Eary Doubles: Tympanic Mechanisms and Cochlear Structures in Nabokov's Ada

Abstract

Abstract:As this paper will show, Ada's bizarre telecommunication devices are far more than technical solutions of the problems imposed by Antiterran ban of electricity. Ada foregrounds their operation mode in terms of transmission and transduction, and, with it, what Jonathan Sterne identifies as sound reproduction devices' "tympanic principle" that simulates the mechanism of the human eardrum. Whether hand-cranked, operating on fluids like Olga Veen's bizarre invention and its offspring, the aquaphone, or on modulated current – Ada's telecommunication devices are based on the tympanic principle. They are abstractions of the human ear, or "eary doubles" which turn Ada into the continuation of Nabokov's previous inquiries into sound propagation and the vibrational nexus.Ada, however, goes beyond the tympanum. Abstractions of the human ear are likewise the numerous cochlear structures to which the novel refers. Spirals and whelks evoke the cochlea which, located anatomically, to express it in Van's words, "between [tympanic] membrane and brain" processes sound's frequencies, time and timbre. Situated at the intersections of the physical and the physiological, of the technological and the organic, of acoustics and aesthetics, Ada's eary doubles articulate Nabokov's keen interest in the physical and the physiological aspects of the auditory from which its metaphysical dimension derives.