Back to the Future

Just as America has left an unassailable mark on Western culture, so too has Walt Whitman left an unassailable mark on America. Well before blossoming into the ubiquitous poet that is revered today, Whitman had no reservations about his own destiny: he was to become America’s poet, just as Shakespeare was Britain’s. Indeed, the grandeur of Whitman’s hubris, coupled with his poetic vision of what he thought America could be, paved the way for contemporary Western literature. In similar fashion, Ben Lerner seeks to establish himself as the Whitman of our modern-day in his novel, 10:04. Lerner attempts to speak on behalf of not only a nation, but an entire generation. Like Whitman before him, Lerner is channeling the past into the present, posturing himself as the voice of a nation while at the same time projecting himself into the future. However, Lerner has his own reservations about Whitman, and in his attempts to emulate the great poet he becomes aware of the fallacies in trying to be the voice of millions. Lerner’s chief critique of Whitman is that in his attempts to write for everyone, he in fact wrote for no one in particular. In 10:04, Lerner establishes himself as a Whitmanesque poet who is dedicated to voicing the universal American experience, while at the same time forgoing Whitman’s universal ‘we’ in favor of an intimate ‘I’ in Lerner himself. By including intimate, mundane, and even embarrassing details about his own lived experience, Lerner is able to embrace the distinctive functions of autofiction, capture the American consciousness, and evade what he considers to be the great pitfalls of Whitman’s literary anonymity.

In the film Dead Poets Society, a young student describes Walt Whitman as “a sweaty-toothed madman” (00:56:58). Indeed, a madman he was. In Whitman’s preface to his monumental poetic work, Leaves of Grass, he brings forward the notion that every country should have a national poet, a writer capable of endearing the reader to the land and history of the country they live in (Whitman 1045). Whitman saw the American people as the very soul of the nation, and as such it was the national Bard’s duty to capture the consciousness of the country in his poetry - to craft a “Great psalm of the Republic” (1049-1050). Whitman did not think that the poet was above the common man; rather, like an elected politician, it was the divine impetus of the poet to speak on behalf of the people entrusted to him. To achieve such a monumental task, Whitman undertook the lifelong course of living in the shoes of the everyday American, irrespective of race, class, sex, or trade (1049). If Whitman was to speak on behalf of the nation, then he had to become the nation. By working and living alongside those in a variety of trades - carpenters, fishermen, nurses - Whitman was able to observe the common American citizen. In his poem “Song of Myself”, Whitman outlines the poetic philosophy that would later characterize his legacy as a writer: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (1062). As America’s Bard, Whitman saw no distinction between himself and the American citizen; his experience was their experience, just as theirs was his.

While this lofty approach served Whitman well in the halls of literary history, for his universality is the chief concept of his writing that he is remembered for, it nonetheless resulted in a sort of hubris that would later characterize not only Whitman, but America itself. Whitman saw America as “the world’s greatest poem”, and additionally, he saw what the nation could become if properly guided (1048). Whitman’s goal was to project his poetry into the future, to create “the secular Bible for the United States”, ushering in an America that was, and was to come (Clune). Indeed, under Whitman’s poetic guidance, he projected himself and the nation into the future, forging the paths of both American literature and American culture. In 10:04, Ben Lerner’s narrator sees himself as a Whitmanesque poet as well, endeavoring to “project [himself] into several futures simultaneously” (Lerner 4). Lerner is looking into the past to Whitman, while also looking ahead. Both men hold that the “past and present and future are not disjoined but joined” (Whitman 1053), thus creating a poetic and temporal synthesis between Lerner and Whitman’s writing.

It is no secret that Ben Lerner finds Walt Whitman inspiring, for in 10:04 alone the poet’s name is mentioned no less than twenty times. In a recent poetry collection of Lerner’s titled The Light, he includes poems that are uniquely Whitmanesque in execution. One poem in particular, “The Dark Threw Patches Down Upon Me Also”, is written in a kind of blank verse, paying little mind to prose and strict poetic rules, rather featuring long strands of verse that overflow, mingle, and collide into hybrid emergences (Nathan). These strands of verse overflow the page, “they openly or formally inveigh against one another, casting lyrical aspersions or doubts” (Nathan). In true Whitmanesque fashion, Lerner implies an important question to his reader in the unconventional structure of these verses: is experience continuous? Like Whitman himself, Lerner is suggesting that experience is continuous, that the “past and present and future are not disjoined but joined” (Whitman 1053). Whitman’s writing, his entire poetic philosophy, operated upon this very basis - that he not only spoke for all peoples, but for all times as well. The cry of Whitman across the ages could be distilled to this very sentiment, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (1062).

Before zeroing in on the American individual, Lerner takes aim at the American consciousness. 10:04 is bursting with cultural landmarks, events, and eras that every American can claim as their own to some degree: 9/11, the Challenger Shuttle explosion, the Reagan Era, and pop-cultural phenomena such as the film Back to the Future. Indeed, there are many times in which Lerner takes his audience ‘back to the future’, to a time before many of these monumental events shaped American history and the nation’s people, only to usher us back into the present. In these wide-sweeping moments of historical significance, Lerner is explicitly Whitmanesque in his execution. For instance, when describing the Challenger disaster, Lerner directly addresses “the schoolchildren of America”, the very children who, like Lerner, would have experienced the event in their classrooms (Lerner 15). Like Whitman, Lerner projects himself back and forth in time, assuring the American people that “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence; / I project myself - also I return - I am with you, and know how it is” (168). Even in his description of an American icon, President Ronald Reagan, a man that Lerner despises, he tries to speak to both sides of the political aisle as Whitman would have done. Like Whitman, Lerner’s “work is a response to pressure to not take sides” (Cline). Indeed, though Lerner himself considers Reagan “a mass murderer”, he nonetheless bridges the gap between Americans by confessing that it is because of Ronald Reagan and Peggy Noonan that he became a poet (Lerner 112-116). However, in all of these instances it must be noted that, though Lerner inserts himself into history like Whitman, he nonetheless does so within the context of his own personal experiences - something lacking in Whitman’s work.

In order to speak for all peoples, one must know all peoples. Just as Whitman condescended to the common man in his pursuit of universality, so too does Lerner’s narrator in 10:04. When asked by his agent what his new book will be about, the nameless narrator, a stand-in for Lerner himself, answers that he will be “a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid” (4). Across the novel, there are a variety of instances wherein the narrator condescends to those abiding in ‘the vulnerable grid’. Early in the novel, the narrator invites a young male protester into his apartment to use his shower, wash his clothes, and share a meal with him (44-50). Despite the narrator’s admission that he is an incompetent cook at best, the protester nonetheless delights over the meal they eat, leading to the pair sharing in rich fellowship afterwards. They discuss police brutality, addiction, traveling, and the seemingly ubiquitous masculine experience of “assuming that every male stranger past puberty was a physical and psychosocial threat” (48). Lerner’s narrator, comfortable in his bourgeois existence, has very little in common with the anti-capitalist sitting across the table from him, and yet they still manage to find not only one, but several points of connection between themselves.

This pattern of condescending to the common American is persistent within the novel, and is a key way in which the narrator attempts to identify with Whitman. For example, not long after hosting the protestor, the narrator finds himself in another deep and intimate conversation, this time with a young woman named Noor (99). The very fact that this conversation takes place during working hours in The Park Slope Food Coop, a locally sourced supermarket funded by its patrons, serves to illustrate the narrator’s desire to be associated with the common American. The narrator, like Whitman, is a man of some means and prestige, and though he could be shopping and serving his time elsewhere, he chooses to do so among ‘the vulnerable grid’.

Indeed, it is no coincidence that, only hours after picking up Whitman’s memoirs, the narrator in 10:04 tries to form a connection with the Spanish workers that are fixing his roof (172). The narrator and the roofers could not be further apart, and yet he tries to bond with them over coffee and drinks all the same. At the realization that he, a poet, shares so little in common with these men, a form of embarrassment begins to take hold of the narrator. Compared with the roofer’s work, the work of a poet “could be hard to tell apart from leisure, from loafing” (172). Lerner’s use of the word loafing in this instance is crucial, for according to Lerner himself in an interview, “‘Loafing’ is the key word. That’s Whitman’s word” (Clune). Lerner is meditating on the leisure-labor divide in America, wherein he on the one hand wants so desperately to be included in the folds of the common American, only to realize that such a chasm is not so easily bridged. Poets are at once doing the most important work that can be done in society - forging the country’s culture and future - while at the same time, like Whitman, sitting “under a flowering tree, taking his ease, watching people bathe” (Clune). It is at this point that Lerner’s narrator begins to doubt the effectiveness of Whitman, realizing that the “poet is doing work that’s more important than the work he might do in the mundane economy, but it’s also indistinguishable from leisure” (Clune).

However, not everything that Whitman did was under the guise of leisure. During the Civil War, Whitman found himself serving as a nurse, a station that brought him closer to the common American man in ways more revealing and profound than had been the case in any other industry he tried his hand at. Whitman took an “almost sensual pleasure in the material richness of the surrounding carnage” that he witnessed all around him in the Civil War (Lerner 168-169). While reading Whitman’s memoir, Specimen Days, Lerner’s narrator perceives that Whitman exploited the horrors and raw emotions of the Civil War for the furtherance of his own artistic vision: “the delight he took in the willingness of young men to die for the union whose epic bard he felt he was destined to be” (168). Alan Grossman, Lerner’s mentor, has his own criticisms regarding Whitman’s intentions while serving as a Civil War nurse. Grossman contends that, as a nurse, Whitman could insert himself into the history books, not as a person but as a spokesperson for America: “that he could tend to the wounded of both sides… because taking sides would compromise his claim to universality” (Clune). By loving the young boys on both sides, who each gave up their bodies and blood to “refresh the tree of liberty”, Whitman was able to be the voice of a divided America (Lerner 169). Whitman cannot choose a side, for that would betray his destiny, his call to universality. Whitman must “be less a historical person” and more “a marker for democratic personhood” (168). Indeed, Whitman became a nobody in order to become an everyman.

Lerner is critical of Whitman’s approach to poetry, both as a person and through his narrator in 10:04. After spending some time in Whitman’s Specimen Days, Lerner’s narrator remarks that the memoir is “bizarre”, that Whitman’s overwhelming desire to outpace the tides of history has resulted in a biography that is “an interesting failure” (168). There are no personal or intimate details about Whitman ‘the man’ in Specimen Days, only vague facts that can be attributed to anyone. Specimen Days fails as a poem “because it wants to become real and can only become prose” (194). Indeed, Whitman’s obsession with his universal ‘I’ renders him in the end a faceless, nameless entity that must empty his poetry of himself if he is to effectively represent an America that is increasingly divided. There is a sense in which Whitman embodies the very best and worst of autofiction as a genre. By foregoing his personal identity in favor of the universal ‘I’ and ‘we’, Whitman creates a fiction about himself that has little in the end to do with his own life at all.

Lerner realizes, unlike Whitman, that if poetry is to be great, it cannot possibly appeal to everyone who reads it. In an interview about his essay titled “The Hatred of Poetry”, Lerner criticizes individuals who think that great poetry must appeal to everyone. Lerner goes on to say, “The main demand associated with lyric poetry is that an individual poet can or must produce both a song that’s irreducibly individual—it’s the expression of their specific humanity, because it’s this intense, internal experience—and that is also shareable by everyone, because it can be intelligible to all social persons, so it can unite a community in its difference” (Clune). Later in the interview, Lerner concludes that such an end is beyond the scope of what poetry can do. Lerner’s statement is not only a critique of individuals who assert that poetry must have a universal appeal if it is to be considered great, but a critique of poets like Whitman who try to convince the whole world that they “know how it is” (Lerner 168). A popular critique of Whitman, by both Lerner and his mentor Grossman, is that by Whitman claiming to be the “poet of both master and the slave”, he is embroiling himself in a contradiction that he can never unravel (Clune). Whitman’s insistence that an America as divided as it was during the Civil War could be bridged by one man’s poetic presence is “embarrassingly universal” (Brophy). According to Brophy, Whitman’s ambitions were so sweeping and grandiose that they have left an indelible mark upon American culture, for better or for worse.

Indeed, the critique of Whitman lies like a shadow over Lerner’s essay on “The Hatred of Poetry” and his novel 10:04. However, it is to be noted that Lerner does not dispense of Whitman’s work entirely; on the contrary, he is deeply inspired by Whitman. Lerner does not posture himself as ‘Whitman without the baggage’, not in the slightest. Lerner, primarily through his narrator in 10:04, takes what he values from Whitman and goes ‘back to the future’ with it - thus forming a poetic vision of America that is only possible because of Whitman’s legacy. Lerner builds his novel off of Whitman, not in spite of him. Only, rather than positioning his writing in the form of the universal ‘I’ and ‘we’, as Whitman does, Lerner takes on the role of the universal ‘me’ in his novel. In this way, Lerner is furthering the legacy of Whitman while at the same time dispensing with the issues he sees in Whitman’s work. Lerner’s 10:04 tries to speak to the American consciousness as Whitman did in his own writing, albeit by using the intimate details of his own life rather than vague abstractions. 10:04 ought to be seen as the thoughtful “interplay of factual and fictional narration, as well as not only the link but also the difference between author and character, and between life and art” (Effe 739-740). By employing the fundamental and experimental facets of autofiction as a genre, Lerner is able to produce that which is truly helpful to the common American by blending universal truths with his own experiences, such as his recounting of the Challenger disaster. According to Lerner, that is his chief aim in all his writing: not to appeal to everyone, but to produce that which is helpful, even if only to a select few (743). 10:04 may not appeal to everyone, and that is just fine for Lerner, because neither did Whitman, try as he did.

Just as times change, people, and the help they need from their fellow man, change as well. In this way, by helping the modern man where he is at, Lerner’s narrator is striving to be a contemporary successor to Whitman; not in an abstract and universal way, but in an intimate way. The most profoundly intimate example of Lerner’s Whitmanesque care for the common American man in 10:04 comes not long after he reads about Whitman’s exploits as a nurse. While at a party, Lerner’s narrator and an intern have a powerful reaction to some drugs they are given, so much so that the young intern falls ill (Lerner 186). Though he is in a remote part of the country and surrounded by complete strangers, the intern among them, Lerner’s narrator takes it upon himself to care for the intern (187-191). In this scene, it is not a remote and universal Whitmanesque presence that cares for the intern in his distress, but the flesh and bone of Lerner’s narrator, indeed Lerner himself. Through its author-character, “10:04 depicts a way of being in the present that is sensible to the impact humans have on others, including close friends, distant people” (Effe 446). The touching scene is replete with personal intimacies shared between the two men, wherein the narrator comforts the intern and talks softly with him until he falls asleep (Lerner 191). It is a hauntingly human moment between two real individuals, rather unlike the exchanges between the anonymous Bard of the nation and nameless faces on both sides of the Civil War. All the same, the irony of the moment is not lost on the narrator: “Whitman would have kissed him… would have taken the intern’s fear of the loss of identity as seriously as a dying soldier’s” (190). Indeed, the narrator does take time to “kiss him on the forehead”, as Whitman would have done (191). In Lerner’s preservation of the intern’s identity, so contrary to Whitman’s vague treatment of the soldiers he was treating, he actually addresses the young man’s fear of losing his identity by giving him a name and a face. Lerner is not exploiting the young intern in favor of some literary renown among posterity - he is simply caring for him, no strings attached. Lerner, as the Whitman of his day, dares to step into history and take care of those who inhabit the world - not nameless projections, but real souls. In this way, Lerner’s ‘me’ becomes the more stirring and effective cultural alternative to Whitman’s universal ‘I’.

In 10:04, Ben Lerner aims to do what Walt Whitman set out to accomplish many generations before him: to be the voice of a nation. Lerner, though he “had been hard on Whitman” during his residency, begins to see more of the man in himself as life goes on (194). In the early days of America, Whitman looked at the same East River that Lerner himself would later gaze across (193). Whitman was looking across an ocean of time to those readers, such as Lerner, who would pick up his work in their own times, and in their own ways, to finish the legacy that he started. In 10:04, Lerner does not obliterate the past, nor does he dismantle Whitman. No, by amending in his own writing the things that Lerner found fault in with Whitman, the two men make a pact, “a kind of peace” with one another (194). Somewhere in the halls of time, Whitman is calling out to Lerner from underneath a dimly lit lamplight, saying “I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is”, to which Lerner responds, “I’m basically there. Chill, I’m basically there” (239-240).

---

Photo by Matt Antonioli, Unsplash

Reference:

Brophy, Kevin John. “From execrable to memorable: Ben Lerner’s essay on the hatred of poetry.” The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/from-execrable-to-memorable-ben-lerners-essay-on-the-hatred-of-poetry-63413. Accessed 3 Dec. 2023.

Clune, Michael. “The Hatred of Poetry: An Interview with Ben Lerner.” The Paris Review, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/06/30/the-hatred-of-poetry-an-interview-with-ben-lerner/. Accessed 3 Dec. 2023.

Dead Poets Society. Directed by Peter Weir. Distributed by Touchstone Pictures, 1989.

Effe, Alexandra. “Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and the “Utopian Glimmer of [Auto]fiction.” Johns Hopkins University Press, vol. 67, issue 4, Winter 2021, pp. 738-754.

Lerner, Ben. 10:04. McClelland & Stewart, 2015.

Nathan, Jesse. “Short Conversations With Poets: Ben Lerner.” McSweeney’s, https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ben-lerner. Accessed 3 Dec. 2023.

Whitman, Walt. “Preface to Leaves of Grass.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Beginnings to 1865, Tenth Ed., edited by Robert S. Levine, W.W. Norton & Company, 2023, pages 1044-1062.