The Moment As It Passes You By
A Closer Look at "Leaving the Atocha Station"
👋 Long time no see! This hopes to be the first in a series of monthly posts investigating books that have influenced my own writing and the writing of my second novel, leading up to its publication next year.
Adam Gordon is suffering from writer’s block. He’s won a prestigious poetry fellowship in Madrid, allegedly to complete an epic narrative poem about the Spanish Civil War, but he’s struggling to engage with art, with what it even means to engage with art, as much as he’s struggling to face his own feelings of fraudulence: in his ability to write poetry; in his ability to speak Spanish; in his ability to engage, at all, with anyone or anything, especially history. The irony is two-fold: first, that the book’s prose is excellent, evidence in some meta-reflexive capacity that Adam’s artistic faculties are, in fact, all there (or, as he puts it late in the book, that “only his fraudulence is fraudulent”); and second, that while he wonders what is so special about him to have the authority to write about Spain, he lives through one of the most impactful elections in modern Spanish history.
On March 11, 2004, the Atocha metro station was attacked by al-Qaeda on the eve of a general election. After the bombing, in which thousands were injured and hundreds killed, Adam aimlessly follows the sounds of sirens until he sees the carnage first-hand and spends the rest of his day in his apartment, reading online accounts by American news publications detailing the helicopters he can hear chopping air above his building. He wonders how his physical proximity informs his inclusion in history and what it might offer to be a credible participant in it. It is the question he asks himself as he stares at the same painting every day, feeling nothing, or as he instinctively tells a romantic interest that his mother is dying to solicit pity.
This question of authentic engagement, whether with art or a political moment, and what that could possibly entail in practical terms, is central to the text.
That kind of anxiety about, you know, “Here I am, am I really here?” is, to me, the oldest—it’s like the fundamental question of the novel. In [The Charterhouse of Parma by] Stendhal, when Fabrice is wandering around the Battle of Waterloo he’s kind of wondering, “When do I know that I’ve participated in history? How close do I need to be to the guns to actually participate in history?” And that idea in the novel is kind of like, “What’s the value of my experience? How do I know when it crosses a certain threshold of authenticity?”1
The novel examines the self-conscious perception of one’s own perception and how that recursion precludes genuine participation. Adam Gordon’s preoccupation is chiefly with relationships. He is concerned with the strings connecting him to people and events and things more than the people and events and things themselves. His solipsism is a form of narcissism—if not an exceptional one, then at least a variety we all recognize in ourselves—the injection of self in the context of other. He is aware of the general election and its stakes, for instance, but is only curious about what it will provide him by way of experience.
Early in the novel, Adam visits Toledo with one of his romantic interests, Isabel.
On highways to Toledo we passed several tour buses full of what looked like Americans, digital cameras already in hand, and as we drew past them I expressed infinite disdain, which I could do easily with my eyebrows, for every tourist whose gaze I met. My look accused them of supporting the war, of treating people and the relations between people like things, of being the lemmings of a murderous and spectacular empire, accused them as if I were a writer in flight from a repressive regime rather than one of its most fraudulent grantees.
Once in Toledo, his sense of superiority falls apart when actively questioned.
“But why are Americans studying Franco,” she asked, gesturing toward a group of Americans being led around the Alcázar, “instead of studying Bush?” She said it as if every American tourist were planning a monograph on El Caudillo.
“The proper names of leaders are distractions from concrete economic modes.” I was trying to sound deep, hoping concrete and mode were cognates. My limited stock of verbs encouraged general pronouncements.
“Why aren’t you studying the American economic mode?” She was angry.
“You can’t study a mode of production directly.” And with my manner, I said, “I am delivering a fact so obvious it pains me.”
“I’m sure the people of Iraq are looking forward to your poem about Franco and his economy.” It was the first unkind thing she’d ever said to me.
Lerner makes a direct connection between awareness and the superiority it affords. Adam thinks himself “better” than these tourists, who he assumes know nothing of their complicity with the American empire (the same tourists that Isabel implies are just like Adam, all artists here to pilfer a foreign context for material). He claims his work has importance because of what it says about him to be working on something important. But when pushed to explain what is so critical about responding to Spain’s past instead of America’s present, which he is ostensibly better equipped to do as an American, he is exposed.
Adam has created a version of himself he thinks others will find more compelling: a poet with deep thoughts writing an important political poem about Spanish history. He uses his inability (or, at least, refusal) to speak Spanish as a tool to gesture at grand ideas, if only he were fluent enough to express them. He speaks about the superstructure of politics (e.g. “concrete economic modes”) to escape discussing the politics themselves. He does the same for art and his relationships, maintaining a layer of abstraction that lends (he hopes) an air of sophistication. But the distance is a defense mechanism which, as Isabel rightly points out, relegates his engagement to mere posturing.
In 1920, the Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist Joseph Roth migrated to Berlin. Over the next thirteen years, his reportage from a city in the dwindling days of the Weimar Republic was eventually collected in What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933. Roth’s work gives us a uniquely fascinating view of the concerns of people who were unknowingly living through the rise of the Nazi Party. Most contemporary art and literature about the period fails to escape shortcomings inherent to the form: they linger on that which interests us the most, i.e. what will gain importance in time, and in so doing inject present considerations into the past. But Roth’s accounts are by contrast much more human. He is there, preoccupied mostly with bathhouses, entertainment, crime, all while, in the background of his life, the prevailing political context slides into fascism, the clues of its magnitude evident only to the reader of today, who knows what to look for.
Roth’s work is powerful and enduring precisely because it illuminates how undramatic that slide was, how life continued on. The book has become a warning only in retrospect and is charged with the political potential of what followed. It also serves as a kind of counterpoint to Adam Gordon’s concerns, to Leaving the Atocha Station as a whole: that narrative fiction can actually instruct political change, even when the work is not directly concerned with politics (i.e. does not become propaganda or a polemic). This, to me, is among the more interesting facets of the question Lerner’s novel raises: what does it mean to engage with a present moment through art, as in, what is its function?
In his introduction to Granta 165: Deutschland, editor Thomas Meaney defends the utility of narrative literature in times of political upheaval.
As long as people continue to hate reality, and do anything to defend themselves against it, realism will not have exhausted its possibilities. We [Granta] believe great literature is political, but not in the sense that is commonly meant: literature is most enduring, not when it is most saturated with political ideals, but exactly when it is not, and because it is not, it is.
The Charterhouse of Parma was published 186 years ago and the question in its text remains as relevant as ever, particularly through Lerner’s lens of political engagement. It is the question we ask ourselves from protests or else hunched over our phones watching videos of protests or else videos of protestors filming themselves participating in protests: “Here I am, am I really here?”
The novel ends with Adam’s participation on a panel of influential writers, where Lerner puts as close to a button on things as he can manage.
Elena, distinguished professor, directed a question at me: “Then why write at all?” She said it without malice, but I was unequivocally the addressee, and I was now required to respond, and against the backdrop of my memorized quip, my speech would seem all the more halting and confused. Any answer would do, cryptic or funny, but I was unable to locate my Spanish; time was passing and I’d parted my lips, but I could not formulate any response. Finally, I said: “I don’t know.”
I, too, do not know. I do not know what is so important about writing at a time when a sitting President off-handedly suggests deracinating an entire people for the purpose of riviera real-estate development; or when a South African billionaire grants himself access to the financial infrastructure of the United States, cutting jobs and slashing regulatory budgets for self-interest; or when the Alternative für Deutschland breaches a long-held parliamentary firewall and with it over 20% representation in the Bundestag, with sights on the Chancellory; or when in the next five years, either China or the EU will emerge as the dominant global force, all ties to the US severed by the bipolar volatility of its two-party system, the sun-setting of Pax Americana. I don’t know what writing—especially writing fiction—can possibly help, and perhaps it is true to say that it cannot help at all. But I feel, perhaps misguidedly, that it is important to soldier on not in spite of but because of its powerlessness to create change. As Adam puts it, “No writer is free to renounce his political moment, but literature reflects politics more than it affects it, an important distinction.”
In other words, literature is a lens, and if we are interested in the world around us then it our duty to point that lens at anything in need of magnifying. Because even if we do not understand the significance of our moment or else miss entirely what will eventually be seen as its most critical attributes, our participation by way of recording—like Roth—will still be charged with political potential over time. So long as we pay attention, it will end up in the work.
What I take most from this novel in service of my own writing is that Lerner’s debut only poses the one question and that there’s power in that simplicity2. Many novels ask about eighteen disjointed things simultaneously which all muddle together into an unfocused mess (my current work-in-progress included). And of course many, many, more novels don’t raise any questions at all, even ones people call “important literature.” Lerner makes clear his preoccupation with something tangible about the world and, without devolving into polemic, his novel is suffused with the thought. Reading it serves as a reminder that so long as we avoid holding the present at arm’s length from our work, it has value, and is worth doing. That it is “most enduring, not when it is most saturated with political ideals, but exactly when it is not, and because it is not, it is.”
I’m finishing a new novel! There’s not much I can say about it right now except that it has been incredibly influenced by the books I’ve read (and re-read) over the past two years, hence this new “Closer Look” series. Each month, I’ll write an essay on a facet of a book that has informed my new novel. And there might be some exciting treats along the way.
Until next time.
-JSR
P.S. Before I get called out, I am well aware that Leaving the Atocha Station takes place in Madrid while my photographs are from Barcelona. They are from a 24-hour solo trip that is still, regrettably, the only city in Spain I have film photographs of. If it helps your immersion, note with satisfaction that Adam Gordon describes La Sagrada Família as “the ugliest building [he] has ever seen.” This happens to be the only thing in the book I disagree with.
I recently had the pleasure of attending the book launch for and subsequently reading The Wardrobe Department, by Elaine Garvey, and had a similar reaction. Though Garvey is working much more with the meaty question of domestic subjugation and the domineering patriarchal male dominance of society, she is working only with that (which is a compliment): every dynamic, every beat, no matter how varied, contribute to that question and the novel is better for its central focus.