The literary adventures of Martin Thomsen, Ecuadorian.

Alvaro Alemán

“Whosoever wishes to bathe in pain, spiritual and moral pain, total and definitive, a pain that will not be forgotten for the rest of one´s natural life; whoever wishes his very Ecuadorianness to hurt and to feel shame of one´s condition as a member of humanity, let him go and visit the San Lázaro madhouse, in Ambato way, between the streets Bahía and García Moreno. . .” (Más allá de la simple receta. Franklin Tello Mercado)

 
The example of Moritz Thomsen enables an understanding of the way literary reputations are distributed world wide, of the limits of contemporary literary art and of the turmoil of identity in the age of globalization. The present text wishes to contribute to the dissemination and evaluation of the work of one of the most interesting and peculiar writers of the last third of the XX century. Current interest in Moritz Thomsen runs parallel to a growing planetary consciousness over the fate of the environment (one of the mainstays in this author´s “green” literature), the problematics of nation making and the return of an ethical and social discourse linked to the issue of poverty. Moritz Thomsen arrives in Ecuador in 1964 and initiates a relationship with a township far removed from the reach of the State, he establishes a well earned credibility with the local population (both native and foreign born, he will soon become one of the mythic figures of the Peace Corps) and spends the rest of his life thinking and writing about those topics which he is passionate about: poverty, cultural and racial difference, personal and group identity, art and nature.
 
Thomsen´s work (dozens of newspaper articles, four printed books, plus another which remains unpublished) has exerted a powerful influence among his numerous readers. He received various prizes while still living and has now received a posthumous celebrity that has turned him (almost) into a cult figure. Meanwhile, his life and works are practically ignored in Ecuador, save for a handful of foreigners who were his followers, collaborators, friends and readers.

In what follows I will attempt to offer some clues in relation to what may be of interest to an audience who approaches this enigmatic figure for the first time: his relationship to afro Ecuadorian culture, his contributions to current thinking on globalization and the nation, the difficulty of his insertion into the field of Ecuadorian letters, the specificity of his literary production and the convenience of associating the writings of Moritz Thomsen to the immensely productive notion of shame and shaming.
 
 
The figure of the foreigner

The advent of nationalism during the XIX century reshaped the field of knowledge and experience with a disconcerting suddenness. The reverberations of this impact on the world view of most westerners ushered the formative stage of modern literary studies. Literature as a field thus emerges as an academic discipline, hand in hand with the onset of nation making. Terry Eagleton and Benedict Anderson, for example, single out the discourse of literature as a force in the build up of the imaginary communities we term nations. 
 
 
Thus, a fundamental criteria for evaluating the value of a literary work in modern scholarship, together with its aesthetic worth, is
 
1)      its contribution to the task of nation making and/or
2)      the possibility of a strong reading of the work as an allegory of the nation

 
If  this is the case, it should come as no surprise that both literary history as well as literary criticism in Ecuador present a strong opposition to textual forms and justifications  that are essentially alien or at least distant from the affirmative goals of nation building. Historically, these expressions, which have never been lacking, have been classified in the form of anomalies, exceptions or paraliterary curiosities. They have sometimes been collected and published under uncomfortable and rarified names like “The narrative of travelers” or “Foreign accounts”. This rich production has remained, in the case of Ecuador, as an index of the “other” in Ecuadorian literature.

 
The case of  Moritz Martin Thomsen II (1915-1991) is exemplary. Thomsen arrived in Ecuador in 1964 as one of the first Peace Corps Volunteers, he initially became involved with a small coastal community in the Province of Esmeraldas called Río Verde and he spent the remainder of his life in Ecuador. He published three books during his lifetime Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle 1969, The Farm on the River of Emeralds 1978 and The Saddest Pleasure: a Journey on Two Rivers  1990. A fourth work, My Two Wars appeared posthumously in 1996 and one more book, Bad News from a Black Coast remains unpublished, in manuscript form.
 
With the possible exception of only one of his books (My Two Wars), the whole of his life´s work is firmly established in the physical, spiritual and physical scenario of Ecuador and is particularly concerned with poverty.
 
Thomsen´s work has been attended by such diverse and influential contemporary writers as Wallace Stegner, Paul Theroux, Martha Gellhorn, Tom Miller and  Larry McMurtry  and the majority are favorable to the opinion that Thomsen is one of the most valuable American authors of the end of the past century. His condition as a cult writer has been ratified by means of the continuous republication, on both sides of the Atlantic of almost all of his books, translations into German and French and  the transformation of his works into workable screenplays. Thomsen, in sum, is, today, an author with a solid international reputation, a known literary commodity and, with no fear of being mistaken, a virtual unknown in Ecuador.

This oversight can be explained in part by a host of factors: the language barrier to start, Thomsen wrote and published in English; the virtual absence in Ecuador of non fiction as a literary category capable of holding together his literary production, his legendary marginality and inaccessibility, although, in truth, the greatest obstacle to his inclusion in the system of Ecuadorian letters is the result of his foreignness.
 
I mean to say that Moritz Thomsen´s foreignness presents an irresolvable problem to  current literary history in Ecuador, possibly to the system of Literature in its entirety and I wish to present evidence in support of this claim.
 
Foreignness, among other things, posits identity as an intolerable proximity to the Other.
The Other is thus a negative, looming, oppressive figure from which we separate ourselves in a positive, virtuous form. The Other, the stranger, the foreigner, becomes an adversary, an enemy. In the specific case of Ecuadorian national identity, the Other has been modeled as the foreigner which, in order to consolidate our own identity must of necessity be excluded, repudiated, denaturalized, discredited.
 
And yet the Other is not necessarily situated outside of territorial boundaries, it also surfaces within, the Other, for the purposes of fashioning an Ecuadorian national identity, as has been established by at least a decade of research and investigation in the Social Sciences has been, in different times and media, the native American, the black man, indigents and peasants, women and homosexuals. In the case of the works of Moritz Thomsen, two powerful anti territorial forces are at work, the foreigner and the poverty stricken person. Thomsen thus represents a double threat within the Ecuadorian cultural system; in the first place, the emergence of a critical consciousness (immensely eloquent) which confronts the shortcomings and excesses of a local nationalism and its irrational defense of discriminatory and unjust tactics; on the other hand, the acknowledgement of a brutal reality within national borders which is expressed in the form of an intense meditation on the phenomenon of a felt poverty. The only other text which can compare to the work of Thomsen in Ecuador may well be Leonardo Chiriboga´s Sucedió en la frontera, a notable frontier text that narrates the hardship of Ecuadorian military troops towards the middle of the past century, as they patrol the no man´s land that is the Ecuadorian borderland.

Na(y)tion

The idea of Ecuador as a multicultural society is present in the work of Moritz Thomsen from the very beginning of his first journey there. His acute observations on everyday life, in unison with his own sense of being newly arrived lead him to write:

The idea of the uniqueness of place that Thomsen registers cancels out the totalizing impulse of affirmative World making which is the nation. Years later, in response to a question addressed to him by the head of the Committee which awards him the Paul Cowan  prize for his book The Saddest Pleasure, Thomsen offers this extraordinary answer as a response to his fascination with Ecuador:

Poverty

Moritz Thomsen inhabits a desolate place. His writing signals the point of contact between a personal poetics and the encounter of the modern industrialized World with the desolate margins of capitalism. His entire system examines the impossible and volatile meeting of those antipodes. Reading Thomsen one feels a strange familiarity with his savage descriptions of a desperate poverty which brushes up against the suddenly vulnerable world view of a consciousness steeped in the myths of modernity. Thomsen´s dilemma is that of the representation of poverty. How is this condition, under a perpetual state of fugue, to be understood? How can it be conveyed under its own power? How can it avoid betrayal of its innermost being in representation? These questions, which Thomsen turns over like cherished stones and which are the result of decades of reflection, today harbor a singular interest. Here are Thomsen’s own views:

Living poor is, for Thomsen, contrary to the worldwide perception of this condition as a private affair, an ethical, aesthetic and public challenge, a defiant call to arms which brings forth, patently, both a literature of poverty as well as the poverty of literature itself.

Río verde, Esmeraldas original illustration by Moritz Thomsen

Afro Ecuador/Shame
 
If Thomsen’s work is lodged in the porous tissue of Ecuadorian literature, it surely descends, up until it reaches the muscle of a pan African, continental,  tradition. Richard Jackson has insisted for decades in pointing out the panafricanist dimension of Nelson Estupiñan Bass´s work; and this assertion also reaches the likes of Adalberto Ortiz (a friend of Thomsen for the latter part of his life), Antonio Preciado, Juan Montaño as well as Argentina Chiriboga. There is a well documented inconformity in Afro Ecuadorian oral tradition that reaches far back and that expresses itself, among other things, by means of the poetic form of the décima. Laura Hidalgo and Jean Rahier are two critics which have successfully tapped this tradition. Thomsen narrates the concrete experience of poverty on the Pacific Coast of Esmeraldas and fashions, properly, an Esmeraldan literature, his scenery, concerns, hopes and disillusions are firmly entrenched in that land. Thomsen may be the only contemporary writer (with the exception of Montaño) that has faced the issue of racism and otherness by means of literary discourse and that has done so in the concrete terms of lived experience.
 
The literature of Esmeraldas unavoidably exposes the contradictory nature of the modern nation State: a theoretically inclusive space, the reality of cultural practices-- like racism-- steeped in exclusionary behavior. A brilliant example of this aporia, of which perhaps Thomsen was unaware, is the publication of the memoirs of Franklin Tello Mercado, a key figure in the history of Esmeraldas who rose to the rank of Minister during several administrations in the middle part of the past century and who is the author of one of the single most provocative books written in Ecuador: Más allá de la simple receta (1973).
 
Similar to Thomsen, Tello is an inspired story teller who also writes, like Thomsen, memoirs. Tello writes about his experiences as a medical practitioner and makes an inventory of his rage and impotence before the injustice and inequality he observes throughout his life, both he and Thomsen are similar in that they transform this raw material into a force for shaming. The epigraph that opens this essay is drawn from his only work and serves to illustrate the operation of producing a literature allied to shame.
 
The following extract from Thomsen´s The Farm on the River of Emeralds (1978) moves in the same direction. In the scene that follows, Thomsen has been witness to a hit and run incident on his and Ramón´s farm, one of their workers has been killed:

The importance of shame for literary production is directly related to an historical association between pride and the nation. All of the effort placed into building the nation, its spiritual promise, nest in the generation of pride as an emotion. Shame represents its opposite: the denial of a sense of belonging, or adapting to a given form of reality, the rejection of what is appropriate. Instead, shame elicits a feeling of alienation, stigma, hand in hand with inadequate and censored behavior. Thomsen writes a literature that calls forth shame, that seeks out shame as a source of legitimacy. Under the shameful terms set out in his memory of an event, and which exist firmly outside of the circuit of prideful registration, what is it to be Ecuadorian but to be an individual unwilling to stop at the scene of an accident?

One of the results of this unflattering encounter with reality is a newfound capacity to see the world differently: to see ourselves negatively so to speak, reflected in the gaze of the Other. Surprisingly, it was none other than Charles Darwin, whose incursion into Ecuadorian territory in the XIX century granted him a brief glimpse into evolutionary theory, who formulated just such an interpretation in his book The Expression of Emotion in Men and Animals (1872). Darwin affirms that shame emerges when we see ourselves negatively cast in the eyes of the Other. Shame would thus be the preeminent social emotion. Helen Lewis for example, holds that even as human beings are social because of a biological inheritance, shame is an instinct that has the function of signaling threats to the social bond. In the same way that fear as an instinctive emotion signals physical danger, shame marks a potential danger for species survival, a threat to the primordial social bond.
 
The work of Moritz Thomsen links shame and literary art in an extraordinary manner. The Russian formalists, a group of linguists working in the 20s, singled out literariness as a property of language that works by drawing attention to the artificial, constructed nature of literary discourse in order to produce estrangement, a sense of the world as something different from our daily experience. Shame as an affect produces a similar response, it identifies a threat to our connectedness with others and alerts us of  our complicity or participation in posing that threat. The result is a vision of reality in which it appears as a different world than that of our conventional awareness. Shame returns us to a community from which we have made a break, and reawakens the emotional impact of that separation
 
Shame is thus, or can be shame of shamelessness; in other words, a felt  mortification linked to our abandonment of social bonds and their obligations. The work of Thomsen, like that of Franklin Tello, reminds us that beyond the “autonomous” existence we enjoy on earth we also live in the minds of others. One of the strengths of the register in which these two authors work is the very force of their respective historical personalities as we use them as filters for our own consciousness as readers. This is possibly what several commentators of Thomsen´s work have in mind when they refer o his work as “honest”, the remark may not refer to his relative sincerity or candidness but rather to the degree to which the quality of his writing enables us to see ourselves more clearly, to feel shame, in order to return, transformed, no longer laden with pretexts or self delusions, to our own minds.
 
Thomsen´s work is in fact, plagued with different forms of shame, personal and borrowed, imaginary and past. Above all, if we follow Erving Goffman, we may understand the extraordinary level of awareness of social standing that we experience in every social situation no matter how trivial. Shame as a social force is connected to this fine tuned sensibility to social climate and expected deference. What Thomsen does is to assume beforehand his own guilt and culpability, due to the precariousness of his position as a foreigner and so he generates precisely those defensive maneuvers that he/we would employ were he really guilty. In this way, Thomsen facilitates our conversion, fleetingly, into becoming for ourselves the worst person we can imagine that others might imagine us to be, an example:

But that which moves us towards shame is not simply a mechanical reflection of ourselves in another place, it is an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of that reflection in the mind of another. This is evident in that the personality and weight of that other, in whose mind we find ourselves, shapes our perception differently. This is why the life story of that individual intensifies or devalues our sensations. Knowledge of the lives of Thomsen, or of Tello, personal knowledge, by means of life writing, invariably affects our reading experience and capacity for shame since what we imagine is not simply our appearance in that person´s consciousness, but the judgment he or she passes on that appearance.

Río verde, Esmeraldas original illustration by de Moritz Thomsen

And Yet. . .

It is not my intention here to sing the praises of shaming since that sentiment can easily be placed at the service of Power or of the Norm; what is more, an inferiority complex, or sense of inadequacy, shame of oneself, as we can clearly see in all of Thomsen´s books, may be read as the internalization of the dominant (and oppressive) social values of modernity. In this way, racism, sexism, and other complex procedures, are responses to the powerful persuasion offered by the forces of shame insofar as it is a mechanism for collective discipline.
 
This is why it is useful to distinguish between shame as a method for the strengthening of the social bond and shame as a controlling principle for the individual imagination. It might be more useful then, to speak of the first of these meanings as Shame and the second as embarrassment, or even humiliation
 
In this state of affairs we could reasonably refer to Moritz Thomsen´s writing as a literature that excites Shame at the same time as it rejects humiliation even as it dissects it as a social practice. Thomsen´s discovery, during his long years in Ecuador, in my mind, is that the acknowledgement of Shame is what binds and strengthens individuals and societies alike. The articulation or materialization of a shared shame (the rejection of a certain shamelessness) marks the itinerary of Moritz Thomsen´s literary production. Beginning with this sojourn in Río Verde in the sixties, and his encounter with Shame as a binding principle, Thomsen is able to arduously find his way back, towards the end of his life, in My Two Wars, to the issuing force of his chronic embarrassment: his own relationship to his father. His four books oscillate in perpetual movement, between the subject positions of father and son (his own father, Ramón as his son, himself as father/son surrogate), his understanding, shot through with flashes of shameless comprehension of his own quandary and that of others, fills his works. In the same fashion his literature can be seen as an attempt to convey his shameless embarrassment or embarrassed shamelessness, and to pass on that experience to his readers.
 
On the other hand, Thomsen´s devastating encounter with poverty and its sequels signals a different move: the recognition that the force that quietly implodes societies is, among other things, repressed Shame, the endless capacity to hide and ignore our social craving for the exact deference we deserve, the unconditional acceptance of the mandate of Western Civilization (to be male, white and economically successful), our own fateful and unwilling denial of seeing the world through the eyes of another.
 
What makes Thomsen such a magnificent author is his recognition of the intersubjective nature of the causes of Shame. Thomsen arrives in Ecuador fleeing from a society which has lost, in his own mind, any sense of proportion, and thus, any possibility of experiencing shame collectively. Here are his own words:

He arrives in Ecuador, specifically in Río Verde in search, in a Proustian paraphrase, of a lost Shame. An attentive reading of his books and in particular his experiences in Esmeraldas reveals a profound suspicion of anything and everything capable of  upsetting his sense of appropriate and just relations between human beings, irrespective of economic position. In Río Verde, Moritz receives more deference than he feels he deserves, which awakens in him a sense of displacement and imbalance; thus, he  finds himself neither at peace with his embarrassment nor in the uncomfortable placidity of the shameless individual. All of Thomsen´s work attempts to overcome the setback of an overdeveloped sense of Shame, in order to do so, he wields, as his proper instruments, a merciless and dogged shaming and a humorous and razor sharp shamelessness.
 
Norbert Elías wrote, in 1937, that the Civilizing Process (the title of one of his important Works) advances by means of a reduction of the threshold of Shame and, in a parallel fashion, a growing incapacity to detect its presence. Our current predicament, unquestionably ashamed of Shame and anxious to banish it from our midst, explains the absence of a critical mass capable of thinking with and against this general tendency. Moritz Thomsen opposed this path, he produced a shameful, embarrassing, humiliating form of literature, a literature highly attuned to the rhythm and flow of affect, social and personal, and he attempted to exert a certain degree of modesty and discretion in his intervention by abstaining from publishing in Spanish. It might be said that he wished to save potential Ecuadorian readers from the deep embarrassment which he seems to have singled out for an English speaking public. Thomsen is a Shame magnet, he sees it everywhere: poverty is in fact a shameful state and he cannot and will not abandon that nationless State that marks the very condition of his expatriate status. Perhaps this is why he ventures deep into the countryside, Elias writes that the reduction of the Shame threshold is a result of the advance of modernity, Río Verde, is thus, a final outpost in which Thomsen can observe the merciless progress of this global movement. It is precisely this encroachment of shamelessness upon lived experience which fascinates and repels Thomsen:

Exordium

Thirty nine years after the first edition of Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle, there is a general consensus that there are few documents more capable of capturing, justly, the complexity of the experience of intercultural relations than that text. The book has been in print continuously since 1969 and has made Thomsen one of the preferred voices of several generations of volunteers, travelers and adventurous readers. His latter works have justified the faith placed in him by a group of loyal readers who slowly expand the reach of his writings. The image of Ecuador lodged in the minds of thousands of readers in different parts of the world belongs to Moritz Thomsen II, Martín, as he was affectionately referred to by his Ecuadorian friends.
 
In the meanwhile, in Ecuador, his works have yet to be discovered, a potential readership remains distant from this enriching source of reflection and perspectives capable of transforming, or at least altering its vision, of refreshing its perception. It is time to make a joint effort to produce the first Spanish translation of a surprising, unique, hopeful, terrifying, Ecuadorian, work. 

Works Cited

Darwin, Charles. The Expression of Emotion in Men and Animals. London: John Murray,  1872.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: V. 1-3. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Goffman, Erving. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor, 1959.
Lewis, Helen B.. Shame and Guilt in Neurosis. New York: International Universities Press, 1971
Tello Mercado, Franklin. Más allá de la simple receta. Quito: Fray Jodoco Ricke, 1973