After watching Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige" with its instances
of doubles ( I won't say more to avoid inadvertently spoiling it to anyone who
still hasn't seen it) and hearing comments that compared the story
to E.A.Poe's "William Wilson", I thought that a Nabokovian
magician's spirit was also detectable.
Initially, I accepted this as arising from a common reading
from E.A.Poe: coded messages, mirrors, illusions, twins...
But there was another thread running through "electricity" and this
set me on to the "Lettrocalamity" issue in "Ada" ( annotated as "amber", as
an organic substance itself where other animal bodies can be entrapped, a kind
of "preterist's nest").
David Bowie, at its most encased cereous, plays Nikola Tesla, a "world-renowned Serb-American inventor, physicist, mechanical
engineer and electrical engineer." Mr. Tesla actually did have an enmity with
Thomas Edison over the primacy of AC versus DC ...(wikipedia.com).
Tesla might have had an appeal to omnivorous VN.
The entire issue about AC versus DC could have been variously alluded
in VN's works [ not only with the Lettrocalamity reference but...a
"preterist", doesn't this word also carry a link with Before Christ, or
BC ( it became AC in some romance languages) and After Christ, or AC (
DC in the same other languages?)]
I know absolutely nothing ( and I do mean that, almost
shamefacedly) about AC/DC electrical currents.
Once I kept an electric-fish that operated
with two different kinds of charges, the strongest was
repelling instead of attracting by the effect of a continuous
current -so that the prey didn't get stuck to their bodies, as it happens when
we get stuck in a live wire - and that's all I know about alternate
and continuous flows.
But I gather the entire conflict bt. AC and DC, and
electrification and transmission, is something of an overwhelming significance.
Would VN have missed that?