Ned Beauman’s genre-bending second novel, The Teleportation Accident (2012), contains a minor character called Colonel Gorge who suffers from a remarkable – and frequently hilarious – neurological disorder. Dubbed by his doctors ‘ontological agnosia’, Gorge’s condition makes him progressively unable to distinguish between representations and the objects they represent. Hard currency is banned from the Colonel’s LA residence after the third time he ‘took up arms to rescue George Washington from kidnappers’. Gorge’s difficulties later extend to written language: upon reading the word ‘hurricane’ in a newspaper, he will dive for cover from the storm. By the disease’s final stage, Gorge simply has to hear a word spoken aloud to see the thing it represents, leaving his long-suffering butler unable to talk to him ‘except in pure abstractions, like bad transcendental poetry.’
Part of Beauman’s joke here is, I think, that we do all hallucinate after a manner when we read a poem. The ancient rhetorician Quintilian certainly thought that language, in the hands of orators and poets, could conjure an experience so visually vivid that an audience would experience it as a kind of ‘daydream’. But then again the material dimension of written language – black marks on a white page – makes it hard to think of it in the same frame a painter’s trompe l’oeil, capable of deceiving the eye with its simulated world. Thinking through these questions recently, I found myself returning to the work of US poet and novelist Ben Lerner. Lerner shares some of Ned Beauman’s clever-cleverness and many of his laughs, but directs them towards a distinctively, and often thrillingly, philosophical poetics. His oeuvre so far consists of three collections of poems, one very un-poet-like novel, which nevertheless features a poet as protagonist, and a recent handful of critical essays on painting. These essays alone suggest some of the inventive ways in which Lerner has picked up the mantle of John Ashbery, spanning the worlds of art criticism and poetry.
From his first book of poems, The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), Lerner has been interested in the potential kinship between poetry and art, traditionally called ‘ut pictura poesis’. These crossovers were of course a staple of the New York School with its much-cited ties to Abstract Expressionism, but Lerner’s thinking owes as much to Pliny and videogames as it does to Ashbery and O’Hara. The poems in The Lichtenberg Figures circle around the relation between figure and abstract. One of that book’s freewheeling ‘sonnets’ compares the ‘allover abstraction’ in a grandfather’s decaying mind to the ‘late style of Matisse /… made up of broad and colorful strokes’. Another poem asks if a woman, made beautiful by her crying in the Surrealist wing, is ‘therefore a work of Surrealist sculpture?’ (Keen-eyed readers will note the parallel with the opening scene of Lerner’s novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, in which the narrator watches a stranger break down in front of a canvas in the Prado, which itself depicts a weeping figure.) Lerner’s thinking on art takes the form of riddling, recursive aphorisms, somewhere between pathos-charged and tongue in cheek: ‘Only time will tell / if my work is representational. / Only time will tell if time will tell.’
By Lerner’s second book, Angle of Yaw (2006), this faintly Ashberian play of abstract and surreal gives way to a series of politically-charged meditations on perspective and technologies of viewing, written in the wake of 9/11. The book is preoccupied with unusual, often aerial vantage points (‘the bird’s eye view abstracted from the bird’). Its title comes from an aeronautical term, referring to the left-right axis along which a plane’s nose moves as it shifts heading. The fact that this particular motion can only really be perceived from directly above or below suggests the work Angle of Yaw does with constrained or eccentric perspectives. The title sequence in two parts takes the form of a series of brief, enigmatic, parable-like prose poems. Thanks to the book’s extravagant margins, they hover at the centre of each larger-than-usual white page as though viewed from a great height. Here is one from towards the beginning, in its entirety:
In the earliest films, actors pretend to accomplish prodigious acrobatic feats by rolling around on a black carpet while being filmed from above. The prophet who seems to ascend to heaven is being dragged across the floor. The first generation of moviegoers was unable to decipher the action on the screen, despite the explicador. The second generation mistook them for real grapes. In order to reproduce the colors of nature in our films, we have painted nature black and white. Startle the cuttlefish. Harvest the sepia. The literal color of fear.
These poems’ manner is somewhat reminiscent of the chunks of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror where Ashbery cites Vasari or Sydney Freedberg’s monograph on Parmigianino wholesale, blending appreciation of the illusion with a footnote explaining the mechanics of its creation. This poem’s ‘black and white’ palette, drawn from the early celluloid which is its subject, harks back to the ‘grey glaze of the past’ in Ashbery’s Self-Portrait, where Parmigianino’s masterful wash of skintones is mediated through a book of ‘black-and-white illustrations’. But the punctum in this tale of people struggling to learn the codes of a brand new artform has to be the elliptical reference to ‘real grapes’. The poem’s speaker presents himself as a kind of explicador – an interpreter for the baffled audience, interposed between them and the screen – yet one who doesn’t explain very much.
Lerner’s ‘real grapes’ invoke Pliny’s tale of the ancient Greek painter, Zeuxis, who painted a bunch of grapes so realistic that the birds are supposed to have flown down to peck at them. Photography and cinema are the rightful successors to this art of trompe l’oeil – an idea that comes back a few poems later in ‘Angle of Yaw’:
The first paintings were made on the inside walls of cameras. Still, painting was the first medium to attain a verisimilitude capable of confusing birds, the highest achievement in any art. When Wu Daozi painted dragons, their fins stirred. The rest of the story is about flatness.
‘Flatness’ might refer equally well to these poems’ studiedly affectless tone as to a painting’s surface. In a book much concerned with what it elsewhere calls ‘the old debate between depth and surface’, Lerner’s project is to explore how images of reality modify and distort our perception of reality. Many of the poems in Angle of Yaw, including ‘Didactic Elegy’, the book’s central essay-in-verse on art after September 11th, develop what starts to look like a reciprocal relationship between reality and representation. The more realistic the image, the less real the world. Drone warfare and videogames borrow their visual language from one another. The footage of the falling towers displaces the reality. It’s hard not to find, in the poor birds smacking into Zeuxis’s painting, some echo of planes crashing into buildings.
Lerner’s third book, Mean Free Path (2010), is a book-length sequence of mostly love poems, whose shuffled lines, often apparently out of order, create a reading experience a little like turning over two pages by accident and then carrying on regardless: reading as a kind of trompe l’oeil? The ghost of Zeuxis comes back again, this time in an erotic light, with the repeated motif of duped bees bumping against glass flowers: ‘Glass anthers / Confuse bees. Is that pornography?’ Aside from the joke about what might help bees get their rocks off, this leitmotif seems to be about pornography in the largest sense – the problem, structural to certain kinds of love poetry, of turning the loved one inevitably into an object. Jacques Lacan saw in Pliny’s tale of Zeuxis’s grapes a truth about human desire. Lacan didn’t regard Zeuxis’ painting as a true trompe l’oeil, but reserved that title for the work painted by his younger rival Parrhasius, who had challenged him in a contest. Parrhasius won the competition by painting a curtain so convincing that Zeuxis asked for it to be drawn aside to show him the picture.
For Lacan, this work is the true trompe l’oeil, indicative of the shape of longing, because it depends on an absence concealed behind the surface of the paint. In Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), Lerner presents the reader of his novel with a string of Parrhasian curtains, not least in the novel’s own tricksy, Sebald-like inclusion of photographs. Replicating the same logic of tantalisation as the painted veil which cannot be drawn aside, they hold out the promise of illustration while, at the same time, frustrating or complicating it. One photograph features Franco on a balcony mid-speech, the dictator’s face masked entirely by his folder of notes. Another shows the interior of the Alhambra, which the novel’s protagonist tries to see, but by various misdirections never actually gets to visit. Another nod to Pliny – and also perhaps to the black canvases of Ad Reinhardt – comes in the Madrid gallery whose paintings are shrouded in black cloth as a kind of impromptu ‘moment of silence’ for the victims of the Atocha bombings: ‘People were looking at the covered paintings as if they weren’t covered, looking long and thoughtfully at the black felt and then reading the placard. I wondered if any of them would sell.’ In the words of one of the love poems-cum-elegies in Mean Free Path, ‘funny, how the black / Canvas grows realistic’.