This book was one of three novels to be read and discussed on a course called The European city in contemporary literature.
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This is a very clever book. Too clever, in fact, for any one person to fully appreciate I think. There are so many references, to books, philosophers cultural stereotypes and even a film, most of which are unreferenced, that when the tutor said “This echoes <name of Russian philosopher I didn’t quite catch> my first response was to type “Of course!” in the class chat. By that time even I was becoming slightly exasperated with the author’s apparent showing off his erudition.
However, I think that is all part of the charm of this story. The protagonist doesn’t simply live and do things, he continually thinks about what he ”should” look like, or whether his pretence at being a poet is itself a pretence and that perhaps he really is a poet, or whether Teresa is going to reject him, which to prevent he decides to reject her first….
A classic example is when he is invited to appear on a discussion panel on the subject of “Literature Now”. As he knows nothing, or thinks he knows nothing, he memorises a few quotes which in themselves are pretty meaningless, but which are all-purpose quotes.
This reminded me of two texts. First, Knots, by R.D. Laing. In addition to including passages along the lines of “Jack thinks Jill is going to reject him he rejects her; because Jack has rejected Jill she rejects him”, there is also this:
“There is something I don’t know that I am supposed to know. I don’t know what it is I don’t know,
and yet am supposed to know, and I feel I look stupid if I seem both not to know it and not know what it is I don’t know. Therefore I pretend I know it.”
The idea of the all-purpose phrase also reminded me of Stephen Potter’s one-up-manship books. One of the ploys he recommends to make yourself appear as though you have gone into the subject rather more deeply than the expert who is speaking about it is to interject with:
“But surely not in the south?”
The expert is bound to say “Eh?”, and this is enough to throw them off their stride and give the appearance that you know more than they do.
The one-up-manship books also take opportunities to bet “one up” on the reader. Thus a footnote declaring the results of a survey is enough to break your reading flow and make you hesitate for a moment before realising that the statistics quoted are completely a propos nothing at all. You’ve been had. Similarly with a sentence like “ I was sitting on the beach at Eastbourne when this idea suddenly came to me.” There’s a footnote then, which reads: “See our booklet called ‘Places where it is OK for things to first come to you at’”.
John Webster, in his play The White Devil, also, it seems to me, treats the reader and his characters in the way they treat each other. In that case it involves bumping people off. A major character will have someone killed, and then in further Acts is never mentioned again. They, like their victims, are simply discarded.
In the same way, I think Lerner is treating the reader the same way that his narrator treats others. He, the narrator, will come out with quotes and even “steal” experiences in order to somehow burnish his credentials. The narrator would be quite happy to not acknowledge his sources if he thinks that will make him look more intelligent, so why would he not treat us, the readers, in the same way?
I wasn’t able to spot all the philosophical references, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t get all of the cultural and literary references either.
As for the story itself, it was very interesting, though we learnt very little about Spain, apart from that it seems to have a lot of cafes. This was in contrast to the other books discussed on the course, Book of Clouds (Berlin) and Things Seen (Paris), where we learnt, or at least were able to infer, a great deal about the cities in which the stories were set.
This was the first Ben Lerner book I’ve read, and it certainly won’t be the last.
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