Walt Whitman has influenced many writers that have come after him. His style of writing, emphasis on human connection and the natural world and eagerness to relate to many different groups of people has translated into the modern world of literature, prose and poetry. Walt Whitman didn’t fit into the confinements of his time, and many of today’s authors refuse to succumb to the boundaries as well. One in particular, Ben Lerner, is more alike with Whitman than one might think, which is evident in his novel 10:04. In his article “Realism 4. Objects, weather and infrastructure in Ben Lerner’s 10:04,” Ben De Bruyn investigates Lerner’s ability to reflect on “our increasingly unrecognizable planet with a remarkably realist attention to everyday life.” One could argue that that is exactly what Whitman works to do as well through his writing. Looking at the two writers through a lens of similarity and comparison, the alikeness of their work starts to shine through.
For example, Lerner put an abundance of emphasis on the natural world, just as Whitman often did through his writing. In what Bruyn describes as a “rare example of a contemporary climate-change novel,” Lerner often works through the connection between humans and nature, specifically how weather and climate affects our bodies as humans. Though Whitman never discussed climate-change on the scale that we explore it now, it is evident that he did care about nature and the living world around him. From his most famous poem “Song of Myself” to his more intimate poems like “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” nature seeps through his words with lasting effect. Much like how Whitman discussed and put emphasis on nature, Lerner did the same. He discusses hurricanes and their ability to form commonalities between groups despite their backgrounds, but also their inherent sense of eeriness and power. It’s not often that poets successfully talk about the power of nature, but these two men from different time periods, do a pretty good job.
On the other hand, both of the writers discuss human connection and fluidity. Lerner often puts emphasis on what a sense of community. In his book he writes, “I was aware of the delicacy of the bridges and tunnels spanning the water, and of traffic through those arteries, as though some cortical reorganization now allowed me to take the infrastructure personally, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body” (28). Whether than just focusing on mere human interaction, he investigates the connectivity of the larger picture – even something as simple as transportation is creating a “communal body.” Whitman explored this idea as well, often talking about how connected humans were despite everything else in the world. Though Lerner talks about this in the realm of the hurricane dooming over them, he still features “so many positively charged scenes involving public infrastructure, be it the ‘common conversation… removing the conventional partitions from social space’ in a subway before Irene makes landfall (17), the scene where the protagonist allows an Occupy protester to use his bathroom and washer (44),” and so on to prove the connectivity of the world and humans within it.
After reading these two writers in juxtaposition with each other, I see how they are holding hands across time periods. They are still sharing the inherent need to know more about the world around them and the people that surround them. They aren’t solely focused on politics or war or money, they are focused on what makes us feel, what makes us human, and what makes up the natural aspects of the planet earth. There may be a lot going on in Lerner’s book, and there might be more going on in Whitman’s endless pieces, but there is something fresh about the way they write about human connectivity and nature. A breath of fresh air among the deteriorating world we live in.
There is certainly a fascinating way in which Whitman and Lerner both view weather as a focalizing and unifying force–a sort of concrete entity that nevertheless serves as a sort of abstract holder for shared experience. Lerner often refers to these kinds of things as forms of collectivity that, even if negative, can have a utopian quality to them as well. You do a good job of noting a few key moments in the novel when Lerner turns to those forms of connection and collectivity in a way that certainly unifies him with a strong Whitmanian element as these figures, as you so aptly put it, hold hands across the century.
It is interesting that you start your blog post the way you did- saying all that Whitman is praised for like his focus on the connection of human beings and his point-blank writing style. Like you say, Lerner’s novel is similar to Whitman’s work in that his style is rather new-age, there are themes of connectivity and the natural world, and the effects of time. I was talking with my Grandmother this weekend about Whitman and how he was so very popular for the way he spoke of the world around him. His ideas weren’t necessarily uncommon, that’s why everyone (well,, a lot of people) connected and admired his words. Someone had to say them, and it turned out to be Whitman. So it is really no surprise that Lerner’s work is similar to whitman’s, or that 10:04 was such a success. It deals with themes of life that many many people have observed.