, for most of the twentieth century, migration was primarily linked to urbanisation phenomena, that is, movements from the countryside to the cities. See Jorge Luis Borges, ‘El escritor argentino y la tradición’, in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), p. 267–274 (p. 274). The connection of Valencia, Arcos and Alemán with Borges’ essay is significant for this chapter. The proximity to Borges, whose work is considered central not only to Latin American literature but to the whole Western canon, highlights the capacity of Latin American literature to cross national and regional frontiers. Also, and perhaps more importantly, because Borges’ early text foresees and advises readers about the capabilities that every national literary tradition has to transgress territorial limitations. If national writers are capable of imagining national experiences beyond the borders of their nations, the nation that they contribute to imagining through their writing might not be limited by physical frontiers after all.

The three novels studied in the following pages stage the ways in which contemporary Ecuadorian writers go beyond the frontiers of Ecuador to create their fictions. By centring their plots around journeys and travelling characters, they question the nature of national borders to lay bare their porosity. In doing so, Humo, Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga and Kazbek engage with and challenge the Ecuadorian literary tradition. They showcase characters and scenarios that counter purity and homogeneity with mixture. That is to say, they give traces of being born from the context of a society marked by exchange, whose inhabitants put pressure on and stretch old notions of belonging by mixing diverse heritages and traditions in their daily experiences. From multiple perspectives, these novels underscore a shared understanding of Ecuador as a transnational space, not only enabling readers but also urging them to think of Ecuador as a nation that dramatically differs from the one that existed before the economic crisis and the migration phenomenon.