Last year, I visited the MoMA to see Christian Marclay’s film The Clock. Stitching together clips from film and television that depict timepieces or reference the time of day, the twenty-four-hour-long film is synchronized to real time, functioning as a clock. I arrived on a crowded Saturday afternoon and was prompted to join a “virtual queue,” leaving me free to wander the museum while my phone stood in line. Already, I had Ben Lerner on the mind—the film serves as the centerpiece of his 2014 novel 10:04—but the museum’s turn of phrase echoed his language, too. In 10:04 and elsewhere, the writer distinguishes between two states of the “actual” and the “virtual.” The former is lived, material reality; the latter, in Lerner’s configuration, is pure potential: the promise of poetry and art, the multiple alternative futures possible within each present moment. Watching Marclay’s film lends the narrator of 10:04 brief, thrilling access to the virtual—“I felt acutely how many different days could be built out of a day, felt more possibility than determinism, the utopian glimmer of fiction.”
In the bathroom at the MoMA, however, my actual phone slipped out of my back pocket and into the toilet, briefly and wholly submerged underwater. I wrapped it in paper towels and held it under the dryer. Miraculously, it survived. My spot in the “virtual queue” was maintained, and I soon received an alert that it was my time to watch The Clock.
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Ben Lerner is a great historian of the present. His fourth novel, Transcription, deftly records a shift in contemporary experience between the last decade and this one. The novel unspools across three chapters, each titled after a different hotel. The narrator revisits cities familiar to fans of Lerner’s fiction, such as Providence and Madrid, and returns to themes of authenticity, falsification, and mediation. What differs is style: there is a new level of distance to the narrative voice, closer to Rachel Cusk or Katie Kitamura’s recent fiction than the anxiety-ridden, self-conscious 10:04. Digital stimuli crowd the mental space of Transcription’s narrator, collapsing his experience of space and time. He listens to walking directions through his earbuds, even though he knows the way. He enters a hotel lobby and hears live piano music, but doesn’t see a piano. Like anyone else these days, he checks his phone obsessively, and checks his pockets for his phone obsessively. This slippage, or surrender, between the narrator’s actual life and his digital one captures the nature of our exact post-pandemic moment. Sometime between 10:04 and Transcription, that is, lived reality has become so permeated by digital technology that it is difficult to discern what makes up “actual” life, much less access the pure potential of the “virtual” imbued in it.
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Transcription is a slim book, weighing about the same as a phone. Its fragmented, experimental structure mirrors this contemporary incoherence of time and space. In the novel’s opening, the narrator—a writer who lives in New York City with his school-aged daughter and his wife—returns to the Rhode Island locale of his youth to interview his aging mentor and former professor, Thomas, for a magazine. Thomas is a world-renowned cultural theorist who seems born from “the future and the past simultaneously.” He rarely agrees to interviews, and given his advanced age, the conversation with the narrator has the foreboding aura of an “exit interview,” as Thomas himself suggests.
Just before they meet, however, the narrator drops his phone into a bathroom sink. Never one to conceal the constructedness of his novels, Lerner writes, “For the duration of this sentence, it was submerged.” But unlike my own unscathed device, the narrator’s phone drowns. He loses contact with the digital world and large swaths of the material one—his family, the news, Apple Store hours, Uber—as well as any ability to record the impending interview. Without means to contact Thomas to cancel or postpone their meeting, and embarrassed to appear unprepared in front of his mentor without a backup recording device, the narrator heads over anyway for an informal chat, resolving to begin the real interview the following morning.
Briefly freed from the phone’s perpetual mediation, the narrator experiences a heightened sense of presence that is “indistinguishable from mild intoxication” as he walks through Providence. Here, attention to lived, material reality—the actual—produces the thrilling effect once associated with the virtual. The digital, in other words, has taken the place of the actual, displacing the actual actual into a “state of exception.” With the loss of the actual, how, then, can one access the virtual? Instead of opening up the present into multiple futures, the narrator’s anomalous contact with the actual ushers in the past. Phonelessness prompts nostalgia for the narrator, flooding him with memories of being a phoneless student in Providence. He remembers being heartbroken when his now-wife, Mia, broke up with him and the intimate, strange friendship he struck up afterward with her then-roommate, Anisa.
It is alongside Anisa, at the Harvard Museum’s Glass Flower Gallery, some decades prior, that we get an origin story for the narrator as a writer. Standing in front of the otherworldly, delicately sculpted objects, the narrator realized that by changing his attention—what he terms a “hinge in my looking”—he could see these art objects as natural, and then as man-made, on command. This “hinge” in perception unlocks the virtuality of actual objects insofar as he can view their multiple potential significations. He carries this “quiet but crucial technique” with him beyond the museum; it is “somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually, I’d call this fiction.” Lerner handles the matter of contemporary life—whether his biographical life or not, his fiction is realist and, save for passages in The Topeka School, set in the present. His oeuvre can be understood as an attempt to expand this actual reality into its virtuality, opening up this singular world into its manifold potential possibilities. As a work of fiction set and produced within contemporary conditions of constant digital mediation and distraction, Transcription can therefore be read as testing whether this “crucial technique” still holds in a world so estranged from the actual.
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Arriving at Thomas’s house suspends the narrator’s reminiscing, as well as the pleasures of presence. He is unsettled by hints of Thomas’s cognitive decline, like his dirty kitchen, broken clock, and moments of forgetfulness. Disturbing also is Thomas’s insistence on beginning the actual interview that evening, instructing the narrator to start recording their conversation. Wishing to avoid upsetting Thomas or embarrassing himself, the narrator acquiesces. He places the dead phone face down on the table.
Characteristically opaque, Thomas elides direct questions and remains in hypothetical and referential registers, jumbling personal memory with allusions to film, poetry, and history. “You were saying that your earliest memories involve the radio?” the narrator asks. Thomas answers with a question: “The first experience of voice is disembodied, yes?” Their conversation is muddled further by the nonagenarian’s waning memory and the wine they drink. Thomas repeatedly asks if the narrator is recording, and the narrator grows paranoid that his mentor can see through his lie. Thomas mentions an impending trip to “Dignitas,” somewhere in Switzerland; the narrator does not register the name of the assisted-suicide provider. The conversation turns: Thomas grows agitated and confuses the narrator for his son, Max, and eventually cuts off the interview. The narrator pretends to swipe on his phone to turn off the recording. Thomas warmly takes the narrator’s hands, the “speed with which his equanimity returned further confound[ing]” the narrator, and retires upstairs without further discussion, exiting the diegesis of the novel.
And since the conversation is not recorded, the text of the interview recounted in the pages is not a transcription—it is fiction. Cased within a novel, it is metafictional. This clever formal destabilization shifts the “actual” conversation into the virtual register of fiction, opening up the possibility of multiple significations to be found within this one text.
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Yet this decision has consequences. The second chapter takes us to Madrid for a colloquium in Thomas’s honor. Over dinner and drinks with the other participants, the narrator is surprised to learn that the speech he gave, in which he recounted the incident with the broken phone and admitted that his published interview of Thomas was in fact reconstructed from memory, was controversial. His closest friend present calls his explanation a “bizarre” “self-justification” and informs him that Max is “furious.” Going phoneless, however briefly, renders the narrator out of sync with others. His confession of falsification is not understood as a gesture toward authenticity, but as a system failure.
This is a marked departure from previous stagings of similar themes in Lerner’s oeuvre, most notably in his debut, Leaving the Atocha Station. In the earlier novel, the narrator lies to a woman that his mother is dead to gain affection; when he later confesses, his performance of guilt is rewarded with further attention. Lerner’s 2011 Künstlerroman follows Adam, a young American writer living in Madrid on a fellowship. He reads, writes poetry, gets high, crushes on women, and experiences history, namely in the form of the bombing of the novel’s titular train station. Like Transcription, Atocha is a novel highly concerned with mediation. What primarily mediates Adam’s experience is other media—literature, art, history, language, and mistranslations—and others’ ideas. Largely, Adam feels removed from his experience by these preconceived notions, unable to have a “profound experience of art,” or a profound experience of anything at all.
In Atocha, it is precisely this awareness of mediation that reaffirms the actual. On a train, Adam pulls out a book and finds that “reading, instead of removing me from the world, intensified my experience of the present.” He turns to a poem of John Ashbery’s, a writer whose work conveys to the narrator “the experience of time as it passed, a shadow train, life’s white machine.” Reading on the train and, even more so, being aware of reading on the train affects the experience of reading on the train. The compounding effect of awareness opens up this one specific moment into its multiple potential significations, or virtuality.
Unlike Lerner’s other highly intertextual novels, Transcription contains few encounters with traditional media. This absence imbues the novel with an elegiac tone, as if wanting for meaningful attention to and engagement with cultural forms. In the first chapter, the narrator opens a book of poems and finds he “couldn’t attend to [them],” his fingers reaching for his dead phone instead. “I wanted—I needed—to check my texts, my email, to swipe and scroll and photograph, to frame and filter and archive, to share my location, etc., so as not only, not fully, to be where I was.” The experience of being in place, of being within the flow of time—the actual—has been displaced and deferred by a deluge of digital stimuli. Life’s white machine has been replaced by one in technicolor.
Considering these novels together reminds us that perpetual mediation is not unique to the very recent past, even if the form and extent of the mediation has changed. Moreover, it also demonstrates that this shift to digital mediation has produced new attitudes regarding mediation. This shift has created a sort of “reality hunger”: phonelessness becomes intoxicating, and the loss of the actual generates an intolerance for open artifice—like the narrator’s playful mendacity publishing the fictional interview. Recording and transcribing the interview would still constitute mediation; fictionalizing the interview is a different kind of mediation, but one that acknowledges its mediation openly. Neither method is more “truthful” in its representation of the conversation, but recording technology offers a veneer of empiricism and objectivity that fiction, by definition, cannot claim.
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The final chapter of Transcription is a dialogue between the narrator and Max, who is the same age and also has a young daughter. On display is Lerner’s skill at rendering dialogue, as the narrator listens to Max recount in painstaking detail his daughter’s struggles with Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID), an eating disorder characterized by atypical eating patterns and an extreme avoidance of food. This passage demonstrates the writer’s newfound interest in the interiority of children, especially the Gen Alpha generation, whose relationships to material and social reality have been indelibly shaped by the pandemic. Childhood is inextricable from digital technology; the debates over screen use permeate Max’s household, but it is the screen that eventually coaxes his daughter into eating again. The disappearance of the actual is made explicit in Max’s interpretation of his daughter’s interest in ASMR: “It’s like the device takes you out of the real world, shields you from all the pressures and information, but then it administers this series of subtle sensory inputs and muffled shocks, these mild effects, as compensation for the unmanageable reality it’s made disappear.”
Later, Max describes his father’s brush with death when hospitalized with COVID early in the pandemic. In this final-hour moment, Max called Thomas to say goodbye—speaking intimately and freely to his father in a way that was always impossible for the two men face-to-face. After this final resolution, obviously mediated by distance and the device, Max feels at peace with his father. Yet Thomas miraculously survives, making a near-full recovery yet losing all memory of their call. During Max’s next trip to Providence, he decides to secretly record a conversation with his father. The father and son begin to discuss Thomas’s decision to register for Dignitas, but the novel’s end cuts the conversation off midway.
This set-up is an uncanny inversion of the narrator’s own conversation with Thomas. Thomas and the narrator speak unrecorded, and yet the conversation is represented in the novel within the virtual register of fiction. Thomas and Max’s conversation was recorded, but this “actual” conversation is left off the page and conveyed neither to the narrator nor to the reader.
The second chapter suggests that these different forms of representation have an ethical dimension. Fiction, unlike transcription, enacts and acknowledges its own constructedness. Transcription feigns transparent access, disguising its own mediation. But since the novel only contains the fictional conversation, it argues for the significance of this “crucial technique”: it is a form of representation that acknowledges its own mediation, and thus becomes a privileged way to recuperate access to the virtual when the actual has been replaced by the digital.
By transposing themes from Lerner’s oeuvre into the post-pandemic contemporary age, Transcription records the recent shift in the forms of mediation and the relationship between the actual and the virtual. The novel successfully captures the rhythm of this new way of life as well as its affective and ethical consequences. Lerner suggests that attention—the “hinge” he calls “fiction”—can locate the virtual within an actual, the latter of which has become, in a very traditional sense of the word, quite virtual. A careful reader, of fiction and of life, must recognize the mediation inherent to digital forms. This acknowledgment pierces through the veil of the digital and recuperates the actual, offering a glimpse of all those futures, all the possibility that the virtual offers. I have never been an adult without a phone. What would have happened if MoMA’s toilet claimed mine? Had I joined The Clock’s “virtual queue” with my actual body, I could have experienced the intoxicating presence of the actual. Had I emerged from The Clock and into the world in that state, I may have become accustomed to this anachronistic experience of actuality. The virtual might appear to me more frequently than it does now, save for those brief flashes within great novels like Transcription.
Amelia Anthony
Amelia Anthony is a writer from Los Angeles living in Brooklyn.