Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, and Aesthetics of Failure

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Writing Against the Image

Alexandra Smith

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of Arts The University of Sydney

2015

Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank my supervisor, Rebecca Johinke, for her steadfast confidence and belief in this project, and for her invaluable strategic and generous advice. Her gentle guidance helped me pursue the lines of inquiry in the way that I do so here. I would also like to thank Peter Whiteford for his generosity of time in the various number of conversations about ekphrasis, poetry, and the intersections between visual art and literature, which have continued since my undergraduate studies at Victoria University of Wellington, and Charles Bisley for introducing me to Rilke, Pessoa, Neruda, Milosz, and Dickinson, the poetry that has shaped my reading of everything since. I also benefitted greatly from the feedback given by Lisa Samuels and Aaron Nyerges on an earlier version of Chapter Four, which offered new critical spaces for me to explore, as well as the insights of the other postgraduates in the English Department at the University of Sydney throughout the writing process. Conversations with my collegues have at various times throughout this project proven indelibly useful and comforting. Thank you, also, to Rafe Hampson and Lucas Thompson for your thoughtful and generous readings of my project in its later stages. Most of all, my sincerest appreciation goes to my family, for understanding what it is to be so driven by curiosity, language, and a love of learning. To my extended family, for the numerous travels we have shared and for the many to come. To my parents, for encouraging my creativity, for never letting me give up, and for their wisdom and counsel for which I will be always grateful. To Nicky, for reminding to be grounded. To Rebekah and Kaitlyn, for your unwavering friendship, despite the distance between us. As this project concludes in the end, the ineffability of some experiences and feelings can never be adequately translated into words, and it is with this in mind that I dedicate this project to Sam, whose love, wisdom, and constant conversation have taught me what aesthetic and poetic experience really is.

Contents

Acknowledgements ii

Introduction: Writing Against the Image 2

Against Fiction 42

The Negative World 95

Against Poetry 143

Against the Mirror 197

Conclusion: Towards an Aesthetics of Failure 243

iii

Introduction: Writing Against the Image

I have always aspired to a more spacious form that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose and would let us understand each other without exposing the author or reader to sublime agonies.

Czeslaw Milosz, “Ars Poetica?”

This is what the day looks like:

White

Crocus. Lilies, Snowdrops. Cigarettes. Sun. Something black.

Even early in the morning, in all that strong light; something or the other black. It doesn’t disappear.

Something bad. Something dark. It becomes visible

and then turns invisible again. White.

Something or the other black. During the day.1

These lines appear midway through Against Art, a novel by Norwegian writer Tomas

Espedal. While it would not be complex to attribute a blind passage like this to a poetry collection – indeed, it looks more like poetry than some other contemporary, or even

Czeslaw Milosz, “Ars Poetica?” The Collected Poems: 1931-1987 (New York: Ecco Press, 1988). 1 Tomas Espedal, Against Art, trans. James Anderson (Chicago: Seagull World Literature, 2011), 76.

2 postmodern, poems – and while there is no doubt that these lines constitute poetry both in terms of form and language, Against Art is by all means a novel. This passage, by its simple inclusion within narrative prose, questions its very description: is it poetry? If so, can it be called a poem? Or, is it prose masquerading as poetry? While it might be strange to encounter a poem in a work that is stipulated by its very genre as not poetry, Espedal suggests an explanation in its subtitle, “The Notebooks.” The notebook form, he writes, is

“a dream of a book.”2 But what does he mean by this? Is ‘a dream of a book’ an expression of ideal form? Or, of something that can simultaneously exist and not exist? To Espedal, it seems, Against Art denotes the act of creation rather than the created object, and that reads, as Edward Sugden wrote, “as an experimental meditation on itself.”3 In other words, to the reader, it is a material object, a book; to the writer, it is abstract, its image.

Is this the kind of prose – interwoven with poetry, photographs, paintings, other embedded artistic forms – that the twenty-first century novel is aiming for? In his essay

“Art as Device,” the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky explained poetry as “a special mode of thinking – to be precise, a mode of thinking in images.”4 What happens, however, when prose evokes poetic imagery? Or, a prose work such as Espedal’s occasionally appears structurally, formally, and essentially as poetry? Shklovsky provided one answer to this persistent question by suggesting that “a work may be either created as prose and experienced as poetry, or else created as poetry and experienced as prose,” or in other words, “the artistic quality of something, its relationship to poetry, is a result of our mode of perception,” not its reliance upon conventional form.5 Literary critic Michael Clune proposes that this also lies in how readers experience aesthetic form. In an emergent critical

2 Espedal, Against Art, 44. 3 Edward Sugden, review of Against Art, by Tomas Espedal, Times Literary Supplement (20 April 2012). Original emphasis. 4 Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, IL.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 1. 5 Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” 2.

3 model, he understands this kind of experience as fluid, suggesting that “we have begun to see how art is not immune to the temporality of perceptual experience.”6 Indeed, as Clune argues, “the proponents of art’s efficacy at renewing and transforming our experience are acutely aware of this problem.”7 How, then, does contemporary prose reconcile meditations on experience, either profound or prosaic, with concerted critical realignments in understanding literary form? And how do its authors use the map as a critical strategy in order to interrogate not only what it means to be writing ‘now,’ but how to reconfigure the form of the twenty-first century novel?

In this thesis, I consider these questions with specific regard to the postmillennial

American writers Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, both of whom are concerned with the intersections and digressions between formally diverse aesthetic practices. While the novel is neither Cole nor Lerner’s sole, or primary, form – the former is a photographer and art historian; the latter, a poet and, on occasion, art critic – I suggest that their prose can be considered as interlocutors to their earlier, at least in published form, artistic practices.8

Their debut novels, in particular, engage with the experience of and creative engagement with literary form. Engaging with sensory aesthetic experience – visual art, music, and literature – they seek not only to refract and problematise direct artistic experience but to also provide a lens through which these experiences are compellingly interrogated. Both novels were received with wide acclaim upon publication: while Cole’s Open City (2011) won both the PEN/Hemingway Award (2012), and the Internationaler Literaturpreis

(2013), was the finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize (2012), Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) won the Believer Book

6 Michael Clune, Writing Against Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 17. 7 Clune, Writing Against Time, 17. 8 Cole contributes to publications including The New Yorker, New Inquiry, and The New York Times Magazine; Lerner’s poetry anthologies are as follows: Ben Lerner, The Lichtenberg Figures (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2004); Angles of Yaw (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2006); Mean Free Path (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2008).

Award (2012), and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (the Art Seidenbaum

Award for First Fiction, 2011), The New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction

Award (2012), the James Tait Black Prize in Fiction, and was runner-up for the Sami Rohr

Prize for Jewish Literature (2013).9 Their second novels – Cole’s Every Day Is For the Thief

(2014) and Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) – will be read here in relief to the experimentations and inherent failures of their debut works – what Tom McCarthy calls the “First Novel

Syndrome.”10 Indeed, both writers conceptualise the novelistic image in distinct terms and the works of each can be “read,” as Clune argues of John Ashbery, “like a manual for describing things”; as a suggestion for a new literary mode that aspires towards, as Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz contemplates, “a more spacious form.”11

Milosz specifically “aspires” to a form that prefers to “be free from the claims of poetry or prose,” and instead one that, “without exposing/ the author or reader to sublime agonies,” charts an expansive rather than narrow space for exploration and interrogation.12

Indeed, Jacques Rancière understands the aesthetic as corresponding to the political in its capacity to “draft maps of the visible, trajectories between the visible and the sayable, relationships between modes of being, modes of saying, and modes of doing and making.”13 While he defines this as a relationship “between literarity and historicity” not based on their intrinsic connections to reality, per se, but on the way that “political statements and literary locutions produce effects in reality,” such an approach is also evident in the twenty-first century novel’s approach to literary form, as well as wider

9 Teju Cole, Open City (New York: Random House, 2011); Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2011). All further references to these two texts will be made through in-text citation. 10 Teju Cole Every Day is for the Thief (New York: Random House, 2014); Ben Lerner, 10:04 (New York: Faber and Faber, 2014). All further references to these two texts will be made through in-text citation. Tom McCarthy, interview by Christopher Bollen, “Tom McCarthy is No Longer a Wellkept Secret,” Interview Magazine, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/tom-mccarthy#_. 11 Clune, Writing Against Time, 118; Milosz, “Ars Poetica?” 12 Milosz, “Ars Poetica?” 13 Jacques Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2005), 39. My emphasis.

5 cultural and political concerns. Indeed, while Milosz’s equation is precisely the sum of its parts, not only suggesting a form that is ‘spacious,’ but one that offers more room in how it is understood, Rancière’s literary maps suggest possibilities beyond the image of the real and “open up space for deviations.” Each of the following chapters in this thesis composes a particular aesthetic of ‘writing against’ – both in the proximal sense ‘to be against,’ next to, to run up against, and as a term of opposition – and of ‘against the image,’ where the literary visual image is an ekphrastic subject, and the literary image concerns formal ideals or guidelines governed by convention; the image of what the novel ought to look like. A reading such as this suggests mapmaking as a critical strategy employed by writers for the way in which they conceptualise and craft artistic form, how they negotiate their works once they are in print, and how they seek to look toward a new ekphrastic and lyrical novel form while writing against realist convention and the typology of the novel form itself.

So, while Chapter One proposes that Cole creates a form opposed to the conventions of fiction, Chapter Two discusses Open City’s mediation of different aesthetic experiences as constructing a blueprint for viewing the world in negative. Chapter Three, moreover, interrogates the way in which Lerner’s novel form works against poetry, and

Chapter Four proposes a construction of the self through literature against experience in

Leaving the Atocha Station. Not dismissing the critical discourse around the novel as extraneous material – either that which is constructed by reviewers, critics, and interviewers, or by the writers themselves – but regarding it as integral to the reflective reading process of contemporary literature is crucial to a reading that places such importance on the writing process.14 Indeed, it necessarily employs an self-reflexive approach to criticism that is vital to reading the novels as mapping out routes for the form that go

14 Indeed, reflection and reflective are important words in this thesis. Not only does it prove useful as a way of categorising how writers talk about their writing and writing in general, and how writers talk about reading, it also applies to the tone and structure of the primary novels considered here.

6 against convention and places emphasis on the contemporary novel as a form that is continually ‘in-progress,’ even after publication. As David James discusses, “to accommodate an analysis of intentionality alongside that of influence is important when encountering writers who are still living, producing and commenting on their work, while also talking about the literary movements they inherit and whose impulses they extend.”15

While, he argues, “we have to concede that writers’ answers are guided by the questions asked, and even the conversational (and confessional) novelist might not be able to sidestep the interviewer’s insinuations,” writers’ “artistic ambitions are not,” nevertheless, “simply arbitrary or deceptive.”16 Rather, they formulate an extensive network of mediated notes, observations, and comments on artistic practice itself, and as such “provide another layer for critical evaluation, providing a form of contextualisation that is as legitimate as any cultural or historical one.”17 Such a consideration of writers in dialogue about their writing, whether in the form of interviews, lectures, or essays, provides a useful and productive map of their “politico-aesthetic” and “literary-historical” concerns, and the way in which their fiction is situated against them, even if what they say is paradoxical: “I have nothing to say,” McCarthy claims, “[i]ndeed, I’d go as far as to claim that no serious writer does.”18

AESTHETICS OF EXPERIENCE

What is peculiar about Lerner and Cole, as well as other novelists discussed throughout this study, is how they construct their own critical language with which their novels ought to be understood. Not only do their interviews, lectures, and essays present a concerted

15 David James, Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), 32. 16 James, Modernist Futures, 32; 33. 17 James, Modernist Futures, 33. 18 Tom McCarthy, Transmission and the Individual Remix: How Literature Works (London: Vintage Digital, 2012), Kindle edition.

7 interrogation of how incipient literature works, invariably postulating how, as many contemporary novelists often effusively do, how it could work if it performed as it should, their novels themselves are written in this same language, mapping out how they should be interpreted and read. This auto-critical language promotes a certain second-order reflexivity that is not simply metafictional, but in line with the attitude toward aesthetic discourse that is prominent in what Nicolas Dames calls the “theory generation”.19 Moreover, although it speaks to the contemporaneity of their works – they anticipate critical scrutiny – it also emphasises the prominence of reverie and lyricism in their narratives of aesthetic experience. In fact, these authors are not only mediating aesthetic experience through literary language but creating an aesthetics of experience through their critico-literary language. The current self-reflexive attention of writers to the creation of their own critical language thus suggests a key difference between the modernist intersections with the art world of Proust and Virginia Woolf, and similar postmodern attempts in John Ashbery and Vladamir

Nabokov. This particular turn toward mediating aesthetic experience in and through literary language is an attempt to find ways to engage with the limits of their own practice, and of the efficacy of language itself in representing experience. Placing their works in direct conversation with actual visual images and experiences of them highlights precisely this problem of purpose that writing seems to have acquired post-2000. Given that both

Cole and Lerner’s novels have in their background traumatic events, it is not suprising that their works might be heralding in a new conceptual literature that seeks to grapple with what McCarthy has called in his most recent novel Satin Island, the “Present-Tense”.20

But, while this is particularly pertinent for postmillennial novels, for McCarthy, this is where the visual art world has already pushed ahead in how it understands the language

19 Nicolas Dames, “The Theory Generation,” n+1 magazine 14 (Summer 2012), https://nplusonemag.com/issue-14/reviews/the-theory-generation/. 20 Tom McCarthy, Satin Island (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 127.

8 of its own practice as a sincere attempt to grasp a hold on future forms, while working against tradition and inherited forms. It has invented “an operational logic… that is basically the right one,” where artists simultaneously “work… at self-consciously negotiating the symbolic structures of their day, and at self-consciously negotiating their relationships with dead ancestors.”21 The “literary world,” however, as “the world represented by today’s publishing world and its attendant institutions and media, has got the wrong operational manual. It’s got a kind of humanistic, idealist one that is just no good. It’s not going to produce anything interesting. It’s become a branch of the entertainment industry.” As a writer indelibly concerned in his novels, essays, and art projects with constructing a

“radical” avant-garde that does not just redirect the “false trail” of “the naturalist route,” he nevertheless suggests that “[w]e need to be really suspicious of th[e] schematic” that describes the “literary landscape” as opposing “middlebrow realism” and “the avant- garde.”22 For McCarthy, while “[r]ealism, as a literary convention as full of artifice as any other, has no more purchase on the real than anything else,” what writers ought to turn their attention to is “a disruptive real” not dependent on realism; one that is not “some empirical, positivist, or preexisting real,” but one “that threatens to tear and rip and rupture a certain harmony of a crafted plane.”.23 Indeed, he proposes that contemporary literary culture is one that places equal emphasis on both writing and reading, and whose confluence bears responsibility of creating experience of the real together:

My aim here, in this essay, is not to tell you something, but to make you listen: not to me, nor even to Beckett or Kafka, but to a set of signals that have been repeating, pulsing, modulating in the airspace of the novel, poem, play – in their lines, between them and around them – since each of these forms began. I want to make you listen to them, in the hope not that they’ll deliver up some hidden and decisive

21 Tom McCarthy, interview by Matthew Hart and Aaron Jaffe, with Jonathan Eburne, “An Interview with Tom McCarthy,” Contemporary Literature 54, no. 4 (2013), 677. 22 McCarthy, interview by Hart and Jaffe, 680; 675; 679. 23 McCarthy, interview by Hart and Jaffe, 680. Original emphasis.

message, but rather that they’ll help attune you to the very pitch and frequency of its own activity – in other words, that they’ll enable you to listen in on listening itself.24

Over the last decade, critics have taken increasingly divergent approaches both to understanding the novel and, in particular, to accounting for the aesthetics and politics of the form in the early twenty-first century. This thesis could readily have taken its cue from

Lawrence Buell’s Dream of the Great American Novel, and read Cole and Lerner’s interrogation of literary representation in terms of the influential narratives around the novel’s role as a reflection of society, as an ideally representative form. Such a reading, however, runs up against Cole and Lerner’s deliberate questioning of the novel’s ability to represent, quite apart from their formal presentation as short novels. As Buell himself notes, one factor that has influenced the conceptualisation of the Great American Novel “may be sheer territorial bulk,” where the expansiveness of the country has necessitated a novel of correspondingly vast scope and ambition; “the heady challenge of getting a whale sized country between covers is almost certainly an incentive to dreaming about a possible great national novel.”25

This thesis equally could have followed the line of critical inquiry exemplified by Mark

McGurl’s groundbreaking study The Novel Art, and considered the implications of reading

Open City and Leaving the Atocha Station as artworks in and of themselves.26 Such a reading might have focused on their liminal status between popular and high culture, and their authors’ deliberate cultivation of status as ‘popular intellectuals.’ Given that both Cole and

Lerner position America squarely within an international political sphere, using fiction as a way to interrogate two of the early twenty-first century’s most prominent terrorist attacks, this thesis could also plausibly draw upon Caren Irr’s recent work Toward the Geopolitical

24 McCarthy, Transmission and the Individual Remix. 25 Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: HUP, 2014), 13. 26 Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

Novel.27 In this case, it might have figured their interrogation of literary form within a transnational, geopolitical poetics, following the tendency of many important contemporary critics.28 What I am arguing, however, is that by breaking the conventions of the novel and incorporating other aesthetic forms and experiences within their works, Cole and Lerner display a much more linguistic, conceptual concern than any of these potential frameworks allow: their prose works to reinvigorate the novel, creating a map for new routes it can take, and reinvesting an aesthetic sincerity in the form.

This speaks to a wider culture of twenty-first century novel writing that interrogates the aesthetic experiences of thinking, reading, and writing. Angela Leighton suggests that the question “What is form?” persists beyond such specific conditions of any specific form, such as the novel, as a crucially aesthetic question, to speak to a conceptualisation of form itself.29 Indeed, as Leighton probes, “Why might form matter? Why does this word continue to worry our accounts of art?” Form is conceptualised almost as ineffably as the experiences it seeks to convey in paint, clay, melody, harmony, or words. While “[a]s a word it holds off from objects, being nothing but form, pure and singular,” in application as ‘literary form,’ it simultaneously bends “towards materialization, towards being the shape or body of something.” What, then, does the twenty-first century novel look like? Is its formal image and its actual form one and the same? Can it be safely claimed that the way in which it is considered, discussed, and understood, denotes what it actually is? The 2012

Special Issue of Contemporary Literature explored precisely this worry. Describing this era of writing as “post-millennial” fiction, the editors Andrzej Gasiorek and David James framed the issue’s “intervention” as one that not only considers mapping as a key critical tool, in

27 Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 28 Such studies include Paul Giles’ Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) and Donald E. Pease’s, New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 29 Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word, (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 1.

11 the way in which it “charts the novelistic emergence of specific artistic, political, and ethical objectives that allow us to distinguish that body of writing as singularly ‘post-millennial’; it also reflects at a metacritical level on the vocabularies by which we historically and aesthetically constitute twenty-first century fiction as a focus of scholarly enquiry.”30 This framework suggests how intertwined literature, and its criticism have become – indeed, how criticism has begun to dominate the direction of the conceptualisation of emerging literature. The aim that McCarthy outlines, then, is particularly timely, advocating for a particular understanding of literary form as a transmitted or transmissible machine, dependant upon the reciprocal action of reading and writing. Indeed, as Rancière notes, in

“The Thread of the Novel,” the constellation of ideas and experiences of novelistic fiction constitutes more “than the matter of straight or curved lines.”31 Instead, the “assembl[y]” of words “in the form of a fiction… is about the possibility of combining two powers of words: their power to draw a line between one fact and another and their capacity to tell the truth about those facts by so doing.” The aesthetics of form are thus bound to the implicative function of language, where form is a coherence between words and their images.

As critics like Leighton have noted, just as in the late nineteenth century, there has been a resurgence of “[c]ross breeding between the arts.”32 For postmillennial writers such as Cole and Lerner, the novel’s integration of visual art, poetry, and essay has become the way forward in interrogating various forms of experience and designates language as formally more important that any kind of adherence to convention. Indeed, as Leighton suggests, this impulse is “one which could seem to protect artistic integrity by emphasizing

30 Andrzej Gasiorek and David James, “Introduction: Fiction since 2000: Postmillennial Commitments,” Contemporary Literature 53, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 609. 31 Jacques Rancière, “The Thread of the Novel,” Novel 47, no. 2 (2014), 196. 32 Leighton, On Form, 30.

12 the self-enclosed inviolability of art on art.” Such a self-consciousness of art also speaks to how literature mediates experiences of art, or aesthetic experiences. First, as Peter de Bolla notes, what might an experience such as this pertain to?

What is an aesthetic experience? How might one set things up in such a way as to have this kind of experience? Would one be able to recognize it as distinct from other kinds of experience? What would such an experience be of? What might keep it in the realm of the aesthetic, or allow it to be open to (or alternatively close it off from) other registers or forms of experience? And, assuming that one might be able to settle all these questions, is this form of experience communicable to myself or to others?33

Taking my cue from de Bolla, “[w]hat distinguishes affective or aesthetic experiences” from ordinary, everyday experiences “is the fact that they are occasioned by encounters with artworks.”34 Despite the use of the term aesthetic, however, these encounters do not have to be profound, or positive; as Sianne Ngai reminds us, negative or equivocal affects such as disappointment, disgust, envy, irritation, or anxiety, hold equal sway over experiences of art.35 So, while “what elicits aesthetic experience is an artwork,” the artwork itself “is defined as an object that produces aesthetic experience.”36 But literature does not only construct such aesthetic experiences, but aesthetics of experience. Because experience is “largely a matter of language” – the way in which it is discussed, framed, understood, and described – forms such as the novel propound, as Joan Didion has put it, “a literary idea of experience.”37

33 Peter de Bolla, Art Matters, (Cambridge, Mass.: HUP, 2001), 5. Original emphasis. 34 Ibid., 9. Original emphasis. Such discussions of aesthetic experience, however, are founded upon the arguments of John Dewey in Art as Experience, in which he posits that “[i]n common conception,” experience of “the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience.” (New York: Perigree Books, 1980), 3. 35 See for example, Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: HUP, 2005). 36 De Bolla, Art Matters, 9. Original emphasis. 37 Karl Ove Knausgaard, interview by James Wood, “Writing My Struggle,” Paris Review 211 (Winter 2014), 80; Joan Didion, interview by Linda Kuehl, Paris Review 74 (Fall-Winter 1978), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion. Some writers have proposed a problem with this configuration, where the idea obscures the experience itself – Didion “still do[es]n’t know where all the lies are”, while Karl Ove Knausgaard is worried about “a new kind of moralism evolving, where the obligation is to the language”, because it forms “a kind of make-believe.” Didion, interview by Kuehl; Knausgaard, interview by Wood, 80.

Transforming ordinary experience in fiction, either through aestheticising, or fictionalising it, can, therefore, create a gap between the experience and its image. Indeed,

Michael Wood claims that although “[w]e have words… that help us to meet these demands” that the real places on fiction, “we also have… perceptions we cannot translate into words.”38 This means that “if those perceptions come to us from a work of literature, we may find we cannot happily translate them into words others than those we have already been given.” Karl Ove Knausgaard points out precisely this problem: “I had a feeling that novels tend to obscure the world instead of showing it, because their form is so much alike from novel to novel… the same form, the same language, makes everything the same.”39 Equally Theodor Adorno suggests that “[i]f the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye.”40 But what does it mean to not obscure the world through fiction? What is the alternative when literary form is necessarily a mediated structure through which the world is seen and spoken of? Allen Grossman suggests one line of conceptualising literary mediation, noting that “the manifest world (the only one there is) is subject to the logic of representation because it comes to mind only as representation”; as such, literary fiction “is the site on which originality is expressed as the attempt to discover alternative structure of intelligibility that do the work of representation in another way.”41

But equally, as Wood sensorially reminds us, literature is not only an art form that “reports on what happens and on what may happen,” but “it is itself ‘a form of lived experience,’” or aesthetic experience. “We have the direct experience of words behaving and misbehaving”, he argues, “[o]ur reading is an immediate event, like tasting salt or

38 Michael Wood, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 35. 39 Knausgaard, interview by Wood, 76. 40 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 27-8. 41 Grossman, Long Schoolroom, 11.

14 coriander.”42 Conceptualising literature as constructing an aesthetics of experience points to a way of understanding Cole and Lerner’s reflexive treatment of experience in the novel.

Indeed, Gasiorek and James question whether “fiction [has] witnessed a new phase of development that should no longer be read primarily in relation to earlier twentieth- century phases of innovation, such as, most monumentally, modernism and postmodernism,” or whether “novelists’ formal commitments over the last ten years” should continue to be “very much in dialogue with preceding traditions?”43 Should criticism, in other words, consider contemporary authors more in relation to past traditions, or with an eye to future formal and experiential developments? I argue that while these questions can find constructive answers in Cole and Lerner, who occasionally explicitly draw upon modernist and postmodernist figures or forms (Cole on French photographic, literary, and aesthetic modernism, and Lerner on the postmodernist poets

John Ashbery and Marianne Moore), they do so fluidly, absorbing what they need, without overtly straining against tradition. While their literary inheritance can be considered critically in relief to their practices, and although their novels are not distinguishably predicated upon the formal developments propounded by such innovators, their own emphasis is on creating a new mediation of aesthetic experience in literary form specific to the politicised aesthetics of the twenty-first century.

As this postmillennial era advances, I suggest that novelists are increasingly writing against the image. This ambition is in part ekphrastic and in part driven by virtual ambitions for literary expression of perceptual experience. James’ explanation for the postmillennial resurgence in what he calls “the crystalline novel” offers an analogue for such an impulse: “writers are thus looking beyond parodic reflexivity as the default mode

42 Wood, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, 9. 43 Gasiorek and James, “Introduction,” 611.

15 for writing in postmodernism’s wake, in order to find a sincere means of visualizing what’s ethically profitable about paying closer attention to everyday perceptions.”44 Those writing against art strive for a novelistic prose that while not relying solely on a linguistic reality through the expansive use of alternative artful aesthetics, such as those used in the production of photography, painting, music, and poetry, also reasserts the linguistic force of writing. They are usually first-person, solitary narratives that cover shorter periods of time, are often peripatetic in movement, and are solipsistic yet ethically motivated fictions that engage with a particular kind of trauma – either shared, or of the self. They write in tension with other arts, may or may not include actual images or literary forms, and, as

James writes of Alan Hollinghurst, they “take sensory perceptions of everyday environments and allow them to shape the structures of their narration.” 45 Meanwhile, they are existential in subject and constitute, as Zadie Smith insists, “nothing of any great consequence.”46 The postmillennial aisthetic and lyrical mode is not only concerned with representing a visual work of art, but how it makes the character, the narrator, the author, feel; how it is experienced; how it affects other perceptual experiences; how it seeps into fictionalised consciousness.

VIRTUAL POETICS

Mapping literary form as an experiential mode inexorably borrows language and critical approaches from both philosophy and aesthetics. Clune’s recent model of the virtual in

Writing Against Time attends to such confluence of form and aesthetic practice, as “the tendency of artworks to project blueprints for a kind of conscious experience that we can’t

44 James, “Crystalline Novel?” 871-2. 45 David James, “Integrity After Metafiction,” Twentieth-Century Literature 57, nos. 3-4 (Fall/Winter, 2011): 496. 46 Zadie Smith, interview by Synne Rifberg, “Bad Girls and the Hard Midlife,” Louisiana Channel (2013), http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/zadie-smith-bad-girls-hard-midlife.

16 yet actualize” formally, either in poetry or prose.47 This is perhaps what Espedal means by the phrase, ‘dream of a book;’ in critical terms, “the outlines of a novel.”48 Clune charts what he argues is the Romantic tradition of the virtual in literature, a mode through which writers “encounter,” and seek to “prolong” the “richness and vividness of… first experience[s].”49 Intrinsically bound up with “the desire to counter time’s negative effects on ineluctably time-bound human experience,” Clune’s virtual mode is one such technique to overcome such “deep conceptual and practical problems.” As such, it also differs significantly from Brian Massumi’s interrogation in Parables for the Virtual and Allan

Grossman’s use of the term as a poetic mode in The Long Schoolroom.50 For Massumi, the virtual concerns the body’s affective states of experience, while for Grossman, the way in which Hart Crane’s poetry, in lieu of being able to create a poetry entirely “free” from actual techniques, instead “halluncinate[s] or thematize[s] structures (building, bridge, tower)” in the “absence of the invention of new structures.”51 Despite their differences, however, Clune draws on Grossman’s conceptualisation to a certain extent. Rimbaud’s prose poems, for example, sit between an “abandonment of verse” and an “abandonment of writing,” in which “he jettisons the achieved forms of art in favour of virtual forms, images of form.”52 Employing the argument of Leo Bersani, Clune argues that “Rimbaud’s prose poems are animated by a desire that cannot be satisfied by artistic form.” Instead,

“Rimbaud’s ideal form is not a poem but an imaginary science.” His prose poem gestures

47 Clune, Writing Against Time, 35. 48 Espedal, Against Art, 140. 49 Clune, Writing Against Time, 9. 50 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 51 Alan Grossman, The Long Schoolroom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 86, 89. 52 Clune, Writing Against Time, 33-4.

“beyond itself” to an image of the ideal; “it indicates that the action will take place elsewhere.”53

Indeed, this theorisation of the virtual became a prominent issue in an experiment conducted by the journal Nonsite in 2013, where five critics responded to an edited version of Clune’s introduction to Writing Against Time.54 Jonathan Kramnick argued that Clune’s key interest in the binary of actuality and virtuality at times overshadows the powerful formal concerns of a poem or piece of prose: “literature provides an account of what

[Clune’s conscious experience] entails or feels like, and it could be that it is able to do so because it has a form” to begin with.55 Jesse Matz questioned what Clune “might… recommend for the actualization of these virtual techniques” and “if his virtual techniques are literary forms themselves,” while Gabrielle Starr suggested that “neuroscientific investigation” could help to identify the kind of aesthetic experience that “some literary works seek to model in imagination” because it “is impossible in reality.”56 Blakey

Vermeule, however, described her experience of such an aesthetic encounter as “transport, translation, metaphor,” in effect, entirely virtual. 57 Clune responded by questioning why it is that he “value[s] ideal form over actual form,” for which he provided no direct answer.58

If literature’s virtual image exists because what the writer wants to achieve is impossible, if

“each work sets up a goal for aesthetic form that is explicitly or implicitly distanced from what the work’s actual aesthetic form can possibly achieve,” then is this image not also

53 Clune, Writing Against Time, 33; Gabrielle Starr, “Response to Writing Against Time,” Nonsite 10, (September 2013), http://nonsite.org/the-tank/writing-against-time. 54 These included Joshua Kotin, Jonathan Kramnick, Jesse Matz, Gabrielle Starr, and Blakey Vermeule. Clune also responded to his critics. 55 Jonathan Kramnick, “Response to Writing Against Time,” Nonsite 10, (September 2013), http://nonsite.org/the-tank/writing-against-time. 56 Jesse Matz, “Response to Writing Against Time,” Nonsite 10, (September 2013), http://nonsite.org/the- tank/writing-against-time; Starr, “Response.” 57 Blakey Vermeule, “Response to Writing Against Time,” Nonsite 10, (September 2013), http://nonsite.org/the-tank/writing-against-time. 58 Michael Clune, “Response to Writing Against Time,” Nonsite 10, (September 2013), http://nonsite.org/the- tank/writing-against-time.

18 achieving something resembling an aesthetic object itself? That Clune “approached virtuality” within a specifically Romantic tradition speaks to further emphasise the effectiveness of the way in which he figures the ideal image: not simply as a form of consciousness that cannot be actualised, but “as writers’ acknowledgement of temporal limits of actual artistic form and their expression of a desire to transcend these limits.”59 I suggest that as debut novels – as attempts and experiments inherently and necessarily unable to achieve what their authors want them to achieve – Open City and Leaving the Atocha Station, engage with this interpretation of the virtual mode. This does not make them incomplete aesthetic objects, but contingent on the promise of failure.

Clune’s concept of the virtual is not spontaneous, but is indebted to a line of critical thinking that traces back to Henri Bergson’s meditations on language in Creative Evolution

(1907).60 Where Clune’s central image of the virtual is the blueprint, Bergson conceptualised the virtual as the idea. But for him, the virtual is not irreducible; it “has to become actual.”61 This is the function of language; language has “liberat[ed]” thought.

“Without language,” he argues, “intelligence would probably have remained riveted to the material objects which it was interested in considering.”

The word, made to pass from one thing to another, is, in fact, by nature transferable and free. It can therefore be extended, not only from one perceived thing to another, but even from a perceived thing to a recollection of that thing, from the precise recollection to a more fleeting image, and finally from an image fleeting, though still pictured, to the picturing of the act by which the image is pictured, that is to say, to the idea.

Language, therefore, is the mechanics, the cogs and wheels, of actualisation. It has the capacity to show “a whole internal world,” or, in other words, “the spectacle of its own workings.” For Bergson, “the word is an external thing, which the intelligence can catch

59 Clune, Writing Against Time, 112-3. 60 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution trans. Arthur Mitchell (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977). 61 Bergson, Creative Evolution, 175.

19 hold of and cling to, and at the same time an immaterial thing, by means of which the intelligence can penetrate even to the inwardness of its own work.” Gilles Deleuze in

Bergsonism (1966), however, emphasised Bergson’s attention to time’s virtuality, suggesting that “the subjective, or duration, is the virtual. To be more precise, it is the virtual insofar as it is actualized, in the course of being actualized, it is inseparable from the movement of its actualization”, or in other words, the language of its actualisation.62 However, while this intellectual heritage is present in the way that Clune, as well as Lerner and Cole, theorise the virtual in literature, their approaches are remarkably fresh departures from the philosophical mode of experience. Theirs are crucially literary. While for Bergson and

Deleuze, the virtual is dependant on its subsequent, or possible, actualisation, literature’s virtual mode of form, and fictional experience is not; its interest in the virtual is the inevitable collapse of language in realising an ideal. What these writers are attempting to identify, and what Clune’s model of the virtual encompasses, is a linguistic gap between, as

Rancière remarks, what is sayable and what is not; what is able to be experienced and what is not. Indeed, this is to achieve a poetics of prose that reinvests in an understanding of form that is engaged in “talking back to the language itself” and, as Leighton suggests, one that “is not the knowing of a matter through language, but knowing the language matter of a text.”63 As Joseph Brodsky reminds us, while poetry “is the supreme linguistic operation… our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal,” and while to “regard… poetry as an entertainment, as a ‘read,’ commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against

62 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, (New York: Zone Books, 1988) 42-3. 63 Joseph Brodsky, interview by Sven Birkerts, “Joseph Brodsky, The Art of Poetry No. 28,” The Paris Review 83 (1982), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3184/the-art-of-poetry-no-28-joseph-brodsky; Leighton, 27.

20 himself,” negating the linguistic function of prose is to refuse it the subtlety of artful poetic writing.64

When read against Lerner’s own writing on the virtual form of literature, these conceptualisations establish a compelling argument for the postmillennial prosaic mode. In a 2013 essay for the contemporary art magazine Frieze Magazine, “The Actual World,” he proposes a strikingly similar framework for developing the theoretical language so prevalent in Leaving the Atocha Station. Establishing an innovative reimagining of the virtual in literature, he posits that not only does “[t]he absorptiveness and virtuality of the novel make it a testing ground for aesthetic experiment and response,” but the novel form “is a space wherein such an experiment in art writing can take place before the existence of the art itself, where an encounter can be staged between individuals and/or art works that are not or cannot be made actual.” 65 Framed in this way, literature’s virtuality allows not only for the inclusion of other forms into the novel, but the mediation of perceptual experiences of art – both the protagonist and reader’s – and negotiation of fictional artistic encounters; as Clune argues, “not representations of actual commodities but creations that selectively and transformatively incorporate elements of actuality in the process of making something new.”66 As a novel that also inserts fully formed poems into the narrative, Leaving the Atocha

Station develops a practice of so-called ‘translation’ that extends beyond the novel’s absorption of other literary forms, such as the embedded poem, to encompass visual genres. In doing so, Lerner identifies “a formal problem” of such a practice that “underlies all the other thematic problems of translation in the book,” as “the question of how prose translates or fails to translate into images, how an optical realism is achieved or

64 Brodsky, interview by Birkerts. 65 Ben Lerner, “The Actual World,” Frieze Magazine 156 (June-August 2013), http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/the-actual-world/. 66 Clune, Writing Against Time, 136.

21 purposefully frustrated.”67 With the inclusion of photographs and paintings, he argues that

Leaving the Atocha Station negotiates its own narrative “silence about certain elements of exposition and detail”; and though they are “never illustrative in any straightforward way,” the images nevertheless “always contain the promise of the illustrative.”68

From this perspective, what concerns both Clune and Lerner is the distance between the object (the actualized form) and the image of the object (the virtual form). The poem “Didactic Elegy,” inscribes a similar sentiment: “This is the role of the artwork – to authorize hope,/ but the very condition of possibility for this hope is the impossibility of its fulfilment.”69 However, Lerner expresses how the image can also begin to eclipse the event itself, such as in the defining moment of voyeurism of the early 2000s:

It is difficult to differentiate between the collapse of the towers and the image of the towers collapsing. The influence of images is often stronger than the influence of events, as the film of Pollock painting is more influential than Pollock’s paintings.70

The ethics of viewing, not experiencing, events such as 9/11 has been, perhaps unsurprisingly, a subject for many postmillennial writers. For Ian McEwan, there is a disconnect between an event such as 9/11, or other such traumas, and its image: “one of the most chilling aspects of being sort of just a helpless television watcher was, first of all, the curious kind of silence of those images, of the very first images, while the towers were still standing, but on fire.”71 As James argues, the “traumatic legacy in media and fictional representations alike offered its very own kind of climax for the conflict between actual communities and the images portrayed of them.”72 For Lerner, however, although the

67 Ben Lerner, interview by Adam Fitzgerald, Bomb Magazine, September 2011. 68 Lerner, interview by Fitzgerald. 69 Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw, 65. 70 Ibid., 64. 71 Ian McEwan, interview by Helen Whitney, “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero,” Frontline/PBS April 2002. 72 David James, “A Renaissance for the Crystalline Novel?” Contemporary Literature 53, no. 4 (2012), 860.

22 image develops a virtual poignancy, its representation of the primary experience does not simply acknowledge temporal distance in the recollection of a memory, but creates a cognitive ‘error’:

The critic watches the image of the towers collapsing. She remembers less and less about the towers collapsing each time she watches the image of the towers collapsing.

The critic feels guilty viewing the image like a work of art, but guilt here stems from an error of cognition, as the critic fails to distinguish between an event and the event of the event’s image.73

“Didactic Elegy” is thus concerned with the kind of temporal tradition Clune evokes, in which “[t]he immortality of art is not opposed to time at all. Time is not defeated. Art simply fashions human experience into a lasting form by performing time’s work beforehand.”74 What happens, then, to human experience in the face of art’s representation of it? For Lerner, it is not simply that the image does not stimulate the memory, but that in overlaying the experience, the image can deceive our perception of the actual or real event as would, in Grossman’s words, a hallucination. While Norman Bryson, in the introduction to Mieke Bal’s seminal collection of essays Looking In: the Art of Viewing, claims that “works of art occupy a different kind of space from the space of other objects in the world” because its “frame establishes a convention whereby art is marked as semantically mobile, changing according to its later circumstances and conditions of viewing,” what happens when an artwork is not as defined clearly as such, or it does not have a frame?75 As

73 Lerner, Angle of Yaw, 64. 74 Clune, Writing Against Time, 7. 75 Norman Bryson, “Introduction: Art and Intersubjectivity,” Looking In: The Art of Viewing, Mieke Bal (Amsterdam: OPA, 2001), 3.

“Didactic Elegy” attests: “The image of the towers collapsing is a work of art/ and, like all works of art, may be rejected/ for soiling that which it ostensibly depicts.”76

Cole’s short story “Yashica” is another such example of the tension between the object and the image of the object. 77 The story is divided into twenty-one epistolary notes, each beginning with a variation of “She wrote to me”. Each note is also accompanied by a photograph, which refers subtly to the prose: an image of a doorway in a wall echoes with the remark “[r]emember, you once asked me about the role of thresholds in my work? You saw it before I did.” As a photographer, however, the image’s connection to the actual troubles her:

She wrote: When I’m out walking, and I’m the only one with a camera among these good burghers of Zürich on a weekday, and I center an image in my visual field, say, an image from a poster or a hoarding, I sometimes see it float out of the texture of the cityscape. It “pops out,” leaving behind its assigned purpose (as art or advertising) and spilling over into a play of surfaces. This sensation barely counts as true trompe l’oeil: no one is deceived: but somehow it gives a little kick to the seeing part of the brain, and I’m happy when I can catch it in a picture. And when it is not an image at all but actual objects sitting on a street? I see chairs, fire hydrants, shoes. I wish I could show you the thingness of things! The best I can do is to make images of them, remembering always that even an image is a thing.

In other words, so long as the photographer acknowledges that the photograph does not supersede the actual object, the aesthetic object is distinguishable from the original:

She wrote to me: There is the object and there is the image of the object. Between the two is a tension that is never resolved. God was the first conceptual artist, for he made man in his own image. A human being is a kind of photograph: made with light, a copy after something else. I’m trying to find the dignity in the copy. Not to find it; to see it.

But what are the formal implications for “Yashica”? By weaving photographic images into written description, Cole’s descriptive prose provides a compelling comparison to Lerner’s

76 Lerner, Angle of Yaw, 64. 77 Cole, “Yashica.”

24 virtual potential of literature: the images are not illustrative, they either echo, or are reference points for, the prose. Cole’s inclusion of images, moreover, could illuminate what

Lerner terms fiction’s ‘absorptiveness,’ or could even be one of Clune’s “virtual technique[s]”: the work redefines its own form through the act of composition, “creat[ing] images of more powerful images” to becomes “workshops in which the shape of an ideal artwork is pieced together from blueprints and models.”78 So, while “Yashica” is referred to as a short story, its imagistic echoes and compact meditations, as well as Cole’s use of actual images, suggest a new form that not only recalls the structures of other forms – for example, here it is prose poetry – but realigns literature’s relationship to the visual.

A LYRIC IDIOM

In both Cole and Lerner’s discussions about their artistic practice, the lyric is, at first glance, a significant analogue for their attempt to reinvigorate literary form. Although for some critics and poets (particularly Jonathan Culler, arguably the central proponent of this tradition), the lyric is solely a poetic form, others have argued that the contemporary novel is advancing a certain kind of lyric fiction; or rather, constructing a lyrical idiom that is not peculiar to poetic form, but can be found in narrative prose, or even, in Cole’s case, photography. I take my cue from Leighton, who, while describing “the lyric” as “a capacious form” that is, more often than not, poetic – “ranging from Emily Bronte’s quasi- dramatic monologues to Housman’s minimal rhymes, from Christina Rossetti’s limpid death verses to Hopkins’s muscular experiments in the sonnet” – also accounts for the lyrical as “a quality that might be found in almost any literary genre. It refers to those moments when sound takes over from sense, and we hear, as it were, the lure at work in

78 Clune, Writing Against Time, 20.

25 the words.”79 Like McCarthy’s transmitting literature, Leighton’s description of the lyrical

“makes us think ‘with the ears’, and that, perhaps, requires another account of what it means to think at all.” Zadie Smith, however, is yet to be convinced of a tendency in contemporary novels to work within the convention of what she has termed “lyrical realism.”80 In particular, as Gasiorek and James argue, she “is sceptical about the novel’s tendency to aestheticize the reality it purports to describe.”81 In “Two Directions for the

Novel,” an essay on Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Smith describes how “[a]ll novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us down this road the true future of the Novel lies… A breed of lyrical realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked.”82 Gasiorek and James posit that, for Smith, this kind of lyrical realist mode “is doubly damaging when the novelist is dealing with such subjects as terrorism, war, and trauma.”83 Indeed, for

Smith, events like 9/11 have thus become obscured through its own image: “[t]here was the chance to let the towers be what they were: towers. But they were covered in literary language when they fell, and they continue to be here.”84

But what does Smith want from lyrical realism? Cautious of its ostensible aim for its self-perfecting logic, she asserts that “if it’s to survive, lyrical realists will have to push a little harder on their subject.”85 But, as Gasiorek and James appositely question, “what does pushing harder mean?”86 If by this, as they propose, Smith “seems to suggest that it means refusing what Iris Murdoch saw as the false consolations of form – the smoothing away of

79 Angela Leighton, “Lyric and the Lyrical,” The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), 171. 80 Zadie Smith, “Two Directions for the Novel,” Changing My Mind (London: Penguin, 2011), 71. 81 Gasiorek and James, “Introduction,” 623. 82 Smith, “Two Directions,” 71. 83 Gasiorek and James, “Introduction,” 623. 84 Smith, “Two Directions,” 82. 85 Ibid., 80. 86 Gasiorek and James, “Introduction,” 623.

26 difficult issues by means of a highly wrought, consciously artistic language,” how does this work against conceptualisations of lyrical expression such as Leighton’s, for whom, it “is neither strategic nor oblique, and the lyrical poet is a straight talker, who says what s(h)e feels”?87 Or, for that matter, how does it trickle down into Cole and Lerner’s practical and conceptual application of the idiom? While both writers suggest that the lyric expresses a linguistic and formal ideal to which to aspire, Smith maintains that precisely “the problem” with such a novel as O’Neill’s Netherland is that it is “perfectly done” – “[i]t’s so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait.”88 Neither Cole nor Lerner’s novels, however (even their photography and poetry), want to actualise the real, or, “in the end… always to comfort us, to assure us of our beautiful plenitude.”89 Nor do they entirely promote a lyricism that seeks to obscure the real through fanciful language and formal contrivance. The lyrical question is one of language; while Cole’s Julius is a ‘straight talker’ and his prose tends to work against adornment, and Lerner’s Adam, as a poet, writes within a lyricism that is heavier with

Smith’s artistic language, both aim to speak to real aesthetic experience, without searching for verisimilitude and indexicality.

While purporting to aim for an experience that works within a lyrical idiom, their novels are nonetheless anxious, worrisome, morally apathetic works that use the lyric, instead, as a way of making failure – political, ethical, or aesthetic – their subject. Lerner describes museums as “huge laboratories for all the different contradictory notions of what art is”; they are full of “paintings that depict what paintings can’t depict, like hearing voices,” and like works of literature that are concerned with the ekphrastic gap, question

87 Gasiorek and James, “Introduction,” 623; Leighton, “Lyric and the Lyrical,” 153. 88 Smith, “Two Directions,” 71-2. 89 Ibid., 80-1.

“how artists render phenomena that seem impossible to describe: the passage of time, the texture of consciousness.”90 Clune would argue that this is the Romantic tradition at work, and indeed it may well be: “[w]hat interests me about fiction,” Lerner argues, “is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.”91 Cole’s search for ideal form, both literary and photographic, is an

“expression… of the same instinct” as a “way of aspiring to lyric poetry.”92 Where for

Lerner, it is a ‘tear’ that suggests a pursuit for a more “spacious form,” for Cole, it is a

“pinprick. It draws blood, it quickens, it’s uncomfortable.”93 Cole’s search for a visual lyricism is, in other words, the search for a new poetic language of the image. It “elicit[s] that small inadvertent gasp of recognition” and “create[s] images that are a momentary shock to the consciousness or a sudden rush of blood to the head.”94 This ideal form is, moreover, perceptual: to be concerned with the visual is to be concerned with variations of the gaze. As Cole writes in his story “Yashica,” “She wrote: They say, ‘Look up or you’ll miss it.’ But sometimes, it’s a matter of looking down.”95 Or as Lerner considers, the artistic gaze is indelibly linked with the experience of time: “one of the things I really love about painting [is] the implied history of other people’s looking. I imagine all these very different people who have stood before a painting, people who, of course, I don’t know.

Generations I don’t know… what’s interesting about a picture or a book is the community

90 Ben Lerner, interview by Parul Seghal, “Drawing Words From the Well of Art,” New York Times (22 August 2012), http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/books/ben-lerner-imagines-different-futures-in-his-novel- 1004.html?_r=1. 91 Lerner, interview by Seghal. 92 Teju Cole, interview by Kishwer Vikaas, “Teju Cole: ‘A Good Photograph Is Like a Pinprick’,” The Aerogram (11 March 2013), http://theaerogram.com/teju-cole-on-photography/. 93 Cole, interview by Vikaas, The photographer and poet Rebecca Webb-Norris expresses this same desire in conversation with Teju Cole: “Ultimately, I find the book form grants me greater freedom in my continuing search for “a more spacious form,” to quote Milosz.” “Slant Rhymes,” New Yorker (11 August 2011), http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/slant-rhymes-alex-webb-rebecca-norris-webb-memory- city. 94 Cole, interview by Vikaas. 95 Teju Cole, “Yashica,” The New Inquiry (22 October 2014), http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/dtake/yashica/.

28 of viewers.”96 Indeed, to engage with such a practical distinction also interrogates a critical problem of the real and realism. As McCarthy points out, while in literature, these experiences, interactions, and projects can be imagined, visual “art is the only place where you can actually… turn up and say that you need forty grand’s worth of equipment and a radio license and thirty assistants; and although the end product has no value, and you can’t sell it to a collector, it still somehow needs to be done. There are people and institutions in the art world who will go, ‘Yes, you’re right. It should be done. Let’s do it.’”97

For Lerner, the poetic use of the lyric disrupts the consciousness of experience. In a 2010 essay on Ashbery, “The Future Continuous,” Lerner describes the poetic mode he calls ‘lyric mediacy’ as the form’s “ability to quicken our sense of continuance – to make us experience the flow of thinking and speaking in time over the finished thought.”98 Time, then, creates the effect of overlapping itself. Indeed, Lerner argues that it is this structural self-reflexivity the demands the reader experience a projection of the poem, not the poem itself: “Ashbery makes us read about our reading in real time,” so that “we often feel as if commentary has displaced the actual poem.”99 Although this might suggest that Ashbery’s critical language overrides the act of reading the poem, Lerner perceives it to be accessing a

“reflection of our reading,” mediating the experience of reading back to the reader.100 This circuitous critical narrative not only projects an image of ideal form, but shapes the subject of Lerner’s own poetry, too:

The lyric is a stellar condition. The relation between the lyric I and the lyric poem is like the relation between a star and starlight. The poem and the I are never identical and their distance may be measured in

96 Lerner, interview with Segahl. 97 McCarthy, interview by Hart and Jaffe, 676. 98 Ben Lerner, “The Future Continuous: Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy,” Boundary 2 37, no. 1(2010): 202. 99 Lerner, “The Future Continuous,” 206. 100 Ibid., 209.

time. Some lyric poems become visible long after their origins have ceased to exist.

The heavens are anachronistic. Similarly, the lyric lags behind the subjectivity it aspires to express. Expressing this disconnect is the task of the negative lyric, which does not exist.101

For Lerner, the lyric represents the temporal gap between the ideal image and its formal limitations. “Poetic logic is bitter,” he asserts, “because the poem is structurally foredoomed… as soon as the poet moves from the poetic impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.”102 The lyric poem, then,

“is always a record of failure because you can’t actualize the impulse that gave rise to it without betraying it.”103 Realisable or not, perhaps this is the point: the Romantic lyric was an idealised form – consider Coleridge’s wish to “revive within me” the imagined

“symphony and song” of his “Abyssinian maid” – which acknowledged its contingency upon imagination.104 The postmillennial lyric, however, takes this one step further: where the Romantic lyric aimed for sublimity, the lyric of Cole and Lerner aestheticises linguistic failure.

NEGATIVE EKPHRASIS

The way in which Cole and Lerner map out a ‘new’ route for the novel, therefore, engages directly in the literary potential of the visual, through which they write against the image of convention. I argue that both authors discuss and describe the alternative ways in which literary prose, particularly the novel, can incorporate innovative structures and techniques

101 Ben Lerner, “Didactic Elegy,” Angle of Yaw (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2004), 66. 102 Ben Lerner, in conversation with Tao Lin, “You’re a Poet; Don’t you Hate Most Poems?” Believer Magazine, http://www.believermag.com/exclusives/?read=interview_lerner. “The term “poetic bitter logic” refers specifically to Allan Grossman’s essays from The Long Schoolroom, of which Lerner draws upon frequently in Leaving the Atocha Station, and in interviews when discussing the virtual capacities of poetry. 103 Ibid. 104 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: Edward Moxon, 1863), 145.

30 in order to demonstrate the value the visual image has for prose; the image is a powerful resource in their development of a new literary mode, and as such, literature can cultivate a new claim to the visual image. Although their novels have ekphrastic moments, their approach largely diverges from traditional conceptualisations of ekphrasis, in that neither

Cole nor Lerner is concerned with mediating art objects for their readers per se, but rather develop their novels’ relationships to visual art beyond ekphrasis as a reconfiguration of aesthetic experience. Underlying this approach is an awareness of the contingency of such experience, where the narration emphasises the gap between aesthetic potential, and the inherent limitation of its re-presentation. While Clune’s ekphrasis performs, first and foremost, as a mode – the way in which writers “invent… imaginary forms for arresting neurobiological time by overcoming the brain’s stubborn boundaries” – its second function as “the gap between actual and ideal literary form” is equally significant for the considerable shift it suggests from the traditional understanding of ekphrasis: in Clune’s study, the ekphrastic gap provides “a source for a new kind of literary knowledge.”105 This knowledge is peculiar to the Romantic tradition – a constellation of writers who undergo, in literature, a “quest to defeat time” with “an ideal timeless form.”106

Yet, some contemporary literary engagements with the visual image, of which

Lerner and Cole’s novels are key examples, are negatively ekphrastic in that they work against classical ekphrasis. While these writers do engage with visual art in a traditional mediating sense, they are also not concerned solely with the pure description of the image. Instead, they offer the actual image to the reader alongside virtual interpretations, where the visual image and the literary image riff off one another. While Lerner and Cole can be thought of being in the tradition of Proust, who was “transfixe[d]” by the question of how art can “reliably

105 Clune, Writing Against Time, 20; Clune, “Response.” 106 Clune, Writing Against Time, 17; Clune, “Response.”

31 return us to the intense duration of the first impression”, they also look forward to create recombinatory impressions of art through new literary configurations.107 Ekphrasis is but part of the way aesthetic experience can be mediated in literary language, and is an essential

(even foundational) component of what I am calling the aisthetic mode. Evoking Rancière’s central argument in Aisthesis, that literature has the potential to go beyond the historical reception of a work of art, visual or not, to concern itself with the perception of “the sensible fabric of experience” that surrounds art’s understanding, I suggest that this way of mediating aesthetic experience through literary language emphasises, as Lerner puts it, the novel’s “wonderful potential” in its ability “to absorb other genres”.108

The actual image thus works counter-positionally to the ekphrasis found in James

Heffernan’s canonical definition in Museum of Words as “the verbal representation of visual representation.”109 Despite having a more inventive contemporary application – Lerner in particular refers to his novel’s engagements with visual art as ekphrastic, even if in strict terms it is not – ekphrasis tend to be narrowly defined in critical terms. It is by all means a complex task, primarily due its use in a metaphorical sense, even if it only refers to the most common examples. As Heffernan describes it “must be sharp enough to identify a distinguishable body of literature and yet also elastic enough to reach from classicism to postmodernism, from Homer to Ashbery”; it must encompass the classical “pressure of narrative,” the romantic “belief in the timelessness of visual art,” the postmodern presence of the art gallery and museum, and the twentieth-century concern of the “reproduction” of artwork that is now so “deeply embedded in our experience of art.”110

107 Clune, Writing Against Time, 11. 108 Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis, trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013), x; Lerner, “The Actual World.” 109 James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3. 110 Heffernan, Museum, 3; 91; 91; 139.

But must this conceptual territory only concern visual art? While Heffernan’s delineation explicitly excludes “literature about texts,” Clune argues that Proust’s ekphrastic treatment of music constituted “Swann’s most profound experience of art.”111 The beauty of aisthetic texts is the inclusion of aesthetic experiences that classical ekphrastic readings exclude. Reading other aesthetic experiences against ekphrasis opens up new questions of literary engagements with visual culture, phenomenological states of experience, poetic experience, and musical experience. With regards to contemporary prose and poetry in particular, it would also be reductive to ignore the compelling work of writers whose experience of art attends not just to the visual, but to written, imaginary art. Lerner argues that in “embedd[ing] other art works – real or imagined – in a variety of thickly described artificial environments” a novelist can not only “test a character’s [immediate] responses,” but, as Proust does in In Search of Lost Time, “follow the way an art work enters the memory and spreads out into other domains of a character’s experience.”112 The poet Peter Gizzi is also engaged in this contemporary problem with ekphrastic representation. He claims, for example, that he cannot call his poem “Allegory of Doubt: After Giacomo Balla”, from In

Defense of Nothing, an “ekphrastic poem.”113 This localises the problem with the term ekphrasis in contemporary writers. Although drawing on the painting, rather than “writing what’s there,” he argues, “I’m writing what happens to me, what I receive, at the moment of looking. I’d like to narrate the experience of reception, not the thing itself. And I think that is the thing itself, finally: what it does to us.”114 For Gizzi, his poetic subject is how “art affects memory,” not the artwork itself. Aisthetic texts are thus not only concerned with

111 Heffernan, Museum of Words, 3; Clune, Writing Against Time, 11. 112 Lerner, “The Actual World.” 113 Peter Gizzi, “Allegory of Doubt: After Giacomo Balla,” In Defence of Nothing (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2014); Gizzi, interview by Aaron Kunin, Rain Taxi, http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/gizzi/gizzi_kunin_interview.html 114 Gizzi, interview by Kunin.

33 the actual (as art), but also their virtual implications (the mapping out of aesthetic perceptual response in literature).

What happens to the time of experience in an aisthetic and lyrical mode? Clune proposes a specifically romantic temporal concern of ekphrasis. While the “reasonable

Romantics,” he argues, “respect the temporal constraints of perception,” the “unreasonable

Romantics seek the creation of a work that will permanently arrest perception at the moment of the first encounter.”115 The literary mediation of aesthetic experience in novels such as Cole and Lerner’s thus constitues a linguistic technique that aims to achieve Clune’s

‘arrested perception,’ while still acknowledging the inherent failures of such logic.

Heffernan, in a chapter on ekphrasis in Romantic poetry, describes Keats as “a poet who” by “resist[ing] the traditionally ekphrastic impulse to narrate… reveals – by his very act of resistance – his detachment from the figures, his distance from their transcendent stasis, his capacity to articulate what this transcendence costs.”116 Tamar Yacobi, moreover, registers a problem in “literature’s alleged yearning for imagelike simultaneity, roundedness, permanence, eternal return – in short, deliverance from time – [which] finds its quintessential expression in the ‘still movement’ or ‘stopped moment’ captured by ekphrasis.”117 For Yacobi, the tendency in criticism to equate the ekphrastic image with the objective of the ‘stopped moment’ “symbolize(s) the theme of enclosure” inherently conflicts with narrative ekphrasis, a category occluded by many critics. Omitting this narrativising impulse – as, according to Heffernan, particularly evinced in classical ekphrasis – “results in detemporalizing or ‘spatializing’ the object of literary re-presentation as well as the medium.” The problem lies perhaps in the critical understanding of ekphrasis: most tend to resemble Yacobi’s – “a form of intermedia quotation: a verbal

115 Clune, Writing Against Time, 19. 116 Heffernan, Memory, 109. 117 Tamar Yacoubi, “Pictorial Models and Narrative Ekphrasis,” Poetics Today 16, no. 4 (1995), 615.

34 representation of visual art… a visual inset within a verbal frame” – itself a linguistic echo, in turn, of Heffernan’s.118 They concentrate predominantly on the formal techniques that create the linguistic representation of visual art, not the way in which the experience of these reflections reverberates throughout the narrative, or fail in their ability to be expressed. The objective of mediating aesthetic experience in prose is not to construct a still image in formal terms, reserved from the effects of time, nor does it necessarily aim for a Romantic expression of timelessness. For Cole and Lerner in particular, experience of art transforms the experience of time, and the way in which literature attempts to express this condition is the most evocative aim of the aisthetic mode: as Adam reflects in Leaving the

Atocha Station, “I came to realize that far more important to me that any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine… the sweep of predication was more compelling than the predicated” (19-20).

This kind of aesthetic experience thus occurs within a specific temporal mode.

Reading prose or poetry, viewing art works, listening to music, in other words, experiences of art, take place in everyday life. In “The Invention of Everyday Life,” Rita Felski concludes that “it makes more sense to think of the everyday as a way of experiencing the world rather than a circumscribed set of activities within the world.”119 As such, the everyday – “a temporal term” – is defined by habit and repetition.120 Must aesthetic experience be constrained by these same patterns of time? Felski has argued that criticism has tended to maintain one of two lines of argument: either that high art can provide

118 Tamar Yacobi, “Ekphrastic Double Exposure and the Museum Book of Poetry,” Poetics Today 34, nos 1-2 (2013), 2-3. “I define ekphrasis as a form of intermedia quotation: a verbal representation of visual art, which itself represents some first-order object. What was originally an autonomous image of the world becomes in ekphrastic transfer an image of an image, a part of a new whole, a visual inset within a verbal frame.” Yacobi’s definition also linguistically reiterates Meir Steinberg’s “theory of quoted discourse”. (2-3) 119 Rita Felski, “The Invention of Everyday Life,” New Formations 39 (1999): 31. 120 Felski, “Everyday Life,” 18.

35 escape from the everyday or that “aesthetic experience need not be severed from everyday life”.121 According to Shklovsky, although perceptual experience fades over time – when “it becomes habitual, it also becomes automatic. So eventually all of our skills and experiences function unconsciously – automatically… Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war” – art becomes a technique, or “a way of intensifying the impression of the senses.”122 “The purpose of art,” Shklovsky continues,

“is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition”;

Kramnick elucidates, “[e]xperience dims by the minute; art returns the luminosity to things.”123 Indeed, this informs one of Clune’s most critical questions on art’s transformative potency: “[c]an art reliably return us to the intense duration of the first impression?”124 Or, consider instead Lerner’s anxiety of the effect of temporal distance on the object and its image: “[b]ut as it is repeated, the power of an image diminishes,/ producing anxiety and a symbolic reinvestment.”125 The original perceptual experience fades over time, afflicted by the imperfections of memory. This contrasts with Cole’s reassurance of the aesthetic power over perception: “[t]hese days, I feel as though I see objects everywhere. What I mean is, I see them properly now, in the Proustian sense: ‘We think we no longer love the dead, because we don’t remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.’”126 For Cole, the vivacity of the remembered experience transforms experiences in the present; the object can be perceived afresh, as if strange. According to Shklovsky, this is the method of enstrangement that “can be found… wherever there is an image.”127

121 Ibid., 17. 122 Shklovksy, “Art as Device,” 4-5; 3. 123 Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” 9; Kramnick, “Response.” 124 Clune, Writing Against Time, 11. 125 Lerner, “Didactic Elegy,” 64. 126 Cole, “Yashica.” 127 Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” 9.

Indeed, for Cole, the strange is an aesthetic equally sought after in his photography.

Also known for his photographic work, particularly street photography, and as the photography editor for New York Times Magazine, he is interested in “being caught by the unexpected” – or, “in the value of making the unknown thing familiar.”128 Part of this fascination is the literary use of the photographic aesthetic, a progressive expansion of both forms. Indeed, he perceives photography to be “in its moment of crisis,” whereby there is a

“curatorial uncertainty” in its artistic value.129 His novelistic use of the photographic image, as both actual image and literary method, is one such solution for this crisis: to create a new form that not only develops a visual language, but an experiential model of writing. What implications does this have for literary form, if transforming real experience into the imaginary is the aim of the photographic image? How can a conserved image of a fleeting impression be fully reconciled with narrative movement?

All photography is a record of a lost past. Photography does not share music’s ability to be fully remade each time it is presented, nor does it have film’s durational quality, in which the illusion of a present continuous tense is conjured. A photograph shows what was, and is no more… There are no instantaneous photographs: each must be exposed for a length of time, no matter how brief: in this sense, every photograph is a time-lapse image, and photography is necessarily an archival art.130

His attention to literary form’s temporality is articulated in photographic terms: “I wanted to slow down the timeline of the person reading it.”131 This attempt to still the time of perceptual experience recalls Clune’s virtual mode, “writers’ acknowledgement of temporal limits of actual artistic form and their expression of a desire to transcend these limits.”132

128 Teju Cole, “Photography,” Teju Cole; http://www.tejucole.com/photography/; Clune, Writing Against Time, 115. 129 Teju Cole, “Google’s Macchia,” New Inquiry (29 May 2013), http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/dtake/googles-macchia/. 130 Cole, “Disappearing Shanghai” 131 Teju Cole, interview by Emma Brockes, Guardian (21 June 2014), http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jun/21/teju-cole-every-day-thief-interview. 132 Clune, Writing Against Time, 112-3.

Cole’s photographic image thus aspires to an expansion of experiential consciousness; it seeks in literary form photography’s same “sense of speaking out from a buried visual subconscious.”133 It captures, Cole argues, “how rich the substance of human experience is, and how reliably it is to be found side-by-side with insubstantiality, with what is already a passing, or possibly already past.”

For him, however, music becomes a counter-image to photographic stillness. It not only influences the cadence of his prose, but becomes a metaphor for experiencing art:

“[i]n a successful work of architecture, the rooms open out to one another like a choral work in which one voice after the other adds to the harmony. Is the sense of hearing the most essential for an architect? Photographing certainly feels like close listening at times.”134 As Open City culminates in a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at

Carnegie Hall in New York, of which the narrator has a profound experience, Cole’s own personal ruminations on Mahler focus on the experience of listening to his music. In an interview on the composer, he remarked on the different experiences that his Ninth

Symphony evokes in the listener: “how bewildering it is the first time you hear it, and how logical and sensible it is by the fifth or sixth or seventh listening.” It develops from

“something that is complex but then absolutely resolves into becoming part of your own inner logic,” connecting things so that “the weave of existence is tight.” For Cole, Mahler is

“music that consoles”, and that operates on a level of “complexity and completeness” that allows for a collective experience. This, he argues, is difficult for literature to achieve:

“How does a novelist sit down and write something… that can equal Brahms four,” or something that can “take you to all sorts of places emotionally and just feel complete, without you having to worry about a plot, because the spaces they take you are

133 Teju Cole, “Disappearing Shanghai,” New Inquiry (30 September 2012), http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/dtake/disappearing-shanghai/. 134 Cole, “Yashica.”

38 psychological.”135 What links his photographic and musical aesthetics, therefore, is the solution to the “problem time represents for writing”: photographic strangeness unnerves the experience of the familiar, while musical consolation allows for the familiar to retain, albeit varied shades of, intensity.136 In his literature, this comfort and agitation work in opposition, in tension.

Does the formal frustration of Grossman’s bitter poetic logic, then, create an ekphrastic gap? Anne Keefe has argued that “ekphrasis in the twenty-first century [is] a lyric mode.”137 Where W. J. T. Mitchell asserts that “the language of ekphrasis is not different from that of everyday language of speech,” Keefe contends that ekphrasis uses lyrical linguistic markers.138 Why would the language used to describe the art object or experience not be inflected by what it draws upon? Lerner’s prose, for example, behaves as lyrically as his poetic language does. This, suggests Keefe, is a reason for how many poets

“are drawn to ekphrasis as intuitive source for the lyric,” because both modes are “a necessary and inevitable response to the contemporary poet’s experience in a visual world.”139 If it is a poetic form, then, would it not follow that the lyric cannot also be a prose form? Jonathan Culler argues that the “pedagogical dominance of narrative” has

“threatened” the poetic lyric.140 But Keefe’s definition of lyric ekphrasis negates this: “the ecstatic embrace of both what the poem brings to mind through the energia of vivid evocation of the visual and what it makes memorable through the performativity of

135 Teju Cole, “The Consummate Mahlerian,” Radio Open Source (24 April 2014), http://radioopensource.org/teju-cole-the-consummate-mahlerian/. 136 Clune, Writing Against Time, 5. 137 Anne Keefe, “The Ecstatic Embrace of Verbal and Visual: Twenty-first Century Lyric Beyond the Ekphrastic Paragone,” Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 27:2 (2011): 136. 138 W.J.T. Mitchell, quoted in Keefe, “The Ecstatic Embrace,” 136. 139 Keefe, “The Ecstatic Embrace,” 138. 140 Jonathan Culler, “Deconstruction and the lyric,” in Deconstruction is/in America, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: NYU Press, 1995), 46.

39 language,” an effect equally achievable in prose.141 This peculiarity in language suggests that it is a result of “ekphrastic exchange.” Can the subject transfer some of its “aura,” as

Walter Benjamin’s terms it, to the work that describes it?142 The lyric idiom linguistically captures a kind of perceptual-temporal “strangeness” of the experience of art.143 For

Lerner, it creates an ideal spaciousness of form, re-appropriating narrative time – “what happens next” – with lyric time – “what happens now.”144

WRITING AGAINST

Postmillennial meditations on form thus necessarily mediate the way that literature creates and transforms aesthetic experience. But they also uncover a tendency in discourse to aestheticise linguistic failures in the description and transcription of such experiences of art.

The way that Cole and Lerner engage with these ideas is through a virtual mode in which they map out what the contemporary novel might look like, which repeatedly references a contemporary lyrical idiom that aestheticises experience (though not to the perfection of

Smith’s lyrical realism). Their novels, meanwhile, are constructed through collage, utilising the disintegration of form, through the incorporation of visual art, photography, poetry, and essay into the novel, as a backdrop against an interrogation of writing and experience.

Each author self-consciously discusses and describes the different ways in which prose, particularly the novel form, can incorporate new aesthetic structures and techniques in order to demonstrate the value the image has for prose. The first chapter, “Against

Fiction,” considers Cole’s rejection of the novel as a site of fiction and the real as a site of

141 Keefe, “The Ecstatic Embrace,” 145. 142 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 2007), 222. 143Culler, “Deconstruction,” 46. 144 Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric?” PMLA 123, no. 1 (2008), 202.

40 the actual. His use of photography and essay in literature maps out the way in which the twenty-first century novel can work alongside different media, in photography and Twitter, to scope out what ethical voice literature can accomplish. The second chapter, “The

Negative World,” examines the various experiences of the senses in Open City, as well as his second novel, Every Day is for the Thief. It is here that Cole’s musical images and visual art criticism intertwine with explicit use of the ekphrastic, and aisthetic, mode in order to analyse what it means for the novel to transform ordinary experience ‘today.’ The third,

“Against Poetry,” concerns Lerner’s experiments with form in Leaving the Atocha Station and

10:04. He develops his own techniques of translation, collage, and curation; concepts that argue for prose’s ability to absorb other literary and visual forms and genres. The final chapter, “Against the Mirror,” combines a discussion of his comprehensive theory of literature’s virtual form, and the lyric ‘I’. Lerner’s novel form operates lyrically as it meditates upon different modes of consciousness and the self, from imaginary interactions to chemically induced states of poetic composition and experiences of art. Each chapter develops a conceptual vocabulary of the negative: the photographic (the literary work in relief or in photographic negative), virtuality (a poetics of form that suggest an opposition to actuality), and the literary mediation of aesthetic experience (a development of classical ekphrasis to include aisthetic responses). In focussing on these constellations of ideas, I hope to propose new ways in which prose meditates upon and contends with the vagaries of perceptual experience. I aim to examine the critical model with which the postmillennial novel is creatively and meaningfully understood by questioning the contemporary movement towards a new mapping of literary mode informed by virtual, lyrical, and aisthetic methods and techniques. In effect, this thesis will follow suit, mapping out the various routes in which Cole and Lerner’s forms of writing and artistic practices overlap, dissect, intersect, and converge.

Chapter One: Against Fiction

Two truths approach each other. One comes from inside, the other from outside, and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves.

– Tomas Tranströmer, “Preludes, II.”

CRITICAL RECEPTION

While a novelist that incorporates photographic and poetic aesthetics – defined by his aim for lyricism – Teju Cole’s reviews are remarkably devoid of associations to other form pushing postmillennial experiments. Indeed, critics and reviewers have approached Cole’s aesthetic practice with some reticence. Nevertheless, Open City’s immediate reception in

2011 was unanimously characterised byt its exceptionality. Described by James Wood in

The New Yorker as a “beautiful, subtle, and finally, original novel,” by Tyron Beason as “a remarkably resonant feat of prose,” and by Taylor Antrim as “disquietingly powerful,” the overall critical consensus was that Open City constituted, in Michael Syjuco’s words, “an indelible debut novel.”145 This recurrent theme points to critics’ perception of the novel’s

Tomas Tranströmer, Half-Finished Heaven, trans. Robert Bly (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2001), 38. 145 James Wood, “The Arrival of Enigmas: Teju Cole’s prismatic début novel, Open City,” New Yorker (28 February 2011), 68; Tyron Beason, “Teju Cole’s Open City: Walking the Length, Breadth and Heart of Post- 911 New York,” Seattle Times (26 February 2011), http://seattletimes.com/html/books/2014313330_br27open.html; Taylor Antrim, “The Best Debut of 2011.” The Daily Beast (2 July 2011), http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/02/07/open-city-by-teju-cole- review.html; Michael Syjuco, “These Crowded Streets”, New York Times Book Review (27 February 2011), 12.

42 peculiarity as its style and form, both an “exquisitely written, but quiet… achiev[ing] its resonance obliquely, through inference – meaning you have to pay attention.”146 Drawing attention to the extent to which the text reads like the introspective process of thinking,

Open City has thus been understood as more rumination and reverie than plot and narrative

– like Espedal’s Against Art, the novel could have been subtitled, “The Notebooks” for its meditative, essayistic tone. Indeed, considering the work within the framework of a form quite unlike the novel, critics like Wood have placed emphasis on the cerebral quality of the structure of Cole’s prose, arguing that “Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition” – a task that has been described as “extremely difficult,” but nonetheless accomplished “[m]ysteriously, wonderfully.”147 The language of these reviews, moreover, unconsciously identifies a virtual approach in Cole’s writing. In the words of both Giles Foden and Syjuco, it is a novel of

“[n]egative space,” whose “juxtapos[ition of] the past and the present turns this book into a symphonic experience… summon[ing] a palimpsest of connecting and conflicting histories.”148 In describing the narrative style of the novel, the reviewers thus reiterate the language with which Cole composed it: he “builds” the narrative, anecdotes are

“overla[id],” styles and genres are interwoven.149 However conscious of doing so, critics have positioned Cole’s novel as gesturing toward a new configuration of the novel form with an aim to stretch the limitations of the current conventional idiom.

While critics have been anxious to identify Open City as exceptional, they have also attempted to recuperate it within a recognisable literary lineage. The stylistic influence of

W.G. Sebald – whether positioned as criticism or praise – underlines most, if not all, critical

146 Antrim, “Best Debut.” 147 Wood, “Arrival of Enigmas,” 69. 148 Giles Foden, “Review,” Guardian (17 August 2011), http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/17/open-city-teju-cole-review; Syjuco, “Crowded Streets,” 12. 149 Syjuco, “Crowded Street,” 12.

43 responses to the text; it seems that Open City cannot be understood without referencing

Sebald.150 From the brief comments of critics such as Syjuco, who suggests that “[i]n places

Cole’s prose recalls W.G. Sebald,” or Michiko Kakutani’s criticises Open City for “often read[ing] like an ungainly mash-up of W. G. Sebald’s work and the Camus novel

‘L’Etranger,’” to the more in depth critical comparison of critics like Wood, for critics,

Sebald acts as a vital stylistic counterpoint to Cole’s novelistic style.151 For Wood, although

Cole is ultimately “attempting something different from Sebald’s project”, parts of the novel are “intensely Sebaldian”:

While “Open City” has nominally separate chapters, it has the form and atmosphere of a text written in a single, unbroken paragraph: though people speak and occasionally converse, this speech is not marked by quotation marks, dashes, or paragraph breaks and is formally indistinguishable from the narrator’s own language. As in Sebald, what moves the prose forward is not event or contrivance but a steady, accidental inquiry, a firm pressurelessness (which is to say, what moves the prose forward is the prose – the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing).152 To elicit comparisons to Sebald, therefore, is to construct a certain argument about Cole’s structural approach: a “meandering stream-of-consciousness narrative” that is typical of, but not necessarily specific to, Sebald’s ‘pressureless’ narratives.153 While these resonances are indeed provocative, this focus occludes attempts to create formal spaciousness in such a way as to reassert the aesthetics and ethics of the postmillennial literary mode, where the imaginary is prioritised and the real is rendered within fictional experiences.

While longer critical engagements with Open City have also acknowledged the documentary ethics and collection-based writing practice that motivated reviewers to compare the novel to Sebald, they have also been interested in Julius’ first-person narrative

150 Wood, Syjuco, Antrim, and Michiko Kakutani all make reference to Sebald in their reviews. 151 Syjuco, “Crowded Street,” 12; Michiko Kakutani, “Roaming the Streets, Taking Surreal Turns,” New York Times (18 May 2011), http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/books/open-city-by-teju-cole-book- review.html?_r=0. 152 Wood, “Arrival of Enigmas,” 69. 153 Kakutani, “Roaming.”

44 voice. Indeed, even when Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu identify the impulse to “collect” in

Open City, it is figured in terms of Julius’ actions, rather than Cole’s wider textual strategies.154 Pieter Vermeulen, in “Flights of Memory,” suggests that this expansiveness is a product of a “self-conscious struggle to decentre the single narrative perspective to which it confines itself,” focussing on Cole’s “decision not to use quotation marks,” which “leads to passages in which it is unclear whether we are reading the interior monologue of the narrator, his own speech, or the reported speech of one of his interlocutors.” 155 For

Vermeulen, his aesthetic practice subordinates speaking to thinking and imagining. Arguing that “Open City experiments with a flat, nearly affectless tone” corresponds to “Julius’s dissociated mind,” he positions his narrative style in terms that are reminiscent of a certain lyric idiom: Open City is “occupied with the challenge of finding an adequate medium or form,” where the “intense evocations of aesthetic experiences test several aesthetic paradigms for this role: the portrait, the symphony, the fugue, the photograph, the cathedral and so on.”156 In other words, the experience of the “I” is vital to Open City’s aesthetic aims; indeed, finding a place for the “I” not hindered by categories such as

‘fiction’ and the ‘real’ in the postmillennial novel is an aim implicative of both Cole and

Lerner resistance to the type of conversation Tom McCarthy is dispirited by in “Writing

Machines”: that of “the simplistic oppositions” of “reality versus fiction.”157

While I argue that Cole’s aesthetic aims – both photographic and literary – express a desire for the lyricisation of the novelistic first person, critics tend to prioritise the observant, peripatetic nature of the narrator: to critics, Julius represents a reimagining, or at

154 Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu, “Imperfect Strollers: Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, W.G. Sebald and the Alienated Cosmopolitan,” Los Angeles Review of Books (2 February 2013), http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/imperfect- strollers-teju-cole-ben-lerner-w-g-sebald-and-the-alienated-cosmopolitan. 155 Pieter Vermeulen, “Flights of Memory: Teju Cole’s Open City and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Modern Literature 37, no. 1 (2013), 45; 48. 156 Vermeulen, “Flights,” 45. 157 McCarthy, “Writing Machines: On Realism and the Real,” London Review of Books 36, No. 24 (18 December 2014), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/tom-mccarthy/writing-machines.

45 least a reconfiguration of, the Benjaminian figure of the flâneur. Syjuco highlights how

Julius’ “peregrinations liberate him,” while his “peripatetic wanderings and their connections to personal histories – both his own and those of the people he meets – form the driving narrative”; Antrim emphasises that “the character’s inner life is equally peripatetic, moving from migrations of birds… to St. Augustine, to the symphonies of

Mahler, to the city’s bedbug epidemic, to the work of Melville and Nabokov.”158 Other critics mention Julius’ “impermanen[ce]” within the city and how his “walks become oddly metaphysical pursuits”, while another describes him as “single and solitary,” embarking “on aimless, melancholy tramps across a city that resembles nothing so much as the unnerving landscape of a dream-vision” and his wandering as “urban drifting.”159 They liken Julius to the flâneur by referencing the attention that is given to the act of observation: Thomas

Marks argues that “Julius parses the dense text of New York’s street life with an analyst’s eye,” Wood notes an “interesting combination of confession and reticence about Julius”, and James points out that, with “the frailty of memory in view,” Julius’ “gaze also makes him – or allows him to – miss critical insights into his own past.”160 It is with this in mind that critics link the concept of the flâneur to Julius’ role as an embodiment of cosmopolitanism, where, as with the novel’s other characters, he is understood as a

“citizen… of the world, not nations.”161

The problem, however, is the anachronism of the term flâneur. In an article comparing Open City to Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, Kuo and Wu have suggested that

158 Syjuco, “Crowded Street,” 12; Antrim, “Best Debut.” 159 Rachel Arndt, “Reading Teju Cole’s Open City in NYC,” Iowa Review (21 January 2014), http://www.iowareview.org/blog/reading-teju-coles-open-city-nyc; Beason, “Walking”; Thomas Marks, “Review,” Telegraph (22 August 2011), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8709112/Open-City-by-Teju-Cole-review.html. 160 Marks, “Review”; Wood, “Arrival of Enigmas,” 69; Marks, “Review”; Chantal James, “Open Questions in an Open City,” Paste Magazine (22 May 2012), http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2012/05/open-city- by-teju-cole.html. 161 James, “Open Questions.”

Julius, and Adam, Lerner’s protagonist in Leaving the Atocha Station, is mediated through

Sebald as a recontextualised, postmodern flâneur: “[t]he 21st century flâneurs at the centre of these novels are dislocated and wayward,” and “are different creatures from their 19th century predecessors.”162 Kuo and Wu purport that both novels “question such optimism in the transformative potential of the flâneur’s wandering gaze,” as both protagonists “are fundamentally alienated from the society in which they have chosen to live”: “they become increasingly thoughtful, yet also remain alone inside their thoughts.” For Kuo and Wu, the interiority of the characters is reflected in the narrative structure of the novels themselves, where “the plot of each novel is as desultory as the narrators themselves, and unapologetically interior. This obsession with interior life prevents the narrator from making a connection with others.” They connect their wandering interiority to a lack of

“committing themselves to an ideological position,” where the act of “[w]andering may be a very literal way to avoid staking out a position. To wander is to avoid belief.” To Kuo and

Wu, Cole and Lerner’s protagonists are, therefore, flawed representations of Baudelaire’s flâneur: as “alienated cosmopolitans,” they are performers in the “false, slippery narration…

[that] damns the 21st century flâneur.” While Kuo and Wu’s argument – indeed the preceding arguments of other critics too, for whom physical wandering is linked to an abstracted detachment – where Baudelaire’s flâneur is “‘everywhere at home’… [f]or Adam and Julius, there is nowhere they might call home” – could be justified by the association of interior and exterior spaces in the novels, their approach relegates wandering to an aimless, rather than purposeful, act. It is in opposition to these terms, moreover, that Open City has again been linked to Sebald, particularly “the roving ‘I’ of European romantic modernism”

162 Kuo and Wu, “Imperfect Strollers.”

– a form of the lyric “I”, which when used in prose, incorporates a distinctly poetic aesthetic.163

With such a cosmopolitan reading common in criticism of Open City, and of Cole himself, Vermeulen concedes that it “seems to bring the novel in line with the dialectic figure of the flâneur, as well as with forms of cosmopolitanism that do not require a full- scale detachment so much as a dynamic of re-attachment or multiple attachments in which a confidently rooted subject never fatally loses itself.”164 Vermeulen, however, asserts that

“the novel does not endorse this program.” Instead, he argues that it “abandons its signature combination of the casually chronological flow of the narrative present and the repeated excursions into Julius’s or his interlocutors’ narrated pasts”; rather than a stream- of-consciousness narrative, the novel is structured around a complex relationship between the present moment and memory. It is this structure that “radically rupture[s] the composure of the flâneur that the rest of the novel seems to sustain.” He argues, moreover, that the novel “resists the complacency of a literary cosmopolitanism that believes that intercultural feeling and understanding can be more than a spur to worldly change,” and instead “converts the spectacle of traumatic suffering into an assertion of the heroism of inexpressiveness.”165 The fragments of memory that intersect “the chronological unfolding of the narrative present” suggest, according to Vermeulen, a relationship between “Julius’s incessant walking, his dissociative condition, and a failure of memory.”166 This in turn alludes to “the novel’s repeated invocation of the fugue form,” a specific form Vermeulen calls the “phenomenon of ‘dissociative fugue.’”167 Julius’ dissociative state – his “amnesia, his compulsive walking, and his dissociation from the stories and memories he encounters”

163 Foden, “Review.” 164 Vermeulen, “Flights,” 52. 165 Ibid., 54, 53. 166 Ibid., 53-54. 167 Ibid., 54.

– does not suggest a correlation between Julius and the “cultivated” flâneur, but rather a flawed figure that he explicitly frames in terms of dissociative mental states.

For Vermeulen, then, Julius resembles a fugueur, the “sinister, and mostly forgotten, nineteenth-century figure of restless mobility.”168 Described as “mad travellers,” this figure can be considered as “the pathological flip-side of the flâneur”, one that Open City “subtly evokes in order to indicate the limits of the cosmopolitan imagination.” In describing the fugueur’s relationship to the more commonly known flâneur, he argues that:

[W]hile flâneurs take an acute interest in the world around them in order to enrich the self, fugueurs’ compulsive escape from their normal lives was ‘less a voyage of self-discovery than an attempt to eliminate self’… Unlike the urban mobility of the flâneur, the unwanted restlessness of the fugueur is not an attitude that literary cosmopolitanism can celebrate.169 Indeed, this figure corresponds to the fugue structure of the novel. “[T]hrough the use of a fugueur narrator,” Open City “sabotag[es]…its own aesthetic success,” and in turn provides

“an indication as to why the fugue resists literary elaboration.” In other words, the novel’s emphasis on aesthetic failure acts as a nuanced “critique of literary cosmopolitanism.”

However, neither characterisation of the fugueur or the flâneur points to the wider exploration in postmillennial novels of the wandering, creating, imagining, ‘I’. I argue that the lyricisation of the first person novelistic narrative provides a more specific framework for the aesthetic modes of the virtual, ekphrastic, and aisthetic work. Where flanerie and fugueurie both focus on the figure who wanders, lyricisation considers narrative form, aesthetic practice, and novelistic description as intertwined in the aim of creating a more expansive form.

168 Ibid., 42. 169 Ibid., 54.

As a novel that outlines the failures of cosmopolitanism, Vermeulen claims that

Open City “hit a nerve in contemporary literature culture.”170 Despite its particular combination of “investment in cultural difference” and “markedly melancholic tenor” that

“is inescapably reminiscent of the work of W.G. Sebald,” Julius’ various “aesthetic experience[s]” fail “to generate the intercultural associations that literary cosmopolitanism claims it can provide.”171 Indeed, while Vermeulen is prepared to acknowledge that, as in

Sebald, “the novel is thoroughly occupied with the question of how aesthetic form can contribute to the furthering of cosmopolitan understanding,” he considers Open City in regards to its failure, “end[ing] up as a catalogue of failed attempts to forge intercultural connection by artistic means.”172 These failures attributed specifically to the way in which

Julius conceptualises his own experiences. Cole’s critique of cosmopolitanism rests on the faults of his narrator to successfully relate together his ostensibly cosmopolitan experiences; the “novel’s anticlimactic ending underlines its main insight: recording the ‘still legible’ world involves a refusal to see the stars as self-sufficient constellations of significant connectedness.”173 While, by relating Open City to cosmopolitanism, Vermeulen’s argument acknowledges the range of aesthetic experiences that Cole collects, it also overlooks other motivations for including such experiences and, more significantly, ignores the way that

Cole structures these experiences into a novel that writes against the image.

Unsurprisingly, critics of Open City have also been attentive to the role the city plays within the novel. In spite of the detail of Cole’s descriptions, and the specificity of many of the novel’s passages, however, reviews have tended to focus on the more abstract qualities of Cole’s depictions of New York and Brussels; Kakutani suggests that “[s]ome of Cole’s

170 Ibid., 40. 171 Ibid., 40; 49. 172 Ibid., 42. 173 Ibid., 55.

50 descriptions of New York have a faintly hallucinatory feel, suggesting a contemporary version of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Unreal City’ in ‘The Waste Land.’”174 Regardless of what aesthetic it evokes, however, Open City remains, for critics, “an excellent novel about spatial relations,” where its spatial poetics are understood explicitly in terms of layers.175 Indeed, Ardnt has noted that the novel could be considered as being “about a city in flux and the way certain cities, like New York, are built of layers and rise vertically, covering the topography below but never quite flattening it into oblivion,” while Foden has, more specifically, identified the novel as exploring “layers of urban history and immigrant experience.”176 For Kakutani, both of these perspectives are reflected in Cole’s structural approach, where “his glimpses of the city turn out to be fragments.”177 Open City’s structural composition is informed in large part by Cole’s treatment of the cityscape – it is not only the novel’s setting, but its predominant subject matter. In explaining his focus on the city, Cole has stated that he is

“drawn to the kind of dynamism and complication and solitude of the city,”178 a combination of qualities that he has argued is accordingly rendered in New York City. In conversation with Tepper, he describes cityscapes as “spaces that are porous,” a concept described further in later interviews, such as with Jeffrey Brown, in relation to the title of the novel: the “city is accessible to him. It’s open.”179 His conceptualisation of the city in terms of “layers,” moreover, relates visibility to the openness and porousness of the cityscape. Describing the composition of the layers themselves in regards to “different registers,” he prioritises the act of doubling. 180 Evinced particularly in his description of the

174 Kakutani, “Roaming.” 175 Foden, “Review.” 176 Arndt, “Reading”; Foden, “Review.” 177 Kakutani, “Roaming.” 178 Teju Cole, interview by Allain William van Heerden, Mahala (19 September 2013), http://www.mahala.co.za/art/open-city/. 179 Teju Cole, interview by Anderson Tepper, Tin House (26 January 2011), http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/6650/a-conversation-with-teju-cole.html; interview by Jeffrey Brown, PBS Newshour (18 March 2011), http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/conversation-teju-cole/. 180 Cole, interview by Brown.

51 use of Brussels as an interlocutor with New York, he argues that “I also wanted to create a sort of double for New York City, but not an obvious one. Not London, not Paris. I wanted to pick this eccentric double, Brussels, which actually was an open city during the war.”181 In suggesting that New York “is a place that’s constantly reinventing itself,” he has also equated the cityscape with the wanderer, as “a place” that is “not always very good about dealing with the past,” inclined “to ignore some of the important things that are going on, because they’re not necessarily as visible.”182 The question of visibility is, according to Cole, one of the novel’s important interrogations, intertwining “the history of place and the history of self,” where “an obsession with the history of place or others can be an excuse for not fully confronting the history of self.”183 His discussions of the cityscapes portrayed in Open City predominantly centre on the creation of the lyric self.

Indeed, Cole’s aim in writing Open City – as “something that could conceivably be passing through the mind of an admittedly acute and over-educated protagonist” – emphasises the novel’s experiential narrative. He describes his intention in these terms, to

“tell the story in a way that reflected the way a certain we live today – the experience of buying books, reading books, going to museums,” giving the novel its peculiarly immersive quality. Indeed, Open City correlates solitary introspection with aesthetic experience; not only in specific terms – Cole discusses Pietr Breughel as “the kind of artist… whose works reveal more the more you look at them” – but as indicative of art in general terms:

I think this is generally true of art… that they were made to reveal more the more you look at them. I wanted to broach Julius’s encounters with people and places in that same way… If you keep looking at a place, it begins to give you more. Or: If you have an encounter with another human being, in a sensitive way, you begin to get more.

181 Cole, interview by Tepper. 182 Cole, interview by Brown. 183 Cole, interview by Tepper.

Indeed, the novel’s structure consists of, schematically, a series of observations: Open City proposes that the urban wanderer is an observer who, like a gallery goer, has a sensitivity to connections embedded within that which he sees. Indeed, Julius observes the cityscape with the same gaze as the observer of an artwork:

In many places in the book I tried to slow things down to the point where I can give an account of what’s happening when a person is looking at something – not necessarily an art object, but some sort of object that is somehow removed in time. And there’s something that happens – not just aesthetically, but psychologically, too.

The implications of this are twofold: firstly, this process places emphasis on what is seen, and secondly, like viewing an exhibition in a gallery, this framework of ‘observation’ presupposes connections between what is seen; whilst a gallery-goer is there to view, the exhibition has been curated to prompt connections between artistic objects. Indeed, the novel is concerned with more than immediate impressions: its eye is sustained and attentive, creating a notebook of experience.

In the same way that critics identified Open City in contradistinction to the traditional novel, Cole has characterised the work in interviews as more essay than novel.

He describes it as peculiarly postmillennial; rather than “plot-driven,” it is “an ideas driven book.”184 Indeed, Open City is not only “a work of fiction” but “also profoundly nonfictional”; as a metafictional “memoir” of the “inventions” conceived during the process of writing.185 In an interview with Amitava Kumar, he considers the essay as a form

“available” – along with “the list, the tangential excursus, the stream of unbroken dialogue, the thicket of unremitting description” – to the novelist, but “rarely use[d].” For Cole, a novel that “focuses on mind rather than on narrative” and on the “exploration of

184 Cole, interview by Brown. 185 Teju Cole, interview by Amitava Kumar, “Pitch Forward,” Guernica Magazine (15 March 2013), https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/pitch-forward/.

53 consciousness” employs a more complex formal approach than that which a stream-of- consciousness narrative or traditional novelistic narrative structure can yield.186 Like Valeria

Luiselli’s collection of essays Sidewalks, Open City is meditative and existential, rather than conventionally ‘about something.’ These reticent formal considerations are reflected in

Cole’s own description of his style as structured around “quiet foreshadowings” and “the failure of mourning.”187 Describing echo as “very important,” emphasising its role as “a good way to intensify that region of localized weather that we call a novel,” he similarly figures mourning as the act of “writing allusively.”188 Both stylistic functions necessitate a certain reticence: “the repetition of motifs” and “the slight alteration of what’s been said before” requires a subtlety commensurate with that required when “consider[ing] the suffering of others.” For Cole, the broad artistic interest the novel displays is a necessary product of this stylistic approach, where “[i]nto the space created by that reticence, you bring in those things that best help us confront ambiguity: music, painting, film and so on.”

Bringing together both formal and stylistic aesthetics with the aim to “trouble the complacency of the viewer or reader,” he therefore writes in order to “elicit… that small inadvertent gasp of recognition”; the lyric emptying out of the self that so preoccupies

Lerner is also present here where the reader can grasp a hold of something resembling themselves.189

Not only does this operate in a virtual mode, it gestures towards another aesthetic impulse of Open City. Given Cole’s training as an art historian, it is not surprising that he draws attention to “a curatorial instinct driving [his] writing,” and, indeed, much of his

186 Teju Cole, interview by Supriya Nair, “The voice of the mind,” Live Mint (30 December 2011), http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/B1Fzos9jUiB3EI31eocl5O/Teju-Cole--The-voice-of-the-mind.html. 187 Cole, “Pitch Forward”; interview by Max Liu, “Palimpsest City,” 3:AM Magazine (16 August 2011), http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/palimpsest-city/. 188 Teju Cole, “Palimpsest City.” 189 Cole, “Pinprick.”

54 writing – in novels or essays – writes against art.190 In an interview with Anthony Byrt for the New Zealand Listener, Cole claims that the differences between Open City and a true stream-of-consciousness work are “that the events, and the sensations and the thoughts, are calculated to look as if they are random, but are actually carefully selected.” In another interview he describes Open City as “a kind of Wunderkammer, one of those little rooms assembled with bric-a-brac by Renaissance scholars” – as “cabinets of curiosities [that] contained specific sorts of objects – maps, skulls (as memento mori), works of art, stuffed animals, natural history sample, and books” – arguing that “Open City actually contains many of the same sort of objects.”191 This aesthetic of collection, then, manifests through

Cole’s treatment of the objects within the novel, through which the narrative is able to

“excavat[e] the past, or sens[e] the past inside the present.” From this perspective, Cole can be seen to conceptualise Open City as underpinned by a curatorial framework. This, in turn, relates intrinsically to his writing’s aisthetic approach, collecting experiences and images. It not only informs his writing but his photographic practice too, arguing that it “pulls my photography towards fragmentary anecdote.”192 Where some of the criticism portrays Open

City as Sebaldian in its random assortment of thoughts and events, Cole’s own perspective on the novel’s aesthetic suggests a more controlled and reflective treatment of structure.

What arises when Cole speaks about Open City in interviews, therefore, is the attention given to the way that his work operates within a specific kind of aesthetic.

Describing himself as “very deeply interested in bringing slowness into basically everything that I do,” and his literary work as “a space where… something strange can happen,” it is

190 Teju Cole, interview by Anthony Byrt, The Listener (1 June 2012), http://www.listener.co.nz/culture/books/teju-cole-interview-the-long-version/. 191 Cole, “Palimpsest City.” 192 Cole, “Pinprick.”

55 evident that his aesthetic is spatial and meditative in both composition and subject.193 In many interviews, moreover, he identifies this approach as a side-effect of being an art historian, where “everything comes filtered through the fundamental insight of studying paintings for a living, which is that if you spend enough time with a still image, it can be drawn out, it has things to say to you.” Cole’s pursuit of the literary ‘still image’ performs in many ways as the key photographic mode in Open City – the slow pace at which the novel moves elicits the effect of a series of photographic stills or a series of still-lifes, and becomes a crystalline object that the reader observes through the act of reading. In conversation with Amitava Kumar, Cole identifies the impulse to create such an effect by questioning “how can you do something that’s a little bit arresting and not merely beautiful but that creates a capacity for a doubt and for rereading”; an impulse that seeks “to capture that surreal lyric moment.” Cole’s prose thus aims toward a resonance, where “it is enough if one note is played beautifully”, and silence, where it is “trying to find a way to turn the volume down”; in terms that recall Milosz’s, writing prose is “about the space that you create in which other things might happen to the reader”, where it can not only gesture toward, but create the poetic self. For Cole, “[e]very form finds its own spaces and silences,” a mode precisely to which Open City’s prose aims.194

PHOTOGRAPHIC AESTHETICS

Cole’s engagement with literary negative aesthetics is tied inexplicably with his artistic training as a photographer. Cole’s aims for formal spaciousness, both literary and photographic, “are expressions of the same instinct: both are my way of aspiring to lyric

193 Cole, “Pitch Forward.” 194 Teju Cole, interview by Charl Blignaut, “Teju Cole: Even Breathing is a Political Act,” City Press (19 September 2013), http://www.citypress.co.za/lifestyle/teju-cole-even-breathing-political-act/.

56 poetry.”195 For Cole, the use of the photographic aesthetic – simultaneously aiming for stillness and consolation; disquiet and unexpectedness – creates a new kind of lyricised language for prose’s experiential aesthetics because it emphasises the negative (what is realisable), rather than the positive (the realised). It also questions the relationship between art and the real and asks whether it differs between forms and genres. Photography has a claim to the real that prose does not, the claim goes, but it is also, like poetry, not concerned with the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Cole’s ideal contemporary literary mode uses aisthetic techniques, not only in incorporating aesthetics from other artistic forms – such as the use of actual photographs in Every day is for the Thief, or poetry in

Leaving the Atocha Station or 10:04 – but by systematically employing an aesthetic register not peculiar to literary prose. Indeed, the photographic image in Open City, although an inherently visual apparatus, is not necessarily a visibly pictorial mode. His prose does not necessarily evoke photographic description, nor does he overtly discuss photography within the novel aside from a single exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photography.196

Instead, what the novel proposes as its central formal preoccupation is an aesthetic similarly pursued in his photography in order to create a lyrical language for aesthetic and ethical prose in the postmillennial novel.

In questioning art’s relation to ‘real experience,’ Cole’s prose resembles a form of crystalline fiction. David James, in “A Renaissance for the Crystalline Novel?”, argues that originally a term “coined by Iris Murdoch in 1961,” it “is not so much being revived as transformed by postmillennial writers.”197 In his “diachronic” account of the mode, James identifies the aim of such fiction as being in part to question “how aesthetic attention in contemporary fiction can perform ethical and political work,” likening crystalline fiction to

195 Cole, “Pinprick.” 196 This section will be discussed in Chapter Two. 197 James, “Crystalline Novel,” 847; 849.

“what Rancière identifies as ‘an aesthetic regime in which the distinction between those things that belong to art and those that belong to ordinary life is blurred’… govern[ing] not so much ‘the criteria of technical perfection’ as a ‘specific form of sensory apprehension.’”198 But why write fiction in this way? And why are postmillennial writers finding resonances between aesthetic practice and this mode? James suggests that writers are working within this mode now, because doing so “is to affirm how the novel, after an era of being subjected to self-reflexive deconstruction and epistemological doubt, still has the capacity to simulate and thereby intensify our attention to the aesthetic dimensions of ordinary experience, while probing the political and ethical implications of inhabiting those dimensions anew.”199 Indeed, while poetry may possess an inherently lyrical form that captures experience, whether real or imagined, without the need for such categorisation,

“narrative fiction remains perhaps the most effective and resilient artistic medium we have for proving why we should value such moments as socially or ethically instructive.”200

Crystalline fiction, therefore, aims to transform ordinary experience and in doing so attributes it with an affective state resembling the sublime. For James, writers in this mode employ – and struggle against – Toni Morrison’s dictum for fiction “to be thrifty with images and language,” and Murdoch’s “self-containedness”; in other words, they

“reemploy… principles of obliquity and ellipsis.”201 Indeed, such attention to aesthetic form and artistic practice might refuse this type of fiction a social role. Indeed, of Joseph

O’Neill’s novel Netherland, James argues that the crystalline mode can be almost virtual – his “lyrical portraits of prosaic perceptions, at the level of style, correspond with his propensity, at the level of plot, to renegotiate ‘the actual’ within ‘soothingly’ fanciful

198 Ibid., 846; 870. 199 Ibid., 857. 200 Ibid., 846. 201 Ibid., 856.

58 coordinates.” For O’Neill, this preoccupation with imagining the ‘actual’ – in other words, the real or the ordinary – within artful conditions denotes an “anxiety over authenticity

[that] is also an anxiety about maintaining the sincerity of artistic purpose.”202 But, as Zadie

Smith worries, for prose to be crystalline it must also be finely wrought – so much so that it becomes the image of fiction. Because it is “so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction… it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait.”203 Thus, the aestheticisation of ordinary experience, fictionalising the ordinary, or raising everydayness to the level of art, frustrates the function that the real has as literary artiface. As the image of what fiction should be – through the use of the “self-perfecting inwardness of crystalline prose” – it does not strain against the aim of writing the ideal, nor strive for anything more.204 Rather, like the photographic image, it represents a certain kind of formal stillness; it has arrived.

How does Cole’s photographic aesthetic achieve stillness yet avoid the staid? If, for

Cole, the photographic image is indelibly concerned with manipulating time, what does the literary appropriation of photographic aesthetic achieve for experiential time? Cole’s virtual techniques aspire towards something quite different to the preoccupation with the

“neurobiological defeat of time” of Clune’s Romantic tradition, and the archaeological gaze that the photographic eye is often accorded.205 Rather than concerned with achieving experiential timelessness, Cole’s novel experiments with the parallel experience of the present and imagined past in order to achieve a more expansive literary form; his photographic aesthetic acts as a literary technique in the interrogation of narrative and experiential time, and the time of experience. If his photographic practice – a self-

202 Ibid., 865. 203 Smith, “Two Directions,” 71-2. 204 James, “Crystalline Novel,” 865. 205 Clune, Writing Against Time, 4.

59 conscious attention to techniques such as framing, slow shutter speeds, and soft-focus – aspires to create a form that “draws blood,” how does his prose aim to achieve a similar

“momentary shock to the consciousness”?206 Cole conceptualises his images as forming an artistic language that “reminds you in a small sharp way that you’re alive right now,” and as such engages in Shklovsky’s “intensif[ication of] the impressions of the senses” by virtualising what, through everyday eyes, would simply be the street; or, James’ description of crystalline fiction as a mode that by “[v]aluing sublimity within the ordinary, they advance the possibility that after an era of postmodernist cynicism, fiction can mobilize perceptions of the mundane made marvellously strange.”207

Unsettling the viewer’s expectant perception of what ought to be the subject, many of Cole’s photographs emphasise what is not there – where the subject is a shadow, rather than what is being shadowed; a reflection in glass, not what can be seen through it; what is almost out of frame, not in it – and are defined by a deliberate vagueness. This negative subject operates in a virtual mode. Indeed, the Danish photographer Per Bak Jensen refers to this kind of making absence present in the act of taking photographs: “There’s something hidden in my surroundings when I’m looking. I can’t put that something into words. I can’t describe it in words. So instead I’ve chosen to photograph it.”208 For him, it is perhaps this kind of interrogative “art” that “not only create[s] something new, but remind[s] us of things we’ve forgotten.” Indeed, Cole’s prose is often concerned with forgetting, with the acknowledgement of an absence. Referring to novelist James Salter, he considers his artistic practice as determined largely by the philosophy that “what you don’t

206 Cole, “Pinprick.” 207 Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” 3; James, “Crystalline Novel,” 846. 208 Per Bak Jensen, “The Presence of the Absent,” Louisiana Channel (February 2015), http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/bak-jensen-presence-absent.

60 write down, vanishes,” but “if you write it down, it remains.”209 This is linked explicitly with his preference for an “unsystematic history” – where “intuitive experience of place” creates the texture of the real, while also allowing space for perceptual “darkness” – that suggests an experience that is “closer” to the possible. In Shklovsky’s terms, Cole’s aesthetic of the image ‘enstranges’ – or, in Marjorie Perloff’s, defamiliarises – an everyday perceptual experience ‘eroded’ by habit; ordinary experiences are given a new vivacity, as if seen through new eyes.210 This is not, as is the general argument of much historical photographic scholarship, in order to preserve the moment, or, as Clune’s Romantic tradition aims for, to immortalise the intensity of the experience, but, if only briefly, to renew the experience of an object or place, and create a new language with which it can be understood.

Cole aestheticises this perceptual darkness through writing prose. Indeed, if his prose maps out the way in which he conceptualises this occlusion of subject, or negative subject, then his photographic images realise the result. If his images actualise, then his use of the photographic aesthetic in his prose is his most central virtual technique intent on creating a new lyrical language for a contemporary fiction socially and aesthetically interrogative. His short prose work, “You Drank Some Darkness,” provides a particular interpretation of this method.211 Written for New Inquiry the piece combines various artistic practices: the written prose is overlaid with an audio file of Cole reciting the story, a few brief motifs of Brahms’ music, Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s voice reciting the poem

209 Teju Cole, “The City as Palimpsest,” (presentation, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA, 7 November 2012). In James Salter’s words: “Because all this is going to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing.” Interview by Edward Hirsch, Paris Review 127 (Summer 1993), http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1930/the-art-of-fiction-no-133-james-salter. 210 Marjorie Perloff, Poetics in a New Key: Interviews and Essays, ed. David Jonathan Y. Bayot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 211 Teju Cole, “You Drank Some Darkness,” New Inquiry (9 September 2014), http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/dtake/you-drank-some-darkness/.

61 from which the title is drawn in its original language, and a photograph of a woman looking out to sea that evokes the story’s first line. With lyrical apostrophe, the story begins:

Stand here and look out at the steady fact of the sea. Like a closed door, it gives you little. Behind you is the museum, and between you and the sea are a number of sculptures. The sculptures are like ancient rocks that have sleepwalked out of the water. Now they rest. What is hidden between here, where you stand, and there?

The aesthetic that governs this prose is the paradox that underlines not only this story, but

Tranströmer’s poem, “Elegy.” He writes: “Friends! You drank some darkness and became visible.” For Cole, “[w]hat is hidden between here and there is space as well as time; and it is width as well as depth.” This paradox is a virtual one; the photographic and poetic darkness that makes things visible is a metaphor for the virtual mode. While the virtual opposes, or even deposes, the actual, it is represented through a systematic formal absence.

The virtual paradox questions how something can exist as imagined, but not real, and proposes that whether or not it is formally, or experientially possible, it has the potential to be. Is an imagined perceptual experience any less real? What is the difference between an actual experience and its imagined counterimage? Cole cannot actually experience the “grief that is visiting all of Europe” in 1943 and discuss Brahms with Tranströmer in Sweden in

2013 simultaneously. But, in imagining such a perceptual experience, he can suspend its experiential time; for Cole, the passage of time is something that is “visible only in the darkness.” From the evacuation of more than seven thousand Danish Jews to Sweden over three weeks in October – an act that, Cole considers, is “the light switch for the whole country” – to the Bowheads – a “certain species of whales… massive and secretive, [who] have been swimming under the ice, full of their whale life, for a hundred or two hundred years, since before the time of Brahms” – time is where “the darkness shines.”

In a 2012 lecture given at Harvard’s Graduate Design School on ‘the city,’ Cole proposes a way in which his creative practices can be combined in a single aesthetic concern. For Cole, his methodology is importantly engaged in the “art of describing,” whether in photographic image or prose.212 His works aim to convey a perceptual newness, writing “as if [I]’ve never seen them before” and “as though my interlocutor were blind.”

Art needs to abstract the familiar in order to find what is “submerged,” to bring this essence to the surface to allow a fresh experience of something familiar. In his photographic practice, this “search for echoes” in experience is rendered in images of

“ghostly presences.” Through the use of photographic film – “because of the kind of slowness that it forces me into” – and slow shutter speeds, time can be captured as it passes. As people move across the frame, they become blurs of his displaced subject; what he ends up working with are “reflections and shadows.” Cole explicitly associates this practice, moreover, with Thomas Browne’s philosophy in “Burial”: he explains that while

“[l]ight reveals some things… there are other things that are concealed in light.” The stars, for example, are invisible in the “presence of light”; it is “only in darkness can we see the stars.” Preoccupying the aesthetic form of both his photography and prose is the question of possibility. He asks “What is the role of dark spaces? What role is black playing in a picture plane, or in a piece of writing?” While Brazillian photography collective Cia de Foto proposes that “[t]he dark, far from representing a total absence, remains in our photographs like information at rest,” Cole’s work is arrested by the mourning of this absence. I argue that this preoccupation that so “absorbed [his] thinking” constructs his most evident, and most compelling, virtual concern: where art can uncover the traces of past experiences, of memories, that are “retain[ed]” in space.

212 Cole, “The City as Palimpsest.”

I would suggest that Cole’s use of a photographic aesthetic informs the way in which his prose is particularly attuned to the historical erasure of the past.213 Indeed, like crystalline prose, it is simultaneously finely wrought and artful, and concerned with creating the novel’s socially ethical space. While Frank Kermode asserts, when discussing novelist

Jim Crace, that the crystalline and the social mode oppose one another – crystalline fiction is “where the novel is most like a poem, most turned in on itself, most closely wrought for the sake of art and internal cohesion,” while the social mode is not – James suggests that the two ought to be considered together, one the symptom of the other, where the layering of disregarded trauma and memory is done so in fine prose.214 Vermeulen has argued, however, that Cole’s “figure of the city as a palimpsest… points to a minimal practice of marking history, of preserving the past as a legible trace, rather than composing it into the raptures of aesthetic experience.”215 For Vermeulen, Cole’s so-called palimpsestic practice of overlapping time is an historical approach desensitised to its implications for aesthetic practice. However, the way in which a photographer, for example, constructs an experience of the imaginary from an experience of the real rejects the photograph’s simply historical function in favour of creating an aesthetic form; or, in other words, a fiction. Cole’s prose, although incorporating ‘actual’ questions of the historical past of New York City, is nevertheless invention equally concerned with aesthetic practice. Cole imagines the city’s past specifically with regards to the photographic image: “[t]here are no instantaneous photographs: each must be exposed for a length of time, no matter how brief: in this sense, every photograph is a time-lapse image, and photography is necessarily an archival art.”216

213 The metaphor of the palimpsest is referred to throughout Open City’s criticism: Arndt has argued that the novel is “about a city in flux and the way certain cities, like New York, are built of layers and rise vertically, covering the topography below but never quite flattening it into oblivion” (“Reading Teju Cole’s “Open City” in NYC”), while Syjuco has asserted that “Julius summons a palimpsest of connecting and conflicting histories” (“Crowded Streets,” 12). 214 James, “Crystalline Novel,” 855. 215 Vermeulen, “Flights,” 51. My emphasis. 216 Cole, “Disappearing Shanghai.”

In wandering through the city, Julius simultaneously experiences his present moment with events from the past. “That afternoon,” he reflects, “during which I flitted in and out of myself, when time became elastic and voices cut out of the past into the present, the heart of the city was gripped by what seemed to be a commotion from an earlier time” (74). For

Julius, imagining another time either becomes more perceptually intense and ‘real’ than his experience of his own present, or, increases the vivacity of his current experiences: his meditations on the experience of being in the New York subway – “[a]boveground I was with thousands of others in their solitude, but in the subway, standing close to strangers, jostling them and being jostled by them for space and breathing room, all of us re-enacting unacknowledged traumas, the solitude intensified” (7) – intensify his imagination “of underground travel, we millions moving underneath cities, inhabitants of an age in which, for the first time, travelling great distances beneath the earth had become normal for humans” to include thoughts of “the numberless dead, in forgotten cities, necropoli, catacombs” (93-94). Julius’ experience of the city is engaged in “making sense of the language” created by other things, by achieving a kind of balance; between the sacred and the new, between preservation and innovation.

Cole’s photographs thus construct virtual tensions between images of the visual world. While Cole’s website bears witness to an extensive archive of his urban photography, in 2012 and 2013 he curated a small itinerant exhibition entitled “Who’s Got the Address?” Held in December 2012 at the Old Secretariat in Goa, India, and at the

Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College, New York in April 2013, this exhibition forms

Cole’s only exhibited collection of photography, despite many individual images appearing in journals such as the New York Review of Books and A Public Space.217 Comprised of 15

217 The exhibited diptychs, as well as the text accompanying them by Amitava Kumar, were printed in Guernica Magazine, and are available to view at https://www.guernicamag.com/art/whos-got-the-address/.

65 thematic diptychs – paired photographs of different global cities – the exhibition invites a visual consideration of the affinities between contemporary cityscapes and of the intersections of urban space: layering such cities as Rome and New York, Lagos and New

York, Sasabe and Margao, Jaipur and Kathmandu. Accompanying the images are short prose reflections by writer Amitava Kumar, which pairs Cole with other writers with a similar attention to overlapping aesthetic formal considerations. Although the premise of the exhibition is not entirely novel – Italo Calvino wrote in Invisible Cities that “the ideal city is a city that is made up of many different parts, of many different cities” – it interrogates the photograph’s relation to the real, exploring the limitations of visual expression, and asking “how do you move an image beyond illustration?”218 In pairing images together,

Cole constructs a blueprint for how cities can be perceived as parts of the same subject, not as distinct political and cultural identities. For Cole, this project is preoccupied with the aesthetic of the “analogue,” or, in other words, “the idea that each image is connected in some mysterious way to another image taken in another place at another time.”219 Here,

Cole’s photographic project functions in such a way to provoke “productive ironies that might emerge” from overlapping images; suggesting tangible connections in implicit or imaginary conditions.

Kumar’s reflections add an ekphrastic register to Cole’s visual images. Assembling references to Cole’s literary influences provide an intersecting literary space to the visual space of the exhibition. Indeed, Cole remarks how through Kumar’s “words, I learned more about what I was doing, but also about what I ought to be doing.” Consider Kumar’s response to Cole’s diptych of São Paulo and Palouse:

218 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 2013), 32. 219 Cole, “A Good Photograph Is Like a Pinprick.”

In Ondaatje’s The English Patient, the young woman Hana recalls a line from Stendhal: “A novel is a mirror walking down a road.” The novelist is a photographer. Here is Teju Cole in the “My Hero” column in the pages of the Guardian: “Michael Ondaatje’s work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes. All his books were odd, all of them ‘unfinished’ the way Chopin’s Études are unfinished: no wasted gestures, no unnecessary notes.” In the pair of São Paulo – Palouse photographs, the images work as fragments, a common element of visual poetry uniting them, producing what Cole calls “a journalism of fleeting sensations.” This is the singing photojournalism – to quote Cole’s twinned phrase – “of the barely visible, of the barely important.”220

Or of Rome and New York:

Teju Cole has written that Tranströmer is a “master of solitude” and that his poems hover “on the edge of the unsayable.” In the Rome – New York pair of photographs, we see the walkers – on their way to the Address! Cole the photographer is watchful but he holds back. Even in the act of speaking to us, he is alert to stillness. (To recall another fragment of Tranströmer’s: “I come upon the tracks of deer’s hooves in the snow./ Language but no words.”) I admire the fact that all the images in this exhibition – pierced by shadows and brightness, speech and silence – are imbued with their own lasting mystery. Like magical poems that leave brief traces of light on the fingers of a reader who is now alone in the middle of the night.

These passages not only engage with Cole’s photographic aesthetic, but the way in which it informs techniques used in his literary practice. They suggest, moreover, a virtual dimension to the images that they do not possess on their own. It is here that Cole’s virtual aesthetic is clearly evident: in his creative practice, the virtual is not only a specifically literary phenomenon, it requires conversation between various artistic forms. For Cole, literature, on its own, is “not precise or exact or obscure or suggestive enough,” while photography although possibly “self-authenticating,” its “authentic truth is available only in language, as practiced in narration.”221 Combining photography with prose then is his

220 Amitava Kumar, “Who’s Got the Address?” Guernica (15 March 2013), https://www.guernicamag.com/art/whos-got-the-address/. 221 Teju Cole, interview by Margherita Stancati, Wall Street Journal India (20 January 2012), http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/01/20/teju-cole-on-why-photography-beats-literature/; Cole,

67 aspiration toward creating a new language – spacious and lyricised – of artistic form, both aesthetically and ethically conscious. Although this can create a “fracture” of meaning, for

Cole, this rupture locates the potential expansiveness that literary form proposes through the use of a negatively ekphrastic approach.

Cole’s use of the photographic aesthetic in prose exemplifies another hallmark of postmillennial crystalline fiction: it develops “what can only be described as the new vocabulary of attention that Murdoch had hoped for, a vocabulary that is often as unsettling as it is consoling.”222 Indeed, Cole draws on the vocabulary of the Situationist

Guy Debord, who was equally preoccupied with attributing the strange to ordinary experience: the dérive delineates an experience of the city that rejects everyday consciousness. For Cole, his interest in the dérive was particularly focused on “absorbing the spiritual intensities, the psychological intensities, of particular spaces in the city”; while these spaces can appear “seemingly random,” there is also a certain kind of “openness to those places in the city that are vortices of energy.”223 This energy draws the photographer towards certain places; as Jensen remarks, although you do not see what is hidden in his photographs, “[w]hat you do see is places where I’ve felt that something was hidden – and that reaches out to me and somehow wants to contact me. It might be something spiritual or something else.”224 But, he questions, “[h]ow can it speak to us? It gives us a strange desire. A strange desire to photograph it and a strange desire to look at them.” For Cole, this manifests across his artistic production – he writes without “agenda” in anticipation of aesthetic collisions, as a street photographer does – and is coincident with the way that

Julius’ experiences often rely upon chance. His encounters with the space of the city in the

interview by Aleksandar Hemon Bomb Magazine 127 (Spring 2014), http://bombmagazine.org/article/10023/teju-cole. 222 James, “Crystalline Novel,” 860. 223 Cole, “City as Palimpsest.” 224 Jensen, “The Presence of the Absent.”

68 novel are not only often acts of chance, but mimetic descriptions of his actions that ‘things’ that happen to him. On his way home after a day working in the inpatient unit at the hospital, Julius performs one of these acts:

I entered the subway at 168th Street and caught a packed southbound 1 train. So absorbed was I in rehearsing that afternoon’s consultation with M. that, when the train reached 116th Street, I simply watched the doors open, stay open, and close. The car moved on past my stop, and momentarily I tried to figure out what had happened… (44)

Although “not conscious”, Julius “finally decide[s]” that “staying on… was intentional”

(44). While deliberate, however, the act is defined by both spontaneity and delay, improvisation and depersonalisation, an effect that emphasises the theatre of the scene: staged in the restricted space of the subway, the performance of suspension “was confirmed at the next stop, when again I failed to exit and instead sat there, with the feeling that I was watching myself, waiting to see what would happen next” (44). The mimetic nature of this prose also conveys the everydayness in less abstract terms as other parts of the novel do, the way in which Julius’ curious encounters with the ordinary creates such perceptual intensity of the uncanny. Here, his close description of the act of engaging with chance – “[a]t Ninety-sixth Street, I switched to the 2 express, which happened to arrive on the platform just at that moment” (45) – although initially disconcerting to him, eventually leads him to a moment of sublimity and perceptual clarity: “it was although the entire world had fallen away” (52). The symbolism here is evident. His chance wanderings guide him, in true dérive fashion, to the “ruins” of the World Trade Centre: the surrounding buildings are “veiled in a densely woven black net,” the site is “a great empty space.” This absence is, moreover, etched into time itself, it is “not the site of the events of 9/11 but…

9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones” (52). The way Julius happens upon this

69 space emphasises his experience of the negative space created by the towers’ absence; although physically absent, he nevertheless experiences it as energetically present.

Open City’s prose oscillates between lyrically described aesthetic and artistic experiences and unembellished descriptions of trauma – symptomatic of the economy of crystalline prose. Not only does 9/11 quietly (almost silently) reverberate in the novel, so does an accusation of rape late in the novel. Attending a party with Moji, a woman he knew from his childhood in Nigeria, Julius is confronted by her unexpectedly. Rising “around six,” Julius “tiptoed over the slumbering bodies on the floor of the living room… made some tea” and “sat on the glassed-in terrace, overlooking the Hudson,” at which point

“Moji came to join” him, “look[ing] out over the river, narrowing her eyes.” It is striking that Julius’ description of this scene is focussed through Moji’s experience, rather than his own:

And then, with the same flat affect, she said that, in late 1989, when she was fifteen and I was a year younger, at a party her brother had hosted at their house in Ikoyi, I had forced myself on her. Afterward, she said, her eyes unwavering from the bright river below, in the weeks that followed, in the month and years that followed, I had acted like I knew nothing about it, had even forgotten her, to the point of not recognizing her when we met again, and had never tried to acknowledge what I had done. This tortuous deception had continued until the present. But it hadn’t been like that for her. Indeed, I had been ever present in her life, like a stain or a scar, and she had thought of me, either fleetingly or in extended agonies, for almost every day of her adult life. (244)

Just as Moji’s tone is “emotional in its total lack of inflection,” so is Julius’ reaction to her words. While Moji’s accusations are to Julius the unfolding of “her precise memory of what had happened,” he does not express denial, regret, shame, or guilt. Having “went on in this vein for what was probably six or seven minutes,” Moji claims that “[t]hings don’t go away just because you choose to forget them.” This is the central aesthetic image of Cole’s artistic philosophy. For him, as well as Salter, art preserves experience; it creates a form for

70 memory. However, does this same logic apply to Julius? Despite waxing lyrical about art, his reaction remains – here, concerningly so – untold. The way in which the prose recalls it is in the abstract, as if spontaneously inserted into the narrative, and his acknowledgement of the rape is equally suspended. If, for Moji, voicing her experience of the rape is an act of resistance against forgetting, what is it for Julius? Cole explains:

I wanted to ask: what is taken for granted in the matter of being a man? And since I feel that one answer is “far too much,” I tried to convey that answer novelistically… But let’s think about rape and justice. Beyond the very obvious – a woman’s body belongs to her, there's nothing to discuss here – there’s also the maelstrom of that comes with every incident of sexual molestation. It is one of the most narratively complex things that can happen in a community. People take sides, and it’s often quite saddening what sides people take. But rape is also one of those situations where, as a man, your wiser self says: shut up, dude. Believe her, and shut up. Men opine entirely too much about rape, while managing not to ever say enough.225

This poses a complex ethical question about memory and the experience of remembering through writing, and one that fiction could consider where its social viability lies. Formally,

Cole has described this as “invit[ing] the ambiguity” – a technique that plays on the opacities of memory – into prose that seems certain of its own certainty.226 It not only occurs at the end of the novel, it is not even described during the passage about the party.

Instead, Julius’ experience is discursively elided, only mediated after he returned home. His description of the event begins as such:

Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self- admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and we only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than

225 Teju Cole, interview by Aaron Bady, Post45 (19 January 2015), http://post45.research.yale.edu/2015/01/interview-teju-cole/. 226 Teju Cole, interview by Christopher Bollen, Interview Magazine (24 March 2014), http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/teju-cole/.

heroes. Who, in the age of television, hasn’t stood in front of a mirror and imagined his life as a show that is already being watched by multitudes? Who has not, with this consideration in mind, brought something performative into his everyday life? (243)

He continues:

And so, what does it mean when, in someone else’s version, I am the villain? I am only too familiar with bad stories – badly imagined, or badly told – because I hear them frequently from patients. I know the tells of those who blame others, those who are unable to see that they themselves, and not the others, are the common thread in their bad relationships. There are characteristic tic that reveal the essential falsehood of such narratives. But what Moji had said to me that morning, before I left John’s place, and gone up on the George Washington Bridge, and walked the few miles back home, had nothing in common with such stories. She had said it as if, with all of her being, she were certain of its accuracy (243-4).

If Moji was certain, Julius is not. Whether through shock or denial, the incident is not referred to for the remainder of the narrative, as if it never happened. This bears comparison to what Michael Clune calls Ashbery’s aesthetic of “leaving out”; “a certain abstraction,” he argues, “is basic to the mimesis of things as they show up in a world.”227

Indeed, this economical “version of novelistic description” ought to be differentiated

“from the idea of the novel as a project of complete description, the novel Flaubert sometimes dreamed of, in which the writing renders a blade of grass in minute perceptual detail and a house as a gray stone rectangle.” However, where for Ashbery, this kind of description – “to describe a thing as it shows up for someone familiar with it” – requires

“leaving this kind of perceptual detail out,” for Clune, leaving out the psychological details of such an experience takes the “abstraction of novelistic description” one step further: this is an experience not familiar to most. Considering Cole’s photographic aesthetic, however, the technique of leaving out these perceptual details expresses more rather than less; although deliberately vague, it ultimately is what is shadowed by what can be seen.

227 Clune, Writing Against Time, 117.

This abstraction is a remarkably virtual concern. Clune argues that this technique of leaving out is where Ashbery’s poetry “reads like a manual for describing things,” in which

“[t]he ‘art’ of this kind of description is knowing what to leave out.”228 Here, saying a lot without becoming effusive requires a certain reticence of narratorial voice, and as such,

Julius’ reportage of Moji’s speech is a clear act of devocalisation. He provides himself with no voice, his experience of it is entirely inexplicit. While mimetic of Moji’s experience, it is a deliberately vague representation of Julius’. As such, this scene is a remarkably strange disruption of the narrative flow of the novel as a whole. Indeed, in many ways, given that this development occurs late in the novel, it implores rereading. What the novel becomes on a second reading, with this knowledge, is ostensibly different: Julius’ solitude becomes suspicious, even potentially sinister, and the dissolve of his relationship with Nadege at the very beginning of the novel takes on new nuances. Whether or not the rape accusation works within the fiction – the way in which Julius does not address it is somewhat unsatisfactory – his ethical failures revitalise the reader’s experience of the prose; failure is aestheticised. I argue that the spectral hold this scene has on the novel’s subject implies an imaginary and unarticulated narrative that overlays the one that exists in the literal pages of

Open City. The virtual mode that Clune describes, therefore, not only denotes the mode in which Cole’s artistic practices sits, but the abstraction of the self that Julius experiences, or rather the rupture that the reader experiences, that follows Moji’s accusation. Indeed, Cole remarks of Moji’s accusation that “it’s absolutely true. I can’t imagine Julius’ story without it. I knew right from the beginning the book would end like that: a three vicious thwacks of the hammer, and then a soft exit to strings. I’m attracted, in art, to things that trouble the complacency of the viewer or reader.”229

228 Ibid., 118. 229 Cole, “Palimpsest City.”

Is Open City, therefore, a consolatory novel? Cole is self-consciously aware of the limitations of prose to offer consolation, questioning how “a novelist sit down and write something… that can equal Brahms four,” or something that can “take you to all sorts of places emotionally and just feel complete, without you having to worry about a plot, because the spaces they take you are psychological.”230 James, however, argues that prose’s awareness of its own failures is precisely the aim of crystalline fiction: it instead seeks to unsettle despite describing lyricised experiences and offering stylistic elegance in its prose construction. “Although it strives to democratize, if not domesticate, the sublime,” he argues, “the best crystalline fiction nonetheless refuses to paint a picture of harmony between aesthetically attuned ways of seeing and good ways of living.”231 The strange and disquiet, therefore, becomes part of this lyricised language. Indeed, the failure of language to address trauma is a kind of ethical responsibility of fiction – as he argues of crystalline prose, there is “a danger that [it] will become a victim of its own elegance.” For Cole, events like “crashing a plane into a building full of people, or people on account of their sexuality or race being marched off to camps and killed in large numbers” ultimately

“defeat language” – while “[i]ndividual tragedies come close to defeating language… [m]ass tragedy does.”232 Instead of transforming tragedy into artful prose, he treats them simply and economically: the aim of such prose is to create a tightly woven, quiet work that evokes the consolatory force of Transtromer’s poems, where “the magic lies in their ability to present aspects of our selves long buried under manners, culture, and language. The poems remember us and, if we are perfectly still, give us a chance to catch sight of ourselves.”233

230 Cole, “City as Palimpsest.” 231 James, “Crystalline Novel,” 860. 232 Cole, interview by Byrt. 233 Teju Cole, “Miracle Speech: the Poetry of Tomas Tranströmer,” New Yorker (6 October 2011), http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/miracle-speech-the-poetry-of-tomas-transtrmer.

VARIOUS INDELIBLE REALITIES

Although the critical and commercial success of Open City certainly helped Cole to establish a public profile as a prolific essayist and social commentator, his prose has been far from restricted to the traditional domain of ‘the literary.’ Indeed, his strategies for writing against the traditional image of the novel reflect his intellectual investment in contemporary culture at large. This manifests in Open City as the interweaving of voices and registers that are both ostensibly fictional and non-fictional, while Every Day is for the Thief was originally composed as a series of blog posts in essay form. His status as an authoritative voice outside of the literary was confirmed in February of 2015 when he was appointed photography critic for the New York Times Magazine. Alongside writing for the New Yorker, Granta, and Transition, his regular series for the magazine New Inquiry, “Double Take,” offers a striking example of the way that his diverse writing output frequently blends fiction, photography, and essay – an approach that culminates in his idiosyncratic approach to Twitter, through which he consciously adapts Modernist journalistic form, poetry, and politically outspoken social commentary. While the crystalline mode searches for an aesthetic yet ethical and social fiction, for Cole, incorporating an essayistic register into fictional prose is a way of attending to this demand, while also engaging openly in the current conversation around the real in fiction, and the reality of fiction.

“There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about reality in fiction, or reality versus fiction,” Tom McCarthy worried in “Writing Machines: On Realism and the Real.”234

Expressing the same concern as Cole, in different terms, for him it seems “meaningless, or at least unproductive, to discuss such things unless… we first ask what we talk about when we talk about the real.” What is perhaps most striking about McCarthy’s critique is that,

234 McCarthy, “Writing Machines.”

75 despite its salient phrasing, the issue he raises echoes what concerned Walter Pater during the 1890s. Noting that “the line between fact and something quite different from external fact” is “hard to draw,” he suggests that “in proportion as the writer’s aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his sense of it, he becomes an artist.”235 For Pater, the “literary artist is of necessity a scholar,” because his writing draws on the essayistic quality of interpreting fact, or creating an

‘imaginative sense of fact’; as for McCarthy, the distinction between fiction and reality become instead a matter of recognising the difference between a “literature of fact” and one of “the imaginative sense of fact.”236 Indeed, such a tendency in the way in which current cultural criticism leans on stark categorisations of forms and genres, including that of prose and poetry, limits the way some literary works can be read: “those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction between prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have been tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly.”237

While the creation of a fiction can elicit a certain type of aestheticisation or lyricisation of experience, therefore, fiction nevertheless continues to stridently engage with a certain concept of the real. But, if Smith’s lyrical realism and James’ crystalline fiction both elevate ordinary experience through finely wrought, self-perfecting prose, does that meant that this prioritises literature’s artfulness over its social mode? I argue that an approach such as Cole’s, as McCarthy propounds, “invents” its own reality.238 This position self-consciously advertises its divergence from the traditonal demand of authors to anchor their fiction in a preexisitng reality – the need that Henry James famously articulated for

“the air of reality (solidity of specification),” which he elevated to “the supreme virtue of a

235 Walter Pater, Appreciations with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1895), 9. 236 Ibid., 11; 8. 237 Ibid., 7. 238 McCarthy, “Writing Machines.”

76 novel.”239 In stark opposition, McCarthy argues that novelists do not “‘discover’ or ‘intuit’ or ‘reveal’ reality… Reality isn’t there yet; it has to be brought forth or produced; and this is the duty and the stake of writing.”240 In the spirit of McCarthy’s argument, however, there seems to be a critical assumption that fictional experiences are not ‘real,’ and thus, when following this logic, it is surprising for contemporary readers when a novel seems to be

‘true.’ Why should it matter if contemporary fiction transforms everyday experiences into art? I would argue that Cole, in searching for a lyrical language, is also aiming for a novelistic language that eschews such categories, rejecting, to borrow McCarthy’s terms, prose’s “simplistic oppositions.”

Critically speaking, what might be useful is a more multifaceted view of what literature as a mediating form really denotes. According to Michael Wood, it contains all, or any number of combinations, of the following: “representations or imitations of life as it might be and perhaps is; imaginary people doing real things; real people doing imaginary things; more rarely, imaginary people doing imaginary things; and more rarely still… real people doing real things, but not the things they actually did.”241 For Wood, however,

“[t]he term ‘fiction’”, while it “has come to cover much of the same ground,” it also

“seems, on the face of it, fully to accept a condition (not-fact, not-reality, not-truth) that

‘literature’ and ‘poetry’ never quite settle for.” This question of reality and imagination, the real and fiction, has increasingly placed literature in an ontological crisis, whereby form and content are bound up together in a single artistic purpose. Indeed, as critic James Wood has described, there has been a recent “insistence on breaking the forms” in contemporary literature, “out of a desire to achieve greater verisimilitude, and a belief that the only way to

239 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan 1894), 390. 240 McCarthy, “Writing Machines.” 241 Wood, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, 44.

77 get there is to break the grammar of realism.”242 Given these strategies, the novel might attempt to resemble an integrity both poetry and literary form have without falling victim to the ensuing definitional problems ‘fiction’ has; to think of it in poetic terms as writers like Cole and Lerner do, reroutes the discussion of how their fictional worlds work, and instead, focuses on the experiential mode that the novel takes.

Such an approach bypasses the concerns of earlier authors, like Henry James, of how best to mimic reality within fictional conditions. While for James the effect of a novel on its reader was entirely due to “the success with which the author has produced the illusion of life,” as I have argued, Cole deliberately undercuts such an illusion. Indeed, contemporary writers in general seem to increasingly regard realism in McCarthy’s terms, as simply the “literary convention” a novel employs to convince the reader of its own fiction

– it is “[w[hat opens up beneath the place where we wrongly thought a solid floor lay… an abyss, endlessly regressive, of convention on convention, code on code, reading of reading of reading” and consists of “blatant and splendid take-downs of naturalism” – what ought to be obvious to any reader of fiction. Indeed, his essay is invective to the point of scathing at times; of “the naive and uncritical realism dominating contemporary middlebrow fiction,” as well as “the doctrine of authenticity peddled by creative writing classes the world over, all the more simple-minded” for their occlusive reading habits and writing practices.243 The real, however, is not only “an emporium of simulations and reflections in which the real remains hidden by being disguised as the copy of what it actually is,” but where “its significance lies in its absence.” It is this real that “impinges on all of Beckett’s work, whose unnameables and catastrophes convey the horror and unspeakability of this event to which they never refer far more profoundly than the directly representational

242 Wood, interview with Knausgaard, 77. 243 McCarthy, “Writing Machines.”

78 writing of, say, Primo Levi” – indeed, “a work’s unspoken real can reside in exterior historical fact.” But, the real is not always reliant upon “any putative correspondence between the writer’s work and the empirically understood world”, not to mention having

“nothing to do with authenticity.” Instead, “a thing’s real would consist in its materiality: a sticky, messy and above all base materiality that overflows all boundaries defining the thing’s – and everything’s – identity.” It is, whether fictional or not, “matter”: it “threatens ontology itself.”

Rather than preoccupied with writing a certain ‘reality,’ Cole’s novels aim for an ethical and political, yet aesthetic, fictional prose incorporates elements of essay in tone and subject, as a fictional form. From the French essayer, to try, this understanding of the form reflects Valeria Luiselli’s favoured refrain in her essay collection, Sidewalks, “we are in the process of.”244 Cole and Luiselli expound a type of essay that emphasises its musing form as an attempt, a work that maps out ideas, tries out ideas, tests ideas. Their approach is distinct from the European model of novel-essay that Stefano Ercolino identifies as a genre that “emerged in France, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and reached its highest formal complexity in Austria and Germany, during the interwar period,” and which is concerned “the ideological crisis, which fell upon the epistemological and symbolic apparatus of modernity in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and which culminated following the disasters first of World War I and subsequently of World War II.”245 Indeed, his understanding of the novel-essay shares an underlying methodology with crystalline fiction. Presenting it as form that seeks to aestheticise the problems posed by contemporary society through a controlled fictional discourse, he emphasises that rather

244 Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks, trans. Christina McSweeney (Minneaopolis: Coffee House Press, 2014). All references to this will be made in the body of the thesis. Both the title and the meandering subject of this essay collection recalls Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street. 245 Stefano Ercolino, The Novel-Essay: 1884-1947 (Bassingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), xv.

79 than an open, ambiguous and unresolved form, “the novel-essay… presents, on the contrary, a closed dialectical structure.”246 As such, it represented a kind of literary conceptual art, defined by a central idea and a “characteristic interplay between narration and concept,” and underpinned by a “totalising ambition.”247

In contrast to this tendency towards completion, for Cole and Lusielli the use of an essayistic register does not dictate either a need for factual accuracy, or even a narrative logic; the essay can be a poetic prose form, and include lists, poems, memos, and reference obsequiously to the imaginary world. Luiselli’s “Alternative Routes” is an essay in which these ideas form not only its subject, but the way in which it is written; a kind of meta-essay that is a virtual map for, and of, itself. Not only does the title express multiple possibilities for itself – multiple directions without stipulating an end point, or a conclusion – each section is delineated by their own set of directions: the first reads “Calle Mérida – northbound” (41), the next “Turn left at Durango” (43), then “Circle Plaza Rio de Janeiro

– clockwise” (43), and so on and so forth, each mapping out the author’s cycle route one evening in search of a Portuguese dictionary that includes the word saudade. Indeed, while the essay begins in the active, present tense – “[a] few blocks later, I chain my bike to a lamppost and go into the Librería del Tesoro – one of the few bookstores left in the neighborhood. I look for a Portuguese dictionary, which, once again, I can’t find” (41) – it ends as a denial of expressability: “‘Perhaps what is inexpressible… is the background against which whatever I could not express has its meaning,’ wrote Wittgenstein somewhere” (52). Indeed, she writes in the subjunctive, “If I were to leave my apartment now, I’d ride my bike to the Librería del Tesoro… I’d buy the dictionary… Sometimes I’d

246 Ibid., xvii. 247 Ibid., xvii; xviii.

80 ride in the street – sometimes, on the sidewalk” (52-3). The essay, in other words, maps out its own lack of coherence, drawing attention to the absence of a dictating social concern.

Julius’ meandering, peripatetic walks in Open City work within a similar idiom, and indeed, could be considered in terms of Luiselli’s title, as side walks: occurring outside of, and alongside, his work as a psychiatrist, he follows his thoughts as though walking down alleyways, side routes; they are asides; they move sideways. While on these walks Julius meditates upon many subjects – histories of New York, people he knows, stories he has heard or told, art he has observed, books he has read, music he has listened to – the subject most often woven between these is the conflicting ideas of home. Indeed, in an interview with Aaron Bady for Yale’s Post45 “African Writers in a New World” series, Cole quietly takes issue with being labelled as any kind of writer: “labels,” he argues, “always apply, except when they don’t.”248 Noting trenchantly that “[n]ot caring too much how I’m labeled has gotten me into a bit of trouble at times,” he refers to how “[s]ome Nigerians object to me being called an American writer… as though I were shirking some invisible responsibility to be allied to one place and one place only.” Instead, he does not “care” what he’s “called: African, African-American, American-African, black American, Nigerian

American, Nigerian, American, Yoruba,” because such labels do not acknowledge the

“European antecedents, Indian influences, Icelandic fantasies, Brazilian aspirations” that his writing has. Rather, he refers to labelling as “a game we play with whomever happens to be sitting at the table with us,” or a side effect of literary posturing:

But beyond the labels are various indelible realities: the sordid processes of publishing and marketing, the difficulty of writing well, the unfairness about who gets celebrated and who gets ignored, the difficulty of getting properly paid for any of it. To the extent that I’m in the public eye, I do like to speak to those realities. I speak not as someone who’s above it all, but as someone who tries to be aware of

248 Cole, interview by Bady.

labor, systems of rewards, canon formation, and all the various problems of prejudice that just won’t go away. I try to stay awake. I listen to hip hop. My dreams are not materialist but, inshallah, my feet are on the ground.

Such an opinion on labelling is reflected in his resistance to formal and generic convention.

Not only does his writing absorb aesthetics of his photographic practice, but it exhibits – in an ostensibly transnational attempt to add a level of social thinking to artful writing and narratives of aesthetic experience – a convergence of prose fiction and essay.

Such a resistance to literary classifcation also defines Julius’ thoughts on Africa: his memories of Nigeria, he mentions late in the novel, are like how he considers the past,

“mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float” (155). Indeed, these vague memories are often gestured to by events that happen to him in New York. His initial opinions about Africa unfold early in the novel as he watches a film about Idi Amin Dada, the Ugandan dictator in the 1970s. While “had come prepared to like some things about the film,” he had also “expected that some other things would annoy” him – for example, while the “jaunty credit sequence featured music from the right time period,” it was “not from the right part of Africa: what has Mali to do with Kenya?”

For Julius, “Africa was always waiting, a substrate for the white man’s will, a backdrop for his activities. And so, sitting to experience this film, The Last King of Scotland, I was prepared to be angry again. I was primed to see a white man, a nobody in his own country, who thought, as usual, that the salvation of Africa was up to him” (29). In one of Julius’ asides, he recalls “[w]hile watching the film… an uncomfortable meeting I’d had one evening, in an opulent house in a suburb of Madison a few years before” – he “was a medical student at the time, and our host, an Indian surgeon, had invited me and a number of my classmates to his house… He and his family, he told us, had been expelled from their homes and lands by Idi Amin.” While “successful now,” Julius’ host explained, “if I may

82 speak frankly, I’m still angry. We lost so much, we were robbed at knifepoint, and when I think about Africans – and I know we’re not supposed to say such things in America – when I think about Africans, I want to spit” (30). To Julius, this “bitterness was startling. It was an anger that, I couldn’t help feeling, was partly directed at me, the only other African in the room. The detail of my background, that I was Nigerian, made no difference, for Dr.

Gupta had spoken of Africans, had sidestepped the specific and spoken in the general”

(30-1). Returning to the film, Julius admits that – as if to speak to not only the film but racism, and the state of Africa itself – he “wished to believe that things were not as bad as they seemed. This was the part of me that wanted to be entertained. That preferred not to confront the horror.” Resigning himself to the inevitability of its negation, this “satisfaction did not come: things ended badly as usual” (31).

Julius’ trip to Belgium is thus in some ways a strange effort to find a sense of home elsewhere; away from Nigeria, away from New York. For Julius, Brussels is a city that rests heavily within his imagination – as the place his maternal grandmother lived as a refugee after the Second World War. His visit to the city is shadowed, therefore, by her image, her ghost. “Every now and again,” he writes, “looking into the faces of the women huddled at the tram stops, I imagined that one of them might be my oma,” where “[i]t was a possibility that had come to me each time I was out in the city, that I might see her, that I might be tracing paths she had followed for year, that she might indeed be one of those old women with their orthopedic shoes and crinkly shopping bags, wondering from time to time how her only daughter’s only son was doing.” I argue that this thought of searching for her attempts to create an alternate map of the self, to actualise a European longing, or at least, a longing for another part of himself; as “Part Two” of the novel’s epigram testifies,

“I have searched myself” (147). In this, however, “I could recognize the nostalgic wish- fulfillment fantasy at work. I had almost nothing to go on, and my search, if my poor effort

83 could be called by that term, became insubstantial and expressed itself only as the faint memory of the day she had visited Olumo Rock with us in Nigeria, and had wordlessly massaged my shoulder.” This virtual mapping is echoed as he is about to land in New York on his return – the city’s image from the sky “saddled” Julius’ imagination “with strange mental transpositions: that the plane was a coffin, that the city below was a vast graveyard with white marble and stone blocks of various heights and sizes” (150). Indeed, “[t]he pilot’s voice crackling through the system – We are now making our final approach for landing – added to the anxiety of return because those ordinary and, by now, banal words seemed to carry some ghostly portent” (150). When the plane “broke through the last layer of clouds,” however, the city “in its true form suddenly appeared a thousand feet below”; it was experientially expansive, not morbid, reminiscent not only of “the sprawling scale model of the city that was kept at the Queens Museum of Art,” but of “Borges’s cartographers, who, obsessed with accuracy, had made a map so large and so finely detailed that it matched the empire’s scale on a ratio of one to one” (150). It was an image of the city

“in which each thing coincided with its spot on the map”; a virtual image that is nevertheless also indexical.

Intriguingly, Luiselli’s essay “Alternate Routes” begins in such a way as to recall

Open City’s opening paragraph. Both begin leaving their apartments in the evening: while

Julius does so for a walk – “And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found

Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city” (3) – and Luiselli embarks on a bike ride – “Around six in the evening, when that last layer of daylight begins to detach itself from the objects in our living room and the electric light only serves to blur the somewhat unclear outlines of things even further, I feel an urge to leave the apartment”

(41). Indeed, this ‘urge’ exhibits a similar aim within the prose of finding something, whether as explicit as Luiselli’s definition of the Portuguese word saudade or something

84 more indefinable, ineffable, as a salve for evening melancholy. Luiselli’s prose is soaked in musings on melancholy and nostalgia – as saudade, only “understood by those who love, experience pleasure, and suffer in Portuguese” (42), but also like “a child with a bad squint”

(51); as echoing the “Finnish kaihomielisyys” or the “German Sehnsucht” (43); as a medieval

“humor, an excess of black bile” (43); as the “[b]astard daughter of melancholy” (44).249

The essay explores, through gentle modulation of tone, the variations of each word; seeking for a meaning that will make sense to her, and provide a correlation to Wittgenstein’s

‘inexpressibility’ of the sense, rather than definition, of words. For Luiselli, therefore, as a non-Portuguese speaker, saudade is “those things that are at once beautiful and a little sad: boats, willows, saurian lizards, a bough,” rather than any literally accurate definition may insist upon. “Nostalgia isn’t always for a past,” she argues; instead, “[t]here are things that produce nostalgia in advance – spaces that we know to be lost as soon as we find them – places in which we know ourselves to be happier than we will ever be afterwards.” Indeed,

“[i]n such situations, the soul twists itself around, as if in a voluntary simulacrum of seeing its present in retrospect.” Nostalgia performs like a blueprint, a map, a virtual route for the self, “[l]ike an eye watching itself look from the perspective of a later time, it sees that remote present and yearns for it” (50).250

Indeed, imagined maps are dotted around Sidewalks as images essential to Luisell’s aesthetic form. In the essay “Flying Home,” she linguistically maps out Mexico City’s nine

249 The word saudade is what the editors of the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2014) call an unstranslatable word. For António Quadros, it is because it both “conceal[s] and at the same time reveal[s] a long and mysterious experience that is supra-individual and trans-temporal” (929). Meanwhile Fernando Santoro describes it as having become “particularly suitable for expressing the relationship of the human condition to temporality, finitude, and the infinite,” having been “[d]rawn from a genuine suffering of the soul.” Indeed, as he continues, “[t]he object that produces saudade determines in each case an existential, cultural, aesthetic, religious, metaphysical position (the saudades for a lover, a country, a time, this or that idea, etc.); inversely, everything, from literature to religion and politics, is capable of an interpretation modulated by saudade” (931). 250 Lerner’s 10:04 and McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) both have this neo-Futurist implication – striving toward a more sincere artistic form than what is currently in use. As such, they differ substantially to the modernist emphasis on the present moment as found in Proust and most modernist art movements.

85 dried up rivers: “Chrurubusco, Hondo, Magdalena, Chico, Ameca, Colmena, Piedad,

Mixcoac, Tacubaya” (30). Moreover, for Luiselli, they “seem like little more than empty, arid words”; linguistically and physically barren. In general terms, the essay employs a map- like structure for its prose. Each section is titled with one of Mexico’s hidden rivers; each section operating like an imaginary marker for the river to which it belongs. Her words are imagined as the ideal map – virtual in its unrealisable potential – for the rivers, no longer visible and rarely thought of. This, she elucidates, is what she cries for upon flying home.

While, she argues, “[i]t’s not unusual for some passengers to cry when an airplane takes off… I imagined that it’s not so common to see such a spectacle when the plane finally lands” (30). Suffering from what she calls “reverse vertigo,” she conceives of her tears as “a simple, moist tribute to landing on that great desert lake fed by rivers that have dried up or been channelled underground” – or, in other words, “an expression of resistance to the descent to a future world which, as it draws closer, becomes once again immeasurable” (30,

31). Such ‘resistance’ to the actual, in its finite enclosure, is echoed throughout Sidewalks, where as in the act of “[s]earching for a grave” – “like arranging to meet a stranger in a café… at a given distance, every person could be the one waiting for us; every grave, the one we are searching for” – a necessary preference for ‘searching’ over finding: the find is to embrace the actual, to bring to an end the multiplicities, the possible, and the alternate routes (9).

Clearly more than a ruminative strain, Cole’s incorporation of an essayistic register suggests expansive lines of intellectual inquiry. But, how can ‘the essay’ operate in this way when the form used is stylistically circular and self-enclosed? In such a way as to suggest an aesthetic and ethical practice of literature not confined to traditional literary production,

Cole’s use of Twitter interrogates this very question; the concision, the restriction, of the mode calls for writers to invent strategies in order to overcome them. Leaving “no space

86 for brooding about the death of the author,” Cole believes that the “author, if not dead yet, will die” just as the “reader will die and be replaced by another reader. But literature itself – its peculiar form of communion – is a deeper miracle.”251 Although “at the present moment, books have a near monopoly on the literary reward system (if not on actual literary production),” he likens the impact that technological advancements have had, and will have, on writing to the similar evolution of musical composition – just as the predominant classical soundscape developed into the variety of forms of the contemporary music scene, he “expect[s] that the rewards of literary production will inevitably include people whose work is embedded inside these newer technologies.”252 As such, the Twitter form allows a peculiar kind of aestheticisation of the mode in which his ideas are

“deliver[ed].” Indeed, “thanks to the limitation of length Twitter imposes,” Cole “felt the form would migrate well from one language to another, and from one social context to another” – and this is how his literary production finds its ethical, yet aesthetic, mode. He has transformed the ephemerality and impermanence for which Twitter is generally criticised to become his very subject. For Cole, there are “[s]ituations [that] can get to the point where what needs to be said must be said very simply,” for which “Twitter is paradoxically” unhelpful – it is “not good at helping us express the most needful things” because “[t]here’s so much foolishness around.”253 He acknowledges that it can be, however, sometimes “very good about… saying plainly what needs saying,” where “all of a sudden, a pristine line emerges and I forget to breathe. @Impalestine was one of those who brought us unbearable but un-ignorable news of the world.” Twitter’s capacity for linguistic precision, moreover, evinces his “poetic impulse.” While an open and unfiltered forum that poses a complex alternative to traditional methods of literary production – if

251 Cole, interview by Bady. 252 Cole, interview by Hemon. 253 Cole, interview by Brady

87 used effectively – the way in which the platform has the capacity to mediate aesthetic form into the culture of prosaic experience, not only facilitates the spontaneity and improvisation of Cole’s artistic experiments, but becomes itself an aesthetic mode.

In 2011, Cole began a project on Twitter entitled “Small Fates.” Running until early

2013, the project reimagined the modernist French form of the fait divers. While this form

“has influenced the writing of [Gustav] Flaubert, [Andre] Gide, [Albert] Camus, [J.M.] Le

Clézio and [Roland] Barthes,” the writer to whom Cole turns for direct inspiration is Félix

Fénéon.254 An art historian and critic like Cole, Fénéon wrote fait divers – which translates to

“diverse or various things” – anonymously for the newspaper Le Matin in 1906, somehow

“elevating” what was a prosaic journalist technique “to an art form… inject[ing] them with irony, with a dark humor, with a kind of epigrammatic compression.”255 For Cole, Fénéon was “the greatest practitioner of the form” – his fait divers, dating back to 1906, were only translated and published in English in 2007 – which has “never quite… caught on in the

English language as a literary form.”256 Yet, Cole’s use of Twitter here reflects the use of what was still a reasonably new technology during the fin-de-siécle and into modernism: the newspaper. While the original French title, of his collected fait divers, Les Nouvelles en trois lignes, translates to either “the news in three lines” or “novellas in three lines,” Julian

Barnes, one of the few to critically reflect on this collection in English, observes that

254 Teju Cole, interview by Steve Inskeep, “Simple Tweets Of Fate: Teju Cole's Condensed News,” NPR (April 09 2012). Today, Fénéon is most commonly known as an art critic and dealer, despite the fact that he was the “editor and organiser of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations” and French “publisher of Joyce and translator of Northanger Abbey”; he was also the inventor of the term ‘neo-Impressionist’ in 1886, and was connected to an array of artistic and literary figures that were essential to developing French modernist aesthetic culture (including Paul Signac, Georges Saurat, Henri Matisse, Paul Verlaine, and Stephane Mallarmé). Indeed, as Julian Barnes explains that Fénéon was “invisible partly because he was a facilitator rather than a creator,” and his influence on “literary and artistic history” instead “comes down to us in shards, kaleidoscopically” (Julian Barnes, review of Novels in Three Lines, by Félix Fénéon, “Behind the Gas Lamp,” LRB 29, no.19 (October 2007), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n19/julian-barnes/behind-the-gas-lamp). Not only were his nouvelles stylistically “elliptical” and “taciturn,” so was he personally; even the way his work was contextualised in Parisian artistic culture at the turn of the century is unclear. 255 Cole, interview by Steve Inskeep, “Simple Tweets Of Fate: Teju Cole's Condensed News,” NPR (April 09 2012). 256 Teju Cole, “Small Fates,” Teju Cole (March 2011), http://www.tejucole.com/small-fates/.

“nouvelles normally means ‘short stories’ in French.”257 The English title, he argues, Novels in

Three Lines, is a deliberate mistranslation that suffers from what he terms the “slipperiness of fictional taxonomy”: although it is “a completely impossible stretch to make it mean

‘novels’,” the English title subverts the formal discourse of the novel in a way not dissimilar to the destabilising form of the fait divers itself.258 Indeed, Cole reimagines the form for its compelling virtual mode; a self-entangled, suggestive blueprint that can be read rather as a manual for describing things than as a self-contained nuanced whole. The fait divers constructs an aesthetic reading in such a way as to evoke the virtual discourse surrounding the Symboliste poets, gesturing outward to an image of ideal form.

The fait divers form is notable for its prosaic, yet poetic, brevity – usually only three lines at most – and concerns marginal ‘small’ news stories: “Raoul G., of Ivry, an untactful husband, came home unexpectedly and stuck his blade in his wife, who was frolicking in the arms of a friend,” or “Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.” In emphasising the precise aesthetic of the form, Cole describes the way that Fénéon’s “emotional unease and formal perfection” transformed the journalistic register of the fait divers into “a modernist form,” and in doing so, associates Fénéon’s artistic eye with his own intentions for a contemporary reimagining of ordinary Nigerian experience.259 Indeed, in his interpretation of the form, Cole argues that in order “[t]o signal certain differences between [his] writing and that of the French journalists,” he named his project “Small Fates.” Explaining that although the title of his project and that of the form “have nothing to do with each other,” the “near-rhyme of fates and fait” echo some of the wit to which the form aspires. In this

257 Luc Sante, “Introduction,” Novels in Three Lines Félix Fénéon (New York: New York Review of Books, 2007); Barnes, “Gas Lamp.” 258 Barnes, “Behind the Gas Lamp,” London Review of Books, Vol. 29, 19 (4 October 2007). 259 Cole, “Small Fates.”

89 project, Cole interrogates the perception of Nigeria’s seeming otherworldliness in order “to show that what happens in the rest of the world happens in Nigeria too,” interweaving textual fugues of “crimes of passion, inexplicable murders, courtroom outbursts, and moments of greed” that are “beautifully absurd, charged with a… meaningless symmetry.”

The emphasis, moreover, while generally on the story itself, often translates across to the reader as solely aesthetic: here, a “news report” can “collapse… into syllogism,” while in

“others, the inflection is more subdued.” In other words, they are linguistic “snap shots” of the fates of Nigerian experience:

I found myself drawn to the “small” news. I began to read the metro sections of newspapers, and the crime sections. When I was in Lagos itself, where there is a thriving newspaper culture, I bought several papers and went through them each day. In Brooklyn, I rely on the internet, through which I have access to some dozen Nigerian papers each day: Daily Times, NEXT, Vanguard, Punch, This Day, National Mirror, Tribune, PM News, Guardian, and so on. What I found in the metro and crime sections of these papers was a different quality of everyday life. It was life in the raw…

While much of the material was “too brief, too odd, and certainly too sensational for the kind of writing [a] book requires,” the fait divers offer a suitably virtual form for the kind of

“imprecise translation” of experience Cole aimed to achieve.260 Arguing that, like Fénéon, he allows his fait divers some formal variation, he notes that not only does he avoid a

‘narrow definition,’ his “small fates are more tightly compressed than most fait divers… and often more laconic.”261 What Cole prioritises, “whether they are funny or not, is the closed circle of the story,” where “[e]ach small fate is complete in itself,” “need[ing] neither elaboration nor sequel.” This distance from explanation, however, creates “the satisfaction of the epigram”, instead focusing on “the ambiguity about why what happened should have happened at all.” His small fates “bring news of a Nigerian modernity [to the Western

260 Sam Twyford-Moore, “Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole?” Meanjin, http://meanjin.com.au/articles/post/twitter-the-novel-tejucole-teju-cole/. 261 Cole, “Small Fates.”

90 world], full of conflict, tragedies, and narrow escapes,” and aestheticise through compression events that perceptually shock the Western reader’s experiences of the familiar. Indeed, while often also darkly humoured, many of his “Small Fates” read like a koan in the way that they create the effect of “the first-half of a joke,” without the necessity of a resolution:

Arrested for theft in Mecca, the Nigerian immigrant Ibrahim is now learning to use his left hand. Oluwatosin was swimming in a pool in Ikotun when he entered the past tense. God is in all things. In Lagos, ThankGod was murdered by his brother. In Abuja, Godswill was appointed Minister of Power. In Ikotun, Mrs Ojo, who was terrified of armed robbers, died in her barricaded home, of smoke inhalation. In the matter of a 12-year-old girl in Ekiti, Innocent, 35, admits he wasn’t.262

These fragments deftly and succinctly capture the suggestion of a narrative, rather than the story itself, encouraging the reader to imagine and create the surrounding narrative ephemera themselves.

Concerned as they are with linguistic compression, are these fait divers concerned with the failure of expressability as is his prose? How does a form so concerned with its own precision of meaning, also represent the way in which individual tragedy almost

‘defeats language’? Does the way that Cole transforms actual, almost ordinary, experiences of personal tragedy into art, occlude their ethical, political function? As James questions, does the form, in its artfulness, risk ‘becoming a victim of its own elegance’? I argue that

Cole’s fait divers seek to give voice to what is difficult to say in such a way as to strip everything away until there is nothing but language; where its artifice protects what, for

Cole, needs to be said. Indeed, in a 1962 essay on the structure of the fait divers, Roland

Barthes argued that, formally, they are “total news, or more precisely, immanent,” because

262 Teju Cole, “’I don’t normally do this kind of thing’: 45 Small Fates,” New Inquiry (13 August 2013), http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/dtake/i-dont-normally-do-this-kind-of-thing-45-small-fates/.

91 each “contains [the entire story’s] knowledge in itself.”263 Moreover, because it “refers formally to nothing but itself,” it is an inherently self-referential and enclosed form. He writes:

[O]n the level of reading, everything is given within the fait divers; its circumstances, its causes, its past, its outcome; without duration and without context, it constitutes an immediate, total being which refers, formally at least, to nothing implicit; in this it is related to the short story and the tale, and no longer to the novel. It is its immanence which defines the fait-divers.264

While some fait divers, however, work entirely in a single register as Barthes describes –

“MYXOMATOSIS. n. 1 Viral disease of rabbits. 2 Radiohead song. 3 Word spelled by

Ibukun, 15, in Abuja to win the 2012 Spellbound Contest” – others can be comprised of an implicit narrative, working in a similar way to how Clune describes the prose poem: “the work’s closure or actualization is [located] outside of the form.”265 Indeed, Flaubert “found the story of Madame Bovary in [this] provincial fait divers”: “Delphine Delamare, 27, wife of a medical officer in Ry, displayed insufficient austerity. Worse, she ran up debts. To avoid paying them, she took poison.”266 Fait divers, therefore, can not only be an isolated, complete fragments, but blueprints for expansive novelistic description, referencing outside of its form to a broader idiom of meaning.

Reading the fait divers form as such, it generally employs some kind of irony – what critic Matt Pearce terms as “dark glances through the looking-glass”; although prosaic, it invokes something that resembles a poetic register.267 Indeed, this poetic irony is reminiscent of poet Grossman’s “bitter logic of the poetic principle.”268 In an essay on Hart

263 Roland Barthes, “Structure of the Fait-Divers,” Critical Essays, trans. Richard Hower (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1981) 186. 264 Barthes, “Structure of the Fait-Divers,” 186-7. 265 Cole, “45 Small Fates.” 266 Cole, “Small Fates.” 267 Fénéon, cited by Cole, “Small Fates”; Matt Pearce, “Death by Twitter,” The New Inquiry (13 October 2011), http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/death-by-twitter/. 268 Grossman, Long Schoolroom, 11.

Crane, Grossman delineates this philosophy as that which underpins his discussions of poetry’s virtual mode:

[T]he manifest world (the only one there is) is subject to the logic of representation because it comes to mind only as representation. And representation, our only access to [the] world, reproduces its hierarchical and exclusionary structures as social formations. The poem is the site on which originality is expressed as the attempt to discover alternative structures of intelligibility that do the work of representation in another way.

Just like the poem, the ironic fait divers is thus a form that seeks to express meaning in a way that is not necessarily bound by the restrictions of linguistic meaning. While operating within the literal mode, it also resists it by suggesting that the meaning of the story lies elsewhere. This gestural gap is where the virtual mode operates. Although its actual form – the two or so lines – are compact and self-enclosed, its virtual mode refuses to be

“compromised by the finitude of its [own] terms.”269 For Cole, what is proposed instead is the image of, or a map for, an implied narrative; whether real or imaginary, indexical or aestheticised.

More than just an ethical form, Cole is searching for an empathetic form. One that is more “convinc[ing],” as Sebald wrote, than painting or writing in “captur[ing] and document[ing]” experience; contained in which is an image that somehow “contain[s] the secret.”270 Sebald claimed that he “believe[s] that writing and photography are also very intimately linked with the art of recherche,” and that while it is “something that today’s writers neglect,” engaging in the “art of reportage” creates a work that not only blurs the lines between genres and forms, but mediates the experience of both art and life with

269 Lerner, “You’re a Poet.” 270 W.G. Sebald, interview by Christian Scholz, “’But the Written Word is Not a True Document,’: a Conversation with W.G. Sebald on Literature and Photography,” Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald, eds. Lisa Patt and Chris Dillbohner (Los Angeles: ICI Press, 2007), 106; 107.

93 integrity.271 “I see the literary,” Cole argues, “as a modest contribution to closing the empathy gap” – while often it achieves “[l]ittle more than that,” the aim is “important anyway.”272 For him, “[t]here’s a refuge in those things – in poems, in novels, in tweets – that contain no clear policy recommendations,” no conventional restrictions; in other words, when what is said is mirrored by how it is said – despite the possibility of its eventual failure – fiction comes close to being consolatory. As F. Scott Fitzgerald advised his daughter, “[i]f you have anything to say… you have got to feel it so desperately that that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter – as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.”273

271 Ibid., 108. 272 Cole, interview by Bady. 273 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1945), 303-4.

Chapter Two: The Negative World

Imagination equals nostalgia for the past, the absent; it’s the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

Cyril Connolly

STRUCTURES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

For Iris Murdoch in Against Dryness, writing fiction must always be an act of resistance against the real. She cautions that “[l]iterature must always represent a battle between real people and images,” opposing with critical and linguistic force the actualities of social life and literature’s imaginary mode.1 What, however, is the significance of Murdoch’s warning for postmillennial fiction, resistant as it is to writing novels devoid of any reference to the real? For writers like those mentioned so far, is this distinction so transparent as to not warrant questioning? Are Cole’s aesthetics – ethically charged and aesthetically formed as they are – content to leave real people to the real world, and their portraits to art? The aesthetic experiences within Cole’s novels engage in these precise questions between fiction and nonfiction; imagination and the real; art and social experience. They interrogate how

Cyril Connolly, cited by Luiselli, Sidewalks, 50. 1 Iris Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” Encounter (January 1961), 20.

95 fictionalising can, but also how it fails to, transform ordinary experiences into subjects for art. Indeed, both novels aim to create a new experiential language not just for the spectator of artworks, but for the reader of fiction:

I think in many places in the book I tried to slow things down to the point where I can give an account of what’s happening when a person is looking at something – not necessarily an art object, but some sort of object that is somehow removed in time. And there’s something that happens – not just aesthetically, but psychologically, too.2 Cole wanted, in Open City, “to tell the story in a way that reflected the way a certain we live today – the experience of buying books, reading books, going to museums”; while some ordinary experiences are common in postmillennial fiction, aesthetic experience is not:

“[t]here almost seems to be an unwritten rule against bringing in other cultural experiences into a book.”3 As Peter de Bolla defines in Art Matters, “[w]hat distinguishes affective or aesthetic experiences from others is the fact that they are occasioned by encounters with artworks.”4 Indeed, “[t]his proposes a mutual definition, so that what elicits aesthetic experience is an artwork and an artwork is defined as an object that produces aesthetic experience.” In placing such focus on aesthetic experiences that are not “reflected very often in fiction,” both novels explore literature’s negotiation of the real in fictional experience. Why is this of particular concern in postmillennial fiction? For fear of creating a literary mode too focussed on its own artfulness to, as James writes, “confront twenty- first-century actualities?”5 In writing prose, Cole not only aims for “the curation of incident” – aestheticising experience – but “is concerned with structures of consciousness”

– or, in other words, exploring the levels of perception involved in experiencing.6 While not

2 Cole, interview by Tepper. 3 Ibid. My emphasis. 4 De Bolla, Art Matters, 9. 5 James, “Crystalline Novel,” 856. 6 Cole, “Voice of the Mind.”

96 describing it in explicit terms, his meditations on form concern the prioritisation of the imgination in such a way as to echo the aims of the virtual mode.

The way that Cole intersects the visual image with novelistic prose is a vital question to his approach to fiction’s resistance to actualising conditions. From using visual metaphors in reviews – he “feel[s] Tranströmer’s use of imagery is like… contact printing, in which a photograph is made directly from a film negative or film positive. There is little elaborate construction evident; rather, the sense is of the sudden arrival of what was already there, as when a whale comes up for air: massive, exhilarating, and evanescent” (“Miracle

Speech”) – to the more permanent venue of his column “Double Take” for The New

Inquiry, which concerns how the visual can be experienced through prosaic imagery, Cole’s commentary on the form his writing takes is indicative of not only his background in art historical scholarship, but his subsequent preoccupation with the way that art can be mediated in contemporary literature.7 Perhaps most striking is how he categorizes his own position as a writer – “I made a sideways move from art history into writing”; art forms the substance of his interrogation into the reinvigoration of fiction’s contemporary mode.

Literature’s “stern distinction between fiction and nonfiction,” he claims, misses the point of artful writing:

It’s not at all a natural way of splitting up narrated experience, just as we don’t go around the museum looking for fictional or nonfictional paintings. Painters know that everything is a combination of what’s observed, what’s imagined, what’s overheard, and what’s been done before. Is Monet a nonfiction painter and Ingres a fiction painter? It’s the least illuminating thing we could ask about their works.8 While “[s]ome lean more heavily on what’s seen,” and “some more on what’s imagined,” all synchronise their “various sources” with the aim of creating new conditions – with

7 Cole, “Miracle Speech.” 8 Cole, interview by Hemon.

97 recombinatory force – for perceptual experience.9 Indeed, taking issue with how “these days, a work has to be clearly marked ‘fiction’ or ‘nonfiction,’” his novel Every Day is for the

Thief is thus considered “a work of fiction because it has quite a number of things in it that are made-up,” not because it is “a literal record of reality.” Instead, in describing his style, he returns to artistic metaphor; while “fiction is more exploratory” than essayistic writing,

“what I strive for both in fiction, but also in the best non-fiction that I try to write, is to actually take a photo of a situation rather than an object.”10 Here, what Cole interrogates is an aesthetic aim for a literary language that ignores generic conditions for a more reflexive mode of expression, ethically and aesthetically potent.

What happens to Murdoch’s warning, however, when literary fiction incorporates images of ‘real’ significance; photographs that depict ‘real people’? Working within a crystalline mode in its artful, yet ethical, concerns, and within a lyrical mode through its use of the photographic negative, Cole’s prose is nevertheless concerned with a resistance to how fact is tied into current ways of understanding the real. Of Everyday is for the Thief, he cautions that “you know a lot of it must have been made up, not just because of the label, but because of some of the texture of the recollection. It is too precise not to be made up in some way.” He argues, moreover, that the confusion about its ‘truthfulness’ has been due to the inclusion of photographs that appear to be illustrative of the storyline, or at least illustrative of the real world. But are photographs necessarily bound to their resemblance to the real world? Cole does not think so: photographs incorporated within novels such as this are themselves “works of fiction”:

9 Cole does goes on to say that although “[w]riters know this too, they knew it a lot better before the market took such a hold.” 10 Teju Cole, interview by Paul Morton, “You Can’t Avert Your Eyes,” The Millions (24 April 2014), http://www.themillions.com/2014/04/you-cant-avert-your-eyes-the-millions-interviews-teju-cole.html.

I’m often asked about how a photograph can be part of a work of fiction. For me, the fiction happens in the placement, in the way a photograph taken under one set of conditions is made to suggest another. A photo becomes fictional on the basis of the text beside it, or the photos that precede or follow it… My photos for Every Day is for the Thief narrate an imagined Lagos, much like the text in which they are interspersed.11 For Cole, photographs embedded in fiction can be used “in a way that has imprecise connections to the text,” where, rather than descriptive, the images become part of the harmony of the fiction, the aesthetics of the story (this is also seen in novels by Julio

Cortázar, Catherine Taylor, Carole Maso, and Aleksandar Hemon).12 The photographs in

Every Day is for the Thief are therefore essential to the effect of the prose on the reader, not as a representation of events, but as an integral to the construction of the narrative in the fictional mode. The novel’s actual images affirm the postmillennial aim of intensifying the real within imaginary conditions without being metafictionally reflexive of its own construction. Cole’s use of visual media differs crucially from that of other authors who employ a similar use of visual art is that the images are all street photographs, all taken by the author, and all created within the fiction of the prose – correlating his images with those of others, Cole argues that “almost everyone else is using other people’s photos, found photos, or (in Sebald’s case) sometimes snapshots. In my case, I have for sure spent more time in the past decade taking pictures than writing.” The visual accompaniment to the written material thus operates as another layer of the novel’s lyrical language. Visually,

Cole argues that the photographs “are anti-spectacular pictures”:

I was trying to present a series of pictures that if you did not read the text and you just looked at each photograph in the sequence that is presented, there is a kind of psychological mood that I’m building, which is quite similar to the one of the book. I think of it as a slant rhyme. They rhyme with the book in a slant way.13

11 Teju Cole, interview by Chelsea Matiash, “Life in Lagos,” Wall Street Journal (30 April 2014), http://blogs.wsj.com/photojournal/2014/04/30/life-in-lagos-as-shown-in-teju-coles-every-day-is-for-the- thief/. 12 Cole, interview by Hemon. 13 Cole, “Avert Your Eyes.”

The language Cole uses here resonates with a conversation he had with photographers

Rebecca Norris Webb and Alex Webb about their collaborative photographic books – the latest of which evolved in the same way as Every day is for the Thief, as a blog.14 Noting how critic Pico Iyer observed that their “work sometimes rhymes,” Norris Webb explains how she “can pinpoint these subtle echoes or slant rhymes – such as a shared palette or an affinity for surreal or surprising moments.”15 As a poet, Norris Webb shares a similar intention to mix media: of prose, she describes that she is “drawn to the tactile nature of the form, to the paradox of being able to hold in my hands a series of intangible moments.” Every Day is for the Thief is not, therefore, simply a fictional work that includes images; the way in which images intersperse the narrative refuses traditional categorisations of fiction.

While without the use of actual images, Open City appears to be a traditional novel,

Cole nevertheless incorporates actual images, just not within the pages of the book itself.

Between September 2010 and March 2011, he posted several images and written quotes on a Tumblr site entitled op cit.16 Not only an abbreviation of the title of the novel, it also refers to the Latin term for ‘opere citato,’ meaning ‘in the work cited.’ While it quotes text from writers, philosophers, and dictionaries that correspond to certain sections of what Julius is ruminating on in the novel, op cit also features actual images; both images that recall certain things and places that Julius describes – such as “Panorama of the battlefield of Waterloo and Mont-Saint-Jean,” which, as Cole directs, corresponds to page 97 of Open City – and the artwork that Julius encounters, particularly that of the two core aesthetic experiences in

14 “Two Looks,” with “its mix of photographs – ours and other photographers’ – and short text pieces… became the model for “On Street Photography and the Poetic Image.” (“Slant Rhymes.”) 15 Norris Web, “Slant Rhymes.” 16 Teju Cole, op cit http://op-cit.tumblr.com.

100 the novel of John Brewster and Martin Munkácsi.17 Using a medium that is more interactive than the novel form not only allows Cole to make accessible ‘real’ experiences of art – as well as visual artwork, he placed a link to a recording of Mahler’s Ninth

Symphony – but allows the novel to gesture outside of itself to actual conditions of aesthetic experience; and indeed, allows the reader the apparatuses to simultaneously experience what Julius encounters.18

But if Open City does not use actual images within the prose of the novel itself, how does the use of virtual images construct a corresponding conflict between fiction’s imaginary conditions and the conditions of the real? In other words, how do images of aesthetic experience say something about the way in which real aesthetic experiences are encountered? Quoting Martin Donougho’s article “Stages of the Sublime in North

America,” James argues that writers of this mode have “reanimated the idea that ‘the sublime… come to form part of the furniture of our common world.’”19 Indeed, fiction that imbues experiences of art with lyricism “can mobilize perceptions of the mundane made marvellously strange, framing ‘the sublime,’ as Philip Shaw suggests, ‘in a positive light as the means by which the beautiful is prevented from slipping into the merely agreeable.’”20 Writing aesthetic experiences – whether entirely lived or amplified through lyricisation – can thus “retrieve in poignant yet unsentimental terms moments of sublimity from the onrush of daily experience so as to explore how such moments become the occasion for both individual and shared discernment that arises out of quotidian wonder.”

They interpret and “stage our compulsion”; mediated experience becomes a performance

17 The first captions a painting attributed to painter John Brewster as follows: “Francis O. Watts With Bird, 1805, John Brewster, Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York. op. cit., p. 38-39.” The second: “Martin Munkácsi, Liberia, 1931. op. cit., p. 152.” 18 This entry is introduced by Cole as, “Simon Rattle discussing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, with excerpts of his performance of the piece with the Berlin Philharmonic. op. cit., p. 249-254,” and the hyperlink is as follows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3DHYRMoTN4. 19 James, “Crystalline Novel,” 846. 20 Shaw, cited in James, “Crystalline Novel,” 846.

101 of what we encounter in everyday life. “By dramatizing that compulsion,” James argues,

“these novelists aren’t simply reaching outside the immediate sphere of concrete social actions to savor sublime events for their own sake.” Instead, they encourage us to “value such moments as socially or ethically instructive in the first place.” This is particularly so of

Cole’s experiential aesthetics: visiting the American Folk Art Museum connects a Nigerian man with a deaf painter; viewing Munkácsi’s photographs refer Julius to Nazi Germany;

Nigeria’s National Museum documents a deplenishing cultural voice.

Early in the novel, Julius visits New York’s American Folk Art Museum: rather than part of a ritual experience, he retreats inside the museum by chance in order to escape inclement weather. Described as exhibiting “the art of a country that had an aristocracy but did not have the patronage of courts: a simple, open-faced, and awkward art,” the museum’s curatorial program “featured” artists who “were, in almost every case, working outside the elite tradition,” and who “lacked formal training, but [whose] work had soul”

(36). The specific exhibition to which Julius is drawn features the work of the deaf artist,

John Brewster, he immediately notes that “the scale of the exhibition made it clear that he had been much in demand as an artist” (37). Encapsulated within these paintings is silence as a kind of formal consolation – which Julius perceives to be “brought to life by an incisive gaze. The effect was unsettling. The key, as I found out, was that John Brewster was profoundly deaf, and the same was true of many of the children he portrayed.” Indeed, the paintings are rendered as if behind glass – “[e]ach of the portraits was a sealed-away world, visible from without, but impossible to enter,” a peculiar quality of silence and stillness, which is for Julius reserved for narratives of profound quietness of the deaf.

Considering this relationship, he observes the paintings from an oft-referenced intellectual perspective – which, indeed, accesses Cole’s own ekphrastic inclination:

102

Standing before Brewster’s portraits, my mind quiet, I saw the paintings as records of a silent transaction between artist and subject. A laden brush, in depositing paint on the panel or canvas hardly registers a sound, and how great is the peace palpable in those great artists of stillness: Vermeer, Chardin, Hammershøi (38). For Julius, “Brewster hadn’t resorted to indirect gazes or chiaroscuro to communicate the silence of his world,” while Vermeer, Chardin, and Hammershøi had; rather the subjects’

“faces were well lit and frontal, and yet they were quiet” (38), while “his images were imbued with what that long silence had taught him: concentration, the suspension of time, an unobtrusive wit” (39).

Here, the stillness of the viewed work overflows into Julius’ experience of it, and is even reflected by where they are exhibited – perhaps artfully amplified, as Cole himself notes, as a gallery, admitted he had “actually only been [there] once or twice.”21 As Julius enters the gallery, his experience of the space is figured in terms of the colonial context of

Brewster’s work, where the gallery’s “row of slender white columns running through its middle,” and “floors [of] polished cherrywood” are “elements” that “echoed the colonial architecture of the New England and Middle Colonies” (36). The silent and self-contained aesthetic that Julius observes in the portraits, moreover, corresponds to the solitude that

Julius experiences in the space: “[t]he silence was even more profound, I thought, as I stood alone in that gallery, when the private world of the artist was total in its quietness”

(38). Indeed, Julius’ solitary and introspective experience of the space, as “the only person there,” resonates with the artwork, “heighten[ing] the feeling of quietness” that he “got from almost all the portraits,” to the point where, although the “stillness of the people depicted was certainly part of it, as was the sober color palette of each panel,” Julius nonetheless begins to attribute aspects of the space to the artwork, explaining that “there was something more, something harder to define: an air of hermetecism” (37). Indeed, the

21 Cole, interview by Tepper.

103 space that the art creates draws him out of the present moment, where “[t]he sense of having wandered into the past was complete” (36), and he had “lost all track of time before those images, fell deep into their world as if all the time between them and [him] had somehow vanished… eventually walk[ing] down the stairs and out of the museum… with the feeling of someone who had returned to the earth from a great distance” (39-40).

Cole complicates this rendering of gallery space through Julius’ later visit to the

International Center for Photography, at which is held an exhibition of Martin Munkácsi’s photography. Described as a “white gallery” (152), the space employs a contemporary aesthetic model; its bareness naturally eliciting a contemplative response. Indeed, despite the “press of murmuring spectators,” and one particular interlocutor with whom Julius engages in discussion, he is more conscious of the act of voyeurism: his observations are particularly attentive to surfaces, as he contrasts the opaque white walls with the transparency of the “Plexiglass cases at waist height” which contain “copies of the magazine, showing Munkácsi’s work,” and notes that “our eyes moved over the surfaces of

Munkácsi’s photographs as he talked.” Using the exhibition to meditate upon photography,

Julius enters into a particularly modernist discourse about the photograph’s relationship with the moment, gesturing towards essays by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roland Barthes, and

Walter Benjamin, using the latter to frame his own meditation: “[p]hotography seemed to me, as I stood there in the white gallery with its rows of pictures… an uncanny art like no other,” where “[o]ne moment, in all of history, was captured, but the moments before and after it disappeared into the onrush of time.” In his 1928 essay “A Small History of

Photography,” Benjamin suggested that the photographic aesthetic is “to focus [on] the moment rather than hurrying on past it; during the considerable period of the exposure, the subject as it were grew into the picture, in the sharpest contrast with appearance in a

104 snap-shot.”22 Indeed, as Benjamin argues, photography could “find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently but we, looking back, may rediscover it.”23 For Julius, Munkácsi’s photographs of the 1930s depicted the growth of Nazi Germany; “there was the image, at once expected and unexpected, in the middle ground of a row of soldier, of the new German chancellor.

Walking close behind him, with his contorted nightmare of a face, was Goebbels” (154).

Julius’ experience quickly becomes unendurable, noticing a young Jewish couple looking at the same photograph – “I needed to move away, immediately, needed to rest my eye elsewhere and be absent from this silent encounter into which I had inadvertently barged…

I couldn’t bear to look at them, or at what they were looked at, any longer” (154).

It is specifically with regard to Benjamin’s term of the “snap-shot” that Julius frames Munkácsi’s photography. Describing them as “snaps,” Julius observes an in-built tension in the photographs, suggesting that “Munkácsi’s journalism was dynamic” and held a certain “alertness” (152). That the photographs “were so carefully composed but always seemed to have been taken on the go” prompts Julius to consider the works explicitly in regard to its aesthetic origins, noting that “[i]t was from him… that Henri Cartier-Bresson had developed the ideal of the decisive moment” (152). Introduced in his influential 1952 essay “The Decisive Moment,” Cartier-Bresson had structured his early work around the concept of the instant decisif (a concept perhaps inspired by his interest in Zen aesthetics), explaining that “[o]f all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant” and “deal[s] in things which are continually

22 Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” One Way Street, Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), 245. 23 Benjamin, “Photography,” 253.

105 vanishing.”24 Critic Carlos Fuentes identifies this core temporal principle in Cartier-

Bresson’s Mexican photography in particular, as “[a]rt that is simultaneously instant and eternal.”25 Indeed, Cartier-Bresson developed his snapshot technique specifically as a means of capturing the transitory and the ephemeral. His photographs do not aim to just capture or record a moment, but aim to preserve the poetry present in that moment, and not the next; in waiting for the precise moment of revelation when the subject is rendered in balance, Cartier-Bresson accesses the ephemerality and transitive nature of the present moment; the sublimity of the experience. Julius’ encounters at these gallery spaces are focused around an experiential model that draws together these photographic interrogations of the aesthetic of the fugitive moment. Within these specific excerpts of gallery experience, therefore, Cole explores aesthetic experience in specifically temporal terms; literary mediations of the image echo the core photographic aesthetic question of how the impression of an experience can be described in visual terms or as simultaneously fleeting and permanent.

Every Day is for the Thief is itself a snapshot of Nigeria’s cultural failures. Although it occupies a similar aisthetic register, unlike Open City, it is less a novel than either, stylistically, “a guidebook in negative,” or, methodologically, an experiment in conceptual art.26 Rather than a novel, Cole considers it broadly as “a work of fiction, or when pressed… a novella.”27 Indeed, as Mark O’Connell wrote in a review of the book, Cole’s writing produces “an artful wreckage of formal expectations”; a virtual ‘negative’ novel

24 Henri Cartier-Bresson, “Introduction to The Decisive Moment,” Photographers on Photography, ed. N. Lyons (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966), 44. 25 Carlos Fuentes, “Introduction,” Henri Cartier-Bresson: Mexican Notebooks (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 11. 26 Cole, interview by Bollen. 27 Cole, “Avert Your Eyes.”

106 refusing to satisfy aesthetic conventions.28 The work’s composition elucidates precisely this resistance: after a trip to Nigeria in 2005, Cole returned to New York to write “a series of blog posts” about it producing “one chapter each day” for a month. Rather than being composed as a novel, the project developed “as a limited edition experiment,” becoming “a fiction” but remaining “close to the experience”; in other words, drawing on real experiences but reimagining their ontological logic.29 After the project had finished, however, Cole “took it offline,” and it was only afterwards that publishers approached Cole with the suggestion that it ought to be turned into a book.30 In creating the work in “this seemingly unfiltered way about Lagos, about our contemporary situation,” Every Day is for the Thief has crucially embodied, for Cole, the conceptual impulse that can “mak[e] something alive in the moment.” In seeking to reflect this experiential mediacy through form, Cole distinguished himself from the failures of other writers to break with tradition.

Suggesting that “people who tried to write about Lagos, for the most part, had written a fairly conventional type of novel,” his own work was motivated by the “need to find ways to speak truth to power,” striving for an ethical prose through aesthetic means. Indeed, it is for this reason that Cole maintains that “art is really important” today; rather than as “a way of convincing people,” his use of art is a way of engaging with his immediate context, of “testifying to your presence in the world.”

What happens when what is experienced is not sublime? Or at least, when it is not written as such? The aesthetic spaces of Every Day is for the Thief are grimly sparse.

Particularly so at Nigeria’s National Museum – “in Onikan in the heart of old Lagos” – which precariously sits in “a combination of the borrowed old and the uncertain new” (72),

28 Mark O’Connell, “Escaping the Novel,” Slate (6 April 2014), http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/04/teju_cole_s_every_day_is_for_the_thief_reviewed.html. 29 Cole, interview by Bollen; interview by Hemon. 30 Cole, interview by Bollen.

107

“consist[ing] of three or four low buildings set at the end of a drive fringed with manicured lawns” (73). He is “the only guest” in the grounds, the entrance, and indeed the gallery itself – having “looked forward to this visit for many years” the museum “has been a memorial touchstone” (73). Where Julius’ gallery visits in Open City provoked a kind of reverence for the artworks (indeed, an almost transcendent experience), here, the narrator expresses an ambivalent reaction to the museum space, despite his expectations. As a space he remembers from his childhood, which has held “many of my musings about Nigerian cultural patrimony,” and “insubstantial recollections” that he has of his original home,

Lagos, he attributes the space with a recollective quality, explaining that “[a]ll people who are far away from home have something they hold on to. For me, it was the museum and the meaning I had invested in its collection.” Indeed, as a space viewed through the transformative – and sublime – lens of memory, his experience of the gallery is distressing:

The galleries, cramped, are spatially unlike what I remember or had imagined, and the artifacts are caked in dust and under dirty plastic screens. The whole place has a tired, improvised air about it, like a secondary school assignment finished years ago and never touched since. The deepest disappointment, though, is not in presentation. It is in content. I honestly expected to find the glory of Nigerian archaeology and art history on display here. I had hoped to see the best of the Ife bronzes, the fine Benin brass plaques and figures, Nok terra-cottas, the roped vessels of Igbo-Ukwu, the art for which Nigeria is justly admired in academies and museums the world over (74).

Unlike other fictional experiences of art, here, Cole offers an antithetical aesthetic experience: where experience is elevated through memory – a kind of fictionalising or lyricisation – and yet is flattened by its actuality. Of the artwork in the museum, he expresses a kind of distanced sadness not only in the quantity of displayed work –

“[t]hough there are examples of each kind of art, they are few, are rarely of the best quality, and are meagrely documented” – but the effect of the art that is there on the space: “[t]he whole enterprise is clotted with a weird reticence. It is clear that no one cares about the

108 artifacts” (73-4). He argues, moreover, that “[t]here are such gaps in the collection that one can only imagine that there has been recent plunder. The best pieces have probably found their way into the hands of dealers in Paris, Zurich and elsewhere” (74). Instead, the narrator recalls how similar “Nigerian art” was exhibited to much greater effect at Western museums, and for whom the experience at “the Metropolitan Museum in New York was excellent,” and “the same had been true at the British Museum, as well as the Museum für

Volkerkunde in Berlin.” The intellectual tone created by this distance is striking in the way it evaluates the culture of post-modern Western curation and display:

A clean environment, careful lighting, and above all, outstanding documentation that set the works in the proper cultural context. What each of those places had done was create a desire in me to see this astonishing art at its best, to see it in its own home. London, New York, and Berlin had made me long for Lagos. The West has sharpened my appetite for ancient African art. And Lagos is providing a crushing disappointment. This paradoxical turn causes the thoughts of the narrator to drift to “the troubled history of the collecting of African art, the way colonial authorities had carted off treasures to their capitals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” and, in doing so, Cole’s art historical, and ethical, voice assumes primacy. Reflecting on the comparative “rich[ness]” of Nigerian museums “when the British archaeologists Frank Wilson and John Wallace had been curators” in the “1960s and ‘70s,” and when “the outstanding art historian Udoh

Udoh… was director of the National Museum” (75), the narrator asks: “What, I wonder, are the social consequences of life in a country that has no use for history?” (80). What is most palpable in this scene is the narrator’s disquiet at such a display of ahistorical contempt toward Nigeria’s cultural and artistic integrity. Such an attitude further reflects the process of contradistinction at play during this scene; the recognition of this failure to successfully reflect on and respond to a rich culture involves imaginatively figuring a successful, but non-existent, alternative.

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Must aesthetic experience, however, always be one of sublime transformation? As

Sianne Ngai has explored, aesthetics are not just beautiful thoughts, or ideal conditions, and indeed, “most of our aesthetic experiences are based on combinations of ordinary feelings.”31 Indeed, “states of weakness,” in Ngai’s words, can wield surprisingly equal critical, ethical, political, and aesthetic power. These aesthetic experiences are “grounded in equivocal affects… on feelings that explicitly clash”; in other words, sites of conflict that paradoxically affirm art’s uncomfortability with reality, as well as its failures in aestheticising it. “To make an aesthetic judgment,” Ngai argues, “is to project one’s feelings onto the object in such a totalizing fashion that the ‘actually subjective’ basis of the judgment of aesthetic quality ends up being somewhat incidental to how we experience or understand that quality.” The experience of art in fictional conditions does not necessarily transmute the ordinary in favour of an aesthetically charged art form in and of itself. While writers like

Espedal and Lerner transform experiences of the self, literature, and art with obtuse intellectual dexterity, Cole’s fiction is quieter and more controlled in its sublime ambitions; instead searching for ordinary feelings that might on occasion preference “ambivalent” or

“non-cathartic feelings that index situations of suspended agency” over aesthetic intensity.

MUSICAL EXPERIENCE

Open City’s prose is at its most poetic when talking about music. For Cole, achieving the an experiential form involves not only an aisthetic treatment of experience of visual art, but another perceptual experience, of music. How prose can linguistically represent musical experience is one of the novel’s central formal questions, and speaking to a larger cultural discourse of aesthetic experience in literature asking whether literary description can

31 Sianne Ngai, interview by Adam Jasper, “Our Aesthetic Categories,” Cabinet 43 (Fall 2011), http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/43/jasper_ngai.php.

110 adequately transpose the perceptual intensity of musical experience. While Julius’ experience of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony offers a way in which prose can operate like this, Cole also explores the difficulties that literary form has in mediating the experience of an art form so reliant upon sensorial perception, varying the strength to which the ekphrastic mode is actually effective. For him, these concerns are significant when operating in imaginary conditions, not only performing as a technique in the literary mediation of aesthetic experience, but as an ekphrastic form, literary music. He asks whether musical experience the same when listening to a piece in different situations. Can a familiar work produce the same perceptual effect as a new one? Does listening to a recording played over the radio engender a similar experience to encountering the work as live performance in a concert hall? Does literature, when attributing sublime qualities to aesthetic experience, treat that of music differently to that of visual art?

But what is musical ekphrasis? This question seems important to address first, based on the varied, and often contentious, accounts of this mode in recent criticism.

While some critics believe it is the musical response to a work of visual art or literature, others consider it the written interpretation of music as a work of art; the poetic response to the perceptual complexities of musical experience. But as Peter de Bolla reminds us, an aesthetic experience is an experience of an artwork, but also acknowledges the artwork as one that creates such an experience.32 Generally, however, criticism rules out music as an ekphrastic subject due to definitions such as Heffernan’s “verbal representation of visual representation”; while linguistically representing musical form is considerably more difficult than describing visual art objects, music is not necessarily a representational form either.33

Indeed, according to musicologist Siglind Bruhn, musical ekphrasis is the “interartistic

32 De Bolla, Art Matters, 9. 33 Heffernan, Museum, 3.

111 mode of transfer” from visual art to musical form.34 She claims that “[w]here transformations appear in poetry or prose about painting, they are referred to as ekphrasis. In music, such ekphrasis can take as its object a work of literature… or a work of visual art.”35 Like programme music, musical ekphrasis “involve[s] purely instrumental music whose raison d’être is in its response to a definite literary or pictorial source.”36 But musical ekphrasis,

Bruhn argues, “typically refers not only to the content of the poetically or pictorially conveyed source text but usually also to one of the aspects distinguishing the mode of primary representation – its style, its form, its mood, or a conspicuous arrangement of details.” Lydia Goehr defines this form more broadly both as “a musical work follows another work whatever the latter’s medium,” and artworks – like Cole’s Open City, Proust’s

In Search of Lost Time, or Goehr’s primary example, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus –

“inspired by musical works or, as in literature, by moments when music is brought to aesthetic presence through imaginary performance or through the sheer power of description.”37 Considering that the use of ekphrasis in an aisthetic text is a mediating technique – that is, in prose, one that focusses on experience, particularly aesthetic experience – it should not be surprising that music be considered in these terms, as it is necessarily experiential because of its form’s intangibility. For Goehr, although the aim of ekphrasis is “sometimes to illuminate another artwork,” it is also “to produce virtual and dynamic spaces in which all the tensions between saying and showing, concealing and revealing, are put into play.”38 Mack Smith, however, contends that musical ekphrasis as a literary technique originates from the Symboliste poets. Imaginary music “is the closest parallel” to their aspiration to “eschew… realist externality,” and “to portray internal states

34 Siglind Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis (New York: Pendragon Press, 2000), 551. 35 Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis, 572. 36 Ibid., 554. 37 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: OUP, 2007), 407. 38 Goehr, Imaginary Museum, 410.

112 that concrete detail and referential language are ineffective in describing.”39 For Smith,

“[t]he language of the Symbolists” is so “evocatively ambiguous” that the musical image can linguistically create the “almost ineffable internal states” they sought to describe.40

Critically speaking, it is generally agreed that imaginary music – or music evoked in prose or poetry – is more often than not a sublime experience. But, can imaginary or fictionalised music in postmillennial prose work in a similar way as Symboliste poetry did?

And if so, does contemporary literature even seek to recreate the ‘ineffable states’ of aesthetic experience? Indeed, the imaginary conditions of such allows for a certain tone of enthusiastic critique of not only the experience, but creation, of art. As Ngai argues, the

Kantian “sublime is still western philosophy’s most prestigious example of an aesthetic category that derives its specificity from mixed or conflicting feelings.”41 While they are not, however, “held in indefinite tension”, instead “[w]hat makes the sublime ‘sublime’ is precisely the fact of its emphatic resolution; that the initial feeling of discord culminates in the feeling Kant calls ‘respect.’ This final feeling is singular and unequivocal. And it is always intense.” But sublime experience often appears to be out of favour in contemporary art discourse, preferencing ordinary aesthetic experience. According to Cole, the experience of music as a sublime consolatory form is not a subject many contemporary writers choose to interrogate. Indeed, Ngai has argued that the prominent line of aesthetic criticism, has eschewed these states for “one evaluation that continues to circulate promiscuously… in virtually all contemporary writing on cultural artifacts: ‘interesting.’”42 Wary of proclaiming how art makes us feel, “academic analysts of art and literature” instead chooses to route terms such as the sublime though an attempt to articulate aesthetic judgement, and land

39 Mack Smith, Literary Realism and the Ekphrastic Tradition (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 246-7. 40 Smith, Literary Realism, 247. 41 Ngai, “Aesthetic Categories.” 42 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, Mas.: HUP, 2012), 110.

113 safely – but conflictingly – on the interesting. While Ngai has elucidated that the

‘interesting’ is an evaluative aesthetic category in and of itself, for writers like Cole (and later, Lerner and Knausgaard), the lack of rigorous discourse in contemporary literature itself of aesthetic experience is what, in part, fuels the kind of writing Open City demonstrates: “[i]f the interesting speaks directly to this aspect of modern culture,” Ngai argues, “what Mark Seltzer calls the doubling of everything with its description – it also speaks to what many have noted as the increasing convergence between art and discourse overall.” So, where the narrator’s experience of Nigeria’s National Musuem was disappointment in the curators’ seemingly disinterestedness in, and lack of respect for, the country’s cultural integrity, Julius’ experience of Mahler holds in tension political views of race and sheer experiential illumination.

While in critical discourse the interesting is troubling “as a notoriously weak evaluation” denoting a “relatively small surprise of information, or the perception of minor differences from an existing norm,” to some writers or artists, it is emboldening, “generally bound up with a desire to know and document reality.” For Susan Sontag, Ngai suggests, the interesting “is an aesthetic closely bound up with both the nineteenth-century novel and the history of photography” – where the term “tends to promote a general

‘indiscrimination’” of value to the extent that “the reason why photography becomes ‘one of the chief means for producing that quality ascribed to things and situations which erases these distinctions’ is because ‘the photographic purchase on the world, with its limitless production of notes on reality,’ makes everything comparable to others of its same kind or type.” Indeed, in On Photography, Sontag condemns purely indexical readings of photography:

While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency.

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But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.43

Indeed, for Ngai, this is vitally “central” to Henry James’ “Art of Fiction,” within which

“openness to impressions, capacity for absorbing experiences, and ability to thrive ‘upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints’ – are thus explicitly gathered under the umbrella of ‘interesting.’”44 If James, in writing about the aesthetic aims of the nineteenth century novel, identified these as crucial to the way it could “legitimate its still-tenuous status as art,” how does this reflect the current reinvestment in the artfulness of the novel, writing against the commodification and cynical artifice of its postmodern predecessor?

How, moreover, does Cole work against ‘interesting,’ as what has become the dominant idiom for the literary interrogation of aesthetic experience?

What literature’s imaginary experiences do, then, is create imaginary forms. Unlike critics like Bruhn who conceptualise this kind of ekphrasis as musical form, Clune’s discussion of the temporality of the Romantic tradition proves aesthetically instructive for this aspiration of literary form, even for a postmillennial approach. “Imaginary Music,” he argues, “is the first weapon Romantic writing deploys in its war against time. Immanuel

Kant, John Keats, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Marcel Proust all imagine musical forms that resist neurobiological time’s erosive force.”45 But, he questions, “why imaginary music?” Surely “[t]hese writers’ interest in virtual forms” and their “imagination of time-resistant music” fall short of actually achieving timelessness. However, it is this kind of experimentation “with different kinds of imaginary sound and different kinds of

43 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, 1977), 6. 44 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 136. 45 Clune, Writing Against Time, 23.

115 imaginary listeners,” as in “the ekphrasis of music in several of Keats’s key works,” that

“robustly imagine[s] a way to ‘feel for ever.’”46 Drawing on Kant’s Critique of Judgement and his aesthetic object, moreover, Clune undertakes the task of defeating time through the

“achievement of virtual” form: in other words, making imaginary music, or “the unimaginable imaginable.” He even outlines his virtual account of Kant’s aesthetic philosophy:

1. To value an aesthetic object is to value the intense feeling of life it produces in me. 2. I evaluate the aesthetic object in terms of its capacity to preserve this vital state, not simply in terms of its capacity to produce it. 3. The intense feeling of life produced by the aesthetic object is a result of my effort to understand it. 4. This effort does not rely on concepts. The aesthetic object’s ideal form is wordless music. 5. Its actual form is words about music.47

As it was for Shklovsky, Kant’s aesthetic object is not susceptible to ordinary perceptual laws of time; the vivacity of experiencing it does not fade. Instead, it “is not simply that which produces an immediate sense of perceptual vitality in me. It is also that object which

I sense as having the capacity to extend this vitality.”48 Imaginary music, then, not only

“awakens [the reader] to vivid perceptual life,” but, “through its structure, defeats the tendency of that vividness to fade.”49 For Clune, musical ekphrasis is thus formed in the gap between the real and the attempt to evade its temporality of the actual. In terms that echo Ngai’s, this is “[w]hat happens when one art form represents another.”50 Indeed, the ekphrastic mode he advances rejects the complexities of the more traditional theoretical treatments of the term for a simpler logic. While musical ekphrasis can be considered as

46 Ibid., 26. 47 Ibid., 42. 48 Ibid., 40. 49 Ibid., 41. 50 Ibid., 43.

116 musical form, ekphrastic music only refers to the creation, and experience, of imaginary music.

When discussing ekphrastic music, Proust’s imaginary composer Vinteuil is perhaps critics’ most favoured and frequent example. Mauro Carbone argues that Proust’s use of an imaginary composer (rather than an actual one), reflects the fact that the “works of art” that were “most transparently indicated as models for what the Narrator ultimately devotes himself to writing could only be imaginary.”51 This is because, as many critics and writers contend, imaginary art is ideal art; it is not bound to the restrictions that actual music has, by existing solely as fancy. Indeed, as Carbone suggests, “Proust’s choice to create his own

– musical, but pictorial as well – works of art” – that eventually become these models –

“seems to accept Rimbaud’s invitation for modern poetry to turn to ‘hearing the unheard’ and ‘inspecting the invisible’.”52 As a technique of experiential translation, ekphrasis suggests an aesthetically crucial correlation to the Symbolistes’ gesture to the negative, to the ghost of the present, to absence, and to the mirrored image. Smith argues that Proust was influenced by “the symbolist musicalization of literature,” where “an ekphrastic musical theme” becomes “an analogue of the central experience of the novel – the preservation of the past through first recollection and then transformation into art.”53

Michael D’Arcy, moreover, considers Proust’s music to be act of translation where “[t]he connection drawn by the narrator between his own privileged impressions and Swann’s experience as a listener points us to an important parallel established in the novel between the writer’s task of ‘translation’ and the deciphering of music.”54 These “musical impressions” are subsequently considered “in terms of a fleeting (temporal, intermittent)

51 Mauro Carbone, “Composing Vinteuil: Proust’s Unheard Music,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 48 (Autumn, 2005): 165. 52 Carbone, “Composing Vinteuil,” 165. 53 Mack Smith, Literary Realism, 247; 249. 54 Mack Smith, Literary Realism, 247. Michael D’Arcy, “The Task of the Listener: Beckett, Proust, and Perpetual Translation,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 12 (2002): 45.

117 trace of an unchanging (extra-temporal) reality. Crucial here is a distinction between music is its essence, and music in its phenomenal appearance to the listener.” For D’Arcy, this bears comparison to Samuel Beckett’s imaginary music – for whom “literary form is… inadequate” in “translating musical impressions to their essential reality.”55 Clune, however, frames his reading of Proust with the ever-present question of temporality of perceptual experience: “Why is it hard to imagine music that stays new?”56 Swann’s experience of listening to Vinteuil delineates these exact descriptive difficulties:

In Swann’s encounter with the ‘little phrase’ of Vinteuil’s sonata, Proust describes the trajectory of aesthetic experience from an initial intense renewal of the feeling of life, to growing familiarity with and knowledge of the work’s form, to recognition of an object that belongs to the understanding but no longer to the senses. By the end of the process, the life force that the work stimulated has ebbed, and the little phrase has become powerless to renew it.57

Here, it seems “[m]emory eventually swallows perception,” and “obliterates the intense contact with the present.”58 Proust’s aesthetic treatment of music, however, is developed differently later in the novel. Unlike Swann’s, Marcel’s encounter with Vinteuil’s Septet is transformative – “[m]usic gives Marcel a glimpse of the world through the composer’s eyes.”59 Indeed, Clune suggests that “[m]usic enables, through its direct transcendence of language’s imbrication with familiar concepts, transmission of the composer’s very perceptual organization.”60 The work of art becomes “not an object of experience”, but “a subject of experience.”61 For Clune, this “description of a character’s encounter with an imaginary piece of music” is Proust’s so-called ‘virtual aesthetic.’ But imaginary music’s ability to not only transform but transcend the listener’s real-world experience, “to imagine

55 Michael D’Arcy, “The Task of the Listener,” 48. 56 Clune, Writing Against Time, 24. 57 Ibid., 26. 58 Ibid., 49. 59 Ibid., 29. 60 Ibid., 28. 61 Ibid., 29.

118 the internal life of others,” is precisely the ambition of both a ider aesthetic mode than that of ekphrasis and of literature’s lyrical modes.

Likewise, Cole uses musical ekphrasis as a technique that attempts to translate the ineffable states of Julius’ “mental landscape” (19). Early in the novel, he describes Julius’ habit of listening only to European classical radio stations (because the American ones

“had too many commercials”), whose “programming always met [his] evening mood with great exactness” (4). Although “[m]uch of this music was familiar,” Julius notes, “[t]here were also rare moments of astonishment, like the first time I heard, on a station broadcasting from Hamburg, a bewitching piece for orchestra and alto solo by Shchedrin

(or perhaps it was Ysaÿe) which, to this day, I have been unable to identify” (4). The effect of interspersing familiar music with an unidentifiable piece never before heard effects, in much less dramatic fashion, the difference between Swann’s and Marcel’s experience of

Vinteuil: listening to recorded music while reading, as Julius does – “[s]ometimes, I even spoke the words in the books out loud to myself… my voice mingl[ing] with the murmur of the French, German, or Dutch radio announcements, or with the thin texture of the violin strings of the orchestras” – is not a complete musical experience in which the music is the only subject of one’s attention. Familiar music is experienced as an accompaniment to other activities, while new music renews the intensity to engage with music as an art form.

Later in the novel, however, Julius hears a piece over the speakers in a Tower

Records store that he “immediately recognized: the opening movement of Mahler’s late symphony Das Lied von der Erde” (16). Upon hearing this symphony, Julius is initially distracted – “[r]ecord shops, I felt, should be silent spaces; there, more than anywhere else, the mind needed to be clear” – but he “finally beg[an] to acclimatize to the music playing

119 overhead and… enter[ed] the strange hues of its world” (16). Julius describes the rapid progression of his experience of this music as happening “subliminally”: “before long,” it enfolded him “in a private darkness” (16-17). Although it was music he was familiar with, it was only “[o]n hearing Christa Ludwig’s voice, in the second movement, a song about the loneliness of autumn,” that he “recognized the recording as the famous one conducted by

Otto Klemperer in 1964.” Here, the familiarity of the music did not dull his experience, as

Shklovsky would have feared, but rather renewed his connection to the work:

With that awareness came another: that all I had to do was bide my time, and wait for the emotional core of the work, which Mahler had put in the final movement of the symphony. I sat on one of the hard benches near the listening stations, and sank into reverie, and followed Mahler through drunkenness, longing, bombast, youth (with its fading), and beauty (with its fading). Then came the final movement, “Der Abschied,” the Farewell, and Mahler, where he would ordinarily indicate the tempo, had marked it schwer, difficult. The birdsong and beauty, the complaints and high-jinks of the preceding movements, had all been supplanted by a different mood, a stronger, surer mood. It was as though the lights had, without warning, come blazing into my eyes. (17)

For Julius, listening to this work in a public space nevertheless tempers his experience: “[i]t simply wasn’t possible to enter the music fully.” Despite subsequently leaving for home, however, the music did not fade and disappear. Instead, “Der Abschied” “followed” him,

“playing through with such presence that it was as though” he was still listening to it; his memory became “overwhelmed” by its melodic figures. Mahler’s music was now imagined music, existing solely in Julius’ mind, transforming his perception of his “activities for the entirety of the following day” (17). Indeed, “[t]here was some new intensity in even the most ordinary things all around the hospital… as if the precision of the orchestral texture had been transferred to the world of visible things, and every detail had somehow become significant” (17-18). The “gleam on the glass doors” of the hospital, the “stacks of patients’

120 files in the psychiatry department,” become renewed through the lens of art, so “somehow seemed a part of that intricate musical world” (18).

Cole’s own meditations on Mahler represent his most profound reflection on the aims of literary form. Mahler’s late symphonies exemplify for Cole the “complexity and completeness” that musical form can achieve, but that prose unsatisfactorily strives to produce.62 It is the Ninth Symphony (the symphony that also draws Open City to its close) that particularly captures an art form so linguistically ineffable. Indeed, Cole articulates his experience of Mahler’s Ninth in an interview for Radio Open Source. It opens as a “vast force,” with “soft and hesitant sound… sighing,” becoming the motif of a “falling figure” that “the entire first movement, and in fact the whole symphony, is built on.” At first

“gentle,” then “different instrument groups carry different versions of this figure,” the movement develops an “incredible complexity” of sound and sentiment: for Cole, “the core of it is essentially simple, almost as if it’s saying life, death, life, death… every complication comes out of this binary.” Indeed, this evokes what Mahler considered to be his “only consolation”: sorrow.63 The second and third movements are comparatively lighter, “interrupting the [previous] music with more folkloric elements, with more parodic, more satirical elements.”64 It is the final movement, however, that offers Cole his own kind of consolation. As in Lewis Thomas’ “lovely brooding meditation,” Late Night Thoughts on

Listening to Mahler’s Ninth, listening to this music is “a solitary, private” act, in which the listener can find a kind of “metaphor for reassurance.” Cole emphasises this is “because we know exactly what that feels like to have music going through you in the still small hours of the night.” Listening in a large concert hall, however, does not have to be a sociable experience: at the end, “the music has died out… reluctantly, like one’s last breath. And

62 Cole, “The Consummate Mahlerian.” 63 Gustav Mahler, cited in Norman Lebrecht, Why Mahler? (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 17. 64 Cole, “The Consummate Mahlerian.”

121 you just want everyone to hold that moment with you… to be with that crowd in absolute silence, so that you can all experience this together.” Norman Lebrecht has also expressed the way in which Mahler can cultivate privacy in this way:

He expressed intimate, furtive, even shameful feelings in pages that were written for a hundred players and an audience of thousands. This contrast of message and medium is innate: it may also lead us towards the secret of Mahler’s intensive appeal. Mass society overwhelms the individual in us with the encroachments of ephemeral fashion. Mahler turns that formula on its head, using orchestral mass to liberate the individual unconscious. Among these thousand people in a concert hall you are always alone when Mahler is played.65

Music thus allows for a collective experience of solitude. It is this sublime function of music that Cole aims to encapsulate in his central Mahlerian image. “When something is shadowed,” he argues, “it is not just black in an undifferentiated way, but… there are places where light then shoots through.”66 Mahler’s music for Cole achieves something close to ideal aesthetic form: shadowed light, or, conversely, illuminated shadow, produces a “natural instinct for montage [that] makes sense to the environments that we function in; life cannot be just one thing or another. The sublime and the ridiculous are always interspersed with each other in life.”

In Julius’s encounter with Mahler’s Ninth Symphony at the culmination of the novel, he describes the intensity of experiencing music performed, offering a stark perceptual difference to his earlier experience of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. As a familiar musical experience, it does not inhibit Julius’ true intense appreciation of the subject, but allows him to anticipate the listening experience, and for perceptual echoes to reverberate within him, for him, following the performance. For Julius, it is a piece that provides him a perpetual novelty, despite being one with which he is already familiar. Cole

65 Lebrecht, Why Mahler? 6. 66 Cole, “The Consummate Mahlerian.”

122 allows this experience, moreover, structural significance, containing one of the few markers of specific time in the novel: Julius’ experience of music allows the novel to ‘catch-up,’ so to speak, with the present, with ‘real’ time. Music thus takes possession of Cole’s form, creating a final transformative aesthetic experience for Julius. “Last night,” Julius writes, “I attended the performance of the Ninth Symphony… the work Mahler wrote after Das Lied von der Erde” (249). For Julius, Mahler “made himself a master of the ends of symphonies, the end of a body of work, and the end of his own life” (250), or, in other words, of creating a perpetual aesthetic end. His last years were as clouds that “sometimes race across the sunlit canyons formed by the steep sides of skyscrapers, so that the stark divisions of dark and light are shot through with passing light and dark,” while his final works “are vast… lively works,” that “overwhelming[ly] impress…” upon Julius “the light of a passionate hunger for life, the light of a sorrowful mind contemplating death’s implacable approach” (250). It is here that Julius’ encounter with Mahler’s Ninth finds an analogue in

Clune’s analysis of Vinteuil’s Septet: experiencing art allows the viewer, reader, or listener the perceptual ability to “see… through another’s eyes.” While for Marcel, it is “in order to counter the habit that dulls our perception with time,” to achieve “permanent novelty”

(30), for Julius, experiencing his music like this creates an imagined existence for Mahler that colours his own experience; his encounter with this symphony coincident with

Mahler’s experience of composing it. Julius imagines that “[a]ll the darknesses that surrounded him, the various reminders of frailty and mortality, were lit brightly from some unknown source, but even that light was shadowed” (250). Imagining this perception of mortality so lucidly transforms his musical experience from ‘object’ to ‘subject,’ and is rendered intensely vital.

The concert begins with the description of the epiphenomena of Julius’ aesthetic experience, noting that the symphony “was part of a series celebrating the city of Berlin”

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(250). Because he had “bought [his] ticket for yesterday’s concert too late… [he] was up in the fourth tier above ground level” of Carnegie Hall, “a beautiful conch shell of a space, with a ceiling studded with fixtures and recessed lighting” (250-51). Remarking on the

“overapplied perfume of the “person next to [him], a beautiful woman, dressed in an expensive coat,” and “[h]er companion, a tall, tanned man in a blue suit and a checked white shirt, a European-looking type with merry grey eyes,” his attention turns to the orchestra as it tunes: “first with the oboist sending out a clear A, and then the sounds of the string instruments drawing themselves out of beautiful cacophony into unison,” then

“the woodwinds tuned, and they were joined by a flurry of strings” before “a hush fell on the hall” (251). Noting the racial composition of the audience – “[a]lmost everyone, as almost always at such concerts, was white” (251) – he suggests that “Mahler’s music is not white, or black, not old or young, and whether it is even specifically human, rather than in accord with more universal vibrations, is open to question” (252). Cole’s music, even before it has begun, is a form that has the ability to transform individual consciousness and experience.

Julius’ experience of Mahler is perhaps the novel’s most concerted use of aesthetic experiences. While he describes the “first movement of the Ninth Symphony” as “a great ship slipping out of port: weighty but nevertheless entirely graceful in its motion” – to him,

“it began with sighs, a series of hesitations, a repeated falling figure that stretched out at the same time that it became more frenzied” (252) – the third movement, “the rondo, was loud, rude, and as burlesque as it could conceivably be” (253). His experience of listening is enacted, Julius writes, “both with my mind and my body, entering into the familiar details of the music, discovering new details in the score, points of emphasis and articulation that I had not noticed before, or that had been brought to the fore, for the first time, by the conductor” (252). For Julius, experiencing familiar art is not as Clune argues – “repeated

124 exposure to a work of art operates just like repeated exposure to anything else… a precipitous drop-off in sensory intensity” – or as Edmund Burke worries – “‘[w]hen we accustom our eyes’ to an image, it ceases to affect us” – but continues to enrapture because even the most familiar works can offer perceptual renewal; his “sensory engagement” does not dull because he knows the contours of the work, but brightens because the art work

“prolongs intense perceptual experience.”67 Experiencing this particular music, moreover, has the capacity to defeat the diminishing intensity of familiarisation, because Julius perceives it as a new work: he experiences it as it is being recreated. Music is an art form that presents as, in essence, aesthetically fresh each time it is performed:

Then, out of a calmness that seemed to have all the in the auditorium holding their breaths, the sweet, hymnlike opening of the final movements, carried by the string instruments, filled the hall. I was stunned: I had never before noticed how similar the melody in this movement was to “Abide with Me.” And that revelation steeped me in the deep sorrow of Mahler’s long but radiant elegy, and I felt I could also detect the intense concentration, the hundreds of private thoughts, of the people in the auditorium with me. (253)

For Julius, Mahler’s music can still astonish him. Indeed, his captivation has a hallucinatory effect on his perceptions:

In the glow of the final movement, but well before the music ended, an elderly woman in the front row stood, and began to walk up the aisle. She was slowly, and all eyes were on her, though all ears remained on the music. It was as though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to us… As she drifted to the entrance and out of sight, in her gracefulness she resembled nothing so much as a boat departing on a country lake early in the morning, which to those still standing on the shore, appears not to sail but to dissolve into the substance of the fog. (253-54)

The music itself then dissolves into “[p]erfect silence,” and Julius considers those “flooded with that silence” to possess “illuminated faces.” The cessation of this music is linked with

67 Clune, Writing Against Time, 12; Edmund Burke, cited in Clune, Writing Against Time, 10; Clune, Writing Against Time, 11.

125 aesthetic enlightenment; musical experience allows Julius, as it does earlier in the novel, to be transformed.

This change in perception continues its effects even after Julius leaves the hall. Lost both in thought and the reverberations of the music, he accidently locks himself out of the hall on a “flimsy” fourth tier fire escape, from which “[t]here was to be no respite from the rain and the wind” (255). Precariously suspended “[i]n the darkness above a sheer drop” to the street, Julius “face[s] solitude of a rare purity.” Upon finding another door, he looks up and sees that “there were stars. Stars!” (256) Where previously a “situation of unimprovable comedy” (255), this realisation holds for Julius what could be argued as the singular experience of transcendence in the novel. Like Mahler’s music, which joins the ‘sublime and the ridiculous,’ seeing stars when he “hadn’t thought [he] would be able to see them” – because of “the light pollution perpetually wreathing the city, and not on a night on which it had been raining” – constitutes the effect that the performance had on him. Indeed, the chiaroscuro of Mahler’s music becomes a metaphor for Julius’ experience of the stars:

The miasma of Manhattan’s electric lights did not go very far up into the sky, and in the moonless night, the sky was like a roof shot through with light, and heaven itself simmered. Wonderful stars, a distant cloud of fireflies: but I felt in my body what my eyes could not grasp, which was that their true nature was the persisting visual echo of something already in the past. In the unfathomable ages it took for light to cross such distances, the light source itself had in some cases been long extinguished, its dark remains stretched away from us at ever greater speeds. But in the dark space between the dead, shining stars were stars I could not see, star that still existed, and were giving out light that hadn’t reached me yet, stars now living and giving out light but present to me only as blank interstices. (256)

Like his experience of listening to Mahler, Julius finds comfort in his view of the sky. “I wished I could meet the unseen starlight halfway,” he muses, and despite being unable to so, the “starlight… was coming as fast as it could, covering almost seven million miles every hour” (257). Not even the thought of the end of the world frightens him; starlight

126 would persist nevertheless, and “cast its illumination on other humans, or perhaps on other configurations of our world, after unimaginable catastrophes had altered it beyond recognition.” Although Cole’s inability to linguistically transpose Mahler’s music directly is not in and of itself a failure; it, at the very least, expresses the formal limitations of literary and imagined aesthetic experience – as lyrical as it may seem at times, literary prose can never harness the sonority of music. However, the way in which this passage creates an aisthetic experience coincident with how we would imagine an actual musical experience to unfold; describing the intensity of his exact perceptual experience – “it was as though I had come so close to something that it had fallen out of focus, or fallen so far away from it that it had faded away” – affirms literature’s effort to articulate such an experience; the attempt is, in many ways, literature’s aesthetic raison d’être.

Such is the power of literary music. Here, Cole’s musical image is a virtual technique that appropriates Mahler’s aptitude for perpetual completion. Not only a feature of the Ninth Symphony, Mahler’s elegiac movement represents the ‘falling figure’ of perceiving starlight, and precipitates, in the terms of sublime aesthetics, the collapse of humanity. While not a specific example of musical ekphrasis, or ekphrastic music, this passage represents the effect that the music has on Julius’ senses. The sublimity of his perception of Mahler heightens his sensibility of other ‘real’ objects; what could have been, without music, an object of experience – he views the stars; the stars are beautiful objects to him – to a subject of experience: he feels the stars ‘in his body’ as an abstraction of aesthetic experience itself; it becomes coincident with the end of the world. Cole’s aisthetic mode is not, therefore, only representational, nor does it rely upon literary description to denote the experience of music. Instead, it performs as an experiential idiom that can transform perception and, whether familiar or new, ultimately aims to achieve something resembling sincere aesthetic form.

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VANISHED THINGS

While not a poet himself, the poetic image suffuses through both Cole’s prose and his meditations on photographic and literary practice. The priorities of Cole’s artistic practice can be seen in his interest in Tomas Tranströmer, 2011 Nobel Prize laureate for literature, and W.G. Sebald, as writers that write against the image: the intersection at which imagination, art, the actual, the ethical, and the aesthetic collide. In discussing the ekphrastic works of these two authors, Cole’s aversion to the literary critical structures of fiction and nonfiction comes to the fore. When reading him with regards to his conceptualisation of the poetic image, therefore, it is apparent that he perceives there to be an inherent problem with the critical mode for contending with the use of the visual image in written narrative. Critically, this gap has provoked Clune to call for a “viable mode of interdisciplinary research… that isn’t simply parasitic on the claims of other disciplines, but offers meaningful interventions in shared questions.”68 Where, as I will explore in the following chapters, Lerner is preoccupied with the virtual possibilities of literature, Cole is concerned with utilising critical assumptions about genre in order to meditate on the important questions that a more inclusive form of literature can pose to the mediation of experience.

While Sebald’s influence on Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief has been widely referred to by reviewers and the authors themselves, it is Cole himself who particularly engages with this association, even if it is only to complain about how often critics make this connection.69 Despite the lack of direct influence, I argue that Cole’s expressed

68 Clune, Writing Against Time, 146. 69 Aside from Cole himself, critics that evoke this line of influence include Wood for The New Yorker, Hari Kunzru for The New York Times, and Kuo and Wu for The Los Angeles Review of Books.

128 admiration for Sebald gestures not only to a shared aesthetic in the incorporation of images within the form of the novel, but a shared approach to stretching the boundaries of the form itself.70 To Aleksandar Hemon, he contended that “Sebald was up to something sly with his photographs,” explaining that “[h]is writing tested, much more than that of most other writers, the boundaries of what we consider fiction.”71 In interweaving photographs with narrative, Cole argues that Sebald was not only creating atmosphere – “many of which were intentionally worn away through repeated photocopying” – but “propos[ing] a dare” to the reader. He asserts that, in his works, Sebald is asking us to believe the collective narrative of the images and the text as “testimonial,” which “we almost believe… until we notice the slight fracture between the claim in the text and the photograph, or until we look so closely at the text that we realize there are elements in it that came into being because he had a certain photograph on hand for which he made up a story, and not the other way around.” The novelistic image has, therefore, become more than just a result of literary description, functioning as a compositional tool that distorts the novel’s relationship to fiction. It is not, moreover, critically sufficient to consider the novel to have repurposed the image from visual disciplines, or to claim that such a treatment necessitates dependence on their critical structures. Ultimately, the way in which the novel renders the image places demands on criticism to follow suit, in such a way that demands that it be understood in literary terms.

While addressing the critical discourse surrounding Cole and Lerner’s use of images lends a great deal to the discussion of aesthetic experiences in literature, the conversation around Sebald’s photographs directly illustrates the current state of criticism on the novel’s use of the image. Although it is a well-worn subject, Mary Griffin Wilson has argued

70 Cole has written two essays on Sebald for The New Yorker, one which addresses his poetry, and the other a form of requiem. 71 Cole, interview by Hemon.

129 recently that the discussion has so far revolved around the reductive application of the

“analogy between photography and memory” and the “preformulated theory of the photograph as temporal shock.”72 Her argument instead substitutes the common use of the

Barthesian ‘shock,’ whereby the photograph disrupts narrative flow, in favour of a contention that echoes Cole’s: Sebald “did in fact integrate these images, and that he did so through a highly intentional, albeit subtle, interweaving of the indexical qualities of image and text,” asserting that “Sebald took pains over the placement of his images,” so much so that “the images appear having been pointed to, more or less directly, by the text itself.”73

However, while noting that “any reading of Austerlitz that implicitly aligns the visual with fact and the textual with fiction – as a surprising number of critics do – ignores the ontological relationship between image and text that is crucial to the proper understanding of the novel,” she maintains that “the deictic property of these photographs is ultimately

(and perhaps irresolvably) complicated by the fact that they appear within the context of a fictional work.”74 Because the text is fiction and the image is a photograph, and thus

“point[ing] to a pre-existing reality outside of itself,” there is a “fundamental deception at work in Sebald’s novels: that the referent of the text and the ‘real’ referent of the photograph… may not be synonymous.”75 What both Cole’s use of the novelistic image frustrates, therefore, is the assumption that ‘reality’ must necessarily disrupt ‘fiction,’ instead conceiving of the visual image as constituting a central part of the novel’s language.

As the following chapters will show, writers including Cole, Sebald, Lerner, and

Knausgaard have all addressed this complex notion, whereby the logic of such an argument becomes entangled in the assumption that something that engages in realism must also be

72 Mary Griffin Wilson, “Sheets of Past: Reading the Image in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” Contemporary Literature 54, no. 1 (2013), 49; 50. Lise Patt’s edited collection Searching for Sebald: Photography after W.G. Sebald has particularly given photography and the image in general extensive analysis. 73 Wilson, “Sheets of Past,” 53. 74 Ibid., 55. 75 Ibid., 54.

130 real – which is not, as McCarthy notes, a literary convention, but a condition that upholds a semblance of truth.

While addressing the critical discourse surrounding Sebald’s use of images lends a great deal to the discussion of aesthetic experiences in literature, what sheds more light on the subject is the way in which he describes how images act as a compositional tool, and how he conceptualises the role of the photograph in his novels, and in narrative more generally. Not only a stylistic preoccupation, but a personal one, Sebald describes how he collects photographs: “[f]or many years I have found images in a most unsystematic manner. One finds such things enclosed in old books that one buys… in antique shops or thrift shops. That’s typical for photographs after all, that they lead such a nomadic existence and then are ‘rescued’ by someone.”76 From these images, then, as Cole described earlier, Sebald “notice[s] that an enormous… appeal emanates from these images; a demand on the viewer to tell stories or to imagine what one could tell, by starting with these images.” Because “[y]ou don’t know” necessarily what these pictures depict, Sebald explains:

[Y]ou have to start thinking hypothetically. This track inevitably leads you into fiction and to storytelling. When writing you recognize possibilities: to start by drawing out stories from the images, to walk into these images… through the telling of stories, to implant these images into a text-passage, and so on. The image thus “exert[s] a pull on the viewer” and subsequently “draw[s] him out, so to speak, from the real world into an unreal world.”77 It is this question of reality that interests

Cole and occupies Wilson, particularly the way that through the insertion of images, a fictional narrative creates the façade of the real, but not necessarily of fact. Sebald explains that the photograph is more “convinc[ing]” than painting or writing in “captur[ing] and

76 Sebald, “The Written Word,” 104. 77 Ibid., 105.

131 document[ing]” experience.78 Despite this, however, he does not “want to integrate images of high photographic quality into [his] texts; they are rather documents of findings, something secondary,” which prioritises not only the “indistinctness” of, and the “minor things in an image” but an image that somehow “contain[s] the secret.”79 Ultimately, the use of photography in fiction clarifies the similarities in formal composition, with Sebald espousing that he “believe[s] that writing and photography are also very intimately linked with the art of recherche,” and that while it is “something that today’s writers neglect,” engaging in the “art of reportage” creates a work that not only blurs the lines between genres and forms, but mediates the experience of both art and life most faithfully.80

Like Cole, Sebald’s novels do not only feature the incorporation of images, but describe the experience of contemplating specific art works. Although both of Cole’s protagonists use a historical lens throughout the novels, Sebald frames these scenes with a particular historical voice, only subtly describing the personal meditations of the narrator.

The novel that critics align most with Cole’s works, Rings of Saturn, discusses Rembrandt’s

The Anatomy Lesson in the first few pages. Approaching the painting through a discussion of

Thomas Browne’s visit to Amsterdam in 1632, where he saw the particular anatomy lesson that Rembrandt has “depicted in his painting of the Guild of Surgeons” take place, he begins by describing how the painting is attentive to the wider social conditions of such an event, particularly through “Rembrandt’s representation of the ceremonial nature of the dissection – the surgeons are in their finest attire, and Dr Tulp is wearing a hat on his head

– as well as by the fact that afterwards there was a formal, and in a sense symbolic, banquet.”81 What is most provocative about his discussion, however, is how the way in

78 Ibid., 106. 79 Ibid., 106; 107. 80 Ibid., 108. 81 W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1999), 12-13.

132 which the experience of viewing the painting is described as an act that creates a fiction of how the lesson itself was experienced – an ekphrastic perceptual transformation:

If we stand today before the large canvas of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson in the Mauritshuis we are standing precisely where those who were present at the dissection in the Waaggebouw stood, and we believe that we see what they saw then: in the foreground, the greenish, prone body of Aris Kindt, his neck broken and his chest risen terribly in rigor mortis. And yet it is debatable whether anyone ever really saw that body, since the art of anatomy, then in its infancy, was not least a way of making the reprobate body invisible. This is the followed by a reflection on the composition on the work, evoking Manet-esque questions of the gaze:

It is somehow odd that Dr Tulp’s colleagues are not looking at Kindt’s body, that their gaze is directed just past it to focus on the open anatomical atlas in which the appalling physical facts are reduced to a diagram, a schematic plan of the human being, such as envisaged by the enthusiastic amateur anatomist Rene Descartes, who was also, so it is said, present that January morning in the Waaggebouw. The emphasis Sebald places on the gaze of both those who saw the lesson – Browne,

Descartes, Rembrandt, and those who visit the painting – is also transferred to the reader: a double page reproduction of the painting follows the description. As such, the prose directs our gaze, with a kind of Symboliste typographical precision, to the body that is being analysed, a direction that is reaffirmed when the prose begins again – “Through the body is open to contemplation” – which signals the act the reader ought to have taken in the process of reading. The prose gestures to the image, drawing the reader’s gaze, like a map. Sebald has also included a cropped detail of the painting, which is bracketed not only by an analysis of the painting, but is inserted in the middle of a sentence, the line break surreptitiously drawing attention to the aspect of the image Sebald is discussing in the prose. It details the body’s hand in the background as “most peculiar” because it is

“grotesquely out of proportion compared with the hand close to us,” and so too does the cropped image. The caesura falls after “compared with” and “the hand close to us”; the

133 enjambment drawing the reader’s eye diagonally down the page, from the end of one line on the right-hand side of the page, through the image itself (the image is cropped so that the surgeon’s hands are in the top right-hand corner, and the body is in the lower half), across both hands, to the beginning of the next line on the right-hand side of the page, which begins with the words, “the hand.” Such a seamless integration emphasises Sebald’s self-conscious aesthetic on the mediation of art within literature.

It is Cole’s praise for Sebald’s poetry that proves compellingly instructive; not only for Sebald’s influence on either novel, but the aesthetic priorities with which he is associating his work. In a review for The New Yorker, “W.G. Sebald’s Poetry of the

Disregarded,” Cole compares Sebald’s poems to his prose, emphasising how “[h]is tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur.82 To this he added a wilful blurring of literary boundaries and, in fact, almost all his writing, and not just the poetry and prose, comprised history, memoir, biography, autobiography, art criticism, scholarly arcana, and invention” – he demonstrates, in other words, an “expert mixing of forms.” Indeed, Cole considers Sebald’s poetry to echo the imagery in his novels, focussing on how his poetic form “shows us the development of the author’s poetic voice over more than three decades, beginning in the nineteen-sixties,” and suggests a broad aesthetic programme – “that would later be seen as distinctively his” – predicated upon “borders, journeys, landscape, memories, and solitude.” Most of all, however, Cole prioritises

Sebald’s “reportorial interrogation of vanished things,” a central literary concern of both authors. Although while his novels attend to uncovering the disregarded measuredly, his poems create a frenetic “assemblage” of “references, untranslated fragments from different languages, and classical allusions.”

82 Teju Cole, “W.G. Sebald’s Poetry of the Disregarded,” New Yorker (5 April 2012), http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/w-g-sebalds-poetry-of-the-disregarded.

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In the latter half of the review, however, Cole emphasises how Sebald’s “special love for paintings” – “they are half object, half window into another world” – construct a virtual process of writing against art. “A painting becomes, in Sebald’s hands” he argues, “a world of enumerated wonders,” conceptualised “as self-contained Wunderkammers… summon[ing] their magic simply by close description of their contents.” Poems such as “In the Paradise Landscape,” a reading of a painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder, which begins

“of the younger Brueghel/ on a surface roughly/ thirty by forty/ centimetres in size” (1-4), work precisely in this way; as a collection of jewelled descriptions.83 Writing against the painting, the poem quietly describes even the smallest of details, refusing the reader any self-reflexive comments on the act of gazing upon such a work, as other poets (notably

John Ashbery) have done; instead, the poem is itself a ‘self-contained Wunderkammer,’ creating an image of itself. Moving his eye around the canvas he notes that:

in the foreground at the bottom edge two spectacled monkeys one of which is gingerly plucking strawberries from a little shrub while on the right roses climb an apple or pomegranate tree & tulips in full blossom & spring stars & lilies & hyacinths (20-32)

Compact and economical, the poem also recreates the experience of viewing the painting –

“before which I stood/ for a time at the Städel/ Museum” (5-7) – composed of a persistent enjambment both staccato and lyrical, the short lines and stanzas that are

83 W.G. Sebald, Across the Land and Water, trans. Iain Galbraith (New York: Random House, 2011), Kindle ebook.

135 common in his poetry. It is, however, the ekphrastic register of this poem that particularly creates the sense of following the current of his thoughts: as the poet’s eyes drift over the painting, the description both gathers momentum as the list comes to a close with the description of Adam and Eve, and maintains measured metre, transforming a simple ekphrastic reading into an interior retreat, to a near-spiritual contemplation.

Where “Paradise Landscape” primarily occupies a descriptive visual register,

Sebald’s long three-part poem, After Nature, interweaves critical visual language in an idiosyncratic poetic landscape.84 While published separately and earlier than Across the Land and the Water, this extended poetic sequence is the most discursive example of his ekphrastic concerns, and an analogue to Cole’s description of his poetry: “[o]ften, in describing the actual world, he paints it similarly, detail by detail, attentive always to effects of the light.”85 Focussing each of the three parts on a historical figure – the second, the eighteenth-century botanist Georg Stellar, the last, the poet himself, and the first, the life and art of Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald – the work itself is a triptych, a work of art encompassing three separate pieces resonating in tone and subject. Beginning with an ekphrastic description of Grünewald’s most prominent work, the Isenheim Altarpiece, the first part immediately gestures to the image of the artwork as an object:

Whoever closes the wings of the altar at Lindenhardt parish church and locks up the carved figures in their casing on the lefthand panel will be met by St. George. (1-6)

84 W.G. Sebald, After Nature, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Random House, 2002). Although Sebald composed the poem in the late 1980s (the German title, Nach der Natur), the first English translation only appeared in 2002, a year after the author’s death. Each ‘scene’ is also divided into several sections. 85 Cole, “Poetry of the Disregarded.”

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Beginning as such alerts the reader to not only “the three dimensional nature of the altar that [so] resembles the format of a bound volume,” as Dorothea von Mücke notes, but that the artwork does not exist on a flat plane: “its wings need to be closed and opened in order to be seen in its entirety.”86 Sebald, however, does not only play with the experience of viewing the work – “Foremost at the picture’s edge he stands/ above the world by a hand’s breadth/ and is about to step over the frame’s/ threshold” (7-10) – but blends art criticism with the creation of imaginary aesthetic experience. While the first and sixth sections of

Sebald’s meditation on Grünewald focus on his art, every other section of the eight part poem creates a new art historical form, supple in its treatment of biography, critical reflections on post-structuralist questions of authorship, and experience of the work itself, often imagined. Calling the work a “restoration,” von Mücke argues that “the poem re- writes or undoes the accepted art historical narrative and engages with the painter and his oeuvre in order to pursue questions about the relationship between artist and work of art and about the relationship between the work of art and history,” and as such, emphasises

“the work’s unique status as an original, which produces a certain re-auratization of the art work,” as well as “the referential dimension of a verbal or painted picture and the artwork’s unique relationship to history” – an approach that echoes Cole’s discussion of Brewster.

However, where von Mücke asserts that “art has the position and function of a [historical] witness” – it can thus “transcend any one specific historical context through the complex web of inter-textual borrowings and loans, homages, appropriations, and misappropriations” – I argue that by incorporating criticism with poetic invention, Sebald evokes in poetry the ability to reimagine not only the way that we experience the art object, but the boundaries of our perceptual experience.

86 Dorothea von Mücke, “History and the Work of Art in Sebald’s After Nature,” Nonsite.org 1, No. 1 (2011), http://nonsite.org/issues/issue-1/sebalds-after-nature-authorship-at-the-threshold-of-representation.

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Cole’s preoccupation with the poetic image, however, comes to the fore when discussing Tomas Tranströmer. In his most lucid discussion about influence, he asserts that, upon writing his acclamation for the poet “Miracle Speech,” he “realize[d]… how many of Tranströmer’s concepts I have hidden away in my own work.”87 This has manifested outside of his work, too, “usually answer[ing]” the question of his “favorite thing about New York” by referencing “a line lifted from ‘Schubertiana’: ‘Outside New

York, a high place where with one glance you take in the houses where eight million human beings live.’” Describing the poet as a “master of solitude” who “dwells in quiet… precincts,” Cole proposes that in Tranströmer’s poetry, the reader engages in “much following… much watching, from a distance and from close by, and the trees, pasts, houses, spaces, silences, and fields all take on invigilative personae.” For Cole, Tranströmer is a place to turn “when I wish to come as close as possible to what cannot be said”; where in reading him the reader can do so intimately, “as a personal secret.” The process of reading thus becomes a way to “inhabit space differently” because Tranströmer has “fused the biggest questions with personal experience”; both affirm that a writer voices through silence the failures of language to express personal or mass tragedy, or in Luiselli’s words,

“[a] writer is a person who distributes silences and empty spaces.”88 Associating his poetry with “the music of Arvo Pärt and the photography of Saul Leiter” Cole focuses on the way that the poems evoke “a kind of motionlessness that is indistinguishable from terrific speed, in the same way Arvo Pärt’s music can sound fast and slow at the same time,” and where the photography of Leiter can instil in a still image the potential for grand

87 Cole, “Miracle Speech.” 88 Cole, “Miracle Speech”; Luiselli, Sidewalks, 72.

138 movement: to borrow a phrase from Cole’s “postscript” on Leiter, a concurrent “stillness, tenderness, and grace that is at odds with the mad rush of New York street life.”89

The way that Cole compares Tranströmer here to Leiter reflects a photographic aesthetic similarly concerned with the negative, the mirrored image, that pervades his own writing. In “Miracle Speech,” while he likens Tranströmer’s imagery to the concept in

Byzantine art of “acheiropoieta,” which means “making without hands” – he argues that

“acheiropoeitic images were those believed to have come miraculously into being without a painter’s intervention” – the most striking comparison is to the photographic technique of contact printing. A technique, Cole notes, “in which a photograph is made directly from a film negative or film positive,” the emphasis is on “the sense is of the sudden arrival of what was already there”; rather than poetry that draws attention to its own artifice, “[t]here is little elaborate construction evident.” Indeed, this description is echoed in Cole’s discussion of his own photographic aesthetic, a connection particularly accentuated in his adoption of a line from Tranströmer’s poem “The Scattered Congregation” for the title of his sole exhibition: “Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way/ to the Address. Who’s got the Address?/ Don’t know. But that’s where we’re going.” Imbuing a sense of invisible movement in his photography – where the first of the diptychs asks the question, the second answers – this poetic fragment aligns strongly with Cole’s reflection on not only his photographic practice, but photographic method in general, to find “poignant fragments” and to then “somehow connect… them to each other, introduc[e] them to each other, reuniting little bits of the shattered world.”90

Indeed, critic Steffan Bergsten concludes his analysis of Tranströmer’s “Vermeer” with a similar stylistic observation: his “[a]esthetic principle” in this poem “applies not only

89 Cole, “Miracle Speech.” 90 Cole, “Pitch Forward.”

139 to the art of painting and Vermeer but also in a similar way to his own poetry, where simple ordinary words are made to float, so that they, with their retained tangibility, provide an emotional energy which goes far beyond the literal meaning.”91 “Vermeer” is a particularly resonant example of Tranströmer’s poetic mediation of aesthetic experience.92

Gestural in its impressions, it breathes life into the small studies of the Dutch painter’s light-, and solitude-, filled interiors. The eye is drawn through the wall “straight into the airy studio/ in the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries./ Paintings that choose the name: ‘The Music Lesson’/ or ‘A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter’” (11-14).

Rather than a portrait, as Bergsten notes, the poem moves beyond the artist’s studio, “not stop[ping] in front of the painting” and instead “continues into it.”93 Indeed, the studio expands to encompass the room within “A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter”: the woman reads facing the window, through which a soft light floats to rest on her face, a map beside her covers the back wall, the composition articulated “as if there had always been stillness and nothing else” (20). Indeed, Tranströmer’s description of the room in which the work is hung suggests how it can be experienced:

The ears experience a buzz, perhaps its depth or perhaps height. It’s the pressure from the other side of the wall, the pressure that makes each fact float and makes the brushstroke firm (21-4). The room thus becomes part of the painting, asking the viewer to ‘inhabit space differently’:

The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall. It is like a prayer to what is empty. And what is empty turns its face to us

91 Steffan Bergsten, “To Go through Walls: Tomas Tranströmer’s “Vermeer,” trans. Steven P. Sondrup, World Literature Today 64, no. 4 (Autumn 1990): 588. 92 Tomas Tranströmer, “Vermeer,” trans. Samuel Charters, World Literature Today 64, no. 4 (Autumn 1990), 555. 93 Bergsten, “To Go through Walls,” 587.

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and whispers: “I am not empty, I am open” (31-5) While Bergsten suggests that the painting itself is where the sky ‘leans against the wall’ –

“[i]t is as if the sky had come to the woman in the chamber in the form of an empty blue surface” – the following lines invoke simultaneously the woman in blue, the observer of the painting, and the reader of this poem.94 Although enclosed within actual and metaphorical walls, both the painting and the poem (which uses the word no less than nine times) nevertheless resist closure and stasis; through the transcendence of the object, the poem instead produces a study of imaginary light.95 Unlike much of ekphrasis, the poem steps into the mirror; rather than content with its own image, it aims to alter it, open it, create spaciousness.

Often featuring less-appreciated or unknown artists, Tranströmer could be considered to engage with the subject of light metaphorically as well, including visual artists such as Vermeer, or others, such as his study of Schubert in “Schubertiana.” Such an emphasis on other sensory arts shows a concern for the way that the experience of art is expressed, a total perceptual experience that engages the imagination rather than one that relies solely on sight and the actual world. For Cole, the poetry of both Tranströmer and

Sebald respond photographically – even cognisant of the literal meaning ‘to write with light’ – to the experience of the world, capturing the things that are in the process of vanishing, and things for which the poet must search. Indeed, this echoes the photographic aesthetic that Cole is so preoccupied by: equally metaphysical and bound by an invisible tension between the self and the image, the actual world and its image. This is perhaps why the image of the secret is so prevalent in Cole’s discussions of both Sebald and

94 Bergsten, “To Go through Walls,” 590. 95 The soft distillation of light in both the poem and the painting with which it engages bears comparison to Cole’s preoccupation with the same subject in his photographic works: most, if not all, are attentive to capturing the textual subtleties that light can expose.

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Tranströmer, suggesting that the secret corresponds to his ethical concern for writing about the disregarded: veiled events, people, and experiences. For Cole, this is where the literary representation of the experience of art sits – on the cusp of shared cultural experience and intimate experience, and most importantly, one that can be uncovered in a open form of literary language.

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Chapter Three: Against Poetry

I don’t believe in genres. I believe in your perception of language. Maria Negroni

CRITICAL RECEPTION

The initial reception of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station could be understood by the general consensus that it is a “sharp, clever” poetic achievement.1 Indeed, the praise garnered by the novel tended to verge on the superlative: Geoff Dyer described it as

“intensely and unusually brilliant,” while James Wood thought it “subtle, sinuous.”2

Despite ready acknowledgment as a “remarkable first novel,” comprised of “many layers,” the novel also provoked a sense of unorthodoxy, often characterised as “offbeat.”3 Its

Maria Negroni, interview by Sophia Kelley, Finding Your Own Voice, http://www.sarahlawrence.edu/magazine/voice/extra/negroni.html. 1 Vernon Shetly, review of Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner, Common Knowledge 20, no. 1 (Winter, 2014), 148. 2 Geoff Dyer, review of Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner, The Guardian (5 July 2012), http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/05/leaving-atocha-station-ben-lerner; James Wood, “Reality Testing: A first novel about poetry and imposture in Spain,” The New Yorker (31 October 2011), http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/10/31/reality-testing. 3 Gary Sernovitz, “Lost Generations: What Leaving the Atocha Station Says About America,” The New York Times (9 March 2012), http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/books/review/what-leaving-the-atocha- station-says-about-america.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0; Tegan Bennett Daylight, “Illusions Explode in Blast of Harsh Reality,” The Australian (16 June 2012), http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/illusions- explode-in-blast-of-harsh-reality/story-fn9n8gph-1226395465990; Maureen Corrigan, “Life Without Plot in

143 author, moreover, has been understood by Gayle Rogers as “[o]ne of the most important and prodigious young writers in America today,” who is “a multiform talent who crosses genres, modes, and media to represent a leading edge of contemporary writing, and… has already found success in both academic and literary ‘prize cultures.’”4 Given the poetic resonance that guides the novel’s aesthetic, critics have been quick to emphasise the novel’s inherent association with Lerner’s poetry; indeed, Tao Lin has noted that it is “as if

[Lerner’s] oeuvre were a single work that is already completed and is being released in parts,” while Wood has considered Atocha to be “centrally, about communication and translation, about what can be truthfully expressed.”5 It has been, moreover, considered as formally unusual, with “scant” plot where “the real action of the novel is interior”6. While described by one reviewer as “too ironic and intellectual to be the kind of novel that really moves readers,” critics like Kevin Moore have argued that “one of the novel’s most distinctive accomplishments, and… a source of some of [its] richest formal resonances,” is its “exceedingly frank, confessional” tone.7 Stylistically “hypnotic,” critics have described the novel’s “self-cancelling repetitions” as filtered through mind of an “impulsive, overmedicated, brilliantly perceptive, and cripplingly self-conscious” protagonist. 8 What is particularly emphasised, moreover, is the approach taken in the novel of rendering– both poetically and spatially – a particular kind of lived experience; occupying a critical space, the novel features “a fascinating and often brilliant investigation of the distance (or the communication) between experience and art… the places between languages, between

Leaving the Atocha Station,” NPR (7 November 2011), http://www.npr.org/2011/11/09/142109786/life- without-plot-in-leaving-the-atocha-station. 4 Ben Lerner, interview by Gayle Rogers, Contemporary Literature 54, no.2 (2013), 219; 219-20. 5 Lerner, “You’re a Poet”; Wood, “Reality Testing.” 6 Sernovitz, “Lost Generations.” 7 Corrigan, “Life Without Plot”; Kevin Moore, review of Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner, Make (4 August 2012), http://makemag.com/review-leaving-the-atocha-station-by-ben-lerner/. 8 Dyer, review; Meagan Day, review of Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner, Full-Stop (3 October 2011), http://www.full-stop.net/2011/10/03/reviews/meagan-day/leaving-the-atocha-station-ben-lerner/.

144 feeling and thought, between places, and, most often, between lived experience and ‘the moment of art.’”9

As with Cole, critics have tended to distinguish the novel as an “intellectually compelling” achievement, for its reminiscence of a wide range of literary and philosophical works.. 10 Many have compared Lerner’s novel, like Cole’s, to Sebald, particularly in the way that it “evok[es his] strange, beautiful documentary ‘novels,’” capturing the same “impulse to make a narrative scrapbook of lived experience.”11 Other such comparisons have argued that Lerner’s novel elicits “the atmosphere of Sylvia Path’s frequently underappreciated The

Bell Jar,” The Sun Also Rises, “Jean Baudrillard’s in his canonical work of literary theory,

Simulations,” and Knut Hamsun’s Hunger.12 The most extensive example of such a critical approach occurs in a short essay by Rogers that accompanies an interview with Lerner, for

Contemporary Literature, in which he aligns Leaving the Atocha Station with “a host of antecedents, many of them notably opposed to theories of writing as the expression or revelation of a singular, coherent interiority”:

Perhaps the clearest line extends, as Marjorie Perloff might trace it, from the early modernism of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams to Objectivism, through the Black Mountain poets and Language poetry, and to current figures such as John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, and those whom Stephen Burt has termed ‘elliptical’ poets. If there is or was a tradition of the American avant-garde, Lerner would seem to belong to it.13 Perhaps what is most salient about this particular analysis is the way in which Rogers constructs a line of influence only consisting of poets; that he would eschew generic

9 Chris Carosi, “The Slippery Nature of Experience: Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station,” ZYZZYA (1 November 2011), http://www.zyzzyva.org/2011/11/01/the-slippery-nature-of-experience-ben-lerners- leaving-the-atocha-station/. 10 Day, review. 11 Peter Carty, review of Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner, Independent (14 July 2012), http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/leaving-the-atocha-station-by-ben-lerner- 7939249.html. 12 Moore, review; Sernovitz, “Lost Generations”; Alex Gallo-Brown, “Turning the novel on its head,” 3AM Magazine (14 August 2013), http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/turning-the-novel-on-its-head/; Dyer, review. 13 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 219.

145 convention – that Leaving the Atocha Station looks like a novel – for a Shklovskian approach that focuses on how it is read. More curious is the way in which a metafictional line of inquiry can work within this conceptualisation. Geoff Dyer and Laura Kolbe approach the novel’s poetic timbre with brief comparison to modernist metafictional, yet poetic, novels: both Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte

Laurids Brigge – sharing with the latter a narrative approach that “alter[s] and fictionaliz[es] a past period of [the protagonist’s] own artistic production,” which makes it, therefore, “both further from himself (through falsification) and nearer to himself (through recollection).”14

Although a notably contemporary text, Lerner’s distinctively poetic approach to a traditionally prosaic form has thus been critically reconciled by aligning it with formally unusual works from the modernist period, whose aesthetics seem to resist a ready generic classification. What seems to be lacking, however, is the recognition that Lerner shares this concern with other contemporary writers; to name a few, Norwegian writers Karl Ove

Knausgaard and Tomas Espedal, and Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli, adopt a similarly poetic register and are inexorably concerned with the question of writing against formal convention.

Given this concern, poet John Ashbery is an important counter figure, or interlocutor, to Lerner. Particularly attuned to the novel’s overt interplay with the poetry of

John Ashbery, however, reviewers have identified him as the predominant figure with which Lerner’s work resonates. “[O]ne source for the novel,” Lerner explains, was “an essay I wrote on… Ashbery for boundary 2”: indeed, its reincorporation and redevelopment into narrative form “dramatize[d] how these ideas infect or animate other areas of

14 Dyer, review; Laura Kolbe, “A Crucible of the Human Spirit Guy,” Open Letters Monthly (1 October 2011), http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/a-crucible-of-the-human-spirit-guy/.

146 experience,” something its original form as “a critical essay” could not really do.15 Even the novel’s title was appropriated from Ashbery’s poem of the same name from 1962. As such,

Lerner openly invites a discussion of his aesthetic correspondences with Ashbery, reinforced by his protagonist’s ubiquitous recourse to volumes of his poems. Sheila Heti, focusing on the essay-fragments that Lerner incorporates, argues that “[o]ne of the most exciting aspects of Leaving the Atocha Station is seeing a dedicated poet write a novel that addresses poetry’s limitations.”16 This interpretation prioritises the novel’s aisthetic register, through which Heti evokes Lerner’s understanding of Ashbery’s practice: he says of

Ashbery’s “best poems” that they “are written as if ‘on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you [see] only the reflection of your reading’. This ‘keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror.’” Rather than simply re-presenting his work, Lerner mediates the poems in a way that both distances and necessarily engages an awareness of the mediating process of reading. Approached in this way, Lerner’s use of poetry can thus be understood as necessarily critical, at the same time as it offers both as “a homage to Ashbery,” and as a manual for how to read poetry in general.17

As part of their focus on Lerner’s poetic sensibility, critics have been particularly attentive to his innovative use of form. Noting that “although the book takes the liberties of a work of fiction,” it also “does sometimes have the appearance of documentary,”

Moore places particular emphasis on the presence of images within the novel.18 He also elucidates that the novel could be considered as a “novel-length rendition” of Marianne

Moore’s poem “Poetry,” taking the form of a “Postmodern ‘Defense of Poesy.’” Indeed,

15 Ben Lerner, interview by Elsbeth Pancrazi, “Poet Novelist,” PSA, http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/interviews/poet_novelist_an_interview_with/ 16 Sheila Heti, “I hadn’t even seen the Alhambra,” London Review of Books 34, no. 16 (August 2012), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n16/sheila-heti/i-hadnt-even-seen-the-alhambra. 17 Daylight, “Illusions.” 18 Moore, review.

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Laura Kolbe argues that Leaving the Atocha Station “is as much an apologia for poetry as it is a novel,” suggesting “Lerner’s ability to accomplish both projects at once is a marvel” – the novel occupies the space of two forms, where a “sense of narrative forward motion and his penchant for rumination are kept in constant competition with one another.”19 Other critics have suggested, moreover, that the novel is more fragmented than cohesive: rather than “a novel, [or] a public performance,” the novel is “an inward-looking text to which we have been given access, something like a diary, or notes towards a future work.”20

Reflecting Lin’s earlier argument that the novel is a fragment of an already completed larger work, critics have suggested that a ‘work in progress’ draws attention to the “number of crazed essay-reflections… on poetry and art [that] flow through the book.”21 Taking a

Benjaminian approach, the novel uses a method that “collect[s] experiences,” which are mediated through what Max Ross has termed Lerner’s “meander[ing]” “phrases.”22 Other critics coalesce the novel’s metafictional reflexivity with its ‘notebook’ aesthetic, through the established formal categories of the “bildungsroman” and the “künstlerroman” to account for the novel’s meditative subject and “precise, reflective and darkly comic voice.”23 As such, because Leaving the Atocha Station denies critics an exact generic categorisation, the critical approach to his work has been intrinsically concerned with the novel’s ability to incorporate other forms of writing into, what appears on the surface as, a novelistic structure. Like Espedal’s Against Art, Leaving the Atocha Station is a meditation on the act of writing; of creation.

19 Kolbe, “Crucible.” 20 Heti, “Alhambra.” 21 Dyer, review. 22 Heti, “Alhambra”; Max Ross, review of Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner, Star Tribune (2 September 2011), http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/128938058.html. 23 Sernovitz, “Lost Generations”; Hugh Foley, “Born Between Mirrors,” Review 31, http://review31.co.uk/article/view/53/born-between-mirrors; Sernovitz, “Lost Generations.”

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There is a distinction, however, in how reviewers and interviewers approach Leaving the Atocha Station. In conversations with Tao Lin and Elsbeth Pancrazi, (whose interviews place particular emphasis on Lerner as a poet-novelist), he has expressed that he does not

“have an exact sense of the constellation of books into which my novel fits.”24 Among contemporary prose writers that he does consider “important,” however, are “Thomas

Bernhard, Javier Marías, and W. G. Sebald,” as well as Roberto Bolaño, with whom he has

“overlapping concerns” despite not “consciously think[ing] of him as a model.”25 Across these interviews, moreover, Lerner has consciously delineated a particular aesthetic inflected within his novel; the inclusion of images interspersed with the text. He elucidates that “[o]ne way to note… influence on Leaving the Atocha Station is around the question of images,” of which Sebald, Marías, and Alexander Kluge have provided contemporary models for the use of visual fragments within textual narratives: he states that he is

“particularly interested in what the photograph can do in or to fiction, how the inclusion of even a few photographs changes the novel’s relationship to the conventions of realism.”26

This concern with realism as a fictional technique can be seen in Lerner’s approach to dialogue. A “problem” that was solved by analysing “writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Ivy Compton-Burnett and Aaron Kunin and even the Hemingway of For Whom the Bell

Tolls,” Lerner approached dialogue by rendering it “through a narrator whose unreliability extends to his descriptions of his own linguistic competence in the language from which he’s translating.”27 While in some cases Lerner resists contextualising his novel, when he does so, it is with regards to formal techniques, working through its linguistic failures in expressing understandable meaning.

24 Lerner, “You’re a Poet.” 25 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 234. 26 Lerner, “You’re a Poet.” 27 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 234.

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Indeed, as a writer whose meditations on artistic practice are confessorial in tone,

Lerner is similarly critically aware of the various ways in which the novel could be read.

Arguing that rather than having written a ‘poet’s novel’ – by which he means, “either a lyrically charged text in which the signifier keeps overwhelming the signified or a more

Ashbery-like (or de Chirico or Pasternak-like) drama of evaporating content, a kind of syntactic engine in which language dematerializes as if into narrative but the narrative itself is more of a motion than a meaning” – Lerner “was surprised… to find [he] had written a novel with a largely undisturbed surface, or whose disturbances don’t disturb the narrative.”28 Instead, as he has outlined to Rogers and Pancrazi, he perceives Leaving the

Atocha Station’s form to be malleable dependant on the reader’s approach to the novel, stating that “[i]f you think the narrative demonstrates serious literary engagement and ability, then it’s easy to read the work as a Künstlerroman,” or even “a collision of an ars poetica with a Bildungsroman.”29 Whereas, “if nothing in the prose gives the lie to Adam’s doubts about his own commitment and seriousness, then it’s something else – a year in the life of an anxious young conman or whatever.” Indeed, while “Adam is conscious of” his own fraudulent practice as a writer, “perhaps his goal is to lay bare his literary fraudulence in a work of literature whose merit dispels it.”30 This aesthetic of failure is an idea that has pervaded many of Lerner’s discussions of the novel, particularly so in an essay he wrote as a finalist for the 2013 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature: he argues that he “came to write this novel, then, in part by working against an image of the conventional novel – by writing my resistance to the form into the form, narrating the pitfalls of narrative.”31

28 Ben Lerner, interview by Fitzgerald. 29 Cole, interview by Rogers, 235; Lerner, “Poet Novelist.” 30 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 235. 31 Ben Lerner, “Working Against the Image of the Conventional Novel,” Jewish Book Council: The Prosen People (14 May 2014), http://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/BlogRetrieve.aspx?PostID=1008857&A=SearchResult&SearchID=6606 278&ObjectID=1008857&ObjectType=55.

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Despite whether Lerner perceives that the novel can be read as a ‘poet’s novel’ or not, he does prioritise the novel’s complex relationship to poetic form. In conversation with Jason Rehel, Lerner posits that he “turned to the novel in part because [he] could say things about poetry that [he] couldn’t say in poetry – it gave [him] a kind of critical distance.” In response to Pancrazi’s categorisation of the novel as a ‘poet novel,’ Lerner proposes that while poetry was a “major theme of the novel,” it was in particular “the gap between Poetry with a capital ‘P’ – the virtual possibilities of the art” and “actual poems, which to a certain extent must always betray the abstract potential of the medium the second they become merely real.”32 He argues, moreover, that:

I did become interested in the novel as a vehicle for meditations on poetry, what the specific opportunities afforded by that distance might be. Leaving the medium of poetry to talk about poetry was a way of keeping in contact with the virtual – a way of analyzing or flirting with the poetic without producing actual poems. Indeed, what Lerner finds exciting about the form is the way in which it can be used as a medium through which to “absorb and comment on other forms”33 – an argument that is prevalent throughout his interviews. Lerner argues that the “ability of the novel to absorb other genres is… a wonderful potential of the form,” a “porous” process that allows

“language and concepts [to] migrate from one genre to the other.”34 He, moreover, conceptualises this practice of “embed[ding] artworks” as “curatorial,” which, when combined with the novel’s emphasis on the mediation of experience, recalls the surrealist method of found objects: the novel constitutes an “artificial environment” into which these

‘artworks’ are placed, “in order to test how one’s response is altered.” 35

32 Lerner, “Poet Novelist.” 33 Lerner, interview by Rehel. 34 Lerner interview by Rogers, 229; Lerner, interview by Jonathan Derbyshire, “The Books Interview,” New Statesman (8 August 2012), http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/08/books-interview-ben- lerner. 35 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 228.

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Indeed, it is precisely through mediation of aesthetic experience in literary language that Lerner articulates his resistance to the conventions of literary realism. In conversation with fellow poet Cyrus Console, Lerner argued that the relationship between text and image “is crucial to the contemporary novel as a form.”36 He proposes that the “text-image relationship in the novel raises and sustains,” not only, “the question of the degree to which either prose or the image have a purchase on the real,” but whether “the extent to which the meaning of one is stabilized or undercut by the other.” Expressing awareness of the lack of “interesting talk among novelists about how fiction has had to reassess its priorities in light of cheaply reproducible photographs,” he describes his use of a “few” images – six in total – with specific regards to Leaving the Atocha Station, by suggesting that

“their presence” and “ambiguity… very much links up with the conversation about mediation,” and “spectacle.”37 Indeed, he notes how “novelistic writing is often given the goal of dissolving itself into an image,” where “the use of images in a novel… complicates the prose’s relationship to what you could call ‘optical realism.’” As such, the incorporation of images disrupts what Lerner perceives as the conventional novelistic method of mediating experience. What he consequently suggests by this is that the visual spaces that the text manifests are, therefore, “interestingly strained, simultaneously restricted and enhanced, by the juxtaposition of prose with actual images”; the use of “even ambiguous ones,” interrogates imagined experience, making “the difference between reading and looking… more acutely felt.”

Across both the reviews of Leaving the Atocha Station and related interviews with

Lerner, critics express a persisting concern with reconciling his poetic style with the formal

36 Ben Lerner, interview by Cyrus Console, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Age of Spectacle,” Molossus (2 September 2011), http://www.molossus.co/prose/fiction/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young- man-in-the-age-of-spectacle-ben-lerner-in-conversation-with-cyrus-console/. 37 Lerner, “You’re a Poet”; Lerner, “Portrait of the Artist.”

152 aesthetics of the novel. Indeed, many of the questions directed at Lerner explicitly invite an explanation of what are seen as potentially irreconcilable aspects of his approach. In one interview, Rogers suggests to Lerner that while the “language and form in [his] poetry are formally experimental and difficult,” it is executed “less so” in his novel – although it also

“experiments with a number of theoretical approaches to novel-writing itself.”38 One of which, he suggests, is the novel’s erratic momentum, consisting of “hesitations, repetitions, moments of doubling back or speaking in fragments.” This conceptualisation of the novel, however, relies necessarily upon the language of poetry; Rogers describes Lerner’s text as having “eloquently integrated and contorted jargon and platitudes through inventive line breaks,” as well as reduced polished speech (often prose incorporated semipoetically) to flatness, stripped of grandiloquence.”39 This analysis acknowledges the textured landscape of, or even, as Lerner might say, the texture of language within, the novel:

Stark declarations and proclamations stand alongside voids, deferrals, and inauthenticity… and recursivity is multiply employed. Failure, anxiety, repetition, incomplete experiences, and missed moments of anticipated pathos or sublimity abound, presented to the reader with a self-consciousness about Lerner’s own authorship and full of difficulty, paradoxes, and questions about the technologies of readership and viewing that govern contemporary reception.

Indeed, as Maureen Corrigan posits, the protagonist’s “thoughts don’t so much resolve themselves into conclusions; they simply dissolve into other thoughts.”40 As such, Lerner’s poetic style – and, indeed, ‘defence of poesy’ – can be understood through its mediation of

Adam’s experience, “structured around… subtle, delicate moments” or “performances… of intense experience.” If we follow the line of argument established by his critics, Lerner’s style thus inherently reflects the subject matter with which the novel is concerned.

38 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 232. 39 Rogers, interview with Lerner, 224. 40 Corrigan, “Life Without Plot.”

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While critics like Rogers readily identify stylistic “traces of or allusions to” authors such as “Leo Tolstoy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, or Walt Whitman”, or point out “quotations from Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, or Jacques Derrida”, they argue that such literary fragments perform “not as explanatory or exegetical concepts, but as figures for the acts of poesis and consumption.”41 Indeed, Lerner stipulates that he was neither “in conscious control of how the novel unfolded,” nor “elaborating a program that preceded the act of composition.”42 Rather, Lerner’s style “emphasiz[es] process over product, composing over composition, and limits over ideals of transcendence.”43 Lerner himself figures this use of language explicitly in relief to his poetic style:

[I]n a narrative there are certain sentences whose job is to disappear into the story, there are moments in which the self-effacement of language is a virtue, and if the goal of a sentence is to melt into air, that sometimes relieves a certain kind of pressure on its construction.44

In contrast to his poetic priorities, Lerner’s prose dissolves the overtly constructive aspects of his writing. Indeed, he suggests that his incorporation of fragments of poetry within the novel contributes towards this effect; he considers Leaving the Atocha Station to be “in some ways” a “very contemporary and very neurotic reading of Marianne Moore’s famous and whittled down poem, “Poetry”: ‘I, too, dislike it./ Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in/ it, after all, a place for the genuine.’”45 As such, the stylistic traces that critics can recognise within the novel form part of his mediation of aesthetic experience.

41 Rogers, interview with Lerner, 219-20. 42 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 225. 43 Ibid., 219-20. 44 Lerner, “Poet Novelist.” 45 Ben Lerner, interview by Ted Hodgkinson, Granta (9 July 2012), http://www.granta.com/New- Writing/Interview-Ben-Lerner.

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As a narrative that is mediated through the protagonist’s thoughts, discussion of the character of Adam Gordon forms a significant part of the novel’s criticism. Characterised in general terms as “[a]drift in postmodern perplexity, he finds solace in substance abuse,” is “spectacularly self-indulgent,” is “engagingly self-deprecating and acutely self-aware,” and

“[h]is deliberate, analytical voice makes his confessions more humorous and unsettling.”46

Despite being described as such, the criticism has tended to read his character in one of two distinct ways: either as the archetypal twenty-first century poet, with “a profound interior life,” or as a sociopath with narcissistic tendencies. Christopher Griffith has suggested that “one of the most impressive things about Atocha Station is Lerner’s depiction of what it’s like to be a young artist in the early 21st century, when technology mediates our experience to an unprecedented degree,” while Alex Gallo-Brown has argued that Adam

“is like the vision of the poet put forth by Vilem Flusser in Does Writing Have a Future?” – referring to Flusser directly, he identifies that “poetry seems to exist not to communicate transcendent meaning or inspire sublime experience but instead to “remix” cultural signs into unusual or surprising patterns.”47 Moore and Rogers, however, propose a reading that reconciles the two critical perspectives. Moore’s reading, which compares Adam to “other künstlerroman protagonists, such as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus” – a form that uses the

“mechanism of negative readerly identification with self-obsessed characters who are at once vain, blind to their privilege, and not-so-secretly self-loathing” – aligns with Heti’s analysis which proposes that a contemporary poet is “not someone who feels more, or more intensely, but someone who feels less.”48 As such, Leaving the Atocha Station can be considered as “partly a description of the inner territory of a new kind of American artist:

46 Carty, review; Christopher Griffith, review of Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner, Electric Literature (17 August 2011), http://electricliterature.com/blog/2011/08/17/review-leaving-the-atocha-station-by-ben- lerner/. 47 Griffith, review; Gallo-Brown, “Turning the Novel.” 48 More, Review; Heti, “Alhambra.”

155 cold, lazy, artificial, yet oddly honourable given the extreme honesty and thoroughness of his self-scrutiny.”49 As a postmillennial exploration of the art of writing, Adam thus embodies a kind of negative image of the traditional ideal poet.

If critics have been sensitive to Adam’s more poetic sensibilities, however, their criticism of him nonetheless repeatedly expresses an ambiguous opinion, which intimates broader insecurities about the role of poetry in literature. Wood summarises this perspective in his explanation that Adam, as a character “at once ideological and post- ideological, vaguely engaged and profoundly spectatorial, charming and loathsome,” offers

“a convincing representative of twenty-first-century American Homo literatus.”50 Drawing out the dismissive implications of this equivocal characterisation, he argues that the juxtaposition of Adam’s “poised intelligence” with his “aimless[ness]” is “hospitable to paradox and dialectic, so that his ‘profound experience of the absence of profundity’ becomes, for the reader, an engrossing inquiry into a man’s shallow depths.” Attentive to the same “fallibilty” in Adam, however, Moore instead suggests that by crafting a “fallible narrator whose fallibility must be trusted,” Lerner “purchases for his narrator a most rare brand of narrative authority”; Adam represents, in this logic, a model through which “we learn something of human experience in all its broken complexity.”51 Indeed, critics tend to acknowledge that the novel’s interrogation of literary convention is tied to Adam’s fallibility as a narrator; Dyer articulates a commensurate sense of Adam’s failings, suggesting that he

“suffers frequently from linguistic dislocation and – permanently – from bipolarity which he self-medicates with a cocktail of prescription drugs, coffee, nicotine, booze and marijuana.”52 What such readings of Adam ultimately register is the discomfort induced by

49 Heti, “Alhambra.” 50 Wood, “Reality Testing.” 51 Moore, review. 52 Dyer, review.

156 an overtly poetic narrator, especially within the confines of a prosaic text. To some extent, moreover, this reflects a critical uncertainty about a poet writing a novel, particularly given the critical readiness to read Atocha as “in some ways a roman à clef, with Adam’s back-story mirroring Lerner’s own, and Adam even corresponding online with Lerner’s real-life close friend, the poet Cyrus Console.”53 Thus, even as critics acknowledge the possibilities of a more poetic approach, their awareness of Adam’s ambiguity suggests an ironic reflexivity to his aesthetic expression.

This desire to understand the novel through a specific characterisation of Adam has been particularly motivated by a frequent discomfort within Leaving the Atocha Station’s generic critical classification. Given the novel’s preoccupation with urban spaces, and

Adam’s own apparently perpetual wandering through Madrid, critics have readily applied the same concepts of flânerie and the flâneur to the novel’s movements and characters as were applied to Open City. As discussed in Chapter One, Kuo and Wu’s article “Imperfect

Strollers” analyses the “evolution of the flâneur” through a comparison of Lerner, Cole, and Sebald’s novels.54 Despite Leaving the Atocha Station’s prominence in the title of the article, it features very little substantive analysis of the text itself, instead relying upon simple observations such as “Adam is an outsider” and “takes no consolation in the company of his fellow expats.” It nonetheless places the novel within the tradition of the flâneur, describing both it and Open City as “desultory… and unapologetically interior.”

Moore articulates a similar reading of the novel when he suggests that “most days Gordon seems content with his existence as a flâneur in the city.”55 By framing his behaviour in terms of flânerie, moreover, he draws attention to Adam’s “meander[ing]” movement through the cityscape; Heti, who reduces Atocha to a novel in which the protagonist

53 Kolbe, “Crucible.” 54 Kuo and Wu, “Imperfect Strollers.” 55 Moore, review.

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“mostly wanders around”, offers a similar assessment.56 In contrast to this rather dismissive application of flânerie, however, Wood develops as more nuanced reading of Atocha, which uses Adam’s flâneuristic qualities as a way to link him to a specific literary tradition. He argues that “Lerner nicely combines the tradition of the Superfluous Man with that of the flâneur. As in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (and as in Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of

Disquiet, which might well be this novel’s model in the flâneur tradition), the narrator is condemned to wander the darkened corridors of his own authenticity.”57 Rather than reducing the protagonist to the sum of his physical movements, therefore, Wood’s more sensitive reading of Atocha is attuned to the intimate personal resonances that Adam’s

‘meanderings’ suggest. Intrinsically tied to the poetic reticence of Pessoa’s heteronyms, the way that Lerner renders Adam’s perspective can thus be understood as a way of mediating his interiority through his external experiences. On a superficial level, Dyer has noted that

Adam is “an outsider,” while Moore argues that “he finds himself subject to loneliness”; reading him instead, as Wood does, as a Pessoan figure suggests a way of reconciling the two facets of Adam’s experience, without necessarily diverging into a discussion of flanerie per se.58

Lerner himself has articulated an understanding of Adam similar to that which

Wood proposes. Drawing his interior world into relation with his external wanderings, he suggests that “there is a sense in which Adam might form – or might see himself as forming – part of a constellation of diverse antiheroes: Bartleby, Oblomov, Jakob von

Gunten, the Underground Man, Julien Sorel, etc.”59 Rather than suggesting a direct correlation, however, this characterisation suggests a productive dissonance between

56 Moore, review; Heti, “Alhambra.” 57 Wood, “Reality Testing.” 58 Dyer, review; Moore, review. 59 L:erner, interview by Rogers, 234.

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Adam’s thoughts and experiences. Indeed, Lerner argues that “the novel’s concern with the disconnect – sometimes humorous, sometimes harrowing – between interior and social experience is traditional, is one of the founding concerns of the novel as a form from Don

Quixote on.”60 In this respect, Lerner’s characterisation of Adam resonates with, and indeed reflects, the negative style of the novel as a whole. Rather than offering a smooth, coherent narrative, the novel, as Lerner suggests, relies upon a tension, both linguistic and subjective:

[H]e’s beset by failures – but he also seems to believe that linguistic and artistic failure can catalyze a certain experience of plenitude and possibility. For instance, his tenuous grasp of Spanish isn’t just a source of anxiety; it also allows him to experience a kind of ambiguity and polysemy even in mundane exchanges.61 Such an understanding of Adam’s retrograde or meandering method of generating personal and narrative energy echoes Lerner’s characterisation of the novel’s larger concerns with the act of experiencing rather than the experienced act; the performance of linguistic creation. In contrast to the critical equation of performance with inauthenticity, however,

Lerner asks, “[i]f all identity is to some extent a performance, what could be more authentic than performance anxiety?”62 Ultimately, he argues, Adam is concerned with depicting

“changes in personality that are too subtle or ambiguous to register in novels concerned with grand transformations,” and his success in doing so is contingent upon his interest “in depicting the arc and feel of (often neurotic) thinking, the texture of time as it passes in both dramatic and non-dramatic experience.”63 It is this last interest that Lerner suggests is particularly resonant with his own poetic concerns, and if Adam is to be understood in relation to his creator, it should be through their mutual concern with the aesthetic mediation of experience, and the question of aesthetic sincerity.

60 Lerner, interview by Rehel. 61 Lerner, interview by Hodgkinson. 62 Lerner, interview by Rehel. 63 Lerner, “Working Against the Image.”

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In this way, Lerner relates Adam’s private mode of experience to the novel’s broader concerns of postmillennial art. Suggesting that “Adam is obsessed – like a lot of people – with all the overlapping forms of mediation in contemporary life,” he explains that he would “like to think he reveals – as characters in any serious novel reveal – something about the texture of the contemporary.”64 As a “young poet abroad trying to figure out if he’s worthy of his art,” Adam is particularly attentive to the implications of the technological mediation of poetry; he is unsure whether “his art can endure in an age of mass media and spectacle, and so his coming of age as an artist – or, depending on your reading, his failure to come of age – isn’t just something the prose describes: it’s enacted in the writing itself.”65 This relationship suggests that the novel ought to be understood as

“very much centered in Adam’s head”, but also as presenting “two Adams: the one who is having the experiences in Madrid and the one who is recounting them from some unspecified later point, writing them down”.66 It is through this dual characterisation that

Lerner is able to render Adam’s relationship to society-at-large through his writing: the novel reveals that “what’s in our heads isn’t really ‘in,’ isn’t really ‘ours’ – it’s inseparable from the hum of the social, from all the information and misinformation circulating through us.”

ABSORPTIVE FORM

In his interview with Rogers, Lerner comprehensively delineates a crucial priority that underlines his aesthetic practice across both Leaving the Atocha Station and his poetic works, suggesting that the “ability of the novel to absorb other genres is, it seems to me, a wonderful potential of the form.”67 Later in the same interview, he adds that a novel

64 Lerner, interview by Rehel. 65 Lerner, “Working Against the Image.” 66 Lerner, interview by Rehel. 67 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 226.

160 composed in this way uses curatorial techniques, stating: “I suppose part of what attracts me to fiction is how it lets you embed artworks (like the poems or images…) in various artificial environments in order to test how one’s response is altered. Fiction can be very curatorial in that regard.”68 These experiments with fragmentation, recombination, and assemblage do not spontaneously appear within his novel, but are part of an extended aesthetic practice that also informs his poetry, particularly in his latest collection Mean Free

Path (2010), and in his second novel 10:04 (2014). Although curatorial in its embedding of other forms and genres, Lerner’s concept of absorption is not limited by the grammar of collection, but draws upon actual images to mediate the very experience of the aesthetic.

Moreover, writing against several genres and forms – essay, poetry, visual art – and assembling them in a recombinatory style necessarily invokes the virtual conditions of fictional composition: in absorbing previously published works, Lerner transposes their authorship from himself to Adam in Leaving the Atocha Station, or Ben in 10:04, whereby, in metafictional terms, not only the act of reading but of “composition” becomes one of

“discovery.”69 Crucially, this strategy facilitates Lerner’s use of the lyric register within novel form.

Yet the novel as an absorptive form, as one that incorporates genres, forms, fictions, realities, eschews metafictionality precisely because, as with Cole’s Everyday is for the

Thief, the material absrobed remains nevertheless as authorial creations. While both

Lerner’s novels provoke questions about the idea of fiction, and what fiction means, their ambitions are more nuanced than the garden-variety metafictional novel; both Adam and

Ben are not just authors, they are both authors of the novels Leaving the Atocha Station and

10:04, as well as the assumed authors of any absorbed poems, stories, or essays that the

68 Ibid., 228. 69 Lerner, “You’re a poet.”

161 novels integrate. The metafictional premise of both novels is accentuated by their narrator’s insistent self-exposure, openly meditating on the limitations of their linguistic expression.

Given that Lerner has claimed that he is not concerned about creating a metafiction that

“draw[s] attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text,” but a metafiction that “move[s] towards something like sincerity,” it is vital not to pigeonhole his interrogation of form within the ludic metafiction of postmodernism. 70 Rather than

“mocking fiction’s inability to make contact with anything outside of itself,” Lerner is aiming for an elevated virtual mode: “how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.” This ontology manifests as an intrinsic interrogation of realism, or what Lerner describes as “the oldest novelistic question,” concerning “what counts as an authentic aesthetic experience.”71 Is to write fiction an act of writing against reality? Is reality not just a form of fiction? Or, as Lerner writes, “[w]hat’s the role of the imagination in lived experience?” What are the “limits of “lived experience”?

His novels self-consciously gesture toward this, and it is in this framework that, for Lerner, such a collage of genre is where “[t]he edge of fiction flickers.” Emphasising a key aesthetic difference in the conceptualisations of each of his novels, he claims that while his first was predominately about fraudulence – “the way Adam Gordon approached truth through its opposite” – his second “has an explicit relation to that one, in part tracking how that fiction became a fact in my life, but it’s primarily a relation of difference – the second narrates a moving away from the first.”72 Indeed, his novels aim for a fiction that questions its own authenticity; not necessarily in counterpoint to reality, but in order to amplify a

70 Ben Lerner, second interview by Tao Lin, Believer Magazine, http://www.believermag.com/exclusives/?read=interview_lerner_2. 71 Lerner, interview by Bollen. 72 Lerner, second interview by Lin.

162 texture of the ‘real’ literary experience. Or, in other words, they advance the case for a reinvestment in fiction, and embody the “attempt to make formal integrity viable again.”73

In 10:04, this manifests in the way in which Lerner transforms the novelistic first person into a lyric ‘I’. In an attempt to answer how “fictions have real effects,” the reader is made to be there within the very contours of the prose, rather than the implied presence or literary construct that she is arguably imagined to be.74 I argue that Lerner does so in order to endow a sense of perceptual reality to the narrator’s experience of a fictional world. In an interview with Lerner, Christopher Bollen identifies this as a generic problem that

“rarely occurs in visual art.”75 He explains that “[v]isual art hardly enters the vein of real experience because we as the audience always understand the frame – this is a gallery, and art happens inside but not outside.” Lerner, in response to Bollen’s comments, argues that it is precisely this uncertainty that 10:04 meditates upon, particularly “the way our lives are confusions between imaginative structures and real forces.”76 In order to do so, he claims,

“I need a first person that is intensely felt to move across the levels of fiction. There’s no way for me to do it without inviting that conflation of fact and fiction.” But, the novel is also ostensibly “to the second person plural on the perennial verge of existence.”77 In other words, while there is a first person in the form of the narrator, there is also a second, the implied reader. For Lerner, through an “emptying” of the “self,” fiction is “imagine[d]… as a space of transpersonal imagination,” the self “as a multitude.”78 The narrator, Ben, often addresses a vacant ‘you’, such as when he imagines how mourning looks:

73 James, “Integrity After Metafiction,” 464. 74 Lerner, interview by Bollen. 75 Bollen, interview with Lerner. 76 Lerner, interview by Bollen. 77 Ben Lerner, interview by Ariana Reines, BOMB Magazine 129 (Fall 2014), http://bombmagazine.org/article/10101/ben-lerner-ariana-reines. 78 Lerner, interview by Bollen.

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Have you seen people pause in revolving doors like divers decompressing, transitioning slowly as to prevent nitrogen bubbles from forming in the blood, or noticed the puzzled look that many people wear – I found a bench across Fifth Avenue and sat and watched – when they step onto the sidewalk, as if they’ve suddenly forgotten something important, but aren’t sure what: their keys, their phone, the particulars of their loss? (43)

Or in “The Golden Vanity” – a short story initially published in The New Yorker, and embedded in the novel as a piece written by Ben – where this kind of question pervades even the author’s own compositions:

Would you know what he meant if the author said he never really saw her face, that faces where fictions he increasingly could not read, a reductive way of bundling features in the memory, even if that memory was then projected into the present, onto the area between the forehead and chin? (68)79

In effect, this suggests how, for Lerner, the second person is defined by a state of ineffability and elusiveness as an imagined construct. Indeed, 10:04 aims to provide an answer to the perennial question of the lyric addressee is who the ‘you’ embodies: “a collective person who didn’t yet exist, a still-uninhabited second person plural to whom all the arts, even in their most intimate registers, were nevertheless addressed” (108). This lies in the ability of fiction to capture a “process of characterization and re-characterization instead of offering up a few stable, easily-summarized individuals”; the movement of

“reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences.”80

10:04’s lyric ‘I’ is embodied in Ben’s pervasive experience of Walt Whitman, who can be considered a significant analogue for Lerner’s own aesthetic approach. “The only book I’d brought with me to the residency,” Ben notes at the beginning of his residency in

Marfa, “was the Library of America edition of Whitman” (167); he would “read Specimen

79 Also published as Lerner, “The Golden Vanity,” The New Yorker (18 June 2012), http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/18/the-golden-vanity. 80 Lerner, second interview by Lin. My emphasis.

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Days, his bizarre memoir, for hours” (168). Ben’s Whitman figure thus becomes in part a suggestion for the failure of the lyric voice – “he has to be nobody in particular in order to be a democratic everyman, has to empty himself out so that his poetry can be a textual commons for the future into which he projects himself” (168) – and as such, echoes

Lerner’s own reflections on the way that “Whitman went out of his way to make himself a poetic character.”81 For Lerner, the failure of Whitman’s project lies in his “dream of corporate personhood,” the mode in which “you can dissolve yourself through art into collective possibility,” in which “[w]e can all fit in his ‘I’ and we can all be addressed by his

‘you’.” While “never realized,” however, this lyric dream “remains live” for Lerner in such a way that it unfurls reflexively in both his poetry and novels. Indeed, considering the voice of the self – and the ear of the other – like this is an expression of the virtual, “as an invitation to a certain kind of participation on the reader: Think about these things with me. Can you see this?”82 The problem, however, lies in the question of response – who is to respond, can they respond, and is there an expectation of response? Lerner suggests that despite “the sense that the reader is invited to imagine herself as the ‘I’ and ‘You’ simultaneously,” such an invocation necessarily prescribes “total failure.”83 The kind of poetic address 10:04 is trying to achieve “is also just about opening a channel, about making a space for the possibility of address more than communicating any particular thing.” So, while the lyric inherently acknowledges both the realism of the first person and the vivacity of the imaginary second, it also accepts the failure of the latter to materialise; as the narrator says to himself, “You have failed to reconcile the realism of my body with the ethereality of the trees” (31-2).

81 Lerner, second interview by Lin. 82 Lerner, interview by Bollen. 83 Lerner, interview by Reines.

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This is, in part, why the action of waving in the novel is laden with such poetic significance. To Lerner, waving becomes a peculiarly lyric act of performance and response:

I have a line in a newer poem about the phenomenon of waving to somebody who in fact was waving behind you. Or someone waves and you can’t decide if they mean you. That to me seems to be a great figure in all kinds of ways for the embarrassment of receiving or performing poetic address. Poetry as overheard, in the traditional formulation. It can be hard to know if you’re being hailed, whom you’re hailing. And there’s also delay and an awkwardness and a sociality to it. It’s both a breach in communication and a way of imagining, albeit accidentally, a second person plural. Poetically, then, waving can be the ideal signifier of reciprocation. In 10:04, it is a mirrored action of directed intimacy, of a conscious acknowledgement of the other – “having hesitated and knowing I’d been seen, even in the dark, I felt a pressured to turn around and signal some kind of greeting to the other nocturnal resident… he raised his arm and I raised mine” (167) – when encountering the unnamed Polish poet across the road from his

Marfa residence, yet also an unreciprocated expression of goodbye to Alena, Ben’s occasional lover (210). Lerner thus considers the act of waving in similar lyric terms as love poetry: “to think about the ‘I’ and ‘you’ as sites for love poems, to be aware of the love poem’s history, but not to be disabled by it, not to end up just demonstrating the tiredness of certain tropes.” In conversation with writer and friend Aaron Kunin for Jacket Magazine, he considers this very question of reciprocity in poetic address in his latest collection of poetry, Mean Free Path: “[o]ne advantage of the unrequited in love poetry is that it provides a fictional support for apostrophe – the recipient of address isn’t responding, isn’t there, because of her coldness or superiority, not because she’s been objectified, or because she’s a personified abstraction, or whatever.”84 While Mean Free Path “has many moments of address… their failure to be reciprocal is understood as a limitation of the speaker or his

84 Ben Lerner, interview by Aaron Kunin, Jacket Magazine 37 (2009), http://jacketmagazine.com/37/iv-kunin- ivb-lerner.shtml.

166 medium, not some attribute of the beloved (perfection, indifference, death).” Lack of reciprocity, then, is figured as a failure of language to express. In many ways love poetry can be considered in this way; as a failed love, a failure to love, a failure of language to express love, or, as the poet Robert Creeley wrote, a failure “to speak of it” (“For Love”).

As a novel, however, 10:04 attempts to overcome the virtuality of the second person, or recipient of poetic address, through the parallel gaze, the site of Ben and Alex’s “most intimate exchanges” (8); as if simultaneously experiencing a profound work of art, or gazing at the stars.

Lerner’s self-referentiality in interviews exposes a method of collage within his works themselves: a collage of gazes, voices, and selves.85 In another interview with Tao

Lin following the publication of 10:04, Lerner describes the fragments of poetry, essay, and visual art in these terms as “readymades.” The lyric aesthetic of his prose manifests, in part, through a form of collage; despite its prominence within modernist visual arts, however, literary collage remains a subject that has received little critical attention. So far, the only major studies have tended to be oriented around a close historical focus: Ellen Levy’s

Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery and the Struggle Between the Arts, Matt Miller’s Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass, and Elza Adamowicz’s Surrealist

Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse. Levy’s study, which is explicitly concerned with Ashbery’s poetry, also appears to be indebted to Walter Benjamin; the epigraph to the introduction is taken from The Arcades Project, and Levy frames her approach to literary collage within specifically Benjaminian concerns. In particular, she is attentive to the links that these authors themselves made between collecting and collage, suggesting that “Moore, Cornell, and Ashbery all conceive of themselves as collectors and

85 Lerner, second interview by Lin.

167 link the practice of collecting cognate ways to the practice of their respective arts.”86

Understanding collage as a “dynamic assemblage of materials in themselves often ephemeral and moribund,” which can be considered in some senses as an act of

“reanimation,” Levy develops the line of analysis established by poets like Ashbery; she argues that, as a practice based upon collection, collage is “the practice of making art out of fragments without denying their fragmentary nature.”87 As a process that was developed and advocated for by the surrealists, moreover, collage naturally bears comparison to surreal aesthetics. Noting that “[f]or both Ashbery and Moore, ‘surrealism’ seems to have been a label for a tradition to which they felt themselves to belong, but to which they could belong only if they could redefine the tradition,” Levy turns to Ashbery to define a wider understanding of surrealist aesthetics, within which to locate the practice of collage.88

Ashbery’s “distinction between surrealism ‘in the parochial 1920’s sense of the term,’ and surrealism ‘in the second, open sense in which it can still be said to animate the most advanced art being done today’” thus suggests considering collage beyond the specific bounds of modernism, as an approach that continues to inform aesthetic practices, including Lerner’s.89

When the surrealists publically established themselves as distinct avant-garde movement in the early 1920s, they sought to position themselves as literary iconoclasts. At the same time, they also self-consciously invoked earlier writers, from Edgar Allan Poe to

Rimbaud, who they reclaimed as ur-surrealists. In doing so, their foremost concern was to align their work with other authors who had developed disruptive literary techniques. In this respect, their development of literary collage techniques was inextricably tied to earlier,

86 Ellen Levy, Criminal Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle between the Arts (Oxford: OUP, 2011), xxiv. 87 Levy, Criminal Ingenuity, xxvi; xxvii. 88 Ibid., xxiv. 89 Ibid., xxiv.

168 fragmentary styles of literature, and as Adamowicz notes, “the increased fragmentation of the modern text can be traced from Rimbaud and Joyce to Burroughs and Butor.”90 As such, although it owes much of its development to surrealism, collage, “or its cognates assemblage and montage, privileging such concepts as heterogeneity, play, transgression and marginality, has been considered as the paradigm of the (post-)modernist aesthetic.”

Although, as a specifically surrealist practice, collage “suffer[ed] a momentary eclipse after

1924 in Breton’s critical and theoretical texts,” it nevertheless remained “very present in other surrealist programmatic texts, as an innovatory mode of perception or production.” 91

Indeed, it constituted the core textual strategy in surrealist writing, and its prominence is evinced by its “significant presence in surrealist publications, journals and exhibitions throughout the 1920s,” and Adomwicz notes such examples as “poems made partly or entirely from ready-made materials (Péret, ‘Hier en découvrant l’Amérique’ 1926), collage elements in prose works (Aragon, Paysan de Paris, 1926) and collaborative collages such as surrealist games or ‘L’enfant planète’ (1926), a montage text by Robert Desnos and

Benjamin Péret.”92 As such, poetic aesthetics like Ashbery’s, or even Lerner’s, can be understood as intrinsically tied to earlier surrealist practices.

Indeed, the surrealist found object correlates to Lerner’s concept of “found language” within the novel, as both are appropriative strategies to transform the original.93

He argues that:

I think the instability and participatory nature of the form is supposed to shift attention from the finished and polished artifact to the process of thinking and feeling in time – to let the struggle to express be expressive. And I wanted repetition and recombination in the sequence to make a reader experience even the

90 Elza Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), 14. 91 Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage, 8. 92 See Adamowicz’s first chapter (1-25), which incorporates a brief literature review of surrealist collage. 93 This is particularly evident in Lerner’s appropriation of Grossman’s categories of the ‘virtual’ and ‘actual’.

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most personal and direct utterances as composed of found language – which of course all of our utterances are.94 Lerner identifies this through prioritising the experience of the reader, not the author/artist as the surrealists do in their attempt to reconfigure a vision of reality. In his influential study, Pulp Surrealism, Robin Walz suggests that the surrealists were drawn to particularly diverse, often low-cultural texts, which they appropriated as part of their disruptive textual aesthetics.95 Such an impulse is manifested in Ashbery’s reappropriation of movie titles, and suggests why the surrealists developed collage as a technique: it offered a strategy for the reconfiguration neglected or disregarded material into new aesthetic forms. As such, critics tend to “focus” on the “mechanisms of collage production or the ‘cut-and-paste’ technique,” because it suggests the surrealists’ predilection for “cut-out materials which are trivial or outmoded, marginal or ephemeral.”96 Collage developed, however, into a form of writing detached from strictly demotic material. Instead, the surrealists used it as a strategy of dislocating material from a rational structure, and emphasising ‘surreal’ connections between words and images – heightening their virtual or latent relationships – without rendering them as a coherent, linear whole, with fixed relationships. Indeed, while ‘collage’ generally denotes a finished product, whether image or text, Adamowicz rightly “considers surrealist collage as a process rather than a product, an experimental mode of textual and pictorial production more than a fixed genre, a disruptive activity, not a static form.”97

Conceptualising collage as an ongoing process emphasises its “paradoxical structure [and] visibility as the collation or copresence of disparate elements, and its legibility as a configuration of signs, in a dynamic process of multiple meanings and hovering significations constantly reactivated.” Rather than tied to any specific subject matter,

94 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 236. 95 Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2000). 96 Adamowicz, Surrealist Collage, 24. 97 Ibid., 25.

170 therefore, collage is a technique that emphasises multiple meanings and indeterminate relationships.

Despite its initial prominence within the surrealists’ oeuvre, collage quickly lost its theoretical status. This was closely tied to changes in Breton’s attitude to collage, after he first advocated for it in the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto. Although the “Manifeste presents collage and automatism as two distinct modes of textual production,” in Breton’s 1925 essay “Le Surréalisme et la peinture’ (1925), he instead “privilege[d] gestural automatism and automatism of the dream. As a technique collage itself [was] rethought in terms of automatism… stress[ing] the importance of chance in the manufacture of collage.”98

Adamowicz cites several critics who “consider collage to be a feature of automatic production,” including J.H. Matthews, and Michel Murat, and explains that because collage is seen as “tapping the resources of the unconscious mind,” it has been “considered… parallel if not equivalent to automatic writing.”99 The distinction between automatism and collage is worth maintaining, however, particularly in light of Lerner’s own use of collage. It is a disjunction that Ashbery himself is attentive to: on one level, his poetry demonstrates a thoughtful reconfiguration of images, holding them in an unresolved relation to one another through the tension of collage as a form. The deliberation of his craft defies automatism as an unthought method of composition. In his critical writing he develops this distinction with more complexity, differentiating between works like de Chirico’s, which are constructed through the logic of collage, and the ‘drivel’ produced through the methodology of automatism. Ashbery distinguishes between the two approaches based upon their potential for expanding the possibilities of the novel – collage, as a structure for

98 Ibid., 6; 7. 99 Ibid., 7.

171 organising text, suggests innovative formal changes for the novel, while automatism only offers a method for generating material.

Although surrealist practices of literary collage provide a useful comparison to contemporary approaches, particularly Lerner’s, Benjamin’s method, as evinced in the unfinished Arcades Project, offers an equally productive methodology for accounting for this practice, particularly in the role quotation performs. The text, which Benjamin himself comments on in Konvolut N, “has to develop to the highest degree the art of citing without quotation marks. Its theory is intimately related to that of montage.”100 Such an approach renders text in its most plastic form: citation, reference, and quotation in an incomplete labyrinth of notes on the ephemerality of urban living. As Philip Rosen emphasises, “Benjamin’s interest in the literary or critical fragment, the aphorism, and like modes of expression is here combined with an unprecedented mass of extracted quotations,” which could indeed be considered as a methodology for investigating and representing the everyday.101 Distinguishing Benjamin’s form of citation from historical commentary, Rosen rightly argues that these “two impulses are manifested formally as the extremes of citation (letting the object or state of being from the past speak for itself) and of commentary (asserting the activity of the epistemological subject to speak in the present around and through the historical object).”102 Benjamin’s cultivation of such references could thus suggest his investment in the fragment as a new form of collecting ideas and knowledge. So, if we consider his materials as Henry Sussman does – “as the diffuse, panoramic background to two essays… the Exposés of 1935 and 1939, both known as

‘Paris, the Capital of Nineteenth Century’” – or even as the notes for a larger work that was never completed, or started for that matter, these fragments form a comprehensive

100 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mas.: Belknap Press, 2002), N1,10. 101 Philip Rosen, “Introduction,” Boundary 2 30, no. 1 (2003), 4. 102 Ibid., 6.

172 appendix.103 It is interesting to note, that while, as Eli Friedlander argues, “Benjamin does not dwell at any length on the form of the fragment,” the fragments gain their meaning from their role within a collection/the collection itself: “Fragments are at the service of the intensification of relatedness, thus ultimately viewed in terms of the continuous medium of reflection.”104 While what Benjamin collects in The Arcades Project are fragments, however, they nonetheless form part of an extensive collection that prioritises some form of coherence as a constitutive project, formally combined as montage. Within this same

Konvolut, Benjamin states: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations.

But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.”105 While his use of montage operates as a process of assembling collected material, therefore, the concept of fragmentation acted as a framework, and method for his application of material.

In light of Lerner’s appropriation of a similar absorptive method, Benjamin’s use of fragments could be considered within a practice not only of collection, but of translation, as indeed could his use of citation: both in its original sense, as the Latin trans latio, the concept of translation represented the transfer of an object from one location to another, and as translation as what we know it to be. As such, it is fitting that Benjamin’s work exists largely in translation, especially the Arcades Project and One Way Street, as the process of reading it in translation requires the use of a similar method by which Benjamin composed the texts; the Arcades Project is an archaeological site that requires excavation, while One Way Street charts new terrain. Translation to Benjamin, as Friedlander explains,

103 Henry Sussman, “Between the Registers: the Allegory of Space in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project,” Boundary 2 30, no. 1 (2003), 172. 104 Eli Friedlander, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait (Cambridge, Mass.: HUP, 2012), 55. 105 Benjamin, Arcades Project, N1a, 8.

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“does not re-create the original poetic intention,” rather it “demands the destruction of the original unity of the beautiful work.”106 As an archaeological approach translation reflects, therefore, the use of the imagery of the palimpsest to the construction of writing, where

Benjamin “was captivated by interlinear translation, libraries, and the superimposed strata underlying the modern city.”107 Transforming text from a source language into a new context and recuperating fragments of text within new structures of meaning are complimentary strategies; Benjamin’s use of citations from other languages within the

Arcades Project reflects both the fragmentation of the original text into citation, as well as the fragment it is rendered as in the text. In using quotations Benjamin removes his material from its original site and relocates it within a new constellation.

What are the implications for a practice of writing against the image informed by collage and absorptive aesthetics? Such an approach is precisely what Lerner adopts – while the Acknowledgements appended to Leaving the Atocha Station hold the usual recognitions, for Lerner they also become a place for the ‘attribution’ of fragments of text and ideas appropriated from other sources. Although unusual, such a section does not inherently indicate a practice of collage. Here, however, Lerner’s specific use of the term “stolen” suggests a distinct compositional methodology (“Acknowledgements”), which reflects his critical stance toward literary convention. Equally, the ‘stolen’ material itself denotes a kind of self-consciously destabilising aesthetic; Lerner identifies as sources for theft the

“language and ideas from Michael Clune’s essay, “Theory of Prose,” which appeared in No: journal of the arts, #7”, alongside an “indebted[ness] to Alan Grossman’s essays in The Long

Schoolroom.” Crucially, these texts themselves challenge the coherence of traditional concepts of literary form; Clune’s is an essay that “drawing on Grossman’s categories,

106 Friedlander, Benjamin, 27. 107 Sussman, “Between the Registers,” 175.

174 considered the prose poem as a kind of ‘virtual poetry’ – as a kind of blueprint for a poem, a kind of writing that is not yet a poem” – an idea intrinsic to the novel.108 This strategic layering of embedded references is taken to its logical extreme in the mis-en-abyme of ‘Life’s white machine,’ a phrase repeated throughout the novel, and which Lerner “encountered… in Jeff Clark and Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s collaboration 2A,” which had then been used by

Ashbery “as an epigraph to the poem ‘Longing of the Accords’ (Planisphere).” Given the importance of the role of collage in both Ashbery and Marianne Moore’s poetic works, their prominence within the novel’s intertextuality is significant. The novel’s very title is borrowed from “Leaving the Atocha Station,” “the title of a poem in Ashbery’s 1962 volume The Tennis Court Oath,” (although not attributed by Lerner in the

Acknowledgements), while Adam’s reply to Isabel’s aunt Rufina in a discussion about poetry, “I, too, dislike it” (58), is a direct quote from Moore’s oft-cited poem “Poetry.”109

Considering the way that such absorbed material itself calls into question the stability of the literary image, it is not surprising that this process of ‘borrowing’ so occupies Lerner’s method of composition.110

Taking the process a step further, Lerner practices a form of self-quotation in which he weaves his own previously published work into the novel. Noting in an interview with Ted Hodgkinson for Granta that “this novel does assimilate many other modes and sources,” Lerner states more specifically that “it contains a poem from my first book of poetry… entire pages from an academic essay I wrote on John Ashbery; lines from my third book of poetry,” as well as “language stolen from friends and heroes; and so on.”111

108 Rogers, interview with Lerner, 226. 109 John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1962); Marriane Moore, Poems (London: Penguin, 2005). 110 See Ellen Levy. 111 Lerner, interview by Hodgkinson. The article is ‘The Future Continuous: Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy,’ and is reworked into the novel on pages 90-91.

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This strategy can be understood in terms that Adam uses when describing poetry – as one that valorises the virtual potential of the fragment over the cohesion of a ‘whole’:

I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose… where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual art-works and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity. (8-9) Reflecting on this, Lerner emphasises the radical politics of such a position, suggesting that it constitutes both an “embarrassing confession of poetic fraudulence, but [also] a statement in support of prose’s ability to incorporate other modes of writing in a manner that retains or even amplifies their power.”112 The mediated ‘distance’ experienced when encountering ‘embedded’ text is indicative of Lerner’s approach to the practice of collage; an approach that is equally informed by Ashbery’s self-referential style particularly evident in poems like “They knew what you wanted,” where Ashbery reappropriated movie titles, reframing them within a literary collage.113 Ashbery often reassembled textual fragments within new formal structures in order to create distance between their original meaning, and their new textual organisation. Within Lerner’s practice, this method manifests as an experiment with “how a novel can absorb and constellate other forms”; particularly so here because “both Gordon and Ashbery are drawn toward a sense of language as assemblage in part because they’re living outside of English,” although Lerner self-effacingly protests that

Adam’s own approach is “not nearly as interesting as Ashbery’s.”114

112 Lerner interview by Hodgkinson. 113 Ashbery’s practice of collage crosses visual art as well as poetry, famously creating visual collages during the 1940s, 1970s, and more recently again in 2008. These collages were exhibited at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York between September 4-October 4 in 2008, while his so-called “collage environment” formed an exhibition entitled “John Ashbery Collects: Poet Among Things” at the Loretta Howard Gallery in New York (September 12-November 2, 2013). 114 Lerner interview by Hodgkinson.

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Indeed, Lerner asserts that he is “fascinated by poems within novels,” poems that operate virtually within a fictional exterior world. What happens, however, when a writer incorporates a previously existent poem into a fiction? What happens to the poem when it is conceived of no longer by the writer, but by a fictional mind? To Lerner, this transposition alters the very fabric of the poem, changing it “considerably.” Adam Gordon, Lerner argues, “claims to have written” two poems that were previously Lerner’s: the first, a poem that Adam reads at a friend’s gallery in Madrid (40) – “made out of lines from the novel itself”115 – while the second is a poem from Lerner’s first book of poetry, The Lichtenberg

Figures (2004):

Possessing a weapon has made me bashful. Tears appreciate in this economy of pleasure. The ether of data engulfs the capitol. Possessing a weapon has made me forgetful. My oboe tars her centotaph. The surface is in process. Coruscant skinks merge in force. The moon spits on a copse of spruce. Plausible opposites stir in the brush. Jupiter spins in its ruts. The wind extends its every courtesy. I have never been here. Understand? You have never seen me. (127-8)116

What does Adam’s so-called ‘claim’ of authorship mean? Does Adam recognize that these are not his poems, is he meant to be aware of his own metafictional tenure? Lerner suggests that in transposing the poem into a fiction “its authorship is fictionalized in a way that makes it a different text in the novel than it was in the volume of poems.”117 In other words, not only is the author fictional, so too is the poem. This is, moreover, the virtual

115 Lerner interview by Lin. I will discuss this poem at length later in the chapter. 116 Also published in The Lichtenberg Figures,15. 117 Lerner interview by Lin

177 mode of the novel form, “how it can build the world in which a poem is read or misread.”

Aligning with Adam’s own predilection for the distance created by ‘actual art-works’ and

‘the claims made on their behalf,’ the poem’s inclusion in the novel subverts its own actuality. Instead, it becomes a virtual artwork, free from the significance that objects contain.

This is a method also employed in 10:04. The novel includes a short book on dinosaurs – “To the Future” – that Lerner actually self-published with a young student of his (225-9), a short story entitled “The Golden Vanity” published in 2012 by The New

Yorker (61-81), ideas lifted from his article “Damage Control” published in 2013 by Harper’s

Magazine about art vandalism, and excerpts of his poem “The Dark Threw Patches Down

Upon Me Also” published in 2011. Incorporated into the novel, these “different modes of writing” are what Lerner calls a “species of readymades” that “became a kind of solution to a problem in the novel that I was already writing.”118 While originally made in reference to

Leaving the Atocha Station, Lerner’s claim that he “came to write this novel… in part by working against an image of the conventional novel – by writing my resistance to the form into the form, narrating the pitfalls of narrative,” is equally reflected in the way that Ben approaches, in 10:04, writing a novel: as ‘against an image.’119 When discussing “The

Golden Vanity” with a “distinguished female author” at a dinner for a literary event, Ben notes that “I think I might try to make it into a novel. A novel in which the author tries to falsify his archive, tries to fabricate all these letters – mainly e-mails – from recently dead authors that he can sell to a fancy library”; indeed, he continues, this “idea was the origin of the story.” But, while he was concerned with writing “another novel about fraudulence, no matter the bruised idealism at its core,” the female author was fascinated such fictional

118 Lerner, interview by Bollen. 119 Ben Lerner, “Working Against the Image.”

178 deception: she suggests that “[y]ou should try to pass off letters you’ve written to an archivist. That’s how you’d now if the fiction was plausible.” For the female author, making a fictional, fake, or virtual form – as Lerner himself worries of literature in “The Actual

World” – ‘plausible,’ real, or at least, making it work within the conditions of the ‘real world,’ is precisely the point of writing a novel. Indeed, she discusses the idea of Ben’s fiction in the same terms as Lerner, asking “[w]ould you include real correspondence, too –

I mean, do you have actual letters you received that you’ll insert into the fiction?”

For Lerner, while writing a novel is curatorial, in the sense that it can be an “echo chamber” of multiple sources and forms, equally (and perhaps even because of this) the novel’s genre is not something he is “really in control of.”120 While of the character Alena’s art project, the “Institute for Totalled Art,” Lerner notes that it is a “nonfiction” invention of the novel – inspired by the work of artist Elka Krajewska, founder of the Salvage Art

Institute (SAI) in New York of “total loss” art – “The Golden Vanity” and “The Dark” both became inventions of the narrator within the fiction of 10:04. Although as in Leaving the Atocha Station, “the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering” – in fiction they can be composed in a way they were not actually composed – the way in which Lerner conceptualises the relationship that 10:04’s fictional versions have with their actual counterparts finds a more complex vocabulary than Adam’s poems and essays do.121 He suggests that “narrating certain experiences as they happen or obliterating those experiences with narrative” transposes “fact into fiction,” transforms actual experience into virtual experience: “those stories – not the experiences themselves,” he

120 Lerner, interview by Bollen. 121 Ben Lerner, “Damage Control,” Harper’s Magazine (December 2013) 49. The SAI’s mission statement is as follows: “Salvage Art Institute confronts and articulates the condition of no-longer-art-material claimed as ‘total loss’, resulting from art damaged beyond repair, removed from art market circulation due to its total loss of value in the marketplace yet stored in art-insurance claim inventory.” http://salvageartinstitute.org/

179 argues, are what “might become material for art.”122 It is around the poem, however, that

“the novel was, in part, formed.”123 Indeed, Lerner likens how the story and the poem become so “obviously changed by being placed in the novel,” that “in a sense they’re no longer the works that preceded the novel,” to “how readymades work in visual art: they’re recontextualized by the novel or the museum and, while they’re materially identical – every word is the same – they’re utterly transformed.” And as 10:04 itself predicts in its epigraph, like “a world to come.”

FICTIONAL COMPOSITION

In an essay for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2013, Lerner proposed that “a writer is necessarily refracting the world she describes through a prism of one sort or another. Maybe the advantage of a first-person narrative is that you can dramatize that process itself – that’s why it’s so satisfying to write from the perspective of a writer; you can make the composition of the novel [the precise] subject of the novel.”124 Indeed,

Lerner’s artistic approach as the absorption of poetry, essay, and story into both novels is elucidated and defended by the narrator of 10:04 through a quotation that concluded what he considers to be one of “the greatest twentieth-century presidential addresses”: Ronald

Reagan’s speech following the Challenger disaster in 1986 (111). The final phrase “‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God’” was not, as he originally thought, Reagan’s own composition, but from “a poem by John Gillespie Magee entitled ‘High Flight,’” which was itself an instance of poetic collage incorporating those lines from Cuthbert Hicks and

G.W.M. Dunn (112, 113; original emphasis). Rather than considering such a compositional

122 Lerner, second interview by Lin. 123 Lerner, interview by Reines. 124 Lerner, interview by Rehel.

180 device as “scandalous,” the narrator, Ben, finds it “beautiful: a kind of palimpsestic plagiarism that moves through bodies and time, a collective song with no single origin, or whose origin has been erased – the way a star, from our earthly perspective, is often survived by its own light” (114). As works of collage, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 can be considered both as the material for art and the art itself. Not just assemblages that create beautiful mosaics, they layer fiction upon nonfiction, poetry upon essay, in order to go beyond the metafictional to compose a method for the virtual artwork, as Ben tells the reader in 10:04: “I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them” (194). Both novels thus write not only about the art of writing and the writing of art, but question the fictional conditions for artistic practice: what does an imaginary poem look like?

In Leaving the Atocha Station, Adam’s experience is rendered largely a negotiation of the interstices of language (English and Spanish), form (poetry and prose), and mode of expression (reading and writing). Considering the unusual space the novel occupies, I argue that Lerner’s compositional method is indebted not only to the aesthetics of literary collage, but to his compositional techniques for Mean Free Path: he notes that “part of the goal is to use poetry to track failures of representation – hesitation, fragmentation, doubling back – in a way that can measure the experience of feeling and thinking in time.”125 Throughout the novel, Lerner refers to the negotiation of this linguistic space symbiotically in terms of translation and reflection, as the former is often referred to as an act “between mirrors”

(181). This process, which primarily refers to reading poetry’s original and translated forms together, instigates a transformation where “the translations would become the originals”

125 Ben Lerner, interview by Ken L. Walker, Coldfront Magazine (1 January 2011), http://coldfrontmag.com/spotlight-ben-lerner/.

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(181). This is complicated, however, by Lerner’s extended use of this imagery across different forms – the Rogers interview, his interpretation of Ashbery in his essay, and the novel itself. 126 While translation is a process that occurs between mirrors, a poem is itself a

“mirrored thing” (149) or a “mirrored surface,” suggesting that the translation of a poem occurs in the threshold between the mirrored objects. Although when Teresa read her translations of Adam’s poems to him in the novel, he “felt that she had carried a delicate, mirrored thing down a treacherous path” (149), Adam manifests an aesthetic of indeterminacy – he observes that he “had no idea” “what that thing was,” “and ‘path’ isn’t really the word” – masking Lerner’s own broader poetic dialogue on the subject (149). The novel questions if ‘mirroring’ is enabled through the act of translation; if a poem can only be a ‘mirrored thing’ when there is a translated copy, having necessarily been through the process of translation. His extended multi-formal negotiation of this dialectic culminates only in the close of the novel, with Adam’s question: “Why was I born between mirrors?

Teresa would read the originals and I would read the translations and the translations would become the originals as we read” (181). While in and of itself his question confuses the novel’s earlier imagery, the following line clarifies it: translation is both an object, as well as a method of transfiguring the original.

While the novel could have been written both in English and Spanish, by mediating

Adam’s conversations in Spanish through recollection, the narrative bypasses the compositional difficulties involved in such a bi-lingual project; instead Leaving the Atocha

Station narrates across language to imitate both the experience of translating another language during a conversation, and the act of recalling distant conversations. Indeed, what

Lerner is attempting to do here is informed by his own analysis of Ashbery’s poetry in his

126 Lerner, interview by Rogers, “Future Continuous,” 209.

182 article “The Future Continuous: Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy,” in which he posits that “[p]art of the bizarre power of Ashbery’s best poetry is that it seems to narrate what it’s like to read Ashbery’s best poetry, and when his work manages to describe the time of its own reading in the time of its own reading, we experience mediacy immediately.”127 Such mediacy is essential to understanding Lerner’s own technique of rendering experience through translation; as Adam expresses his impressionistic experience of meaning, there is the suggestion throughout the novel that we are meant to read certain passages in the same way. One of these sections is the first conversation of the novel, during which conversational-space and recollection-space collide, and which culminate in an evocative statement about the way in which he expresses and mediates his experience of language:

I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds… This ability to dwell among possible referents, to let them interfere and separate like waves, to abandon the law of excluded middle while listening to Spanish – this was a breakthrough in my project, a change of phase. (14)

While the effect is deliberately gestural, vague, and impressionistic, this is nonetheless an arresting image. How Adam’s reflection on this experience is narrated, moreover, is aligned with the way Lerner narrates his experience of this process. But what does it mean to experience ‘understanding in chords’?

She began to say something either about the moon, the effect of the moon on the water, or was using the full moon to excuse Miguel or the evening’s general drama, though the moon wasn’t full… Then she might have described swimming in the lake as a child, or said that lakes reminded her of being a child, or asked me if I’d enjoyed swimming as a child, or said that what she’d said about the moon was childish. She asked me if I knew a poem by Lorca, this time about something that involved several colors and required her to softly roll her r’s, which I couldn’t do. (13-14)

127 Lerner, “Future Continuous,” 203.

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Each possibility is itself like a mirror image, close to the original, but somehow changed.

Such a description of the difficulties of translating recalls what Rebecca Walkowitz has posited as a “view inherited from modernist criticism.”128 In this model, she contends,

“literature should be relatively ‘untranslatable’ because thematic innovation ought to be sutured to the sound and sense of a specific language,” and as such, “[i]t is a commonplace that something is always ‘lost in translation.’ The content of a work in one language cannot simply transfer to another language, and no serious translator working today would make that claim.”

Indeed, as Walkowitz notes, “[s]ome works not only appear in translation but are written for translation from the start.” But what happens when a work is already in translation, despite never being translated? Leaving the Atocha Station can be considered in these terms: although some characters speak in Spanish, the novel is written in English. As such,

Lerner’s approach to translation here is indebted to his understanding of Ashbery, whose

“poems are glosses on poems we can’t access… when we read, we see only the reflection of our reading. But by reflecting our reading, Ashbery’s poems allow us to attend to our attention, to ‘experience our experience’; they offer what we might call lyric mediacy.”129 Not only as recollected experiences, but translated experiences, these passages in Leaving the

Atocha Station are characterised firstly by their aestheticisation of possibility and approximation – as mirrored experience – and secondly, as speech that the reader cannot access; where the recollection occurs mostly in the subjunctive ‘might have,’ where Adam, rather than attempting to understand the specific meaning of Isabel’s words, lets the flow of her words wash over him, ‘let them interfere and separate like waves.’ While for Adam

Fitzgerald, this use of the word ‘or’ has the “solemn grammatical function” developed by

128 Rebecca Walkowitz, “Close Reading in an Age of Global Writing,” MLQ 74, no. 2 (June 2013), 172. 129 Lerner, “Ashbery’s Lyric Mediacy,” 209.

184 writers such as Mallarmé and Derrida, who tried “to rethink ontology through an existential awareness and demonstration of lexical instability,” it also fuctions as a linguistic mirror, gesturing to alternative versions that somehow echo one another.130 Lerner’s conceptualisation of translation as a mirror thus echoes in its own right Walkowitz’s question of whether it is possible for “an aesthetic of translatability [to] find a place for the historical, political, and cultural texture that we value in literature and especially in literature produced in languages that are not our own,” as one that can get close to what the original is really trying to say.131 In other words, one that is not only “for translation,” but “also for translatability.”

Adam’s interpretation, and use, of language is perhaps the novel’s most compelling subject; intellectualising every interaction, he curates his own aesthetic of experiencing meaning. Never speaking “English with Teresa… to preserve the possibility of misspeaking or being misunderstood,” for example, he “hoped she would always translate [his] fragmented Spanish in her head, transforming [his] halting and semicoherent utterances into the most eloquent English she could imagine” (83). Figuring Adam’s conceptualisation of translation in these terms virtualises language; the movement between these spaces is the process of translation. The novel, moreover, develops the concept of translation’s potential for creating plurality and indeterminacy – where language no longer moves from one space to another, but from one space to a potential multitude of different spaces. Adam’s stated ideal of translation as a process of interpretation is one where the translated text no longer occupies a fixed space, as rendered in Adam’s ruminations on reading “masterful works of

Spanish literature,” a technique he employed in order to teach himself the language:

130 Fitzgerald, interview with Lerner. 131 Walkowitz, “Close Reading,” 173.

185

I had fantasized about the nature and effect of a Spanish thus learned, how its archaic flavour and formally heightened rhetoric would collide with the mundanities of daily life, giving the impression of less of someone from a foreign country than someone from a foreign time; I imagined using a beautiful and rarefied turn of phrase around the campfire after Jorge had broken out the powerful weed and watching the faces of the others as they realized their failure to understand me was not the issue of my ignorance or accent but their own remove from the zenith of their language. (19)

But because he wants to maintain an approximate, rather than definite, meaning, he also argues that this process could not work in reading prose, “in part because I had to look up so many words that I was never able to experience the motion of a sentence; it remained so many particles, never a wave.” But in reading poetry, this experience is crucially different:

Reading poetry, if reading is even the word, was something else entirely… It was much easier for me to read a poem in Spanish than Spanish prose because all the unknowing and hesitation and failure involved in the attempt to experience the poem was familiar, it was what invested any poem with a negative power, its failure to move me moved me, at a little; my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in Spanish so resembled my inability to grasp or be grasped by the poem in English that I felt, in this respect, like a native speaker. (20)

The motif of translation as a mirror that such a description evokes culminates in his experience of poetry, where he no longer experiences the language itself, but its image. This registers, moreover, the power of translation not only as a movement between languages, but between forms of expression and levels of elucidation.

The way in which Adam consciously curates aesthetic experiences, however, develops occasionally into controlled interactive performances, particularly with his occasional girlfriend, Isabel. His insistence throughout the novel that he finds it “difficult to express [him]self with subtlety in Spanish” (111) – a statement that is consistently countered by either Teresa or Isabel who express confidence in his fluency – manifests

Adam’s insecurities regarding his own fraudulence:

186

[O]ur conversation largely consisted of my gesturing toward something I was powerless to express, then guessing at whatever referent she guessed at, and gesturing in response to that. In this, my project’s second phase, Isabel assigned profound meaning, assigned a plurality of possible profound meaning, to my fragmentary speech, intuiting from those fragments depths of insight and latent eloquence, and because she projected what she thought she discovered, she experienced, I like to think, an intense affinity for the workings of my mind. (46)132

Given that the conversations are reported the reader is not unable to judge the validity of

Adam’s claims of fluency, nor are these fragments transcribed; rather his speech is described, and his judgement on his fraudulence is suspended in a place the reader cannot access. These confessions have prompted some reviewers to use, somewhat hyperbolically, claim that Adam is a character who is manipulative, some argue even sociopathic. While

Adam does realise that these conversations are dependent on his purported lack of fluency, which became “an excuse to speak in enigmatic fragments or koans” (51), in “unconjugated sentences or sentence fragments” (46), it suggests a more aesthetic concern that attempts to create a ‘profound experience of art,’ rather than social coldness. Indeed, he consciously reflects on this process in terms that render it a poetic act of creation, suspended in a state of ongoing mediation. His constellation of potential phrases – “I would say, Blue is an idea about distance, or Literature ends in that particular blue, or Here are several subjective blues; I would say, To write with sculpture–, To think the vertical–, To refute a century of shadow–, etc…” (46) – reflect Adam’s attempts to access art in a virtual state.

Within the novel, Lerner advances the metaphor of translation by using it as a method of composition for a poem that Adam ‘writes,’ the subsequent import of the poem into the novel, and its translation into Spanish by Arturo. One of two poems in the novel, it can be distinguished from the other, which sits paratextually to the text, absorbed as a

132 Other examples include: “‘I didn’t mean that exactly, but it’s difficult to express myself with subtlety in Spanish,’ I said./ ‘You are fluent in Spanish, Adán,’ she said, maybe sadly.” (111) “‘I don’t understand what story you said before to me,’ is probably what I said. ‘My Spanish is very bad. I get nervous.’/‘Your Spanish is good,’ she said.” (13)

187 previously published poem, because it is expressly a fictional work of Adam’s. In conversation with Walker, Lerner identifies Adam’s compositional practice as distinct from

Lerner’s own – although arguably not very different at all. “Adam Gordon’s poems are collages,” Lerner claims, an approach he associates with Ashbery, “although not as interesting as Ashbery’s, and I think it’s reasonable to speculate that both Gordon and

Ashbery are drawn toward a sense of language as assemblage in part because they’re living outside of English.”133 Adam explains his writing process at length as one that constitutes collecting and translating fragments of Spanish poetry into his own poems:

On these days I worked on what I called translation. I opened Lorca more or less at random, transcribed the English recto into a page of my first notebook, and began to make changes, replacing a word with whatever word I associated with it and/or scrambling the order of the lines, and then I made whatever changes these changes suggested to me. Or I looked up the Spanish word for the English word I wanted to replace, and then replaced that word with an English word that approximated its sound (‘Under the arc of the sky’ became ‘Under the arc of the cielo,’ which became ‘Under the arc of the cello’). I then braided fragments of the prose I kept in my second notebook with the translations I had thus produced (‘Under the arc of the cello / I open the Lorca at random,’ and so on). (16)

The poem described in this passage, moreover, is then cleverly woven, or imported, into the novel during the first poetry reading at the gallery, at which time Adam reads his original poem, and Arturo, his translated version:

Under the arc of the cello I open the Lorca at random I turn my head and watch The lights slide by, a clearing Among possible referents Among the people perusing The gallery walls, dull glow Of orange and purple, child Behind glass, adult retreating I bit hard to deepen the cut

133 Lerner, interview by Fitzgerald.

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I imagined the passengers Could see me, imagined I was A passenger that could see me Looking up… (40)

Not only is the poem embedded into the novel, the poem itself embeds lines and events from elsewhere – including later – in the narrative; a reverse process of Clune’s formal embedding, whereby the poem is given an authorial prescience, providing a blueprint for the narrative. Indeed, for Lerner, this is as a “virtual poem,” because, as it “is made out of lines from the novel itself… it’s a structural impossibility for Adam to have had available to him language from an as-yet-unwritten novel.”134

In regards to Mean Free Path, Lerner discusses how “a major dimension of the book looks at how phrases, clauses, etc., can recombine (or fail to recombine) into higher units of meaning,” arguing further that “[o]ne function of the recombinatory activity of the poems is to make it very difficult to identify the ‘original’ usage of a phrase, clause, etc. in the book… I wanted to give a sense of language as found – that these phrases were being worked with, cut and pasted, not generated spontaneously.”135 This same aesthetic practice can be seen here in the construction of the poem. The line “I bit harder to deepen the cut”, for example, refers to a passage earlier in the novel at the lake, which follows Adam being punched – “I bit hard to deepen the cut so that I would appear more injured and therefore solicit sufficient sympathy to offset the damage my smiling had done” (13) – as does the phrase “Among possible referents”: “This ability to dwell among possible referents, to let them interfere and separate like waves, to abandon the law of excluded middle while listening to Spanish – this was a breakthrough in my project, a change of phase” (14).

Indeed, the phrases are incorporated in such a way as to gesture to the process through

134 Lerner, interview by Lin. 135 Lerner, interview by Walker.

189 which they are created. Where in Mean Free Path, the “way lines are out of order or belong to multiple orders at once has made some readers wonder if there was a prior, more linear version of the book I then cut up and rearranged. There isn’t – that is, there wasn’t an actual original that I then distressed – but I understand how the poems imply such a source, a kind of virtual hypotext,” this poem performs in the same way, although it is framed within an actual hypotext, rather than a text incorporated, or ‘cut and pasted,’ into the novel from another source – such as a previous collection of Lerner’s poetry – the poem is composed through the act of writing the novel, where construction becomes an act of writing poetry, absorbing Lerner’s already established poetic compositional techniques.136

Critically speaking, the reading of Adam’s poem exemplifies the centrality of translation to Lerner’s aesthetic practice in the novel. While the poem in its original English is transcribed into the narrative, Arturo’s translation of the poem is not; what is described instead is Adam’s experience of listening to his poem translated into Spanish, a “strange” process of “recogniz[ing] something like [his poetic] voice” (41):

Something in the arrangement of lines, not the words themselves or what they denoted, indicated a ghostly presence behind the Spanish, and that presence was my own, or maybe it was my absence; it was like walking into a room where I was sure I’d never been, but seeing in the furniture or roaches in the ashtray or the coffee cup on the window ledge beside the shower signs that I had only recently left… the specific disposition of those objects, the way that they had been lived with, required or implied me; not that I was suffering from amnesia or déjà vu, but that I was both in that room and outside of it, maybe in the park, and not just in the park, but also in innumerable other possible rooms and parks at once. Any contingent object, couch or cup, ‘orange’ or ‘naranja,’ could form the constellation that I was, could form it without me, but that’s not really right; it was like seeing myself looking down at myself looking up. (41)

The passage’s most striking image is Adam’s experience of translated poetry as a space between absence and presence, between familiarity and unfamiliarity; spaces which

136 Lerner, interview by Walker.

190 manifest his ‘domestic’ interiors and exteriors – a room that ‘required or implied’ him – within his contemplative interior. While this passage is indicative of Lerner’s broader aesthetic concerns of the way in which translation can be depicted through narrative, it also gestures to his overall compositional practice, which prioritises curatorial, collage techniques. And although his is an approach self-consciously influenced by broader modernist literary trends, as well as postmodernist and contemporary thinking about form, it is nonetheless one that combines novelistic concerns with curatorial and poetic ones – collection and reference; translation and mediation – to produce what is an exciting development in the cross-section between literary forms. By approaching the novel as an intrinsically absorptive form, Lerner has used the process of translation to expand the possibilities of both poetry and the novel.

Lerner’s insistence of the possibilities of form and genre is echoed in the aesthetic framework of 10:04. The use of the subjective and future tenses signals an increasing commitment to imagining the future. “[B]ecause of all the Whitman in this book,” Lerner argues, “the might is a hedging against the Whitmanic confidence in the future. Because it’s about imagining a second person when you can’t necessarily imagine a readership or a posterity.” Indeed, the novel’s epigraph gestures towards this very aesthetic concern:

The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps no, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different. (no page) The future is, therefore, a mirrored image: it looks like what it has always been, but somehow changed, or, ‘a little different.’ Rather than operating outside of the narrative – although within Ben’s fiction – the epigraph’s final line is slowly incorporated into the narrative: “Everything will be as it is now, just a little different” (19); “Everything will be as it is now –

191 the room, the baby, the clothes, the minutes – just a little different” (54). A possible future, a future possibility, is signalled to – without necessarily eventuating within the actual narrative (Ben and his friend Alex do not have a child in this story, although Alex does become pregnant in the last pages of the novel). Formally, this mirror image also delineates

“a distance remained between art and the mundane” (54); just as the prose poem, as Clune argues, gestures towards meaning outside of itself, Lerner’s epigram unfolds within his prose as if it were a blueprint for the novel itself.

Fictional composition in 10:04, like in Leaving the Atocha Station, explores linguistic possibility. Such aesthetic practice goes beyond writing ekphrastically against art, to encompass writing about artfulness. Ben’s only poem consists of excerpts from Lerner’s

“The dark threw patches down upon me also” – both Lerner, in 2011, and Ben, in 10:04, write this poem during a residency in Marfa. Not only is fictional composition virtual, it is also lyric. Lerner’s lyric aesthetic concerns not only the habitation of the second person plural, but the ‘I’ of authorship. How does Lerner place the poem within Ben’s voice? How does Ben occupy the ‘I’ of Lerner? Does Lerner ever vacate it, or is his voice draped over

Ben’s as did Pessoa with his heteronyms? Aestheticising the poem’s composition, Ben explains that:

The poem, like most of my poems, and like the story I’d promised to expand, conflated fact and fiction, and it occurred to me – not for the first time, but with a new force – that part of what I loved about poetry as how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading. (170-1)

But, this poem, as with the novel Ben intends to write, is shadowed by the virtual image of what it could have been: “[i]nstead of fabricating the author’s epistolary archive,” he explains, “I was writing a poem, a weird meditative lyric in which I was sometimes

192

Whitman, and in which the strangeness of the residency itself was the theme” (170). 10:04 unfolds with the hypothetical, the subjunctive, the Whitmanic might, and virtual possibility, and appears in the narrative before it is even finished: “[i]n a few weeks,” he says, “just before this book began, the poem would end” (194). Indeed, as Ann Lauterbach posits,

Whitman’s “beautiful recursive moments of inquiry and supposition come to rest with [his] vision of an unbounded temporal mobility: forward, onward, outward.”137 As such, the way in which the poem is absorbed into the prose places further emphasis on its virtual, or imaginary existence. Operating within a kind of subjunctive mode, the poem is mediated further; the prose quotes the beginning of the poem, and virgules delineate each line break:

“‘I am alien here with a residency, light/ alien to me, true hawks starting from the trees/ at my footfall on gravel, sun-burnt from reading/ Specimen Days on the small porch across/ the street from where another poet died/ or began dying’” (171). What happens to art that is saturated with different methods of mediation? Is there a point at which it, as in translation, does not resemble the original anymore? Does its artfulness subtract from the intensity of the reading experience? The end of the poem – inserted several pages later at the end of Ben’s residency – is concerned with precisely this problem of lyric readership, the failure of Whitman’s lyric ambitions: “It’s among the greatest poems and fails/ because it wants to become real and can/ only become prose, founding mistake/ of the book from which we’ve been expelled” (194).

If the virtual operates negatively – as the construction of an image that responds to another work – then Lerner’s approach in Leaving the Atocha Station is heavily virtual. The mirror image, for example, creates a visual metaphor; it looks like the original, but it is somehow changed. Just as a translated poem is the original work’s mirrored image, so then is a poem that has been absorbed into a new genre – the novel – and a new set of literary

137 Ann Lauterbach, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (New York: Penguin, 2008), ebook.

193 existential conditions – fiction. While Adam’s poem is, as Lerner considers, virtual because it is composed of lines from later in the narrative, it also operates within the virtual mode:

Adam’s poetic ‘translation’ uses an imaginary technique, inverting the logic of Lerner’s absorptive approach where prose is absorbed into a reconfigured poetic structure. What happens, however, to the virtuality of a poem in a novel when it is not written by the

‘author’ but by a creation of the novel’s own fiction? How does this change the poem as opposed to when it is read in an anthology? By creating a fictional poet that can write without being bound to the restrictions of ‘real’ conditions for the creation of poetry – in language, publication, funding, conception, imagining, writing – Lerner manages to balance a delicately complex idea without the process bordering on the ideal. Indeed, Adam’s process – as is Ben’s in 10:04 – is dependant on failure. As such, Lerner’s novels are a particularly instructive example of not only the metafictional suggestion for new imagined forms and techniques for writing against the image, but the inescapable influence that imaginary techniques for writing art has on real, or actual, writing.

What then can be said of literature’s virtual mode? For Lerner, it concerns the realness of language, its ability to form actual images from words. In an article entitled

“The Actual World” for Frieze Magazine, he explicitly grapples with literature’s virtuality in competition with the actuality of visual art, admitting that he has an “unsophisticated yet unshakeable” impression that a work of visual art is “more real, more actual, than a machine made out of words.” This evokes a critical question: what makes the visual more real than the imaginary? Does the visibility of an object, an event, an idea, create an aura of reality unattainable for the imaginary? And why might it matter if a ‘machine made out of words’ is not real? While this may indeed be the crucial point of difference between a work of visual art and a work of the imaginary, literary virtuality is more than “the ghost of the actual” in visual art. The writer ought to “concede the actual to artists”; virtuality is “the

194 domain of the literary.”138 For Lerner, its autonomy lies in its ability “to produce images of impracticable techniques,” to become a technique even visual artists can use in order “to open a space where the visual artist can desire and think beyond the stubborn boundaries of her materials.” Here, Lerner consults Clune’s Writing Against Time. Considering Clune’s ekphrastic virtual mode is “particularly focused on representations of works that defeat time,” Lerner suggests that, “‘[l]ike an airplane designer examining a bird’s wing,’ the writer of the virtual ‘studies life to overcome its limits.’”139

Such is his aspiration in Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, which, I argue, exemplifies an idiosyncratic attempt to combine these approaches in order to link writing practice with the reader’s experience. While Writing Against Time was not published when

Lerner wrote Leaving the Atocha Station, he did consult an earlier essay of Clune’s on the virtual in prose poetry. “You could say,” Lerner interprets in conversation with Rogers,

“that the prose poem is a literary technique for defeating actuality, for suspending it and keeping the poem in touch with the virtual.”140 He goes on to explain that:

Clune identifies [virgules in a prose poem] as indicating that the concluding heroic couplet isn’t a poem but a blueprint for a poem, instructions for a reader, that the work’s closure or actualization is outside of the form. I think what Clune is saying about how the prose poem can virtualize poetry is to an extent true about the novel as well: a poem in a novel isn’t an actual poem – whether the line breaks have been replaced with virgules or not – because it’s been embedded in a fiction. I mean that there’s a sense in which encountering a poem in a novel is a blueprint for an encounter with a poem.141 Indeed, 10:04 ends with such a virtual suggestion: “I know it’s hard to understand/ I am with you, and I know how it is” (240). The virgule comes at the end of a line, which, whether intentional or not, draws attention to Lerner’s use of a specifically poetic technique for rendering prose as poetry. By the end, therefore, the novel’s prose has started

138 Lerner, “The Actual World.” 139 Lerner, “The Actual World.” 140 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 226. 141 Rogers, interview with Lerner, 229.

195 to turn inward on itself, turn toward, turn into, poetry, gesturing to a future of prose that appears as poetry; that moves from the first person reflection “I will begin to remember,” to the third, “our walk in the third person,” to the second, “I am looking back at the totalled city in the second person plural” (240); that moves into, as Milosz terms, “a more spacious form.”

Just as Tomas Espedal’s Against Art and Leaving the Atocha Station are meditations on their own construction, 10:04 is a fictional meditation on lyric authorship and the creation of the fluid ‘I’. Even the book Ben intended to write, was contracted to write, is itself concerned with fictional authorship, where the author fraudulently constructs letters between poets and authors in order to be sold as part of a literary archive to a library. It is, however, never written, instead existing only as an imaginary novel in the narrator’s mind.

This novel – 10:04, the novel that, theoretically is also written by the narrator – is, therefore, mirrored with the subjunctive of the other novel; the book that it could have been. The narrators of both Lerner’s novels meditate what it is to create art through, paradoxically,

Adam’s commitment to, and Ben’s refusal of, fraudulence, while Adam’s peculiar addiction to the vagaries of language and Ben’s eventual decision not to write what he imagined both deeply invest in a virtual art. In both novels, ‘might’ and ‘should’ become strangely powerful words, linguistic images even, that gesture to the imaginary. Lerner’s novels not only engage in Zadie Smith’s question “Where is our fiction, our 21st-century fiction?”, but the question of what it could look like.142

142 Zadie Smith, ““The Book of Revelations,” Guardian Review (24 May 2008), 4.

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Chapter Four: Against the Mirror

Poetry cares for the local; for incident, increment, detail; for tendencies, measures, mysteries, margins, dialects; for exceptions, boundaries, games, memories, transitions, translations; poetry is less interested in plots, more interested in epistemology as an ongoing retrieval of, and quest for, the unknown: that which is omitted or conceived as the yet-to-be. Poetry foregrounds the indissoluble relation between how words are used and what they might mean; it trains us to listen for the moment when tears commence to be intellectual things.

Ann Lauterbach, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience

A PROFOUND EXPERIENCE OF ART

Lerner’s virtual aesthetics of translation in Leaving the Atocha Station extend beyond how the novel can absorb poetry, and other literary forms, to suggest a blueprint for the way in which it, as a form, can encompass aesthetic experience. Such a concern what is the possible for the contemporary novel is equally concerned with the necessary acknowledgement of failure. “[A] formal problem of translation [that] underlies all the other thematic problems of translation in the book,” Lerner argues, is “the question of how prose translates or fails to translate into images, how an optical realism is achieved or purposefully frustrated.”1 How can words interrogate this peculiar kind of visual currency of the real? How does the convention of literary realism work in an aisthetic mode? And

Lauterbach, The Night Sky. 1 Lerner, interview by Fitzgerald.

197 how does this failure suggest ways that prose can find more expansive, spacious, expression? In Writing Against Time, Michael Clune recommends that “the first step in describing the relation of the work to the actual” requires a restructuring of the critical mode, which needs to ‘embrace’ literary “criticism’s virtual dimension” in order to consider

“how the literary image differs from the actual.”2 In addressing the formal possibilities for the novel, Lerner, whose novels have been noted for their realist prose, has dramatized larger questions concerning the meaning of the ‘real’ and the imaginative qualities of literary form. Indeed, the way in which the novel includes actual images and ekphrastic description of the experience of the image in order to engage with the virtual possibilities for literature, suggests not only a new method for writing novels, but offers new meaningful interpretations of the things we read. Does an embedded image make the narrative seem ‘real’? Or does it echo Clune’s question – “is art different from life” – and engage in the novel’s existent fiction? 3 What Lerner’s novels interrogate, ultimately, is how aisthetic prose can create a work that requires both novelistic description and the perceptual experience of an actual image: a work that provides its readers with both vicariously imagined and direct aesthetic experience.

For Lerner, with “its inclusion of photographs,” Leaving the Atocha Station negotiates its own narrative “silence about certain elements of exposition and detail.” While they are

“never illustrative in any straightforward way,” the photographs nevertheless “always contain the promise of the illustrative.”4 This promise is never actualised, however, but remains as a possibility, dependant on the subjective mode. Lerner’s methodology of embedding not only poetry, but visual art is suspended in a broader, metatextual discourse in both the novel, and the article “The Actual World.” Establishing an incipient

2 Clune, Writing Against Time, 146. 3 Ibid., 1. 4 Lerner, interview by Fitzgerald.

198 reimagining of the virtual in literature, the article posits that not only does “[t]he absorptiveness and virtuality of the novel make it a testing ground for aesthetic experiment and response,” but that “the novel is a space wherein such an experiment in art writing can take place before the existence of the art itself, where an encounter can be staged between individuals and/or art works that are not or cannot be made actual.”5 Indeed, it constructs a map for aesthetic experience and novelistic response. Framed in this way, literature’s virtuality allows not only for the inclusion of other forms into the novel, but the mediation of perceptual experiences of art, regardless of whether they pertain to the real – both the protagonist and reader’s – and the specific negotiation of fictional artistic encounters; as

Clune would argue, “not representations of actual commodities but creations that selectively and transformatively incorporate elements of actuality in the process of making something new.”6

As discussed earlier, Lerner explores in “The Actual World” what he calls the

“(largely indefensible) distinction between the actuality of visual art and the virtuality of the literary,” a preoccupation that pervades both his fictional and critical works. Arguing that he has “spent a lot of time being jealous of artists who work with something other than words,” he registers an uncomfortability with language as an abstract medium; visual artworks are somehow more actual and more stained with reality than literary works. This distinction is reconciled, however, when visual art is rendered within literary prose; Lerner has “come to think that one of the powers of literature is precisely how it can describe and stage encounters with works of art that can’t or don’t exist, or how it can resituate actual works of art in virtual conditions.”7 This is precisely the method of embedding evident in both Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04. Arguing, moreover, that it is in these ‘virtual

5 Lerner, “The Actual World.” 6 Lerner, “The Actual World”; Clune, Writing Against Time, Stanford: SUP, 2013: 136. 7 Lerner, “The Actual World.”

199 conditions’ of literature that writers find the opportunity to experiment with the way in which prose could indeed mediate fictionalised art or art environments, it also concerns how the reader is able to negotiate these works within prose when they come across them.

Literature can thus “function as a laboratory in which we test responses to unrealized or unrealizable art works, or in which we embed real works in imagined conditions in order to track their effects.” Reminiscent of Cole’s curatorial approach to such aesthetic experience,

Lerner’s conceptualisation of the virtual implies a set of conditions for aesthetic experience opposed to the image of real experience.

But what are the implications for novelistic description when there is also an image that denotes a reality more ‘real’ than the prose itself? Although his article suggests a new conceptual discussion about the curatorial potential of literature, Leaving the Atocha Station exhibits a specific intersection of visual art and literature; Lerner’s interviews, particularly those with Cyrus Console, Tao Lin, and Jonathan Derbyshire, have identified his process of embedding ‘actual’ images within his prose. In these conversations, he points out that the “claim of writing to make you see is interestingly strained, simultaneously restricted and enhanced, by the juxtaposition of prose with actual images, even ambiguous ones,” and doing so “can relieve the prose of the burden of a certain kind of realistic description.”8

Indeed, he is sensitive to varying conditions of realism as a fictional construct; imagining reality on a graded scale, where “[e]ven grainy photographs are more optically realistic than the most realistic novelistic prose,” making “the difference between reading and looking… more acutely felt.”9 He admits, moreover, that this process is one that “fascinates” him, and his own incorporation of images within Leaving the Atocha Station reflects his preoccupation with these distinct registers of realism:

8 Lerner, interview by Console; Lerner, interview by Derbyshire. 9 Lerner, interview by Derbyshire; Lerner, interview by Console.

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The thickest novelistic description is less optically realistic than any conventional photograph. As a result, including photographs both subtracts and adds pressure to the prose: it relieves it of the burden of stimulating the optical if only because it reminds us how narrative prose just isn’t as good at that as the camera. Then the novel has to figure out what it is good at. A lot has been said about how painting responded to the photograph, but I haven’t heard nearly as much or as interesting talk among novelists about how fiction has had to reassess its priorities in light of cheaply reproducible photographs.10

Lerner’s preoccupation with optical realism manifests specifically in his “interest… in what the photograph can do in or to fiction how the inclusion of even a few photographs changes the novel’s relationship to the conventions of realism,” and “how it complicates the prose’s relationship to what you could call ‘optical realism,’ the way novelistic writing is often given the goal of dissolving itself into an image.” Indeed, as Mieke Bal has suggested, visual culture necessitates an “attempt to objectify experience,” thus producing a “rhetoric” that creates “an effect of the real” as well as one of “materiality.”11 As Cole has insisted, however, the question is not of opposing the real and fiction – art is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but is nonetheless creates the texture of the real – but whether the use of visual materials within prose fiction alters the conditions of realism that writing seems to work within. A real work can also be a work of fiction, of imagination, a creation. Covered by the same logic, contemporary writing against visual art – both classically ekphrastic and through more aisthetic interrogations of perceptual experience of art – is thus fundamentally concerned with how the mode of the literary, of the imaginary, can also be real.

The way in which Lerner has framed the process of embedding photographs within the novel focuses not only on how it “activates the relationship between reading and

10 Lerner, interview by Lin. Sic. 11 Mieke Bal, “Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 5 (2003), 8.

201 looking within fiction,” but accentuates “the relationship between seeing and writing.”12

While he acknowledges that there are very few images in the novel – which might elicit some scepticism in readers – he argues that their “presence” and “ambiguity is crucial to the work.”13 Moreover, the reader’s engagement with the images is juxtaposed not only with Lerner’s but the protagonist’s careful curation of the images. Indeed, the way in which they are interspersed throughout the prose as a kind of additional layer of linguistic, albeit visual, meaning “is crucial to the contemporary novel as a form.” In other words, the absence, or failure, of description is just as significant as what is it there. Even the image’s visual language in the novel operates within the subjunctive: missed connections and lapses in understanding; imagined possibilities rather than certainties. As he notes in a conversation with Cyrus Console:

In my novel, there are passages of very thick or realistic description, but there is also a lot of physical detail left out or withheld. The way Teresa widens her eyes or squints, for instance, is talked about at length; but what color are her eyes? This withholding of description in the presence of images that necessarily contain a comparative surfeit of a visual information activates the question of prose’s capacity to make us see.

The cropped image of a woman’s face (173), therefore, is intended to overlay the absence of, or ‘withheld,’ physical descriptions of Teresa, subsequently questioning the visual performativity of the prose. Developed within the virtual mode – where “the text-image relationship in the novel raises and sustains the question of the degree to which either prose or the image have a purchase on the real, and the extent to which the meaning of one is stabilized or undercut by the other” – the novel’s use of images aligns with Lerner’s broader destabilising collage aesthetic.14 Intrinsically connected to “the conversation about

12 Lerner, interview by Derbyshire; Lerner, interview by Console. 13 Lerner, interview by Console. 14 Lerner, interview by Console.

202 mediation, [and] spectacle,” his theoretical conceptualisation of embedded images goes towards actualisation in his application in the novel itself.

Rather than illustrative, then, the way in which the images are placed prompts a conversation between the where the photographs occur within the prose, the caption

(which is taken from elsewhere in the narrative), and the “Credits” section, in which Lerner attributes the images. The caption, as a quote from another section in the novel, suggests an affinity between the section of quoted prose – becoming poetic, or poetry, in its fragmentation – and the section in which the photograph occurs. Indeed, Lerner couches his claims about the captions in terms of failure: they are intended to “inflect how we view the images, so that they end up illustrating the problematic nature of the illustrative as much as actually anchoring the prose in a visually intelligible world.” The second photograph, for instance – “Photo of the bombing of Guernica, 1937” – is captioned with a line following Adam’s first poetry reading at the gallery: “I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen” (44, 52; original emphasis). Captioned in this way, the image recalls the authority of Picasso’s Guernica, and connects the passage into which the image is inserted – where Isabel is interrogating why Americans are “studying

Franco” (50) – and the passage that precedes the quoted line – “I tried hard to imagine my poems’ relation to Franco’s mass graves, how my poems could be said meaningfully to bear on the deliberate and systematic destruction of a people or a planet, the abolition of classes, or in any sense constitute a significant political intervention” (44). These layers of image and prose contribute significantly to Lerner’s aesthetic of virtual translation, and this particular collage interweaves effectively with the fourth, a photograph of Franco speaking

– “Francisco Franco, 1958” – which occurs in the aftermath of the Atocha Station bombings and whose caption is taken from the same passage into which the second image is inserted:

“The proper names of leaders are distractions from concrete economic modes” (141, 50; original

203 emphasis). The captions, therefore, subtly connect the predominant political themes within the novel – economics and terrorism, Franco and America, art and war – and question how artists, in a postmillennial, terror-ridden world, can reconcile their art with real works that can ‘make things happen.’

Of the images used in the novel, Lerner has only referred specifically to two in interviews: the third (103) and fifth photographs (173). The third is the photograph, “The

Alhambra, by Esther Singleton.” Inserted into the section during which Adam ups his dosage of ‘white pills,’ spiralling after he realizes “how much I was invested in the idea that

Isabel and Teresa were invested in me” (101), the photograph is captioned thus: “The relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive” (103; original emphasis). This line, taken from an earlier scene in which he first questions what he thought about his relationship with Teresa (88), inflects the latter passage with equal uncertainty. This tone is further reinforced as Adam, although never having seen the Alhambra, pretends that he has. Indeed, it works within the virtual – hypothetical, subjunctive, possible but only imagined – mode as Lerner explains, “[t]here’s an image of the Alhambra, for instance, but that’s something that Adam never actually sees in the novel.” He instead offers “an image of the Alhambra [to] illustrate… a prose description of the Alhambra.”15 The gestural quality of this virtual technique is echoed later with the fifth image: a “Detail of a production still from The Passenger (1975)”, the caption of which, “A movie I had never seen”

(173), refers to the line “I felt like a character in The Passenger, a movie I had never seen”

(155). Lerner posits, however, that while the image – which details a woman’s lower face –

“might be of Teresa, or somebody who looks like Teresa… it’s a fragment, cropped so as to withhold the eyes, which the novel, as I mentioned, often, but never fully, describes”;

15 Lerner, interview by Console.

204 indeed, he wants it to signify more than this – it “becomes your image of a female character, so that the novelist doesn’t have to describe every physical feature.”

How does this virtual mode work within the prose itself in the creation of linguistic images? While Lerner’s use of the virtual suggests a provocative use of the novelistic image, it also aims to create a new emphasis on the prose description of aesthetic experience. In other words, Leaving the Atocha Station is concerned with how to create an effective linguistic expression of the image in order to inflect direct experiences of art. Such a method, although Lerner localises it firmly within an ekphrastic vocabulary, may be better described as aisthetic here, primarily because it does not only rely on the description of visual art, but the experience of it. Although Lerner argues, “[m]ost ekphrastic poetry – although certainly not all – focuses on how verse can vividly describe a particular work of art, even an impossible one,” he himself is “drawn to an ekphrastic prose that operates at a greater remove, less concerned with detailing the object than the total environment in which the artistic encounter takes place.”16 Leaving the Atocha Station’s use of actual art objects negates the implicative artistic power of classical ekphrasis to prioritise instead its experiential power.

Not simply the description of artworks, Lerner argues that this process encompasses characters’ own encounters with artistic experiences:

Prose fiction can allow you to offer a robust description of all the epiphenomena and contingencies involved in a particular character’s encounter with a particular work: it allows you to place that encounter in a character’s life, time, day, describing not only a quality of light in a gallery, but what the character has read or eaten or smoked, what was on his or her mind on that morning or evening, what protest they passed on the way to the museum, etc.

In referring to described experiences of art, Lerner’s ‘ekphrastic prose’ not only constructs the characters’ encounters of art within a novel, but the reader’s as well. While the virtuality

16 Lerner, “The Actual World.”

205 of descriptive prose allows the author to “embed other art works – real or imagined – in a variety of thickly described artificial environments in order to test a character’s responses,” these are, in turn, mediated to the reader as their own imagined perceptual experience.

Unlike the novel’s actual images (which, as we know, while not illustrative, are intended to inflect certain passages within the novel), these ekphrastic passages not only describe the experience, but “follow the way an art work enters the memory and spreads out into other domains of a character’s experience.”

Indicative of Lerner’s self-conscious virtual practice, the novel begins in this same ekphrastic mode. Detailing the daily ephemera of Adam’s routine before his regular visit to the Prado, the first two passages create experiential spaces that establish the novel’s residence within artistic encounter; compellingly establishing the epiphenomena of Adam’s first, and only extended, museum encounter. The novel immediately positions Adam’s experiences in regards to the negotiation of manifold, and often competing, layers of consciousness – from dream to waking, sobriety to inebriation:

The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment, the first apartment I’d looked at after arriving in Madrid, or letting myself be woken by the noise from La Plaza Santa Ana, failing to assimilate that noise fully into my dream, then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee. (7)

This space is then expanded to include a vertical ascent to a voyeuristic view of the city, and furthered through the brief description of a skyscape:

When the coffee was ready I would open the skylight, which was just big enough for me to crawl through if I stood on the bed, and drink my espresso and smoke on the roof overlooking the plaza where tourists congregated with their guidebooks on the metal tables and the accordion player plied his trade. In the distance: the palace and long lines of cloud.

206

The passage quickly moves beyond these initial descriptions to include the perfunctory

‘requirements’ of Adam’s daily experience – “dropping myself back through the skylight, shitting, taking a shower, my white pills, and getting dressed” – before he leaves the apartment for the Prado with his “bag, which contained a bilingual edition of Lorca’s

Collected Poems, my two notebooks, a pocket dictionary, John Ashbery’s Selected Poems, [and] drugs.” Maintaining the premise of ekphrasis, the narrative then describes his journey to the museum, the way he accesses the museum, and his method of negotiating the space of the museum:

From my apartment I would walk down Calle de las Huertas, nodding to the street cleaners in their lime-green jumpsuits, cross El Paseo del Prado, enter the museum, which was only a couple of euros with my international student ID, and process directly to room 58, where I positioned myself in from of Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross. (7-8, sic)

By describing the minutiae of this process – how much it cost to enter, the precise location of van der Weyden’s painting – and diffusing the experience across several narrative spaces,

Lerner positions the reader within Adam’s own experience. Because what is described is done so as a habitual practice, the account is has a tone of familiarity, allowing the reader to be absorbed into this same encounter in a passive but observational role; a position accentuated further by the description of the experience of viewing van der Weyden’s painting, which immediately follows the above passage:

I was usually standing before the painting within forty-five minutes of waking and so the hash and caffeine and sleep were still competing in my system as I faced the nearly life-sized figures and awaited equilibrium. Mary is forever falling to the ground in a faint; the blues of her robes are unsurpassed in Flemish painting. Her posture is almost an exact echo of Jesus’s; Nicodemus and a helper hold his apparently weightless body in the air. C.1435; 220 x 262 cm. Oil on oak paneling. (8)

Further playing on the virtuality of literary description is the juxtaposition of this passage with the first photograph in the novel, which occurs at the end of the section (11). A detail

207 of this same painting, the caption reads “I thought of the great artist for a while” (113; original emphasis), which gestures back to evoke Adam’s contemplation here.17 Rather than cropping the image to reflect Adam’s description, however – the choreography of the painting, the colour, the presence of the painting in physical space – the ‘actual’ image supplements Lerner’s ekphrasis by detailing the face of Nicodemus’ helper. Indeed, while the actual and the virtual overlap here, they also transect one another: the ekphrasis includes the dating of the work, its dimensions and its materials, details the credits would usually state. The overlapping virtual claims of the text with the actual image thus inscribes a permanence to Adam’s, and the reader’s, ephemeral perceptual experience, which engages, on a literary level with Clune’s Shklovskian argument that “[a]ll reasonable criticism holds the tacit belief that the experience of art is subject to the same temporal limits as all other experience.”18 The temporality of a habitual experience functions in such a way as to fade perceptual vividness; aesthetic experience, however, “returns the luminosity to things”.19 While these arguments tend only to evaluate our experiences of art in ‘real life,’ it bears asking the question of what happens when literature uses its virtual, gestural capacity for relating these experiences.

It could be argued that Lerner’s method of familiarising the unfamiliar is echoed in

Clune’s reading of Ashbery: “his poetic career consists of a rigorous and sustained effort to take something you’ve never seen before, and show you what it would look like if you had seen it every day of your life.”20 By the end of the novel’s first section, it is precisely this familiarity that creates a quotidian aesthetic in the reader’s perceptual experience of the passage, as the reader is ensconced in the environments of Adam’s morning routine.

17 This same method is apparent in Lerner’s poetry, for instance, the poem beginning “The author gratefully acknowledges the object world” from The Lichtenberg Figures, which includes the collection’s Cataloguing in Publication (CIP) data. (43) 18 Clune, Writing Against Time, 19. 19 Kramnick. 20 Ibid., 116.

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Indeed, Adam’s next observation – “A turning point in my project: I arrived one morning at the Van der Weyden to find someone had taken my place” – disrupts this seemingly continuous routine, particularly in the Magrittesque image he evokes: “He was standing exactly where I normally stood and for a moment I was startled, as if beholding myself beholding the painting, although he was thinner and darker than I. I waited for him to move on, but he didn’t” (8).21 This oblique image then transforms unexpectedly as “the man broke suddenly into tears convulsively catching his breath. Was he, I wondered, just facing the wall to hide his face as he dealt with whatever grief he’d brought into the museum? Or was he having a profound experience of art?” (8).22 As a concept defined by Adam by its elusiveness, it provides an opportunity to reflect on the experience of experiencing art:

Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experiences of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity. (9)

This sense of spatial distance is expanded to include a sense of time as he follows the man through to room 57, “pretend[ing] to take in other painting while looking sidelong at the man,” who “walked immediately up to the small votive image of Christ attributed to San

Leocadio: green tunic, red robes, expression of deep sorrow… For a long minute he was quiet and then he again released a sob” before “walk[ing] calmly into 56” where, standing

“before The Garden of Earthly Delights,” he “considered it calmly, then totally lost his shit”

(9). Depicted previously as a quiet, empty space of artistic contemplation, this

21 It is in a phrase such as this that the reader can almost imagine the virgule that would appear between these two sentences if it were poetry – the full stop call to mind the mirroring action of Lerner’s artistic concerns. 22 This concept reverberates not only through the rest of the novel, as will be analysed later in this chapter, but is a phrase reiterated and examined by most reviewers. Although it is transformed through Adam’s subsequent treatment of Ashbery, Lerner’s reviewers have nonetheless simplified its application in the novel. Instead they focus on Adam’s “long worr[y] that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art” (8) as applying specifically to visual art, and as indicative of the novel’s overall aesthetic impulses, without considering other aesthetic experience such as reading and writing.

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‘performance’ destabilises Adam’s perspective on the use of museum space: “Maybe this man is an artist, I thought; what if he doesn’t feel the transports he performs, what if the scenes he produces are intended to force the institution to face its contradiction in the person of these guards” (10). The distraught man, therefore, simultaneously becomes the artwork and the artist, as Adam “follow[ed] this man, this great artist, out of the museum and into the preternaturally bright day”; a performer experiencing art, and an artwork to be experienced.

Questioning this “power of the virtual,” Lerner suggests that while “[l]iterary virtuality became the ghost of the actual, driving certain artists crazy, driving them conceptual,” we can nevertheless “think of contemporary artists’ increasing interest in literary techniques in part as a desire to reincorporate the power of the virtual back into their work.” By reading Leaving the Atocha Station alongside “The Actual World,” the novel can be read as a blueprint for a new kind of fiction. While in the latter, “[b]anishing the

‘literary’ – the temporal, the representational – from visual art was a major (if unsuccessful)

20th-century critical project,” a project that “made the kind of virtuality I’m describing the domain of the literary,” his novel embodies a postmillennial preoccupation with virtualising actual art works by embedding them within literary prose.23 In other words, visual art sheds its actual conditions and becomes part of the fiction – the subjunctive mode, the imagination, of the prose. Indeed, while the novel explores this idea through both the inclusion of actual images and ekphrastic prose, the aesthetic achieved by this combination creates a virtual gallery, where the role of the reader rejects her passive role for that of an perusing observer that too ‘experiences’ art. Arguing that “[w]e’re often told that the figure within the work was replaced with the viewer standing before it,” Lerner suggests that

“[e]jecting the virtual from the object increased the former’s power: now it could reabsorb

23 Lerner, “The Actual World,”

210 the object along with is viewer.” Leaving the Atocha Station’s aisthetic mode thus not only signals the ‘organisation’ of a new “genre of ‘speculative fiction’ around virtual arts” but the creative postmillennial interrogation of the prosaic image.

THE LYRIC ‘I’

Writing about experiences of art, therefore, renders an actual form virtual. While the same could be argued of all mediated experience, Leaving the Atocha Station interrogates the way in which experiences are constructed specifically within the virtual mode. As a poet, Adam thinks self-consciously of the virtual in the same terms as his author; rather than creating a character who simply occupies a virtual world, Adam struggles with the idea of his own metafictionality. While Lerner proposes that the question of the mediation of experience

“was an aesthetic preoccupation of mine as a poet (and sometimes critic),” he also states that “it became, albeit with some modiﬁcations, Gordon’s [own] idée ﬁxe”; it becomes a linguistic anxiety that creates his obsession with translation, “spread[ing] out into all of his relationships,” including the way he thinks about poetry. 24 This aesthetic aim is deeply concerned with exploring the conditions placed on aesthetic experience, and the question of “whether you’re actually experiencing your experience, whether you really are identical to yourself.”25 This lyric question is “a foundational issue for the novel.” Adam, like Ben in

10:04, is obsessed with creating a lyric ‘I’, or, in other words, with constructing multiple realities, existing within several possibilities at once (the Whitmanic “might” corresponds to

Adam’s “or”). While Adam’s lyric concerns are necessarily tied to his conceptualisation of experience, he is particularly obsessed with his failures of experience. The novel, therefore, is not only an interrogation of how experience can be authentic when constructed in prose,

24 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 226. 25 Lerner, interview by Console.

211 but how it ultimately fails to express authenticity: Adam’s absence of profundity is the aestheticisation of failure.

Lerner’s central theoretical image of the virtual in Leaving the Atocha Station is expressly one of linguistic failure. He has stated in several interviews that not only is conceptualisation of the virtual “indebted to a position” forwarded particularly by poet

Allan Grossman “in his weird and beautiful essays” in The Long Schoolroom, he describes his influence as an act of theft – having “basically stole those terms” before adapting them to embody a larger aesthetic concern.26 “The idea that so obsesses Adam,” Lerner argues, “the idea that all empirical poems are in some sense the record of a poet’s failure to actualize the virtual capacity of the medium – [was] certainly an idea that’s exercised me, maybe an idea that the novel was meant to exorcise.”27 Despite arguing that he “wasn’t in conscious control of how the novel unfolded, wasn’t elaborating a program that preceded the act of composition,” Lerner’s aesthetic practice co-opts Grossman’s language in the development of a broader consideration of literature’s virtual mode. The essays compiled in The Long

Schoolroom, as Lerner states, describe his virtual poetry as such “because there is an unbridgeable gap between what the poet wants the poem to do and what it can actually do.”28 Inhabiting the gap between what a poem aspires to do and what it can do is thus the poem’s virtual act; the actual poem is what exists, and the virtual image is what overlays its actual form.

“For Grossman,” Lerner argues, “this arises out of a kind of contradiction at the heart of poetry that’s always been with us, what he calls ‘the bitter logic of the poetic principle,’” which Lerner explains as meaning “poems are necessarily foredoomed for

26 Lerner, interview by Lin, 27 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 225. 28 Lerner, interview by Lin.

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Grossman because there is an ‘undecidable conﬂict’ between the poet’s desire for alterity and ‘the resistance to alternative . . . making inherent in the materials of which any world must be composed.’”29 In other words, the poet although not wanting to write through representational means, must do so because language structures are indeed representational and unavoidably indexical. In quoting Grossman at length in his interview with Rogers,

Lerner argues further that the “poet wants to get beyond the world of representation but necessarily depends upon existing representational techniques”; to Tao Lin, he explains that

“[a]ccording to Grossman, poetry issues from the desire to get beyond the human, the finite, the historical, and to reach the transcendent or divine. But as soon as the poet moves from the poetic impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.”30 As such, Grossman’s understanding of poetry is predicated upon an understanding of failure as inevitable, which necessarily inflects Lerner’s conceptualisation of the poem as “evidence of the failure to discover or disclose those alternative structures.”31 Indeed, Lerner emphasises that a poem “is always a record of failure because you can’t actualize the impulse that gave rise to it without betraying it,” suggesting that the virtual act is an intrinsic signifier of poetic expression, and by extension, of the experience of poetry.32

In his interviews, however, Lerner diverges from relying upon these initial analyses of Grossman to explain his virtual concerns. Where “as it seems to be for Grossman,” poetry’s transcendent impulse is “about divinity or the noumenal,” for Lerner, “poetry can arise from a desire to transcend the given, the actual, and that desire can be described in a

29 Grossman, cited by Lerner, interview by Rogers, 225-6. 30 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 225-6. The quote is as follows: “[T]he manifest world (the only one there is) is subject to the logic of representation because it comes to mind only as representation. And representation, our only access to [the] world, reproduces its hierarchical and exclusionary structures as social formations. The poem is the site on which originality is expressed as the attempt to discover alternative structures of intelligibility that do the work of representation in another way.” Lerner, interview by Lin. 31 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 225-6. 32 Lerner, interview by Lin.

213 variety of ways,” for example, “the desire to think something outside capitalism.” His conceptualisation thus rejects the inherent desire for the virtual to become actual – to be able to exist within what can be realisable – and instead suggests, like Clune, that the virtual mode in poetry “is an attempt to figure – with the irreducibly social materials of language – possibilities that have not yet been actualized.” Developing Grossman’s idea further,

Lerner suggests that “a failure can be a figure, can signify”:

Maybe poetry can fail better than other art forms, because poems can point to what they can’t contain – that desire for something beyond what’s actual. That’s part of what Benjamin is arguing about Baudelaire, I think – that he makes a lyric out of lyric’s impossibility in modernity. Or you might say that even the failed attempt to write a successful poem makes us aware of having the faculties, however atrophied or underdeveloped, for such an undertaking in the first place, and so keeps us in touch with our formal capacities for imagining alterity even if we can’t achieve it. A novel that seeks to explore this, therefore, will always fail in its attempt, because it is limited by the same ‘finitude of its terms.’ But because it does not seek to depict the virtual act but rather the removed experience of this act (as in the prose poem’s circumvention of

Grossman’s ‘bitter logic principle’), its attempts are more closely realisable. It is in distinguishing his understanding of the virtual capacities of poetry that Lerner thus articulates the importance of such a conceptualisation to his artisic practice and in its specific application in Leaving the Atocha Station. Indeed, he maintains that “a serious aesthetic position” of the novel is the “belief that the virtual possibilities of art are always in a sense betrayed by actual artworks.”33 While much more interesting than the affirmations of actual art is the failures of virtual art in the novel raises a question expressing an uncertainty of the postmillennial literary virtual arts, “of their contemporary viability.”

Lerner’s conceptualisation of virtual experience also extends to his understanding of Clune’s virtual prose poetry. Positing that, “as a kind of blueprint for a poem,” the prose

33 Lerner, interview by Console.

214 poem’s use of the virgule constitutes a positive “literary technique for defeating actuality, for suspending it and keeping the poem in touch with the virtual.”34 Using the following passage from his novel to illustrate the novel’s virtual considerations, Lerner connects

Clune’s argumentation to his own theory of the virtuality achieved by embedding poetry within other forms of text:

It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror: “You have it but you don’t have it. / You miss it, it misses you. / You miss each other.” Indeed, Lerner intends that “Ashbery’s poetry never becomes actual for Gordon, never succumbs to that ‘bitter logic’” – thus remaining virtual – as Adam “is disappointed in artworks that are merely real, finished, final.” It is this inward turn in perception that allows virtuality to be sustained because it resists closure – as a mirror enacting circularity, emulating literary contraption – and its virtuality is what resists the work from transcending the boundary of meaning, while suspending it in multiple states of possible comprehension.

For Lerner, meaning is created in these gaps, as those inhabited by poetry: “the power of artworks [is] to allow us to experience a gap between the possible and the merely real.”35

Indeed, he argues that in occupying a space outside of meaning, this bears comparison to

“something like a ‘negative Romanticism,’ as Robert Kaufman has called it,” where “Poetry allows us to negatively figure something beyond what passes for the real, to imagine its outside.” Within the Leaving the Atocha Station, this aspiration towards an imagined exteriority is reflected not only in Adam’s poetry, but in his articularted motivation for writing. Rather than embracing “any claim made for poetry’s direct efﬁcacy,” Adam “might

34 Lerner, interview by Rogers., 226. 35 Lerner, interview by Rogers, 231.

215 embrace what Robin Blaser said of [Robert] Spicer” – that his poetry developed “the practice of outside.”36

In spite of this self-conscious borrowing of terminology, Lerner nonetheless develops his own nuanced argument concerned specifically with the virtual conditions of experience. For Lerner, the virtual mode extends beyond the parameters of poetic expression to encompass the aesthetics of negotiating experience. Adam’s interrogation of

‘profound experiences of art’ is the central analysis of virtual experience in the novel. What arises in such a discussion around the “disconnect between the virtual and the actual” in the arts is the question of how and what the novel persuades the reader is a virtual experience.37 He has argued that while “the power of the arts is the way they model – and so give one the opportunity to explore – the mediacy that is generally characteristic of our experience in an era of spectacle,” it is also one that “let[s] us experience” this “mediacy immediately.” Adam’s experience of the Madrid train bombings, for example, intensifies his perception of mediation. Although he “feels he is having – or should be having – a firsthand experience of this tragic historical event,” he is also “acutely aware of how mediated his experience is, despite his literal proximity: mediated by his foreignness, and mediated by the mass media, the inevitable spectacularization of the tragedy into a ‘media’.”

During much of the novel, Adam is under the influence of hash, alcohol, or other drugs. This affects the gestural nature of his understanding and recollection of certain conversations, as well as the way in which his experiences are mediated. Adam’s use of drugs both embodies and enables his most persistent virtual experiential state. This is the novel’s “chemical mediacy,” which, for Lerner, “becomes another site where the virtual

36 Ibid., 231-2. 37 Lerner, interview by Console.

216 and the actual are hard to tease apart.”38 Forming another layer of mediated experience, chemical mediacy goes further to mediate Adam’s perception of his own experiences, and as such, questions the condition such a mediation actualises – the virtual or the real.

Indeed, he has noted the connection between the virtual “experiment” of interpreting meaning through experience and drug use: “I love how people who abuse drugs are said to

‘have a substance problem.’ It sounds like a philosophical problem distinguishing semblance from essence or something.” Negotiating the city of Madrid and art through the lens of intoxication, therefore, virtualises experience through altering sensory perception:

Well, I’ve always been struck by how a range of drugs is celebrated and denounced in somewhat contradictory terms: drug x is said both to obliterate the real and intensify your experience of reality. There is – often for the same drug – a discourse of Dionysian enthusiasm and a discourse of numb somnambulance. Or SSRIs are at once praised and denounced, depending who you ask, for helping you be yourself again, and for artificially altering your personality. For Adam, identity and language are intricately co-dependant on their connection to reality: as he becomes more intoxicated, language becomes suppler, more diffuse, more virtual, and so does his perception of reality. Although he experiences an intensification of linguistic potentiality, the subjunctive mode, and the multiple possibilities of meaning that it renders, disperses the intensity of the experience itself in such a way to recall Howard

Eiland’s description of Benjamin’s aesthetics in On Hashish, suggesting that “[i]n a state of intoxication, the thread of ratiocination is loosened, unraveled, not dissolved.”39 Adam’s intoxication similarly allows for a lyric “emptying out of personality,” so that there can be

“a diffusion of perspective”– language occupies multiple layers of imagined meaning and

“[t]hinking is sensualised.”

38 Lerner interview by Lin. 39 Howard Eiland, “Translator’s Foreword,” On Hashish, Walter Benjamnin (Cambridge, Mas.: HUP, 2006), ix.

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How does intoxication perform as a virtual mediator in the novel? One of Lerner’s interviewers, Jason Rehel, has commented that “Adam has a complex formula for how he uses different drugs (tranquilizers, pot) to mask his consciousness, as often from himself as from others.”40 While it could be argued that Adam’s use of pills engenders a sustained dissociative state, his most prominent uses of hash in the novel, however, occur when extensively commenting on his poetic practice and when he engages, or attempts to engage, with his poetic consciousness. This contributes to Adam’s “obsess[ion]… with all the overlapping forms of mediation in contemporary life,” of which drugs, Lerner suggests,

“are another medium he’s trying to figure out,” probing whether “they intensify his experience of reality or obliterate it,” and if “they make him more or less himself.”41 This concern is evident from the very beginning of the novel, where it is established as part of

Adam’s everyday routine through two scenarios, of which both, he implies, occur regularly.

Describing his routine after leaving the Prado, he would “walk a few blocks more to El

Retiro, the city’s central park, find a bench, take out [his] notebooks, the pocket dictionary,

Lorca, and get high” (15).42 Adam then describes carefully the conditions of the first scenario: “If the sun were out and I proportioned the hash and tobacco correctly, if there were other people around, but at a distance, so that I could hear that they were speaking without hearing in which language, a small wave of euphoria would break over me” (15),

This euphoria manifests in a rolling ratiocinative motion, syntactically accumulating the

“rush of what [Adam] considered love,” initially “for the things at hand: the swifts… hopping in the dust, the avenues of old-world tress, the stone statues of kings and queens with whom the tourists pose, love for the glare off El Estanque, the park’s artificial lake.”

(15) Although the other scenario (“if there were no sun and the proportioning [of the hash]

40 Rehel, interview with Lerner. 41 Lerner, interview by Rehel. 42 El Retiro forms the location for the two prominent discussions of hash use in the novel, presumably because in this park “[t]here were always hash dealers” (65).

218 was off, if were either too many people around or if the park was empty, an abyss opened up inside me as I smoked” [16]) generates this same syntactic motion, it instead creates a slow dissolve of the self. His intoxication allows Adam to vacate the ‘I’, speaking about, and observing, himself in the third person in order to mediate and experience his own experience: “[s]ome of the gray was sucked inside him, and he was at a loss; he became a symptom of himself” (17). Offering one of the novel’s most virtual images, this section precisely articulates Adam’s perception of experience: through intoxication he feels “most intensely for that other thing, the sound absorbent screen, life’s white machine, shadows massing in the middle distance, although that’s not even close, the texture of et cetera itself” (16).

Adam’s description of his chemical mediacy, however, differs dramatically later in his project. Ruminating extensively on his hash experience, he observes the epiphenomena that leads to the purchase, the hash market and police tolerance, and the way his intoxication manifests and intensifies his sensory and poetic perceptions. Taking place during his “uneventful third phase,” which “possessed… no intrinsic content” (64) and is primarily characterised as “rainy” (65), “the particular texture of [his] loneliness derived in part from my sense that [he] could only share it, could only describe it, as pure transition, a slow dissolve between scenes” (64). During this phase, he “would buy an egg or half an egg

[of hash] from whatever dealer [he] first encountered,” find “a relatively dry, sheltered place… smoked and watched the faint rain fall into the artificial lake” (65). Refracted through ‘experience,’ Adam’s meditations on the subject here again emphasise the formal implications of his intoxication: the use of this hash allowed him to “experience… it as a tuning of the world, not, as with strong weed, its total transformation or obliteration” (64).

But the alterations effected by the hash were somehow all the more profound for being understated, in part because one could forget or at least discount the role of

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the drug in one’s experience. If, say a group of trees that had previously been mere background suddenly stood forth a little and their slender and strictly symmetrical forms became an elegant if unparaphrasable claim about form in general, you could write that observation down without dissolving it in the process, or without the strangeness of your hands distracting you from however you’d planned to use them… if these realizations inspired some meditation on the passing into one another of the natural and the cultural, the meditation, if not profound, could at least achieve coherence, could be formulated as it was experienced, not retrospectively, after coming down. (66-67, my emphasis)

Adam’s meditations on the subject of chemical mediacy are indeed echoes of Lerner’s discussions about intoxication in interviews. Where Lerner explains that “[t]here is a very contradictory discourse around drugs”, which is a “contradiction [that] Adam dwells in – not only in his experience of or on drugs, but in his thinking about paintings, poems, etc.”

– “[s]ometimes we talk about their ability to bring us into contact with the present and sometimes we talk about how they make us sleepwalkers, robbing us of real experience” –

Adam argues that “for as long as I could remember, I always already felt removed from my experience” (67).43 Where others, he “believed, used similar drugs to remove themselves from their experience,” he “took the drug to intensify the vantage from said remove, and so experienced it as an intensification of presence, but only at my customary distance from myself; maybe, when panicked, that distance was collapsing” (66-7). Adam’s intent to

‘intensify presence’ creates, as in Cole’s aesthetic practice, an affirmation of a negative world of absence in such a way as to also suggest a presence that is not necessarily visible; in other words, they both imagine it as a virtual possibility.

Adam’s use of pills, however, represents a more constant, and serious, intoxicator in the novel. Although intended to relieve his anxiety, he is conscious that the “white pills certainly did not seem to work for [him] the way they worked for some people”; indeed, even doubling his dose in his project’s fourth phase, he “always felt a few strains away from full orchestral panic” (100). Rather than a poetic aid, his pills were “a daily reminder that I

43 Lerner, interview by Rehel.

220 was officially fucked up,” a state that he conceptualises as “a Eurcharistic rite of self- abnegation in which I acknowledged to myself that I was incapable of facing the world without designer medication and thereby absolved myself of some portion of my agency; it was a little humiliating, a little liberating” (100). It is prompted by the foundation’s upcoming panel, at which he would speak, that Adam begins to realise that his perception of experience, of his poetry, of himself, is mediated through his intoxication, and questions his use of drugs as a mediator of reality:

But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where ‘poem’ is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures… only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability. But wasn’t my relationship with substance also fake?… had the effort to prolong my adolescent experimentation indefinitely shaped imperceptibly into fearsome if mundane dependence, had mythomania become methomania? (164) Most, if not all, of these extended interrogations of his chemical mediacy occur while traversing the cityscape: “I less thought than felt these things on my skin as I wandered the city” (164). Indeed, intoxication facilitates a mediation of the city, allowing Adam to wander without direction, in a dissociative state not quite connecting to reality. In this interrogation of his chemical habits, he consciously figures his use of drugs in virtual terms.

By rendering himself as a ‘poem,’ he draws correspondences between the limitations of the actuality of poetry and the way his own ‘substantiality’ mitigates his experience of reality.

Moreover, he asks if what he perceived to be defying the actual, his ‘relationship with substance,’ is indeed itself succumbing to the same logic; whether in attempting to mediate the virtual, he does so ‘mundanely,’ and without serious aesthetic ramifications.44

44 Reviewers have generally overlooked Adam’s reliance on imagined reality as a virtual condition of the novel. Alex Gallo-Brown, for example, suggests a direct correspondence between Adam’s perspective and the hyperreal, arguing that Baudrillard “shed[s] light” on the novel’s more complicated claims about artistic

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At the centre of the novel, Lerner suddenly switches modes of narration to a strange interaction over instant messenger between Adam and his friend Cyrus Console.

Here, the act of recounting is transferred from Adam – the first and only instance in the book – to Cyrus, who messages him from Mexico, where he has travelled with his girlfriend, Jane, in search of an ‘authentic experience.’ The ten page long section is a transcription of a particular kind of contemporary discourse that maps out, spatially and indexically, the way in which mediated conversation works against the discursive narratorial flow typical of novels. It begins in a similar way to the novel itself, with an indication of quotidian action – “[o]ften around eight or nine p.m. in Madrid, Cyrus would be in an internet café in Mexico, and we could instant message” – followed by an the indication of an extraordinary event – “One Monday night:” – when Cyrus recounts an alarming “bad scene” that unfolded in Mexico (68). Formally, the section prioritises the disruption, fragmentation, and overlapping of Adam and Cyrus’ narrative voices. Typographically creating the effect of a script on the page, with each ‘character’ or ‘performer’ taking turns to ‘speak,’ the section evolves in carefully balanced tension of slow enrapture: indeed

Lerner argues that he views “the chat [to be] closer to poetry than prose in so far as the fragmentation of syntax bears an emotional charge.”45

CYRUS: … Anyway, Jane – we were on the opposite bank as the swimmer’s girlfriend – Jane wanted to swim ME: she had a swimsuit? meaning, contending that “Adam’s perspective early in the novel is reminiscent of Jean Baudrillard’s”; in such a reading, Adam’s “skepticism… about nearly every form of human communication” is equated with Baudrillard’s argument that “the old paradigm of representation… had collapsed in the face of simulation”. As such, his “distrust [of] art and its capacity to inspire transcendent experience” and his “doubt [of] his ability to communicate in Spanish or, for that matter, in any language” constitutes a “fear [of] artistic inspiration”. For Gallo-Brown, Leaving the Atocha Station develops “a world of near-total referentiality, cultural signifiers wrenched free of their signifieds. It is a world made bearable only by intense and repetitive chemical alteration.” I would argue, however, that Adam is not, as Gallo-Brown suggests, a Baudrillardian figure: although I agree that he is inflected by Baudrillard’s theoretical position, not only was Lerner’s literary exploration of virtual experience influenced predominantly by the theories of Grossman and Clune, it was developed with his own distinct assembled terminology. 45 Ben Lerner, interview by Jessica Loudis, Book Forum (15 September 2011), http://www.bookforum.com/interview/8321.

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CYRUS: and did get in the water, although I told her I didn’t think CYRUS: Yes, we both had swimsuits on under our clothes. (70)

The section is, as Ed Sugden notes, “[f]ull of hesitations, awkward half-sentences, flat enunciations, and the implied delays of distracted minds,” which creates the novel’s only interaction between two characters “where we are granted a privileged viewing of directly transcribed and unmediated communication.”46 Like poetry in the novel, the instant messaging conversation is a peculiar image of experience; does its fabrication interrupt, or even deny the reader, the flow of experience in real time? The conversation’s virtual conditions (surprisingly) succeeds in mediating narrative time “as it unfolds” because “the patterns of written language” are written “as thought,” where “the building blocks of words slowly and rhythmically accumulate.” As such, this section aligns Lerner’s attempt to mediate the limits of virtuality with Sugden’s assertion that what he articulates is

“the process of Adam Gordon’s thinking and getting to the heart of his search for a language that adequately fulfils the burden of narrative representation.” As abruptly as the section begins, however, it ends – “CYRUS: “How is Spain?” (78) – an abruptness that reflects the fragmentary quality of the passage itself within a comparitively smoother narrative style.

When considering this section within an argument about virtual mediation, the question that ultimately arises is what simultaneously enacting and describing this form of communication indeed mediates. Clune would argue that it forms a blueprint for the experience of an authentic conversation; because the conversation has “been embedded in a fiction,” it is not an actual conversation, but by taking place in this form, “virtualize[s]” the experience of this encounter, more than it already is when it takes place outside literature in everyday life.47 Lerner, moreover, would argue that “there’s a sense in which

46 Ed Sugden, “The Tragic Interchangeability of Nouns,” Lana Turner Journal (21 April 2012), http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/blog/sugdenconsolelernerreview. 47 Lerner, interview by Loudis.

223 encountering [instant messaging] in a novel is a blueprint for an encounter with [instant messaging]”; “it’s a space where a reader can have a kind of second-order aesthetic experience. Perhaps the contemporary is characterized by the anxiety that this might be the only kind of aesthetic experience left.” Indeed, he posits in conversation with Jessica

Loudis that rather than Adam’s “more literary prose,” it is “the technology of instant messaging [that] can convey… more readily” the “trauma Cyrus is describing,” “because it records hesitation and interruption” without needing to create “conventions… around online chatting that can assimilate the [conversation] into a familiar genre.” He argues, moreover, that “mediation isn’t treated exclusively as a way of distancing from reality but also as a way of calibrating distance so that reality can be experienced fully,” and as such, technology forms a subtle mediator in the novel, because it “enable[s the] experience of presence” without actualising it. Indeed, “[p]resenting a chat allows you to collapse the distinction between writing and speech” (insofar as we read a chat understanding it as an act of presentation rather than of writing) and thus “dissolve by the technology of instant messaging” “the two levels of Adam’s voice – the narrating and narrated,” in order to create the effect of “hear[ing] his voice immediately.”

The novel’s mediation of the virtual ultimately culminates in the rejection of the actual. Although on the last page Adam “thought about my tranquillizers in my suit jacket pocket only because I was surprised not to want one” (181), the earlier image of the exigencies of the virtual echoes throughout the novel: “when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium… then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual” – “in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.” Indeed, the novel is the only form in which the literary virtual arts could be effectively interrogated; for Lerner, “the novel is a good medium for

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‘virtual poetry’” because it “is itself a kind of virtual poem” – it can express possibility and imagined experiences without the burden of realising them.48 Therefore, the way in which he talks about the novel in relation to poetry – inextricably so – posits critical questions about aesthetic aims toward a failure in postmillennial prose. Because “[t]here are influential accounts of the novel that argue it emerges when the conditions of possibility for poetry have been lost… the novel emerges as the dominant literary form of a world in which meaning is no longer immanent.” Postmodernist aesthetic cynicism no longer dominates the literary market; instead, literary forms can incorporate other genres and styles – prose and poetry; fiction and nonfiction; words and images – with the aim to optimistically, and virtuosically, suggest new directions for the virtual arts. To Lerner, the two forms are inextricable – “the novel as a genre is inextricable from the banishment of poetry to the realm of the virtual” – because, in a rather Shklovskian expression, prose is no longer only the image of itself, it can create poetry, too: “verse is a present absence in its prose,” and as such, the novel is experienced “as something that emerges out of poetry’s impossibility.”

EXPERIENCE OF EXPERIENCE

While writing against the image, about aesthetic experience, and contending with questions of fiction and reality are subjects for poetry and the novel, Lerner’s virtual conditions interrogate postmillennial literary art most powerfully when the forms are combined.

Indeed, this approach is inflected by his close reading of a variety other writers, particularly poets, and as a self-proclaimed “curator,” it is not surprising that Lerner’s interpretation of his literary influences holds similar significance to understanding his approach of mediating

48 Lerner, interview by Lin.

225 experience through prose. The most immediate connection is to John Ashbery, with whom both Lerner and Adam are ostensibly enamoured. Given Lerner’s interest in explicitly theorising the mediation of experience, the intensely self-reflexive work of Ashbery offers an important aesthetic corollary to Leaving the Atocha Station. Indeed, the two authors generate a kind of metafictional feedback in Lerner’s meditations on strategies for aestheticising Adam’s self-conscious experience in such a way to invoke his own experience of reading Ashbery, while, in reviewing Leaving the Atocha Station, Ashbery himself describes it as “[a]n extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life.”49 Given the fruitfulness of this confluence, it is worthwhile to consider how other postmillennial writers with similar aesthetic intentions struggle with the image of the contemporary novel. Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six part semi- autobiography, My Struggle, considers precisely this critical concern, which, Lerner reflected upon in a review of part three, Boyhood Island, for the London Review of Books. Of particular interest to both Ashbery and Knausgaard is how visual art, as well as the experience of it, can be mediated through literature, creating imaginary conditions around real works.

Ashbery’s ghostly echo in Lerner’s novel is present right from its very title: Leaving the Atocha Station is the title of a poem in Ashbery’s 1962 collection The Tennis Court Oath.

While in a 1981 interview with A. Poulin, Ashbery claimed that it “was really nothing for me to be leaving this particular railway station,” and that the title “meant nothing to me at the time except that I was in a strange city going somewhere,” he conceded that “the dislocated, incoherent fragments of images which make up the movement of the poem are probably like the experience you get from a train pulling out of a station… The dirt, the

49 John Ashbery, “Rear Cover,” Leaving the Atocha Station.

226 noises, the sliding away.”50 Lerner nevertheless has appropriated the aesthetic significance of this title, encompassing both Ashbery’s poetic aims, and the political implications of the

2004 Madrid train bombings, an event that occurred some forty years after the poem’s initial publication. Considering the title in terms of its suspended aesthteic register

“evok[ing] Ashbery’s own time abroad – and the strange work that arose from his being outside of English” – Lerner frames its political implication in explicitly virtual terms:

[T]he title here evokes the aesthetic and the political and the troubled relation between them. The title names the site of the tragedy only to “leave” it; is there a turning away from the political toward poetry? Or is what’s being left the poem – the virtual Atocha station of poetry – for a place made actual by the irruption of the historical real?51 As a kind of translation, the title of the novel itself suggests a distinction between the aesthetic and the political in terms of the virtual and the actual; how can poetry not only be politicised, but, through this, made actual? Rather than simply mediating experiences, Lerner’s works of poetry and prose can be read like Ashbery’s, as describing the act of experiencing:

“the experience of experience.”52 Indeed, Ashbery suggests that this is something all of his poetry attempts to express, “not for itself but as an epitome of something experienced; I think that is what my poems are about. I mean it doesn’t particularly matter about the experience; the movement of experiencing is what I’m trying to get down.” In other words, the work itself reads experientially, as a kind of manifesto of its own creation – a map of the writer’s act of writing and the reader’s act of reading. For Ashbery, perhaps what most represents the act of experiencing art is, as it is for Espedal, the unfolding of the poem

50 John Ashbery interview by A. Poulin, “The Experience of Experience: A Conversation with John Ashbery,” Michigan Quarterly Review 20, No. 3 (Summer, 1981): 245. 51 Lerner interview by Fitzgerald. 52 Ashbery, “Experience of Experience,” 245.

227 itself: “the subject of any one of my poems,” he posits, is “the poem creating itself. The process of writing becomes the poem.”53

The poem, however, that reveals the most about Ashbery’s influence on Lerner is his 1975 “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” which references Parmigianino’s c.1524 painting of the same name. Briefly mentioning it in his article, “The Actual World,” Lerner places the poem in the category of prose and poetry that, unlike classical ekphrasis, is “less concerned with detailing the object than the total environment in which the artistic encounter takes place.” This approach moves beyond the image of the art object to mediate the experience of the aesthetic. Writing necessarily engages an awareness of absence as well as presence, bearing comparison to Ashbery’s suggestion that poetry can

“suggest other words, the thoughts other thoughts, and when one starts to think about it the whole thing expands out of the frame in a way that a painting can’t” – for Ashbery,

“the poem is not a visual thing, but something that’s going on in one’s head, coming in contact with all kinds of other things, remembered experiences, words that one heard used in a different context than that in which they’re occurring in the poem.”54 This is particularly evident in the description of the epiphenomena of the poet’s aesthetic experience:

Vienna where the painting is today, where I saw it with Pierre in the summer of 1959; New York Where I am now… It is another life to the city, The backing of the looking glass of the Unidentified but precisely sketched studio. (75)

53 Ibid., 251. 54 Ibid., 247.

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Poetic form, therefore, allows for meditations on art, as well as analysis and criticism of art not necessarily confined to the intellectual history of conventional art criticism and art historical scholarship. Not that the poem is unable to draw on these sources:

“Dabbled in alchemy, but whose wish Here was not to examine the subtleties of art In a detached, scientific spirit: he wished through them To impart the sense of novelty and amazement to the spectator” (Freedberg)… (74)55 Indeed, Richard Stamelman has suggested that the poem “serve[s] as a critical reflection of the painting,” whereby “[c]riticism, the poet suggests, is reflection: a specular interpretation that mirrors and meditates simultaneously. The critic reflects the work he studies – quotation, paraphrase, photographic reproduction are mirror images of a special type – by reflecting upon it.”56 For Stamelman, the poem moves through an ekphrastic description of

Parmigianino’s painting, particularly the act of creating a self-portrait – from “a contemplation of his own life” to the “radical criticism[s] of the illusions and deceptions inherent in forms of tradition representation,” accompanied by an oscillating

“consciousness [that] moves in a recurring, although decentered, pattern.”57 These oscillations reflect the poet’s own experience of viewing, and interpreting, the painting:

… This past Is now here: the painter’s Reflected face, in which we linger, receiving Dreams and inspiration on an unassigned Frequency… (80) While Stamelman describes ekphrasis as “tend[ing] to still the temporal activity… of the poem,” this would apply only to its traditional form in the description of art, but not in the

55 The poem quotes Sydney J. Freedberg’s well-known book Parmigianino: his works in painting (Cambridge., Mass.: HUP, 1950). 56 Richard Stamelman, “Critical Reflections: Poetry and Art Criticism in Ashbery’s ‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,’” New Literary History 15, no. 3 (Spring, 1984): 608; 609-10. Sic. 57 Ibid., 607; 608; 607.

229 description of experiencing art.58 Considering its subject matter, however, the poem will necessarily conform to a circular self-reflexive logic that is susceptible to distortion and misrepresentation, despite appearing “open-ended, rambling, and fragmented” as

Stamelman argues.59 It instead reinterprets Parmigianino’s Mannerist technological playfulness as postmodern literary contraption, which is, perhaps, the poem’s ultimate virtual argument: the reflective meditation of art as the creation of a self-portrait suggests the repetitious self-enclosure of the mirror image.

For Lerner, however, this does not simply represent constant recreation because the mirroring occurs in the subjunctive, where what is visible is not necessarily real; or, what is a mirror image is not necessarily the same as the original object. Indeed, perhaps Ashbery’s

“Self Portrait” delineates how he is not the same as his poetic image. For Lerner, this is crucial. In his article on Ashbery, “The Future Continuous,” he reads “Self Portrait” in light of his own aesthetic concerns, producing an analysis that reflects his wider consideration of poetry’s virtual relationship to experience. Juxtaposing the effect of “Self

Portrait” against poems such as “Clepsydra,” he proposes that this poem constitutes the exception to the way that Ashbery’s poems usually work. While calling the poem

“magnificent,” he argues that it also marks a “melancholic retreat from his method” in that it expresses Ashbery’s own personal act of experiencing rather than “reflecting” our own – a conclusion that is perhaps evident in the title “Self-Portrait.”60 Indeed, the poem is for

Lerner “a meditation on [the] limits” of what he has defined as “lyric mediacy”; the circular process by which in reading Ashbery’s poetry we read about our own “unfolding” experience of reading. However, in order to work within as a lyric – which is itself a virtual mode – he argues that “Ashbery has to vacate the ‘I’ so that we, along with future readers,

58 Ibid., 614. 59 Ibid., 607. 60 Lerner, “Future Continuous,” 210.

230 can inhabit it,” and thus enact the self-reflective experience that denies the true interiority to include the reader.61 Or, as Lauterbach terms, he “gracefully configures an intimate, personal voicing onto a public ground, the ground that is ‘plural’ in its potential expansion among the individual yous that make us.”62 From this perspective, Lerner’s conceptualisation of Ashbery’s poetry reflects the poet’s own understanding of his writing, who suggests that

“poetry has to be a new experience.”63 The poem’s focus is thus on the writer’s reception of his own image; the poem becomes a meditation on the failures of experiencing the image and the original as the same.

The mirrored image is, for Lerner, the ultimate imagining of the way that the virtual works in literature – where what you are reading tells you how to read what you are reading.

This same analysis is echoed in Adam’s ruminations of Ashbery’s poetry in Leaving the

Atocha Station. He positions the poet as “one of the only people I described as a ‘major poet’ without irony” (90). Taking place as Adam leaves Madrid for Granada by train with

Isabel, this scene, as Lerner argues, “tries to account for how [Ashbery’s poems] produce an intensification of life by enabling an immediate experience of mediacy,”64 or as Adam describes, the “experience the texture of time as it passed, a shadow train, life’s white machine” (90). Indeed, as I have mentioned earlier in this thesis, the novel has appropriated a paragraph of the article in which Lerner explains how “when you read about your reading in the time of your reading, mediacy is experienced immediately” (91).65 Edited to be refracted through Adam’s narratorial voice, the passage takes on a more personal tone that not only comments on the way ‘one’ can read Ashbery’s poetry, but throws a cliché into a

61 Ibid., 211. 62 Lauterbach, The Night Sky. 63 Ashbery, “Experience of Experience,” 250. 64 Lerner, interview by Fitzgerald. 65 The line in the article is as follows: “Part of the bizarre power of Ashbery’s best poetry, and when his work manages to describe the time of its own reading in the time of its own reading, we experience mediacy immediately.” Lerner, “Future Continuous,” 203.

231 new light. Reading poetry as an aesthetic experience itself while not a peculiar suggestion – de Bolla, in particular, has not restricted aesthetic experiences to only those of visual art – for Adam, act as a blueprint for such an experience: the “best Ashbery poems, I thought, although not in these words, describe what it’s like to read an Ashbery poem; his poems refer to how their reference evanesces” (91). Adam develops, moreover, Lerner’s image of

Ashbery’s poetry as a mirror:

It is though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror: “You have it but you don’t have it. / You miss it, it misses you. / You miss each other.” (91) This scene is not only one of the novel’s major descriptions of aesthetic experience, but can be considered alongside that of Rogier van der Weyden (7-8) and Picasso (156-8) as its defining descriptions of art. Although reviewers have concentrated “on Adam’s inability to have ‘a profound experience of art,’” they have, according to Lerner, overlooked Adam’s mediation of Ashbery as such an experience.66 The novel parallels poetry with art, reading with viewing: where “this strange experience of reading, the sense of harmony between the rhythms of a reproduction and the real, their structural identity, so that the subject of the sentence was precisely the time of its being furthered” is as vivid description of art as is the brushstrokes and compositional techniques of painting.

Ashbery’s influence on Lerner, however, also contributes to the way politics manifest in the novel as an aesthetics of wandering away. Chris Nealon, in The Matter of

Capital, has discussed what he has called Ashbery’s “optional apocalypse,” wherein his poetry describes “scenes of spectacle, pageantry, and even apocalypse, which are made

66 Rogers, interview with Lerner, 236.

232 harmless by the poet’s turning to face the other direction, or drifting in a different direction.”67 Discussing Nealon’s reading in conversation with interviewer Adam

Fitzgerald, Lerner explains the novel’s attempt to address this act as “an embracing of the minority of the poet as a way of dealing with the guilt of being part of the American hegemon but without any real power to change it.”68 This is expressed particularly in the way that Adam “articulates his commitment to the arts through series of negations about their political efficacy,” a habit that manifests in his impulse not only to wander, but also, to wander away. This aesthetic, however, is evident particularly in regards to the intersections between poetry and politics articulated in the novel, which revolves around a question Isabel asks Adam early in the novel: “What makes the poem an effective form for a historical investigation?” (49) The answer, it seems, is that poetry cannot function in this way: “the arts preserve the possibility of alterity precisely by enabling us to experience a desire for something other than the given, by allowing us to wander away from official reality, to experience our own agency.”69 Adam expresses just this antipathy for art to encompass protest:

I tried hard to imagine my poem’s relation to Franco’s mass graves, how my poems could be said meaningfully to bear on the deliberate and systematic destruction of a people or a planet, the abolition of classes, or in any sense constitute a significant political intervention. I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. (44) Indeed, Adam counteracts Lerner’s concern with virtual poetry – poetry that is not, and cannot, be real – by considering suicide if poems were to become political ‘machines:’ “I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills” (45). These two

67 Chris Nealon, The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Cambridge, Mass.: HUP, 2011), 78. 68 Lerner, interview by Fitzgerald. 69 Lerner interview by Fitzgerald.

233 states, of wandering and of wandering away, only collide, however, during the demonstrations after the bombings (130-1): Adam dissolves into the crowd despite consciously recognising “that History was being made and that I needed to be with

Spaniards to experience it” (132). Adam’s inability to partake in these protests epitomises his anxiety of the way the virtual unfolds in reality, not just in poetry. Indeed, it is an overt reference to Ashbery’s statements in The Nation in 1967: “All poetry is against war and in favor of life, or else it isn’t poetry, and it stops being poetry when it is forced into the mold of a particular program. Poetry is poetry. Protest is protest.”70 Adam, however, cannot reconcile the poet with the political participator, instead choosing to walk away to avoid the spectacle. Indeed, through incorporating poetry, the novel can be a site for protest and apology.

How do these ideas of Ashbery’s virtual ‘self’ and virtual poetry correspond to

Lerner’s consideration of similar movement in postmillennial prose? How does the novel as a form construct itself through the virtual mode in opposition to contemporary realist impulses? And moreover, how do postmillennial prose writers struggle with the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in ways that poets are not required to? Knausgaard’s My

Struggle, attends to such questions with an appositely negative view. While both novelists are concerned with writing against art in order to map out a new counter-image of the novel, Knausgaard’s operates on a scale more encompassing, more intense, more brutal, than Leaving the Atocha Station. Describing his work as being “very much about what experiences are and what they’re good for,” rather than “one of those experiences in itself,”

Knausgaard’s aesthetic agenda starkly contrasts Lerner’s reading of Ashbery, and the

70 Ashbery, cited by Lerner, interview by Fitzgerald.

234 implications that his reading thus transfers to his novel.71 Indeed, as a “book about experiences that doesn’t produce those experiences,” it both addresses the subject of rendering the act of experience through literature and exposes the inability of literature to imitate the act of experiencing. This is echoed in Knausgaard’s reflections on how he envisages the act of writing as “recalling,” in which “matter [he is] a classic Proustian.”72

His use of art as a form through which experiences can be recollected resonates with the ambitions of Lerner’s novel, if not the work itself, particularly in the uncompromising honesty of My Struggle’s prose. As he states, “as anyone with the least knowledge of literature and writing – maybe art in general – will know, concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value”: Adam’s concerns with his compulsive fraudulence adhere to a similar logic.

Combining novelistic description with essayistic digression, My Struggle, as Jonathan

Callahan has argued, “provides the reader with a portrait of an artist whose sometimes- quixotic-seeming-endeavor to narrate his struggles with life and art in their entirety consumes, possesses, captivates him, in that last verb’s literal sense, and thereby sets him free.”73 Describing this as an intention “to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read,” to create a work that consisted of “nothing but digressions, no story lines,” Knausgaard explains that he saw the project as “an experiment in realistic prose.”74 Indeed, it is a novel that strives deliberately towards the actual and

71 Karl Ove Knausgaard, interview by Jesse Barron, “Completely Without Dignity,” Paris Review (26 December 2013), http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/12/26/completely-without-dignity-an- interview-with-karl-ove-knausgaard/. 72Knausgaard, “Without Dignity.” Knausgaard repeats this observation in conversation with Medaya Ocher to whom he says: “remembering and creating is basically the same thing for me” (“Karl Ove Knausgaard, Himself,” LA Review of Books (15 June 2014), http://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/karl-ove-knausgaard.) 73 Jonathan Callahan, “Devoutly to Be Wished: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Consummation,” The Millions (10 June 2014), http://www.themillions.com/2013/06/devoutly-to-be-wished-karl-ove-knausgaards- consummation.html. 74 Knausgaard, “Completely Without Dignity”; Knausgaard, interview by Steven Gale, Sydney Writers’ Festival (2013) podcast video, http://www.swf.org.au/2013-videos/karl-ove-knausgaard-my-struggle.html.

235 constructing a verisimilitude of experience; in framing the work as a novel, he was able to

“use [him]self as a kind of raw material,” enacting “an existential search” of the self that had “to do with the form, not whether it’s fiction or non-fiction.”75 Indeed, the ‘struggle’ suggested in the title references, in part, the struggle to write, to create both artfully and truthfully. James Wood has positioned the novel as a kind of bildungsroman, as “one of those highly personal modern or postmodern works, narrated by a writer, usually having the form if not the veracity of memoir and thus plotted somewhat accidentally, concerned with the writing of a book that turns out to be the text we are reading,” rather than, as Lerner’s novels do, gesturing towards it, not only likening the project to Proust’s À la Recherche du

Temps Perdu, but to Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, works that have invariably become the “complex” image of “the struggle to write.”76 However, for Wood, the work is

“stranger than these strange books” because of Knausgaard’s “artistic commitment to inexhaustibility – a prosaic rather than a painterly one, which manifests itself as a kind of tiring tirelessness.”

So, while Lerner’s virtual prose writes metafictionally of its own creation, elevating the prosaic to work idiomatically within a purposefully artful lyric – interrogating the self as a writer and constructing the self through fraudulent construction – Knausgaard’s destroys the self, and the literary manifestation of the self, through writing. His almost compulsive detailing of this process is precisely what Lerner has come to address in his review of Vol.

3. Boyhood Island. He asks: “does My Struggle ultimately have an aesthetic form? Or is it just one thing after another?”77 Proposing that “it’s significant that My Struggle has six volumes while À la recherche du temps perdu has seven. Knausgaard doesn’t offer a strategy for

75 Knausgaard, interview by Gale, c.42 min. 76 James Wood, “Total Recall: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Strucgle,” The New Yorker (August 13 2012), http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/08/13/total-recall. 77 Ben Lerner, “Each Cornflake,” London Review of Books (May 2014), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/ben- lerner/each-cornflake.

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‘regaining’ time through the power of art; instead he attempts to achieve closure by sacrificing art itself.” Indeed, what occupies Lerner most is how such a work can achieve closure; how it can resolve the “problem of form rising from formlessness, of how to bring order to the undifferentiated mass of experience, and the relation of that problem, to death.” He proposes that in order to “take the problem of closure into one’s own hands,” the work can be read as, and indeed has been discussed as, “a fictional farewell to literature,” which leaves the author able to commit an “act of literary suicide.” Indeed,

Lerner’s reading of Knausgaard seems predicated upon a formal assessment of the text, interpreting his motivations as focussed around the novel as a literary genre. By figuring his project as “the chronicle of Knausgaard turning his back on the genre of the novel,” he claims that it is “intended to exhaust and extinguish all of Knausgaard’s literary ambitions”; or, in other words, it is intended to embrace the failures inherent in the creation of new literature (while, ironically, achieving precisely the same thing).

What Lerner concentrates on in his review, so Knausgaard contemplates in his first volume of My Struggle. A Death in the Family features several meditative sequences on his personal response to art, something he finds “immensely interesting.”78 Although this is predominantly centred on visual art, it is notable that Knausgaard also discusses his own writing practice and literature in a similar way. Comparing his own technique to Rimbaud’s, he comments that “everything has to submit to form” (Death in the Family 176). Indeed, comparing writing to literary suicide, he describes how “[s]trong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called ‘writing’.” He suggests, moreover, that “[w]riting is more about destroying than creating” – a process that, although divergent from Lerner’s, is in essence still virtual. As

78 Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: 1. A Death in the Family, trans. Don Bartlett (London: Vintage, 2013); Knausgaard; interview by Gale.

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Clune argues in Writing Against Time, Rimbaud’s “poems are animated by a desire that cannot be satisfied by artistic form”79; as Knausgaard argues in Death in the Family, for

Rimbaud, “everything was about freedom, in writing as in life, and it was because freedom was paramount that he could put writing behind him, or perhaps even had to put writing behind him, because it too became a curb on him that had to be destroyed. Freedom is like destruction plus movement” (176). It is this rejection of literary artistic form that delineates how Death in the Family also discusses experiencing visual artistic form:

I had studied the history of art and was used to describing and analysing art. But what I never wrote about, and this is all that matters, was the experience of it. Not just because I couldn’t, but also because the feelings the pictures evoked in me went against everything I had learned about what art was and what it was for. So I kept it to myself. I wandered around the Nationalgalleri in Stockholm or the Nasjonalgalleri in Oslo or the National Gallery in London and looked. There was a kind of freedom about this. (185) This is a tension that Knausgaard has sought to unravel in such a project: to describe the emotions evoked by looking at art and, as Rancière put it, “the sensible fabric of experience within which [art] is produced” and received.80 The freedom he describes Rimbaud to have possessed is precisely this same freedom of destroying the traditional structures around art historical analysis by prioritising how art makes us feel. At the Sydney Writer’s Festival in

2013, he explained that while art history and literary studies have “to do with the intellect” and “a lot of theory,” he wanted his project to specifically examine what these fields deem

“unimportant”: the “emotion that pictures or books can evoke in you.”81 What is commented on in traditional art historical and literary criticism is its actuality – of its form, its structure, its use in the real world – not the contours of the movements it makes towards the centre of true artistic meaning – for the writer, the reader, and the viewer. For

Knausgaard, “experiences with art or with books have to do with emotions,” and what

79 Clune, Writing Against Time, 33; Knausgaard, My Struggle 1, 176. 80 Rancière, Aisthesis, x. 81 Knausgaard, Interview by Gale.

238 really matters about writing is the way it avoids the economics of political use, but expresses a desire for art to create something more.

In Death in the Family, Knausgaard uses this freedom in a similar way to Lerner; it is, however, refracted through a more personal lens due perhaps to the autobiographical use of the pronoun ‘I’, rather than the distance expressed through the character of Adam. In other words, the ‘I’ or ‘me’ used across My Struggle is Knausgaard’s; there is no façade of the fictional voice, regardless of whether what is being narrated or described is indeed fictional. The first scene in which he discusses art is a meditation on Rembrandt’s self- portrait, “a painting that moves me as much every time I go and see it” (23). This introduction is followed first by a stylistic analysis:

His later paintings are usually characterized by an extreme coarseness of stroke, rendering everything subordinate to the expression of the moment, at once shining and sacred, and still unsurpassed in art, with the possible exception of Hölderlin’s later poems, however dissimilar and incomparable they may be – for where Hölderlin’s light, evoked through language, is ethereal and celestial, Rembrandt’s light, evoked through color, is earthy, metallic, and material – but this one painting which hangs in the National Gallery was painted in a slightly more classically realistic, lifelike style, more in the manner of the younger Rembrandt. (23) He also concludes this passage with a similar analytical and historical tone:

The difference between this painting and the others the late Rembrandt painted is the difference between seeing and being seen. That is, in this picture he sees himself seeing whilst also being seen, and no doubt it was only the Baroque period with its penchant for mirrors within mirrors, the play within the play, staged scenes and a belief in the interdependence of all things, when moreover craftsmanship attained heights witnessed neither before nor since, that such a painting was possible. But it exists in our age, it sees for us. (24) What differs, however, from a traditional analysis is the way that he describes his view of

Rembrandt’s face; indeed, it becomes a lyric meditation on the mirror, and the self, not unlike Ashbery’s or Lerner’s. As if it were almost alive, Knausgaard feels “as though someone else is looking at us, from somewhere inside the face, where everything is different. One can hardly be closer to another human soul” (23). It is this evocation of

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‘soul’ that moves him the most, because as it is “more than four hundred years old,” and because “Rembrandt died the same year it was painted… what Rembrandt painted, is this person’s very being.” Imagining the painter in situ thus creates an intimate attention to the experience of the viewer, who worries not about contextualising the work, but lets his mind wander over the act of standing in front of such a work: the being “that which he woke to every morning, that which immersed itself in thought, but which itself was not thought, that which immediately immersed itself in feelings, but which itself was not feeling, and that which he went to sleep to, in the end for good” (23-4).

This meditation on the effect of art is most pronounced in a scene in which

Knausgaard, in the middle of the night, takes “one of the art books from the shelf above the sofa… and sat flicking through it” (185). He describes this book, on Constable, as

“[m]ostly oil sketches, studies of clouds, countryside, sea,” over which “I didn’t need to do any more than let my eyes skim… before I was moved to tears. So great was the impression some of the pictures made on me.” For Knausgaard, these visual, actual,

‘impressions’ are something that has not yet been interrogated adequately in the virtuality of literature: he asks “why should those feeling be important, and in what way? It makes you feel sad, it makes you cry, it makes you laugh, but what’s the importance of that?”82

The opposition between the works that evoke intense experiences, and those that “by contrast, left me cold” is what occupies him as he peruses Constable’s reproduced image:

That was my only parameter with art, the feelings it aroused. The feeling of inexhaustibility. The feeling of beauty. The feeling of presence. All compressed into such acute moments that sometimes they could be difficult to endure. And quite inexplicable… It was a fantastic picture, it filled me with all the feelings that fantastic pictures do, but when I had to explain why, what constituted the ‘fantastic’, I was at a loss to do so. The picture made my insides tremble, but for what? The picture filled me with longing, but for what? (185-6)

82 Knausgaard, interview by Gale.

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At first, he seems to attempt to answer it by analysing the style of the work:

For if I studied the picture that made the greatest impression, an oil sketch of a cloud formation from 6 September 1822, there was nothing in it that could explain the strength of my feelings. At the top a patch of blue sky. Beneath, whitish mist. Then the rolling clouds. White where the sunlight struck them, pale green in the least shadowy parts, deep green and almost black where they were at their densest and the sun was furthest away. Blue, white, turquoise, greenish-black. That was all. (185) Yet, the point of this passage is the conclusion that this ‘study’ cannot explain or approximate the experiencing of the work: “reasoning vanished in the surge of energy and beauty that arose in me” (186). Regardless of the attention he placed on ekphrasis, the work’s essence still eludes him: as he “kept flicking back to the picture of the greenish clouds,” it “was as if two different forms of reflection rose and fell in my consciousness, one with its thoughts and reasoning, the other with its feelings and impressions, which, even though they were juxtaposed, excluded each other’s insights.” Instead, the work called to him, and suggested something more: “Yes, yes, yes, I heard. That’s where it is. That’s where I have to go”: But what was it I had said yes to? Where was it I had to go?”

Although not translated into English until after the publication of Leaving the Atocha

Station, My Struggle’s emphasis on developing this almost anti-ekphrastic mode reflects a trend in postmillennial writers who are well versed in different forms of artistic expression.

Equally, Ashbery represents a similar pull toward artistic expression as form, the use of

“your dreams, your average thoughts, things you overhear people saying in the street – anything that comes into your mind – as raw material for poetry.”83 Lerner’s novel operates in this same way – concerned with the intersection of different aesthetic forms, and gesturing to a broader cultural conversation about the aims and failures of literary production. The approach of all three converges in the motif of the mirror: their writing

83 Ashbery, interview by Poulin, 249.

241 does not simply present an image of aesthetic subjects to the reader, but mediates the process of aesthetic experience. In doing so, they invariably draw attention to the failure of such experience to match the possibilities its virtual image can conjure, through a prose that self-consciously emphasises its own limitations and failures of expression.

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Conclusion: Towards an Aesthetics of Failure

To let the orange orange and the flower flower… We take the side of things and try to evoke their nocturnal, mineral quality. This is for us the essence of poetry, as it is expressed in Francis Ponge, Wallace Stevens, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, and some of the personae of Pessoa… of trying, and failing, to speak about the thing itself and not just ideas about the thing. Of saying “Jug. Bridge. Cigarette. Oyster. Fruitbat. Windowsill. Sponge.”

Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy, “The New York Declaration”.

If, as McCarthy and philosopher Simon Critchley say, “the essence of poetry” is “of trying, and failing, to speak about the thing itself and not just ideas about the thing,” then what are the implications for prose that attempts the same thing? For Angela Leighton, “[t]he beauty of form is that it nicely confuses body and soul, being both the object and the outline, the thing and its formal impression in the mind.”84 Failing to speak adequately is a peculiarly literary concern, devoid of visual apparatuses to gesture toward the actual. The term

“[n]othing,” then, for Leighton, “seems to carry a special resonance when understanding what poetry is for,” but is also similarly implicative of the resistance to effusiveness the

Simon Critchely and Tom McCarthy, “The New York Declaration: Joint Statement on Inauthenticity”, International Necronautical Society (2007). 84 Leighton, On Form, 33.

243 novels of Cole and Lerner cultivate. The word is “like ‘form’” in the way in which it

“already toys with its own content, enjoying the hologram effect of being a thing and an absence, a sound and an emptiness, there and not there.” But if “[h]aving ‘nothing to say’ is a way of allowing the shape or sound of writing to be heard, rather than its substance understood,” what happens when nothing is said because it cannot be said, because it refuses to be said? However, to remember that contemporary literary form is, by definition, in process, being formed, is instructive on how to read it in such a way as to emphasise, appropriating McCarthy and Critchley’s phrase, its ‘nocturnal, mineral quality.’ Most of the writers discussed in this thesis, particularly Cole and Lerner, are young and energetically intellectual, expressly aiming for concerted and critical interrogations of the act of writing.

Their practice emphasises both writing strategies and the writing of strategies. The idea of form is itself constantly in progress as an organic aesthetic structure, “not as a systematically produced artifice, but as an experience to which the writer contributes imaginatively and with which the reader interacts interpretatively.”85 To consider form as the defining structure of literary language is to place emphasis on the way that it shapes how writing performs in its communicative function and reading approaches understanding it. But what might be expected from a novel that reflects on its own inarticulability, or, more pressingly, that constructs failure as its aesthetic subject? Such a constellation of concerns propose a particularly postmillennial model of fiction – writing against postmodernist contraption – that engages with its own struggle while redefining the parameters for its reconciliation within the poetics of experience.

But how do current writers collapse vocative reticence with reservations about the novel form and with failure as an aesthetic aim? The novel’s appellative function, or

McCarthy’s ‘speaking to the thing,’ has become aesthetically contentious; where for Cole,

85 James, Modernist Futures, 15.

244 these gaps in language are provoked by ethical considerations, for Lerner, the subjunctive mode and mistranslations are sympathetic to his poetic tonality. An aesthetics of failure creates art from faults in communication, where hiccups, stammers, refusals to listen or speak, become a matter of form, not just part of the dialogic structure of narrative speech.

Indeed, the obfuscation of language and of communicating becomes part, not a refusal, of the lyric idiom. How the negative becomes the preferred mode of expression for Cole and

Lerner is indicative of the alternative way in which the art of fiction is being considered, not only negative in the sense of working against the novel as a self-perfecting circular aesthetic object or as an ironic timepiece of humanity’s failures, but in the photographic negative sense: realisable. If it intersects presence and absence, the imaginary and the actual, the fictional and the real, the written and the visual, what is visible and what is not, between writing and art, the reading of Cole and Lerner that this thesis has presented is suggestive of a way forward that prioritises the underside of aesthetic understanding. As McCarthy proposes, “the best model for thinking about [literature] is radio transmission. Think of literature as a set of billowing transmissions picked up and warped and mutated into something else.”86 It is this consideration of form that asserts its participatory impetus; a vocative literature that transmits but encodes what it says; “coded transmissions” that come from a “hidden fold or enclave… itself remain[ing] out of earshot.”87

It is tempting to think that literature that adheres to McCarthy’s model is also one that is, often frustratingly, oblique. For Matthew Hart and Aaron Jaffe, McCarthy’s fiction is preoccupied with the “sense that language and literature resist the very communicative function by which they are nevertheless defined,” or, as McCarthy and Critchley wrote in

“The Tate Declaration: Joint Statement on Inauthenticity” in 2009, “the way that the

86 McCarthy, interview by Hart and Jaffe, 672. 87 McCarthy and Simon Critchley, cited by Hart and Jaffe, interview with McCarthy, 659.

245 modern has always, and very selfconsciously, been devoted to failure.”88 On the one hand,

Hart and Jaffe argue, “is the idea of literature as a radio network, a technology that helps us listen ‘to a set of signals that have been repeating, pulsing, modulating in the airspace of the novel, poem, play – in their lines, between them and around them – since each of these forms began.’”89 And on the other, “there is literature as crypt, an occult zone within which… inadmissible or unsayable losses are encoded and preserved.” To McCarthy, the vocative ability of literature is buried alongside the tragedies it seeks to simultaneously

‘preserve’ and speak to by, paradoxically, refusing to speak to. “Transmission and entombment. Broadcast and burial,” Hart and Jaffe muse, “[t]hese seeming antinomies come together because, for McCarthy, the crypt is not so much a space of silence as it is the deathly ‘nonplace’ in which meaning is mutilated,” encrypted beyond recognition. Such a constellation of ideas recalls Leighton’s proposal for thinking about form as “what remains when all the various somethings – matter, content, message – have been got out of the way. Form, perhaps, is the sense of nothing.”90 It is this negative consideration – as one that attends to what lies underneath – that “happily” refuses to negotiate literature in the terms dictated by the mainstream current of literature that asserts itself as a fully functioning communicative tool. Alternatively, “his writings combine big ideas with a

Beckettian sense… that, in the end, artistic meaning amounts to very little, almost nothing.”91

Such a gap between expression and understanding is part of the linguistic agenda of these novels’ in creating an aesthetics of failure – but it also constitutes a virtual gap: between an experience of art, the novelistic description of the aesthetic experience, and its

88 Ibid., 658. 89 Hart and Jaffe, interview with McCarthy, 658. 90 Leighton, On Form, 263. 91 Hart and Jaffe, interview with McCarthy, 657.

246 comprehension in the same terms as aesthetic. This is what Peter de Bolla calls “‘mutism,’ the sense of running out of words or not knowing how or where to begin speaking in the face of the artwork, to be the most common initial response to works of art.”92 Indeed, as he elaborates, “[a]lmost as common is the sense that any attempt at verbalizing a response to an artwork diminishes the experience or even destroys it.” For this, he gives two reasons. On the one hand, “this ‘mutism’ is sometimes given within the technical literature on aesthetics: since, it is claimed, affective experiences do not lie within the realm of the cognitive, there is nothing, as it were, to communicate,” and as such, “the very definition of art is tied to this inarticulacy.” But, on the other hand:

What if this ‘mutism’ were merely the result of a fault in our language – the lack of a lexicon for dealing with such experiences – and not a constitutive aspect of art as a category? Although the observation that we have very few words, hardly any at all, for talking about affective experiences certainly seems accurate, it does not follow that such a lexicon is beyond invention.

Indeed, as Rancière argues in the prelude to Aisthesis, far from universal or static, the concepts of beauty and art themselves “depend upon a transformation of the forms of sensible experience, of ways of perceiving and being affected. They formulate a mode of intelligibility out of these reconfigurations of experience.”93 The effect of such aisthesis is therefore contingent on a sense of continual reconfiguration, forestalling conclusion or completion – a quality Rancière attributes to his own work. While he admits that, “if so inclined,” a reader could consider the series of episodes that make up Aisthesis “as a counter-history of ‘artistic modernity,’” he considers his work to be “both finished and incomplete,” where it “is open to future development, but also allows for the construction of different narratives.94 Thus, while Leaving the Atocha Station and Open City both present counter-images of the conventional novel, they do so in such a way as to emphasise their

92 De Bolla, Art Matters, 4. 93 Rancière, Aisthesis, ix. 94 Ibid., xiii.

247 own gaps and failings, particularly through an incipient mediation of the aesthetic experiences in and through literary language. But, although de Bolla claims that “it should not be taken as self-evident that the attempt to construct a more supple and subtle lexicon will inevitably fail,” literary aesthetic experience and aisthetic prose aestheticise failure, even if such attempts do not eventuate in actual failure.95

But what does such aesthetics of failure mean here, in regards to literary experience?96 Indeed, why failure? Why do these authors write against failure, rather than, say, the limitations of literary realism instead? I argue that regarding failure as a negative aesthetic is to create an understanding of it both in terms of the Latin sense to deny or refuse, as well as reflecting a cultural unease with states of weakness. Sianne Ngai calls such negatively affective states “ugly feelings,” the emotions that are interrogative of “art’s social inefficaciousness in a market society.”97 Yet strangely, or perhaps not so strangely given the forward-looking nature of the novels of both Cole and Lerner, as well as other writers mentioned in this study, this is approach to the image of literary form is reflected in Fredric

Jameson’s discussion of utopian and science fiction. For Jameson, “what is indeed authentic about [science fiction], as a mode of narrative and a form of knowledge, is not at all its capacity to keep the future alive, even in imagination.”98 Instead, he argues:

[I]ts deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future, to body forth, through apparently full

95 De Bolla, Art Matters, 4-5. 96 Failure as a tenable strategic or aesthetic method of creation is increasingly becoming a matter for study. Indeed, the current Core Project of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin focuses upon this kind of discursive failure in many different disciplines. Entitled Errans, it draws upon the Latin ‘errare,’ ‘to go astray,’ and “[r]ecognizing that a critique of ideals of productivity, success, goal-orientation, and determination is necessarily paradoxical,” it “take[s] the shifting meanings of ‘erring’ – connoting the violation of norms as well as the activity of wandering – as a starting point to explore the critical potentials and risks of embracing error, randomness, failure, and non-teleological temporalities” (“Core Project ERRANS,” ICI, https://www.ici-berlin.org/errans/). 97 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 36. 98 Fredric Jameson, Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 288.

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representations which prove on closer inspection for be structurally and constitutively impoverished, the atrophy in our time of Marcuse has called the utopian imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical difference; to succeed by failure, and to serve as unwitting and even unwilling vehicles for a meditation, which, setting forth for the unknown, finds itself irrevocably mired in the all-too- familiar, and thereby becomes unexpectedly transformed into a contemplation of our own absolute limits.99

The “inevitable failure of the imagination” to come up with real effects is thus “not so disastrous aesthetically as one might expect”.100 In fact, for these writers, it allows a self- reflexive approach to the tensions between trying to speak to writing ‘now’ (in its multi- various forms and images) and the limitations of expressing it in and through literary language. Failure as a negative aesthetic also implies a certain artistic negativity toward mainstream capitalist objectives. As implicative in broader society’s desire for economic success and art’s search for aesthetic supremacy, the individual’s act of aiming for presupposes a goal of achievement, a state necessarily contrapuntal to failure. But what happens when such an aesthetic is, for writers, an enthusiastic aim? For McCarthy, this is precisely “what differentiates the artistic field from the political field… in the political field projects have to succeed. They have to be watertight (discourses, ideologies); they don’t really tolerate ambiguity, paradox and self-contradiction very well, whereas that’s the very stuff of art and poetry.”101 For Ngai, “[i]t is these multiple levels of negativity that make the ugly feelings in this study so useful for conjoining predicaments from multiple registers – showing how sociohistorical and ideological dilemmas, in particular, produce formal or representational ones.”102 Indeed, if “ugly feelings… can be described as dysphoric or experientially negative, in the sense that they evoke pain or displeasure,” they are also those that can “be described as ‘semantically’ negative, in the sense that they are saturated with

99 Ibid., 288-9. 100 Ibid., 256. 101 Tom McCarthy, interview by Cameron Bain, “10,000 Floricides,” Log (18 May 2014), http://physicsroom.org.nz/archive/log/archive/14/mccarthy/. 102 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 12.

249 socially stigmatizing meanings and values… and as ‘syntactically’ negative, in the sense that they are organized by trajectories of repulsion rather than attraction, by phobic strivings

‘away from’ rather than philic strivings ‘toward.’”103 While considering failure as a negative aesthetic engages with its uncomfortability within the cultural vernacular of a market society, it is also “informed by… the global affect of ‘against’.” Ngai reminds us that “the negativity at stake is algorithmic or operational, rather than value- or meaning-based, involving processes of aversion, exclusion, and of course negation”; they are “explicitly agonistic emotions.”

What this negative view of artistic production culminates in is a series of professions by many writers of the failure of a certain kind of literary realism that has become the dominant mode of prosaic expression in the last twenty years. Smith laments the tendency toward a highly wrought lyrical realism, Cole rejects the dependence literature has on categorisation, Lerner proposes that the literary leave the actual to visual art and reclaim the imaginary, and McCarthy is “dishearten[ed]” to hear “[t]ime and again… about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on.”104 Curiously, most then discard fiction as a mode of realism, preferring the aesthetic techniques of other genres: usually visual art, poetry, or essay. Knausgaard trenchantly writes in Man in Love, part two of My Struggle, of the lack of value in “[f]ictional writing” and “documentary narrative,” because of the expectations they have to reflect the world: “nowadays it was through fiction we saw it.”105 Instead, he argues:

The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another

103 Ibid., 11. 104 McCarthy, “Writing Machines.” 105 Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: 2. Man in Love, trans. Don Bartlett (London: Vintage, 2013), 497.

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person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.

Indeed, the way in which writers think about visual art directly influences the way in which they consider writing: while Lerner considers viewing art to be a collective experience – as

Ben notes in 10:04, “in the galleries… our gazes were parallel, directed in front of us at a canvas and not at each other, a condition of our most intimate exchanges,” and in doing so, “we coconstructed the literal view before us” (8) – Cole is concerned with “what’s happening when a person is looking at something – not necessarily an art object, but some sort of object that is somehow removed in time.”106 As such, approaches to writing are expanded when considered alongside conceptualisations of other artforms: as Michael

Ondaatje notes, with an “interest… in forms of art which have a different structure” and with an attention to “witnessing… different genre[s].”107

In light of writing ‘against’ such artfulness, however, Ngai’s negativity “privilege[es] the aesthetic domain as the ideal site to examine the politically ambiguous work of negative emotions.”108 Indeed, because “the situation of restricted agency from which all of them ensue is one that describes art’s own position in a highly differentiated and totally commodified society,” it may seem that literature is “the ideal space to investigate ugly feelings that obviously ramify beyond the domain of the aesthetic proper.”109 How might literature, or more specifically the novel, be ‘ideal’ in interrogating negative aesthetics such as failure? Might it be that “the novel is the art form of ambivalence” as Daniel Kehlmann

106 Cole, interview by Tepper. 107 Michael Ondaatje, interview by Maya Jaggi, “Michael Ondaatje with Maya Jaggi,” Writing Across Worlds, ed. Susheila Nasta (Routledge: London and New York, 2004), 263. 108 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 6. 109 Ibid., 2.

251 notes?110 In this thesis, I have focussed on postmillennial novels in which alternative states of experience and living that are socially maligned outside of such specific artistic conditions are evoked with equivocal attention, where Cole’s Julius may be accused of rape and Lerner’s Adam might engage fraudulently in every relationship he has. But is not failure also a formal preoccupation of the literary arts? Understanding form James does as

“participatory” and “performative,” and as Isobel Armstrong describes of art, not as

“achieved form” but as “an experience distributed across makers and perceivers,” questions the generally assumed notion that form is somehow complete, and therefore, affirmative.111 To understand it instead as an organic structure of experience that necessitates a degree of failure, in communication or organisation, is to suggest that it should, or rather will, be remade. By suggesting that such postmillennial works engage formally with failure, I by no means imply that they also function as linguistic cryptograms or work within a similar syntactically complex register to Beckett’s writings or Ghérasim Luca’s stuttering poem “Passionément” – “pas pas paspaspas pas/ pasppas ppas pas paspas/ le pas le faux pas le pas” – but rather that they valorise a kind of writing that reinvests in a conceptualisation of form that continually negates itself, through creating against itself.112

“This is it,” McCarthy proclaims, “in a nutshell: how writing works.”113 It is “[t]he scattering, the loss; the charge coming from somewhere else, some point forever beyond reach or even designation, across a space of longing; the surge; coherence that’s only made possible by incoherence; the receiving which is replay, repetition – backwards, forwards, inside-out or upside-down, it doesn’t matter.”

110 Daniel Kehlmann, interview by Marc-Christoph Wagner, “I Could Have Been Someone Else,” Louisiana Channel (2014), http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/daniel-kehlmann-i-could-have-been-someone-else. 111 James, Modernist Futures, 15; Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 165. 112 Ghérasim Luca, Le Chant de la Carpe (Paris: Le Soleil Noir, 1973), 92. 113 McCarthy, Transmission and the Individual Remix.

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Indeed, the way in which both Cole and Lerner think about writing as a process instructs the way that they consider failure aesthetically. In a series entitled Eight Letters to a

Young Writer, initially published serially in 2008-2009 for NEXT newspaper in Nigeria, Cole writes that “even for good writers, writing is mostly failure: it is rare for a writer to reach the mark she has set herself.”114 But “the question is whether this failure is productive or not,” not whether the writer fails at all. “Remember Beckett,” he cautions, “‘Ever failed.

No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.’” But although Cole specifies that this failure must be “of a kind that might even be better than certain forms of success”, an opposition to success does not predetermine the aesthetics of failure that his novel is engaged in creating.115 Instead, it emphasises the faults and limitations of the process by which aesthetics can be mediated through literary language. For Lerner, however, “the biggest embarrassment” about writing “prose is the dialogue.”116 Dialogue, the means by which characters communicate to one another in a form like the novel, is “the biggest investment in realism,” for which reason “it fails the most spectacularly.” But because it is “not how language is processed,” it eventually only “ends up being very conventional theater,” aware of its own artificiality. It is with this in mind that “[h]umor” becomes “a structure of acknowledgement of [such] failed realism of the novel. In a way, that is mimetic of how all kinds of staged dialogues fail in real life.” So what, therefore, can remedy such a failure of novelistic convention but a reinvestment in a lyric idiom? For Lerner, it is precisely this reinvestment in the translatability of language that aims to overcome such a structure of failure. Indeed, he approaches writing prose with the same awareness of failure that he remarks of poetry, “the challenge for the poems is making the failures of expression

114 Teju Cole, Eight Letters to a Young Writer (2010), PDF ebook, 11. 115 Ibid., 14. 116 Lerner, interview by Reines.

253 expressive” – Adam thus anxiously ruminates on his dialogic mistranslations in Spanish and Ben’s thinks predominantly in the subjunctive.117

Because the experiential remaking of form, as Ngai remarks of Beckett, “relies on a process of material build-up, where words are slowly added rather than subtracted,” the way in which writers construct failure as an aesthetic evokes negativity in its creation.118 But this is not to suggest that they are effusive novels, nor are they novels that are so stripped back they resemble Leighton’s form of ‘nothing.’ What eventuates instead is “a proliferation of precise inexactitudes,” whereby the emphasis is on the process, on the mapmaking.119 This thesis has considered the novel as a form that can gesture toward the kind of form it wants to be; Open City and Leaving the Atocha Station both suggest the image of the novel toward which they aspire. In essence, they perform like maps to a future form that combines novelistic description with poetry and essay, and incorporates actual images within literature. This fiction is not fussed with being what it says it is on the box, which, contributes to the production of an aesthetic of failure; the writers’ published ideas of their novels are changing constantly – their interviews produce a constant proliferation of ideas about the novels that change from interview to interview – and the novels themselves act as blueprints, gesturing toward a larger cultural and formal picture while pointing directly to their construction. Rather, what the writers say about their novels, and what the novels say themselves, is inexact. Inexact but indelibly ‘precise.’ Both Julius and Adam think in maps; the former of historical routes of people and spaces, multiple layers simultaneously, the latter of a multitude of alternative possibilities of meaning in what others say, different linguistic routes to take, which he himself chooses. But what is the use of map if it doesn’t lead to somewhere? If against features so integrally within an aesthetic that prioritises failure,

117 Lerner, interview by Walker. 118 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 256. 119 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 255.

254 how do writers carefully and reflexively work towards a new fictional configuration of thinking about form? A map necessarily leads to somewhere; as Adam says in Leaving the

Atocha Station, “perhaps literature’s role was to help us keep our perspective, to take the long view, to allow us to link our ‘now’ to various past and ‘nows’ in order to form an illuminating constellation” (175). I argue that this ‘illuminating constellation’ constitutes a form of authenticity of the literary.

This fiction aims to glimpse something resembling authenticity, where ‘the orange is orange, and the flower flowers.’ For Lydia Davis, this is to create an aesthetic of experience in such a way as “to confront an object, an experience, directly and immediately, often accepting [the] first impression… and allowing that to remain the explanation or statement about the thing, rather than labeling that impression, explaining it away, rejecting it.”120 This impression “has a certain validity,” in and of itself, “even if it isn’t ‘true.’” Indeed, her attraction to an experiential way of writing also describes the way in which she translates, particularly Proust:

I read the text a little at a time and translate that little bit very directly, as I read it, sometimes almost simultaneously. I do not pull back and consider the whole work, interpret the whole, “contextualize” it (I don’t like jargon, but that word is useful), form a prior opinion of “how” it should be translated, and certainly I don’t recast or rearrange the sentence more than necessary.

It is here that she locates a critical distinction between fictional prose and poetry, where

“this method of translating” would “work… well for many works of fiction” but “wouldn’t with most poetry”; where poetry “needs a lot of reinvention in translation” and its economy of language requires more attention, what is important in prose is achieving the texture of experience. If, as Davis understands, writing is a form of translation, then reading is equally so. Indeed, as Leighton’s form does, the map dramatises not only the role

120 Lydia Davis, interview by Dan Gunn, The Quarterly Conversation (10 March 2014), http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-lydia-davis-interview

255 of the writer, but of the reader; by implicating the reader in the creation of the fiction, by splitting the agency, gestures toward an aesthetics of reading.

Translation is thus an important aesthetic strategy in contemporary writing, both as a method of writing experience and a method through which meaning is transferred. But within a novelistic aesthetics of failure, the emphasis of translation changes; it is no longer constructed with a sense of completion, but rather with an attention to what Barbara

Cassin, the editor of Dictionary of Untranslatables, defines as untranslatable. While she uses this term to denote the transaction between different languages, I contend that such a term can elicit a productive view on the way in which certain writers are finding difficulties with literary expression within their own language. For Cole, this concerns tragic experience, for

Lerner, experiential meaning, and for both, the conditions of aesthetic experience. In order to express such states successfully – although determining success is itself problematic – is dependent upon a certain linguistic stridency. But, for these writers, attempting to delicately express such experiences exposes them as sites for not only failures of language, but of the novel form as a place to translate them. Is this because they are all, in some way, ineffable, or untranslatable? While Cassin writes,“[t]o speak of untranslatables in no way implies that the terms in question, or the expressions, the syntactical or grammatical turns, are not and cannot be translated: the untranslatable is rather what one keeps on (not) translating,” it does imply that the way in which such a word, condition, or experience, is understood is constantly in process, constantly developing, constantly reflecting back at itself and seeing an altered image.121 As she notes, “[w]e are confronted with the irreducibility of certain inventions and acts of forgetting: appearances without any equivalent, intruders, doublings, empty categories, false friends, contradictions, which register within a language the

121 Barbara Cassin, “Introduction,” trans. Michael Wood, Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, NJ: PUP, 2014), xvii.

256 crystallization of themes and the specificity of an operation.” But the term untranslatable has its inherent problems. Indeed, while interviewing Cassin, Rebecca Walkowitz questions the tendency to consider translation in ethical terms, as “the untranslatable sometimes makes one think of irreducible singularity, the idea that a word cannot be translated or really should not be translated, because to translate it is to violate it in some way or to violate the culture from which it comes.”122 The term denotes “two meanings of ‘can’t be translated’: mustn’t be translated, or… is difficult to,” or even that it “will never be perfect, as if there could be a perfect translation,” in that “you can’t get to it.” Walkowitz stresses that it is this uncertainty of meaning evokes the crucial question of translation as one of process, incompletion, and failure: “how do you translate in a way that registers the incomplete nature of the process of the translation?”

Translating the untranslatable – whether a foreign word, or an experience into artistic form – thus constitutes “a kind of slowing down of language,” where writers are required to be careful, deliberate, and attentive to language as a tool that is both communicative and aesthetic. This gestures to a kind of conceptual turn in the contemporary novel towards a language for engaging with the idea of authentic experience, and indeed, points beyond this thesis to a wider consideration of the culture of anxiety about the direction of art in an era of hypercommodification. This is therefore not new or unusually peculiar to Lerner and Cole; this thesis might have equally included recent novels by Aleksandar Hemon, Michel Houellebeq, or Enrique Vila-Matas, all of which engage with the art world through distinctly aesthetic interrogations, or McCarthy’s Remainder and the International Necronautical Society, as exhibiting an overt and anxious search for the authentic experience, or even prioritise Smith’s novels On Beauty (2005) and NW (2012) as

122 Rebecca Walkowitz, interview by Barbara Cassin, “Translating the Untranslatable,” Public Books (15 June 2014), http://www.publicbooks.org/interviews/translating-the-untranslatable-an-interview-with-barbara- cassin.

257 literary manifestations of the same worry expressed in “Two Directions for the Novel.”

But Cole and Lerner’s novels prove instructive in the way in which they seek to illuminate how a reinvestment in literature as an authentic form of expression and attempt to offer multidisciplinary strategies to achieve a new intensity of language. They offer a “healthy suspicion of neat distinctions between a pre-this and a post-that” (Leaving the Atocha Station,

175) and seldom offer language as a consolatory tool; they instead follow what poet Joseph

Brodsky notes, that “[w]hat ‘hurts’ you into poetry or literature is language, your sense of language.”123 They seek to speak to the ineffable experiences of reading, writing, viewing art, and listening to music, and crucially, the experience of global terror without falling into effusiveness. Instead, they favour poetic economy, and aestheticise a certain not quite-ness, in-progress, and untranslatability of prosaic language. Indeed, if for Brodsky, translation constitutes the writer’s attempt not only “to preserve the sheen, the paleness of the leaves,” but also to “accept how some of them look ugly,” writing experiential prose accepts these same limits of the transformative function of literature. But how does writing about art in this way interrogate the culture of ‘real’ experience in twenty-first century society? Does it enact, like Matthew Hart argues of synthetic vernacular poetry, an “authentic text of an inauthentic world”?124 While translating aesthetic experience into a prosaic novel form proposes a new language with which the novel can, or cannot, identify, describe, and transform such experience, it also reflects the unsatisfactory image that writers consider current literary convention generates. Perhaps it is this priorisation of an aesthetics of failure that can also offer an insurrectionary critical model for reading the experiential sites between the novel and poetry, art and writing.

123 Brodsky, interview by Birkerts. 124 Matthew Hart, Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Translationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (Oxford: OUP, 2010), 7.

258

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