Media Laboratories: Late Modernist Authorship in South America by Sarah Ann Wells (review)

Much has been written about the integration of preexistent modes of cultural production into emerging mass media in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly after the arrival of sound to the cinema, but not nearly enough scholarship has explored the ways in these new industrial forms of expression were remediated into literature. In her provocative new book, Sarah Ann Wells convincingly argues that media—film, radio, typewriter, and imaginary media—reshaped how canonical authors in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay understood the practice of authorship, making possible writing from the position not of creator, but rather spectator, listener, and user. These media laboratories, Wells contends, are not spaces of invention and novelty, as they had been for modernists in the 1920s; to the contrary, late-modernists occupy a place where manifestos' possibilities will not materialize, where media and their technologies are a known aspect of everyday life.

Following an excellent introduction, albeit one that initially seems a little too entrenched in debates regarding literary modernism, Wells closely analyzes Jorge Luis Borges's A Universal History of Infamy (1935) and Patrícia Galvão's Industrial Park (1933), proposing that each reconsiders authorship through distinctive cinematic tactics and strategies, ones reminiscent of Hollywood and Soviet montage techniques. The spectator, as Wells shows through wonderful readings of each work, thus allows Borges and Galvão to reconceptualize what it means to write. In the next chapter, through analyses of works by a wide range of authors such as Mário de Andrade, Felisberto Hernández, Nicolás Olivari, and the Cuban Virgilio Piñera (writing a decade later in Buenos Aires), Wells reconsiders what it means in the period to hear or, more specifically, how the materiality of the disembodied voice (the acousmêtre) of radio and sound cinema is felt as a kind of tuning in (and out). Setting aside its rather curious description of the transition to sound, the chapter details how writers mediated radio and film to approach their contemporary experience. Moving away from spectatorships, the next chapter examines a kind of usership through the figure of the late modernist typist in two works of narrative fiction: Graciliano Ramos's Anguish (1936) and Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star (1977). Even though I am not fully convinced of the latter's arguably anachronistic inclusion, Wells's reconfiguring of authorship through proprioception is compelling. Ramos and Lispector's iterations of typists are users; instead of being a receiver, Lispector is a conduit between two states, intervening and intervened upon. By returning to Felisberto in the next chapter, Wells aims to develop the notion of feelership. Moving away from understanding it as usership in its various forms and permutations, Wells contends "Authorship becomes a process of enacting a haptic ritual rather than inaugurating a new world" in both minor and canonical works of Felisberto's (113). Rather than defining a new choreography, Felisberto's narrative fiction (I would argue following Wells's reasoning) feels through what human geographer David Seamon calls a place ballet. Feelership, as an affective experience of the media laboratory, is performed through Felisberto's role as piano accompanist to silent film. However tenuous this connection may seem, Wells's highly suggestive readings of stories like "The Daisy Dolls" will force readers to reread Felisberto haptically. Through examining Adolfo Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel (1940) and Borges's "Funes, the Memorious" (1942) and "The Aleph" (1945) Wells's consideration of late modernist authorship considers the cultural anxiety generated by the unrealized potential of new media. Following inventive, thorough readings of the media archeologies in these works, but especially The Invention of Morel, the chapter concludes with a vital contribution, the section "Imaginary Media's Global Networks." Reasserting Bioy's and Borges's place as important (quasi-)media theorists, which, in a flourish, she argues "is a symptom of a deficit of imagination" (155), Wells advances her position to its most suggestive: literature is intensely engaged with mass media not beginning in...