Transcription
Transcription
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Ben Lerner on Transcription
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
A disorienting interview and a fiction hiding inside itThe book began with an assignment that made Lerner uncomfortable before a word was written. In 2024, they agreed to interview the poet Rosmarie Waldrop for The Paris Review, knowing her resistance to the conventions that make such interviews run smoothly.
I was really ambivalent about it. Rosmarie is amazing. She’s a hero of mine. But she’s not very easy to interview, in part because one of her remarkable characteristics is she doesn’t just bullshit.
When the interview was finished and edited, standard Paris Review practice had moved passages, adjusted phrasing, and let Waldrop revise her own remarks. The result was professionally accomplished, but the gap between the recorded experience and the published artifact was the thing Lerner could not stop thinking about.
The Review did a great job, but it was disorienting to have had these conversations, and then to see that what was going to be transmitted was real in its way but not a transcription of the experience I had. It was a fiction, in that regard.
Disorientation alone does not make a novel. The project clicked into place when Lerner reframed it away from screen-time complaint and toward something older: the strangeness of a voice detached from a body, audible across time and distance, a phenomenon as ancient as writing and as contemporary as a voicemail.
There wasn’t a book in me that was merely about showing how our attention is degraded by our phones. The book became writable when I thought of its project as partly about restoring our wonder before the weird fact of the disembodied voice that is made possible by different media, like voice mail and radio.
Fatherhood pressed on the project from a different angle. Lerner had two young daughters, and the experience of talking to them surfaced something they had not expected: the sensation of being a relay rather than an origin, carrying voices forward that were not entirely their own.
When you start talking to your kids, you open your mouth and all this stuff comes out that’s not you. It’s your parents, or your image of what parents should be, or your own voice as a child, travelling into the future.
How they wrote it
Felt silences instead of explanationsComing off The Topeka School, a novel that confronted male rage and family trauma with unusual directness, Lerner felt the pull toward a different register. The new book would carry the same preoccupations but carry them less visibly, trusting atmosphere over argument.
I worried that The Topeka School might have explained too much, and I wanted to write a book that could let in all the things I’m interested in but around the edges or in felt silences.
Dialogue had been a formal trouble for Lerner across all three earlier novels. In Transcription, the narrator pretends to record the speech of Thomas, a composite ninety-year-old mentor drawn partly from Waldrop and partly from the German filmmaker Alexander Kluge, while actually producing something the phone cannot: what a sentence catches rather than what a microphone preserves.
For me, as a fiction writer, dialogue has always felt like the most potentially embarrassing moment of any work, because it’s the moment where there’s a maximal bid for realism. It’s supposed to be mimetic of speech. But, if everyone speaks in perfectly grammatical sentences, it’s not realistic. And if you actually try to register the fragmentation and cacophony of speech, if you try to be a recording device in that literal sense, the signal can be lost in the noise.
To articulate what fiction does when it represents reality without reproducing it, Lerner drew on an image from Harvard’s Natural History Museum, where glass flowers made by nineteenth-century craftsmen are displayed alongside actual botanical specimens. The experience of looking between the two gave them a figure for the imaginative act the novel asks of readers.
The narrator has this experience where he can see the work as real flowers one moment and as artificial flowers the next. And that ‘as’ is what fiction is for me. There’s the merely real — the brute facts of the world — but you can see them as this or as that. It’s like the duck-rabbit drawing, which you can see as a duck or as a rabbit. That’s the potential of art: imaginative re-description.
The duck-rabbit figure, borrowed from Wittgenstein and philosophy of perception, runs through the novel’s structure: the same events, the same voices, keep flipping between categories of real and artificial without settling into either.
Lerner’s description of how voice travels through characters in the book makes explicit the narrative technique that might otherwise feel like a stylistic quirk. The narrator is not an individual consciousness so much as a medium, a figure through whom other speakers arrive.
Part of it is a kind of realism. I think fiction is really good at depicting the way the voice is a tissue of different voices. In Transcription, Thomas speaks through the narrator to Max, or Max speaks through the narrator to Thomas. The way that language passes through us sometimes has the intensity of a visitation. We’re all spirit mediums, and we’re all haunted. Technologies also enable hauntings. That was the centre of this book.
Working across poetry, essays, and novels simultaneously shapes how Lerner tests an idea, cycling it through different formal pressures until it becomes visible in ways a single genre would not permit.
[paraphrased from audio] For Lerner, each literary form is a laboratory for testing an idea, with novels, poems, and essays each exerting different pressures on the same concerns — so that what seems possible in one form becomes visible by contrast with another.
The personal thread
Fighting for their intellectual lifeLerner does not write about technology from a position of detachment. In the same period they were composing Transcription, they were recovering from open-heart surgery and raising two daughters while holding a full-time teaching position at Brooklyn College. The gap between the behavior they modeled and the behavior they hoped to encourage was not theoretical.
I’m always looking at my phone while telling my daughter to not look at hers. I feel the degradation of my own attention. But I’m not superior and offline. I speak from a position of feeling totally fucking compromised. I’m fighting for my intellectual life.
The concern about what AI voice replication takes away from the sentence is not, for Lerner, purely philosophical. It is bound up with their identity as a poet, a form built on the body’s breath and the mind’s movement through time, both of which a language model does not have.
I am primarily interested in writing written by humans with a heartbeat. I like the idea that the sentence measures the body and the breath and thinking in time.
What they want us to sit with
What a sentence can do that a recording cannotLerner positions the book against a familiar kind of cultural pessimism that treats digital media as straightforwardly corrosive. Their reference point is Proust on the telephone: technology as the site of revelation and loss at once, not a problem to be solved but a condition to be inhabited with full attention.
The book is not in the position that everything is stupid, everything is flattened, everything is done. I think of it as trying to make contact with mystery from within the media environment.
The question of what AI voice replication costs arrives in the book obliquely, through the narrator’s attempt to get a recording device to preserve Thomas’s speech before he dies. Lerner frames the threat not as replacement but as a prompt to ask what the older technology, the sentence, can do that the newer one cannot.
I do think that that kind of verisimilitude is frightening in all sorts of ways, but it also makes me wonder, Well, what are the special powers of the comparatively low-tech, but nevertheless technological, way of registering a voice that is the sentence, or the line of poetry, or novelistic dialogue?
The novel’s final ambition, as Lerner states it, refuses to separate the parenting question from the media question or the literary one. Every technology of transmission, from radio to the poem to the iPad, is part of the same problem: how a voice outlives the body it came from.
Transcription is trying to think about all the technologies: poems, cell phones, paintings, iPads, radio, cinema, and what media configuration might produce the miracle of intergenerationality, where voices outlive their bodies and move through us.