Mind the gap: Marcelo Chiriboga and the Boom

Even when they are ‘successful’, contemporary Ecuadorian writers tend to be hard to notice on a global scale. Leonardo Valencia, Gabriela Alemán and Carlos Arcos have all been published nationally and internationally. The first edition of Kazbek was released in Spain by Funambulista (2008). Humo was published in Colombia by the multinational Penguin Random House (2017). Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga appeared in Quito under the widely recognisable brand of the Spanish publisher Alfaguara. The fact that these writers have been included in the catalogues of some of the staple names of the global publishing business, however, does not necessarily mean that their work is widely circulated beyond Ecuador, neither commercially nor academically. For instance – with the exception of some specialised collections on Latin American letters – the novels studied here are difficult to find in the universities and public libraries networks of Spain and the UK.1 My view is informed by searching the databases of the Catalogo Colectivo de Bibliotecas Públicas and the Red de Bibliotecas Universitarias Españolas, in Spain; and the Jisc Library Hub Discover, a service that brings together the catalogues of major UK and Irish libraries. In those databases, Alemán and Arcos are scarcely mentioned while Valencia is more easily found in Spain, where he lived for nearly 20 years.

Similarly, commercial bookstores in Europe rarely stock the work of Alemán, Arcos and Valencia on their Hispanic fiction shelves. One could argue that, notwithstanding, they are easily available worldwide in digital editions; in Kindle, for example. Yet, for searching a novel in Amazon’s or similar catalogues, one first needs to know about it. That is, in this scenario, readership remains limited primarily to specialised audiences. Translation is, of course, a significant issue that hinders international commercial circulation here. After all, most of the work of these writers remains limited to Spanish-speaking audiences, though not entirely. Kazbek appeared in English in 2020 – 12 years after its original publication – in the catalogues of the independent US publisher Autumn Hill Books. At the time of this book’s writing, Humo is still untranslated; however, Dick Cluster, who has worked with Alemán in the past for the English versions of Poso Wells (2018) and Album de Familia (Family Album, 2022), received a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts from the US federal government to translate the novel into English. Of the three titles studied here, Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga is the only one that has so far eluded translation entirely. Nonetheless, even when there are versions of their books available in other languages, Alemán’s and Valencia’s works often take part in ‘indie’ collections with modest print runs or are exclusively available to order online. Be it due to late translations, the lack of them entirely, or due to limited or specialised commercial circulation, the result is the same: Alemán, Arcos and Valencia remain largely invisible to a global audience when we compare them with other Latin American authors who navigate global literary markets effectively.

At this point, Arcos’ argument on the ‘invisibility syndrome’ of Ecuadorian contemporary literature resurfaces. Trying to offer a plausible explanation for this phenomenon that still affects Ecuadorian writers, Arcos proposes to see Marcelo Chiriboga as a figure that lies at the root of the problem. Marcelo Chiriboga is a fictional Ecuadorian author, not only Ecuador’s only representative in the Latin American Boom of the 1960s, but also the most important writer of the region in the twentieth century, according to his fictional biography. Chiriboga is an invention of two Boom writers – José Donoso and Carlos Fuentes – who introduced him as a ‘real’ person in their novels, according to Arcos’ account:

Although the different recollections of Chiriboga’s life do not necessarily match, that is, even if the narration of his exploits might differ depending on who is telling the story, there are some regular ‘facts’ that remain as staples of his profile. In all the mediums where he has appeared, the path Chiriboga follows as a writer maps onto that often associated with Boom writers: expelled from his home country for supporting left-wing ideologies, he finds refuge in Europe, where he publishes his work and becomes a household name of Latin American letters to international acclaim. Of course, Chiriboga’s novels – including his allegedly most notable work, La línea imaginaria (1968) – are usually described as explorations of Latin American realities following the aesthetics of magical realism. The quality of his fiction, which focused on blurring the lines that divide reality and fantasy in Ecuador, so his creators say, led to Chiriboga being awarded multiple literary prizes. His novels and short stories were translated into various languages to be circulated around the world, and he became a notable figure in the global literary market.

That Chiriboga’s life should shadow the life of a Boom writer is by no means accidental. His fictional presence fills a gap: in reality, Ecuador never had a representative in the Boom. In an interview with the Ecuadorian newspaper El Comercio, Carlos Fuentes admitted that, alongside Donoso, they created Chiriboga to ‘gift’ Ecuador with the Boom writer the country lacked:

The absence from the Boom – a gap that the figure of Marcelo Chiriboga comes to embody – is essential for understanding the invisibility of contemporary Ecuadorian literature. By missing the worldwide recognition that the Boom brought, Ecuador also missed its opportunity to be recognised as part of Latin American letters globally. My point here rests on the idea that, no matter what we consider the Boom to be, it is undeniable that it has a large influence over what is understood as Latin American literature by global audiences. I stress this point because the Boom can be thought of under two contrasting perspectives that, while not opposite, do favour different foci. On the one hand, the Boom can be understood as a marketing phenomenon tailored for European readers. On the other, it can be considered a literary movement representing the climax of Latin American writing. Either way, it is widely accepted as the most significant literary phenomenon from the region.

If one leans towards the marketing viewpoint, it is vital to consider, as John King does in The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, that the story of the Boom ‘is linked to the open and aggressive policies of certain publishing houses, in Spain and throughout Latin America’.6 John King, ‘The Boom of the Latin American Novel’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, ed. by Efraín Kristal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 59–81 (p. 61). Such editorial processes included the marketisation of regionally specific experiences for the rest of the world. To explain this idea, an anecdote of Gabriel García Márquez in King’s article is illuminating. The anecdote goes that when the Colombian author’s third novel – La mala hora (1962) – was first published in Spain, it was ‘dubbed’ into the dialect of Madrid to laughable consequences. García Márquez pulled the edition out of circulation and had to ‘retranslate’ it into Caribbean Colombian Spanish.7 King, p. 62. The way I see the story, the problem was not only that the ‘Spanish edition’ was not what García Márquez had originally written, but also that it was not what he was ‘selling’. That is to say, should we have translated the novel from its original Colombian Spanish into Spanish from Spain, it would have ceased to be recognisably a Latin American novel, and then there would be no point. The commercial success of the Boom was largely due to what its representatives – and especially the publishing houses behind them – were selling through their stories: Latin America.

On the other side of the argument, the Boom can also be seen as a consummation of Latin American writing and not only a marketing craze. This view – supported by García Marquez’s biographer, the British critic and translator Gerald Martin – sustains that the term ‘Latin American literature’ only began to achieve generalised currency in the later 1960s, i.e. once the Boom had already begun.8 Gerald Martin, Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1989), p. 4. Martin translated into English Miguel Ángel Asturias’ Hombres de maíz (1949) and is one of the main voices in favour of the global reach of the Latin American Boom. As such, he argues that, in the major works of Fuentes, Vargas Llosa or García Márquez, it is possible to find the culmination of 400 years of Latin American cultural development. The keyword here is ‘culmination’. Martin considers that the Boom is the peak of Latin American writing not only up to the point when it appeared in the 1960s, but until today. In 1989 he wrote that the Boom writers ‘seem for the moment to have put an end to the possibility of further developing the novel as we know it’.9 Martin, Journeys Through the Labyrinth, p. 204. And his vision, it seems, remains predominantly unchanged. In 2018, in the context of the XXXVI International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association that took place in Barcelona, Martin gave a talk entitled ‘Has Anything Happened since the 1960s? Reflections of an Old-Timer’. With the caveat of admitting that in a limited space he would inevitably resort to generalisations, his answer to that provocative question was that, with the notable exception of Bolaño, little has transpired in literary terms.10 Gerald Martin, ‘Has Anything Happened since the 1960s? Reflections of an Old-Timer’, LASA Forum, 49.4 (2018), pp. 18–22. The template of contemporary Latin American literature, Martin believes, was forged in the 1960s and most writers today either follow it or fight against it. Either way, the Boom remains an insuperable presence.

If we focus our understanding of the Boom in terms of marketing as much as if we direct our attention to the argument of culmination, one aspect of the phenomenon that traverses both ideas stands out as especially relevant for the discussion of contemporary Ecuadorian literature. The Boom functions as a major term that not only brings together different writers under the tag of ‘Latin American’, but also, by the same token, it leaves others out. In an article where he theorises on the ‘novel of the continent’ – included in an ambitious edition on the history of the novel globally – Martin holds that Latin American literature has been historically governed by a logic in which big names obscure small ones:

While Boom writers were becoming increasingly popular in Europe, Ecuador was living a literary phenomenon of its own. According to Arcos’ account, the 1960s were years ‘particularmente ricos en términos de análisis, debate y produccción, especialmente de poesía’.15 Arcos, ‘La caja sin secreto’, p. 192. The Ecuadorian literary landscape was dominated by a cultural movement known as the Tzántzicos, whose production was mostly centred on poetry. The group based its identity on the Shuar word tzantza, a term used by the Amazonian indigenous community to designate the ritual practice of shrinking severed heads. Starting from the selection of an indigenous word for the name of the group, the Tzántzicos defined themselves and their work in opposition to the intellectual elites that had dominated Ecuadorian cultural life in the first half of the twentieth century. Their proposal was precisely to step away from the indigenistas of the past, whom they perceived as privileged mestizos responsible for the objectification of Ecuadorian indigeneity. They were a ‘parricide’ movement, whose primary goal was to target and attack – by means of criticism, poetry and happenings – Ecuador’s ‘cancilleres-poetas, cónsules-pintores, embajadores-prosistas’.16 Arcos, ‘La caja sin secreto’, p. 194. It was their heads they wanted to shrink, in order to achieve a radical change in society. In challenging Ecuador’s politician/writers, they also embodied a critique to the centrality of the figure of the intellectual in public life and the political order, which was key for the Generación del 30. They wanted to ‘revertir el orden de las cosas a fin de cambiar aquella manera caduca de gobernar, de sentir, de pensar, y atacaron lo que estaba a su alcance, lo que la literatura ecuatoriana había producido hasta ese momento’.17 Susana Freire, Tzantzismo: tierno e insolente (Quito: Libresa, 2008), p. 19. One of the main ideas behind the group was taking poetry to public spaces, in an attempt to intensify the subversive anti-elitist character of their work, that is, live poems to be read and performed not just in front of street audiences but alongside them.

The anti-elitism promulgated by the Tzántzicos does not pair well with the Boom, which has been often criticised for being ‘high’ literature. This is precisely one of the recurrent criticisms hovering over the Boom: that it was an elite men’s literary club where women and other minority groups were not allowed. There are many elements to support that stance, starting from the fact that, indeed, not a single woman is recognised as part of the Boom, even when the name of the literary agent Carmen Balcells frequently pops up as ‘the woman behind Latin America’s literary Boom’.18 Carmen Balcells represented some of the household names of the Latin America Boom, including the Nobel laurates García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, who have both recognised the relevance of Balcells’ presence in their literary circles. García Márquez’s short story Los funerales de la Mama Grande (1962), about a matriarch of Macondo, is often perceived as a reference to Balcells. Upon her death in 2015, Balcells’ role in the commercial success of the Boom was revisited and widely acknowledged in the media. See Jonathan Blitzer, ‘The Woman Behind Latin America’s Literary Boom’, The New Yorker, 28 September 2015 <https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-woman-behind-latin-americas-literary-boom> [accessed 26 November 2019]. However, the reality is also more complex than that, as some of the names usually associated with the Boom experienced what Swanson describes as ‘a turn to the popular’.19 Swanson, p. 88. In their analyses of the post-Boom Latin American novel, both Swanson and Donald L. Shaw discuss a ‘perceived elitism’ as one of the elements challenged by the novels that came after the commercial success of the Boom. Shaw refers to the work of the Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta (1940), who voiced his concerns over the tendency of ‘los herederos del Boom’ to carry to an extreme ‘some of its “ludic”, “intellectualist” and elitist features, instead of rediscovering a degree of positive commitment and coming to terms with the growing political consciousness of the working class’.20 Donald L. Shaw, ‘Three Post-Boom Writers and the Boom’, Latin American Literary Review, 24.47 (1996), pp. 5–22 (p. 11). Similarly, Swanson notes that one key marker of the transition to a Post-Boom is the transformation in the work of writers who made their name in association with the Boom. For example, he points towards Vargas Llosa’s shift to farce and soap opera in Pantaleón y las visitadoras (1973) and La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977). As the most vivid example of this tendency, Swanson mentions José Donoso, whose Historia personal del boom (1972) is one of the key texts for understanding the period, and who in the early 1980s became explicit about ‘overcoming the perceived elitism of the Boom, despite his earlier aspiration to and eventual attachment to it’.21 Swanson, p. 88.

Anti-elitism, however, was not the only issue that distanced the commercial and recognition dynamics of the Boom from what was happening in Ecuador in the 1960s. The Boom of Latin American Literature is, above all, a Boom of novels and the Tzántzicos were primarily poets. In his study on the Ecuadorian novel after the Generación del 30, Miguel Donoso Pareja refers to a ‘void’ in the production of novels in Ecuador during the 1960s. Building on Hernán Rodríguez Castelo, Donoso Pareja’s essay posits that the work done by the generation that came after Icaza’s ‘cuenta muy poco para una nueva novela ecuatoriana’.22 Miguel Donoso Pareja, Nuevo realismo ecuatoriano. Los grandes de la década del 30 (Quito: Eskeletra, 2016), p. 95. Additionally, he argues that ‘los productos más válidos dentro de la renovación narrativa del país, específicamente en la novela, se dan en la década de los años 70’.23 Donoso Pareja, Nuevo realismo ecuatoriano. Los grandes de la década del 30, p. 95. He then goes on to mention works by Jorge Enrique Adoum (Entre Marx y una mujer desnuda, 1976) and Eliécer Cárdenas (Polvo y ceniza, 1978) at the forefront of the Ecuadorian novelistic panorama that emerged in the 1970s. By then, nonetheless, the Boom was already starting to lose steam.

As the word ‘boom’ itself implies – Swanson notes – the Latin American Boom should be understood as a ‘finite’ phenomenon. Alongside other critics, he places the beginning of the end of this phenomenon in 1970, when an ensemble of factors signalled the conclusion of a prolific spell of commercial activity and the exhaustion of a literary model. On the commercial side of the issue, Swanson points towards a rift inside the publishing house that had powered the international expansion of Latin American writers for the previous decade: ‘there was a major split within Seix Barral and the key player, writer, publisher, and entrepreneur Carlos Barral, left to found Barral Editores in 1970’.24 Swanson, p. 83. The split also caused the suspension in 1970 of another of the mechanisms that gave recognition to Boom writers, the Biblioteca Breve Prize. The winner of that year would have been José Donoso for El obseno pájaro de la noche, a novel that has also come to represent ‘the culmination of the process of complexity, fragmentation, tortuousness, and sheer difficulty that had come to be seen as synonymous with the Boom, but also as the extreme of experimentalism, the point of exhaustion and no return’.25 Swanson, p. 83. In addition to the editorial and literary aspects, the end of the Boom is also marked by disenchantment over the Cuban Revolution, that had previously caused a sense of political unity among Boom writers and had made Latin American narrative fashionable for international audiences. The arrest in 1971 of the Cuban poet Humberto Padilla on the grounds of being counterrevolutionary ‘led to a huge rift between Latin American writers and shattered the mirage of the unity of the Boom’.26 Swanson, p. 84. All these factors, Swanson argues, helped to bring into sharper focus the fact that by the end of the 1960s the newness of the Boom novels was not so new anymore: