COPYRIGHT AND USE OF THIS THESIS This thesis must be used in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. Reproduction of material protected by copyright may be an infringement of copyright and copyright owners may be entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. Section 51 (2) of the Copyright Act permits an authorized officer of a university library or archives to provide a copy (by communication or otherwise) of an unpublished thesis kept in the library or archives, to a person who satisfies the authorized officer that he or she requires the reproduction for the purposes of research or study. The Copyright Act grants the creator of a work a number of moral rights, specifically the right of attribution, the right against false attribution and the right of integrity. You may infringe the author’s moral rights if you: - fail to acknowledge the author of this thesis if you quote sections from the work - attribute this thesis to another author - subject this thesis to derogatory treatment which may prejudice the author’s reputation For further information contact the University’s Copyright Service. sydney.edu.au/copyright Writing Against the Image Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, and Aesthetics of Failure 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. ii 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). 4 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