Interview: Ben Lerner

By Max Liu

Ben Lerner, 2014. Photograph: Matt Lerner

Ben Lerner is the author of two critically acclaimed novels and three collections of poetry. Like its forerunner Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), the author’s latest novel 10:04 (2014) – described in its own pages as ‘neither fiction nor non-fiction’ – is narrated by an unnamed writer whose biographical details closely echo Lerner’s own. Set during an unseasonably warm winter in New York, with the city having recently been threatened by one hurricane and due to be beset by another, 10:04 describes how the protagonist – recently diagnosed with a heart condition and working on his second novel – wanders the city with his best friend, looking at art, discussing the past and the future, and contemplating whether they should try to conceive a child together. Expanding the conventional novel format to embrace short fiction, poetry, art criticism, autobiography and photographs, 10:04 is an original and extremely funny book that also encourages the reader to consider the political implications of social and economic inequality. I met with Lerner in London recently to discuss laughter, Walt Whitman and why ‘art has to offer something other than stylized despair’.

MAXLIU: 10:04 captures a world of uncertainty but it’s a very enjoyable read. Was it your aim to create a hospitable environment for your reader?

BENLERNER: I did, although I wanted to balance the way that a novel can both be absorbing and can acknowledge that it’s a construct. I wouldn’t want, and probably wouldn’t be able, to write a novel that makes you forget you’re reading. I’m interested in eliciting the reader’s participation in the construction of the book.

ML: In 2012, I saw you read from Leaving the Atocha Station. Your delivery was so deadpan that it left me wondering whether or not you consciously try to be funny in your writing.

BL:Leaving the Atocha Station I thought of as comic. Literature often depends on the strategic disappointment of expectation. Sometimes, the effect of that is humorous; at other times, it’s unnerving: I consider it crucial to the composition of a novel. Laughter is physical; it involves the body of the reader in the book in a way that other responses don’t. It’s a tonal antidote to the many reasons for despair offered up in contemporary novels.

ML:*At one point, the narrator of 10:04 says: ‘Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.’ Was it important for this character to be a more sympathetic figure than Adam, the young poet of your first novel?

BL: Both my novels are concerned with what counts as an authentic experience, but I think of Adam as a kid who can’t see other people through the fog of his own concerns. He lies to everyone but the reader. He’s attempting to achieve authenticity via ruthless, literary interrogation of his own inauthenticity. Some people think he’s worse than an axe murderer but I have a fondness for the honesty with which he criticises himself. He’s also involved in a very old form of the interrogation of poetry. Poetry is, in some sense, impossible but some poems fail better than others and keep you in touch with the abstract possibilities of language. I wanted 10:04 to examine how you can inhabit all the contradictions of your position in a way that isn’t about dissimulation; it wants to describe the move away from irony to sincerity.

ML:How did you start writing 10:04?

BL: First, I wrote the poem that’s excerpted in the book, then I wrote the short story that’s in there. I had an idea about writing a novel about a guy who fabricates his own archive. I wrote a long letter in the voice of the poet Robert Creeley, after which I started writing criticism about the Salvage Art Institute (an American organization that appropriates damaged works which have been declared a total loss and removed forever from the art market). Eventually, having already written several of the novel’s components, I realized that I was intuiting a frame for a work of fiction. Now, weirdly, I can’t always remember which parts of it are true and which are fiction.

ML: So, unlike the narrator, you didn’t receive an advance for an unwritten novel?

BL: No, I wrote the book then gave it to a publisher. The reason it happens the other way round in 10:04 is because I wanted the narrator to get the advance so it could be spent on his friend’s fertility treatment. The book is about maternity and the second person, the ‘you’ that the narrator addresses. I wanted to mix different kinds of futures.

ML: The narrator goes to Marfa, Texas, to write his novel but works on a poem instead, declaring that he’s ‘working on the wrong thing’. How do you balance writing poetry and fiction?

BL: I always have to claim not to be doing something in order to do it. Marfa was the one residency I’ve been on. I thought I’d be stuck there and have a nervous breakdown but it ended up being great. You don’t always write what you set out to write, so writing can be a form of displacement.

ML: Do you discuss your ideas with others while you’re working?

BL: Before I can write a book, I’ve got to project it into existence. Wittgenstein talks about language ‘going on’. For me, composition is about that sense of going on. I’ll think: ‘OK, I’ve got this one poem but what would it mean to go on?’ There’s the fiction that the fiction is and there’s the fiction I tell about the book in order to be able to write it.

ML: Walt Whitman, who’s invoked frequently in 10:04, wrote for a future ‘you’ and, throughout your book, the narrator also addresses a ‘you’. Who is he talking to?

BL: I was thinking about the Whitmanic ‘you’ – not in terms of the future, rather in terms of the contemporary readership. 10:04 isn’t for everyone – no serious work is – but I imagined the book as a fairly inclusive conversation.

ML: The narrator believes ‘bad forms of collectivity’ – such as the co-op he joins in gentrified Brooklyn – can ‘stand as a figure of its possibility’. Is 10:04 an optimistic book?

BL: It’s optimistic in as much as the novel insists that spaces for the imagination and the imagination of collectivism are absolutely necessary. Reading can make you feel alive to political possibilities so that, even if literature can’t actualize them, it can still keep those parts of us vitalized. Capitalism is a bad image of collectivity. Our problem isn’t that we’re disconnected, it’s that we’re interconnected in really fucked up ways. We’re hugely implicated in each other’s fates yet wealth and social power are concentrated in the hands of the very few. Literature has to look at the glimmers of possibility in even the most corrupt forms of interconnectedness to find ways of organizing society more fairly.

ML: The narrator admires a couple who are ‘always working and never working’. Does that describe your life?

BL: Yes. In Whitman, and further back, there’s the idea that art is work, but not work as defined by the bourgeoisie. On the one hand, Whitman is doing the most important work imaginable. On the other hand, he’s just loafing. That’s the way artists get talked about and also the way protestors are discussed. When the Occupy movement was taking place in New York, some people thought the protestors were a bunch of ne’er-do-wells while others saw them as tireless revolutionary agitators. Art, like protest, is embarrassing for the economy because we don’t know where it falls in the labour/leisure divide.

ML: Why do so many of the young men encountered by the narrator of 10:04 seem lost?

BL: The narrator is trying to figure out what it means to provide care. Will he be the father to Alex’s child or will he merely donate his sperm? What does it mean for him to be a teacher? People tell the narrator their stories and he listens, whereas Adam, in my first novel, couldn’t see past himself. It’s about care as a way of emptying yourself out so that you can become a vehicle for other people’s stories.

ML: The artist Christian Marclay’s video installation The Clock (2010) features in 10:04. Several authors, including Geoff Dyer and Zadie Smith, have written about The Clock. What is it about this work that attracts novelists?

BL: Well, narrative is a search for a meaningful organization of time and The Clock toys with the border between narrative and non-narrative, in that it borrows from narrative film but also acts as a clock. Film and fiction are time-based arts and any work that mixes real and fictional time raises questions about narrative which must be of interest to novelists.

ML: Fiction and reality overlap in this book. Do you think that the imagined, or misremembered, can sometimes be as formative as so-called real events?

BL: Totally. It’s the same in art and in life. I’m interested in the way the fictional has real effects. As a poet, I also ask myself how silence informs words. How is silence felt? How is negative space activated in a poem? So, in both my fiction and my poetry, I’m exploring the ways in which an absence can be felt as a presence.

ML: You coin a lovely phrase – ‘the intimacy of the parallel gaze’ – to describe the narrator visiting galleries with Alex. Is 10:04 exploring shared ways of seeing?

BL: One of the things I love about art, and which makes it socially necessary, is that we look together. When I observe a painting, I see what I’m seeing as well as a whole history of seeing. I feel briefly coeval with all the people who have looked at the painting. The reader of 10:04 is looking with the characters at images in the book. Viewing is rich with social possibilities and frustrations.

ML: The narrator calls America ‘the empire of drones’. Do you feel distinct responsibilities as an American writer?

BL: Yes. I don’t think I have a choice but to feel responsible. The novel has to deal with the fact that American-style capitalism has remade a lot of the world in its image and destroyed a lot of the world in the attempt. On a formal level, though, my novels are influenced by European writers and many of the novelists who matter most to me aren’t American.

ML: Who are they?

BL: I learned a lot about dialogue from Virginia Woolf, even though my writing doesn’t sound at all like hers. W.G. Sebald made me feel that writing prose was possible because he shows how pattern – more than plot – can structure a certain constellation of historical material. A lot of my ideas about Leaving the Atocha Station came out of thinking about the European anti-hero tradition of Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov (1859) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864). Eileen Myles and Maggie Nelson, two contemporary influences, are interesting as writers who move between the genres of poetry and fiction.

ML: Will your two novels form part of a trilogy?

BL: I don’t know whether they will or whether that’s something I’m just telling myself. At the moment, I’m writing a long monograph about the hatred of poetry, which is related to the novels – why poetry is always denounced and defended. I’ve got half a manuscript of poems. But I don’t see a book beyond those projects.