Ben Lerner’s Transcription

In interviews given around the publication of The Topeka School (2019), Ben Lerner repeatedly stated that he viewed that novel and its two predecessors—Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04 (2014)—as a triptych, with The Topeka School, being the largest and most formally complex of those novels, serving as both prequel and summation. Given this sense of having reached the end of a cycle of production, the first impression when beginning Lerner’s slim new fiction Transcription is one of surprise, and not because the writer has moved into new and uncharacteristic territory.

On the contrary, Transcription seems on first encounter almost too recognizable as a book by Ben Lerner, his tropes replayed in a manner that appears to risk parody. Here is the author’s avatar as intellectual klutz somewhere between Woody Allen and the Coen Brothers, here are the moments of lyrical swoon and linguistic precision hinting at a utopian kernel within damaged life; here are the temporal disjunctions (seeing himself in multiple timeframes, entering into retrospective narrative from the present, etc.,); the brilliantly condensed passages of ekphrasis; the recollections of mental, romantic, and parental crisis; the appeals to a theoretical architecture inherited from the Frankfurt School. All this is assimilated or constellated into a presentation where, as Lerner has written of John Ashbery (one of his significant influences as a poet), “the (mild) shock of recognition and the (mild) shock of the new coexist.”1

To move on as a writer after regularly being lauded as one of the most significant of your generation is no doubt a complicated burden and task. Lerner has always been alert to two problematics for a white, male, highly educated North American writer of his generation: the draw of the Great American Novel, and the problem or dialectic of erudition. Rather than expansion, Lerner’s solution is to condense the music of his earlier work into a sonata form, a three-part construction where a theme is introduced, developed, and then recapitulated. It’s a structure that allows for remarkable depth and associative resonance: that early impression of exhausted tropes is revised and placed under a new aspect as the book progresses. This is a dense, penumbral, glittering text. What is achieved is a kind of Woolfian impressionism, that is, not an impressionism of glancing imprecision, but rather one of constantly shifting depths, a capacious condensation of style and association. We are presented with a book that restates the themes and style of Lerner’s earlier work, whilst opening a route toward new possibilities.

In the first section of the book, the Lerner avatar returns to his college town to interview his mentor, a German immigrant born in the 1930s, like two of Lerner’s real-life mentors, Rosmarie Waldrop and Alexander Kluge, whose real-life statements are woven into Thomas’s constellatory speech. In the figure of Thomas, Lerner has produced perhaps his most fascinating literary creation, and the most successful of the German characters who appear throughout his work, sometimes standing in awkwardly for an exilic European high culture. Thomas, as with Klaus in The Topeka School, is a cipher for much that is of concern to Lerner—technological transmission, the creation of epochal atmosphere, the legacy of the avant-garde, biological and artistic paternity, and the problem of fluency. Thomas has, like Kluge, been a protégé of Theodor Adorno, the most icily severe of the Frankfurt School theorists. He stands as a glyph for a profoundly serious postwar culture, one that took the impossibility of expression in the wake of global catastrophe as its most pressing concern—the music of Schoenberg, philosophy of Adorno, poetry of Celan. One of the novel’s implied questions is what kind of value or purchase such a culture holds under the Trumpian ascendancy. 

As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Thomas is suffering from the early effects of dementia, but this depletion of his capacities allows him to become seer-like, entering into personal and political history as though through wormholes of the mind. “Dreams don’t end with waking,” he says. “Meaning is in the cut, the splice. So what you cut is present, the dead matter.” Another of Lerner’s invoked German fathers, Walter Benjamin, viewed the splice, the montage, the cut, as the place where one might be shocked out of the phantasmagoria of the modern and the fantasy of linear history. For Benjamin, we live within myth, within the dream world of a modernity that is past, and in that dream world the new is always in a critical relation with the ancient. As Kluge said to Gary Indiana in 1989, the computer is to the contemporary family home what the hearth was for pre-industrial households.2 That Thomas is able to represent and contain all this while also flickering into realism, into literary believability, is a tremendous, delicate achievement.

That delicate achievement is given another register in a beautifully written set-piece. The Lerner avatar visits the Blaschka Glass Models of Plants at Harvard University: a selection of anatomically perfect glass flowers “in perpetual bloom” made by a Czech father and son between 1886 and 1936. In the book the glass blowers’ workshop is transposed to Dresden, to give it a different inflection with regard to Thomas’s history. “I joked”, writes Lerner, “that these must be actual plants that some conceptual artist was claiming were glass—they probably replaced them each night—but the joke masked the flowering of a new sense: I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as 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 then he senses that “the tiny glass stems and styles and petals surrounding us were vibrating imperceptibly, or maybe just perceptibly, from our footsteps and voices, that the little wires in the models could register even our breath . . .” He imagines the flowers as historical recording instruments, registering the material presence of bodies near them, the people of Dresden before the allies fire-bombed the city, the brush of presence against time and catastrophe. “The flowers were recording instruments of exquisite sensitivity, their glass anthers captured someone pouring a glass of water, the turning of a page.” This dextrous movement between the material, the corporeal, the cultural, the historical, and the aesthetic recalls Lerner’s description of John Berger as “a materialist of a deeply sensual sort.”3 It is a claim for the value of the constructed, of the fiction, for the resonance of the artwork against and beyond our debased and debasing life-world. With Transcription Lerner has produced a glass-flower of a text, one that, too, resonates with exquisite sensitivity.