Of course, Adam thinks – or often claims to think – of himself as a fraud and a failure in a less redeemable sense, as a talentless fuck-up halfheartedly practicing a bankrupt art. So I would say that, yes, to a large degree it’s a novel about – and an instance of – the unstable relationship between identity and language, but that the ‘faltering’ you describe can also be generative. As he puts it at one point, ‘it was less like I failed to understand that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds.’ Similarly, while Adam fears that most actual poems are failures, he treats those failures as negative figures for the abstract potentiality of the medium: ‘the more abysmal the experience of the actual the greater the implied heights of the virtual’. For instance, his tenuous grasp of Spanish isn’t just a source of anxiety it also allows him to experience a kind of ambiguity and polysemy even in mundane exchanges.

Is the novel in some ways the story of a faltering relationship between an individual and language itself?īL: You’re right that he’s beset by failures – but he also seems to believe that linguistic and artistic failure can catalyze a certain experience of plenitude and possibility. TH: In your novel Adam seems beset by failures of language, both in his at first tenuous grasp of Spanish, and with an ability to capture experience in poetic form. Here he spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about the fictions we construct about ourselves, the relationship between poetry and breakdown, the ‘elasticity’ of the novel and the generative properties of failure. Ben Lerner’s poem, ‘Dilation’ will also be appearing in the next issue of Granta, Medicine. The novel tells of Adam Gordon, an American poet on fellowship in Madrid who finds himself inventing alternate histories for himself and incurring the disapproval of his Spanish hosts. Ben Lerner has received numerous awards for his three collections of poetry – The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path – and most recently has made his debut as a novelist, with Leaving the Atocha Station, to great acclaim.

Ben lerner atocha