When Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises in 1926, he captured the disillusionment and debauchery of a “lost generation” caught between two world wars. Published in 2011, Ben Lerner’s debutante novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, similarly centers around the experience of a young American expatriate in present-day Spain. Though it is difficult – impossible, really – to portray the experience of an entire generation through one single perspective, viewing The Sun Also Rises and Leaving the Atocha Station together does shed light on how much, and how little, has changed in the American expatriate worldview in nearly a century. What is so compelling about the American experience abroad? What is the role of authenticity in a world where it is possible to reinvent oneself? And, above all, has the “millennial” generation confirmed or disproved the predictions made by Hemingway, Jake Barnes, and Brett Ashley?
The life of the expatriate has been romanticized by Hemingway’s “lost generation,” — a life of melancholy writers and artists frequenting Parisian cafés by day and bars by night. The term “expatriation,” while it originally referred to natives of one country who moved abroad and lost their citizenship in the process, like Henry James, now extends to any person living away from their native country. Present-day American expatriates live all over the world, sending their children to international schools, returning to the United States in the summer, and spending two years in Hong Kong or Paris and another three in Madrid or London. The near-elimination of physical distance in the past half-century by cell phones, social media, and commercial airline travel has perhaps changed the appeal of the expat lifestyle. The escapism of the “lost generation” is impossible in a globalized world (and, of course, where alcohol is legal in the U.S.). Hemingway and Lerner’s novels suggest that the 1920s escapism has reversed; young Americans choosing to live abroad are now searching to be “contacted by History” rather than fleeing from it.
In Leaving the Atocha Station, the story’s protagonist, Adam Gordon, comments on the interesting dichotomy between “real” American expats — those who make the effort to blend in with the locals — and American tourists. “Whenever I encountered an American,” he narrates, “I showered him or her with silent contempt […] I reserved my most intense antipathy for those Americans who attempted to blend in, who made Spanish friends and eschewed the company of their countrymen, who refused to speak English and who, when they spoke Spanish, exaggerated the peninsular lisp.” Ben Lerner himself spent a year in Madrid, and his character Adam, the true American, fits this profile as well. “Nothing was more American, whatever that means,” Adam says, “than fleeing the American, whatever that is,” in a “soft version of self-imposed exile.” There is a sense of shame or pity in being American, pride in being taken as a Spaniard, and contempt for both those who fail to do so and those who even try. The idea of American inauthenticity is also present in The Sun Also Rises. Jake recounts: “It was crowded with Americans and we had to stand up and wait for a place. Some one had put it in the American Women’s Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table.” Being an American abroad in the past century has repeatedly been defined, then, in the negative: to be an American expat is to try to not be American. While Americans at home flaunt their ancestry and cultural heritage, Americans abroad aim to assimilate and integrate. But whereas Americans in the 1920s left their native country to “lose themselves,” to forget the hopelessness of the Great War, now, young Americans leave to “find themselves” and their place in the world.
The United States Census Bureau does not formally keep track of the number of American citizens living abroad. The only accepted existing estimates are from a questionably accurate 1999 State Department calculation, which ranges from two to six million. There have been no formal attempts since then to count the number of American emigrant citizens, making the United States the only advanced country to keep no record of its expats. Perhaps the sense of illegitimacy explored in The Sun Also Rises and Leaving the Atocha Station comes, in part, from the lack of information and research on such a sizeable and important population bloc.
What is dangerous, though, is when cultural inauthenticity becomes personal. Adam Gordon sees himself as a fraudulent poet, son, lover, and appreciator of art. Where Jake Barnes sees beauty in bullfighting, Adam thinks himself incapable of finding meaning in poetry without being deceptive. Unlike Jake, who knows that he has afición – passion – for bullfighting, Adam’s half-lover, half-translator Teresa has to ask him, “when are you going to stop pretending that you’re only pretending to be a poet?” Jake’s time in Europe is a time of carelessness and reckless abandon, of escape from history; Adam’s fellowship year is a search for legitimacy abroad, and culminates in his experience of the 2004 Madrid train bombings. “In post-March 11 Madrid,” Adam thinks, “I would imagine my friends from the U.S., their amazement and maybe envy at the death I had made for myself, how I’d been contacted by History.” Yet Adam’s sense of removal from the events of life is astounding: besides his overuse of drugs and alcohol, he views historical events themselves as illegitimate and unimportant, ignoring the protests after the bombings and checking e-mail during the Spanish election. The “millennial generation,” then, may be just as lost as the “lost generation” in its feeling of having been skipped over by history rather than inundated by it.
Lerner’s novel reminds us, however, to be wary of making strict, exaggerated distinctions between time periods and generations, between “a pre-this and a post-that,” suggesting instead to see literature as an “illuminating constellation” linking “our ‘now’ to various past ‘nows’.” The Sun Also Rises and Leaving the Atocha Station, when read in conjunction, superimpose imperfect, though important, views of two young adults’ experiences abroad, allowing us to connect two points of an intergenerational constellation. But is the hopelessness and cynicism of the 1920s still prevalent today? Is the prediction made by Hemingway’s epigraph from Ecclesiastes (“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh…”) true?
Though neither novel has a clear plot – meanderings throughout Spain, substance use, and failed relationships take center stage – Gary Sernovitz’s review in the New York Times suggests that Lerner’s story says otherwise, envisioning a reconciliation between inauthentic America and authentic Spain: “Teresa would read the originals and I would read the translations and the translations would become the originals as we read. Then I planned to live forever in a skylit room surrounded by my friends.” In the end, Adam is not in a dark taxi like Jake Barnes; he hopes to stay in a “skylit room,” where he recognizes himself as authentic, surrounded by people who care about him. To Jake’s hopeless, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” hopeful Adam would answer that yes, it is.
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