February 13, 2020 15
The Topeka School
by Ben Lerner.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
282 pp., $27.
What is a museum guard to do, I
thought to myself; what, really,
is a museum guard? On the one
hand you are a member of a secu-
rity force charged with protecting
priceless materials from the crazed
or kids or the slow erosive force of
camera flashes; on the other hand
you are a dweller among supposed
triumphs of the spirit and if your
position has any prestige it derives
precisely from the belief that such
triumphs could legitimately move
a man to tears.*If people were in fact moved, con-
vincing themselves they discov-
ered whatever they projected into
the hackneyed poem, or better
yet, if people felt the pressure to
perform absorption in the face of
what they knew was an embarrass-
ing placeholder for an art no longer
practicable for whatever reasons, a
dead medium whose former power
could be felt only as a loss—these
scenarios did for me involve a pa-
thos the actual poems did not, a
pathos in fact increased in propor-
tion to their failure, as the more
abysmal the experience of the ac-
tual the greater the implied heights
of the virtual.*These images of art address only
the sick, the patients. It would be
absurd to imagine a doctor lin-
gering over one of these images
between appointments, being in-
terested in it or somehow attached
to it, having his day inflected by it
or whatever. Apart from their de-
pressing flatness, their interchange-
ability, what I’m saying is: we can’t
look at them together. They help
establish, deepen, the gulf between
us, because they address only the
sick, face only the diagnosed.What kinds of characters would say
such things, and why? Ben Lerner is
the author of three novels, three books
of poetry, and numerous critical essays,
including the book-length monograph
The Hatred of Poetry. The more books
of prose he writes, the more clearly a
kind of common persona, singular yet
plural, emerges across his work: his
narrators, whether fictional or not,
share some facts of their background
with one another, while also writing
Lerner’s poems and thinking lines
from Lerner’s essays. Together, they—
or the plural he, a poet and reluctant
novelist, born in Kansas and housed
in Brooklyn—sprawl easily across the
fiction-nonfiction divide.
One of this composite narrator’s
most notable and appealing qualities
is his tendency to launch into hyper-
articulate, often indignant, flights of
literary-critical or theoretical fluency,
like the ones in the passages above. To
the question of when or why a charac-
ter would have such bouts of fluency,
Lerner’s usual answer is: under du-
ress. The first passage is from Lerner’s
first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station
(2011). The narrator, Adam Gordon, isa young American in Madrid on a po-
etry fellowship. But Adam doubts that
he really qualifies as a poet or is even
capable of feeling very much for art, a
doubt brought sharply into focus when
he walks into room 58 of the Prado and
finds standing before his favorite paint-
ing a man who bursts into loud sobs. Is
this man really moved by the painting?
Is he having the “profound experience
of art” that has eluded Adam?
The question gnaws at him as he fol-
lows the man and watches the pattern
repeat itself: “The man walked calmly
into 56, stood before The Garden of
Earthly Delights, considered it calmly,
then totally lost his shit.” The guards
seem as doubtful as Adam about the
authenticity or meaning of the man’s
sobs. Together, they all “trailed the
man from gallery to gallery,” and the
plight of the guards—should they talk
to the man to see if he’s mentally stable,
thereby admitting that even they don’t
believe people can really be moved by
the art, or should they let him go on
and risk enabling some possible act of
vandalism?—becomes more absorbingto Adam than anything on the walls
themselves, furthering his suspicions
of his own incapacity for feeling.
The second quote, from the same
novel, forms a kind of diptych with
the first: Adam is at a poetry reading.
His Spanish is fuzzy, so he’s surprised,
and then affronted, by how much of
the poem he can understand: it was
“an Esperanto of clichés: waves, heart,
pain, moon, breasts, beach, emptiness,
etc.” Only when he looks around and
considers the inexplicably rapt audi-
ence does the scene become interesting
for him. But Adam isn’t there just as a
spectator; he’s slated to read his own
poems next and has been terribly ner-
vous. His jag of critical analysis is not
only a set of ideas, it’s also an expres-
sion of his anxiety and at the same time
his own unusual method for allaying
it. Having worked out for himself that
the poet sucks but is a moving “place-
holder” for the ideal possibilities of po-
etry, he can relax.
Some of the ideas and even these
very sentences also appear in Lerner’s
essays, where we naturally focus on
their face-value critical content. But in
novels, they have a special comic shim-
mer—they’re interesting thoughts, yes,
but also signs that our man is wracked
by fear or internal conflict.
The final quote is from Lerner’s sec-
ond novel, 10 : 04 (2014). The speaker
of these lines about medical office art
in fact never speaks them. Like all the
discursive riffs above, this one sounds
only in his head, as he waits for test re-
sults about a life-threatening medical
condition; it’s part of an internal mono-
logue, a conversation with himself that
we are meant to overhear, while in the
real world he struggles to make himself
understood without breaking down.
What this narrator actually says when
the doctor enters the room is, “Am I
going to be okay?”In 10 : 04 a writer, Ben, has recently re-
ceived a large advance to turn a short
story published in The New Yorker into
a novel. Lerner draws our attention not
only to how fiction gets written, but
why. One of Ben’s reasons for writing
fiction rather than poetry—“something
I’d promised my poet friends I was
going to do”—is no less than a desire
to change the world for the better: to
be able to create complex figures forLearning to Fight
Elaine Blair
have pretty well extinguished whatever
moral authority the US once had on
climate change. A few weeks of a new
presidency aren’t going to change that.
On the same theme, Biden proposes
a global “Summit for Democracy” to
be held in his first year. This was an
unworkable idea when it was discussed
during the Clinton administration and
seems even less well suited to today’s
world, beginning with the vexing ques-
tion of who decides what countries
qualify as democracies in order to be
invited—Turkey? Brazil? Hungary?
the Philippines?—and what happens
to US policy toward those that aren’t
included. The underlying notion that
President Biden could take enough sig-
nificant steps in a few months to restore
the “democratic foundation of our
country and inspire action” by others
seems unrealistic, at best.The thirty years since the end of
the cold war have been a time of ex-
traordinary change. Five profound
transformations—globalization, Chi-
na’s meteoric rise, the spread of terror-
ism, the dawn and epic growth of the
digital age, and the retreat of democ-
racy and international rise of popu-lism—have been crammed into a brief
period, together with the upheaval
of the Iraq war and its aftermath and
the 2008 global financial crisis, both
sparked by American misjudgment.
Even if Trump had never appeared
on the scene, this would have forced
Washington to finally confront the
need to rethink foreign policy assump-
tions made in the aftermath of World
War II that had become thoroughly
out of date. Americans want fresh
thinking about how much of an inter-
national burden the US should shoul-
der if it also wants to meet its domestic
needs, protect its security interests,and sustain the values it cares about.
There is, in short, no going back to
the status quo ante Trump. Moreover,
if he is not reelected in 2020, Trump
will leave behind seriously weakened
international institutions and threats to
global stability that will demand urgent
action. Notwithstanding the Demo-
cratic candidates’ relative silence on
foreign policy thus far, the next presi-
dent will likely have to make interna-
tional decisions of historic significance.
It is important that they say more about
how they would approach them before
a nominee is chosen. Q
—January 16, 2020‘Untitled,’ circa 1964 ; photograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard©Estate^ofRalphEugene^ Meatyard/FraenkelGallery,^ SanFrancisco