Writing Against the Image: Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, and Aesthetics of Failure

277 Pages·2015·1.46 MB·English

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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.

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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

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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.
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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.
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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).
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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
Award (2012), the James Tait Black Prize in Fiction, and was runner-up for the Sami Rohr
Prize for Jewish Literature (2013).9 Their second novels – Cole’s Every Day Is For the Thief
(2014) and Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) – will be read here in relief to the experimentations and
inherent failures of their debut works – what Tom McCarthy calls the “First Novel
Syndrome.”10 Indeed, both writers conceptualise the novelistic image in distinct terms and
the works of each can be “read,” as Clune argues of John Ashbery, “like a manual for
describing things”; as a suggestion for a new literary mode that aspires towards, as Polish
poet Czeslaw Milosz contemplates, “a more spacious form.”11
Milosz specifically “aspires” to a form that prefers to “be free from the claims of
poetry or prose,” and instead one that, “without exposing/ the author or reader to sublime
agonies,” charts an expansive rather than narrow space for exploration and interrogation.12
Indeed, Jacques Rancière understands the aesthetic as corresponding to the political in its
capacity to “draft maps of the visible, trajectories between the visible and the sayable,
relationships between modes of being, modes of saying, and modes of doing and
making.”13 While he defines this as a relationship “between literarity and historicity” not
based on their intrinsic connections to reality, per se, but on the way that “political
statements and literary locutions produce effects in reality,” such an approach is also
evident in the twenty-first century novel’s approach to literary form, as well as wider

9 Teju Cole, Open City (New York: Random House, 2011); Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station (Minneapolis:
Coffee House Press, 2011). All further references to these two texts will be made through in-text citation.
10 Teju Cole Every Day is for the Thief (New York: Random House, 2014); Ben Lerner, 10:04 (New York: Faber
and Faber, 2014). All further references to these two texts will be made through in-text citation. Tom
McCarthy, interview by Christopher Bollen, “Tom McCarthy is No Longer a Wellkept Secret,” Interview
Magazine, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/tom-mccarthy#_.
11 Clune, Writing Against Time, 118; Milosz, “Ars Poetica?”
12 Milosz, “Ars Poetica?”
13 Jacques Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2005), 39. My emphasis.
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cultural and political concerns. Indeed, while Milosz’s equation is precisely the sum of its
parts, not only suggesting a form that is ‘spacious,’ but one that offers more room in how it
is understood, Rancière’s literary maps suggest possibilities beyond the image of the real
and “open up space for deviations.” Each of the following chapters in this thesis composes
a particular aesthetic of ‘writing against’ – both in the proximal sense ‘to be against,’ next
to, to run up against, and as a term of opposition – and of ‘against the image,’ where the
literary visual image is an ekphrastic subject, and the literary image concerns formal ideals
or guidelines governed by convention; the image of what the novel ought to look like. A
reading such as this suggests mapmaking as a critical strategy employed by writers for the
way in which they conceptualise and craft artistic form, how they negotiate their works
once they are in print, and how they seek to look toward a new ekphrastic and lyrical novel
form while writing against realist convention and the typology of the novel form itself.
So, while Chapter One proposes that Cole creates a form opposed to the
conventions of fiction, Chapter Two discusses Open City’s mediation of different aesthetic
experiences as constructing a blueprint for viewing the world in negative. Chapter Three,
moreover, interrogates the way in which Lerner’s novel form works against poetry, and
Chapter Four proposes a construction of the self through literature against experience in
Leaving the Atocha Station. Not dismissing the critical discourse around the novel as
extraneous material – either that which is constructed by reviewers, critics, and
interviewers, or by the writers themselves – but regarding it as integral to the reflective
reading process of contemporary literature is crucial to a reading that places such
importance on the writing process.14 Indeed, it necessarily employs an self-reflexive approach
to criticism that is vital to reading the novels as mapping out routes for the form that go

14 Indeed, reflection and reflective are important words in this thesis. Not only does it prove useful as a way
of categorising how writers talk about their writing and writing in general, and how writers talk about reading,
it also applies to the tone and structure of the primary novels considered here.
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against convention and places emphasis on the contemporary novel as a form that is
continually ‘in-progress,’ even after publication. As David James discusses, “to
accommodate an analysis of intentionality alongside that of influence is important when
encountering writers who are still living, producing and commenting on their work, while
also talking about the literary movements they inherit and whose impulses they extend.”15
While, he argues, “we have to concede that writers’ answers are guided by the questions
asked, and even the conversational (and confessional) novelist might not be able to sidestep
the interviewer’s insinuations,” writers’ “artistic ambitions are not,” nevertheless, “simply
arbitrary or deceptive.”16 Rather, they formulate an extensive network of mediated notes,
observations, and comments on artistic practice itself, and as such “provide another layer
for critical evaluation, providing a form of contextualisation that is as legitimate as any
cultural or historical one.”17 Such a consideration of writers in dialogue about their writing,
whether in the form of interviews, lectures, or essays, provides a useful and productive map
of their “politico-aesthetic” and “literary-historical” concerns, and the way in which their
fiction is situated against them, even if what they say is paradoxical: “I have nothing to
say,” McCarthy claims, “[i]ndeed, I’d go as far as to claim that no serious writer does.”18

AESTHETICS OF EXPERIENCE
What is peculiar about Lerner and Cole, as well as other novelists discussed throughout this
study, is how they construct their own critical language with which their novels ought to be
understood. Not only do their interviews, lectures, and essays present a concerted

15 David James, Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), 32.
16 James, Modernist Futures, 32; 33.
17 James, Modernist Futures, 33.
18 Tom McCarthy, Transmission and the Individual Remix: How Literature Works (London: Vintage Digital, 2012),
Kindle edition.
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