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I’ve been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

Ben Lerner

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Building

Maybe now if you’re not an exhibitionist you’re private. Or maybe it’s just that for a lot of people – sometimes in interesting ways, sometimes in stupid ways – there’s no division between the art object and what surrounds it.
BEN LERNER
Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. “Ari” appears on the edge of this book a couple of times – but on the edge, she’s never in it, even if she’s a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.
BEN LERNER

Real
I like to think – knowing that it’s an enabling fiction – of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn’t the only measure of value.
BEN LERNER

Knowing
Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass “conceptualism” that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.
BEN LERNER

Contemporary Historical
I wasn’t aware I’d write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.
BEN LERNER
I usually see the word “metafiction” applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.
BEN LERNER

Order
I didn’t want to write another book about fraudulence.

BEN LERNER

I didn’t want to write another book about fraudulence.
BEN LERNER
Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me – that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art – emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there’s no escape from it, no outside.

BEN LERNER

Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me – that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art – emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there’s no escape from it, no outside.
BEN LERNER
I don’t think “I’m going to publish this as fiction” but I think “I’m going to tell this story to a friend” and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it’s already happened.
BEN LERNER
I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it’s imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it’s an antidote to despair.
BEN LERNER
Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.

BEN LERNER

Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost.
BEN LERNER

Novelist
I’m defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.
BEN LERNER

Dying Genre Literary
Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.
BEN LERNER

Offers
Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.
BEN LERNER

Firefly West Coast
I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity.

BEN LERNER

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity.
BEN LERNER

Culture
The problem is that if you’re self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn’t something lost – some kind of presence? You’re distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.

BEN LERNER

The problem is that if you’re self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn’t something lost – some kind of presence? You’re distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.
BEN LERNER

Self Trying

I’ve been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

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More Ben Lerner Quotes