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Master's Degree Programme Master’s Degree Programme in European, American, and Postcolonial Languages and Literature “Second Cycle (D.M. 270/2004)” Final Thesis ‘A Place for the Genuine’: Ben Lerner’s Poetics of Liminality Supervisor Prof. Pia Masiero Assistant Supervisor Prof. Daniela Ciani Candidate Damiano Schina Matriculation Number 862733 Academic Year 2017/2018 Table of contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………3 1. From Postmodernism to Post-Fiction………………………………………………………..6 2. Between Mirrors…………………………………………………………………………...16 2.1 The echo of poetic possibility……………………………………………………..17 2.2 Life’s white machine……………………………………………………………...28 2.3 Making Things Happen…………………………………………………………...36 2.4 (Born) Between Mirrors…………………………………………………...……...49 3. Different Futures…………………………………………………………………………...60 3.1 Interested in the Octopuses……………………………………………………….61 3.2 Every atom belonging to me as goods belongs to you…………………….……….71 3.3 How ‘Auto’ is Autofiction?……………………………………………………….83 3.4 A novel of the Anthropocene……………………………………………………...98 Final Considerations………………………………………………………………………...109 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………111 2 Introduction In this dissertation, I want to show why I consider American author Ben Lerner one of the most interesting writers of his generation. Lerner began writing fiction after having published three collections of poems, The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), Angle of Yaw (2006) and Mean Free Path (2010). As we will see, poetry plays a vital role in his two novels both thematically and linguistically, granting him what we may call a double sensitivity that gives his prose a wonderful timber. Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, came out in 2011 and gained a certain attention both by the public and by critics. However, it is 10:04, his second novel, that contributed to make Lerner an important name in contemporary American literature, due also to the excellent reviews that the book garnered. What drew me to Lerner’s writing in the first place was the generic hybridity of his books in which one can find poetry, criticism, photographs but also much more mundane elements, such as anecdotes and apparently uninteresting events taken from real life. This hybridity is also reflected in the fact that Lerner’s books are difficult to categorize. They are between fiction and non-fiction, always rooted in an uncanny development of autobiographical elements easily discernible in Lerner’s narrators. Moreover, pieces of writing previously published elsewhere by Lerner are inserted into the novels and their authorship is ascribed to Lerner’s fictional counterparts. Furthermore, these books are between prose and poetry: both books feature a poet as the narrator and main character, who is presented as writing poems which have been written and published elsewhere by Lerner himself. Ultimately, these books are also between tenses. They are both retrospective accounts of a period in the life of a person, but, as we read them, we feel that we are experiencing the events in the present tense. Lerner’s fiction portrays a situation of liminality that does not quite resolve itself, a situation of in- betweenness that both Lerner and his alter egos accept. This acceptance led to the production of these novels that are the object of my study. 3 This is the perspective I will use in reading Lerner’s novels. In the first chapter, I will position Ben Lerner’s work in the tradition that preceded him in the panorama of American literature after World War II, talking about the tendencies that characterized U.S. fiction starting from High Postmodernism onwards. I will begin by providing an excursus of contemporary American fiction, describing the different literary characterizations that critics, after Postmodernism, have applied to a specific generation of writers. I will use Post- Postmodernism and New Sincerity to describe the first wave of writers born in the sixties who have been considered part of the “Theory Generation” and I will use the term Post-fiction to define the younger writers of the second wave of this Theory Generation to which, I argue, Lerner belongs. In the second chapter, I will deal with Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station. The novel is set in Madrid, where the narrator and main character Adam Gordon is spending a year abroad thanks to a fellowship he won for his poetry. The book is concerned with Adam’s preoccupations about aesthetics and with tensions regarding poetry derived from the work of critic Allen Grossman, particularly the preoccupation with “the echo of poetic possibility.” This is explored through the engagement with an important American poet of the 20th century, John Ashbery. Another theme of the book is the relationship between poetry and politics and what role poetry plays in the real world. Ultimately, this chapter will focus on Adam’s attempt and consequent failure to apply aesthetic ideals to the relationships he has with other people. This leads him to experience situations of displacement that influence his behavior throughout the novel. Adam’s position of displacement will be analyzed as the epitome of the situation of American artists after the terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001. In the third chapter, I will analyze Lerner’s other novel, 10:04. In this book, Lerner returns to some of the themes and the techniques already introduced in Leaving the Atocha Station, but he both expands them and moves away from them. 10:04 is told by an unnamed 4 narrator who became famous for having written a novel that strikingly resembles Leaving the Atocha Station, who got a six-figure deal for a second novel – the one we are reading – and, to complicate things further, who has written a story named “The Golden Vanity,” published in The New Yorker, a story whose authorship outside the world of the novel is attributed to Lerner. In the first book the experiences of other characters were filtered through the mind of the first- person narrator; here, even though we still have a first-person narration, readers can feel that there is an openness to other people. There is a movement, as the narrator of 10:04 clearly explains at the beginning, “from irony to sincerity,” which is performed from Leaving the Atocha Station to 10:04 that shows a desire to connect with other people. This yearning for communion is explicated in the use of the pervasive metaphor of the octopus and in the discussions about the American poet Walt Whitman, thanks to whom this openness to the other can happen. The use of the techniques of autofiction to blur even more the line between facts and fiction contributes in confusing the distinction between author and narrator, making the latter more humane. For these and many other reasons, I will ultimately demonstrate why 10:04 can be considered a deeply contemporary novel and an example of Anthropocene fiction. The goal of my thesis is to show how Lerner’s novels depict what it means to be an artist at the turn of the millennium. In fact, I argue that Lerner creates a 21st-century version of “a portrait of the artist as a young man,” to paraphrase Joyce’s famous novel, which makes him not only a “promise” of American letters but an already remarkable example of where contemporary literature is going. 5 1. From Postmodernism to Post-Fiction During the 20th century, Anglophone literature and American literature, in particular, have been characterized by different literary trends and currents that can be more or less identified and categorized. After World War II, the panorama of American letters witnessed the rise of what has been later called “High Postmodernism,” of which writers such as John Barth, Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon can be considered as being among the main representatives. According to critic Brian McHale, the transition from Modernism to Postmodernism can be identified in a shift of dominance. Roman Jakobson defines a dominant as “the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components” (82). Thus, McHale argues that postmodernist texts embody a shift from an epistemological dominant to an ontological one. If Modernists asked themselves what did they know and how could they interpret the world they lived in, Postmodernists, on the other hand, asked themselves a completely different question, namely, “Which world is this? What is there to be done in it?” (McHale 10), shifting the dominant from a matter of knowing to a matter of questioning if the world in which they lived was “real.” It must be remembered that this reflects the deconstructive/poststructuralist mood of the period, inaugurated in the United States by the famous lecture “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” presented by French philosopher Jacques Derrida at Johns Hopkins University in 1966. After Postmodernism, a new generation of writers born around the sixties emerged. Critics are still debating about what to call what comes after Postmodernism, but Post- Postmodernism seems to be the most common term. Among these writers one can mention David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon. They emerged as a group of writers that, at the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st, took stock of the ideas that Postmodernist writers advanced and developed a new kind of literature that strived for sincerity, as David Foster Wallace writes in his essay “E Unibus 6 Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” This led critics to identify these writers also as representative of a literary movement that has been called “New Sincerity.” In his essay, Wallace wrote that, in an era in which the average American watches television for about six hours per day, The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles.
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