Lerner is also an acclaimed poet and 10:04, like its predecessor, is narrated by a poet-author (this time called Ben), who lives out a thoughtful but fairly routine existence in New York, visiting art galleries, writing fiction and hanging out with friends. Call it autofiction, metafiction, or the post-Sebaldian novel, Ben Lerner’s 10:04 slots neatly into this genre, treading a fine line between the true and the invented.ġ0:04 is the follow-up to Lerner’s first novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), which documented the trials of a poet called Adam as he popped pills and procrastinated while on fellowship in Spain.
In a certain line of recent fiction, the boundary between these domains is frequently and deliberately sabotaged: think of Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2012), Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (2008-11), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011). Yet Freud proved himself remarkably contemporary in his insistence on the proximity between the biographical and the fictitious, the remembered and the invented. Reading it now, Freud’s theory can seem a little forced, with the act of writing contrived as a means to an end. But unlike the child, the writer’s work is destined to fulfill a wish, one triggered by the more fulsome memory of childhood – a time before the wish had cause to exist. The writer, like the child, deals in make-believe. Creative writing, he argued, was a form of daydreaming, an adult extension of child’s play. In his essay ‘The Creative Writer and Daydreaming’ (1908), Freud described the writer as a ‘dreamer in broad daylight’.
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