Between the Brackets

As I mentioned in my first post about Ben Lerner’s Transcription, the novel has three sections. Today, let’s consider the second. It’s shorter than the others and is entitled [Hotel Villa Real]. Yes, it does have those brackets Best B, and no, I don’t know what they mean.

Maybe that it’s in the middle? Could it be that simple?

It begins: “After my talk at the museum I walked back to the Hotel Villa Real and wrote a few emails in the business center. Then I opened a new browser and entered Andres’s full name…”

“The Hotel Villa Real is a 5-star luxury hotel located at Plaza de las Cortes 10 in central Madrid, directly facing the Spanish Congress of Deputies. It sits within walking distance of the famous Prado, Thyssen-Bornemisza, and Reina Sofía art museums.”

So the protagonist is in Madrid at a “real” hotel and googles his wife’s old lover. The book’s last section ended with the protagonist in Providence, Rhode Island, speaking from his mentor Thomas’ house to his daughter after dropping his own cell phone in the bathroom sink. He has just had a long talk with Thomas, who believes the talk is an interview being recorded on this water-logged phone and that it will be published Somehow, he was in Providence and now is in Spain and that has some meaning we don’t immediately understand. Because his daughter’s age is referenced, we can infer that the trip to Spain occurred very close in time to his visit with Thomas. Throughout this section, the protagonist is shown with some humor trying to avoid relying on his phone, so we can also infer that he took some lesson from wrecking it, that he is attempting to be less dependent on it.

It is revealed over three pages that Thomas has died and that the protagonist is in Madrid to deliver some remarks at a memorial to his old mentor. The protagonist has published the interview he conducted with Thomas, and this has become famous as the famous academic’s last words.

So, to learn this, we must read—the information about Thomas’ death and what the protagonist is doing in Madrid is not neatly explained. However, the death comes as no surprise as Thomas is ninety in the first section.

After his talk, the protagonist goes to dinner with other attendees, including Rosa, an old friend. After the dinner, he and Rosa take a walk. The protagonist asks her what she meant by saying at the dinner that his talk about Thomas was “unsettling.”

She responds: “’That it was more in his spirit to be real, to take a risk, than to deliver an encomium.’”

Again, we must read on to get some understanding of the protagonist’s talk—there is no explanation.

When he presses her, she continues: “’You more or less confessed that you falsified a big part of what many of us thought of as his last…testament. A deepfake.’ She said the last word in English.

So Rosa is accusing the protagonist of callously using Thomas and misleading all his devoted followers by publishing an interview that was falsified after the fact—the interview was not a verbatim transcription of a conversation. We the readers have access to the scene wherein the interview takes place and know that the protagonist was mostly trying to cover up his dropping his phone and had no hidden agenda. But we don’t know what occurred afterwords, and if the protagonist did “make-up” the published interview, perhaps in a way that was flattering to him.

The protagonist is defensive.

…’That’s ridiculous,’ I said.…’I told the story of—I told the embarrassingly personal story about breaking my phone, and, yes, I explained how part of the interview was therefore reconstructed…that is entirely typical of interviews, like journalists often take some notes and write them up or condense…And in all the interview in that magazine, the editors move stuff around, make composites. I was not at all confessing—‘”

(Rosa) “’…And you made it clear that you never showed it to him.’

‘I didn’t have the chance.’

(Rosa) ‘More than one person quoted that interview in their talk. His first interview in decades, his last interview ever…So people were suddenly wondering what they’d reproduced.’

‘It wasn’t the most important part, what I had to reconstruct—’

(Rosa) ‘Reconstruct from what, exactly? You presumably weren’t taking notes while pretending to record.’

‘A section of the interview was based on memory…’

(Rosa) ‘It was conducted under false pretenses.’”

The conversation continues, and Rosa reveals that Thomas’ son, Max, is furious at what the protagonist did, saying he’ll have to work it out with Max later.

In a story called Transcription, we have a protagonist who is made ill by regarding the past. Because of accidental damage to his phone, he is forced to rely on methods from the past—including memory—to reconstruct an interview he conducts with his mentor, a conversation he subsequently publishes. Of course, this is a “story” about how a story is published, the story we are reading in a book, a vehicle from the past. We are reading a story composed in the past.

Hall of mirrors. Rabbit Hole stuff (Alice in Wonderland reference). It is a feature of post-modern fiction to be self-referential.

This section ends without much resolution. Rosa confronts the protagonist with more anger, saying he lied and betrayed the others. The protagonist offers no defense. He imagines that Thomas will appear in the protagonist’s hotel room, holding the printout of his talk at the memorial, that the text is re-arranging itself so that it will become a confession by the protagonist that the things Rosa accused him of are true.

As I said, there is no resolution—everything is not made somehow “okay.” The protagonist says he is “fine,” but I don’t think he is. He is ill (I think).

Let’s stop there. We need to examine the story’s final section to see how this one fits in.

Till next time.

#Transcription #BenLerner #AlanBray