Semiotic Weaponry
A Closer Look at "The Topeka School"
👋 This is another in a series of monthly posts investigating books that have influenced my writing. In case you missed it, you can read the first here: A Closer Look At “Leaving the Atocha Station”
On April 12, 2025, I’ll be joining a panel with Elaine Garvey and Louise Hegarty (moderated by Lisa McInerney) at the Granard Booktown Festival. Tickets are available here.
My mother used to read me a children’s book about seven blind mice who find something strange by their pond. “It’s a pillar,” says the red mouse, having touched a leg. “It’s a snake,” says the green mouse, having touched a trunk. “No,” the yellow mouse says, having touched a tusk, “it’s a spear.” On the mice go, one at a time, each incorrectly concluding the shape of the enormous elephant before them.1
This is what we in the business call a metaphor.
Ben Lerner’s third novel, The Topeka School, takes a polyphonic look at prehistory: in the adolescence of the Adam Gordon of his first two novels, before he was a poet in Madrid or successful writer in New York; in contemporary right-wing weaponization of political speech; in the failure of linguistic technologies. It tells the story of a teenage Adam Gordon and his parents, Jane and Jonathan, psychologists who work at The Foundation, a loosely fictionalized psychological institute based on the real Menninger Foundation that Lerner’s parents worked in. The novel comprises alternating vignettes that hop through time and points-of-view.
Each character’s perspective gives Lerner a different angle to attack a specialized language. There is the “spread,” a debate technique utilized by Adam and his opponents to overload arguments into timed speeches at nearly incomprehensible speeds. Then the opposite, “flow,” a mental state found in grassy yards after high school parties, typing in the dull blue glow of a computer screen, a state more slipped into than intentionally achieved. Then there is the psychoanalytical language of The Foundation, designed to impassively dissect the most intense emotional experiences. What Lerner offers most is in aggregate; his elephant is the technology of language itself, the weight at which it trembles, the load that leads to total collapse.
Written during the first Trump administration, it's no mystery why one of the linguistic technologies Lerner pays particular attention to is political speech. It ought to relate—if only conceptually, optimistically—to the proliferation of intellectual ideas made in good faith. Lerner draws a direct connection between the high school debaters of the 1990’s to modern politicians they became: high schoolers playing dress-up on weekends, waking up early and hungover to don suits and debate the efficacy of capital punishment as a deterrent in otherwise empty classrooms. But unlike in Congress, there are rules, points, a determination of winners and losers.
Crucially, points are awarded for “dropped” arguments: a claim your opponent makes that you’ve failed to refute. Where this should incentivize thorough cross-examination of ideas, it instead incentivizes speaking as quickly as possible, encouraging debaters to formulate the most arguments rather than the best ones. Lerner details how, for instance, Adam practices speaking with a pen clenched between his teeth to strengthen his tongue (the same mechanism by which he is able to impress his white suburban friends by free-styling after a night of drinking and smoking crystal). Gordon’s extemp coach, Evanson, a Topekan champion in his own right, serves as an even blunter connection from this dress rehearsal to the real thing: the harmful rhetoric of modern populist politics.
Evanson was also a master of what would come to be called “trolling.” When Adam advocated the moral imperative of redistributing wealth to fund a welfare state, Evanson declared it, with a violent smile, a surprising argument for a Jew. When Adam grew furious, the wide-eyed Evanson clarified that he meant only that it surprised him that someone with such knowledge of the evils of tyrannical government would want the state to have the power to seize individual assets. (“Are you seriously suggesting I would make an anti-Semitic comment?” The sudden widening of the eyes, the animal mimicry of innocence, was one of Evanson’s signature moves.) But what Evanson really “meant,” Adam felt, was precisely to manipulate his emotions and show him to be a paranoid Jew.
The weaponization of speech by “trolling” is the intentional miscalibration of the technology: misusing a linguistic structure that assumes earnest transmission of ideas to intentionally transmit unacceptable ones, then using the assumption of good faith as an argument for mistranslation, which somehow more grievously faults the accuser than the accused. Or, as Lerner goes on to say, “Evanson was gifted at committing the plausibly deniable outrage, then taking tactical umbrage, claiming the high ground.”
The “spread” is another weapon which packs so many competing ideas as to inundate, a DDoS attack of arguments. It has the structure of logical argument but serves not as a vehicle of thought but incapacitation. In his final high school debate, after a successful career of “spreading” opponents, Adam faces one who uses the technique against him. Instead of following the proven tactic to refute as many arguments as possible in the time allotted, he attacks the very method, defending the institution of debate from the “spread” itself. It’s a moving passage—one his parents proudly witness—and both them and us, the reader, are convinced in the power of rationality and logic in the face of driveling nonsense. He loses, of course, 4-1.
“Flow” is the artistic converse of “spread”: it is language which is on its surface meaningless but packs immense personal power. Towards the end of the novel, in the wake of his mother’s storming out of the house after a fight with his father, Adam sits at her computer and begins to type.
He typed out fragments of what his dad had said, but now he organized and broke them roughly according to their syllables and stresses, something he’d been experimenting with in his poems… And so on. There was some kind of special power involved in repurposing language, redistributing the voices, changing the principle of patterning, faint sparks of alternative meaning in the shadow of the original sense, the narrative. The power was both real and very weak, a distant signal.
Prosody, Lerner seems to argue, may not be the antidote to semiotic weaponry. But it is at once a truer and weaker application of the same linguistic faculties.
The novel is not only concerned with successful applications of language, it is also concerned with its limitations. Early in Jonathan’s sections, we’re introduced to his experimentations with “speech shadowing,” an apt metaphor for the breakdown of language that we see throughout the novel.
I’d have participants don cumbersome black over-the-ear headphones and listen to a recording of a text I’d selected more or less at random (a driver’s ed manual I’d found discarded among other books on 109th and Columbus). As the subject parroted the recording, I gradually—almost imperceptibly—accelerated the tape; to my shock, I found that a significant number of the subjects would, past a certain threshold, begin to drivel, thinking all the while that they were repeating the recorded passage clearly.
This idea of failing speech returns again and again. Jane’s sections, for instance, detail her shifting relationship with Sima, another psychologist at The Foundation. Jane’s father is nonverbal and has been recently committed to a home, something she’s struggling with. As the line blurs between friend and therapist, and as Sima pokes at her relationship with her father, Jane arrives at a break-through.
Sima made a space for me to hear that there were depths beneath what I was saying that I hadn’t sounded yet.
Then something happened in that space her silence made: my speech started breaking down, fragmenting under the emotional pressure, became a litany of non sequiturs, like how some of the poets you admire sound to me, or I guess what Palin or Trump sound like, delivering nonsense as if it made sense, were argument or information, although I was speaking much faster than politicians speak; my speech was accelerating as if I were chasing after meaning as it receded; it was like I was having a stroke. Sima would go on to point out to me that I kept saying the word “training”—like I would say, “Why would my mom give that painting to Deborah, well, my training tells me—” and then break off midsentence and start talking about something else entirely.
Later in the novel, Adam calls home with news that his girlfriend has broken up with him and decided to stay abroad in Spain. As he oscillates violently between emotional states, we witness a similar semantic breakdown from Jonathan’s perspective.
But he went on, less about Natalia now than about the pointlessness of everything, phrases from his college reading entering his voice. He kept saying “instrumental reason,” which seemed apt to me because I thought the music of his language was overwhelming its meaning. At one point it was like he was speaking nonsense rhyme. All his vocabularies were colliding and recombining, his Topekan tough guy stuff, fast debate, language he’d lifted from depressing Germans, his experimental poets, the familiar terminology of heartbreak. And something approaching baby talk, regression. He wasn’t driveling, but, from our bedroom in Topeka, I pictured him wearing over-the-ear headphones in New York, receiving 180 words per minute in his left ear, speech mechanisms on the border of collapse.
Both Jane and Adam are experiencing their own sort of “speech shadowing:” internal voices speaking too quickly for them to process, language failing them entirely. The therapeutic technology of psychoanalysis is not equipped for the raw flood of Jane’s revelation. The logic of debate speech is ill-equipped to reason with heartbreak. There are, Lerner seems to say, limits.
Something that fascinates me about Lerner’s novels is how fundamentally un-novelistic they are. He seems unconcerned with narrative and plot as much as constructing constellations of related ideas, like these ideas on language. It is true I am less emotionally invested in his characters than in more traditional novels, and perhaps this is the cost of writing stories this way, but his through-lines are complex and thought provoking and the reason I so often return to his work. In interviews, Lerner has discussed his strategy—if that is the right word for it—in writing novels, particularly this one.
In The Topeka School which very much has a plot, what I was really interested in were these kinds of different theaters of extreme speech and how I could bring them in relation to one other—versions of extreme speech that I experienced like high school debate or white kids free-styling in the Midwest in the ‘90s or the pressurized language of therapy or the pressurized language of poetry—like how could I bring those theaters of extreme speech into relation and then bring that into relation to the kind of present and some of the fascist buffoonery that passes for public speech in the United States, right. So again it’s about creating an alignment between these different theaters or motifs more than it’s just about one paraphrasable story so I think a little more about patterning than plot but of course that kind of patterning is also a way of unfolding a story.2
The Topeka School was written throughout the first Trump administration and published in 2019. For me to be so drawn today to a novel that attempts to make sense of that discord—with particular focus on political speech—should be unsurprising to anyone whose primary residence isn’t under a rock.
Here is Lerner from an interview on Kansas Public Radio in 2024:
To a certain degree, what’s happening politically now is that language is not discourse, I mean people aren’t actually engaging in debate. It’s just these kind of signaling, right—of one sort or another, a kind of tribal signaling. And so that kind of shutting down of the communicative capacities of language is a real problem for sure.3
The novel insists that language is not abstract but can be made abstract intentionally and with devastating consequence. But it also seems to insist two things: first, that this weaponry co-exists with prosody, flow, beauty in the mechanisms of language as almost side-effects of their technologies; and second, that the same mechanism of abstraction which is so destructive can be reflected onto itself, can be used to dismantle its own weaponry.
The latter is particularly exemplified by the novel’s epilogue, where a present-day Adam Gordon attends an ICE protest during the first Trump administration. As his daughter draws chalk hearts around a fountain, he’s accosted by a policeman armed with military-grade riot gear, insisting that she stop. Adam uses his debate skills to disarm the man, underscoring the ludicrousness of the moment.
The cop, heavy, broad-shouldered, white, said to me: “We’ve let you all have your little protest here—but this can’t happen, this is a no.” “What can’t happen?” I said. And he pointed at Luna and the boy, who were drawing hearts and spirals on the ground with yellow and red chalk. “These kids are defacing government property.”
“I don’t understand,” I said innocently.
“What don’t you understand?” the guard said impatiently.
“I guess I don’t understand what government property is,” I trolled. “Is ‘government property’ like ‘public property’? Because I know we’re allowed to use this chalk—it washes away in the rain—on sidewalks.”
…Luna was drawing stars around her fountain. “Like this morning, before we got on the train, I told her that I wanted her to wear the high-tops with Velcro and not ones with laces, but—”
“This is the last time I’m going to ask you.”
“—you see the shoes she’s wearing. Do you have kids? Because I have no authority, is what I’m trying to say. I just have no authority over these kids. Do you have authority? Where does your authority come from again?”
The inclusion of this chapter is perilous. We've spent so long marinating in 90’s Topeka that it could be jarring to find ourselves in this present. It ties a neat optimistic bow that some, John Patrick McHugh reviewing for The Stinging Fly among them, found distracting:
What was said and shown in this chapter that we did not comprehend already? One supposes, that with this final chapter, Lerner sought to display positive community action, the happy ending of a single voice combining with others in protest at vile evil, an evil that loses this particular battle from the perspective offered to us in the book. And, perhaps, as a writer living in precarious and upsetting times, he felt obliged to offer hope (and who am I to criticise if one can take and enjoy this positivity, who am I to wish for a bleak ending in already bleak times?). But for a writer who is keenly aware of the absurdity of the Great American Novel, who obviously understands the failure and racial edge of such a notion, why does the conclusion of this book feel like the very earnest finale of a wannabe Great American Novel?4
The novel serves as a kaleidoscopic analysis of linguistic technologies with special attention paid to the precursors of modern populist speech. It is true, the novel paints a bleak picture of its future—our present—and truer still that this epilogue does present a hope uncharacteristic of the novel that precedes it. Lerner spends hundreds of pages detailing the mechanics of a gun pressed to our temples before finally letting us know that it can, with intentional force, be turned around. The semiotic weaponry cannot be dismantled but we can learn to wield it. John seems to view this as at worst optimistic pandering and at best unnecessary. But it isn’t a purely hopeful message: the weaponization is so pervasive it exists within us, too—there is nothing technologically separating aggressor from aggressed.
Here’s Lerner, again, in his own words:
The disaster of the Trumpian present was the moment in which I was writing the book but what I wanted to do was remember from that present my kind of adolescence in the 1990’s and the formation of my own voice including the way that some of those right-wing tendencies or the weaponization of language or political doublespeak or whatever is inside me, right, I mean it’s not just a kind of denunciation of the American from the outside, it’s an interrogation of the genealogy of my own voice.
And though the novel’s chief setting is in the center of America, what is so American about the linguistic epidemic it scrutinizes? To think of this as a uniquely American problem (one which only a “Great American Novel” can address) is to ignore many meaningful global elections and the leaders they've produced in the past ten years: Milei; Orbán; Meloni; Weidel; Bolsonaro; Johnson. Far from being redundant, I contend that the epilogue contextualises the zoomed in moment of the Reaganesque rhetoric haunting Midwest America by pulling the camera back. And yes, this dollying motion involves hope, too. That this use of language can be reclaimed is not a given otherwise; to see it play out is critical.
Only by showing us the up-close texture of skin on the leg, the smooth hollow knock on ebony, the shifting musculature of an elongated nasal passage, are we the reader able to fully appreciate both the macro and the micro, the intricacies of the elephant and the space it takes up. Its faculties and limitations.
And so ends the Ben Lerner biathlon. I can’t promise not to someday write about 10:04, his second novel, but I can promise that it won’t be next. I hope you’re all enjoying reading these as much as I’m enjoying writing them.
I’ve got a surprise in store for the next post: it’s not an essay.
Until then.
-JSR
Seven Blind Mice, Ed Young, Philomel Books, 1992
“Writer Ben Lerner: How Voices Come into a Novel | Louisiana Channel,” November 23, 2023
“Ben Lerner, The Topeka School” KPR Presents, July 15, 2024
“The Topeka School: Reviewed by John Patrick McHugh” The Stinging Fly, December 2, 2019