An Interview with Ben Lerner

BEN LERNER
Courtesy of Coffee House Press

One of the most important and prodigious young writers in America today, Ben Lerner is an omnivorous reader whose work situates itself in relation to 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, and the theories of referentiality and unoriginality posited by Ron Silliman or Allen Grossman that he cites in this interview seem explicatory. But this genealogy is partial. One is likely to find, in Lerner's poetry and prose alike, traces of or allusions to Leo Tolstoy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, or Walt Whitman; or quotations from Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, or Jacques Derrida colliding with cliche's from TV melodrama; or oblique citations of theories of images and simulacra, not as explanatory or exegetical concepts, but as figures for the acts of poesis and consumption. His writing continually changes shape, employing masks, borrowing and recycling language with both innovative and self-alienating flair, and emphasizing process over product, composing over composition, and limits over ideals of transcendence. Lerner is a multiform talent who crosses genres, modes, and media to represent a leading edge of contemporary writing, and he has already found success in both academic and literary "prize cultures."

All of this—the intra- and extratextual—is complexly woven together in Lerner's debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). Called by Lorin Stein "one of the funniest (and truest) novels I know of by a writer of his generation" and praised ubiquitously en route to winning multiple awards, the book takes its title from one of Ashbery's opaque poems in The Tennis Court Oath (1962). Ashbery himself sees Atocha as "[a]n extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life"; indeed, its fusion of poetic and novelistic materials reveals much about the relationship between these and other genres in our day. Leaving the Atocha Station is the first-person narrative of Adam Gordon, a sort of untrustworthy alter ego of Lerner. He is a habitual liar, a drug-addled poet who thinks of himself as a fraud, a vain and fragile womanizer, and perhaps most importantly for the novel itself, a character who steals others' experiences and language and relates them as if they were his own. Adam spends a year in Madrid on a prestigious fellowship, working on his "project," which is to be (we are told) an epic poem about Franco, fascism, and the Spanish Civil War. He frequently claims to have progressed from one "phase" of his project to the next, but little evidence supports that assertion. He can't keep track of which lies about himself—that his mother died, that his father is a fascist—he has told to which of his two girlfriends.

But the external plot—Adam's time in Madrid—is more a setting for the bigger concerns that the novel takes up, which are the relationships among language, experience, art, mediation, authorship, and the spectacle of violence. The novel culminates with Adam's witnessing the bombing of the Atocha Station in Madrid, on March 11, 2004, an event that he wants to "feel," to experience as presence, but only absorbs secondhand through newspapers, others' responses, and afterimages. The major event of Leaving the Atocha Station becomes a nonevent; most of the novel takes place when nothing happens, when Adam drifts or escapes into gaps between conventional communications and exchanges. In a compelling and darkly comic style, Lerner also builds on the recombinatory, unsettled nature of his own poetry. Adam, whose Spanish is dubious (he claims), relates...