Illustration by Ren O’Hare.
Originally published in print September 2020.
Adam Gordon, the protagonist and narrator of Ben Lerner’s largely autobiographical novel Leaving the Atocha Station, rarely responds to emails. He pretends, even to his best friend, Cyrus, that he has no internet connection in his cheap Madrid apartment, “as I thought this would create the impression I was offline, busy accumulating experience.” Adam begins his account of his year-long fellowship in Madrid with the assertion that he, despite being an up-and-coming American poet, has “never had a profound experience of art.” The story that follows is a somewhat reluctant Künstlerroman, in which Adam struggles with Spanish, with art, with two simultaneous love affairs, and most importantly with his own anxiety and loneliness.
This is a writerly book that wears its intertextuality lightly. The title itself is taken from a poem by John Ashbery, a terrifically challenging poet with whom Gordon is enamoured. To my mind, however, the figure of the Anglophone in Spain conjures Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and the raft of Spanish writings by Ernest Hemingway. Adam’s lassitude and anxiety are striking when considered next to the apparent self-assurance found in Orwell and Hemingway. Adam is the very antithesis of the steadfast Hemingway hero – at least as he exists in the popular imagination, à la Midnight in Paris – and has none of the indefatigable idealism with which Orwell beguiles us in his frank account of the Spanish civil war. When, early in the novel, another man punches Adam, he pretends to be laid out flat: “I could taste the blood from my mildly cut lip and I bit hard to deepen the cut so that I would appear more injured and therefore solicit sufficient sympathy”.
Adam, in 2004, inhabits a world in which a blueprint for manhood that held so much sway in the twentieth century has, for good reason, been eroded. This blueprint was laid out in no small part in Orwell and Hemingway’s writings: broadly, their male heroes are enamoured of a cause despite its concurrent violence in the case of Homage to Catalonia, and they are at one with nature, opposed to the decadence western society, and often chauvinistic in the case of Hemingway. Discussing his latest book, The Topeka School, in which Adam is also the protagonist, Lerner notes that “the triumphalist ‘end of history’ discourse of the ’90s masked an accelerating identity crisis among certain white men of which Trumpism is one manifestation”. Pop-socioeconomic commentators from across the spectrum, from Jordan Peterson to Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints, note that today’s public discourse has been slow to adapt to shifting gender roles, and that men like Adam receive little guidance in conducting themselves, as men, to their own and to society’s advantage.
Lerner himself has described Adam as having a “fear of the actual”, and, indeed, his many lies range from the inane to the inexcusable. As a young adult in a foreign city, Adam wants desperately to feel at home and simultaneously to reinvent himself. He is trying to self-actualise, but how does one self-actualise while eschewing the actual? Frustrated, if excited, by the progress of his relationship with the suave Teresa, Adam attempts to mollify his own anxieties by considering the pleasures of speculation: “maybe I liked protecting the idea of our making love from clumsy attempts at its actualisation.” Adam recognises that his role as the young male artist is supposed to consist of “accumulating experience”, but he is terrified of doing so.
Suffering from an unspecified mood disorder, Adam self-medicates and, in so doing, revels in “absolving myself of some portion of my agency”. Whatever his officially diagnosed disorder is, Adam clearly suffers from imposter syndrome. He needs the “mechanism” of smoking to facilitate his moving through social situations and to convince himself of his unobtrusiveness, a sort of Prufrockian mask; he craves affection from Teresa and Isabel but keeps them at arm’s length, and believes their affection for him will last only as long as they don’t know him well; finally, brought to an anti-terrorism rally by his Spanish friends, he feels his voice sounds “off” in a crowd of thousands: he stops chanting and, worried he looks conspicuous, mouths the chants silently. This is a far cry from the fulfilling, masculinised camaraderie found in Hemingway and in Homage to Catalonia.
Given his paralysing self-awareness and his imposter status, how is Adam to subscribe to a cause or to a social set? If we transpose the conditions of the novel onto 2020’s political climate, how, as a white, straight, wealthy, college-educated American, is Gordon to protest, given that he represents exactly that which almost all protest today is organised: the patriarchal order (an order that excludes him in practical terms, but to which his identity group has almost exclusive theoretical access). In a discussion with fellow artists, Adam gives the pithy assertion that “[t]he proper names of leaders are distractions from concrete economic modes”, a useful aphorism the next time you forget the name of a politician. Not only is his wilful ignorance of political realities a mark of immaturity – Adam lampoons his sexual rival, Carlos, a Marxist who votes for the conservative party in order to “exacerbate the system’s contradictions”– the abnegation of personal responsibility contravenes one of “traditional” masculinity’s core tenets. When bastardised, this principle of personal responsibility yields neoliberalism, but without it little can be achieved by men or by women.
Adam’s desire to elide his identity stems from embarrassment. He eschews the imagined community of his nation but experiences only its lack. The spectre of Bush’s war in the Middle East, of Al-Qaeda and Basque separatist terrorist bombings, and of Franco’s highly masculinised doctrine of fascism cloud the book. Disillusioned young men are a society’s most destructive demographic: the agents of white nationalism, Islamist terrorism, gangland crime, incel culture, and the many other ways in which young male frustration manifests. There is no demographic for which disillusionment translates so directly to damage to society.
Lerner is not afraid to portray the pathetic, which is more difficult than it sounds. We often encounter pathetic characters in art, but rarely are these pathetic characters our heroes. Being pathetic, or indeed vulnerable, is shown by Lerner to be a transitory state, not a character trait. We are all frequently pathetic in our own lives, often within minutes of being enviable, smart, funny, or strong. Lerner’s writing is so powerful because it routinely shows a character who does stupid things, shoddily justified. Adam is insecure and cruel, and at his most cruel when he is at his most insecure. Yet where many artists have given irrational behaviour the character of hysteria (and often coded it as female), Lerner’s protagonist navigates the world according to the logic of irrationality. Just as Cyrus’ girlfriend Jane and the unimpeachably cool Teresa reflect “traditionally” masculine characteristics, Adam is permitted vulnerability, and must construct his sense of manhood and of personal responsibility not in opposition to vulnerability but alongside it.
As Freshers Week 2020 approaches, we, like Lerner’s Adam Gordon, will be attempting to self-actualise and self-author. Ravaged by the unforeseen, Dublin will be a foreign city, perhaps strangest to those of us who used to be familiar with it. Whatever our hopes are for Freshers Week, this week remains a flashpoint in Ireland’s campus rape epidemic and more broadly for the destructive effects of male insecurity and received fantasy, which often triumph over the actual, over our sense of personal responsibility and humankind’s inherent, if forgettable, decency. No man is vulnerable all the time or unfailingly triumphant; accommodating the braided reality of the human experience into our lives is what makes heroes of us.
There are many reasons to read Leaving the Atocha Station. It is technically innovative, funny, and moving, and Lerner’s portrayal of conversation in a foreign language is novel and engaging: “[t]hen she might have described swimming in the lake as a child, or said that lakes reminded her of being a child, or asked me if I’d enjoyed swimming as a child, or said that what she’d said about the moon was childish.” If for no other reason, however, it is worth reading for its prescient exploration of the ways in which a frank regard for our own vulnerability is the only path to heroism.
You can’t spell “pathos” without “pathetic”, or something like that.
