In his book 10:04, Ben Lerner takes a new approach to the novel with an extremely “metaphysical” plot where Lerner adapts a storyline from a short story in which the narrator is writing a novel about a person writing a novel. There are multiple levels of the story, where Lerner will seamlessly transition between which writer is telling the story at the specified moment of time. The construction of the respective novels is their own storyline, and on top of that the unnamed narrator that tells most of the story is faced with several points of adversity like his friend wanting to use his sperm, the ever-impending doom from climate change, and his heart condition. Lerner has several uniquely identifying characteristics of his writing, many of which are extremely Whitmanian. Perhaps the most unique thing Lerner implements is how tied in the story of each narrator is with one another, for example, the way the “Golden Vanity” plays into the construction of the novel. That is to say, the events of what the narrator of the novel is writing in his novel will affect what is happening in the circumstances of the story; at one point, the novel’s narrator explains how “the Golden Vanity” is a song that his father used to sing, and his father altered the ending of the song so said narrator was more satisfied with the ending…the ending of that song is then mirrored in novel’s narrator’s story. The different levels of narration, mixed with the bleeding over between storylines caused a blur between realities existing on or off the page, a very “Whitman” concept. Aside from the broad textual methods of referencing Whitman, Lerner has quite a few moments within the story that read much the same way Whitman’s poems do. There was a moment in which the narrator first introduces his friend that asks him to donate his sperm to her where the narrator says, “…[we] felt an instant mutual sympathy, but had not become best friends until we found ourselves almost neighbors in Brooklyn when I moved there a few years after graduation and we began our walks – walks through Prospect Park as light died in the lindens…Six years of these walks on a warming planet, although walking wasn’t all we did, had rendered Alex’s presence inseparable from my sense of moving through the city, so that I intuited her beside me when she wasn’t; when I crossed a bridge in silence, I often felt it was silence shared between us…”(7). Right from the mention of “walks” within New York this section began to feel like Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” but then it gets a little deeper as Lerner goes into how the walks felt. In Whitman’s “Brooklyn Ferry” he talks to a hypothetical future reader while thinking about how hundreds of years in the future said reader will have the chance to cross on the ferry as well, and says, “And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.” The concept of these disembodied walks with hypothetical people is interesting, adding a sense of meaning to an extremely mundane activity for the sake of invoking deeper thinking is ultimately what each author does.
At the time of writing this blog, I have not finished reading 10:04, but while doing further reading on the book, I found an article discussing the relevancy of Whitman to the book. In the article, it discusses the ending of the book where it, unfortunately, gives away the ending and explains the last line of the book is actually a line re-written from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”, which I think makes the connection I outline all the more strong. http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/anthony-domestico-ben-lerner-atocha-1004
You already know I love crossing Brooklyn Ferry, and I understand where you’re coming from when you reference the parts of Lerner’s meta-meta-novel that remind you of the subject of time in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. For me, the most interesting part of Whitman’s poem is that he is so sure of his work being read beyond his own generation. He is so hopeful that life will be similar even years and years after he is dead, and he is actually right. The part that I think makes Lerner’s novel so much like Whitman’s commentary on time in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is that he barely mentions time at all, we are left to just jump to wherever the narrator has gone to in time. Whitman and Lerner both ask us (or force us, whichever you’d like to believe) to suspend our beliefs about the constraints of time and how it structures our lives.
The idea of Lerner writing this about a man writing a novel about writing a novel, and the way he jumps between narrations and plots and just about everything else, has always reminded me of the idea of lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is basically when a person who is dreaming knows that they are dreaming, kind of creating levels of the dream, much like how you noted the different levels to Ben Lerner’s 10:04. And though it often confuses us, I think its cool that Lerner was able to confuse us so abundantly. We don’t know what’s going on half the time, but we still feel the need to find out – and that matters! I really enjoyed your blog post!
I think you’re right on that both of these authors invest, as you write, “a sense of meaning to an extremely mundane activity for the sake of invoking deeper thinking.” The act of walking and crossing and observing serves for both authors as a springboard for meditations on actual and hypothetical human connection across space and time.
In the first part of the post, you do a good job of noting the metafictional qualities of Lerner’s narrative, though this part seemed less “Whitmanian” to me. In what sense does Whitman blur realities on and off the page in the same way? Perhaps this relates to those moments when Whitman presents clear fabrications as realities, or when he introduces himself in his own text in a way that forces the reader to consider the relationship between the “real” author and the “character” of Whitman that is introduced. Many readers of Whitman have overlooked this distinction, collapsing the “real” Whitman into his poetic persona. But reading Whitman through Lerner, in the way you suggest, complicates that inclination nicely.