I sat smoking and refreshing the home pages and watching the numbers change. I considered walking back to Atocha, but instead I opened El Pais in another window and the Guardian in a third. “I went back to my apartment and refreshed the Times the number of estimated dead was now around two hundred, at least a thousand injured. They mark the far limits of his time in Spain, art and the experience of history.Īfter walking to the Atocha Station shortly after the bombing and witnessing the aftermath, Gordon goes back to his apartment: Gordon describes both his experience of Ashbery’s poem and the event. In addition to being the title of a disjunctive poem by John Ashbery, “ Leaving the Atocha Station” refers to the central train station in Madrid, where, on March 11, 2005, a terrorist bomb went off, killing more than two hundred people, many of them immigrant workers. “Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf the closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.” The deep-seated solipsism of daily life, which the inherent solitude of writing either underscores or tries to ignore, is what Gordon repeatedly bumps up against: Gordon is a young man who believes in poetry or, at least he thinks he does, but has no idea if his belief is genuine or even valid, especially since he states on a number of occasions: “Poems aren’t about anything.”īy refusing to align himself with the any of the modernist, postmodernist, or nostalgic strategies regarding the gap between the individual and experience, Gordon is left to recognize the constant and seemingly increasing state of disconnections that currently exist between the self (or its non-existent shadow) and the other. Lerner’s alter ego, Adam Gordon, a young poet who is in Madrid on a prestigious literary fellowship, is “worried that is incapable of having a profound experience of art and had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone knew.” Although Leaving the Atocha Station might come off as a first person, autobiographical novel about the author’s time in Spain, the primary motivation behind its existence is the consideration of the individual’s relationship to experience and language. Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, which is less than two hundred pages long, observes this condition of disconnectedness and hyperbolic response with a sympathetic, fresh-eyed clarity. Since the death of the self, the author and painting, the desire for significance has led to a daily slew of preposterous claims and downright silly statements. “I’m sure the people of Iraq are looking forward to your poem about Franco and his economy,” Isabel tells the main character, Adam Gordon.
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