“Don’t call me on the phone, you attack me”: Martin Kohan and his literary requiem for a dead device

While around here we say Hello? after picking up the handset, in other properties they appeal to Hello?, to Speak! or to the good? to start a phone conversation. These are variations of a false greeting, the verification that this communication channel works, and that, according to the writer Martin Kohanis a historical remnant of the astonishment that, a century and a half ago, such an invention produced in speakers: the miracle of speaking with an absent person.

The Argentine author brought “Hello?” to the Lima Book Fair, a set of short essays with which, in the manner of a requiem musical, he bids farewell to the landline telephone, an analogue device that brought about a revolution in behavior, manners to listen, to wait or to exchange. With its current obsolescence behind cell phones and social networks, a number of atavisms are diluted that, one by one, Kohan identifies and analyzes with lucidity and resigned humor.

“At some point, each generation has to say goodbye to tools, incorporated into their lives, which become obsolete.”, points out the writer, remembering the old Galena radio of his grandparents around which they gathered as a family before the appearance of television. “However, let us add to this a transformation of communications technology that in recent years has reached breakneck speed.“, Add.

“A requiem is a farewell ceremony. Curiously, the rapidity of the changes that you point out does not allow us, as a society, to stop and think about what we are leaving behind.

That’s why I was talking about vertigo. We live in times of very accelerated transformations. I myself am now somewhat outdated with E-mail, for example. Sounds old now! The speed of the changes and our way of incorporating them means that we cannot stop. In my case, writing a book means stopping. And when you stop, you notice how something that was so present in our life has now almost disappeared. I’m not opposed to the new terms, I just think it’s worth stopping and reviewing what happened.

— Reading your book I guess that many others have stopped with you: In “Hello?” many of your friends shared with you examples of how the telephone symbolized our culture.

It came up time and time again, and thanks to it I detected telephone presences where I hadn’t noticed them before, because they were so naturalized. When it appears, the telephone alters the relations between the near and the far. He recombined them in an unprecedented way: we became close and far at the same time, what was outside was suddenly inside. The interlocutor was present and absent at the same time.

— As if we summoned spirits…

Exactly. Authors like Proust or Chekhov wrote about the telephone when it first appeared, and this ghostly character, as disturbing as it can be, is one of the first things they notice. For Proust, the telephone was a very disturbing experience as it separated the voice from the body, something that until then, except with God and séances, were inseparable. The absence of the body and the voice was subsidized by writing. Proust said that talking on the phone with his grandmother produced a shocking effect linked to death.

— The nature of the traditional telephone was its impertinence. It was ringing and we didn’t know who was making the call. Today it seems that nobody talks on the phone: we prefer to send text messages.

That’s how it is. We have returned to the time of the telegraph.

“I don’t think people feel more liberated, the other way around: they feel more tied down. With the landline phone, we could not be available”

— Do you think we have freed ourselves from the impertinence of the old telephone?

I would not use the term “liberated”. I don’t think people feel more liberated, on the contrary: they feel more tied. With the landline phone, we could not be available. Now we are in demand all the time, we never stop being connected. The personal availability is overwhelming! At the same time, you have to see what looks like a bond and what a liberation: the landline telephone was also a bond. In his “Fragments of a Love Speech”, Roland Barthes talks about how we were “waiting” on the phone, one wait like no other. So you were a slave to the phone because you couldn’t move, you couldn’t go out, you couldn’t even talk on the phone, because you occupied the line. That produced a certain subjectivity, and its decline with the appearance of new technologies brought other subjectivities. For example, it is very striking that an event as simple as the telephone ringing is today experienced as an “invasion”, almost an aggression, which means that we think of our subjectivity as a closed and protected space. Each one conceives of himself encapsulated. But there would be no reason to feel invaded! It is our decision to attend or not. I think the decline of the telephone has exponentially increased our intolerance for the unexpected. Fear of unforeseen change is a sign of our times. Today it seems that everything must be anticipated and agreed upon. All irruption, whether pleasant or ungrateful, is discouraged. Of course life is not like that, and that puts us in conflict.

— Let’s add to this the weariness of the proliferation of unimportant messages…

When you talk to people, you notice the “I can’t take it anymore” in front of WhatsApp groups, for example. There was even a feature to speed up voicemails because people get overwhelmed by endless monologues!

— Unlike the watch, which is still with us, the landline telephone could never be a luxury object. Maybe that’s why we don’t regret his absence…

Indeed, it was never a status symbol, which I am excited about. When I was a kid, status was about accessing the device. But then there were no design or quality sophistications. The landline telephone went from exclusivity to democratization. As an object, it resisted being a status symbol. And it is not necessary: ​​when it is said that in the palace of such a prince the toilet is made of gold, we usually prefer that it not be so.

— So different from the cell phone, with so many designs for the client who wants to show off.

The mystery, for me, is that we continue to call what can be a tape recorder, a camera, a watch and even a flashlight a telephone. I don’t know why we call it a telephone, if that is a function that we almost never use.

— Let’s think of fictions like Hitchcock’s “The Indiscreet Call” or Super Agent 86’s “shoephone”. Have the films that turned the telephone into the center of their stories aged?

They are like layers of sedimentation, product of the speed of changes. They begin to function as historical quotes, as happens when we see a movie in which two people are traveling in a horse-drawn wagon and we assume that the story comes from a time when there were no automobiles yet. However, the effect of historical temporal distance now occurs with much less distance. even the time needed to fabricate history has sped up. Any twenty-year-old boy watches a Hitchcock movie and, upon finding a landline phone, which forced you to get up to answer it, he assumes it as the Titanic, sending distress messages through the telegraph. The difference is that instead of a hundred years having passed, only twenty have passed.

—There are pessimists who could say that we are also writing a requiem for the newspapers. What do you think?

I hope it’s not necessary. I think that both the newspaper and the book are resisting a lot. Something has this invention, this technology, which is still necessary as a format. The question is: What is the quality of reading? A priori, nothing prevents us from reading with concentration and care on a screen. However, empirically there are indications that reading on screens, and even more so on small screens, is lighter and more superficial. I continue reading the newspapers on paper, and I do not speak of longing for what has been lost. I only pose the question: is it read with the same concentration on paper as on screen? Is the reading equally careful and comprehensive? There are strong indications that this is not the case.