#lerner.ben

[aamjp]

A Painting of the Sky Every Sunday, and the Art of Careful Attention

There are signs in the Sunday Paintings of an effort to marry the passage of time, overseen by each day’s “indifferent blue,” to the artistic, domestic, and emotional exertions of a single individual.

“I’m working on a painting about the light in Hopper’s Sun in an Empty Room”, he writes on one canvas; the toss-away update, with that wonderful article, ‘about’, speaks to painting’s utility not only as art-object but as a vehicle for criticism.

This emphasis on the everyday makes the Sunday Paintings cousins to the “autofiction” of contemporary writers such as Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, and Ben Lerner, which tries to make reality, in all its boredom and tragedy, shimmer almost metaphysically.

[aamjp]

Fan’s Notes: A Podcast about Books and Basketball — Episode 20: My Struggle Book 1 / Playoff Preview

is it artful or artless? (circa 9:30-17:00) 

Semi-fictionalised memoir, middle-aged man trying to come to terms with the relationship to his father

Aesthetic project employing a “painterly naturalism” > it’s a “smooth wall of prose where, calm and undisturbed and weighted the same as everything else” 

Philosophising project, in which the structural mundanity allows moments of transcendental enlightenment 

novel or memoir? (20:11)

probably closer to memoir than novel

lots of novelistic structure (buried beneath ten-page descriptions of trying to learn Paranoid by Black Sabbath (21:45)

themed through seeing a face in the water and his weird father, flash forward to him describing his discomfort at being a father, then ultimately burying his father // extraneity and seeming irrelevancy piled upon this 

meta-concern with writing (31:20)

Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station; Tusk, Transit; Geoff Dyer

anxiety about being a novelist, so engaging with semi-fiction (roman a clef-ish)

anxiety about the state of the novel as similar to painting? this is nearly a feature of the novel (33:10)

[aamjp]

Interview with Ben Lerner

Re: Time // this the heterochronic aspect of the contemporary that Osborne talks about. 

“It was as if the little flame in the gaslamp he paused before were burning at once in the present and in various pasts, in 2012 but also in 1912 or 1883, as if it were one flame flickering simultaneously in each of those times, connecting them. He felt that anyone who had ever paused before the lamp as he was pausing was briefly coeval with him, that they were all watching the same turbulent point in their respective present tenses. Then he imagined his narrator standing before it, imagined that the gaslight cut across worlds and not just years, that the author and the narrator, while they couldn’t face each other, could intuit each other’s presence by facing the same light, a kind of correspondence.”

Re: autoficiton

I mean that the self-referentiality of my novel is a way of exploring how fiction functions in our real lives—for good and for ill—not a way of mocking fiction’s inability to make contact with anything outside of itself. My concern is 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.

Re: political // I still don’t understand this

BL: Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring. I have no patience for artists whose primary function is to articulate their art’s impossibility, who in a sense commodify melancholy—just as I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity. Balloon dogs, etc. I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts—all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political.

Re: hesitance to speak in, or for a, third person // cf. Chronicling’s Life’s White Machine

Just because, say, his friend “Josh” appears briefly a few times but doesn’t become important in the book doesn’t mean “Josh” is unrealistic or flat or that the narrator doesn’t care about him. It just means only a small fraction of the implied person of “Josh” is in the book, in this angle on the implied world. I don’t think it’s always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn’t imply people aren’t multi-dimensional.

[aamjp]

“[Allen Grossman] describes what he calls ‘virtual’ poetry... 

...Poems are virtual for Grossman because there is an unbridgeable gap between what the poet wants the poem to do and what it can actually do. For Grossman, 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.’ Poetic logic is bitter because the poem is structurally foredoomed. The lyric poet is moved to make a poem because she is dissatisfied with the human world, the world of representation. But the stuff of poetry, language, invariably reproduces the structures it aspires to replace. According 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. So the poem is always a record of failure because you can’t actualise the impulse that gave rise to it without betraying it.

Cf. [… Writing] is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. 

[aamjp]

The Death of the Postmodern Novel and the Rise of Autofiction

Instead, in a move resolutely against the grain of postmodern fiction — which is often defined as a distrust of metanarratives — she embraces a single, powerful metanarrative: she will believe exclusively in her own life.

“My concern is 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.” — Ben Lerner

All of these novels point to a new future wherein the self is considered a living thing composed of fictions. [...] What’s happening is that new novels [...] are redistributing the relation between the self and fiction. Fiction is no longer seen as ‘false' or 'lies' or 'make-believe’. Instead it is more like Kenneth Burke’s definition of literature as “equipment for living.” Fiction includes the narratives we tell ourselves, and the stories we’re told, on the path between birth and death. — “And, besides, when I make phrases is it really me who is speaking?”

The best way I can describe the new autofictional novel: the oeuvre is the soul. The artist’s body of work, in other words, has come to replace the religious ideal of the immortal spirit. — cf. Schwabsky’s Object or Project

[aamjp]

“It has begun to seem to me that many of today’s best writers are writing fiction in which almost quite literally nothing happens” (¶3)

Re: Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station – “What event there is [...] happens to him or near him, not because of him.” [His agency] is limited by narrative design, clearing maximal novelistic space for his thought process, a process that includes lengthy ruminations on his lack of agency.” (¶4-5)

WHY? O’Fallon Price reckons the internet: “In moving our consumption of news and media from top-down to an a la carte model [...] information of all variety spreads now across a series of nodes on a relatively flat plane of authority” (¶10). Prior to this, “in an era of vertical information [...] novelists predictably wrote vertically [and] there remained an essential confidence in the role of the author as someone bringing the news.” (¶11-12).

“[…] we now occupy individuated worlds of curated art, opinion, reality. There may still be objective truth, but it isn’t clear that we can reach consensus on what it is, and we accept as consensus fewer and fewer people as authorities. Of course, the word “authority” derives from the word “author,” and the act of writing itself is inherently an act of authority, of assuming the right to create and order words and thereby create sense. But there are degrees of order and sense in narrative, and writers like Lerner, Cole, Cusk, Knausgaard, and many others, it seems to me, are responding to this mood of uncertainty—if I may be grand, this weakening of cultural epistemic authority—by mitigating the authority they exert in their narratives; in general, by moving from the objective to the subjective.

“This manifests in [1] a preponderance of first person narrative. Third-person assumes the right to speak for, to inhabit, other characters than oneself, and to manipulate these characters, imbuing the text with a unitary consciousness; first-person, no matter the degree of artifice, implies a bounded consciousness, the disconnection between people. And disconnected first-person narratives — from blog posts to reality show confessional to the infantile tweets of our deranged president — are essentially the narratives of our time.”

And this mitigated fictional authority also manifests in [2] a tendency toward plotlessness and mundanity. The act of making up a story is an act of control, an exertion of order over entropy.  The more carefully narrative is created, the more meticulously ‘event’ is arranged for ‘effect’, the greater the implied presence of authorial control in the traditional sense. [...] Reproducing life 'as it happens' in this type of quasi-memoiristic fiction, implies a position of authorial neutrality, with no presumption of ordering event for narrative effect or explanatory power: This is what happened to me, and who can say why? (¶13-15)

This is an articulation of what I’m doing (and justifies me having kept authors such as Lerner and Javier Marías around). JF said that my hand is present in the crossword paintings and that it reads autobiographically; the use of the first-person within memoir- and roman a clef-ish fiction to communicate an individuated subjectivity through a ‘static’ narrative, is, I think, a kind of permission for me to paint these pictures in which nothing really happens.

In terms of aesthetic experience, it is also a respite—I suspect many readers find themselves pleasantly lulled by the snowdrifts of Knausgaard’s youth, the quiet calm of the novel’s glacial inaction. (¶17)

I think I agree with this. And I think it’s why I enjoy such writing... Maybe that why I’m still uncertain about the black and why I still keep thinking they’re perhaps more paranoid than poetic.

[aamjp]

[aamjp]

Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner

"Such moments were...impossible to represent precisely because they were ready-made literature, because the ease with which they could be represented entered and cancelled the experience: where life was supposed to be its most immediate, when the present managed to differentiate itself with violence, life was at its most generic, following the rules of Aristotle, and one did not make contact with the real, but performed such contact for an imagined audience." — p64

“Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said “I”; who wasn’t a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life? If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.” – p.101

A particularly bright star, a satellite, a plane – something to that effect, at least, from p.146