Although this slim volume poses troubling questions about our dependence on mobile electronic devices, it refuses easy nostalgia for a time when being offline was perfectly normal.
Lerner makes philosophical arguments about technology come alive by embedding them in the ruminations of his characters.
Advance word about Transcription focused on its first and longest section. The narrator travels back to Providence, Rhode Island, where he studied, to interview his nonagenarian mentor, an expatriate German thinker named Thomas.
Because Thomas is a theoretically inclined filmmaker, I thought of Lerner’s collaboration with Alexander Kluge, one of the postwar Bundesrepublik’s great Renaissance men. Even before I knew where the plot was headed, Kluge’s recent passing cast a shadow over my reading, suggesting that Transcription might function as a literary séance.
While getting ready to meet Thomas at his hotel, the narrator drops his iPhone in the sink, leaving him with no way to record the encounter.
The consequences of this mishap demonstrate what makes Transcription so compelling.
While walking from his hotel to Thomas’s house in the city’s College Hill neighbourhood, the narrator keeps wanting to check his phone, only to remember that it is now a useless “brick”. It’s almost as if he has lost use of a limb.
Soon, he realises that this technological disadvantage is psychologically beneficial, because his newfound lack transforms his perception of the city.
“I was having an unusual experience of presence,” the narrator explains, “more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapour that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk.”
Being temporarily freed from the compulsion to keep interacting with his mobile device also makes it easier for the narrator to recall the years when he lived in Providence.
“I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless.”
Almost everyone in the developed world can identify with this experience, from a time when their mobile device was damaged, its battery drained completely, or they were passing through a dead zone where most of its functionality was suspended.
True, they might not have had the inclination or training to ponder the deeper implications of this temporary time travel. But Lerner’s prose is sufficiently accessible to allow the novel’s readers to revisit their own experiences through the narrator’s stream of consciousness.
It also helps that Lerner specialises in autofiction, a literary subgenre in which authors create an uncanny Doppelgänger of their real-world selves.
The young poet in Leaving the Atocha Station has won a fellowship to work abroad in Spain. The father in 10:04 learns he has a serious heart condition. The teenage boy in The Topeka School is a national debating star from that city in Kansas. And the narrator of Transcription studied at Brown University in Providence around the turn of the millennium.
All these statements correspond to facts about Ben Lerner’s life that can be confirmed with a cursory internet search. But that doesn’t mean that these books are properly autobiographical. For every detail in them that blurs the line between fact and fiction, there is another that strengthens it.
What makes good autofiction intriguing is the way it problematises this distinction, making us ask whether it’s ever truly possible to write pure fiction. Or, conversely, whether the impulse to fabricate can ever be sufficiently filtered from prose to meet the ethical and professional standards of news reporting.
The ambiguity of autofiction also invites a particularly intense mode of literary identification, in which readers can imagine themselves as both author and protagonist.
During the first section of Transcription, concrete details of the narrator’s walk through Providence ground his thoughts in an objectively verifiable place and—for those old enough to have spent significant time in a world before mobile devices—in time.
This is what hooked me on Transcription, transforming it from a book that I was intellectually curious about into one that moved me deeply.
Not only do I remember what life was like before mobile phones, but I also spent five weeks in Providence as a teenager while attending a summer program at the Rhode Island School of Design.
When I wasn’t in class, I roamed the city’s streets without a map, my only guide the geographic instincts I had honed while wandering around Washington, D.C. during school vacation days, when my father was at work.
As the narrator recalls experiences from his student days, no longer held at a distance by the mediation of personal technology, I found myself doing the same. His memories started to trigger mine.
I remembered buying the cassette of Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town from a store near my dorm and listening to it while I did my graphic design homework.
I remembered being shocked to see how many of the lovely colonial homes on College Hill had Swedish automobiles in their driveways.
I remembered how, when I walked a half hour to the basketball court in a “transitional” neighbourhood, a large American sedan with tinted windows would park nearby, then slowly follow me home.
I remembered how the guy across the hall from me showed me how to keep enlarging and photocopying images until they became surreal and monstrous; how he would skateboard downhill through heavy traffic; how he loved the band Bad Brains; and how he would organise expeditions to go rat hunting in the sewers beneath the city.
And I remembered stumbling upon a building that looked like a Greek temple on the outside but was a two-story shopping mall inside, one I would recall nearly a decade later while reading about Walter Benjamin’s fascination with Parisian shopping arcades.
None of these experiences is likely to interest anyone else unless I explain why they mattered to me. But the first section of Transcription makes me want to try.
That’s the power of autofiction.
Not only does it blur the boundary between author and protagonist, fact and fiction. It also blurs the boundary between author and reader, encouraging those who engage with the text to avail themselves of opportunities to produce “self-insert” fan fiction on the fly.
Because Ben Lerner refuses to wipe the dirt of the real world from his sentences, he implicitly permits us to do the same.
The result is prose that resists the relentless decontextualisation that social media inflicts upon us. Rather than being stunned into silence by an overwhelming what, we ask who, when, and where.
If someone were to evaluate Transcription based solely on its first section—as some reviewers seem to have—it would be easy to conclude that Lerner takes a dim view of our technology-saturated world.
Certainly, that is the position that Thomas articulates once the interview begins, reinforcing the lesson the narrator learns on the walk over to see him. Although our devices provide us with a wealth of information, they impoverish our experience in the process.
Part of what makes Transcription so compelling, however, is that this neat-and-tidy argument gives way to a more complex, nuanced account of our dependence on devices that make it possible to cross oceans of time and space.
The novel’s short second section takes place in Madrid, after Thomas has passed away. The narrator has just given a talk at a celebration of life.
He explains for the first time why he was unable to record the interview. The problem is that it turned out to be Thomas’s last, making it especially significant. That’s why he took pains to reconstruct it from his memories of that evening.
The “transcription” of the novel’s title refers to this exercise, first and foremost, a different process than the sort for which there is an objective technological record to use as a guide.
While there is always a subjective dimension to human transcription—determining which mistakes to correct and which to include, deciding whether to indicate sounds without a clear semantic purpose—its scope increases dramatically when the fallible memory of an individual is the only source.
In other words, this mode of transcription confronts us with the problem of the unreliable narrator.
Lerner doesn’t let us see the magazine piece that results from this transcription. All we have to go on is the first section, communicating the narrator’s perspective on his trip to Providence, his mishap with the phone, his walk through the city to Thomas’s house, and their conversation.
According to the narrator’s friend Rosa, the narrator’s revelation has disturbed other people attending the celebration of life, in part because they had regarded the published interview as a definitive final statement from Thomas. In particular, Rosa tells him that Thomas’s son, Max, was outraged by this deceit.
To make matters more confusing, the novel’s third and final section is devoted to a conversation in which Max tells the story of his grade-school daughter Emmie’s eating disorder and other painful family history without any apparent animosity towards the narrator.
Since we already know from flashbacks in the first section that the narrator has fallen victim to someone creating an elaborate false narrative, it is conceivable that Rosa—who seems to have had an intense relationship with both Max and the narrator—was exaggerating Max’s displeasure or maybe even making it up entirely.
But there’s no way to know for sure. Many important plot details, including the time and manner of Thomas’s death, are never explained.
Lerner clearly prefers it that way. Despite the acclaim his previous novels have achieved, he remains a poet by both training and inclination, the sort of writer who doesn’t just pare away fat, but bone as well.
Whereas the camera lens—for which the term is “objective” in many European languages—doesn’t just record what the mind’s eye perceives, but a wealth of extraneous detail along with it, fiction is like the work of a painter, foregrounding what matters to the artist at the expense of everything else.
And the same holds true for the auditory register. The recorder invariably captures ambient sounds along with the desired content. By contrast, transcription typically filters out those distractions.
In the final section of Transcription, Max gives a moving account of what happened when his father seemed to be dying of COVID. An ICU nurse used her personal cell phone so that Max could speak into Thomas’s ear. For the first time, he was able to tell his father how he really felt about him.
The irony is that Thomas survived his illness—making possible the interview described in the first section—but apparently without consciously remembering his son’s painful confession.
Max also explains to the narrator that Emmie only started eating enough to gain weight when she was permitted to use her iPad while doing so. Although this meant the end of his family’s attempt to have traditional meals, free of technological distractions, saving his daughter from hospitalisation was more important.
Memories of the pandemic weigh heavily on Transcription. Anybody who suffered because loved ones became inaccessible during lockdown or, worse, were sickened by the virus will find the passages about Thomas’s hospitalisation difficult reading.
As both the ICU phone call and Emmie’s apparent cure demonstrate, the technology that divides us and distances us from interacting with the world around us can also serve a healing function.
This is certainly how Alexander Kluge felt, as his late-career interest in the creative possibilities of AI demonstrates.
Further complicating the novel’s position on technology is the revelation that Max secretly recorded Thomas during their final visit together in Providence, after his discharge from the hospital.
Whereas the narrator recalled his conversation with Thomas from the novel’s first section in vivid, if potentially unreliable detail, Max can barely remember what his father said. Knowing that he would have a recording to refer back to prevented him from paying attention.
Although the contrast between these two conversations might seem to confirm that Transcription is meant to be a rebuke of our dependency on prosthetic devices, this conclusion is contradicted by the realisation that Max actually appears to have benefited from his technologically facilitated “forgetting”.
Perhaps the best thing about Transcription is that the novel makes it possible for us to understand complex arguments about the role of personal technology in our lives without having to wade through dispassionate scholarly prose.
Thanks to the experiences of a narrator we can identify with, we don’t just think about those arguments, but feel them.
Photograph courtesy of Matthias Berg. Published under a Creative Commons license.
