Ben Lerner once described Gerald Murnane’s The Plains (1982) as a ‘bizarre masterpiece that can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed’. Something similar could be said of Lerner’s new novel Transcription. It opens with the unnamed narrator, a Lerner-like writer, sitting backwards on a train – ‘facing the past’, as his ten-year-old daughter Eva says – and falling asleep, and it’s as though we too enter a dreamlike state. As in a dream we are engrossed without being entirely sure why, puzzled but untroubled by what we don’t understand, including the relationship, chronological and otherwise, between the juxtaposed halves of this short beguiling book.
The first, ‘Hotel Providence’, recounts a surreal evening the narrator spent with his ‘mentor’, Thomas, now ninety, whom he has come back to his college town to interview for a magazine. At his hotel he drops his phone – his only means of recording – in the sink. Walking through Providence ‘deviceless’, memories from his student days arise. It seems ‘impossible’ to admit to his screw-up so he decides they can talk in a preparatory way, then conduct the interview the following morning after he has been to the Apple Store. But the conversation gets out of hand. Thomas asks if the narrator is recording and he pretends he is, placing his broken phone on the table next to them.
An interlude, the hinge in the diptych, follows, titled ‘[Hotel Villa Real]’. It takes place at a meal after a memorial ‘conference’ for Thomas in Madrid. The narrator gave a talk in which he divulged that he failed to record the interview. He intended this as a minor self-deprecating anecdote, a fitting tribute to the playful Thomas, but it doesn’t land. Thomas’s son Max, a ‘close friend’ of the narrator at college, is apparently ‘angry’.
The second half of the novel, ‘Hotel Arbez’, is a conversation between the narrator and Max. Much of it is Max’s account of his father’s final visit to California, where he found Max in the middle of a desperate, perverse effort to get his young food-refusing daughter, Emmie, to eat, involving filling the house with sugary junk and allowing her to have whatever she wants while watching ‘unboxing’ videos on her iPad. Soon afterward, Max explains, Thomas was hospitalized with Covid. Max delivered an outpouring over the phone in what he thought were his last words to his dying father, against whom he harboured grievances, especially for his emotional remoteness after the death of Max’s mother. Thomas pulled through and seemed not to remember the phone call. Max then visited him in Providence, and secretly recorded their conversations, during which Thomas asked Max to accompany him to Dignitas.
The most pressing puzzle is Thomas, an otherworldly, spell-binding presence seemingly showing signs of senescence. He is prone to confusing the narrator with Max, but we sense the habit set in before ageing. An artist-intellectual of some expansive kind, he speaks a form of literature, almost embodies it. Our uncertainty about his condition is refracted by our uncertainty about the narrator’s reliability as an interpreter. He is unsettled when Thomas serves him cookies and coffee rather than supper, and alarmed by the spread of untouched food, including strawberries turning mouldy, in Thomas’s usually ‘immaculate’ kitchen. Yet all they had agreed on the phone was that Thomas would prepare something to ‘eat and drink’. And it was 5:27 pm when the narrator left his hotel room, an ambiguous time of day.
The mystery is deepened by Thomas’s mischievous temperament. The narrator reports that his hotel is opposite a church containing an ‘experimental’ theatre space where he once saw a student play. He loved a scene in which a lecturer repeatedly spills water on his projector; what at first seemed an accident becomes a slapstick routine and then ‘stops being funny and grows strangely beautiful’. The narrator says he keeps ‘imagining that a version of myself is still in the theatre’. ‘No one ever leaves a theatre’, Thomas replies, in free-associative flow. ‘A black box theatre. Like the black box of an airplane. That is recovered.’ The narrator suspects Thomas somehow senses he isn’t being recorded, and we too are led to suspect it might all be a performance. Max will later note that Thomas’s living room ‘always seemed in the process of getting dimmer, as though the houselights of a theatre were being lowered forever without the room ever going dark’. He is less charmed by his father’s habit of dispensing ‘some weird allegory, some kind of prose poetry, or an impossible string of references (many of which were probably fictional)’ instead of advice or sympathy, but indulges ‘a suspicion that was a childish form of hope’ that his father secretly did recall his impassioned speech. It’s as though Thomas’s sons, real and figurative, would prefer to believe he was still scheming behind the scenes than that he was fading. But they struggle to read him.
*
Transcription ends with Max telling the narrator that Thomas mentioned something called ‘the glass flowers’. Thomas was seemingly mixing up his ‘sons’. On his walk through Providence the narrator had been reminded of a visit to Harvard’s National History Museum to see ‘botanical models made by glass artists – a father and son – from Dresden a century ago’:
We entered a large room full of dark wooden display cases containing thousands of anatomically perfect flowers in perpetual bloom, but also models of fruit in intricate, perpetual decay: strawberries turning ghostly with mould . . . I was astonished by what I saw. I couldn’t quite believe that this moth orchid was glass, that this pear blossom was lampwork, that these objects had been blown and shaped and painted, that these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand . . . I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and artificial the next, a kind of duck-rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum . . . after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as pencilled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and the pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise and a religion. Eventually I’d call this ‘fiction’.
Stanley Cavell said that you must let ‘the work of your interest teach you how to consider it’, and this memorable passage is a scene of instruction. Transcription is also a form of delicate lampwork made by a father and son(s), the ‘result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments’ which can seem by turns naturalistic and artificial. Its tantalizing final words about the lesson of the glass flowers – ‘Did you not teach me this beautiful rule?’ – urge you back to the beginning in search of its own. And just as Murnane’s novel reveals ‘countless subtle variations’, so Transcription blossoms as you re-read it: the more you scrutinize its plain surface the more pattern and artifice you see. I read Transcription first literally, taking things as they are, and then as literature, ‘a history of small decisions’, until I was convinced, as Cavell once said of Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), that everything mattered.
I say ‘convinced’ to allow for the fact that others might be less so, including myself at different times. In an essay about Sebald, Lerner observed that ‘some motifs are so quiet they might not really be motifs at all’; he wondered ‘if I’ve perceived a pattern where there is none’. Transcription makes its readers similarly doubtful. When he was a student, the narrator suffered a breakdown during which he heard voices, ‘auditory hallucinations’, one of which involved discerning ‘language in mere noise’. Thomas helped by playing him a piece of music – ‘Bartosz singing “The Internationale” in English with a piano and other instruments behind her’ – followed by a version of the recording ‘which abstracts and flattens the instrumentals and vocals into one track’, played on a ‘virtual piano’. When the narrator listened to the solo piano, he still heard – or ‘heard’ – Bartosz’s voice. ‘What you hear is a ghost’, Thomas explains: ‘Your brain adds the voice to the tones based on what it believes is there from listening to the first file. You see, we all hear phantom voices. It is a question of the right conditions. Or the wrong ones.’ The narrator feels saner, reassured that he is ‘not disappearing into privacy’.
Literature, Transcription implies, operates in a similar way, our brains hallucinating tones based on things we’ve heard before. Criticism might be a version of playing the second recording, a ‘conversion of the file’ that abstracts its music into the monotonal voice of the critic. There is a risk that you will present a reading of the work others don’t recognize – a transcription that ‘falsifies’, the word the narrator’s host in Madrid uses to describe his ‘interview’ with Thomas. It’s an occupational hazard because the prolonged attention on which the critic’s authority rests is an unnatural form of reading. Slow motion makes incidental gestures look intentional. Does everything really matter or is the critic, obliged to extract meaning, magnifying its significance? ‘I could will myself to see . . . ’, the narrator said after the glass flowers, enchanting reality by wilfully deluding himself that he can detect the artful impress of intention behind it.
John Berger, an important influence on Lerner, said that ‘we only see what we look at’. Transcription seems designed to press the point. It begins with the narrator taking a photo of the landscape through his ‘masked reflection’ in the train window; the novel too is a window that doubles as a mirror in which we read our own reflection, a reflection that obscures but also composes our partial view. The critic tries ‘to copy all that he saw in the glass’ but may find that ‘the glass chose to reflect only what he saw’. Those are lines from John Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, one of several texts by a literary father-figure which can seem to lie behind Transcription (‘transcribed somewhere inside’ it, as Max says of the speech he hopes his father took in).
Transcription is in part about reading, its pleasures and its problems, the pleasures of its problems – and it invites you to drop the impersonal grammar that criticism typically adopts, which elides the process by which impressions are converted into evidence. In its stead: a transcription of an experience, during which meanings dawned, shifted, dissolved, re-formed. Though Transcription reminds us that a transcription of an experience is a fiction, too, since experience, whether of a work of literature or a person, cannot be directly transcribed. There is no perfect device for doing so, even if this novel about devices reminds us that literature, as the narrator says of the glass flowers, is a ‘recording instrument of exquisite sensitivity’ – or at least it was.
*
Returning to the beginning, with the associations accumulated in the first reading now a kind of foreknowledge, one starts to detect the quiet sources of Transcription’s dreamlike atmosphere. Consider the first sentences of the book: ‘I was falling asleep on the train. I was going to interview Thomas, who had just turned ninety.’ Simple, functional, factual. But lingered over: is there not something awry about the way they begin in medias res? Turning the page, one realizes that the sentences feel off-kilter because they borrow the mode we use to tell people our dreams, as the narrator then does: ‘I was in Paris . . . I was getting Eva from what must have been her school.’
Soon, other details that seemed naturalistic begin to feel charged. In the second half of the novel Max compares the food experiment to a ‘fairytale’, in the light of which the first half starts to sound different. Walking through Providence ‘offline’, the narrator has ‘an unusual experience of presence – more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath’. The narrator has what Lerner elsewhere calls ‘an experience of form’, an experience of reality as form. It’s as though by knocking his phone into the sink in front of the mirror – causing the phone to go ‘black mirror’ – Lerner’s narrator has gone, like Alice, somewhere between through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. The narrator has entered a kind of wonderland, a reality re-enchanted through being defamiliarized.
The moment is one of several that seem inspired by Fredric Jameson’s 1984 essay on postmodernism, another text that can seem transcribed inside Transcription. Jameson writes of ‘how an unparalleled quantum leap in the alienation of daily life in the city can now be experienced in the form of a strange new hallucinatory exhilaration’ such that the ‘present suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness’. His essay also contains a version of the glass flowers encounter: before Daune Hanson’s uncannily lifelike statues, Jameson finds that your ‘hesitation as to the breath and warmth of these polyester figures . . . tends to return upon the real human beings moving about you in the museum, and to transform them also for the briefest instant into so many dead and flesh-coloured simulacra’.
The narrator’s hotel also feels faintly familiar, a descendant of LA’s Hotel Bonaventura, which Jameson describes as a ‘postmodern hyperspace’: the ‘polish’ of Hotel Providence’s ‘recently refinished’ façade is ‘incongruous’ with the street just as the Bonaventura’s ‘glass skin achieves a placeless dissociation’ from the neighbourhood. In his room, the narrator finds ‘two complimentary plastic bottles of water from two different brands’, which at first seem another naturalistic touch. A sign of shabbiness, a failure of attention to detail, or of luxury, an ostentatious token of abundance? Or an emblem of a world in which luxury is shabby and empty – luxury as the simulacrum of a choice between identical substances? But the detail’s significance changes when we re-read the narrator’s conversation with Thomas on the phone:
Of course, I’ve been expecting you, let yourself in; he would have something for us to eat and drink. Then I got in the shower and tried to formulate a question, and when I emerged it was night, the façade of the church yellowed by streetlight. I put on the same clothes in which I’d travelled. I drank down one of the bottles of water.
Every particular has what one might call plausible deniability. Darkness does fall suddenly, sometimes when one is in the shower. And yet: it feels as though night has arrived with unnatural rapidity, like house lights going down. That the narrator is putting on the same clothes may make us feel, subliminally, that he is dressing up as himself. And given the associations swirling, Thomas’s words ‘eat and drink’ may make us hear the bottles as an allusion, especially since the narrator ‘drank down’ one, as though imbibing a potion. ‘Every time I saw Thomas’s red-brick-and-yellow-shingle colonial house – he once told me it had been built for a “prosperous hatter” – it seemed to have retreated from the street a little more.’ Even if one doesn’t mishear ‘yellow-brick road’, ‘prosperous hatter’ might now strike us as crude.
*
What is this novel’s beautiful rule, the principle behind its variations? To transcribe means to ‘make a copy in writing’. There is certainly doubling: two sons, two daughters, Eva and Emmie, one abstaining from food the other from school. Some duplications are more like reversals: whereas the narrator’s final conversation with Thomas was a real interview that wasn’t really recorded, Max’s was a kind of fake interview that was really recorded. (In the interlude in Madrid, the woman hosting the conference for Thomas is the author of a ‘history of reversal, its centrality to so many arts’.)
Describing the scene from the play in which the lecturer keeps spilling his water, the narrator reflects that ‘it’s unclear if this is part of the play or a mistake’. ‘Or part of the play and a mistake’, Thomas offers. ‘This is the third option that becomes possible in art.’ Art is where mistakes can become beautiful rules, where ambiguity – literally, having it both ways – reigns. We might think of Transcription as a mirror, which both doubles and reverses. But a mirror of a more ambiguous kind, like the train window in which the narrator sees his reflection. The narrator’s ‘dead phone’ is also a two-way surface: a window to the world that ‘went black mirror’, which, in becoming mere surface, makes the narrator more alive to the world around him. The touchscreen and the train window oscillate between mirroring and transporting; ‘at one moment they reflect this world’, as Lerner has said of Ashbery’s poetry, ‘then suddenly they’re portals to another’.
In Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), the narrator similarly said that Ashbery’s ‘actual’ poems seem ‘concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface’. They achieve ‘a strange kind of presence’ that ‘keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror’. For Lerner, poems are valuable and lasting because they remain out of reach. Experiencing something ‘as beautiful’, as the narrator put it after seeing the glass flowers, depends on never cracking the beautiful rule, never resolving each equivocal detail that seems organic one instant and artificial the next, by turns a mistake and part of the play. ‘Each time the house lights dimmed’ at the cinema as a child, Lerner recalls in The Hatred of Poetry (2016), ‘I felt that other worlds were possible, felt all my senses had been reset and sharpened’. The actual movie – the ‘particular alternative world’ – ruins the effect. But ‘each time the lights went down . . . I felt overwhelmed by an abstract capacity I associate with Poetry. Not the artwork itself – even when the artwork is great – but the little clearing the theatre makes.’
*
Transcription seduces you into seeking an escape from its hall of mirrors in reality. ‘I exited the campus onto Thayer Street and walked toward Waterman. I turned right on Waterman . . . ’, the narrator says, recapitulating his walk to Thomas’s house. One purpose of this mimicry of phone directions is to show how mediated perception is even when we are without our mediating devices, and that exact transcriptions are not necessarily the most meaningful ones. But the narrator’s account of his route also gives the impression of locating us squarely in the real world. One could no doubt follow his journey on Google Maps. But then what?
The temptation to track down Transcription’s source material is perhaps especially strong in a world of devices that make most information instantly available. You can read Lerner’s Paris Review interview with Alexander Kluge and feel a thrill when Lerner says he’s afraid he’ll delete the recording. But in following such trails – most likely down internet rabbit holes – are we not making a category error? As Thomas rebukes the narrator: ‘It is maybe silly to be so literal now? It is late for the literal, no? We practise literature, not law.’ To treat Transcription as a string of references that can be decrypted forecloses what Derek Attridge, in The Singularity of Literature (2004), calls a ‘repeated encounter with alterity’. The ‘singularity’ of a work arises from its ‘constitution as a set of active relations, put in play in the reading, that never settle into a fixed configuration’. It short-circuits the perceptual process, whose extension through the difficulty of unfamiliar forms, Shklovsky argued in his essay ‘Art as Device’ (also translated as ‘Art as Technique’), is not merely the means but ‘an end itself’, which allows us to ‘recover the sensation of life’.
There is a scene in Leaving the Atocha Station in which the narrator’s girlfriend Isabel tells him about a notebook she found among her brother’s belongings after he was killed in a car crash. It had ‘numbers written all over its pages: 1066, 312, 1916, 1492, 800, 1776, etc’. Isabel ‘convinced herself that it was an elaborate coded message, a message to her’:
She must have known, she was sixteen, that this was impossible, but she had let herself be convinced, and the notebook became her most treasured possession. She never attempted to decipher the code, the point was not to read the message; the point was that there was an ongoing conversation between her and her brother, an unconcluded correspondence.
Isabel’s brother isn’t quite dead so long as mysterious possibilities remain intact. One day, an old boyfriend ‘asked why she had this notebook with years written all over it’. Isabel is furious and distraught. The revision notebook had been her impossible poem; in destroying her fantasy that there was an unreachable message for her behind the numbers, he had shattered the screen onto which she could project the ongoing presence of her brother.
Thomas’s death is an established fact and yet it slips by un-narrated. At the memorial, it has already happened (though might not those square brackets around ‘[Hotel Villa Real]’ give grounds for the childish hope that this middle section has a different, perhaps inferior ontological status?) Max tells the story not of Thomas’s death but of his improbable survival. And Thomas has the last word (‘beautiful rule?’). Repression of his mortality also afflicts his sons. The narrator fails to pick up on ‘Switzerland’ as a euphemism for euthanasia – he assumes Dignitas is ‘a small museum in Zurich’. At first this struck me as a false note. But now it seems implausible that it was not meant to sound implausible. Is the dissonance not a clue? It’s not that the narrator doesn’t know what Dignitas is, but that he has succeeded in forgetting.
‘The locking into place’, Ashbery writes in ‘Self-Portrait’, is ‘“death itself”’. It is the relations remaining ‘active’ that keeps old texts, vanished voices, alive. If the ‘strange kind of presence’ absence can create is an illusion, Transcription is about the depth of this illusion, an illusion that comes from the oscillation between wonder and doubt that literature’s ambiguous surface can elicit. It provides not clarity but a clearing – the conditions in which to hear ghosts, messages from the past. We may worry we are partly reading off our own reflections, but self-reflection is partly what literature is for.
*
In what sense is it ‘late’? And what is the disaster from which this ‘black box’ has been ‘recovered’? The death of Thomas, most obviously. The death of Max’s mother, who it is implied killed herself; that of a fellow student – the lecturer in the play – in another apparent suicide. Transcription is also set amid what the narrator refers to as ‘the disasters of the world. Everything with Covid. The sky orange with Canadian wildfire smoke. There was that day of floods, we were almost swept away on the expressway. There is the war . . . ’. Before that, the disasters of the past century, the catastrophe of ‘progress’ itself. ‘I took a photo of the wintry, postindustrial landscape through my masked reflection as the train picked up speed, and then I checked and deleted the photo and shut my eyes and faced the past’, the narrators says, recalling Benjamin’s angel of history, looking back at the debris left by the storm blowing him into the future. The resonances of this vision of the contemporary world make us think of the disaster of ‘late’ capitalism, whose cultural logic as elucidated by Jameson hardly seems aged, such is ‘the waning of our historicity’. Having lost the capacity ‘to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of the subject could result in anything but “heaps of fragments”’ – which might make us think of Transcription’s dislocated, chronologically scrambled parts.
Amid what Jameson calls ‘the postliteracy of the late capitalist world’, overrun by brighter sources of light – brash new media, proliferating screens – do we still want literature’s delicate lampwork? ‘It is late, as you say’, Thomas says. ‘So we stop it now, the recording. So that you can call your lovely daughter. That is a better use of your device. But does it still have power?’ Thomas repeatedly refers to Emmie as the ‘Hungerkünstler’, the title of Kafka’s story about an artist whose skill people have lost interest in. If we read Emmie’s hunger artistry as a kind of ‘weird allegory’, we might imagine this story about the appetites of a child (children being natural artists, and the artists, and critics, of the future) as a parable about the future of a culture whose growth is in danger of stalling amid the ‘bright foils and plastics of the sugar-industrial complex’, as Max puts it, unless it can regain an appetite for what sustains it.
The longer one dwells on Transcription the more device-like it can seem. But that may be a function of our historical situation, in which, as Jameson wrote, ‘depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces (what is often called intertextuality is in that sense no longer a matter of depth)’. Are we bound to receive Transcription’s densely allusive surface not as rich with ambiguous references but as a depthless collage, what the narrator’s father in Lerner’s third novel, The Topeka School (2019), calls merely ‘an instance of technique’? Lerner’s defence of poems’ ‘not containing anything within them’ can sound less like a celebration of the bottomlessness that has always kept literature aglow and more like a symptomatic expression of postmodernism’s hollow ‘autoreferentiality’, where instead of meaning there are only what Jameson calls ‘meaning-effects’, produced through the interaction of signs that no longer refer to any real content.
*
How did Lerner construct a device of such apparent intricacy? At some point the possibility occurred to me that he didn’t. Impossibly delicate things: does this mean too delicate for my perception, or not as delicate as I am imagining, or – a third option – more delicate than could be made by ‘movements of the hand’ alone? Lerner has long been preoccupied with fraudulence: the narrator in Leaving the Atocha Station is a habitual liar and feels he is a phony poet; the novel that became 10:04 (2014) was originally conceived as fabricated correspondence with famous authors. Lerner’s ‘experiment’, ‘The Hofmann Wobble’, published in Harper’s in 2023, uses ChatGPT. Did Lerner give a chatbot some beautiful rule?
If Transcription is a ‘deepfake’, the word the narrator’s host in Madrid uses to describe his ‘interview’, then I suspect it is only in the sense that all fiction is: deep and fake. The work contains what can sound like coded confessions – ‘the little wires in the models’; ‘I could hear what sounded like live piano music, but saw no piano’, ‘I did a terrible thing: I plugged it in’. Yet these are clues not that Lerner used AI but that he wants to raise the possibility that he might have. This is another purpose of those modulations showing the way technology has left its alienating mark on the human voice (‘I exited’): to activate the hermeneutic of suspicion that computer-generated text has given rise to – a new hinge in our looking. We are all paranoid readers now, or feel we need to be. (‘The world today is no longer mysterious but only sinister’, as Thomas Bernhard wrote in his 1985 novel Old Masters.) Part of the reason we have difficulty telling artificial from human intelligence is that large language models reveal a truth about the human voice, and about literature, which is that it recycles and repurposes what it finds. We are consummate copyists, absorbers of other media (‘A human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings’, as Adorno put it). Our voices, as Lerner has said, are ‘corporate technologies’, made of other voices.
It is late, finally, in the sense that literature is always late: a form of reflection that comes after what it reflects on. The ‘experiment’ is technology’s pervasion of society, our approach to which resembles Max’s scheme to help his daughter: ‘We’re going to conduct an experiment where we just eat what we want without rules for a while and see how that feels for all of us. So anything that looks good, just put it in the cart.’ We collectively adopt technologies whose power no one seems to have a stable understanding of. We unreflectively feed LLMs our sensitive data, our banal secrets, our finest poetry, outsourcing our reading, our thinking, our writing. It is the dynamics driving this seemingly inexorable process – what Jameson called ‘that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions’ – not the gadgets themselves, which seem the true poem behind Transcription’s glassy surface: the movement of history which ‘remains forever out of reach’, as Jameson writes. Technology is ‘a figure for something else’: a ‘representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp – namely the whole new decentred global network of the third stage of capital itself.’
The language of poetry slows perception down, Shklovsky argued. Literature opens a space for reflection – reflection meaning thought, not merely mirroring: the former being the edge humans, at present anyway, have over machines. Reflection though requires distance, what Jameson describes as ‘the possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital’. And this is what has ‘been abolished in the new space of postmodernism’. Our devices eradicate distance, Thomas likewise points out. But whereas the ‘so-called tablet’ over which Emmie is hunched ‘is a black hole for the eyes’, the black box of Transcription draws attention to its own inscrutable surface, poised between portal and mirror, engrossing dream and estranged vantage on reality.
Jameson concluded his essay by calling for a renewal of a pedagogical art, an aesthetic of ‘cognitive mapping’ that would seek to endow the disoriented postmodern subject ‘with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system’. Transcription, a modest heap of perplexing fragments, is closer to a formal expression of our disorientation – in both time and space – than a systematic attempt to overcome it. It concerns a pedagogical relationship, however, and is executed with a pedagogical touch. Lerner, in an essay on Berger’s novel G (1972), extols what he calls an ‘expansion of subjectivity through certain ways of seeing’: the ability to look at things in fresh ways, from alternative angles. Transcription in this sense might at least represent what Jameson called ‘an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions’.
If Transcription does not outline an alternative world, it nevertheless enables what Attridge calls ‘the shifting and opening-up of settled modes of thinking and feeling’. Whether we call the flowering of new senses fiction or criticism, to connect the terms is to see that they meet in the utopian, reflecting on the world being the precursor to being alive to the possibility of others – seeing the world as made by movements of the hand, a history of small decisions, which can be re-made, or at least shaped, by further small decisions; a world which begins to be changed by our changing the way we see it, since what we call reality is shaped by the hallucinations we share (‘The world-as-it-is is more than pure objective fact’, Berger reminds us, ‘it includes consciousness’).
*
Transcription reminded me of a passage in Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus (1947), which I happened to be reading simultaneously. Jonathan Leverkühn, father of the protagonist, collects shells. Whereas Lerner’s narrator was astonished that the glass flowers were not natural, Mann’s narrator is astonished that these delicate natural objects aren’t cultural:
To think that all those spirals and vaults (each executed with such marvellous self-assurance, the elegance of form as bold as it was delicate) with their pinkish entryways, their splendid, iridescent glazes, their multiform chambers, were the work of their own gelatinous inhabitants . . . to imagine these exquisite dwellings as the product of the mollusks they defend, that was the most astonishing thought.
Perhaps it wasn’t coincidence that I was reading Dr Faustus and noticed this passage: maybe I was receiving the messages in Transcription’s air (like Lerner’s Thomas, Mann was born in Germany and died in Zürich and, like Max, lived in LA). Other connections were surely too quiet for consciousness: Max at one point compares himself to ‘Faust’, making a ‘pact with fructose’; there are ‘several similarly sized cockleshells’ among Thomas’s art collection. Jameson mentions the novel in his essay, in the course of discussing ‘the well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche’, a concept ‘we owe to Thomas Mann (in Doktor Faustus) . . . ’. And Death in Venice may be among the more direct models for Transcription: Mann’s novella is another short book set during an epidemic about chasing beauty through a labyrinth (Aschenbach even eats some ‘overripe’ strawberries during his pursuit). Transcription might have been titled Death in Providence – a word which contains ‘Venice’, ‘transcribed inside’ it. (The narrator says he chose Hotel Providence ‘online more or less at random’. ‘A good title, no?’, Thomas remarks later: an organic fact turned charged detail.)
Some of the shells are covered in marks so ornate they seem to be ‘hieroglyphics’: ‘their meticulous complexity gave every appearance of intending to communicate something.’ Jonathan is obsessed with deciphering them:
They elude our understanding and, it pains me to say, probably always will. But when I say they ‘elude’ us, that is really only the opposite of ‘reveal’, for the idea that nature painted this code, for which we lack the key, purely for ornament’s sake on the shell of one of her creatures – no one can convince me of that. Ornament and meaning have always run side by side, and the ancient scripts served simultaneously for decoration and communication. Let no one tell me nothing is being communicated here! For the message to be inaccessible, and for one to immerse oneself in that contradiction – that also has its pleasure.
Ashbery, in ‘Self-Portrait’, sounds less confident that ornament and meaning run side by side. We know
that its windings
Lead nowhere except to further tributaries
And that these empty themselves into a vague
Sense of something that can never be known
Even though it seems likely that each of us
Knows what it is and is capable of
Communicating to the other.
What Ashbery leaves unsaid is that a work’s mysteries generate our communication, to discover if others have had a similar experience. Lerner’s novel may not be as profound as this extended commentary might imply; my transcription risks engulfing the reality. Sometimes looking back at Transcription I am almost disappointed – as though I had forgotten that it’s just black ink on a static page (or screen). But our collective idea of the book, our shared hallucinations about it, are part of its reality; literature is something we practise. Its power is derivative: its hallucinogenic properties depend on prior hallucinogens, the original files it abstracts – Ashbery’s poem, Jameson’s essay, Mann’s novella, Kafka’s short story and all the other ‘music playing that we cannot hear’, as Thomas says.
‘What colour ink?’, he asks the narrator, trying to imagine the projection in the student play, dissolved by the clownish lecturer’s spilled water, the mistake that through repetition became a strangely beautiful rule.
“Blue, purple, I don’t know. Not black, I don’t think.”
“A blue wash, lovely. I see it.”
Do you see it?
Read on: Lola Seaton, ‘The Ends of Criticism’, NLR 119.