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. In the process, he turns “literature now” into “literature that will have been.” This rehearsed spontaneity recalls the practiced improvisation that Derrida remarks on in his appearance with the jazz musician Ornette Coleman in Paris in 1997, where he says that “it is necessary to improvise well” in a performance, such as on a panel or in an interview.
This paper links the necessity to improvise well with Lerner’s novel’s concerns with virtuality and actuality, with the “new now,” and with (im)mediacy and (mis)translation. It argues that the novel demonstrates that it is not just “literature now” that requires us to mimic spontaneously but every “now.” Every “now” is a mistranslation, or an experience of mediacy (which is to say mimicking) immediately (which is to say spontaneously); every “now” is a practiced improvisation. Finally, this argument is considered in the context of the novel’s engagement with the question of 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.”