Adorno’s ‘ Reflections From a Damaged Life' culminate in a twisting negation: ‘the more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously and so calamitously it is delivered up to the world.’ In Adam’s long, dialectical sentences, Lerner pays homage to Adorno’s involutions while affectionately mocking them, transposing them into the mundane and petty world of the over-educated enjoying ‘the package tours offered by late empire’. One apparent influence on the novel is the Adorno of Minima Moralia (1951), the subtitle of which Lerner alludes to when Adam describes himself as a ‘bit player in the looped infomercial for the damaged life’. Adam finds the puzzled reaction of the museum guards, torn between these two thoughts, more powerful than ‘any pieta, deposition or annunciation.’ Lerner’s attempt to depict a failure of affect- in both art and life -is at once cleverer and more moving than the soporose postmodern flatness that this theme usually provokes. He remarks that the only prestige the museum’s guards enjoy is derived ‘precisely from the belief that such triumphs could legitimately move a man to tears,’ yet anyone who actually wept at the sight of a painting might also be deranged enough to damage them. ‘Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artwork and the claims made on their behalf the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of the distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.’ This bravura opening scene, funny and sad in equal measure, showcases some of Adam’s best quasi-aphoristic sentences as Lerner plays up his narrator’s contradictions: ‘I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had,’ he muses while watching a man weep in front of paintings in Madrid’s Museo Del Prado. Every morning he wakes up, gets stoned, takes mood stabilising pills, and then proceeds to look at the same painting without being moved. The novel’s protagonist, Adam Gordon, is on a fellowship in Madrid to write ‘a long research-driven poem’ about the Spanish Civil War. This novel probes the purpose of poetry, ‘deadest of all media’, and art itself in a world where aesthetic creation fails to do much more than reflect and re-inscribe the structures of an unjust society.
After three collections of poetry - most recently the extraordinary Mean Free Path - Lerner has produced a Künstlerroman that, rather than charting the development of the sensitive artist, repeatedly questions the value of his project. What would it mean to have a profound experience of art? This is the question posed by Ben Lerner’s debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station.
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