Toward the end of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), the poet-protagonist takes part in a panel on “literature now.” He is an American who has been living in Spain for some months at this stage, but he does not yet trust himself to be able to communicate well in Spanish. As a result, he prepares for the panel by learning off “a few sentences of wide applicability”: “better to mimic spontaneous if oblique pronouncements than to rely on real-time fluency,” he thinks (171). This rehearsed spontaneity recalls the practiced improvisation that Derrida describes as the “need to improvise well” in a performance, such as on a panel or in an interview (qtd. in Peeters, Derrida: A Biography 483-84). It is also what turns “literature now” into “literature that will have been.”
This paper will read this scene in the context of the novel’s concerns with a profound experience of art, with (mis)translation, and especially, with literature and politics. The Madrid train bombings of March 11, 2004, and the subsequent protests against the government take place in the course of the novel’s events. The poet witnesses the demonstrations both in person and on television, which prompts him to ask, “Is this living,” before correcting himself: “Is this live” (137). In a period that seems to require of all of us that we “move between media” (142), what is meant, finally, by Lerner, learning, leaving, living, live, literature now?