Writer Ben Lerner: How Voices Come into a Novel | Louisiana Channel

Описание: American writer Ben Lerner on how society shapes our identity. “Our voice is this tissue of contradictions that is influenced by family, mass media, and political speech.”

Starting as a poet, Ben Lerner calls himself an “accidental novelist”. “One of the things I love about the novel is that it is a curatorial form; you can dramatize encounters with poems, and you can dramatize encounters with works of visual art. I am not in control of what genre I work in. You have to write what is given to you to write.”

One of the things Lerner loves about literature is “the way it makes clear how the voice is a corporate technology. Corporate in the sense of collective. Our voice is this tissue of contradictions that is influenced by family, mass media, and political speech, and one of the things a novel can do is reveal how many voices go into a voice,” he says.

In his novels, Lerner depicts “the circulations of language in a way that social forces circulate on an individual level”. “The way we parrot speak from one medium to another, even in our most intimate exchanges”. He wants to show the way being an individual is not having a voice that is protected from the world; “it is actually the way you manage the collective voices that pass through you”, he says.

Lerner’s novel ‘10.04’ is full of examples of characters realizing that something they took for granted in their life as fact turned out to be fiction. “I was interested in those moments when the world reorients itself as a result of realizing that something you accepted as an established fact ended up as fiction. It is a constellation of those moments that becomes the tapestry of the work more than a linear plot.

In his autobiographical novel ‘The Topeka School’ Lerner wanted to show “the theatre of extreme speech” and how he could bring them in relation to one another. “It would be versions of extreme speech that I experienced like high school debates or white kids freestyle in the Midwest in the 90ies”. “So I got very interested in how some of my linguistic experiences as an adolescent kind of opened on to problems of political speech in the present”.


Ben Lerner (born 1979) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas he has a BA in political science and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has received many honors, including being a Guggenheim Fellow and a MacArthur Fellow. Lerner’s novels include ‘The Topeka School’ (2019), ‘10:04’ (2014), and ‘Leaving the Atocha Station’ (2011). His poetry collections include ‘No Art’ (2016), ‘Mean Free Path’ (2010) and ‘Angle of Yaw’ (2006). Ben Lerner’s monograph, ‘The Hatred of Poetry’, was published in 2016. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016

Ben Lerner was interviewed by his Danish translator Tonny Vorm in connection with the Louisiana Literature festival in August 2022 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark.

Camera: Rasmus Quistgaard
Edit: Signe Boe Pedersen
Produced by Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2022.
Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet, C.L. Davids Fond og Samling, and Fritz Hansen


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