Facing the Past

Transcription by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026)

Reviewed by Brody Eldridge

"The action or process of transcribing or copying."

-Oxford English Dictionary, “transcription (n.), sense 1.a."

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While Ben Lerner is a "novelist" and "poet," his problem is, as an old supervisor once joked with me, that his fiction is a means to theorize about literature and the world. This continues with his newest novel (really a novella), titled Transcription. The title evokes exactly the types of questions media theory asks, and the novel is quick to entertain them.

Transcription swirls around the centrifuge of an unnamed narrator's attempt to interview his old mentor Thomas, an academic philosopher. The novel is divided into three parts, and each vignette is short and brief. In the first part, the narrator recounts a journey to Rhode Island, where he has gone to interview Thomas. Along the way, he runs into an old acquaintance and accidentally breaks his phone, which disrupts his ability to communicate with his wife and daughter. In the second part, the narrator gives a speech at a conference celebrating Thomas's life (who has now passed). The last section recounts (or is) a conversation between the narrator and Thomas's son, Max, who had a tenuous relationship with Thomas (unlike the narrator).

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"Used attributively to designate equipment used in professional recording or broadcasting transcription…"

-Oxford English Dictionary, “transcription (n.), sense 5.c."

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In the novel's second part, one of the characters presses the narrator about the circumstances of his "transcription" of Thomas's final conversation. Because the narrator's phone breaks in the first part before his conversation with Thomas, the narrator cannot record it as planned. Thomas, in his old age, does not seem to understand the situation due to the narrator's Kafkaesque inability to communicate. Instead, the narrator pretends to set his phone down to "record" the conversation, but, really, he writes it down later from memory. Rosa, who helped organize the conference in celebration of Thomas's life, interrogates the narrator over a dinner conversation about the speech he gave at the conference: "You, well, you more or less confessed that you falsified a big part of what many of us thought of as his last, I don’t know, testament. A deepfake." Rosa's description of Thomas's final conversation as a “deepfake” is ripe in our day and age of AI-generated deepfakes. Ironically, the thing here which Rosa considers synthetic is not AI-generated or digitally altered, but a human transcription.

And here Rosa illuminates the core attitude Lerner hopes to interrogate, that humans are seen as excessively or uniquely fallible, perhaps dishonest and even untrustworthy in the context of our technological age. There is an attitude which treats audio recorders, video cameras, even artificial intelligence as more reliable than the human when it comes to "transcription." Why not do away with the typist if the video camera, or the audio recorder, will record the conversation exactly as it is? Is there not an assumption that technology will better transcribe than the human; that technology will be less fallible than the human? Lerner's novel seems preoccupied with these questions. And transcription, while being the center act of this novel, could perhaps stand in for all sorts of different processes which have been outsourced to technology.

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"The product of this process; a transcript; a copy."

-Oxford English Dictionary, “transcription (n.), sense 2."

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While Lerner centers his newest novel around whether the audio recorder is the true transcriber, it gives a peak into an ongoing conversation regarding how the current dependency on digital technology is affecting humanity. The novel is in line with a recent philosophical tradition, from Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" to Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation (simulacra being a copy without an original). Is Thomas's final conversation a simulacra? It is reproduced by the narrator; does the original conversation lose aura for not being so accurately transcribed?

Media theory has long been preoccupied with what it means to engage with medias and mediums; notably mass media, such as newspapers, television, and smartphones. Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message" is notorious, but even the famous philosopher of German idealism, G.W.F. Hegel, was concerned with mediation. As he says in an 1827 lecture, "immediacy itself is essentially mediated." Hegel was concerned with what seemed "immediate," such as knowledge and being, and he considered that which philosophers at the time took for granted to be mediated. This foundational axiom¾that Hegel established long before the digital age¾ best explains the seemingly immediate digital technology we engage with daily. Media studies wants to understand, as Hegel did, what is truly mediating the algorithms which deliver dog and dance videos and celebrity gossip to our phones? What mediates AI? How does the true source of mediation impact our interactions with the technology/economy/environment?

Here in Transcription, Lerner poses as a McLuhan, wondering about the core concepts of media studies. He considers, as Hegel did, what we have now taken for granted in its immediacy. What mediates the transcriptions, the copies, of our everyday, and how might the transcription equipment (whether it be the human or artificial brain) affect the copy?

Despite this concern with the present, the novel’s opening metaphor brings attention to a certain posture: facing the past.

I was falling asleep on the train. I was going to interview Thomas, who had just turned ninety. My seat was facing opposite the direction of travel, making it difficult to read his latest book, which I was holding in my hand. It upsets my stomach if I try to read while I’m looking the wrong way—or, as my ten-year-old, Eva, put it on a train to Lublin last summer, if I am 'facing the past.'

The metaphor of forward progress towards a destination is embodied by the train, which was itself an icon of forward progress and continued mechanization for the Impressionists. That is contrasted with the exterior surrounding moving away, the past flowing behind the train. The narrator "faces the past" as he moves towards Thomas, towards a broken phone and the final interview, mediated by a human instead of technology. The novel's ongoing interrogation of a (mis)reliance on technology may point the reader towards a certain direction as well.

Brody C. J. Eldridge graduated in 2024 from Palm Beach Atlantic University with a BA in English. He was a 2024-2025 Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award winner for the Republic of Georgia. He is now pursuing a Master of Philosophy in English Studies at the University of Cambridge, where his research focuses on AI generated art and its relationship to contemporary and conventional literature.