I was recommended Ben Lerner’s novel Transcription by someone I met in Berlin this spring. Along with Mathias Enard’s Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild I’ve never felt more seen as an interviewer (the book is actually not about what it claims to be), and by some serendipity I picked up a copy in the bookshop opposite Colombia University in New York and arrived in Providence, Rhode Island at the same time as the protagonist gets off the train from New York to interview their subject in the same city.
In the book the narrator drops his iphone in a sink and spends a good chunk of the novel trying to deal with the sudden disconnection from organised time, interspersed with memories of his college romances and the days when phone calls were timed and costed a lot of money, and where information on other people was hard to come by unless a mutual friend told you. It’s a plot device that let’s Lerner’s narrator play with the unreliable nature of memory, time discipline, and the question of whether conversations recalled are any more or less real than words committed to the archive.
I’ve a project on the go in the background at the moment where I am playing around with the hours and hours of audio recordings I have from the past few years and working out where the gaps are for a book I am writing on time (which I hope might appear around 2028 if I can get my act together). I worked out that -give or take – I’ve probably interviewed about a thousand people in my life. Some have been extended chats with a microphone lasting several hours, others have been grabbed questions at press conferences or walking down corridors, sat on trains and at bus stops. The ease of digital recording means that we are now used to the idea that we can have something approaching total recall, and there is evidence that the use of AI and automatic transcription as part of Marshall McLuhan’s extensions of man is actually changing the way our brains function. They’re all here, consciously or unconsciously collected but we still make choices in what we retrieve and attach meaning to.
What makes Lerner’s very short book so impactful is the way it doesn’t only give us an unreliable narrator but also makes you an unreliable reader. Like with my interviews I found myself leafing back through the novel to check that things I had memorised it were actually there (including writing this, where I was worried I had confused part of the book with something else. As I only had a paper copy I couldn’t even search the keywords). The book has generally been pigeonholed as a well-crafted meditation on technology, but it has more depth than that and really speaks to our own shame in not finding meaning and our constant attempts to rectify it through the assemblage of what we know and don’t know in the flow of time.
Dominic Hinde 