The Thinking Novel: Theme-and-Variations Form in the Contemporary Novel of Ideas

Late in Ben Lerner's 2014 novel 10:04, a Lerner-like professor of poetry meets with a graduate student who he suspects is having a mental breakdown. The student, Calvin, is a little intense, a little jittery, and he seems to have absorbed a set of ideas about the world a little too deeply. He knows, from class, that "the materiality of writing destroys its sense." He knows that "the FBI is fucking with our phones" and that his body is being flooded with chemicals "from a million points." His girlfriend has left him because she doesn't understand the radical implications of Deleuze's "body without organs." The professor (the novel's narrator, who we know only as "Ben") attempts "to reassimilate Calvin's frightening energy to the academic," recommends therapy, and at one point "involuntarily visualize[s] punching him in the throat" if necessary.1 Yet afterwards, Ben is conflicted: isn't Calvin right about the world, right to be alarmed? In 10:04, moments like this fall under the sign of the novel's epigraph and messianic refrain, which describes a "world to come" in which "everything will be as it is now, just a little different." Calvin's thoughts are Ben's thoughts transfigured, just as Ben is Lerner transfigured, transposed to the familiar yet different world of his fiction. Beyond that chain of uncertain resemblances, the thoughts that Lerner himself is endorsing in this scene are hard to pin down, and that slipperiness is the point.

10:04's layered refusal of a stable site of thought is characteristic of what Timothy Bewes calls, in Free Indirect (2022), a new era of "postfiction." In what has become a polarizing landmark of recent literary theory, Bewes claims that literature is "evolving" beyond the strictures and hermeneutic availability of fictionality and towards what he describes as a new kind of thought.2 In developing this argument, Bewes makes a number of pronouncements that, confided in private and in a low enough voice, might cause a listener to scan the room for exits. After comparing the novel's mode of thought to that of cinema, Bewes writes that this suggestion is "audacious, not least in its insistence ... that thought is possible."3 But the thought that he imagines is, in fact, not possible — or, at least, not accessible. Elsewhere, he claims that the contemporary novel "has reached the point of bringing into being — inventing — a thought that cannot be inhabited subjectively."4 Whence the title, which takes free indirect discourse's "unspeakable sentences" as the model for a distinctly literary mode of thought that resists any positionality.5 Like 10:04's Calvin, Bewes has rooted his argument in Deleuzian metaphor and in a messianic theory of literariness.6 Even in the peer-reviewed venues in which such ideas are routine, Free Indirect has raised eyebrows. In an early review, Bruce Robbins suggests that Bewes's resistance to interpretation is a misguided protest against the exaggerated threat of critics who wish to read "the novel as making unambiguous political statements."7 More recently, Walter Benn Michaels has taken pointed aim at Free Indirect's notion of uninhabitable thoughts, which he sees as so vacuously detached from any writerly or readerly practice as to render the category of literature meaningless.8

While it tends towards over-mystification as a theory of literature, Free Indirect nonetheless provides a valuable redescription of experimental twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction, grounded in the shared commitment to refining literary thought. The contemporary authors that Bewes treats — a partial catalogue in his introduction lists Lerner alongside Jesse Ball, Teju Cole, Dennis Cooper, Rachel Cusk, Renee Gladman, James Kelman, Tao Lin, Valeria Luiselli, Ali Smith, and Zadie Smith9 — form a "loose avant-garde" that has often been grouped together under the nebulous label of autofiction.10 That moniker has proven unhelpful, both because it borrows from an only tangentially related French tradition, and because of the emphasis it places on the superficial resemblance between author and character. This leads to an interesting tension when the label is applied to an author whose work is patently non-autobiographical. Cole, for instance, has understandably objected to the categorization of Open City (2011) as autofiction — and to the implication that he is autobiographically reflected in its narrator, Julius, who is credibly accused of rape at the end of the novel.11 The book's stubborn presence on lists of autofiction would seem to rely, most generously, on the fact that Julius's first-person musings on art and history read a lot like Cole's essays.12 In that sense, the revelation of Julius's guilt performs a move that aligns it with, rather than distances it from, a more straightforwardly "autofictional" book like 10:04. Each of these novels is invested in the irreducible difference between authorial and narratorial thought, and each signals this difference by playing an ostensible resemblance against a mounting sense of the narrator's status as a fictional creature.

I want to suggest here that the nebulous categories of "autofiction" or "postfiction" can be productively reframed as a resurgent interest in the novel of ideas — a venerable genre, but one that 20^th century Anglophone criticism has saddled with the stigma of telling, not showing. By inviting and then conspicuously troubling the resemblance between author and narrator, novels like 10:04 and Open City pre-emptively counter that charge of didacticism. The new novel of ideas is not a set of philosophical musings camouflaged as fiction (although at some points it may read this way); nor is it a narrativized philosophical dilemma, a trolley problem expanded into a novel. Instead, it is characterized by the literary mode of thought that it brings to bear on its subjects, an effect frequently achieved by playing more recognizable kinds of thinking against each other. As James Wood puts it in a 2012 review of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, "this is a kind of writing that accommodates variety — narrative and essay, the concrete and the theoretical, the general and the metaphorical."13 When this variety of registers is used to treat a single topic or idea (Wood cites "that quick narrowing, from thinking about the sociology of death to an actual corpse, the author's father"), the effect is often one of incommensurability. In the encounter with Calvin's mania in 10:04, or in the revelation of Julius's rape in Open City, the more abstract ideas of the novels threaten to dissolve into the stark materiality of their utterance.

In this essay, I argue that the "thought" of the contemporary novel of ideas is best characterized by a structural device that I will call the theme-and-variations form. These are novels that replace conventional plot with the repetition and refinement of a theme or themes across multiple registers, achieving their distinctly literary mode of thought through the incommensurable interplay of both direct and implied ideas. In doing so, they make full use of the resources of fictionality — namely the ability to index or "instantiate" unspoken meanings, which Bewes takes to be the dominant "organizational and ideological structure of the novel" — while also pointing to a kind of thought that transcends critical decipherability.14 In the musical usage I am drawing upon, theme refers to the initial melodic phrase that a composition proceeds to elaborate in a series of contrasting variations, each one expanding upon the melody's latent rhythmic and harmonic possibilities. This, to me, is a useful analogue for a certain kind of literary thought; and in drawing from musical terminology, I hope to move beyond the common understanding of "theme" as the topic a novel is about, a usage that tends to imply that novels are a sort of decipherable commentary encrypted in metaphor. Instead, the musical sense of the term points to the kind of thinking that takes place in aesthetic form itself, leaving the theme unchanged but revealing new sense within it. Approximations or characterizations of this effect may be put forward, in the way that a musical structure (or a logical proof) may also be described; but the theme-and-variations form's "thought" is ultimately coextensive with its presentation in the novel. In my view this is not a matter of "subjective uninhabitability" (any more than a proof or a symphony or a book of philosophy could be called uninhabitable), but rather of the novel claiming a privileged status as a site of original thought. This raises the question of what it would mean to read theme-and-variations novels as theoretical statements in their own right, and of what interpretive duty is left for, or opened up to, the literary critic.

How Does a Novel Think?

The question of how the novel thinks has been the subject of a robust body of literary criticism, of which Free Indirect is the most recent major entry. Nancy Armstrong's How Novels Think (2005) uses the premise of literary thought (which she, like Bewes, takes as a radical suggestion) to retell the history of the English novel as the development of a cultural ideological mechanism. The novel, for Armstrong, represents "a way of thinking in its own right, the culture's way of maintaining, upgrading, and perpetuating its most basic categories in the face of pressures that changing social conditions bring to bear on them."15 Although her study focuses on the nineteenth century British novel, Armstrong cautions that "new varieties of novel cannot help taking up the project of universalizing the individual subject. That, simply put, is what novels do."16 Her hope for a literary thought that illuminates more collective ways of being points, necessarily, beyond the novel form. In other words: to stop thinking like a subject, literature must also stop thinking like a novel.

Armstrong's account of the novel as a potent ideological tool is a refinement of a long-dominant strain of literary theory that has located the novel's most meaningful capacity for original thought in its reflection, development, and reification of a (typically bourgeois) ideological worldview. This is the underlying thesis of Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel (1957), which is refined with Marxist dialectics in Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious (1981), and with Foucauldian discursive analysis in Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction (1990). Under this critical lens, a novel that is openly concerned with developing ideas becomes either directly or covertly propagandistic: the novel of ideas fades from view precisely for speaking aloud the thoughts that a more subtle object of criticism might encode or illuminate in the cultural unconscious.

When a novel's capacity for direct thought is treated as a privileged subject for critical attention, that privilege is typically located in a claim for the novel's status as a social form. Martha Nussbaum voices this position in Love's Knowledge (1990), an important outlier in the critical canon on literary thought in which she describes the novel as uniquely suited to certain kinds of direct philosophical inquiry. Nussbaum argues that philosophy and literature are engaged in the same "single and general question [of] how human beings should live" and that the formal attunement of novels to the "noncommensurability" of value, the particularity of perception, the "ethical value of the emotions," and the workings of chance allow for intellectual contributions that philosophy in its conventional forms is not capable of.17 This catalogue of literary affordances provides a useful map of the registers most frequently traversed by the theme-and-variations novel, yet it also betrays a reduction of literature to the social and subjective processes that it mimetically reproduces. Nussbaum's humanist framing is ill-equipped to counter suspicions of a critic alert to literature's ideological functions; and it is inadequate for describing the thought of the new novel of ideas, which is often marked by an equal suspicion of subjectivity.

Devoting significant attention to Nussbaum's seemingly naïve account of literature, Dorothy J. Hale's The Novel and the New Ethics (2020) proposes to bridge the camps of humanism and ideology critique in an ambitious theoretical reframing of twentieth century and contemporary fiction. Hale's project — beginning with her earlier Social Formalism (1998) — traces a broad cultural investment in the ability of fiction to produce ethical encounters with otherness. This "novelistic aesthetics of alterity" begins with the mimetic orchestration of social positionality established by Henry James's theory of point of view, and it continues today in works like Zadie Smith's On Beauty or J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, where the novelist's engagement with otherness also points reflexively back at the contingency of anything that might be described as the novel's own thinking.18 "The novel quickly teaches us that the novel's idea of an idea is different than the philosopher's," Hale says of On Beauty, and the slipperiness of this difference is the reason that the literary encounter with otherness is valorized by both liberal humanist philosophers (like Nussbaum) and poststructuralist philosophers (like Judith Butler) alike.19 For the former, literature is capable of staging ethical encounters while accounting for the thorny human elements that the academic discourse of philosophy might miss; for the latter, the act of narrative itself lays bare the linguistic process by which we constitute ourselves in opposition to the other.

Is the simulation of an ethical encounter (either mimetically depicted, or enacted by narration itself) the only thing that makes the novel's idea different from the philosopher's? I would argue that the novel's "social formalism" — its mobilization of social positionality and narrative address — represents an important but incomplete foundation for approaching the novel's ability to produce original thought. To read novelistic thinking as fundamentally social is to risk reducing its unspoken ideas to a lesson in contingency: no ideas but in people. Contingency is the common denominator of Nussbaum's focus on chance, emotion, and particularity, and it is the bridge by which Hale is able to skillfully connect Love's Knowledge to a poststructuralist ethics. Yet for a novel to produce ideas about a less meta-philosophical area of interest, contingency can only be a possible technique — one that both the writer and the critic must be finely attuned to. But what kind of thought does such a novel produce?

In Free Indirect, Bewes offers a surprising answer to this question by suggesting that the contemporary novel should be seen as "itself a mode of thought."20 As in Armstrong's model, Bewes's conception of literary "thinking" falls outside of the author's conscious control. But in contrast to Armstrong, Bewes suggests that novelistic thought points to a kind of meaning that is resilient to (rather than subservient to) ideology and the process of subject-formation it entails. In his account, the two established critical modes for interpreting fiction's ideas are to read them as either the direct or indirect expressions of a knowable subject: that is, we may take a direct statement made by a character in a novel at face value, or we may read that statement's position within the novel as indirectly "instantiating" a different, unstated thought (either with or without the author's intent).21 Like Armstrong, Bewes acknowledges the importance of these established modes of thought to the novel form; but his project is organized around the idea that there is another kind of literary thinking, which he calls free indirect, that points beyond a knowable subject and perhaps even beyond a knowable thought. The strangeness of this claim is worth considering at length:

Connections, whether external (sociological, philosophical, ethical) or internal (narrative, subjective, ironic), whether intended (part of the artist's plan) or unintended (part of the work's ideology), whether 'represented' (named and established) or 'instantiated' (unnamed and unspecified), are not the primary work of the novel. They are not its endpoint, nor do they participate in the event of the work. On the contrary. The novel is evolving toward a thought that is neither speakable nor instantiable; a thought whose 'subjectivity' is located outside the novel's representational economy; a thought that does not abide by the logics of authorship and expression.22

This is the utopian obverse to Armstrong's claim that the novel's thought is identical to the subjectivity of the bourgeois individual. Under the potent strictures of this hermeneutics of suspicion, to break that ideological equivalence is inherently to produce thoughts which "cannot be inhabited subjectively" (i.e. that are incommensurable to the logic of the subject that shapes author and reader alike). But Bewes' claim is also a maddening one: what good does it do to point to a thought that can be neither inhabited nor articulated? And if this sort of literary thinking is brought to the fore by the contemporary group of experimental authors that Bewes focuses on, what allows it to also transcend "the logics of authorship and expression"? My dissatisfaction with Bewes' theoretical framing is that it is ultimately more interested in safeguarding the unknowability of novelistic thought than it is in exploring the novel's capacity to produce legible intellectual work (which could then be called ideological).

Nonetheless, Bewes's challenge to the dominance of "instantiation" in criticism has the elegant effect of joining Hale's humanist and poststructuralist readers at the level of hermeneutic practice, rather than at the more dubious level of a shared value (as Hale joins them with ethics). Fredric Jameson shares a basic method, here, with the high school student learning about dramatic irony or unreliable narration: the words of the novel say something, but we can identify another, hidden meaning. Whether that meaning is the result of a basic narrative technique or a subtle cog in the ideological machine of capitalism is, for Bewes, beside the point. The point is that both readers share a conception of literature as the site of indirect, "instantiated" ideas that are left to the reader or critic to identify and voice. Bewes does not suggest that this is a misguided approach to literature, merely that it is an incomplete one. His strange and compelling proposition is to ask whether literature might also be thinking in some other way, enacting a mode of thought less easily accessible to a knowing subject.

In suggesting the theme-and-variations form as a means of making a similar kind of literary thinking legible, I would like to both take up and demystify Bewes's call to go beyond the idea that the decipherable, unstated ideas of fiction are "the primary work of the novel." I am aware that, by pointing to a formal quality myself, I am coming perilously close to relying on the logic of instantiation. This is why I believe that the musical analogue is an important one: just as it would be futile to play all of the hidden valences of a melody at once, or to deduce from them some perfected form of the originally stated theme, it is also impossible to articulate the exact intellectual work that the theme-and-variations form does by shifting an idea across various registers. The form inherently rebuffs the logic by which its thought might be understood as an instance of a single, unspoken idea. Yet it would be just as unhelpful to claim that a musical variation produces an uninhabitable thought about its theme, or that it transcends the logic of authorship. It simply locates its thought in the aesthetic work itself. This is a sting, perhaps, to the critic's presumed mastery, but it need not be an existential threat. Instead, I would use Bewes's formulation of an inarticulable novelistic thought as an occasion to return to Nussbaum's, and Hale's, claim that novels may think in ways that are different and complementary to philosophy. This alignment is likely to Bewes's chagrin, although he seems to invite it with the claim that "even in its pedestrian and least interesting forms, literature undertakes [the] exit from the instantiation relation more successfully and completely than the most rigorous and systematic as well as the most experimental and unconventional 'theoretical' work."23 Yet despite this overarching claim for literariness, Bewes's own focus on contemporary avant-garde novelists suggests that, for the implicit value of this "exit" to be at least partially realized, we must look to those authors who seem to be theorizing it through the direct and instantiated thoughts of their fiction.

I would like to return here to 10:04 and Open City, which I see as unusually clear examples of the theme-and-variations form. That is to say that, while the formal device may be used to develop multiple themes or may work alongside a central plot, Lerner and Cole each use the variation and development of a single theme as the primary structural device of their novel. These are the kinds of novels that are often referred to as "episodic": an identification of the theme-and-variations form that unhelpfully boils down to calling it plotless. 10:04 and Open City's opposing stances towards authorial resemblance also make the books instructive to read together. Open City's Julius is much less like Teju Cole than 10:04's Ben is like Ben Lerner, but the two novels nonetheless think in a similar manner. What I mean by this is not that Cole and Lerner's narrators appear to think like their authors (although they do often seem to do this), but rather that the presentation of their ideas as at once serious and ironized is a structural principle of both novels. This similarity is obscured by the very different readings that each novel seems to invite through the logic of what Bewes calls the "instantiation relation." The overt metafictionality of 10:04 attracts critical commentary on the novel's direct ideas about commodified art, suggesting a reading of 10:04 as instantiating an immanent resistance to the market. The revelation of Julius's rape, on the other hand, serves as a lightning rod for the instantiation reader of Open City, threatening to invalidate or disavow the many philosophical ideas Julius has presented on art, cosmopolitanism, and brutality of history. 10:04 invites its reader to think with Ben, while Open City prompts its reader to think against Julius. Yet the striking formal similarity between the two novels suggests that this critical divergence obscures another kind of novelistic thinking, one that must move beyond the novel's directly stated or indirectly instantiated ideas.

To add to the fittingly variational relationship between Open City and 10:04, each novel appears to have found the germ of its theme in Walter Benjamin's 1940 essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Both novels invoke Benjamin's essay as an intertext, and the uneasy blend between Benjamin's Marxist historiography and Jewish mysticism serves as another axis on which to stage Cole and Lerner's varying uses of the theme-and-variations form. Cole takes up the project of a material history of the oppressed, using Julius's narration to scrutinize a New York cityscape whose fading monuments and shining facades are revealed to be variously healed scar tissue over historical trauma. Critics have noted the resonance in Open City of Benjamin's claim that "there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism," and the theme-and-variations form's accommodation of incommensurable logics is essential for reconciling the novel's sincerity in exploring this theme with the fallibility of its narrator.24 The revelation of Julius's own violent past does not instantiate a disavowal of his ideas, but rather his formal status as another variation upon the theme of barbarity.

Lerner uses the theme-and-variations form to take up Benjamin's theological interest: the glimmers of "Messianic time" in which the world is briefly transformed, suggesting a gateway to its possible past or future reconfigurations. The narrator's rhyming of Benjamin's Angel of History ("propel[led] into a future to which his back is turned") with the film Back to the Future provides the novel with its central high- and low-brow intertexts.25 10:04's epigraph of a "world to come" (attributed to Benjamin in Agamben's The Coming Community) is overtly taken up as the novel's theme, with almost every narrative episode being related to an experience in which the world, though materially unchanged, has been briefly or permanently "rearranged." A man confesses a lifelong resentment only to find that his call had been dropped before the confession; a Lebanese activist discovers that her biological parents are white; New York City prepares for the arrival of a catastrophic hurricane, but the storm never comes. If Open City focuses its thought on the ground bass of historical barbarity, 10:04 is drawn to those moments where the world appears, at least for a moment, to modulate into a new and unexpected key.

In nodding to the resonance of their respective themes with Benjamin's "Theses," Cole and Lerner demonstrate how the theme-and-variations form provides a legible way for literature to creatively read, or write back to, critical theory. Yet the original thought that 10:04 and Open City produce on their themes goes far beyond any call for a Benjaminian reading that the novels might instantiate. In reading the two novels side by side, my goal here is to consider the way each uses its form to think about its theme as it varies it across intimate and historical settings, fictional and factual modes, credible and dubious speakers. That each of these novels applies this form to one of Benjamin's famously gnomic aphorisms is of great advantage for considering Nussbaum's, Hale's, and Bewes's respective claims that literary thought has insights that surpass those of the philosopher. But the theme-and-variations form may equally be applied to the more conventionally "literary" problems of character, social fabric, or subjectivity. In following 10:04's and Open City's structure of variations, I show how each of these more familiar modes of literary thinking supplements the thought of the novel as a whole. Through the theme-and-variations structure, the contemporary novel of ideas establishes itself as a form of thought capable of sounding an idea across an unbounded range of incommensurable registers.

Messianic Variations

The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now, there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world, those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different. 

-Epigraph of 10:04.

10:04 is an especially instructive novel for theorizing the thought process of the theme-and-variations form because its metafictional conceit leads it to produce both direct and instantiated thoughts about that form. The novel's events follow the contractual and artistic process of expanding Lerner's published New Yorker story, "The Golden Vanity" (embedded midway through the novel), into "the book you're reading now."26 As the narrator and the self-aware author of that book, "Ben" is ostensibly responsible not only for providing the narrative's many variations on the theme of a transfigured world, but also for aesthetically arranging them into a fictional, and marketable, whole (up to the choice of image for the cover). At the same time, Ben is drawing both his internal motivations and his material from a diegetic world that Lerner has, to varying degrees, fictionalized. This makes the published "book you're reading now" a little different than the one the narrator describes, even if this is a final variation that he seems capable of imagining. It also ironizes the narration, cuing the reader to consider Ben's direct thoughts in light of his status as a fictional creature — when he presents an idea, we must ask whether Lerner wants us also to consider it otherwise. Further complicating this dynamic is the fact that many of 10:04's ideas have been presented directly by Lerner elsewhere, often in the same words. This produces something like Bewes's unthinkable thought in the oscillation between ironized and authorial statements, an effect which Ben himself describes as "neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them."27

The novel's uncertain interplay between direct and instantiated thought is staged in the opening scene, in which Ben and his agent celebrate his advance for the book over an expensive and ethically dubious dinner of baby octopuses that have been "literally massaged to death."28 Asked what he will write to fulfill the contract, the narrating Ben answers in retrospect: "I'll project myself into several futures simultaneously ... a minor tremor in my hand. I'll work my way from irony to sincerity, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid."29 This turns out to be an apt characterization of the book's form, although Ben as narrator remains ironized, if not ironical. At the same time, the overwrought tone of this authorial declaration winks to the instantiation reader: we are to read Ben's artistic self-description against the compromising scene of the publishing world's privileged backrooms and negotiated compromises to the market. We are to read — in favorite terms of Lerner's — the virtuality of the project's goals against the profitable dullness of its actuality. This play of art's utopian impulse against the capitalist status quo instantiates the novel's metafictional project as a key variation of its theme: the impossible ideal of art presents one kind of fleeting moment in which an alternative arrangement of self, world, or collectivity becomes visible. At the same time, Ben's reliance on the prevailing arrangements of institutional power instantiates the possibility that his novel may not be meaningfully capable of realizing this ideal.

10:04 announces itself as a theme-and-variations novel from its epigraph; or, at the very latest, by the first of many times that this epigraph is directly referenced by Ben's narration.30 A combination of direct statements and indirect aesthetic hints cue the reader to understand the novel's progression as the mode of thought by which its theme is applied to, or explored in, an expanding range of contexts. Alongside the framing narrative of the novel's own composition, Ben worries about the potentially fatal dilation of his aorta (from a possible diagnosis with Marfan syndrome), braces for the forecasted landfall of two hurricanes in New York, helps an undocumented Salvadorean third-grader write and self-publish a book about the invented nature of the brontosaurus, visits and reacts to various art installations, and agrees to conceive a child with his non-romantic soulmate, Alex. A secondary set of variations are provided by anecdotes that are either narrated by Ben or recounted to him by other characters. The connective tissue of the theme-and-variations form is provided by Ben's narration: he reflects openly on the "rearrangement" of the world in charged moments, and he uses the poetic repetition of phrases and motifs to instantiate further connections between scenes that are not directly commented on. While Ben's aesthetic fingerprints are conspicuous in weaving the variations together into a structural whole, the form itself is presented as an organic pattern in his life. In the novel's diegetic world, these recurring echoes are what lead Ben to the novel's final shape. He slyly fulfills the terms of his contract by inserting "The Golden Vanity" into the text as a further metafictional variation, rather than expanding its plot.

The effect of this structure of recurring motifs is to redirect the instantiation relation to the theme-and-variations form itself. A minor scene like Ben's confrontation with Calvin (his troubled graduate student), which has no ostensible connection to the novel's main narrative threads, is woven into the form of the novel through its direct and instantiated connections to the theme. The scene is a layered exercise in social positionality, the kind of ethical encounter that is emblematic of Hale's "aesthetics of alterity." Ben returns from a writer's residency to his temporarily abandoned professorial office, which he first encounters as if it were "the office of a dead man."31 Re-investing himself in the office is to step back into the logics of institutional power that allow him to be a professor (and a successful novelist), and which require that he respond to Calvin's distress with a carefully measured blend of concern, wariness, and de-escalation. Calvin accuses Ben of being a mouthpiece for "the institution," and Ben internally acknowledges the truth of this claim. "I did not say that our society could not, in its present form, go on," he reflects, "or that poison was coming at us from a million points, or that the FBI was fucking with citizens' phones, although all of that was to my mind plainly true."32 In other words, both Calvin and Ben are performing an instantiation reading of the interaction in real time, assessing each party's positionality and the possible ideological factors that might be clouding, or distorting, their ideas. This does not, of course, preclude the reader from coming to their own conclusions about Ben's motives or character; but because the action here is peripheral and Ben's own analysis of it is thorough, that mode of reading is given little traction for connecting the scene to the larger threads of the novel. Instead, the central indirect meaning of the scene is its instantiation as a further variation of the novel's theme: Ben's meditation on the resemblance of his unstated beliefs to Calvin's cues the reader to supply the messianic refrain — Calvin is the same, only a little different. This redirects the stakes of instantiation from the scene's contest of ideas to its place in the novel's variational structure: through the formal recognition, we can understand Calvin's volatility as instantiating a viable extension of the novel's theme beyond the ideological strictures in which Ben (and Lerner) are most comfortable.

The inadequacy of the instantiation relation for representing 10:04's thought is especially evident in those passages that are, either openly or covertly, repurposed from materials that Lerner has published elsewhere. Most conspicuous here are "The Golden Vanity" and a long excerpt from Lerner's poem "The Dark Threw Patches Down Upon Me Also": these are included as compositions of the narrator, but a brief check of the Acknowledgments page (or the internet) will confirm that they are also compositions of Lerner's. Because Lerner has published these words elsewhere without the ironizing position of his narrator, it would be strange to read their new fictional context as an instantiated disavowal of the original ideas — but it would be just as strange to read them as if nothing had changed.33 In Bewes's reading of the repurposed New Yorker story, the difference here (like that between Ben and Calvin) is not in the text's words but rather in "the assemblage responsible" for them: Ben's fictionalized composition process in 10:04 instantiates readings of the story that are unavailable to the reader of the standalone original.34 Like Pierre Menard's Quixote in Borges, the republication of "The Golden Vanity" rewrites original and duplicate alike as variations; and as the reprint is neither a retraction nor an alteration of the original text, a conventional instantiation reading of the words themselves can produce no stable meaning.

A more subtle repurposing is at play in Ben's visit to The Institute of Totaled Art — a collection of damaged artworks that have been paid out by insurance, rendering them valueless in market terms: the same, but different. This scene is expanded from the final paragraphs of an essay that Lerner wrote for Harper's Magazine about a similar exhibition, Elka Krajewska's Salvage Art Institute. That essay includes an early reference to what would become 10:04's epigraph, prompted by the pieces on display that are not visibly damaged in any way. Lerner, and Ben, each read these invisibly altered artworks as "redeemed, both in the sense that the [commodity] fetish had been converted back into cash, the claim paid out, but also in the more messianic sense of being saved from something, saved for something."35 In the fictionalized version of this scene, the direct quotation of the epigraph is omitted (that connection is now referred to the instantiation relation), and the Institute's proprietor (Alena) is in a casual sexual relationship with Ben. This adds a degree of novelistic ethical stakes, but none that would lead us to suspect Lerner of retreating from his original ideas. Instead, the fictional context instantiates further variations of the theme inside the scene: the imperceptible threshold between art and commodity is mirrored by that between private and public (the Institute is held in Alena's studio apartment, where Ben has recently slept), and between fiction and nonfiction.

Critics have taken up the instantiated call to read 10:04 according to this scene's articulated ideal of an artwork redeemed from capitalism. In "Totaling the Damage," Jennifer Ashton interprets the novel as "strategically totaled in advance": "Its damage — the fact of it being totaled — is no longer understood as something that has happened to it but as something that is — in the form of the novel — subsumed by it."36 That is, in narrating its own editorial compromises, contractual obligations, and "strong six-figure advance," Lerner's self-aware commodity manages to exist both in the market and in the post-capitalist future it imagines.37 In a response to Ashton, Theodore Martin offers a more pessimistic reading of 10:04, in which the impossibility of transcending market value is figured by the bad politics of the novel's passive, privileged narrator. "The damage on display in the novel's market concessions," Martin writes, "is reiterated at the level of the narrator's beliefs, which only ever rise to the level of political compromise."38 This account produces a traditional instantiation reading: we see that we can't fully trust our narrator, so we infer that the novelist intends a second-order commentary.39 The strange thing about both critics' readings is that they relocate the referent of "damage" from the field of market value to that of artistic autonomy. No lawyer has voided Lerner's contract because his novel has narrated its own commodification (if they had, you wouldn't be reading it), so the "subsumed" or "displayed" damage here is presumably the way that any artwork's supposed messianic value has been vitiated by capitalism. But how is this other kind of damage to be paid out? The Bewesian implication is that Lerner's novel wishes to index, in advance, a species of thought that the bourgeois subject is incapable of inhabiting.

A simpler answer would be that the novel seeks to participate in, and to spark, exactly the theoretical conversation that Ashton and Martin have continued. Each of their responses follows a line of critical thought that 10:04 is clearly courting: the former through the novel's staging of its metafiction as a variation of its messianic theme, the latter through the many scenes in which Ben is directly or indirectly castigating himself for his socio-economic privilege. To the extent that Ashton and Martin are disputing the "correct" interpretation of 10:04, their exchange reveals the limits of the instantiation relation in honoring the full thought of the novel. Yet insofar as they are exploring the (im)possibility of de-commodifying art, they demonstrate the larger scope of thought that 10:04's form compasses. In a 2014 interview, Lerner describes the uncertain blend of meaning created by reproducing the poem and the totaled art paragraphs into fiction: "the genres are in this mutually constitutive practice, or echo chamber, that I'm not really in control of." Lerner's sense of a lack of control recalls the way in which Armstrong and Bewes, to different effects, place the novel's intellectual work outside the mind of an individual subject capable of thinking it. But Lerner emphasizes open-endedness rather than inscrutability: "For better or worse, I think of this book as an invitation to a certain kind of participation on the part of the reader: Think about these things with me."40 In the hesitation of Lerner's "for better or worse," we can hear the utopian impulse of Bewes and Ashton alongside the ideological wariness of Armstrong and Martin. Is Lerner abandoning the novel to ideology by failing to produce a clearly instantiated meaning, or is that abdication what will save it? 10:04's theme-and-variations structure is its formal invitation to that question, and its means of pursuing both paths of thought simultaneously.

Barbaric Variations

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

-Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

As an episodic intellectual's novel, Open City presents an immediate formal and superficial resemblance to 10:04. Its narrator, Julius — a German-Nigerian psychiatrist who is completing a fellowship at a New York hospital — is, like Ben, an erudite and at times insufferable observer of the same New York City streets. Ben and Julius both know how the city causes and disposes of its avian casualties; they know which apartment Mahler lived in while composing his Ninth Symphony, and which Hart Crane lived in while writing The Bridge. They meditate on the "present absence" of the towers at Ground Zero,41 and they muse about the city's bedbug crisis — which represents for Julius an indiscriminate "conflict at the margins of modern life, visible only in speech,"42 and, for Ben, "a bad form of collectivity that can stand in as a figure of its possibility."43 Like Ben, Julius presents variations on the novel's theme through his own experience, his historical knowledge, his critical responses to art and philosophy, and through the relayed anecdotes of others. But where critics like Ashton and Martin can reasonably take up the ideas presented in 10:04 at face value as Lerner's own, Julius's intellectual commentary is marked as suspect by the novel's climactic revelation of a rape that he committed as a teenager and has carefully kept out of mind. This creates an immediate problem for the instantiation reader, who must assess Julius's ideas while also accounting for the deep moral failings of their speaker. The theme-and-variations form provides the key for this balance; and as Open City lacks the metafictional focus of a novel like 10:04, it provides an occasion to follow the thought of the contemporary novel of ideas on a topic other than itself.

The novel's theme-and-variations structure is produced through Julius's voice, but not entirely with his knowledge. Julius is aware of his act of narration (framing his narrative as a recollection of the events of "last fall"), but not, as far as the reader can tell, of its aesthetic arrangement into the chapters of a novel.44 This means that 10:04's flickering between direct and instantiated thought is tempered in Open City: all of the novel's ideas are presented through a fictionalized character with conspicuous blind spots. Cole has suggested in an interview that "a plausible framing device for Open City is a series of visits by Julius to his psychiatrist."45 This is never suggested as an interpretive possibility within the novel, but Cole's comment speaks both to the psychological intimacy of Julius's narration and to the task of instantiation that the text requires of its reader. To read one of Julius's statements as Cole's own would require its own instantiation claim of a temporary proximity between character and author. One major affordance of reading Open City as a theme-and-variations novel is that it provides a stable mechanism for framing such claims: once the recurring theme of hidden brutality has been identified, Julius and his narration become legible as a further variation of that theme. This allows for his thoughts to be considered as both sincere and ironized (as Ben's, or Calvin's, are), without requiring the reader to infer an unspoken authorial correction of Julius's ideas.

Where 10:04 directly foregrounds the creation of its theme-and-variations structure, Open City relies more heavily on the instantiation relation to produce this form. This begins with the theme itself, which is never provided openly. Multiple critics have cited Benjamin's thesis on the barbarity of history as an apt characterization of the novel's guiding philosophical interest, and I would follow them in that assessment.46 An authorial wink in this direction is given midway through the novel, when Julius visits Brussels and befriends a Moroccan intellectual, Farouq, who is reading a commentary on Benjamin's theses.47 This has the helpful function of pointing the reader towards an articulation of the theme that does not come from Julius's mind, but my intention here is not to suggest that a correct understanding of Open City's theme must go through Walter Benjamin. Instead, the intertext should be understood as one (instantiated) variation among many for the novel's larger interest in the violence that flows beneath the surface of modern life. Open City's true intellectual work consists in the exploration of this idea across an expanding range of contexts and applications. For Benjamin's aphorism to be recognized as a possibly privileged phrasing of the novel's theme, the reader must have already identified the gist of that theme — and the novel's structural pattern of variations — through Julius's own development of the form.

The theme of historical violence and its systemic erasure quickly becomes apparent as the connective thread that links Julius's reflections on his ostensibly aimless walks through New York City. Julius is an emotionally detached observer of the world around him, but he is intensely aware of the city's hidden network of global connections. His gaze is drawn to the small traces that larger histories of violence have left on the city's surface: placards, statues, architectural styles. Reflecting on the land at Ground Zero, Julius introduces the figure of the palimpsest as a model for the city and its many pasts:

This was not the first erasure on the site. Before the towers had gone up, there had been a bustling network of little streets ... [A]ll were forgotten now. Gone, too, was the old Washington Square Market, the active piers, the fishwives, the Christian Syrian enclave that was established here in the late 1800s. ... And, before that? What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble? The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.48

This passage is characteristic of Julius's thought, both in its melancholy remembrance of the erased past and in its marshalling of obscure facts. It is left unclear whether Julius has already assembled an encyclopedic knowledge of the city at the time of his walks, or whether passages like this reflect the fruits of later research. Pieter Vermeulen describes the novel's historical asides as having "an insipid tone ... inevitably reminiscent of a Wikipedia page."49 In part, this tonal flatness is a reflection of Julius's own alienation (as Vermeulen interprets it). But it also serves to introduce variations on the novel's theme of history-as-barbarism in direct and impersonal terms, which only later must be reconciled with Julius's role as their mouthpiece.

The transference of Julius's historical gaze to the people around him is the second major level of variation in Open City. Like Ben in 10:04, Julius produces a secondary set of variations by relaying anecdotes of concealed proximity to violence. Some of these are private traumas (a man who never mentions being the lone survivor of a deadly bus accident), while others are implicated in histories of mass brutality. In a memory of a visit to a migrant detention center (with his former girlfriend and a group of "do-gooders" from her church), Julius listens to the story of Saidu, a Liberian refugee who has escaped war only to find himself imprisoned indefinitely and awaiting deportation.50 Midway through relaying Saidu's account verbatim — a frequent and always a somewhat unnerving narrative device in Open City — Julius interjects that "I wondered, naturally, ... whether I believed him or not, whether it wasn't more likely that he had been a soldier. He had, after all, had months to embellish the details, to perfect his claim of being an innocent refugee."51 The subtle claim that Julius places on his audience here with "naturally" is a conspicuous psychological tic, but Julius's suspicion registers as plausible if ungenerous. This suspicion is echoed in a later scene in which, after learning that a festive group of Africans in Brussels are Rwandan and not Congolese, Julius is overcome by "that mental constriction ... that came whenever I was introduced to young men from Serbia or Croatia, from Sierra Leone or Liberia. That doubt that said: These, too, could have killed and killed and only later learned how to look innocent."52 Julius's awareness of the world's war zones and what happens in them is unsparing; and though his morbid extrapolations are off-putting, they are also an indictment of the reader's own mental erasures. His suspicions apply the model of the palimpsest and its hidden, barbaric traces to the self, providing the framework by which the reader will finally be cued to see Julius as a final variation on the novel's theme.

The mounting sense that Julius is not an entirely trustworthy narrator culminates in Open City's third major level of variation, which instantiates the re-application of Julius's critical eye to his own mind. In the novel's penultimate chapter, Julius relates without comment a scene in which his friend Moji — the sister of a childhood friend from Nigeria, who has recently re-entered his life in New York — tells Julius that he raped her at a party when she was fifteen, that she has been haunted by the experience ever since, and that she is disgusted but not surprised that he not only pretended that nothing happened, but also acted as if he did not even recognize her when the two recently crossed paths.53 Like the Rwandans at the bar, Julius has not changed in any external way: but to the reader's eye, he is immediately and entirely transfigured into an avatar for the violence that he once committed and "only later learned how to look innocent." In an echo of Julius's seemingly unreasonable suspicion of Saidu, the reader is now made to take Julius's hitherto plausible account of events (e.g. that Moji was a vague acquaintance who he had no memory of) and ask if he was deliberately hiding a monstrous truth about himself — or, perhaps more disturbingly, if he had truly managed to both erase this memory and naturalize the erasure.

Critics have struggled to reconcile Julius's failings with the ideas that he develops over the course of the novel, ideas that are often thoughtfully voiced and which Cole appears to want his reader to take seriously. Tellingly, the revelation of Julius's rape is mentioned mostly where its sinister note allows for an instantiation reading against the ideas that Julius subscribes to. "This false, slippery narration ... damns the 21st century flâneur," write Albert Wu and Michelle Kuo;54 while Werner Sollors asks whether in "presenting a darker side in his portrait of Julius," Cole is "suggesting a problematic aspect of twenty-first-century cosmopolitan pursuits more generally."55 By contrast, James Wood's New Yorker review praises the novel's exploration of ideas from critical theory, while reading Julius's meditation on solipsism (which directly precedes Moji's accusation) as evidence of a mind that is "central to [itself], in ways that are sane, forgivable, and familiar."56 None of these readings are unjustified, but each does an obvious violence to the full thought of the novel. Wood's reading, which does not mention the rape at all, excuses as melancholy wisdom the kind of thinking that leads both Julius and the world around him to erase their victims. Wu, Kuo, and Sollors err in the other direction, taking Julius's guilt as an instantiated disavowal of the narrative thought process by which we have learned to judge him. Through the theme-and-variations form, Open City is able to think in both of these directions at once — it is through the sincerity of Julius's ideas about buried histories and learned innocence that we can understand his guilt as another variation, one that expands the novel's theme to encompass the act of narrative itself.

As in 10:04, Open City achieves its full effect by redirecting instantiation towards the larger thought of the novel's form. The enormity of Julius's guilt — and his damning incapacity to countenance that guilt privately, or to respond at all to Moji's accusation — clearly instantiates his unreliability as a narrator. And Open City's reader may indeed look back and find clues that Julius may be distorting the nature of his relationships, or his motives, elsewhere. But this is not the kind of novel whose diegetic events fall into a clean narrative shape once we understand the narrator to be a villain. Its narrative structure remains episodic, its loose threads bound only by the undercurrent of violence that has led Julius (and Cole) from one topic to another. So the central instantiated idea of Moji's accusation points less to a hidden diegetic truth than to a hidden formal one, through which Julius's mind is reduced to a variation of the theme it has developed. Like Lerner, Cole imagines this turn as implicating the reader's own thought, for better or worse. "I'm attracted, in art, to things that trouble the complacency of the viewer or reader," he tells an interviewer in 2011. "I was interested [in Open City] in the move that went from 'He's one of us' to 'Is he one of us?'"57 To answer that question in the negative would be to risk falling into the same complacency that Julius has modeled in his judgments of others. The full thought of Open City could then perhaps be described as "subjectively uninhabitable," insofar as it is incompatible with the self-assuring scripts of a normative subjectivity. But the work of Cole's novel is not to suggest an unthinkable thought, but rather to invalidate the fantasy of a subject pure enough to think one. His theme-and-variations form asks the reader to inhabit a thought that requires constant iteration, and to constantly question the logic that would pin that thought down as a finished property of a virtuous mind.

Conclusion

Both 10:04 and Open City end with epiphanies. Lerner's conclusion strikes the promised note of sincerity, as Ben echoes Whitman from the Brooklyn Bridge and looks "back at the totaled city in the second person plural."58 Cole's is bleak: Julius recounts in meticulous historical detail the nightly death of hundreds of birds that, lured by the Statue of Liberty's flame, collided with the monument until its light was deactivated in 1902.59 In both cases, the final variation of the novel's theme instantiates a kind of sundering between the narrator and novel, rather than a final synthesis of the novel's thought. Julius may be thinking of the statue as a symbol for the deadly false promises of the American Dream, but for the reader this scene is the tonal coda to the revelation of his own monstrous secrets. Ben, who is now preparing for a child with Alex (an instantiated variation, of course, of the novel he has delivered), is beginning to become a little more narrator than author, fading into the imperceptibly transfigured world of Lerner's fiction. These epiphanies are ironized, occurring in the narrator's mind after the novel's form has expanded to encompass that mind as one variation among many. The last variation of the theme returns to settle gently within the novel's formal limits, while the thought of the form itself points outwards towards its reader, and towards other possible iterations.

The theme-and-variations form is not a new invention. In particular, the formal self-awareness of the contemporary novel of ideas has rich connections to the experiments of early twentieth-century modernism. Modernist character studies like Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room or Djuna Barnes' Nightwood use the form to undertake parallel deconstructions of individual and society, while episodic Künstlerromans like James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Rainer Maria Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge make a similar use of the flickering proximity between fictionalized character and authorial stand-in. In this sense I would follow Hale in saying that contemporary literature is still very much in the shadow of modernism, especially in its attention to the "aesthetics of alterity" through which literary form engages with the social.

What has changed in the contemporary novel of ideas is that the theme-and-variations form is increasingly foregrounded as the central formal principle of the work, the mainstream in which the more familiar tributaries of direct and instantiated thought intermingle. This is true of each of Cole's and Lerner's novels to date; it is true of books like Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy or Catherine Lacey's The Möbius Book, which invite the label of "autofiction"; and it is true of more overtly fictionalized versions of the intellectual's novel, like Valeria Luiselli's Faces in the Crowd or J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. The theme-and-variations form is also a central mode of thought for a concomitant rise in hybrid works that straddle the genres of fiction, memoir, poetry, and theory: these include Maggie Nelson's Bluets and The Argonauts, Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, and Carmen Maria Machado's In The Dream House. In each of these cases, the theme-and-variations form directs the conventional modes of fictional thought — its direct statements and its ability to instantiate unspoken ideas — towards a structural whole that is able to flicker between them.

The extension of theme-and-variations thinking beyond the novel supports Bewes's argument that the development he calls "postfiction" is one that places a claim on other kinds of discourse. While anything may serve as thematic material for the theme-and-variations form, the latent self-referentiality of its thought ultimately serves to demystify the role of narrative itself in arranging and rearranging reality. We see this in 10:04's nesting of identical texts within the transfiguring context of the novel's fiction, and we see it in Open City's development of a philosophical meditation that is also the form of the narrator's delusion. Cole and Lerner's respective variations on Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" are fitting, suggesting as they do that the novel's mode of thought may be finer tuned than the historian's. But the relevance of the theme-and-variations form for this task has an earlier philosophical advocate: in "The Use and Abuse of History for Life," Friedrich Nietzsche uses the same musical analogy to oppose any model of historiography that sees itself as a science:

[A]nd so I hope that the significance of history will not be thought to lie in its general propositions, as if these were the flower and fruit of the whole endeavor, but that its value will be seen to consist in its taking a familiar, perhaps commonplace theme, an everyday melody, and composing inspired variations on it, enhancing it, elevating it to a comprehensive symbol, and thus disclosing in the original theme a whole world of profundity, power and beauty.60

Like the unthinkable thought that Bewes attributes to literature, Nietzsche's vision for history goes beyond the instantiation relation: although the profundity he attributes to it is ultimately "disclosed" through the theme-and-variations form, its thought cannot be reduced to a directly stated or implicitly instantiated set of "general propositions." Instead, it lies somewhere in the interweaving connections of the variations themselves, providing a kind of a meaning that Nietzsche is content to describe as a "symbol," but which seems only to be localizable in the echoes of potentiality that the variations form gives to its originally stated theme. Returning to that familiar melody, the listener (which is to say the Nietzschean student of history, or the reader of the theme-and-variations novel) finds it both the same and yet different, the mundane shot through with the knowledge of its hidden valences. This is the transformation of literary thought that lies at the heart of the contemporary novel of ideas, and it is the use of the theme-and-variations form — rather than the persuasiveness of its direct or instantiated propositions — that makes this mode of thought possible.

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Benjamin Paul is a PhD candidate at Boston College. His dissertation, "Epic Possibilities: Refiguring History in Modern Transatlantic Literature," is on the use of epic in Anglo-European modernism and postcolonial Caribbean literature as an aesthetic strategy for rewriting historical knowledge and collective identity.

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Banner Image: Eadweard Muybridge, "Plate Number 762. Cockatoo flying" (1887), The National Gallery of Art.

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References

1. Ben Lerner, 10:04: A Novel (Faber and Faber, 2014), 216-220.[⤒]
2. Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (Columbia University Press, 2022), 34.[⤒]
3. Bewes, Free Indirect, 12.[⤒]
4. Bewes, Free Indirect, 37.[⤒]
5. See Bewes, Free Indirect, 105-109, for Bewes's engagement with Ann Banfield's conception of free indirect discourse's "unspeakable sentences."[⤒]
6. Free Indirect's central Deleuzian concept is the "sensorimotor break," which Deleuze uses to theorize the incommensurability of modern cinematic thought with that of embodied human perception. See Chapter 7, 195-227.[⤒]
7. Bruce Robbins, "Timothy Bewes, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age," American Literary History 35, no. 2 (2023): 1118-21.[⤒]
8. Walter Benn Michaels, "Action/intention/interpretation/ambition—Timothy Bewes and Jensen Suther," Nonsite 53, December 15, 2025.[⤒]
9. Bewes, Free Indirect, 6. This list also includes Patrick Modiano and W.G. Sebald, who, with J.M. Coetzee, stand as central influences to the mostly younger cohort of Anglophone writers listed beside them.[⤒]
10. Shaj Mathew, "Global Autofictional Flânerie," Modernism/modernity 29, no. 2 (2022): 219-239.[⤒]
11. See Teju Cole, "Teju Cole," Interview by Christopher Bollen, Interview. March 21, 2014.[⤒]
12. Less generously: it reflects a double bind in which authors of color are denied access to the prestige category of autofiction despite often being misread as writing autobiographically. Cole's common inclusion in the genre may be related to his narrator's tendency to muse about canonical Western art (as Tope Folarin argues in an article for The New Republic, "Can a Black Novelist Write Autofiction?"), but it is also amplified by his white readership's propensity to assume that any Nigerian American protagonist is a stand-in for himself.[⤒]
13. James Wood, "Total Recall," The New Yorker, August 6, 2012.[⤒]
14. Bewes, Free Indirect, 38.[⤒]
15. Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719-1900 (Columbia University Press, 2005), 83.[⤒]
16. Armstrong, How Novels Think, 10.[⤒]
17. Martha C. Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009), 15, 36-43.[⤒]
18. Dorothy J. Hale, The Novel and the New Ethics (Stanford University Press, 2020), 25.[⤒]
19. Hale, The Novel and the New Ethics, 97.[⤒]
20. Bewes, Free Indirect, 19.[⤒]
21. See Bewes, Free Indirect, 4, for an overview of the novel's accepted modes of direct and indirect thought. Bewes defines instantiation as "an idea (a connective relation) whose presence is signaled in the work without being articulated and on the basis of which a claim is made, implicitly or explicitly, for the work's social significance" (25).[⤒]
22. Bewes, Free Indirect, 34.[⤒]
23. Bewes, Free Indirect, 38.[⤒]
24. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, 1968), 256.[⤒]
25. Quoted in Lerner, 10:04, 25.[⤒]
26. Lerner, 10:04, 194.[⤒]
27. Lerner, 10:04, 194.[⤒]
28. Lerner, 10:04, 3.[⤒]
29. Lerner, 10:04, 4.[⤒]
30. On page 19, when describing the city's transfiguration by the collective anticipation of a hurricane.[⤒]
31. Lerner, 10:04, 215.[⤒]
32. Lerner, 10:04, 219-220.[⤒]
33. For a contrasting approach, compare the repurposed chapters of J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, which were published as separate essays but retained the feature of a fictionalized author/speaker in that form.[⤒]
34. Bewes, Free Indirect, 225-226.[⤒]
35. Ben Lerner, "Damage Control," Harper's Magazine, December 2013.  This passage is reproduced identically in 10:04, except for the trivial removal of the word "more" (134).[⤒]
36. Jennifer Ashton, "Totaling the Damage: Revolutionary Ambition in Recent American Poetry." Nonsite 18, October 8, 2015.[⤒]
37. Lerner, 10:04, 4.[⤒]
38. Theodore Martin, "The Dialectics of Damage: Art, Form, Formlessness: A Reply to Jennifer Ashton," Nonsite 18, October 9, 2015.[⤒]
39. Or — we see that we can't trust our author, and that an ideological critique is possible. Martin politely allows his reading to be a part of Lerner's plan, reading "the novel's formal ambivalence as a sign of what it knows it can't achieve."[⤒]
40. Ben Lerner, "Ben Lerner," interview by Christopher Bollen, Interview, September 4, 2014.[⤒]
41. Lerner, 10:04, 108.[⤒]
42. Teju Cole, Open City: A Novel (Random House, 2011), 173.[⤒]
43. Lerner, 10:04, 239.[⤒]
44. Cole, Open City, 3.[⤒]
45. Teju Cole, "Interview: Teju Cole," interview by Aaron Bady, Post45, January 19, 2015.[⤒]
46. See Pieter Vermeulen, "Flights of Memory: Teju Cole's Open City and the Limits of Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism," Journal of Modern Literature 37, no. 1 (2013): 47; Alexander Greer Hartwiger, "The Postcolonial Flâneur: Open City and the Urban Palimpsest," Postcolonial Text 11, no. 1 (2016): 8; and Emily Johansen, "History in Place: Territorialized Cosmopolitanism in Teju Cole's Open City," Diaspora 20, no. 1 (2018): 252.[⤒]
47. Cole, Open City, 103.[⤒]
48. Cole, Open City, 58-59.[⤒]
49. Vermeulen, "Flights of Memory," 50.[⤒]
50. Cole, Open City, 62.[⤒]
51. Cole, Open City, 67.[⤒]
52. Cole, Open City, 139.[⤒]
53. Cole, Open City, 244.[⤒]
54. Albert Wu and Michelle Kuo, "Imperfect Strollers: Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, W.G. Sebald, and the Alienated Cosmopolitan," Los Angeles Review of Books, February 2, 2013.[⤒]
55. Werner Sollors, "Cosmopolitan Curiosity in Open City: Notes on Reading Teju Cole by way of Kwame Anthony Appiah," New Literary History 49, no. 2 (2018): 245.[⤒]
56. James Wood, "The Arrival of Enigmas," The New Yorker, February 20, 2011.[⤒]
57. Teju Cole, "Palimpsest City," Interview by Max Liu, 3:AM Magazine, August 16, 2011.[⤒]
58. Lerner, 10:04, 240.[⤒]
59. Cole, Open City, 258-259.[⤒]
60. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 92-93.[⤒]