Ben Lerner Hears Ghosts in the Wires

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Ben Lerner Hears Ghosts in the Wires<br>ByJonah Walters<br>Critics read Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription, as a commentary on smartphones. But with gothic style and a Victorian temperament, it meditates on a much older technology — the spectral quality of disembodied speech introduced at the dawn of telephonics.

Transcription, the new novel by Ben Lerner, is the author’s take on nineteenth-century gothic. And like the Victorians, who held séances over the novel telephone, it dwells on the occult character of technology that severs speech from the speaker. (Oxford Science Archive / Print Collector / Getty Images)<br>Our summer issue is out soon. Get a discounted subscription to our print magazine today.

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Review of Transcription by Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026)<br>In a short story called “Wireless,” published in Scribner’s in 1901, Rudyard Kipling described “a glass tube” with “two tiny silver plugs, and between them an infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust.” Fiddling with the plugs, Kipling’s protagonist slips into a trance and spontaneously transcribes John Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” a poem he has never read. In an instant, the man becomes a conduit for the unseen flows of text and speech that circulate continuously in the atmosphere. This machine, he says, “will reveal to us . . . the Power — our unknown Power — kicking and fighting to be let loose.”<br>The machine Kipling had in mind was the wireless telegraph, a device that existed only a decade or so before being supplanted by the radio. But you who poke at the glass of your glowing rectangle know exactly where to find “the Power” today. It emanates from the device you call, anachronistically, your “phone.”<br>Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription, begins when the narrator dunks his phone in a hotel sink, turning it into a “wounded animal” that he cannot revive. The loss sends him into a panic. Without the device, he can hardly imagine speaking to his young daughter, with whom he is accustomed to FaceTiming.<br>The drowned iPhone also sparks a professional, even writerly crisis in the narrator. The narrator has traveled from New York City to Providence, Rhode Island, to interview his mentor, a world-renowned academician named Thomas. Thomas is the only person the narrator knows, apart from his ten-year-old daughter, who does not own a smartphone. “Those screens, my love, they dull our senses,” the old man is fond of saying. Without a working smartphone, the narrator has no way to record the interview.<br>Walking to Thomas’s house, he experiences “a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication.” Incapable of “sending or receiving data packets,” his panic gives way to a dreamlike state that is, paradoxically, both unfamiliar and nostalgic. He feels he is walking into the past, “because only in the past would I be deviceless.”<br>When the narrator finally arrives, he commits a transgression from which he cannot recover. He taps the glossy black corpse of his drowned phone and tells Thomas it’s recording.

The things we call phones today are not phones at all. We have appropriated the name of an older technology and applied it to something entirely distinct. If the smartphone is as bright and alluring as Narcissus’s mirror, the telephone — the real phone — was dark and obscure. It did not lull, or seduce, or enchant. It haunted, tormented, and whispered. It drove one mad not through flattery or pleasure, but through a kind of pervasive uncanniness that threatened always to overwhelm the distinction between the scientific and the occult.<br>The history of telephonics is the history of spiritualism, séances, and ghosts in the wires. “There can be drawn no arbitrary line labelled the supernatural or the supermundane,” wrote Florence Whiting in 1899, “when, by the telephone, persons speak with one another from Boston to Kansas City.” Whiting’s friend Kate Field, who in 1868 published a book she claimed was revealed to her by a spirit-writer, worked for a time as a publicist for the transatlantic Bell Company; she convened a series of wildly popular “telephone séances” to promote the telephone overseas.<br>The history of telephonics is the history of spiritualism, séances, and ghosts in the wires.The medium Leonora Piper, who counted the philosopher William James among her clients, listened to the dead by cupping her palm over her ear. She called it her “spiritual telephone.” After James and a group of similarly pedigreed intellectuals founded the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, the term “thought-transference” was replaced by the...