Latin American World Literature

Considering contemporary Ecuadorian literature in the framework of World Literature expands the ways to see and understand the world through contemporary writing. In his study of Latin American literature beyond Roberto Bolaño – that is, beyond the work of a writer who has often come to represent the entirety of contemporary Latin American writing – Hoyos argues that ‘some works of literature have an effect on how we see the world and on how we conceive of their place within the world’.1 Hoyos, p. 1. The novels of Valencia, Arcos and Alemán examined in this book achieve that effect. They aid us in making sense of a national scenario shaped after the effects of the Feriado Bancario by reimagining the Ecuadorian nation. In doing so, these novels also impact how we perceive the world their reimagining of Ecuador connects to. At the same time, however, they thrive and provide insights where Hoyos’ analysis falls short. The study of the Colombian scholar privileges an inquiry into works of literature that convey globality from the spotlight. That is, novels authored by writers who enjoy a base of international readership, critical attention and widespread circulation both in their original language and in translation. The novels I examine here, on the other hand, convey globality from invisibility, shedding light on issues that the spotlight obscures.

Rooting his interpretation in a Borgesian foundation, Hoyos refers to works of literature with global awareness as ‘Alephs’. His reference for this term is, of course, Jorge Luis Borges’ short story El Aleph (1945), a fantastic tale in which the main character discovers a point in space that simultaneously contains all other points. In the story, that point is located nothing less than in the basement of an old house in Buenos Aires. The fiction postulates that standing from one spot in Argentina, it is possible to gaze at everything there is to see in the universe at the same time, ‘sin superposición y sin transparencia’.2 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘El Aleph’, in Borges: Obras Completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974; repr. 1984), pp. 617–629 (p. 625). Hoyos stresses the location of such an unimaginable site to argue that, while grounding the experience of globality, Borges also reassesses the place of his native country in the world, which becomes a space where the centrality of world metropolises is questioned. After all, London, New York as well as Paris and Barcelona are also to be found in one dusty basement on Garay Street, Buenos Aires. In this light, an ‘Aleph’ becomes a work of literature that articulates globality while retaining a tension between ‘the appeal to a vue d’ensemble and the insurmountable situatedness of the perceiving eye’ of the writer3 Hoyos, p. 5. – in other words, a novel that can cultivate, at once, the particular and the general, the global and the ‘Latin American’.

Following Hoyos’ proposal, Latin American world novels are to be understood as Alephs in whose pages we can find both Latin America and the world – consequently, as works that provide insights into the global condition of the present. If this is the case, Hoyos argues, contemporary Latin American fiction that showcases a search for globality must be considered representative of World Literature. While he regards World Literature as ‘a critical movement that seeks the consolidation of a more or less stable transnational canon’, Hoyos is not alone in calling for the inclusion of contemporary Latin American narrative into such a canon.4 Hoyos, p. 6. There is a rich body of scholarship that refers to this issue, coming from within and beyond the region. Naturally, the diversity of approaches results in some similarities and – more often than not – in conflicting differences. Gioconda Marún, for instance, distances herself from Hoyos by arguing that one of the cardinal attributes of Latin American World Literature is ‘la representación del mundo como totalidad, obras totalizadoras donde caben todos los temas, tiempos y culturas creando espacios desnacionalizados y autónomos’.5 Gioconda Marún, Latinoamérica y la literatura mundial (Buenos Aires: Dunken, 2013), p. 10. Marún’s analysis highlights what she sees as the absence of native cultures and the removal of identity traits in Latin American exponents of World Literature. That is, her argument downplays the fact that, even when it shows the entirety of the universe, the Aleph is rooted nowhere else but in Latin America, to use Hoyos’ metaphor.

Other approaches to Latin American World Literature focus on identifying and drawing connections between Latin American writing and other regions, especially when these networks circumvent Europe. In this field, Gesine Müller, Jorge Locane and Benjamin Loy propose to remap World Literature by investigating ‘the links and trajectories that interconnect and energise world regions like the Global South, which have been marginalised by most of the recent studies on the topic of World Literature’.6 Gesine Müller, Jorge J. Locane and Benjamin Loy, ‘Introduction’, in Re-Mapping World Literature: Writing, Book Markets and Epistemologies between Latin America and the Global South, ed. by Gesine Müller, Jorge J. Locane, Benjamin Loy (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 1–12 (p. 3). They concentrate on the examinations of works and authors that bridge, for example, regions as far apart and yet as close as Latin America and Asia or Latin America and the Arab peninsula. The motivation behind this effort is not only to add nuances to the in-progress catalogues and theories of World Literature by bringing together regions that share a dissatisfaction towards its study via Eurocentric perspectives. More importantly, it is to do so while also contributing to creating and studying a multivocal world consciousness that is not rooted in nor dominated by Eurocentric perspectives.

While the diversity of perspectives to think about the world through Latin American literature enriches global-wide discussions on the matter, some recurrent similarities limit the scope of the enquiry. Hoyos rightly points out that Bolaño has been often seen as the major and sometimes the only contemporary Latin American global novelist, a gigantic figure who overshadows a critical mass that is, nonetheless, larger than any individual. To offer a broader perspective, Hoyos calls for the examination of more authors who convey globality. However, in doing so, he goes for the same set of names that continuously pop up in all major studies regarding Latin America and World Literature. That is, he focuses on the likes of Jorge Volpi (Mexico), César Aira (Argentina), Fernando Vallejo (Colombia) and Mario Bellatin (Mexico). These are all recurrent authors who – alongside others including Andrés Neuman (Argentina), Santiago Gamboa (Colombia), Alberto Fuguet (Chile) and Fernando Iwasaki (Peru) – seem to capture most of the scholarly interest when it comes to the issues at hand, at least from a Spanish-speaking point of view. Needless to say, some of them also figure prominently in Marún’s and Müller’s work.

Without questioning the literary merit of any particular writer, the scholarship’s overreliance on the same set of names to study Latin America’s literary expressions of globality needs to be identified and questioned. Otherwise, we are at risk not only of retelling different iterations of similar arguments but also – and more regrettably – of missing out on alternative views coming from those not-so-well-known authors who locate their production in those not-so-fashionable countries to study. In this sense, why is it that some authors are so notoriously – and almost overwhelmingly – present in the scholarship? I believe that writers such as Volpi, Neuman and Bellatin remain in high demand on our critical radars partly because – as Marún explains – they have managed to be part of the global literary market ‘al haber logrado una difusión internacional a través de múltiples traducciones en distintas lenguas’.7 Marún, p. 15. International circulation and translation are, after all, among the pillars that sustain some of the most widely disseminated criteria for cataloguing and reflecting on World Literature. David Damrosch famously considers World Literature to ‘encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language’.8 Damrosch, p. 4. In a study that has helped to shape the scholarship, Damrosch argues that World Literature is a mode of circulation and reading. For him, the condition sine qua non for a work of literature to be considered of the world is reaching readers beyond the place where it comes from ‘originally’.

In a globalised world, what that ‘originally’ means is open to interpretation. After all, Alemán and Valencia, for example, are both authors from Ecuador who write about characters and scenarios elsewhere while publishing their work with international publishing houses. Saying that their ‘culture of origin’ is merely Ecuador would be reductive. Still, Damrosch’s argument goes as follows: a work has an effective life as World Literature only ‘whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture’.9 Damrosch, p. 4. To be present elsewhere actively often means to be translated; hence, he argues that works that cannot be translated without a substantial loss are to remain in their local or national contexts. These include works written in a language that ‘doesn’t travel very well’ or works embedded with ‘cultural assumptions [that] don’t travel’.10 Damrosch, p. 289. On the other hand, some texts gain depth in translation, as readers from different contexts can appreciate and interpret them according to their particular imagination and circumstances.11 Damrosch, p. 292. These texts, in Damrosch’s view, are the ones that have an effective life as World Literature.

Volpi and company tick the boxes of translation and circulation very effectively. Their novels and short stories are easily available in several continents and languages. For instance, Volpi’s novel En busca de Klingsor (1999) remains an international bestseller that has been translated into more than a dozen languages. However, if we accept that World Literature is comprised only of works ready-to-be-translated and shipped abroad, those works would amount to almost the entirety of the Latin American contribution to the field. Certainly, that cannot be the case. This is especially not the case because the translation/circulation model has some problematic shortcomings that limit its theoretical reach. In this area, Emily Apter, one of the founding members of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature led by Damrosch, questions the endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability that – through translation – Damrosch’s understanding of World Literature proposes. Instead, she calls for an approach that ‘recognises the importance of non-translation, mistranslation, incomparability and untranslatability’.12 Emily Apter, Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), p. 4. Similarly, other critics point out that circulation is another flawed parameter to measure the worldliness of a text. Ignacio López-Calvo, who has studied the cultural production by and about Latin American authors of Asian descent, holds that the circulation criterion undermines the production of peripheral literatures because peripheral literatures ‘suffer unequal, hegemonic market conditions and power relations’.13 Ignacio López-Calvo, ‘Worlding and decolonising the literary world-system: Asian-Latin American literature as an alternative type of Weltliteratur’, in Re-Mapping World Literature: Writing, Book Markets and Epistemologies between Latin America and the Global South, ed. by Gesine Müller, Jorge J. Locane, Benjamin Loy (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 15–31 (p. 15). That is, some works are more circulated than others because the global market is and has been uneven.

Considering that neither translation nor international circulation are the only criteria to define World Literature opens up other possibilities of analysis. One may focus on globality – that is, the quality that makes up Hoyos’ Alephs – or on what López-Calvo refers to as globally-oriented authors ‘whose opuses have a global reach beyond Eurocentrism, not in the literary market, but in their global sensitivity and consciousness, through the settings where they take place and the worldviews they present’.14 López-Calvo, p. 18. However, merely shifting the focus away from the inequality of the global literary market does not make the inequality disappear. It is more enriching, I argue, to focus on what we can learn from novels that articulate globality and, at the same time, remain untranslated and poorly circulated. Analysed from their invisibility, and not just in spite of it, these texts offer unique knowledge to enrich the discussions on World Literature. Here, Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga, Kazbek and Humo are especially effective, to use Damrosch’s term. They are almost unknown when compared to the works of Volpi, Bolaño or Neuman. Nonetheless, they offer an advantageous perspective when we consider them as World Literature, yielding unique insights into the global phenomena that shape our present.