‘The problem of other minds’: disappropriation and the limits of polyphony in Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay argues that Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School (2019) complicates Mikhail Bakhtin’s dichotomy between monologism and polyphony through strategies resonating with Cristina Rivera Garza’s concept of disappropriation. In contrast to Bakhtinian polyphony, Lerner’s novel posits the necessity of exposing the author’s agency behind the characters’ voices to refrain from appropriating them; it thus embraces authorial fallibility and turns it into an ethical project. Despite comprising multiple narrators, The Topeka School is metafictionally presented as authored by an older version of its teenage protagonist Adam Gordon, serving as Lerner’s alter ego. Adam’s overarching authorial presence is suggested by the narrative’s frequent rejection of individuation and mimesis in its depiction of different characters’ speeches; yet, by presenting individual voices as interwoven, the novel also emphasises the collective nature of language. I discuss how this tension between authorial control and interconnectedness is reflected in textual interferences across different narrative perspectives, in the oscillation between authorial and figural narration in the interludes dedicated to the character Darren, and in the infiltration of various intra and intertextual references into Amber’s as well as Adam’s voice. Through these disappropriative techniques, Lerner’s novel avoids solipsism while also moving beyond the dialogic strategies of previous post-postmodern metafiction.