Transcription – Ben Lerner

[Granta; 2026]

Writing about Ben Lerner has long felt to me like an act of hubris. The grace with which he articulates his own artistic vision—in the work itself, in discussing it, and when engaging with the work of others—seems to raise the stakes of a piece of writing like this one. What can one add that Lerner hasn’t said better? And yet there’s something deeply Lernerian about having a profound experience of art—as was my reading of Transcription—and trying to make sense of it, with awe and with sentences.

Both Lerner and I are second-generation shrinks—if being raised by and among mental health professionals counts as a shaper of cross-generational experience (it should). For our kind, fiction allows the practice of interpreting patterns—the bread and butter of the talking cure, absorbed early and with confusing intensity—to be discovered anew and used to unlock forms of recognition in excess of the individual. Already as children, we intuit that our language is subject to interpretation and learn ways to influence this. In his discussion of Julio Cortázar’s “In the Name of Bobby” on The New Yorker: Fiction podcast, Lerner describes his childhood discovery of the creative freedom he could exercise in recounting his dreams to his therapist parents. I like to think of these fictionalised renditions as a first encounter with autofiction: early ventures into Lerner’s signature weaving of fantasy and experience.  

I’ve used the image of weaving—as does John Berger in “Woven, Sir”, another of Lerner’s picks for the The New Yorker: Fiction podcast—to evoke the idea, central to Lerner’s work, of writing as embodied labour. Lerner’s sentences foreground their materiality: in Transcription, the narrator’s iPhone is knocked into a sink and remains underwater “for the duration of this sentence”, each word marking a moment of time and electronic degradation. But this “infection of language and life” is, as Jamieson Webster writes, “bidirectional”. Sentences that measure experience are measured, in turn, by the column of air that sounded them out while writing, as I am doing as I write this. In Cardiography, written in the wake of open-heart surgery last year, Lerner describes the impulse propelling his work with a newly re-vivified physiological metaphor:

Long before I’d had any tests, I thought of both sentence and line as electrocardiograms (…). I harbored the fantasy that once encoded in literary form the synchronic rhythms of my heartbeat and my breath might become available to you, and that your own rhythms might be altered by the encounter in the time of reading.

For Lerner, reading is conspiracy: the sharing of breath though words, bringing the “art” and the “heart” into associative continuity. Already in his short story “Café Loup”, he had foregrounded the cellular level at which language affects us, the physical and psychological hinges between choking and speech, anxiety and fiction. Transcription revisits these themes from the vantage point of a post-pandemic world.

Undergirding Lerner’s poetics is a therapeutic understanding of writing as a mediated encounter, visible first and foremost in his use of pronouns. The I’s and you’s implicit or explicit in his textual production function like portals. They connect therapeutic transference, where the therapist stands in for a mother, father, or lover, becoming a recipient of redirected feelings, and the identificatory space of fiction. In Lerner’s own words, during a talk at Harvard, “every time you say ‘I’, it is a choral, intergenerational technology speaking through you”. The I is choral because first-person speech is a universal experience, marking our second birth into subjecthood. It’s intergenerational because it mirrors the I’s and you’s with which we were spoken into subjectivity as infants. And it’s a technology because it facilitates our halting attempts to make our interior life intelligible to others, extending our reach beyond the limits of our body. This “pronominal expansion and contraction”, as he calls it in Cardiography—or the I’s capacity to mean, at once, the (systolic) one and the (diastolic) many—is at the heart of Lerner’s fiction, which functions, since The Topeka School, as a choral, intergenerational technology of its own. His latest work, Transcription, expands this pronominal play even further to encompass a new and timely relationship: between the “I” and the “iPhone”.

Transcription is a novella-length triptych. The first section sees a classically Lernerian narrator—an earnest, bumbling overthinker—travel to Providence to interview Thomas, his elderly mentor, a filmmaker and renowned thinker on art and technology, of German heritage and associatively erudite speech patterns. During his preparation—the account of which tracks the undifferentiated intermingling of online and offline experience—the narrator knocks his iPhone into a waterlogged sink, disabling his one means of accurate recording, thus future transcription, of the interview he is about to conduct. As his various contingency plans fall through, he finds himself unable to either confess his technological breakdown or defer the conversation, and embarks on it with an unresponsive phone, with which he simulates the act of recording.

Freed from technologies of capture, the ensuing exchange and subsequently published interview can transcend literal objectivity—what Thomas refers to scathingly as the “logic of a lawyer”—and morph, instead, into the sharing of a dream. Arriving in Providence, the narrator had been reminded of a dramatic production, seen there years before, in which liquid was “accidentally” spilled, over and over again, on the transparency of an analogue projector, dissolving the information it contained in favour of an anarchic proliferation of meaning. Like this performative device, the narrator’s failure to record is both “part of the play and a mistake”. Not either/or but both/and—a “third option that becomes possible in art”—the unrecorded interview turns a bug into a feature, echoing Lerner’s own poetic process.

The second section takes place in Madrid in the aftermath of Thomas’s Swiss-administered euthanasia. At an event held to honour Thomas’s legacy, the narrator discloses his failure to record the now-published interview to fellow admirers, in what is intended as a self-deprecating opener. His confession is received with unexpected animosity. In the absence of a transcript, the piece has lost value, is reduced to a work of fiction.

Particularly upset is Thomas’s son, Max, a college friend of the narrator’s who lives in LA with his wife and daughter. Addressed to the narrator, his story occupies the final section of the tryptic. Max recounts his struggles with his daughter’s ARFID (“Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder”), eerily resolved through the soothing qualities of ASMR unboxing videos—one acronym treating the other—and two final conversations with his father. The first takes place on an ICU nurse’s phone, in preparation for Thomas’s looming death-by-Covid; the last follows his unexpected recovery, playing out in uncanny parallelism with the narrator’s interview at the book’s opening and adding a third voice, retroactively, to the oneiric exchange occurring therein.

The book is a tapestry of dialogic-diastolic I’s. Except for the shorter middle section, its bulk consists of a triangulation of one-to-one conversations between a father figure and two sons—one biological, one elective—grappling in turn with fatherhood. These roles are malleable. The narrator calling his daughter from Thomas’s landline becomes his father calling his childhood self, and the dream he recounts having on the way there is appropriated by Thomas, who—like the young Lerner—freely rewrites and completes it, dismissing the narrator’s corrections. “We practice literature, not law”, he scalds, and “extend the dream when we share it”—Freud’s mistake being to see dreams as individual. As the interview progresses, Thomas increasingly dispenses with the literal, perhaps deliberately, perhaps due to senile confusion. The narrator and Max begin to overlap in his mind as interchangeable instantiations of symbolic sonhood: a parallelism that seeps out of the scene to contaminate Transcription as a whole, shaping its narrative structure through the virality of collective dreamwork.

As in other works, Lerner grapples in Transcription with the need for fictional fabulation. This is most obvious in his use of association-rich patterns as structuring devices—another tool repurposed from the talking cure. Patterns are always, for Lerner, a double-edged sword: harbingers of the most communal and the most isolating of experiences, they signal art and madness alike, and, when shared, help treat the latter. For the narrator of his short story “The Ferry”, they transform the world into a hallucinatory system of signs for him to decode. A stranger’s voice messages, left accidentally on his answering machine, unlock insights into his own relational strife, becoming distorting mirrors, like the broken one he sees on the sidewalk. Even the subway ticket machine, asking him to choose between adding “time” and “value”, speaks to him in philosophical terms—it is “too much, too beautiful”. “If you leave silence around any language it starts to sound crazy, or sound like poetry,” he pleads with his angry partner, whose silence—like that of a psychoanalyst—lets his speech unravel into madness.

In “The Ferry”, patterns are a private experience: the narrator dreams alone, on the shaky threshold between poetry and paranoia. They serve not to reduce but to increase his overwhelmment, speaking to him—and only to him—in frightening whispers. Something similar is recounted in Transcription. Following a difficult break-up during his college years, the narrator begins, through “auditory hallucinations”, to hear “language in mere noise”—to find meaning in chaos or, in the words of Joan Didion, “impose a grammar on the shimmer”. By confessing this to Thomas, and being offered ad hoc art therapy—in the form of a song, converted to a MIDI file, that tricks the brain into hearing a singing voice—the narrator is able to share, thus normalise, his hearing “as if”, or his mind’s propensity to fiction. Just as it’s normal to see the Blaschka glass models—exhibited at Harvard and vividly inscribed in the narrator’s college memories—as flowers or rotting fruit, so one can identify voices in noise, or stories in experience.

By condensing the mess of the world to a thinkable, speakable system, the patterning impulse of fiction—“somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion” —has a consolatory function. This power to resignify is what links the (bad) poetry, quoted by Reagan in his address to the nation after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, to the ASMR unboxing video that helps Max’s daughter rediscover her appetite. While the former gave prosodic shape to the grief of a generation of school kids, as Lerner muses in 10:04, the latter offers a “series of subtle sensory inputs and muffled shocks” as “compensation for the unmanageable reality it’s made disappear”—a sicker form of fictional reduction in the face of a sicker world.

Like all technologies, Transcription makes clear, the “as if” of fiction can connect and separate, catalyse collective dreaming or defend against it—akin to the wine Thomas pours the narrator, it is “a medicine and a poison”. Ultimately, what determines fiction’s therapeutic power is its interpersonal dimension. Just as the poetic metre helped make sense of the Challenger’s disintegration by being “felt in the chests of a million American children” at once, Max’s daughter rediscovers a desire for eating and even sharing food not by videos alone but under her parents’ steady gaze. Sitting beside her father, “watching a babbling, purple-haired woman opening Mini Mystery Plushies”, she offers him a cheese puff: “They’re good, right?”.

When used to screen out rather than hold another’s pain, though, fiction provides no healing “conspiracy”. In Max’s experience of his father, it is rather an instrument of detachment. “This isn’t art or literature”, he tells Thomas of his daughter’s condition, piqued by the literary-associative nature of his father’s response—he’d been looking for comfort, not Kafka. And later: “I am not painting a picture for you”. What Thomas has done for the narrator, his mentee, through the healing power of shared fictions in the form of a MIDI file, he is unable to do for his biological son. 

The mirroring, here, is complete. Thanks to the disabling of his iPhone, the narrator can relinquish literality, give in to collective dreaming, and let Thomas’s voice speak through him, during and after the interview. Max, on the other hand, can address and forgive his father only as a disembodied voice through an ICU nurse’s phone—a psychoanalytic set-up, liberated of the visual—and experience their final conversation calmly in the secret knowledge that he is, in fact, recording it. The systole and diastole of filiation—biological or elective, too close or distant enough—is tragically articulated in the novel’s father-son triangle.

If, as Thomas teaches the narrator, “the meaning is in the cut, the splice”, then it is in the assemblage of Transcription’s three parts that we must seek it: in how, woven together, they form patterns across voices and generations that celebrate the technologies of the human. As Lerner recognised at the book’s Parisian launch, these include the novel form itself, which we can now see, as it begins to obsolesce, as another of our hand-held devices—one uniquely capable, when it doesn’t try to merge with the technologies it represents, to capture the ways they capture our experience. To acknowledge this potential today, Lerner reminds us, is to revitalise our awe at the capacities of writing. Whatever fiction is, let’s keep doing it, together.

Lianna Mark is a writer, translator, and lecturer in English Literature at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her writing has appeared in Berlin Review, the Journal of Class and Culture, and Comparative Drama. Her first book, Theatres of Autofiction, was published in 2024 by Cambridge University Press. Raised between London and Milan, she is currently based in Berlin.