Lost in Providence

Let’s pick up on our plunge into Ben Lerner’s excellent Transcription. In this first section of the story (first of three), the as yet unnamed protagonist arrives in Providence, Rhode Island where he went to school some twenty years before and where he met his wife, Mia, and studied with Thomas, his mentor. As I mentioned, he’s returning to Providence, a place redolent with memory, to interview an elderly Thomas.

The night of his arrival, he intends to go to Thomas’ house and at the hotel, calls Thomas to make plans and then calls home to talk to his daughter.

There’s a sense of the protagonist inhabiting multiple roles which don’t integrate. He’s trying to function as a father (fatherhood/sonhood becomes a strong theme), a husband, a mentee, a journalist intent on getting an interview, a man re-visiting his university but feels awkward. Talking with his daughter, trying to talk to his wife, and talking to Thomas—all on the phone—he feels disconnected and alienated. Looking out the hotel window, he remembers attending a play long ago in the adjacent building. “I was distracted by the idea that a version of myself was still watching the play…” He exists in versions of himself—an intensely post-modern idea. He is a different person in different contexts, lacking a unique, stable identity—which is a modernist idea. We will see that his mentor, Thomas, does indeed possess a single, stable identity—not that this necessarily makes him happy. He’s a different sort of human than the protagonist, somewhat mysterious.

Then, the protagonist drops his phone in the bathroom sink—a contemporary disaster. The phone dies, and for him, it’s like losing the key to reality. (Thomas has no phone).

In a comic scene of desperation, the protagonist tries to get a new phone, but the Apple store is closed till the morning. He tries, unsuccessfully, to borrow a phone. He realizes he’d intended to record that evening’s conversation with Thomas on his phone and now will have to rely on memory or note-taking. He sets out for Thomas’ house, phone-less.

“I would typically start walking directions on the map—even though I knew the way. And I checked my phone whenever a transition presented itself, whenever I left one space for another, or changed from a standing to a sitting position (or vice versa) or stopped or started walking.

“I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyCheck alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past…because only in the past would I be deviceless.”

I hope what comes across here is that Transcription is not a sort of diatribe against technology, an absolute condemnation and desire to return to the “olden days.”  It is a showing of a contemporary person who is bewildered by the sudden loss of a way to experience the world. There is no value-judgment.

The protagonist walks through the campus area where he had been a student twenty years previously. He muses that, if he had a phone, he could take a picture of the building that his wife had stood in front of twenty years ago and send it to her, instead he must remember the way she looked. He encounters a woman known from the past, Chloe, who knew he and a woman, Anisa, whom he was involved with after a breakup with Mia, “the fall of our junior year.”

So, there’s a nice narrative flow here: he walks through an area full of memory, encounters a real person from that time, and then seemingly remembers a story from that time. That story is presented in the same verb tense—simple past—and set off by paragraph breaks. A more conventional way to do this would be to change the tense of the memory section. Thus, the first sentence might be: “The fall of our junior year, Mia had spent a semester in Granada…” vs. “The fall of our junior year, Mia spent a semester in Granda…” After this initial marking, verb tenses could revert to simple past. But Mr. Lerner does not do this; he relies on that first clause—The fall of our junior year—to indicate the past and then continues with the same verb tenses used to indicate the story’s present. The effect is seamless, as if a consciousness is moving through time and space, sensing the present (a few instants behind, as we humans do) and having it trigger recollection.

Another stylistic feature in this section describing the past is that the protagonist states that after a break-up with Mia, he attempted suicide. “It was conventional undergraduate stuff…” ‘Kay, a suicide attempt, even if it’s a gesture, is no laughing matter, bro. Mr. Lerner doesn’t exactly make light of it but he does treat it dispassionately, and this is a feature of the story—that mortal matters are rendered cooly. There is little shouting or table-pounding, and that contributes to the story’s tone—reserved and unemotional.

The narrative returns to the present with Chloe’s comment: “We’re not in touch, Chloe said. but I know from Instagram she’s in Atlanta.”

The protagonist moves on and arrives at Thomas’ house, but I think we should postpone our look at this till next time.

Till then.

#Transcription #BenLerner #AlanBray