“Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent”: the liar’s guide to creative authenticity

A ballerina spins to the left in silhouette,

Solid as the whiteness she turns in.

Over there, a cup stands straight: the gap

Between two faces; two lovers nearly

Kissing. Out of my sight, she now spins

To the right, I could cover her up with my thumb.

I’ve been studying, practicing and thinking about music for over half my life and yet it still feels like a lie to say: I’m a musician. Technically, I’m a music student — making real music is just something that happens to other people. I only started alI this because my friends were all burgeoning musicians and I felt left out. I’m still the slightly nerdy, flannel-wearing 14-year-old, grimacing as old guitar strings cut into his unpracticed fingertips — but with the addition of facial hair. It doesn’t feel like seven years ago that, on stage, I had to ask a bandmate to sing the first verse of ‘Viva la Vida’ with me so my hands could stop shaking. I never thought of myself as someone focused on pursuing music. But when you look back, it’s easy to track a path of musical progression from then to now. Conducting orchestras with chopsticks to our speakers at age seven, memorising Sondheim musicals in my early teens, butchering Radiohead covers in the high school music rooms, and so on. Music has and continues being a big part of my life, and yet I still think of myself as someone playing at pursuing music. While I study it at university, and practice with friends or at home, I’m waiting for the walls to rise up. Waiting for people to notice I’m not a real musician, and I’ve been getting away with it up until now. In my songwriting, I still struggle to find an authentic voice that doesn’t sound like another artist playing my song for me. Or something that wouldn’t be out of place in in an elevator.

So this is where Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station comes in. It’s a novel preoccupied — despite its protagonist’s best efforts — with the nature of authenticity for the contemporary artist. Adam, a young poet living in Madrid on a fellowship from the States, describes the various stages of his research: mainly a self-prescribed regime of weed, cigarettes, tranquilisers, alcohol and compulsive lying. “I claimed to be a poet”, he tells us, with only his “supposed talent as a writer” bringing him to where he is. He wonders how long it will be until someone notices that he’s a fraud. He is deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to have had a “profound experience of art”, saying that “I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change.” Adam’s cynicism for the claims that others make about art is trumped only by (or perhaps rooted in) his cynicism for himself: “I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing anyone had”. The character the text presents is deeply alienated from everyone, including himself. Losing any sense of personal authenticity, he sees his personality as simply “a symptom of himself”. He tells people his mother has died to garner affection, or tells other peoples’ harrowing stories as his own, all of which develops him in our eyes as fraudulent, and playing at being a poet. The only problem is, the further you read, the more you realise that the only person he’s lying to is himself.

Let me explain. This deeply flawed protagonist provides the perfect lens to examine creative practice and authenticity, because who knows more about the what it is to be “authentic” than a liar? Through Adam, we experience the creative process and mindset as it often is — messy, turbulent and anxiety-ridden. Rather than pulling works fully formed from nothingness, his poems are a patchwork of thoughts and experiences, curated and edited into the final form we see. For example, Adam says that he would only take notes if there was someone around to see him pretending to write them, so as to reinforce his performance of creating. But his “translations”, which he has been doing since long before the novel starts, and always alone, are his practice, despite any assertion otherwise. He takes a sentence, filters key words through Spanish and then finds similar sounding words in English: “‘Under the arc of the sky’ becomes ‘Under the arch of the cielo,’ which then becomes ‘under the arc of the cello.’” This is exactly the process of writing. But when it’s explained so explicitly and almost mechanically, with its meanings and nuances laid bare, it becomes something commonplace. When I first began this essay, I was trying to write about how shifts in perspective can suddenly alter meaning drastically, rendering the authentic inauthentic and vice versa. However, I was making very little progress so I started writing out some unrelated ideas in verse. I remember thinking about how I’d just had a break and I was lazily distracting myself rather than dealing with the issue at hand. I was writing about optical illusions — like the dancer who spins left or right depending on which way you’re looking, or the profiles of two faces that form a cup shape in the negative space. After I finished writing, I went back to the essay reluctantly, only to notice my procrastination was actually just writing the argument I’d had trouble expressing, in verse (like I said before: nerdy, bearded flannel-wearer). The point is that it takes self-reflection to understand why you’ve done something, because otherwise, especially in creative work, you’d just assume you were wasting your own time and avoiding doing the real work. The issue of writing authentically isn’t about some essential part of you that decides the right words. It’s an issue of your focus.

Authenticity is something defined in contrast to that which is inauthentic. Adam sees nothing artistic in his practice, and so it is therefore inauthentic. He is certain he’s a fraud and we go along with him because, well, he’s kinda a dick most of the time, and because of this, readers ignore the steady development of an artistic practice. His intensely aesthetically-focused narration shows he cares very deeply for his practice, even if he doesn’t know it. While he is anxiously dreading the reading of his own apparently inferior work, we hear a description of the poet reading before him:

an Esperanto of clichés: waves, heart, pain, moon, breasts, beach, emptiness, etc.; the delivery was so cloying the thought crossed my mind that his apparent earnestness might be parody. But then he read his second poem, “distance”: mountains, sky, heart, pain, stars, breasts, river, emptiness, etc. I looked at Arturo and his face implied he was having a profound experience of art.

One way to look at this is Adam again feeling separated from the world around him, not understanding why this poet was so interesting to everyone else listening but so boring to him. Again, he is the false poet without a shred of creative understanding. But then that ballerina starts spinning to the right in the corner of your eye. Why does this apparent con-man care? Why does he bother to communicate this experience? If he isn’t a poet, why does it matter to him whether or not this other poet is sincere or not? When asked to speak at a panel about “literature now” in the wake of the Madrid bombings, he is hesitant as he believes that he has nothing of value to share. However, his perspective is drastically shifted by Teresa, his girlfriend, who contests his world view of fraudulence, and he realises that “They wanted the input of a young American poet writing and reading abroad and wasn’t that what I was, not just what I was pretending to be?” (168).

To put it another way, in Leaving the Atocha Station, why is the story of a drugged-up, lying American pretending to be a poet any more believable than, say, a young poet struggling with his identity in a new country, using whatever coping mechanism is at hand? Is the narrative of a someone studying music, dreading the day someone shows him the door, any more believable than a young man so obsessed with all aspects of music that he’s dedicated his short life to understanding as much of it as he can, for as long as he is able to? Authentic expression is not a fixed, essential part of the self — it is the narrative that you tell yourself, sometimes over and over. You patchwork together memories that frame the work you do, and one story can be just as true as the next. Leaving the Atocha Station begins with Adam, the fraud, waking up alone “in a barely furnished attic apartment” — an empty cup. At the end, the poet simply says, “Then I planned to live forever in a skylit room surrounded by my friends” — two faces nearly kissing.