IV
Latin America, Ecuador, the World
In a 2006 article analysing the state of affairs of Ecuadorian literature at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Carlos Arcos argues that Ecuadorian society changed more radically in the period between the late 1980s and the early 2000s than it had changed in the previous two centuries. In his view, this transformation was to result in the emergence of a different kind of Ecuadorian literature. That is, a new type of writing that would emerge from – and engage with – the breakdown of social paradigms, the shattering of collective expectations in the social order and the scattering of Ecuadorian society around the globe that followed the hectic 1990s:
De ese partirse, de ese quedarse sin paradigmas y con sueños colectivos inconclusos, de ese saber que parte de nuestra sociedad está al otro lado del océano y en el norte, imagino que surgirá una nueva literatura, así como el país real y el país imaginario, o el país real/imaginario que cada cual crea y recrea.
1 Carlos Arcos, ‘La caja sin secreto: dilemas y perspectivas de la literatura ecuatoriana contemporánea’, Quórum, 14 (2006), pp. 187–210 (p. 206). So far, I have argued that the changes Arcos points out find their origins in the Feriado Bancario, a watershed experience that this book deems essential for understanding contemporary Ecuador. My proposal in the previous chapter rests on the idea that contemporary Ecuadorian literature has emerged to meet the challenges that post-crisis Ecuadorian society presents. In doing so, authors such as Leonardo Valencia, Gabriela Alemán and Carlos Arcos create fictions that reflect and engage with the transnational experiences that have become part of the fabric of twenty-first century Ecuador.
As fiction that navigates national boundaries, contemporary Ecuadorian literature not only reimagines Ecuador. By transgressing and redefining frontiers, it also dialogues with a wider issue: through novels such as the ones analysed in the previous chapter, which are informed by transnationality and help us to see Ecuador as a transnational space, contemporary Ecuadorian literature engages with and challenges a broader discussion regarding the exhaustion of single-nation frameworks for understanding and reading literature. This discussion, as I seek to demonstrate in the next pages, relates not only to the Latin American context but also to a ‘global’ domain: that is, to World Literature.
I understand World Literature as a field of study that, as Héctor Hoyos explains, considers the world as the organising principle for literature ‘when hitherto we have emphasised, for example, individual languages, nations, regions, superstructures, or genealogies’.
2 Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 6. Hoyos’ definition lays bare the fact that most critical approaches to World Literature take the dismissal of the nation as the natural condition for fiction to be thought of globally. In this sense, Franco Moretti, one of the leading scholars on the topic, proposes to discard national historiographies to focus on global patterns.
3 Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review, 1 (2000), pp. 54–68 (p. 58). In a similar fashion, the French critic Pascale Casanova advocates for the study of literature as a world republic centred in Europe, where Latin American countries are but a distant periphery.
4 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 24. On the other side of the Atlantic, David Damrosch adds that the criteria to evaluate the global potential of novels have often to do with aspects such as international circulation and translation into other languages that, in his account of World Literature as construed from the US, mostly means into English.
5 David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 27.While Moretti’s, Casanova’s and Damrosch’s theorisations about World Literature are vital for guiding the issues addressed in this chapter, they leave out too much. That is to say, if we consider among the ranks of World Literature only the fiction that dismisses national contexts, interacts with Europe while being circulated internationally and translated into English, the field of study remains narrowly and problematically Eurocentric and Anglophone-centric. Left unquestioned, World Literature is at risk of coming to represent the opposite of what Susan Sontag envisioned when – explaining how reading allowed her to enter a life larger than her Arizona childhood – she said that to have access to ‘world literature was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism’.
6 Susan Sontag, ‘Literature as Freedom’, Irish Pages, 2.1 (2003), pp. 175–185 (p. 185). To put it another way, should we continue focusing on Europe and the Anglosphere for reading and understanding the literature of the world, we are at risk of condemning World Literature to be compulsorily provincial instead of genuinely global.
My proposal in this section is to expand the framework of World Literature by considering the case of contemporary Ecuadorian literature, which is uniquely positioned to add different knowledge to this field of enquiry. My argument for bringing attention to the Ecuadorian case rests on the idea that the novels by Arcos, Valencia and Aleman analysed in this book articulate what Hoyos calls ‘globality’, that is, ‘the literary representation of a broadening consciousness of the world as a whole’.
7 Hoyos, p. 2. However, they do so from a position that is crucially marked by a condition of invisibility that renders it peripheral to a corpus of World Literature constructed around circulation and translation.
Hoyos’ notion of globality posits that ‘we imagine the global as we imagine everything else: through metaphor, narrative, image, and related means’.
8 Hoyos, p. 22. Novels that navigate the world also broaden our consciousness that such a world exists as an interconnected whole. Indeed, as I demonstrate in the previous chapter, Arcos, Valencia and Alemán show their readers that Ecuador, Latin America, the US and Europe are not separate cultural entities. On the contrary, they show that these territories are vitally connected through a network of multiple and constant encounters and exchanges. Hence, their work engages with the issues that lie at the core of the study of World Literature.
Contemporary Ecuadorian literature articulates globality from a condition of invisibility that Ecuadorian writing has long endured. In his 2006 article, Arcos proposes that to understand the state of contemporary Ecuadorian literature properly, one has to tackle its lack of recognition, both abroad and – perhaps more importantly – at home. Although he does not offer readership or publication data to support his case, his view is cemented by his own experience as an Ecuadorian writer and by the opinions of other critics, intellectuals and authors.
9 One of the most commonly referred statistics regarding the levels of readership in Ecuador suggests that, on average, Ecuadorians read half a book a year while, in countries like Chile or Colombia, the average is 5.4 and 2.2 books a year respectively. This data, highly quoted in the national media, is normally attributed to a 2012 study published by the Centro Regional para el Fomento del Libro en América Latina y el Caribe (Cerlalc). The available version of this study on the website of the Cerlalc, however, does not contain readership data on Ecuador. Still, the average of ‘medio libro al año’ is broadly regarded as an indicative measure of how little Ecuadorians read to the point that, in 2017, the national Ministerio de Cultura y Patrimonio had to ‘officially’ refute it in the inaugural document of the Plan Nacional de Promoción del Libro y la Lectura José de la Cuadra. While this document questions the origins of the ‘half a book a year’ measure, it does admit that the state of readership in Ecuador is precarious. See Ministerio de Cultura y Patrimonio del Ecuador, ‘Plan Nacional de Promoción del Libro y la Lectura José de la Cuadra’, CERLALC, October 2017 <https://cerlalc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/42_Plan_Nacional_Lectura_Ecuador-1.pdf> [accessed 28 November 2019]. Quoting, among others, the Ecuadorian critic Agustín Cueva, the American scholar Michael Handelsman and the
quiteño novelist Javier Vásconez, Arcos says that Ecuadorian literature suffers from the ‘syndrome’ of being invisible. Something invisible, he explains, ‘es algo que por alguna razón no se puede ver o no se quiere ver, pero que sin embargo existe’.
10 Arcos, ‘La caja sin secreto’, p. 188. My point here is that, by taking into account its ‘invisibility syndrome’, contemporary Ecuadorian literature becomes a type of writing that, from a peripheral perspective, offers an alternative path to reflect on the globality of Latin American novels and World Literature.
One could say that the Ecuadorian experience is hardly different from the rest of the countries of the region. After all, in a world stage largely dominated by centres of production chiefly rooted in Europe and the US, the entirety of Latin American literature occupies a somewhat peripheral position. Nonetheless, Ecuadorian literary production sits in a particular place within Latin American letters. With no real representative name in the Boom of the 1960s, the phenomenon that came to define Latin American literature for the world, Ecuadorian literature appears to be on the periphery of the periphery. This is a position that I understand in terms of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari define as a ‘minor literature’, that is, the literature of a minority written in a major language, in which the individual always connects to the political and where everything has a collective value.
11 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘What is a Minor Literature?’, Mississippi Review, 11.3 (1983), pp. 13–33 (p. 17). The French critics argue that minor literatures have the capacity of undoing cultural spaces, and as such, they pack radical potential.
Building on Deleuze and Guattari, I see contemporary Ecuadorian writing as a minor literature that speaks through the major language of globality. In doing so, it achieves a radical effect for the study of World Literature. Analysed from their minoritarian position and not just in spite of it, the work of contemporary Ecuadorian writers enables us to see that discarding the nation is not the only path to study how fiction engages with and shapes the understanding of global phenomena. I propose that by focusing on the ways in which contemporary Ecuadorian fiction reflects and makes sense of the transnational encounters that mark life in twenty-first century Ecuador, it is possible to direct a critical gaze towards the national, a gaze that enables us to see differently in order to understand the global better.