Tthe text ends with an epilogue. It is a letter, or at least an excerpt from a letter, written by Leopold Blaschka, a 19th-century Bohemian-born artist, who, together with his son Rudolf, created a series of intricate and amazing glass flowers, plants and sea creatures. Their method was so amazing, so incomprehensible that skeptics thought they must be using secret devices. “It’s not like that,” he insisted. My son Rudolf has more than me because he is my son, and the impact increases with each generation. So far, Blaschka has not been mentioned by name even once. But here, in the form of a coda, is the essence of Transcription, a book about touch, tools and family heritage that is itself complex, abstract, sometimes surprisingly true.
It begins with a middle-aged American journalist who goes to Providence, Rhode Island, home to Brown University, where Ben Lerner studied poetry and political science as an undergraduate. He is there to do a magazine interview with a German polymath named Thomas. No ordinary job: Thomas was her mentor in college, the father of her friend Max, and now, at the age of 90, this interview is expected to be her last will. At the hotel, people strike – the reporter drops his smartphone in the sink; it’s not used and he’s too shy to admit it. Thomas soon gets into his conversation, but his pleasantries aren’t bought.
Another city, another hotel, later as time goes by: the reporter is already in Madrid there, at an art meeting dedicated to Thomas, revealing to the delegates that that last conversation, which many of them had quoted in their speeches, was a revival, not the actual words of the matter. In his defense, what was his fault? Then, in the last part of the book held in Los Angeles, he and Max, who is now a lawyer, meet to discuss family matters in a difficult, sometimes sad conversation that covers technology, the plague, eating disorders, and with their perplexing questions about Thomas, the idea itself.
There are readers – I count myself among them – who turn to fiction as an antidote to everyday digital life. Just seeing the word “app” on this page is infuriating. Technology, however, entered almost every nook and cranny of Lerner’s narrator’s mind; he points out that “since at least 2008, being where I was was too difficult for me, or too little”. Now the absence is not normal, it is frustrating: “I was desperate, I longed for my mobile phone.” In the hands of another writer, this novel would be a comedic story.
Lerner is more conservative. His Thomas – both in the interview with the reporter and as Max recalled later – has no form and is next to one of the pictures of Hannah Höch that he keeps near his fireplace, the Mittel-European philosopher of art and science who talks about cubist shards. “What I like about Freud – and what I don’t like – is that everything discovered is rediscovered. Cinema brings back the cave. This is Plato, too. Anamnesis.” His limitless, unifying expressions transcend time and space to the sublime, the evocative. A creature of the 20th century, Thomas lived through the first debates between new media and fascism (his father, a member of the Nazi party, had “radio beliefs” whistling about him), and was able to speak easily on topics such as the powerlessness of the Midi sound. The words of the article are not everything, he argues. “The meaning is cut, splice.”
Quantum mechanics, psychoacoustics, Frankfurt School philosophy: Lerner is not talking to his readers. At one point he winces: when Thomas asks what the narrator’s daughter is called, the answer is “I call her Eve in this book.” Sometimes he becomes his narrator: eschewing the very difficult distinction between real and false, his narrator says that he would “like to see the rose and the pink of the sunset as applied to touch or stain and return to seeing it as natural”. He adds, “In the end I will call this a ‘myth’.”
The Transcript, for all its problems with historiography or attentive listening, its Kafka embrace, its genius is most powerful when it comes to a seemingly simple matter: how to get a girl to eat. Max’s account of trying to understand why his daughter has FTT (Failure to Thriving) reads like a horror story, a Covid-era version of the environmental illness suffered by Julianne Moore’s character in Todd Haynes’ film Safe. He and his wife are looking for answers: “To see your child starve to death, to see him – that’s how it felt – refuse life, the life you gave: is it because the life given is a lie?”
Here in this final section, Transcription presents itself as a more, more, more contemporary digital anthropology. Earlier accounts in the book – about voices in the head, suicide attempts, and even the seemingly inconsequential story about Josef Mengele injecting adrenaline into children’s eyes to change their color – reappear as pre-echoes, ancestral lines. Throughout the generations there is a strange climate, war and its collaterals, isolation, confusion. And it is in these moments of storytelling and connection that we can escape the noise of the present, be touched by the powerful emotions of time.
A silly dream? “We expand the dream when we share it,” Thomas tells the reporter. “You call it a myth but it’s more than that.”
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