Transcription, Ben Lerner’s newest novel, is a slim book that borrows certain qualities from a specific technology: the recording device. The set-up, introduced in the book’s first pages, concerns a Lerner-like narrator who has arrived in Providence, Rhode Island to interview his ageing former mentor, Thomas, and who drops his phone in the sink just as he is about to leave his hotel. The phone dies, and without it, he is unable to navigate the world in his habitual way, or to record the discussion. When he finally arrives at the older man’s house, however, the narrator is unable to confess to this act of clumsiness and places his dead phone between them as though it is still working.

With incredible grace, the novel engineers an experience of attunement, moving like a dial that turns towards the things in our world that listen and transcribe, and creating an expanded sense of sonic capture. Did he mean something figurative by ‘recording’? For it’s not just hard technologies such as phones that record sound. Voices and melodies are recorded in our brains, having traveled down the ear canal as vibrations and entered a synaptic system inside living tissue. Thomas’s unique verbal style travels through the narrator’s memory and enters his own internal voice (‘Where is your dignity, I said to myself, “dignity”—it was not one of my words—surfacing because Thomas had mentioned “Dignitas,” which I assumed was a small museum in Zurich’.) He also notices the way his daughter, Eva, parrots her parents’ words as she talks to him through an iPad, answering his worries about his predicament flatly: ‘“You’ll do great”, she quoted.’) A word heard in the narrator’s dream, an impossible, spoken by a woman with a French accent, also echoes in his mind in his waking life. ‘But waking does not end a dream’, explains Thomas, ‘I am sorry to be firm.’

The book’s central metaphor appears early, when the narrator mentions a transformative visit to Harvard University to see the glass flowers made by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, between 1886 and 1936: ‘as I stood in the dim quiet room […] I sensed that the tiny stems and styles and petals surrounding us were vibrating imperceptibly, or maybe just perceptibly, from our footsteps and voices, that the little wires in the models could register even our breath’. That the flowers were made by a father and son in Dresden, and the last of them were completed in the years before the Second World War, summons the city’s devastation by bombing, which would have had a shattering impact on such delicate objects. That they are doubles of real plants renders them transcriptions of a different nature, sculptural records of living entities. That they can register movement and sound suggests the eerie possibility that memories are held by the materials of our world. Lerner’s treatment of the flowers creates a kind of root network for the text that vibrates, tuning into traumas, sirens, alarms, dreams, lies and above all, ghosts.

These are, to some degree, Transcription’s central motifs, but they are set inside a more intimate framework which concerns intergenerational parent-child relationships. Parental anxiety bookends the text, beginning with the narrator’s worries about his ten-year-old daughter, Eva, who has been refusing to go to school, and even more harrowing concerns that Max, Thomas’s son, has about his daughter, Emmie. Both daughters enact terrifying forms of refusal that their fathers cannot quite diagnose the root cause of. Max wonders if his daughter might have sensed that she has been born into a ‘futureless world’, but the book also suggests an intergenerational transfer of traumas, which have found new iterations or repetitions in the children. Children are the book’s ultimate recording devices, picking up on the intensity of certain frequencies in their parents’ voices: transcriptions, to some extent, of a confusing mix of fear and tenderness.

Diego Marcon’s film Dolle (2023), currently on view at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, is an absurd film, more akin to a Beckettian drama than a novel. The video features two animatronic puppet moles awake at night in their furnished underground house making some kind of calculation that they read from a long ream of printed paper, almost in the form of a call and response. Venti? Venti. Piu? Piu. Nove? Nove. Piu? Piu. Two baby moles sleep in a tiny bed nearby and sometimes interrupt the calculations by coughing and snoring. The moles seem worried about the coughing.

I watched Dolle for the first time a few years ago, not long after the birth of my daughter, and I mostly remember finding it very funny. The moles are like fuzzy grey mounds with shrouded eyes, meaning all of their physical expressiveness comes from their white snouts and pink noses. The delivery of the mole voices when they say the Italian numbers is bizarrely dramatic, and their calculations often halt when one mole takes exception to the number that the other has spoken or when their calculations don’t seem to add up to anything. Occasionally, they respond to each other by breaking into unfathomable hysterical laughter, groaning or coughing. Occasionally, something shakes the mole house. There is a vibration, like the sound of horses’ hooves, or some other distant rumble. The moles pause, worried, before continuing on with their numerical labor.

When I watched the film recently, I had just read a section of Transcription in which the narrator, walking to Thomas’s house, becomes rhapsodic about his refreshed connection to the world now that his phone had drowned. ‘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’. It’s a familiar experience of being without a phone, feeling the brief possibility that our attention might be freed from the horrifyingly recursive loops of interest that want to trap it. With such emancipatory desires in mind, the film, funny as it remained, now seemed to be a more depressing allegory for contemporary human relationships with work, technology and fear. The moles, in their kind of Plato’s Cave, were living blindly in a dark hole, reading off reams of numbers that might as well be codes or algorithms, absolutely committed to their senseless task as their world threatened to crumble around them. Might they be working on a transcription of their own, a record of a life outside the burrow known to them only as an abstracted code?

Like many of Marcon’s works, Dolle employs references to both childhood and fear as techniques to sharpen emotive responses, many of them rooted in media designed for kids. The cosy mole house and its charming characters look as though they could have been made for children’s television. At the end of the film there is a credit sequence for the film in which childish voices sing about learning how to count, and in my memory these are accompanied by drawings of baby moles with educational toys. This sequence creates a surreal pedagogical frame for the video that foregrounds the presence of the baby moles in the background as potential students of the moles’ calculation work. Like Transcription, the film is framed by the presence of children and by the pressure that this presence places on certain issues. What are we teaching children when we are teaching them to do as we do? In Dolle this question is lightly held – it’s almost pleasing – because the moles are endearing, and their world is as peculiar as our own. Any language is a system that is a combination of rules and expressive potential; any society has its laws; any parent worries about their child.

But even so, it’s worry as a habit, a mode, that connects the two works more than any other feature, a frequency of stress that is diverted into the urgency of tasks and technologies that will likely fail to solve any of the problems you face. As I was writing this essay, Europe was in the grip of a crushing heatwave, and I spent a lot of the time caught in the same types of loops that are mentioned above. Concerned for my daughter’s wellbeing, I became glued to my phone, refreshing the temperature forecast on three different apps multiple times per hour, (39, 40, 41, 41, 42, 40…) researching air conditioning units, checking news sites, researching symptoms of heatstroke etc. etc. etc. And there I was in my own trap, both a worried writer and a mole, looking for answers in the wrong places, and transmitting my own mix of fear and tenderness to anyone who might be picking up the signal.