The lack of participation – and hence, of representation – in the Boom is a critical component for understanding the position of Ecuadorian letters today. Going back to Martin’s point, we could say that, with no names in the most internationally acclaimed and commercially successful phenomenon of Latin American letters, Ecuador was mostly excluded from the broader ensemble that is Latin American literature as perceived globally. Having no literary representative linked with the Boom, however, is not to be seen as a curse. It is this absence that enables contemporary Ecuadorian literature to provide a more nuanced, less Eurocentric and less Anglophone-centric understanding of World Literature. I am proposing an approach that, contrary to what Pascale Casanova suggests, takes into account what she categorises as literary peripheries not only when they interact with literary capitals. Rather, my approach considers peripheral literature in the framework of World Literature independently of how it interacts with the centre.
The position of contemporary Ecuadorian authors implies not only that their work is hardly ever to be found internationally in the ranks of ‘Latin American Literature’. Their work is hard to find even inside the country, where most bookshops have only a few shelves devoted to ‘literatura ecuatoriana’. These limited spaces are often occupied by Huasipungo and other school-required books. Clara Medina argues that there is a lack of interest among local booksellers to sell and promote books written by contemporary Ecuadorian authors, a commercial disregard that is worsened by:
La deficitaria labor de edición y distribución de los libros que ejercen instituciones públicas como la Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana o el Ministerio de Cultura, cartera de Estado que premia la labor literaria de los autores mediante concursos y publica sus libros, pero no los vende, porque tiene una política de gratuidad; y, paradójicamente, tampoco los hace circular.
1 Clara Medina, ‘La narrativa ecuatoriana actual en los medios impresos: El Comercio y El Telégrafo (2010–2015)’ (unpublished MA thesis, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2017), p. 18. Critical attention is not a forte either. As I have explained, Ecuadorian literature is primarily studied in relation to the works of the Generación del 30, and Huasipungo is still the go-to Ecuadorian novel in international anthologies and introductions to Latin American fiction. In this scenario, contemporary Ecuadorian authors find themselves on the peripheries of Latin American writing, experiencing a doubly peripheral position. It is double because Latin America is already on the periphery of what Casanova names ‘the world republic of letters’, that is, in the broader ensemble that World Literature constitutes. Although Casanova’s theory is problematically focused on the centrality of Europe, her approach is useful as a point of departure to acknowledge the position of Ecuadorian letters in a larger literary structure and to propose their analysis from a perspective that emphasises their positionality. Seeing contemporary Ecuadorian literature from an angle that recognises its invisibility serves us to challenge the dominant definition of World Literature that proposes to forget national frameworks in order to think and read globally. Confronted with ‘minor’ literatures, one cannot simply overlook their national focus because they are marked by it. Yet, they too articulate globality.
Casanova’s study, published in 1999 to a widely influential reception, proposes that works of literature must be understood against the background of the overall structure in which they take their place. That is, the coherence of each work that is declared to be literary ‘stands revealed only in relation to the entire literary universe of which it is a part’.
2 Casanova, p. 3. The literary universe as a whole, that Casanova refers to as the ‘world republic of letters’, is deeply uneven, as she argues that it has its capital, provinces and borders. That is, it has a centre and a periphery. This organisational model is constructed around a perspective that places Latin American letters in a position of dependency. Paris, Casanova argues, is the capital of the world republic of letters. It is so because, in her view, the French metropolis is ‘the city endowed with the greatest literary prestige on earth’.
3 Casanova, p. 24. Casanova’s study postulates that territories of literature are defined and delimited according to their distance from the place where literary consecration is ordained. She sees Paris, with its ‘incessantly proclaimed universality’ that makes it a homeland not only to French but to all national literatures, as the place where literary prestige and belief converge in the highest degree; therefore, the centre of the literary universe. To a lesser extent and limited to be the centre of a particular linguistic area only, the Spanish-speaking world, one equivalent of Paris could be Barcelona – which Casanova describes as a ‘great intellectual capital’ – and, notably, is the hometown of Seix Barral as well as the commercial epicentre of the Boom. In the world republic of letters, a literary centre exists ‘both in the imagination of those who inhabit it and in the reality of the measurable effects it produces’.
4 Casanova, p. 24. Among those measurable effects, Casanova mentions:
The immense profit that writers from literary impoverished spaces have obtained in the past, and still obtain today, from being published and recognised in the major centres – through translation and the prestige conferred by imprints that symbolise literary excellence, the distinction that accompanies a formal introduction of an unknown writer by an internationally renowned author, even the award of literary prizes – supplies evidence of the real effects of literary belief.
5 Casanova, p. 17. The recognition of a European centre, be it for the Spanish-speaking world or not, places Latin America on the periphery of Casanova’s world republic of letters. Latin American countries suffer from a ‘cultural weakness’ that limits their participation in the world literary space. The reasons behind this weakness are that, when compared to its European counterpart, Latin America sustains its literary market on a smaller readership, more precarious means of communication and diffusion (publishers, libraries, magazines, newspapers) and writers who struggle to specialise in their literary jobs.
6 Casanova, p. 16. For a writer to find their way out of the periphery, they must engage with the centre: just like the Boom writers did through their involvement with Seix Barral, Barcelona, Spain and Europe.
Absent from the Boom, that is, absent from Latin America’s major engagement with the centre of the world literary space, Ecuador finds itself in a doubly peripheral position. In Casanova’s framework, contemporary Ecuadorian literature occupies the space of a ‘small literature’, a national literature that remains mostly invisible – imperceptible in the strict sense – to international literary authorities.
7 Casanova, p. 183. One must criticise Casanova’s approach for its dependence on international recognition to evaluate the currency of literary works. After all, it proposes a model centred on competition, where there is but one standard to measure the relevance of, let us say, a novel in the world literary space. No matter where such a novel is originally written and circulates, judged by this standard, its global value relies on how well the novel is received in Europe. That is to say, Casanova proposes a centre-periphery model that, in Héctor Hoyos’ view, matches ‘geopolitical structures that permeate daily global life, recognisable in the sense that the one important conversation on the world stage is between Western Europe and the US, while the rest of the world mostly listens’.
8 Hoyos, p. 190. Casanova’s paradigm resembles a capitalistic model of consumption based on one of the key assumptions of dependency theorists: that ‘for the period of time that capitalism has formed the dominant mode of production and distribution in the world, the most important fact about any nation has been its relations with other nations’.
9 Harriet Friedmann and Jack Wayne, ‘Dependency Theory: A Critique’, The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, 2.4 (1977), pp. 399–416 (p. 401). The inequality of said relations breeds an uneven flow of resources from peripheral developing states to central wealthy states: the periphery provides, the centre consumes. Similarly, in Casanova’s world republic of letters, fiction is to flow from countries like Ecuador to the centres of literary recognition in Europe. Only then is it to be considered as fiction that conforms to the standards of World Literature. While that might be the case with Boom writers, who effectively managed to produce Latin America for the consumption of European readers, it is not the only way to consider the globality of a literary work, as Hoyos argues referring to the Alephs that inhabit global Latin American novels.
In the Ecuadorian case, with the Feriado Bancario, contemporary writing also shows that the relationship between centre and periphery is more complex than a unidirectional process. As I have argued before, the crisis intensified the connections between Ecuador and the rest of the world, sending migrants from Ecuador abroad, but also bringing foreign cultural elements into the everyday life of Ecuadorian society. In this context of exchange, literature is not simply produced in the periphery to be consumed by the centre. The novels I analyse in this book provide evidence of that. The study of Gabriela Alemán’s Humo, for instance, makes a case for exploring connections that circumvent centres altogether: by creating a Paraguayan-Ecuadorian novel, Alemán directs our attention to literary relationships that develop outside the influence of European or North American cultural capitals. As I discuss in the previous chapter, Humo connects Paraguay and Ecuador, two countries that Alemán considers similar in that they possess almost unknown literary richness. In doing so, the novel bears testimony that the centre/periphery consumption model is not fit for studying all Latin American fiction, which can also privilege dialogues among peripheries and bypass centres.
In a similar vein, Valencia’s Kazbek questions the separation between centre and periphery that Casanova’s model champions. In my previous discussion of Valencia’s novel, when the main character of the story, Kazbek, names his touchstone titles, I highlight that the examples he wants to follow to create his masterpiece are all works of global reach. Interestingly, he mentions Salman Rushdie’s Los versos satánicos (1988) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Los inconsolables (1995). Although he refers to the Spanish-translated titles, these are both works originally written in English by authors of mixed origin: British-Indian, in the case of Rushdie, and British-Japanese, in the case of Ishiguro. As novels conceived by authors who relate to Europe and Asia at the same time, when Kazbek names them he also brings to the table the fact that centre and periphery often merge in narration. Postcolonial theorists have long shed light on the nature of the relationship between the coloniser’s centre and the colonised’s periphery, and how this connection is manifested and contested through writing (both Rushdie and Ishiguro have been widely studied in this sense by World Literature scholarship). Adding another layer of complexity to this approach, one that reminds us that texts mixing centres and peripheries often reach other peripheries in translation, Kazbek demonstrates that literature is more nuanced than – and cannot be limited to – a consumption model.
Nonetheless, as I said earlier, shifting the focus of analysis does not change the fact that some national literatures stay in the margins of the critical and commercial spotlights that negotiate global prestige, motivate widespread translations and promote international circulation. To reflect on Ecuador’s literary production today, I propose to see this fate not as a curse, but rather as an opportunity to think of World Literature from a ‘minor’ angle. In their work on Franz Kafka, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari define ‘minor literature’ as the literature of a minority written in a major language. To explain what such definition implies, and to argue in favour of embracing the minoritarian literary status, the French critics expand on Kafka’s analysis of the Jewish literature of Prague. That is, a Jewish literature written in German, the language of a minority population in the Czech capital. Deleuze and Guattari argue that Jews are, at the same time, part of the German-speaking minority and excluded from it. That condition of belonging and not belonging at the same time, they say, allows their German-written literature to have a ‘strong co-efficient of deterritorialisation’, that is, the ability to undo the cultural space they inhabit by affirming perspectives that are not those of the culture they inhabit.
10 Deleuze and Guattari, p. 16. Thanks to that capacity, they say, minor literatures have radical potential.
My analysis of contemporary Ecuadorian literature in this chapter resonates with the ambiguity of belonging and not belonging signalled by Deleuze and Guattari. Contemporary Ecuadorian narrative is both part of Latin American literature and, at the same time, excluded from it. It is this doubly peripheral position that makes it comprehensible from a minoritarian perspective; it is this particular position that allows it to deterritorialise the cultural space where it develops. From their minoritarian position, novels like Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga, Kazbek and Humo are capable of undoing the translation-based and circulation-based understandings of Latin American World Literature that underlie the discipline. Like the authors listed at the beginning of this chapter, those who tick the boxes of translation and circulation effectively, Arcos, Valencia and Alemán convey globality in their works. As I explain in the previous chapter, they do so by navigating borders and by showcasing the hybridity that traverses and builds Ecuador as a transnational space. However, unlike the commercially successful Volpi and company, Arcos, Valencia and Alemán voice a minor literature. This status as representatives of a minor literature lets them affirm a perspective that differs from that of other Latin American writers who do enjoy widespread readership and recognition. In Deleuze’s and Guattari’s terminology, it is their minoritarian status that allows them to create ‘a third world’ of their own, a Latin American World Literature of their own.
The minoritarian condition enables contemporary Ecuadorian writing to further an alternative path to consider what Latin American World Literature is and what it can be. This is the case because, in minor literatures, everything has a collective value. Deleuze and Guattari explain that proposition by saying that, considering that ‘talent’ does not abound in a minor literature, ‘the conditions are not given for an individuated utterance which would be that of some “master” and could be separated from collective utterance’.
11 Deleuze and Guattari, p. 17. That is, the French philosophers argue that minor literatures are characterised by the absence of one dominant authorial voice that, through its recognition as the voice of a master, could be set apart from collective enunciation. The absence of a master enables individual writers to speak for collective experiences.
A cursory revision of Latin American national literatures could easily prove Deleuze’s and Guattari’s argument on the absence of masters untrue. After all, going back to Gerald Martin’s work, one of the particularities of Latin American literature is that small countries – those that could be put into the category of ‘minor’ – often participate in a larger literary ensemble via one or two prominent names. Martin names, for example, José Martí in Cuba or Augusto Roa Bastos in Paraguay. However, as I have argued so far, Ecuador is a different case because, precisely, it lacks those big names. As such, contemporary Ecuadorian literature is not – cannot be – a literature of masters. But that impossibility, in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s view, is in fact beneficial, for it makes possible a conception of something other than a literature of masters. Freed from the authority of the individual master’s voice, they argue, literature finds itself charged with the function of collective utterance. In this light, what the solitary writer says constitutes a communal action and ‘if the writer lives on the margin, is set apart from his fragile community, this situation makes him [them] all the more able to express another, potential community, to force the means for another consciousness and another sensibility’.
12 Deleuze and Guattari, p. 17.If we see contemporary Ecuadorian literature as a minor literature, Valencia, Alemán and Arcos are among those individual writers whose work speaks for the Ecuadorian experience in the twenty-first century. Hence, considering how their fiction articulates globality within the minor, contemporary Ecuadorian literature is strategically positioned to provide that other ‘sensibility’ mentioned by Deleuze and Guattari. That is to say, as novels that engage with globality from a minoritarian position, Memorias de Andrés Chiliquinga, Kazbek and Humo are able to reflect on and convey the global through the national. They articulate a collective experience in their imagining of post-Feriado Bancario Ecuador. However, to do so, they construct Ecuador as a nation shaped by transnationalism. In their construction of the national as defined by the transnational, Arcos’, Alemán’s and Valencia’s novels become texts capable of articulating globality without losing focus on the national context from which they emerge.
To focus on the national in order to see the global is also to expand current understandings of World Literature that too often discard the nation’s relevance in a globalised world. Franco Moretti, for instance, claims that part of ‘the beauty’ of World Literature is that it goes against the grain of national historiography. To explain his point, Moretti argues against close readings because, as a time-consuming practice to critically analyse a text, it is a limiting approach: ‘you invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter’.
13 Moretti, p. 57. Instead, the Italian critic postulates ‘distant reading’, a type of literary analysis that, to expand the scope of limited canons, call us ‘to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes tropes – or genres and systems’.
14 Moretti, p. 57. Using this method, and in order to understand literature as a global system, Moretti proposes that, first, one must identify a unit of analysis, and then follow its different incarnations through a variety of environments ‘until, ideally, all of literary history becomes a long chain of related experiments’.
15 Moretti, p. 62. This way, the national histories that configure literature are set aside in favour of framing the entirety of the world literary system. The purpose of the study of World Literature, Moretti holds, is to be a permanent intellectual challenge to national literatures.
The novels studied in this book demonstrate that, even if Moretti’s reasoning seems to suggest otherwise, it is possible to challenge national literatures without losing track of the national. Carlos Arcos does that when he reimagines Andrés Chiliquinga. As discussed in the previous chapter, Arcos’ fiction challenges what
Huasipungo, Ecuador’s national novel, represents for Ecuadorian letters by dislocating its hero and putting him in New York City, questioning the national while also engaging with the world. In this light, I agree with Héctor Hoyos when he refutes Moretti’s distant reading by pointing out the problems its preconceptions imply. In his study of global Latin American novels, Hoyos considers that, by focusing on units of analysis fixed
a priori as Moretti suggests, one is at risk of ignoring works that contest or do not fit within the scope of preconceived parameters: ‘if we set the rules of the game in advance, what happens with the works that may want to challenge those rules? They are left out of the game, remaining unnoticed, unseen’.
16 Hoyos, p. 7. Alternatively, he proposes to ‘proceed dialectically’ to reveal individual works’ potential to transform fixed definitions of what the world is and how can we organise bodies of literature around them. By doing so, Hoyos adds to an understanding of World Literature enriched by the contemporary Alephs of Latin American fiction.
Although Hoyos’ theory is better equipped to grasp the Ecuadorian case, it must also be approached cautiously, especially because – although to a lesser extent – it shares Moretti’s, Casanova’s and Damrosch’s dismissal of the nation. Hoyos refers back to Fredric Jameson’s proposal for ‘third world’ texts to be read as national allegories to say that contemporary Latin American literature ‘in a peculiar, sublated return to Jameson, one could say that it trades national allegories for global allegories’.
17 Hoyos, p. 190. Although in Hoyos’ view these allegories signal their own impossibility – for, in terms of cultural hegemony, Latin American authors cannot take part on an equal footing in a global attention economy – he is also keen to discard national historiographies as the way forward for understanding global phenomena through literature.
Contemporary Ecuadorian literature shows that dismissing the nation is not the only path to advance the study of World Literature. Put together, Valencia’s, Alemán’s and Arcos’ novels demonstrate that fiction can convey a sense of a national space while critically engaging with a global dimension. It is so because, as this book argues, the everyday life of Ecuadorians is deeply impacted, shaped and entangled with multiple manifestations of transnationalism. Hence, if a novel is to reflect and make sense of the Ecuadorian nation today, it must also reflect and make sense of the ways in which Ecuador daily interacts with the world at large. Saying that working on ‘a nation-state-centred model that does not match the underlying conditions of culture anymore’, as Hoyos does, misses the point raised by literary voices left out of the international spotlight.
18 Hoyos, p. 202. Contemporary Ecuadorian authors, from their invisible spots in the world literary space, show that the nation does not necessarily go away when writing actively conveys globality. Their fictions help us to make a case for a study of World Literature that need not be the study of the global exclusively, where national historiographies are overcome and buried; rather, they show us that it can also be the study of the global by thinking through the nuanced experiences of national historiographies.