Language games: the gendered politics of the speech act in Ben Lerner's The Topeka School

ABSTRACT

R.W. Connell argues that masculinity is not a unitary phenomenon; rather, that masculinities emerge out of situationally specific choices drawn from a ‘cultural repertoire’ of so-called masculine behaviour that result in a particular ‘configuration of practice’. Ben Lerner's novel The Topeka School (2019) calls attention to this process by focussing on the coding of particular speech-acts as masculine in the context of mid-nineties, small-town Kansas; moreover, he contextualises these particular speech-acts as the cultural precursors to the political rise of the alt-right, leading to Trump's presidency. In The Topeka School, then, speech-acts are not simply gendered but shown to have significant political ramifications. In this paper I argue that while Lerner dissects the genealogy of this particular construction of masculinity, he also presents alternative models of gendered speech-acts that subvert what Hélène Cixous calls the libidinal and cultural masculine economy, and that he explicitly links each of these models to the figure of the mother. Lerner thus suggests a gender-inclusive speaking-back against the dominant masculinist order, with the mother acting as a key locus of political dissent, resistance, and change – he suggests, too, what Connell would call a necessary reconfiguration of masculine practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Ben Lerner
• masculinity
• contemporary fiction
• politics
• gender

Introduction

In his 2019 novel, The Topeka School, Ben Lerner draws his readers’ attention to the gendered codification of particular speech-acts. The text examines the construction of its teenaged protagonist's masculinity – or masculinities – in terms of what R.W. Connell¹ calls the configurations of practice that develop out of situationally specific choices: here, Lerner's character, Adam, makes choices based upon the ‘stereotypes repertoire’² of masculine behaviours available to him in mid-nineties, middle-class, suburban, white Kansas. Through Adam's experience, Lerner contextualises an individual practice of masculinity – one that ‘varies as it is constructed in different situations’³ – within a broader overview of masculinist politics that he presents as the cultural precursors to the rise of the alt-right in contemporary US politics.

In this article, I argue that Adam's specific practice(s) of masculinity is/are bound up with speech-acts – largely those associated with high-school debating and extra-curricular rap battles – that have significant and lasting gendered political ramifications, but also that the novel presents us with various instances in which its characters’ speech-acts subvert what Hélène Cixous refers to as the libidinal and cultural masculine economy⁴ – an economy typified by Donald Trump's ‘grab them by the pussy’ rhetoric⁵ – and that this subversion is primarily associated with the figure of the mother. That is: the speech-acts that constitute masculine practice for Adam, his peers, and their alt-right inheritors are here interrupted by, substituted with, and ultimately drowned out by alternate modes of speech associated with and practiced by mothers. Whilst the mother, then, is absent, or absented, from the cultural masculine economy of the ascendant right, it is speech-acts associated with the maternal that suggest, both to Adam and to the reader, a new configuration of practice that might challenge the masculinist hegemony of that particular economy.

Masculine practice(s)

Connell's account frames masculinity as a dynamic concept that is best understood as ‘a structure of social relations’ shaped in a ‘very complex and often tense process of negotiation’.⁶ In other words, masculinity is neither a fixed role attached to apparently male-bodied people nor an essential attribute of (loosely speaking) biological maleness; rather, it is a social construct, the hegemonic formulation of which gives credence, in any given situationally-specific circumstance, to ‘the currently most honored way of being a man’, such that, practically speaking, all men and women are required to ‘position themselves in relation to it’.⁷ Hegemonic masculinity is not prescriptive – individuals maintain the agency to interrogate, query or defy its creed(s) – but normative: it posits a standard to which one is likely to compare one's own masculinity. As Jonathan Allan argues, and as Lerner's character Adam demonstrates, masculinity ‘is predicated upon a constant fear, in which we, as men, imagine that men are out to get us, out to reveal our less-than-masculine reality’.⁸ Masculinity, then, is to be understood as a framework within which actors are encouraged to assume particular traits as part of a continual power negotiation that is premised on an unattainable, and ever-shifting, mode of ‘doing maleness’. Few men actually embody the ideals of a given hegemonic conceit of masculinity: the term ‘masculine’ does not point to any given ‘type’ of literal man, but rather to how men ‘position themselves through discursive practices’.⁹ Hegemonic masculinity is constructed thus not at the level of individual actors with their particular ideas about masculinity, but at the Foucauldian level of ‘culture or the nation-state’,¹⁰ with the aim of ‘legitimat[ing] and reproduc[ing] the social relationships’ that generate male societal dominance.¹¹ As West and Zimmerman note, if we ‘do gender appropriately, we simultaneously sustain, reproduce, and render legitimate the institutional arrangements that are based on sex category’, but if, as is more likely, we fail to meet the hegemonic standard, ‘we as individuals – not the institutional arrangements – may be called to account (for our character, motives, and predispositions)’.¹² Thus gender, as a social construct, is both normative and punitive.

Judith Butler's theory of performativity describes how this operates at the level of the individual. Like Connell and her sociologist colleagues, Butler rejects the idea of gender as a stable locus of identity; rather, they claim, gender is ‘an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’.¹³ Gender is a performance – a doing – that calls reality into being: its character as performance contests fixity, and thus reification, because any ‘live’ performance always contains within itself the possibility of subversion and change, but yet any individual performance operates nonetheless in the context of an established (if fluid) hegemony, such that its style and repetitions echo those of other, witnessed, performances. West and Zimmerman note the complexity of this operation when they note that ‘[doing] gender involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine “natures”’.¹⁴ To opt out is a problem: as Butler warns, those who ‘fail to do their gender right are regularly punished’,¹⁵ and we see this played out in The Topeka School in the cautionary figure of Darren Eberheart. Much as Allan associates masculinity with fear and the dread of shame, West and Zimmerman frame the ‘doing’ of gender as a hostage situation: it is undertaken by ‘women and men whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production’.¹⁶ Taken en masse, then, the societal accretion of individual gendered performances creates and sustains hegemonic ideas of how actors of a given gender ought to perform in a given situation, even if/as individual actors strive to reject that hegemony.

The Topeka School

Butler argues that ‘systemic or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts and practices’.¹⁷ In The Topeka School, through the figures of Adam Gordon and his less successful peer, Darren Eberheart, Lerner traces the lineage of twenty-first century Republican political ideology through the practices of masculinity enacted by both boys. Seventeen-year-old Adam, a high-school senior, is the son of two progressive psychologists; moreover, his mother is a nationally renowned feminist writer. Adam's emerging practice of masculinity exists, however, across two additional domains quite removed from his home-life: the first is the high-school debating circuit, populated by the nascent members and supporters of the alt-right wing of the Republican party and its media partners, and the second is the rap battles that take place between middle-class teenaged white boys at keg parties and act as precursors to drunken physical fights. Adam recognises that, as Scott Kiesling suggests, ‘[what] we characterize as “masculinity” […] can be thought of as a repertoire of stances connected with hierarchies and cultural models’:¹⁸ his own repertoire straddles both the highly rarefied practice of competitive high-school debate and the middle-class phenomenon of wealthy suburban white boys mimicking the poetics of Black gangster rap. Adam is aware that his strengths (academic success, an interest in poetry) could otherwise code him as effeminate, so he strategically deploys his linguistic and rhetorical skill in activities themselves coded in his world as ‘relevant to the construction of masculinity identities’:¹⁹ thus Adam performs for and reinforces the gendered social hierarchy that he fears might exclude him (as it does Darren). Adam's burden, as Christian Lorentzen suggests, is to ‘resist becoming one of the “types” while also passing among them as not unmanly’.²⁰

Adam's success in figuring his specific locale's hegemonic masculinity – in not passing as ‘unmanly’ – is framed, however, in such a way as to associate that masculinity with a culture of overt anti-feminism and homophobia that also heralds the rise of the alt-right as a political force. That is: to succeed as a young man in mid-nineties Topeka, according to the novel, is to be lauded in an environment that, firstly, tolerates, if not accepts, the ultra-conservative anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church, and that, secondly, sees the (mostly male) children of its intellectual classes succeed on a high-school debating circuit that is itself a training ground for, as Lorentzen notes, ‘[avatars] of Trump-era politics’.²¹ Indeed, Adam's debating coach later becomes ‘a key architect of the most right-wing governorship Kansas has ever known […], an important model for the Trump administration’.²² When Adam competes in the national debating competition, a banner in the auditorium proclaims that this event represents ‘THE FUTURE OF SPEECH’²³: speech, in this context, refers largely to ‘the spread’, a mode of competitive oratorical debate from which ethics and morality have been deliberately divested, and at which Adam and his peers excel. The ‘FUTURE’ is founded thus upon a male-dominated mode of amoral rhetoric, and Adam's participation therein ratifies him as a man in a future that will be dominated by the divestment of truth-values from public utterances – ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’.²⁴ Adam's success here is not, however, sufficient to allow him to ‘pass’ as masculine amongst his peers: he notes that ‘in high school debate made you a nerd and poetry made you a pussy’. His solution lies in ‘linguistic combat’: the rap battles which ‘transmuted his prowess as a public speaker and aspiring poet into something cool’.²⁵ Thus, Adam's linguistic skill facilitates what is, for his less academic classmates, a more acceptable form of speech-act-as-masculinity whereby white boys co-opt, from the safety of their suburban basements, a form of Black urban poetics – a mode of discourse that they associate simplistically with physical urban violence, and by means of which they codify themselves as masculine. Adam, the embryonic poet, brought up in a markedly feminist household, is aware that this codification is problematic, but remains nonetheless complicit:

If linguistic prowess could do damage and get you laid, then it could be integrated into the adolescent social realm without entirely departing from the household values of intellect and expression. It was not a reconciliation, but a workable tension.²⁶

After all, as Butler notes, to be perceived to opt out is to be punished.

Connell insists that masculinity is not a singular practice; that ‘the hierarchy of masculinities is a pattern of hegemony’²⁷ such that multiple masculinities co-exist – often, as Adam illustrates, within the same individual. The normative nature of hegemony, however, means that these masculinities will engage in hierarchical power struggles. West and Zimmerman note that as ‘participants in interaction organize their various and manifold activities to reflect or express gender […] they are disposed to perceive the behavior of others in a similar light’.²⁸ In The Topeka School, we see the social participants (the other adolescents) turn their hegemonic gaze upon an outlier, Darren Eberheart, whose behaviour is perceived to fail to adequately express masculinity in the locally dominant manner. Darren, Adam's one-time classmate, whose learning difficulties preclude him from the sexual, sporting, and linguistic practices at which Adam and the others excel, is seen therefore as a ‘perverted’ form of man, a cautionary tale whose configuration of masculine practice is read by his peers as inadequate and embarrassing: ‘It was his similarity to the dominant that rendered him pathetic and a provocation’.²⁹ Darren's falling short of normative standards is a reminder to the others of the precarity of their own masculinity, which results in an act of violent differentiation: Darren is literally cast out by his community, abandoned at a distant lake after a party. The practice of masculinity he develops thereafter comprises both a continuing faulty compliance based on his ongoing yearning for acceptance (he attends his peers’ parties) and a suppressed violence (he attends rallies organised by the Westboro Baptists) that finally erupts as an attack on a local young woman: he throws a pool ball at her head. While Bond criticises Lerner's novel as dismissing the white working classes, represented by Darren, as archetypal violent and embittered alt-right Trump-voters,³⁰ this is a simplification of the novel's complex portrayal of hegemonic hierarchies: rather, in The Topeka School, both Darren's resentful and retaliatory ‘pathetic’ masculinity and Adam's smooth-talking, amoral, intellectual version overlap in a manner that will later find full expression in the ascendance of Trump to the White House. Connell and Messerschmidt remind us that while a co-existing diversity of masculine practices might appear oppositional, they will nonetheless be hegemonically mutually supportive – ‘[a] degree of overlap or blurring between hegemonic and complicit masculinities is extremely likely if hegemony is effective’.³¹ In the figures of the two boys, then, Lerner recognises and explores the relations of alliance, dominance, and subordination between different practices of masculinity. While, as Bond notes, Darren allies himself with the Westboro Baptist Church and is responsible for a violent misogynistic attack – and is thus aligned and associated with alt-right agitators – he is nonetheless positioned within the novel as a victim, othered and ostracised by his classmates, one of whom, Adam, is himself aligned and associated with the nascent architects of that movement's eventual electoral success: Adam, like Trump himself, uses his own skills and social power to ‘do damage and get […] laid’ while Darren suffers.

The Topeka School, then, is concerned with the negotiation of this shifting power dynamic between different practices of masculinity. Adam is keenly aware of how this operates: he knows that masculinity is not an inevitable consequence of his maleness, nor of his strength or quick-wittedness; it is, in Butler's terms, performative, and Adam is aware that if this ongoing performance falters (as has Darren's) his status as a ‘real man’ is compromised – and yet, as with any hegemony, it is impossible for him to remain aloof, to step outside the masculinist economy. Allan argues that any claim to masculinity is ‘always already’ an expression of what Lauren Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’: ‘It is cruel precisely because we believe and we continue to believe that it is attainable even though we continually fail at masculinity’.³² The penultimate scene in The Topeka School shows us the adult Adam – established poet, and loving, left-wing parent – engaged in an aggressive confrontation with another father. ‘Instinctually’, Adam tells the reader, ‘I went for an element of discursive surprise’ by deploying the psychoanalytical language favoured by his parents, ‘but delivering it as though I were talking shit’ – mixing, that is, the various masculinist codes that ensured his survival in 1990s Topeka. The other parent, ‘startled […] by the tangle of vocabularies’ (‘safe spaces’ juxtaposed with a mention of Adam's fears about a world of ‘pussy-grabbing’), seeks to ignore the problem (his son isn't letting Adam's daughter on the playground slide), but Adam is insistent, citing the importance of behavioural modelling in child-rearing: here, his narration, if not his actual speech in the playground, devolves into a parenthetical citation of Trump's boast that ‘I helped create her, Ivanka, my daughter, she's six feet tall, she's got the best body, she made a lot of money’, thereby linking Adam's own behaviour as a father, and that of the other man, to the problematic practice of masculinity, and fatherhood, embodied by the country's then-president. Meanwhile, when the other man tells Adam to ‘fuck off’, Adam retaliates physically: ‘Only when I heard it clatter on the asphalt was I fully aware I’d knocked the phone out of his hands’.³³ In this scene, Lerner stages the faltering of Adam's carefully redefined progressive masculinity under both the unsympathetic gaze of another father and the ever-present shadow of Donald Trump, but, more significantly, he also dramatises the relations of subordination between different masculinist practices as Adam flails about in search of whichever performance will sustain his own tenuous dominance. Finally, when the ‘symbolic system break[s] down inside [his] body’,³⁴ he resorts to the violence he had avoided throughout his adolescence. That is, the situationally-specific hegemonic masculinity of Trump's America successfully hails Adam as the head of his family, defender of his daughter, and he reacts correspondingly, according to the mores of this particular hegemony – one which developed, of course, out of Adam's own former debating circuit, and which had its precursor in his callous dismissal of Darren Eberheart.

Prophylactic speech acts

Hélène Cixous notes that ‘[nearly] the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason’, such that it has ‘been one with the phallocentric tradition’.³⁵ Lerner's text bolsters this claim, associating the rapid-fire rationality of the debate with a particularly phallogocentric model of state and federal governance. As we have seen, Adam is understood as masculine because his speech acts constitute a series of situationally effective masculine performances; as he notes, however, these are tricky to sustain: ‘[the] pressures of, of staying true to type – the constant weightlifting, the verbal combat – would eventually reduce him to a child again’.³⁶ This ‘reduction’, or the dissociation of Adam from his identity as masculine, is associated with the collapse of rational language, as, at different points in the novel – related variously with the knock-on effects of a childhood head-injury, the onset of adolescence, and great psychological stress – his speech breaks down into nonsensical babbling and he finds himself ‘calling out for his mother from his bed’.³⁷ The figure of the mother – Jane – is thus linked explicitly to the collapse of a particular masculine practice associated with certain types of speech-acts, themselves yoked to an anti-feminist right-wing ideology. This association, however, allows Jane to function as a locus of anti-hegemonic resistance, around which the speech act might be reconfigured in such a way as to offer Adam, and the reader, an alternate linguistic practice of masculinity. Cixous argues that language, as writing,

is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures.³⁸

In The Topeka School, Lerner offers just such a precursory movement, manifested in the text in three different ways, associated both with Jane, and, later, with Adam's wife, Natalia.

As a child, Adam struggles to cope with verbal taunts from his peers and takes solace in a nonsense poem, ‘The Purple Cow’, taught him by Jane, the recitation of which he refers to as a ‘prophylactic speech act’ that ‘protects him from being what he sees in his mind's eye’ – that is, a victim of his peers’ ‘weak spells’.³⁹ Later, when he is recovering from a serious concussion and struggling to express himself linguistically, and again, when he is keen to differentiate himself from his abusive grandfather (who, Jane notes, would have also been an excellent debater), he returns to the same poem. In each instance, the recitation of ‘nonsense’ – the antithesis of the rational speech act – is invoked as both solace and defence. Similarly, when Jane is processing a childhood trauma and finds her own language collapsing, she feels an unexpected and ‘incredible sense of relief’. ‘This language has reached its limit’, she says, ‘and a new one will be built’.⁴⁰ Here, she echoes Cixous's exhortation that woman must invent ‘a new insurgent writing’ that will ‘allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history’.⁴¹ In the novel, ‘nonsense’ is invoked as a form of anti-hegemonic resistance and transformation – but one, too, that transcends sex-categories and gender identities: Adam refers to his and Jane's shared enjoyment of ‘The Purple Cow’ as ‘their ritual refusal of repetition across the generations’.⁴² Thus, in the midst of Adam's debating triumphs and the associated invocation of the ‘FUTURE OF SPEECH’, the novel suggests the possibility of a linguistic insurgency, led by the mother and taken up by the son. However, while both characters’ experiences of the breakdown of the symbolic order herald the disruption of a particular, dominant practice of masculinity, this specific insurgency fails to offer much in the way of political efficacy. The poetry remains a private ritual; the babbling of a concussed child or adult holds no discursive power. The mother is present, or invoked, as a disruptive force, but what respite or alternative she offers here is only, as Adam says, prophylactic.

The future of speech

In the final section of The Topeka School, the adult Adam accompanies his wife, Natalia, and their young daughter, Luna, to an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement centre where Natalia is involved in a peaceful demonstration against the detention of migrant families and children, and the forced separation of children from their parents, by the Trump administration. When his own child gets nervous in the hubbub, Adam verbally reassures her, but he is aware that it is not his words that offer comfort, but rather the tactility of the speech-act – ‘the vibrations of my voice’.⁴³ Much earlier in the novel, Jane refers explicitly to a haptic alternative to language that gives women, in particular, a way to ‘speak’ that is distinct both from the verbal bullying performed by many of the other men referenced in the novel and their ‘very masculine, very businessy’ handshakes: Jane presses the hands of the women who approach her in the supermarket, fans of her writing, with the intention of communicating ‘solidarity through that touch’.⁴⁴ Elsewhere in the novel, male physicality is figured primarily as violence – drunken fights, Darren's attack on Mandy⁴⁵ – but during the protest scene, Adam, assuming the role of caregiver as Natalia initiates a protest chant, adopts a feminine-coded practice of physical reassurance that also doubles as haptic communication, and thereby provides the same solace to his daughter that Jane has given to her readers. Here, then, we can see a second ‘precursory movement’ in the transformation of cultural structures around masculinity. Carrigan, Connell and Lee claim that we need to recognise ‘the importance of violence […] as a constitutive practice that helps to make all kinds of masculinity – and to recognize that much of this violence comes from the state’.⁴⁶ State-imposed and state-sanctioned violence has, they argue, been formative in establishing similar practices of masculinity as that from which Lerner's adult character has tried – and, in the playground scene, failed – to distance himself. In the ICE scene, however, it is Natalia, the mother, who seeks to ‘push past’ the guards and the armed police in their ‘tactical gear’⁴⁷ – who, in other words, directly tackles the ideological state apparatuses working for the masculinist Trump administration – whereas Adam turns, as a parent, towards to what Cixous would call ‘a systematic experimentation with [his] bodily functions’, thus expanding the range of his performances as both father and man. If, then, as Carrigan, Connell and Lee suggest, ‘the historical construction of masculinity and femininity is also a struggle for the control and direction of state power’,⁴⁸ both Adam and Natalia's actions in this final scene speak to a deliberate grassroots reorienting of that control and direction.

By engaging with a haptic mode of communication in the wake of his earlier lapse into violence – itself, as we have seen, linked to Trump's conception of fatherhood – Adam taps thus into a wider ‘cultural repertoire’ of available masculine behaviours. The discursive nature of such an engagement, as pre-empted by Jane's earlier supermarket encounters, distinguishes it from the private constitution of the ‘nonsense’ by means of which Adam also manages to disengage, consciously or otherwise, from hegemonic notions of masculine behaviour. Again, though, compared to the oratory might of the debate-inspired campaign speech or the mass media as another form of ISA, the political efficacy of haptic communication is limited by physical reach. It is in this same scene, however, as the group who had occupied the ICE building emerge outside to meet with the ‘protesters who had joined in solidarity’,⁴⁹ that a final precursor to transformation is introduced: the collectivisation of the speech act.

In the context of a political protest, speech acts tend towards the collective: the crowd, united by disenfranchisement, party politics, or ideology, publicly shouts and chants its united dissent. In this case, the group is united by policies – ‘kids in cages’⁵⁰ – that grew from the political discourse incubated in Adam's own debating circuits, wherein policy was divorced from ethics in order to score tournament-winning points. Now that this ‘FUTURE’ has arrived, Adam is no longer on stage: rather, in the ICE building, it is Natalia who leads a chant in Spanish, and a ‘mother with a baby’⁵¹ who gives a speech to the assembled families, while Adam feels increasingly uncomfortable and unsafe.⁵² Back in 1976, Cixous noted how ‘daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak – even just open her mouth – in public’:⁵³ here we see multiple female voices offering, in public, a political counter-discourse, as the figure(s) of the mother speaks back to, and against, the dominant masculinist order. Earlier, when Jane is watching Adam compete in the national debate final, she notes that the version of public speaking to which he is committed, at which he excels, and with which he upholds one of his several versions of masculinity, is both individual (‘Your speech must be original to be prized’) and social (‘your speech must be intelligible to the tribe’). Through the ‘the individual mouth’,⁵⁴ then, the speaker, a ‘boy’, ritually performs ‘speech’ by mimicking what Jane calls ‘the language of politics and policy, the language of men’.⁵⁵ Public speech is thus coded masculine; ‘politics and policy’, likewise. Two decades later, when the protesters leave the ICE building, we see a crowd led by women raise its collective voice against such politics. Here, the ‘individual mouth’ performs no notable function: rather, the protesters speak together, as one, amplifying their message via the ‘human microphone’, or the ‘people's mic’⁵⁶ – a form of collective speech by (largely) women that rejects the gendered-as-masculine exceptionalism encoded within the mode of public speaking modelled by the debating clubs. Cixous argues that social liberation will be marked ‘by woman's seizing the occasion to speak’, the seizing of which will bring about her ‘shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression’.⁵⁷ Here, the collective speech act outside the ICE building represents just such an entry. The ‘people's mic’ acts as what Cixous terms the ‘antilogos weapon’⁵⁸ with which change can be – or at least might be – effected. Alexandra Kingston-Reese, discussing Lerner's earlier novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (in which Adam also stars), notes that despite Adam's inability in that book to imagine that his poetry ‘could make things happen’, to change ‘the government or the economy’, that novel's attempt to articulate ‘the grammar of the political event’ (in the context, that is, of the 2004 Madrid train bombings) nonetheless suggests that it is only in the subjective language of the individual that any response to the ‘collectivity of the political or institutional’ might be found.⁵⁹ In The Topeka School, however, the same character not only queries the ethics of the individual speech act as a political, or politicised, weapon, but makes himself, despite his admitted embarrassment, participate in the collective speech act: he is determined ‘to be part of a tiny public speaking, a public learning slowly how to speak again’.⁶⁰ Between Leaving the Atocha Station and The Topeka School, then, Adam – and, arguably, Lerner himself – moves from a commitment to the individual voice towards a sincere, if awkward, attempt to embrace collective speech acts as a radical mode of anti-hegemonic political praxis. While my focus in this paper is not on the autofictional aspect of Lerner's work,⁶¹ it is nonetheless notable that he claims to have worked closely with his mother – the model for Jane – during the composition of The Topeka School.⁶² If traditional ‘public speaking’ promotes the individual voice of policy, then, in this novel, at both the level of the narrator and the author himself, the praxes of collective speech and collaborative writing emerge as the most empowering acts of political resistance – a resistance that is built around the locus of the mother, and that nonetheless not only includes men, but facilitates for men a ‘learning […] how to speak again’ – or, in Connell's terms, a new configuration of possible masculine practice.

Retrospectively commenting upon his experience on the debating team, Adam notes that while his coach will go on to ‘[oversee] radical cuts to social services and education, all funding for the arts, [privatise] Medicaid, [and implement] one of the most disastrous tax cuts in American history’, Adam's own narrative – The Topeka School – will act as a ‘genealogy of [that coach's] speech, its theaters and extremes’.⁶³ In tracing this genealogy as far the contemporary alt-right wing of the Republican party – represented here by the ICE programme, which was, and remains, widely condemned as racist⁶⁴ – Lerner also suggests a genealogy for a counter-practice: an anti-hegemonic speech act that denies the political supremacy of the ‘individual mouth’. Back in high school, in the final competition of his short, if exemplary, debating career, Adam argued for ‘the need for societies to free up human capacities from profit-seeking and the need for new regimes of language’⁶⁵: Jane, in the audience, is ‘moved by seeing [her] son defend a more human scale of exchange, by his rejection of linguistic overkill’ as represented by ‘the spread’ – the barely intelligible barrage-like style of argumentation that rejects ethics and embraces the abandonment of meaningful content – but Adam loses the debate 4–1.⁶⁶ In the final few pages of the novel, however, now a parent in his late thirties, Adam finds at last this ‘new regime’ in the collective speech-act – a regime that emerges in the context of a broadly anti-capitalist movement against Trump and his associated practice of hegemonic masculinity.

A reconfiguration of practice

Sam Caleb and Niall Ó Cuileagáin, recalling Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia (2001), suggest that ‘to look back nostalgically is not to recall the past as it really was, but to elide, distort, and occlude its realities in the light of what has happened since’.⁶⁷ In The Topeka School, Adam is decidedly not nostalgic: rather, his examination of the past consciously and conspicuously highlights the problematic genesis of contemporary neoliberal and alt-right politics, from the business handshakes and the homophobic church leaders, to the rationalised erosion of truth-value from public declamations. In contrast, Trump's regime was dominated by nostalgia: like its Brexit equivalent, ‘Take Back Control’, his ‘MAGA’ campaign slogan ‘focused on the notion of restoring a prior state of being’ in which, however, the precise period of this former greatness was not, and could not, be specifically defined – and thus replicated – suggesting that its proponents (if not its architects) were indeed ‘caught in a nostalgic stasis’.⁶⁸ In the novel, this nostalgia is figured in the Westboro congregation, the ‘Men’ that harass Jane, and the ‘agents of the state’, whom Adam fears will arrest Natalia and the other protesters, ‘now that America was great again’.⁶⁹ The closing scene is explicit, however, in its refutation of the power of such nostalgia and of the force of the nostalgic state: not only Natalia, but Adam, too, who is anxious and ‘embarrassed’, embraces a process of ‘learning’ that moves him away from the ways of doing speech, and politics, that have dominated both his and his country's past. Connell and Messerschmidt suggest that ‘a more humane, less oppressive, means of being a man might become hegemonic, as part of a process leading toward an abolition of gender hierarchies’:⁷⁰ Adam's joining of the ‘people's mic’ is a step towards just such a developing practice, and Natalia's more dominant role in the communal voicing of dissent at the protest is an equivalent signal that gender hierarchies can, and ought, to be dismantled.

An effective political practice, according to Carrigan, Connell and Lee, ‘implies something that can be worked on and transformed’; they argue thus that transformation is key to any analysis of masculinity.⁷¹ In The Topeka School, Lerner cojoins the two: Adam's practice of masculinity is tightly yoked to political praxis, and the various transformations of this practice, as figured by his shifting modes of speech, are equally tied to alterations in the political economy of the USA between the nineteen-ninties and the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Butler argues that the ‘transformation of social relations becomes a matter […] of transforming hegemonic social conditions’ rather than individual acts:⁷² here, as we have seen in the movement from Leaving the Atocha Station to The Topeka School, Adam's transformative individual act is the relinquishing of his singular voice, but in the later novel, this relinquishing is brought about by a large-scale transformation in social relations within his peer-group from the hegemony of the masculine to the female-led voicing of collective dissent as Cixous's ‘antilogos weapon’. This transformation was prefigured in 10:04, a book which bridges the gap between Leaving the Atocha Station and The Topeka School, and in which the narrator (also Adam) intermittently cedes the floor to a series of what Maggie Nelson calls ‘guest speakers’ – a series which includes, significantly, Adam's female colleague, Noor. Here, again, we see Lerner suggest that the relinquishment of a singular (male) voice is a transformative strategy in a developing political praxis. If The Topeka School is interested in modes of speech, in 10:04, a novel explicitly concerned with the uncertain future of the human species, this relinquishment is bound up with listening as a way of productively engaging with ‘a certain kind of openness and curiosity’ that might itself lead to political change.⁷³ If, as Butler tells us, gender is an act rehearsed, actualised, and ‘reproduced as reality once again’,⁷⁴ then in both The Topeka School and 10:04, Adam's joining in the collective speech act and listening to Noor's story (amongst others) function as actualizations by an individual actor of a gender-identity – a version of masculinity – that runs counter to those gender-identities rehearsed and actualised by that same actor in previous scenes. Adam's resistance to hegemony is, then, an act that can be read in both novels as contributing to the potential fashioning of a new hegemony.

In Max Fletcher's review of The Topeka School, looking at Darren's attack on Mandy, he remarks that ‘in a country in which language and communication has undergone such a sustained assault, it was all but inevitable that violence would re-assert itself’.⁷⁵ While the peaceful protest with which Lerner closes out the novel queries such inevitability, the January 2021 riots at Washington's Capitol Building seem to uphold Fletcher's assertion in positioning Darren, rather than Adam, as the political avatar of the ‘FUTURE’. But yet, Adam's forcing himself to learn a new way to speak and act as a man, suggests that, as Cixous argued in 1976, ‘we are at the beginning of a new history, or rather of a process of becoming in which several histories intersect with one another’.⁷⁶ Here, Adam's process of becoming is an ongoing reconfiguration of his practice of masculinity: his involvement in the collective dissenting speech-act intersects with a rising tide of real-life protests against the alt-right US administration.⁷⁷ As Connell and Bob Pease both suggest, masculinity research must be ‘integrated with more general analyses of social change’,⁷⁸ and in The Topeka School, Lerner works through just such a process of integration. Citing Karel Kosíc's argument that human practice is ‘onto-formative’ – that is, what we do makes the reality in which we live – Connell reminds us that to effect any social change, we need to reconfigure our practices of gender: the ‘making and remaking’ of gender, and particularly masculinity, she says, is a political process affecting both ‘the balance of interests in society and the direction of social change’.⁷⁹ Adam's subsuming of his ‘individual mouth’ into the ‘people's mic’ is a gesture, however small, towards just such a remaking; the onto-formative nature of human practice, and Butler's related theory of gender performativity, mean that an accretion of similar acts cannot but effect social change, no matter the scale. Carrigan, Connell and Lee argue that the political meaning of ‘writing about masculinity turns mainly on its treatment of power’:⁸⁰ in The Topeka School, Lerner uses Adam as an avatar for exploring the complex links between the hegemonic masculinity specific to the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century USA, the country's administrative and ideological power structures, and the problematics of the ‘cruel optimism’ these systems effect in those people confronted with their own practices of masculinity. If there is hope, it lies, as Connell suggests, in the remaking of gender, and here, it is the mothers who model practices for just such remaking(s). If we seek social change, then, perhaps, like Adam, we ought to all force ourselves to participate.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Martina Mullaney and the steering committee of The Missing Mother conference, University of Bolton, 2021, for which an earlier version of this paper was drafted, and to the anonymous reviewers, whose feedback was invaluable.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005; first published, 1995).

2 Margaret Wetherell and Nigel Edley, ‘Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity: Imaginary Positions and Psycho-Discursive Practices’, Feminism & Psychology, 9.3 (1999), p. 346.

3 Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell, and John Lee, ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, Theory and Society, 14.5 (1985), p. 561.

4 Hélène Cixous, Keith Cohen, and Paula Cohen, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, 1.4 (1976), p. 879.

5 Mark Makela, ‘Transcript: Donald Trump's Taped Comments about Women’, New York Times (6 October 2016). https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/donald-trump-tape-transcript.html [Date accessed: 29 June 2022].

6 Carrigan, Connell and Lee, ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, pp. 587, 563.

7 R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept’, Gender & Society, 19.6 (2005), p. 832.

8 Jonathan A. Allan, ‘Masculinity as Cruel Optimism’, NORMA, 13.3-4 (2018), p. 180.

9 Connell and Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity’, p. 846.

10 Ibid., p. 849.

11 Carrigan, Connell and Lee, ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, p. 592.

12 Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, ‘Doing Gender’, Gender and Society, 1.2 (1987), p. 146.

13 Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40.4 (1988), p. 519.

14 West and Zimmerman, ‘Doing Gender’, p. 126.

15 Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, p. 522.

16 West and Zimmerman, ‘Doing Gender’, p. 126.

17 Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, p. 522.

18 Scott Fabius Kiesling, ‘“Now I Gotta Watch What I Say”: Shifting Constructions of Masculinity in Discourse’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 11.2 (2001), p. 267.

19 Wetherell and Edley, ‘Negotiating Hegemonic Masculinity’, p. 351.

20 Christian Lorentzen, ‘Homo Trumpiens: Ben Lerner's The Topeka School’, Sewanee Review, 127.4 (2019), p. 787.

21 Ibid., p. 782.

22 Ben Lerner, The Topeka School (London: Granta, 2019), p. 143.

23 Ibid., 224.

24 Aaron Blake, ‘Kellyanne Conway Says Donald Trump's Team Has “Alternative Facts.” Which Pretty Much Says it all’, The Washington Post (22 January 2017). https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/22/kellyanne-conway-says-donald-trumps-team-has-alternate-facts-which-pretty-much-says-it-all/ [Date accessed: 6 July 2022].

25 Lerner, The Topeka School, p. 127.

26 Ibid.

27 Connell and Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity’, p. 846.

28 West and Zimmerman, ‘Doing Gender’, p. 127.

29 Lerner, The Topeka School, p. 118.

30 David Bond, ‘A House Divided: Ben Lerner's America’, Anthropology Now, 12.2 (2020).

31 Connell and Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity’, p. 839.

32 Allan, p. 182; Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (New York: Duke University Press, 2011).

33 Lerner, The Topeka School, p. 270.

34 Ibid., p. 269.

35 Cixous, Cohen and Cohen, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, p. 879.

36 Lerner, The Topeka School, p. 31.

37 Ibid.

38 Cixous, Cohen and Cohen, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, p. 879.

39 Lerner, The Topeka School, p. 125.

40 Ibid., p. 88.

41 Cixous, Cohen and Cohen, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, p. 880.

42 Lerner, The Topeka School, p. 241.

43 Ibid., p. 278.

44 Ibid., p. 91.

45 Ibid., p. 258.

46 Carrigan, Connell and Lee, ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, p. 589.

47 Lerner, The Topeka School, pp. 277–8.

48 Carrigan, Connell and Lee, ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, p. 589.

49 Lerner, The Topeka School, p. 280.

50 Clara Long, ‘Written Testimony: “Kids in Cages: Inhumane Treatment at the Border”’, Human Rights Watch (11 July 2019). https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/07/11/written-testimony-kids-cages-inhumane-treatment-border [Date accessed: 7 July 2022].

51 Lerner, The Topeka School, p. 278.

52 Ibid., 279.

53 Cixous, Cohen and Cohen, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, p. 880.

54 Lerner, The Topeka School, p. 225.

55 Ibid., p. 226.

56 Ibid., p. 282.

57 Cixous, Cohen and Cohen, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, p. 880.

58 Ibid.

59 Alexandra Kingston-Reese, ‘The Individual Reader’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 62.4 (2020), p. 7.

60 Lerner, The Topeka School, p. 282.

61 For excellent analyses of this see, for instance, Alison Gibbons, ‘Ben Lerner’, in Patrick O'Donnell, Stephen J. Burn, Lesley Larkin (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 1980-2020 (London: Wiley, 2022); Arnaud Schmitt, ‘The Pragmatics of Autofiction’, in Alexandra Effe and Hannah Lawlor (eds.), The Autofictional: Approaches, Audiences, Forms (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); and Ioannis Tsitsovits, ‘Ben Lerner's Autofictional Politics of Form’, American Book Review, 43.2 (2022). For specific reference to The Topeka School, see also Barry Sheils, ‘Style Interminable: The Auto-Fictional Object of the Humanities in Works by Brigid Brophy and Ben Lerner’, Textual Practice, 36.4.

62 Lerner notes that ‘my mom and I have discussed this book so often, and she was such a crucial interlocutor about it that the historical person enters it that way, too—not just my relationship with my mom but my mom as an editor’. Catherine Barnett, ‘Ben Lerner on Writing and Magic Pills’, The Yale Review (1 January 2020). https://yalereview.org/article/ben-lerner-writing-and-magic-pills [Date accessed: 3 January 2023].

63 Ibid., p. 143.

64 Simon Moya-Smith, ‘Trump's Immigration Policy Is Caging Indigenous Children. This Is the America Native People Know’, NBC News (28 July 2019). https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-immigration-policy-caging-indigenous-children-america-native-people-ncna1035451 [Date accessed: 7 July 2022].

65 Lerner, The Topeka School, p. 213.

66 Ibid., p. 214.

67 Sam Caleb and Niall Ó Cuileagáin, ‘“Forget, Remember!”: Literature and Nostalgia’, Moveable Type, 12 (2020), p. 3.

68 Ibid., p. 4.

69 Lerner, The Topeka School, p. 279.

70 Connell and Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity’, p. 833.

71 Carrigan, Connell and Lee, ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, p. 596.

72 Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, p. 525.

73 Maggie Nelson, ‘Slipping the Surly Bonds of Earth: On Ben Lerner's Latest’, Los Angeles Review of Books (25 August 2014). https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/95063/ [Date accessed: 3 January 2023].

74 Ibid.

75 Max Fletcher, ‘The Topeka School’, Moveable Type, 12 (2020), p. 90.

76 Cixous, Cohen and Cohen, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, p. 882.

77 Robert Chiarito, ‘Presidents Day Protests Decry Trump's Emergency Declaration’, Reuters.com (18 February 2019). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-protests-idUSKCN1Q70XX [Date accessed: 7 July 2022].

78 Connell, Masculinities, p. xix.

79 Ibid., pp. 44, 65.

80 Carrigan, Connell and Lee, ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, p. 552.