An Elegy for the Landline in Literature

An Elegy for the Landline in Literature

Mourning a device that gave fiction surprise, suspense, and uncertainty.

By Sophie Haigney

July 27, 2020

Rows of windows of figures on a landline phone.

Illustration by Eiko Ojala

“The telephone rang. It was an unusual hour for it to ring.” These two sentences are drawn from Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Symbols and Signs,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 1948. They are functionally perfect sentences in a functionally perfect story. When the reader encounters them, an older couple is up late at night worrying about their son. Earlier that day, they’d gone to visit him, for his birthday, at the sanatorium where he lives. Once there, they were told that he had recently attempted suicide. A visit might upset him. The couple had returned home in silence; the father, unable to sleep, had decided that they would retrieve him the next day. This is when the phone rings, and when everything, we think, is about to change. But it doesn’t—the caller is a stranger, with the voice of a little girl. Wrong number, the wife says. The phone rings again. Same caller. The wife gives her instructions—“You are turning the letter ‘o’ instead of the zero”—and hangs up. The couple drink some tea. They admire their gift for their son. And then the story ends: “The phone rang again.”

I think of this story often, for all kinds of reasons, but mostly because of the silence punctuated by the surprising ring of the telephone. The sudden drama, the charge of meaning, the prospect of death conveyed before the call is even answered: this is the power that a phone—and a landline, especially—can hold. The landline is a source of suspense, of great and small action; it is the noise of the world entering almost supernaturally into a room. In fiction, it is a cherished and endangered device, one full of possibility. It could, after all, be anyone calling.

Since its invention, in the nineteenth century, the landline has often been portrayed as sinister—the object through which fate comes to call. Franz Kafka was famously scared of the telephone, and it played a nightmarish role in his writing, including in his unfinished novel “The Castle.” In his short story “My Neighbor,” a young businessman increasingly fears that a competitor is listening to his calls through the wall. His telephone becomes the symbol of this despair, and by the end of the story he has totally unravelled: “Sometimes I dance around, the receiver to my ear, spurred on by my anxiety, on my tiptoes, and still cannot prevent my secrets from being given away.”

Kafka located one of the central qualities of the landline—the way that it allowed someone to speak and be heard, but also to be destabilized, exposed to forces unseen. That quality lapses easily into the supernatural. The plot of Muriel Spark’s “Memento Mori,” from 1959, is propelled by various characters receiving a phone call from a mysterious source, never revealed: “Remember you must die.” Is it God? In the third volume of “In Search of Lost Time,” Marcel Proust describes phone operators as “Danaids of the Unseen,” “the servants of the Mystery,” and—my personal favorite—“the umbrageous priestesses of the Invisible.” In “Lolita,” the narrator, Humbert Humbert, notes that “toilets―as also telephones―happened to be, for reasons unfathomable, the points where my destiny was liable to catch.”

The landline isn’t always an omen or portal, as in Kafka and Nabokov; it can also be a vividly social fixture. Partly this is because it’s inherently public, which can turn a call into a spectacle. But there’s also something about its fixedness—its set position in space—and its anonymity (before caller I.D.) that allows writers to experiment with suspense. Henry Green’s wonderful novel “Party Going,” from 1939, depends almost entirely upon the telephone. The book follows a group of young people heading from London to the Continent, where their enormously rich friend Max, a desirable and enigmatic bachelor, is throwing a house party. When a thick fog descends upon London, their train is delayed, and they’re forced to shelter in a hotel near the station. The rest of the plot finds them drifting between rooms; talk becomes the subject of the novel, and the way that it’s channelled, shaped, and circumscribed by phone calls moves the story forward. At the hotel, Max believes that he can’t be reached by Amabel, his beautiful and commanding lover, with whom he argued on the phone before he left; he considers a courtship with Julia Wray, another member of the group. Throughout the book, the landline is a motif, the one constant as characters argue and flirt and wait for the most important call of all, the one that will tell them that the train can depart. Green builds a whole buzzing world around a single object, which binds the characters by making them reachable and unreachable—knowable and unknowable—at once.

This interplay between public and private—Who will pick up? What will they know?—is essential to the drama of the landline. In Tessa Hadley’s début novel, “Accidents in the Home,” the main character, Clare, calls David, her best friend’s boyfriend and her own would-be lover, from the coin-operated phone in the house that her family is renting in Ireland. It is her first such call, and she makes it in the cloakroom, pressed among the coats of her young children. But David doesn’t pick up; her best friend does. For a second, Clare imagines the conversation they might have, the complaints about her family vacation she might rattle off; her friend would “recognize the phone call as belonging in a long line of such calls.” And yet. Clare realizes that her friend, Helly, has never given her David’s number. Why would she have called it? She also realizes that, if she hangs up, Helly could dial a recall number that might expose her. Helly discovering that it was an international call would “be enough, Clare thought, to give her away.” She hangs up. “Then she sat listening to the tone in the phone as though she might hear in there the aftershock of what had happened.”

The decline of the landline in fiction is, of course, part of its decline in life. More than half of Americans live in households with no landlines; that number rises to nearly seventy-five per cent among those ages twenty-five to thirty-four. Late at night, a phone is probably not ringing ominously in the next room; it’s buzzing on the nightstand, caller I.D. flashing. In fiction, characters, like people, are always reachable. Text messages offer a new, intermediate form of contact; indeed, most of the calls in “Party Going” would not need to happen today. And cell phones are, in many ways, far more intimate than landlines, divorced as they are from a fixed point in the home or on the street.

The cell phone generates its own dramas—the emoji-littered epistles of text messaging, the tug of social media—and it certainly deserves a larger role in literature, where it remains a somewhat stigmatized feature of modern life. In a wonderful essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stephen Marche notes that writers often treat the smartphone like a hot potato, as though, “if you mentioned a smartphone in a short story about intimate life, the subject of that story would be the smartphone.”

Some of this unease may flow from the challenge that cell phones pose to the conventions of fiction, or to the conventions of what it used to be. In “Here and Now,” a collection of letters between J. M. Coetzee and Paul Auster, the two novelists briefly consider how cell phones have changed their process. Coetzee acknowledges omitting such devices from his work, describing himself as a “twenty-first-century person writing fiction from which twenty-first-century tools of communication like the mobile phone are absent.” He wonders about their impact on the turning wheels of plot, and notes how they might especially change the adultery novel. “So much of the mechanics of novel writing, past and present, is taken up with making information available to characters or keeping it from them, with getting people together in the same room or holding them apart,” he writes in a letter from 2011, four years after the iPhone débuted. “If, all of a sudden, everyone has access to more or less everyone else—electronic access, that is—what becomes of all that plotting?”

It’s a good question, if a cranky one. Auster answers by noting that, although everyone has access to everyone, it is “only in a fragmented, ad hoc sort of way.” This is an apt description of communication today—the way that it’s constant but porous, somehow less solid for being more guaranteed. And yet Coetzee’s concerns still stand: the landline creates certain important restraints that cell phones do not. It allows for fictional worlds in which people can be plausibly held apart, unable to communicate, and then convened in a single burst. It allows for information to be withheld and released. It allows for something unpredictable to enter a room.

Uncertainty is invaluable in fiction. It is often what makes reading a novel so pleasurable: the instability of the world that we enter; the sense that something is going to happen, though we do not know what; the promise that what we imagine might, in fact, unfold. The mechanics of this uncertainty have often required certain objects: the broken-down car, the doorbell, the unopened package. The landline telephone is perhaps the greatest of these objects. In the twilight of its life, we might, like Nabokov, remember it as an open line of possibility, just waiting to ring.

Sophie Haigney is a freelance reporter and critic who writes about art and technology.