Ben Lerner and the Impossible Interview

Ben Lerner’s new novel, “Transcription,” is less than a hundred and fifty pages long. It is slim and sly—“quieter” than his three previous novels, as he puts it—but, like all of Lerner’s books, it teems with erudition and artistic ambition, exploring the instability of memory, the mediating powers of language, and the “new-old” complexities of technological change. Lerner is an accomplished poet, but it was his début novel—the restless but self-assured “Leaving the Atocha Station,” which came out in 2011—that made him a literary celebrity. Since then, readers and critics have looked to each of his new novels to reinvigorate the form. “Transcription” begins with the narrator, a middle-aged writer, on his way to interview his mentor, Thomas, who is near the end of his life. Thomas, an eminent artist and scholar, is protean and stubborn, aging and ageless, keenly attentive and impossible to pin down. (His character is a composite evoking several of Lerner’s actual mentors, including the poet Rosmarie Waldrop and the filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge, both of whom were born in Germany.) Shortly before he gets to Thomas’s house, the narrator (whom Giles Harvey, in a recent review, dubbed “an intellectual klutz”) breaks his phone, and thus has no way to record the interview. Throughout “Transcription,” the characters are constantly mishearing, misremembering, and missing each other’s bids for attention and affection. But life can, in rare cases, provide more emotional closure than fiction. Earlier this year, Kluge, at ninety-four, read an advance copy of “Transcription.” “I am impressed by this text,” he wrote in an e-mail to Lerner. “I find it friendly but also very independent and poetical. The text had not only to do with me but with both of us . . . You write at the end of your message ,with love.‘ I would like to repeat ,with love‘ from my side.” He died two weeks later. Lerner and I spoke recently in my living room, in Brooklyn. In person, he takes himself less seriously than you might expect. But he doesn’t apologize for taking his “responsibility to art” seriously (although, characteristically, he immediately asks aloud whether “responsibility” is the right word). We talked about “Transcription,” Trump, our late grandmothers, and, inevitably, the ascendance of A.I. chatbots. On a table between us were mugs of black coffee, which we both finished and refilled; a plate of dates and pastries, which neither of us touched; and an audio recorder. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. I want to be able to speak freely, and I want you to be able to speak freely, and in order to do that I think you should have more freedom than usual to take stuff off the record. My journalistic-ethics justification is that, because we know each other, I don’t want to take something that you told me privately and inadvertently drag it “on record,” if you want it to stay private. You can ask me anything. I feel totally at ease. Sorry that I’m stupid. It could be the cumulative effects of COVID, I’ve decided. And cardiac bypass. And stupefaction of the far right. And screens. You also have to blame the screens. Yes, right, screens. I forgot about the screens. O.K. So I’ll turn this on. [Turns on audio recorder.] Has that recorder been used when you’ve been embedded with the far right? Am I getting the chance to share the hardware with the— Yeah, this hardware has been enchanted by a multitude of voices. [Laughs.] Your new book, obviously, is about interviewing. When I read it, my first thought was, Poor Ben, he’s going to have to sit through a really annoying publicity tour where all these interviewers say, “I’m interviewing you about a book about interviewing—isn’t that clever?” Then, later, I thought, But if I were to interview Ben about his book about interviewing, that would be really clever. What actually made me want to do this as a Q. & A., though, beyond the superficial pattern-matching, is that the interview scene in this book isn’t just used as a plot device. It’s also a way to explore some of the preoccupations that show up across all your novels. For example, the theme of superposition—put very simply, the idea that characters exist in a number of potential states simultaneously, some of them mutually exclusive, and this ambiguity or multiplicity doesn’t get resolved until some point in the future. Which is also a way to think about what we’re doing now: talking to each other in the present but in a way that only really makes sense if there’s an audience in the future. So I want to talk about what the interviewing does in the book, but, first, can you lay out its premise? Well, what sets it in motion is that this middle-aged writer goes to Providence, where he went to college, to interview his ninety-year-old mentor, Thomas, who usually doesn’t give interviews. Thomas is ailing, and this is almost certainly going to be his last interview. When the writer gets there, though, he drops his cellphone—his only recording device—in the hotel sink. So he’s phoneless. The narrator thinks he’ll go to Thomas’s house and say, “Look, this embarrassing thing happened.” But, when he gets there, he finds himself strangely unable to confess that he doesn’t have a way to record the interview. Then the interview happens, and Thomas is swinging between lucidity and senility, and a million things about their relationship come up, and the fiction records the interview the phone couldn’t capture. So the book starts with this interview that both does and doesn’t take place. The book is very interested in questions about the role of technology versus the role of the artist. It’s also noticing how phones are distracting and enervating, which is, on its face, a very familiar observation. Right. 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. I was interested in that séance-like, new-old, ancient-but-very-contemporary charging of the air around us. You’re right that there is a risk of being merely diagnostic when you write about things like cellphones. What fascinates me is the idea of making it seem like more of an ancient, dangerous human capacity to sever the voice from the body. Getting together and talking is something we do, but we wouldn’t normally be talking in this register. Normally, it would be sort of ridiculous for me to say, “Ben, how did you discover this new voice?” But I can talk to you this way because of the future audience that we both have in mind. Some version of this happens in all your books—an imagined future opens up new possibilities in the present. “10:04,” for example, is set in New York City when people are anticipating a big storm. While the storm is looming, there are new glimmers of possibility—friends can become lovers, strangers can become friends on the subway, the supermarket aisles are charged with meaning. Then the storm doesn’t come, and what they did in that past retroactively becomes sort of ridiculous. There’s an analogy between that and what we’re doing now. Because these interviews are edited and condensed, the parts of it that get cut out will retroactively make those parts of this present moment sort of ridiculous. Yeah. An interview intensifies this reality, but, even in a normal conversation, there is a sense in which, when you’re talking to someone, you’re also talking to other people, and you don’t necessarily know who you’re addressing through the medium of your interlocutor. The imagined future audience is just an extreme version of the way that speech is always more than an interaction between two people. Can you say more about what you mean by one person “talking through” another? One thing I love about novels is that they’re really good at showing how supposedly spontaneous speech is just repurposing overheard or assembled or collaged material from other influential speakers—the voice as a tissue of other voices. In my last novel, “The Topeka School,” I was really thinking about the voice as an intergenerational technology. That book involved a version of me channelling a version of my parents’ voices. I was interested in questions like, How does your mother’s or father’s voice get in your voice? How does your debate coach, the music you’re listening to on the radio, the bankrupt contemporary political speech that’s circulating around you, inflect your voice? Adam Gordon, the book’s protagonist, is always passing off someone else’s language as his own. I’ve also been thinking about how many of the voices that I know and that are in my head—the voices of writers, artists, relatives, et cetera—are actually fictions produced by different strategies of transcription. For example, one of the things that went into the writing of this novel was my experience interviewing the great poet Rosmarie Waldrop, in Providence. And I don’t know if you’ve done an interview like that, with a literary figure, but— I’m doing one right now. Yeah. But Rosmarie is a crucial literary figure. Anyway, I did this one for The Paris Review, and, the way the Review does it, they’re heavily edited. People are given a chance to look at their comments. Things are moved around. You cut down a lot of tape into a relatively pithy exchange. The result is a document that has its own authenticity but is by no means a transcription of the actual conversation that took place. 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. Do you recognize your own voice in interviews? I tend not to look at interviews that I do after the fact. If I do, I don’t really recognize myself. But then, sometimes a voice or a sensibility does feel captured in a transcript. When my grandma was in assisted living, in Cambridge, she participated in this interview project. Her answers to questions about her past were very matter-of-fact and generic-seeming, but somehow, when I looked at this document, it was just redolent of her personality and sensibility. It was overwhelming for me to read after her death. But I cannot point to any particular moment in the transcript that captures her voice. I don’t know if it’s about speech rhythms. I don’t know if it’s what’s left out, or the moments of hesitation, when someone else would have generated more language. I just mean to say that there’s both the way that transcripts are fictionalizations and there’s the magic by which language does manage to encode not only a voice but the present absence of the body. I think that these questions—of what a transcript inadvertently records, or fails to register, or falsifies—are ancient questions about writing, and they’re also very contemporary questions about accountability, about the record, about being able to be anchored in the real. One character says to the narrator something like, Maybe, on some level, you wanted to fail to record your last interview so that you could protect yourself from losing this person, because the recording would be too definitive. Yeah, I think that’s right. This is not something that the book gets into, really, but I know you’re thinking a lot about A.I. We’re in a moment where the replication of the voice is totally possible. It takes, what, I think three seconds of an audio clip to be able to generate audio in a person’s voice? 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? You’ve said that, like all poets, you believe in the magical power of words. But you also recognize that their power has limits. This is kind of an aside, but I’m remembering a Trump rally in the summer of 2016, when the implication of what he said was clearly that someone would take Hillary Clinton out if she came after the guns. Now that wouldn’t even count as a scandal, but it was a scandal at the time. And Trump said something like, Look at the transcript. I never said that. And it was true—I mean, this is kind of the definition of the dog whistle, I guess, back when we still had dog whistles. [Laughter.] But there is this way that affect and intonation and implication, those things are precisely what wouldn’t show up in a transcript. So it’s interesting to think about what part of politics is that which escapes transcription, that escapes that kind of record. This is one of the many underappreciated aptitudes of Trump’s art form. He’s incredibly good at leaving things out of the transcript. Which, as you’ve pointed out, makes him a kind of poet. Your poem “The Circuit” starts with a few lines that are just quoting Trump verbatim. You quote Reagan in “10:04” and Bob Dole in “The Topeka School.” When you were working on this new book, did you think at all about whether it would be more or less political, in an overt sense, than those previous books? Well, this book is much quieter. I wanted to write a book that explains very little and makes a lot felt. Political situations, especially in relation to COVID, are around the edges of the book. And the questions about why these children are in these deep protests against contemporary life—refusing to go to school, refusing to eat—are inseparable from their inability to imagine a future. Thomas’s character is also a way of posing questions about the relationship between politics and media now. I mean, he says his earliest childhood memory is hearing Hitler’s voice on the radio. One dichotomy that’s set up in the book is between the language of poetry and the language of law. Thomas, an artist and a critic, keeps saying, Why do we have to be so literal? We speak in the language of literature, not the language of law. Max, his son, is a lawyer, so he wants the real. One way to understand that conflict is to say, No matter how close we try to get to the real, it’s always mediated. 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. At best you have sound art. The degree to which dialogue seems to require cleaning up speech or letting it dissolve into a complicated soundscape—trying to get the level of mediation right—that’s a central novelistic problem that I’ve always been interested in. You once published a long prose poem called “The Media.” Thomas is a media scholar, a multimedia artist, and also a kind of medium. Can you say more about the preoccupation with media, with mediation? I mean, all of my books—and many of the books I love—involve staging encounters with media, whether that media be a painting or a poem or a phone. In “Leaving the Atocha Station,” pay phones are really important. The narrator has an important conversation with his mother on a pay phone. There’s also a scene where a woman recounts talking on a pay phone when she was in New York City, and feeling the reality of her father’s death hit her in a different way precisely because she could feel her distance from Spain, where she’s from, so acutely. For me, one of the most memorable moments in Proust is when the narrator first hears his grandmother’s voice on the phone. The phone is a totally new experience for him, and, when he hears her voice at this distance, she’s suddenly old. The new technology disembodies her voice, such that he’s already experiencing her as a spirit. I didn’t know we’d be talking so much about grandmothers, but I actually associate one of my grandmothers with Proust, because she was in this sort of Talmudic Proust reading group, where they would cyclically reread Proust and then go to France. My other grandmother, when she was losing her memory, she was very anxious about being untethered from her loved ones. One way she stayed tethered to me was through a standing phone call. I started at The New Yorker back when there were desk phones, and she would call my desk phone every day at five o’clock. What were your grandmothers’ names? Clare was the one who called on the phone, and Dorothy was the Proust. Obviously, “Transcription” is not a book about grandmothers—Thomas is no grandmother—but it is about generationality. My grandmother Rose, when she had dementia, became convinced that the staff at the assisted-living place where she lived were coming into her room when she wasn’t there and subtly altering her paintings. Rose had collected art her whole life, cared a lot about her paintings, and was disturbed, obviously, by this fact that wasn’t a fact. Then, eventually—and this gets weird, because I remember this being something my dad did, and my dad claims that I did this—either my dad or I said to my grandma, “You know, Rose, you know these paintings better than anyone, so if you say they’re changing, they’re changing. But you’ve got to admit, the staff is doing an excellent job. There are no smudges on the glass. They’re being really respectful.” My grandma got quiet for a moment, and she said, “You’re right, they’re doing an excellent job.” And that was the end of her worry about the paintings. Maybe I mention this memory because I associate it with this moment in the book where the narrator talks about Thomas’s “art therapy.” The narrator, when he was an undergraduate, had this breakdown in which he was hearing voices. When he got out of the hospital, Thomas showed him an auditory illusion where, basically, if you listen to a recording with a voice in it, and then convert that recording to a MIDI file and play it back—now without the voice, just a computer piano playing all the notes, including the notes that were in the voice—you’ll hear the voice that isn’t there. Thomas plays this for the narrator and says, Look, everybody can hear voices, it’s just a question of the conditions being right. We all err together. What Thomas does is socializing and normalizing. To me, the relationship to the grandmother’s story is that, there’s this hallucination, and then there’s a way of making the experience of distortion feel shared. That’s part of what makes Thomas a great mentor for the narrator. But the other side of that is when Max goes to Thomas with concerns about his daughter or his wife, his experience is immediately aestheticized. Yeah, and he says, “My daughter is not a work of fiction.” Right, exactly. Thomas oscillates between using art in this therapeutic way, and aestheticizing experience in a manner that leaves his son alone. And that’s the difference between being a mentor and a father. I don’t know if it’ll be read this way, but I do think this is, centrally, a book about parenting. And it seems to me that the things that make Thomas worse as a father are the things that make him better as an artist. Max says something about how you don’t want a spirit medium for a father. The inexhaustible fecundity of Thomas’s mind—that kind of associative logic, and the way that he takes over conversations and brings them to these wild domains—is exactly what Max doesn’t need around the death of his mom, for example. Or the parenting of his child. I was thinking about this when I was straightening up the house preparing for you to get here. Thomas’s house in the book is itself a kind of work of art. And I’m like, O.K., that’s the house of someone who is solipsistic. My house would never be a work of art like that, because I have kids, so it’s full of just, like, random plastic crap. And Max talks about how that house in Providence was not a place that had any evidence of him being Thomas’s son—there was never any position for him. It’s interesting, us talking about our grandmothers, because there’s also Thomas’s connection with his granddaughter. It’s a very strong and close connection, but it’s precisely the kind of connection that is enabled by his not having to provide certain kinds of daily care. He can be this wizardly figure because other people are taking care of the question of her eating disorder or whatever else. My fascination with the difference between being a mentor and a father was, to a certain degree, my displacement of this question about responsibility to kids and responsibility to art. I guess I don’t know if responsibility is the right word when it comes to art. When I was tidying, I was, like, The really obvious evidence of child chaos needs to go, but I’m not going to doll the place up because we’re not on camera—we’re not being recorded in that way. And then I remembered, you never know with novelists and poets. You’re never entirely on record, but you’re never entirely off record, either. What if, in five years, I pick up a novel and it’s like, “He had made some pathetic attempts to straighten up—literally pathetic, in the sense of inspiring pathos. There were a few houseplants that were either dead or in the process of dying . . . ” Yeah, it’s true. And it’s very unpredictable what kind of reactions people have to being fictionalized. Wait, did you say “predictable” or “unpredictable”? Unpredictable. Most of my experiences with how this can go awry I shouldn’t speak into a recording device. But coming into print is a weird transformation. It’s weird even if it’s not published, to just know that someone has tried to capture you, some aspect of you, in prose. I mean, there is something really basically disorienting about that doubling. Like, there are two of me now. Or I’m no longer the author of my own experience. And the fictional one will outlive me. It’s certainly in a more durable body. Yeah. I mean, all of that is really powerful. One can have a series of intellectual positions about it, but it is ultimately a magical or metaphysical thing. There is just something risky about taking real experience and transposing it to the plane of art. And then there are these interesting questions about, like, well, how much does something have to be modified before it ceases to have a magical connection to its source and reality? You brought up A.I. before, and I’d like to hear you talk specifically about A.I. and what it’s doing to writing, to poetry, to fiction, to the sentence. But it’s interesting—when I think of A.I., I often think of it in terms of the written word, but you brought it up in terms of the voice. A few years ago my brother left me an A.I.-generated voice mail in my own voice. It just said, “Hey, Ben, this is your brother. I just want you to know what this new technology can do. Imagine if I called Mom and asked for your Social Security number.” And then he left one in Spanish, one in Hindi, and one in Mandarin. And it was—well, it was horrifying. But I do also think that every time there’s this radical extension of the ability to capture or reproduce the voice, or the image, et cetera, it creates an interesting counterpressure on the arts it supposedly renders obsolete. What can your art do that isn’t totally supplanted by this other technology? Well, one thing is that when a human transcribes a human voice the two voices interact in unpredictable ways, and all of this can be beautiful. All of this registers the texture of the lived, of duration. Transmission isn’t just about verisimilitude. I think one response to this is just to get really interested in the specific social conditions of the transmission of the human. There’s a way in which you bypass part of the problem of A.I. and writing if you’re just interested in writing that was done by humans. Like, me, I’m just actually interested in how the bodies and voices of the dead were transferred to the page, and the moment of inscription, and what it means for me to receive that in the present. What if we cross the singularity of being able to know for sure? I think we already have. But I think the Turing test isn’t the right way of thinking about literature. Because it’s also possible to just say, I want to be part of a human community, I want to know the things I’m reading are written by a human, because what I value is the channel opened between the compositional moment and the moment in which I’m reading. Of course you could fool me. But that doesn’t mean that I still can’t read books that I know are written by humans, and enjoy the particular pleasures and pathos of that kind of experience. The visual-art equivalent would be me showing you something my kid did, and saying, If it were framed and it were put in a museum, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Sometimes that’s totally wrong, because people are overestimating their kids or underestimating Joan Mitchell or whomever. And sometimes it’s right, but it’s right in the wrong way, because it gets the social conditions of reception wrong. That is to say, Yes, like, if you put this work in a museum context and I encountered it there, I might, in fact, have a pretty interesting experience. So you’re saying that that’s not you being fooled, that’s you participating, collaborating with the work? Yeah. And it’s also a way of saying this incredibly boring thing, which is that context matters. And the whole social contract around the work of art is part of the experience. It is part of the phenomenology of looking and thinking about art. This is a coincidence, but it’s kind of fascinating to me that in “10:04” you have this stuff about hands blurring, or disappearing from photographs, or merging into the background in this Joan of Arc painting that the narrator is seeing at the Met. And now, one of the first places people tell you to look to check whether something is A.I. or not is at hands. It also reminds me of one of my favorite Onion headlines: “Frustrated Novelist No Good at Describing Hands.” Do you know this great Carlo Ginzburg essay about clues and art attribution? He talks about this guy, Morelli, whose big insight was that if you want to know what’s a real Raphael or not a real Raphael, don’t look at the face of the Virgin. Look at the fingernails. Look at the earlobes. Look at the things that were basically unconscious. That’s where you find the signatures of authorship. It also brings to mind one important part of the social contract of art, to my mind, which is the idea of the handmade. The narrator of “Transcription” goes to the Harvard Museum of Natural History to see an exhibit of these intricate glass flowers, made in Germany and shipped to America after the Second World War. And it’s profound for him, but also profoundly destabilizing. For sure. He has this experience of seeing the flowers as real flowers one second and as artifice the next. He sees nature as culture and culture as nature. But, in this account, it’s not just that the flowers are artificial. What’s important is seeing the flowers as a history of small decisions—human decisions. That these glassblowers did the impossible work of trying to get the styles and stigma right, shaping the glass in these little blue flames. The power of the artwork is not just the verisimilitude of the final product. Small human decisions that were also embedded in history and contingency and politics, right? Part of the power of them also is that they come from Dresden, and before he sees them he’s only just learned about the city being firebombed during the Second World War. And that they were passed down. The flowers were made by a father-and-son duo. They’re intergenerational labor that emerged from a particular relationship. I can imagine that there is or will be some technology that could make better, more perfect versions of these glass flowers. If you showed them to me, I’d be, like, Wow, 3-D printers are really powerful. But none of the experience that’s so central for the narrator would take place. The other thing that’s relevant about seeing that history of small decisions is that it really is about the magical ways that time is encoded in an artwork. And that is totally threatened by these new technologies. But, again, I think that whenever something threatens to obsolesce—and we’re in a moment where everything seems to be threatening to obsolesce—that is also an opportunity to refresh the value you take in the specific medium. When the book is no longer the default unit of cultural circulation, it’s also an opportunity to think about, like, what it is that you really love about the codex form. Codex is also the name of OpenAI’s coding software. [Laughter.] If you’re looking to this account I’m giving for, like, a way out, it’s not a way out. But, like, even the way that this book is short and small—I wanted it to be that way in part so that you kind of are reminded that the book, too, is a handheld device. As these things seem so dwarfed or eclipsed or rendered absurd by other powers, they’re also opportunities to think about the powers of these specific media. And there is a little bit of a reënchantment of the artwork and its capacities precisely at the moment where you can no longer take any aspect of it for granted. Do you have the temptation, which a lot of people do, to completely look away from these new technologies—A.I., for example—to simply disengage from and refuse to look? No, I look at it all the time. I talk to it all the time. How do you talk to it? Are you typing or using voice mode? Only writing, for some reason. I had this heart surgery, and during that time I was talking to Chat all the time about medical stuff. Sometimes because there was information that it could actually be useful about. Oftentimes, because I was just availing myself, for better or for worse, of its constant willingness to read back to me whatever reassuring things I was unknowingly begging it to say. I was not developing romantic feelings for Chat, but I could feel the way that one would develop an emotional dependency on the very reliable rhythms of its reassurance, and on its ability to detect what I wanted to hear. I mean, people get so attached to individual models that when a model gets deprecated there are protests. That’s why I’m getting Claude. To keep myself from cathecting. You’re gonna be poly, like everyone else. Exactly. Even without the A.I. stuff, one could have made the case that we live in a post-literate, audiovisual society. To me, though, there is something in your books that is almost fundamentally anti-cinematic. It’s unable to be reproduced in any other medium, more so than many other novels. To me, the power of the novel is its distance from the technologies whose consequences it wants to describe. Proust didn’t try to make “Remembrance of Things Past” a telephone. He used the ancient resources of prose in innovative ways to capture what it felt like, what it did to his experience, when there was this new thing called the telephone. There are specific things that the medium of the novel is good at. It’s a totally inexact analogy, but you can think about A.I.’s relationship to writing as something like the invention of photography for painting. You say, O.K., well, these are the things that the photograph can do that no longer seem like the specific areas of investigation for painting. So what can painting specifically do? What is the version of that for literature in the face of A.I.? But I don’t know. This shit is crazy. And its power overwhelms that kind of analogy. All the narrator would have had to do is turn on his recorder for three seconds, and Thomas’s voice would be eternally reproducible. Totally. But that kind of presence would obliterate all the significant distances. And haunting is about distance, the presence of an absence. I think that’s the argument of the book, in a certain way—it’s that the voice that isn’t just totally reproducible—externally, objectively—but is in you, and might be encoded in an artwork, haunts you more intensely, and is ultimately more present. ♦ An earlier version of this article misidentified the artist discussed in Carlo Ginzburg’s essay.