Re-Presentation and Repurposing: Curating Climate Realism in Ben Lerner's 10:04

Abstract

Realism, according to recent criticism, is deemed as too rooted in the present, unable to comprehend the potential effects of climatic disaster and imagine new political and organisational responses to vast ecological changes. Instead, the future-orientated genre of science fiction is much better suited to answering the questions that climate change presents. Citing the dangers of focusing on a far-flung future and on cultural narratives that tend towards the dystopian and catastrophic, this article challenges this contention. It concurs with contemporary calls across the humanities and sciences for ‘climate realism’ and suggests that there is no such firm boundary between realism and effective future thinking. Ben Lerner's 10:04 (2014) is a realist novel that grapples with the unfolding impacts of climate change. Yet, criticism has largely failed to consider exhibition spaces in the novel as arenas for thinking ecologically. This article frames the novel as a curatorial project, an exhibition space itself, re-presenting artwork and re-purposing poetry. It argues that Lerner plays with the real biographies of cultural artefacts to join multiple future climate histories to an unfolding present. Furthermore, I also argue that the intertextual, interchangeable reading practice promoted by such repurposing, though rooted in reality, emphasises the agency of the reader in determining a future both inside and outside the text. This paper, more broadly, elicits how cultural forms of climate realism can ‘stay with’ climate change as it unfolds, stressing the importance of such dynamism.