On Ben Lerner’s “Transcription”

Last year, I visited the MoMA to see Christian Marclay’s film The Clock. Stitching together clips from film and television that depict timepieces or reference the time of day, the twenty-four-hour-long film is synchronized to real time, functioning as a clock. I arrived on a crowded Saturday afternoon and was prompted to join a “virtual queue,” leaving me free to wander the museum while my phone stood in line. Already, I had Ben Lerner on the mind—the film serves as the centerpiece of his 2014 novel 10:04—but the museum’s turn of phrase echoed his language, too. In 10:04 and elsewhere, the writer distinguishes between two states of the “actual” and the “virtual.” The former is lived, material reality; the latter, in Lerner’s configuration, is pure potential: the promise of poetry and art, the multiple alternative futures possible within each present moment. Watching Marclay’s film lends the narrator of 10:04 brief, thrilling access to the virtual—“I felt acutely how many different days could be built out of a day, felt more possibility than determinism, the utopian glimmer of fiction.”