#ashberry.john

Re: Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station – “What event there is [...] happens to him or near him, not because of him.” [His agency] is limited by narrative design, clearing maximal novelistic space for his thought process, a process that includes lengthy ruminations on his lack of agency.” (¶4-5)

WHY? O’Fallon Price reckons the internet: “In moving our consumption of news and media from top-down to an a la carte model [...] information of all variety spreads now across a series of nodes on a relatively flat plane of authority” (¶10). Prior to this, “in an era of vertical information [...] novelists predictably wrote vertically [and] there remained an essential confidence in the role of the author as someone bringing the news.” (¶11-12).

“[…] we now occupy individuated worlds of curated art, opinion, reality. There may still be objective truth, but it isn’t clear that we can reach consensus on what it is, and we accept as consensus fewer and fewer people as authorities. Of course, the word “authority” derives from the word “author,” and the act of writing itself is inherently an act of authority, of assuming the right to create and order words and thereby create sense. But there are degrees of order and sense in narrative, and writers like Lerner, Cole, Cusk, Knausgaard, and many others, it seems to me, are responding to this mood of uncertainty—if I may be grand, this weakening of cultural epistemic authority—by mitigating the authority they exert in their narratives; in general, by moving from the objective to the subjective.

“This manifests in [1] a preponderance of first person narrative. Third-person assumes the right to speak for, to inhabit, other characters than oneself, and to manipulate these characters, imbuing the text with a unitary consciousness; first-person, no matter the degree of artifice, implies a bounded consciousness, the disconnection between people. And disconnected first-person narratives — from blog posts to reality show confessional to the infantile tweets of our deranged president — are essentially the narratives of our time.”

And this mitigated fictional authority also manifests in [2] a tendency toward plotlessness and mundanity. The act of making up a story is an act of control, an exertion of order over entropy.  The more carefully narrative is created, the more meticulously ‘event’ is arranged for ‘effect’, the greater the implied presence of authorial control in the traditional sense. [...] Reproducing life 'as it happens' in this type of quasi-memoiristic fiction, implies a position of authorial neutrality, with no presumption of ordering event for narrative effect or explanatory power: This is what happened to me, and who can say why? (¶13-15)

This is an articulation of what I’m doing (and justifies me having kept authors such as Lerner and Javier Marías around). JF said that my hand is present in the crossword paintings and that it reads autobiographically; the use of the first-person within memoir- and roman a clef-ish fiction to communicate an individuated subjectivity through a ‘static’ narrative, is, I think, a kind of permission for me to paint these pictures in which nothing really happens.

In terms of aesthetic experience, it is also a respite—I suspect many readers find themselves pleasantly lulled by the snowdrifts of Knausgaard’s youth, the quiet calm of the novel’s glacial inaction. (¶17)