Late Book Culture in Argentina by Craig Epplin (review)

Craig Epplin has written a great little book about other little books. It teases its presumed readership with hints of an apocalypse, and follows on ideas put forward by, among others, Reinaldo Laddaga, but it has its own original take on contemporary movements. Epplin says explicitly that the “late” of the book title refers to late capitalism, as defined by Jameson in his books on post-modernity and neoliberalism, but Epplin is aware of the more obvious meaning of the adjective (3). Really his focus is on the reduced or transformed status of the Book in the avant-garde. Authors and their books now inhabit a “world of books in the moment when the book cannot be taken for granted” (4). Even the term “Argentina” may be unhelpful: Osvaldo Lamborghini wrote much of his oeuvre in Barcelona, Sergio Chejfec has published mostly while in Venezuela and New York, and Estación Pringles, while it is also a poetry foundation in provincial Coronel Pringles, exists mostly in cyberspace. The project of this book could have and probably should have included the Franco-Argentine Copi, and non-Argentine writers such as Levrero or (of course) Bellatin. Nevertheless, Epplin argues convincingly, “late book culture is a global phenomenon, but the rifts it carves are most clearly visible through its geographically delimited effects” (21).

Conversely, as Epplin admits, almost his entire book examines the impact of César Aira: “No other figure in recent Argentine literature has so insistently placed the processes of literary production into view. No other figure has so forcefully articulated the nexus of avant-garde and minor literary strategies” (120). For Epplin, Aira is both a symptom of late book culture in Argentina and its way forward.

Yet the chapter headings of Epplin’s book somewhat conceal these apocalyptic and Aira-ean foci. The first half of the book is titled “Genealogies,” and covers Lamborghini, Aira, and Eloísa Cartonera press. He begins with Lamborghini’s paradoxical injunction, “First publish, then write,” as a way to talk about the status of Lamborghini’s books (clandestine in the ’70s, unpublishable through most of his life, rescued posthumously by Aira)—but Lamborghini’s most interesting books, he suggests, are the altered books of others: “Books, then, for him, are not instruments of long-distance, temporally dilated literary encounters. They are small, movable stages for the performance of writing, publishing, and reading” (30–31). Likewise, his Teatro proletario de cámara, a collector’s item of his altered collages mostly of pornographic pulps, is more important than Lamborghini’s three (now) widely disseminated collected volumes of prose and poetry. For the second chapter, Epplin focuses, as so many readings of Aira’s oeuvre do, on Aira’s method of procedure, the refusal to edit or change what has been written, the small size of the books, their proliferation. The result is dissemination and dispersal: it’s really not in the spirit of his oeuvre for it to be fully collectible in its totality. Nor is it necessary. We as readers do not read his books, we read Aira’s act of writing: “Here, as in Lamborghini’s case, we are faced with a mode of writing that presents itself fundamentally as a material, irreproducible practice, highlighting an ephemeral situated act that ultimately trumps the product that emanates from it” (46). And so many of Aira’s fictions include scenes of writing, however parodied or denigrated afterwards, “the precisely dated and catalogued act of fabrication” (48). To resist the neoliberalization of the book industry, Aira prefers to publish “cualquier cosa” with small presses, including Eloísa Cartonera, even if this limits his readership for any given text. The third chapter of this first half also combines a critique of the neoliberal cultural machine with a handmade aesthetic: the publishing house of Eloísa Cartonera, the press staffed by cartoneros. Again, the book as aesthetic object threatens to take precedence over the contents of any given book, and Epplin notes [End Page 259...