The Mole

The Mole is a fantastical long-range radio receiver whose many components turn the act of listening into an immense, collective enterprise. Its technical design gathers signals across distance and feeds them into a sleeper, making the device both an apparatus of reception and an image of the book’s crowded, unstable circulation of voices.

Design and Operation

The Mole is identified as a harmonic condenser, equipped with supershielded umbrella antennas for receiving at a distance and connected through a magnetic Bellini-Tosti coupling system to a vital-tone speaker. Its imagined range takes in transmissions from the sky and harbor, as well as clicks and other signals; the machinery filters these heterogeneous inputs for a broad reception. The description gives the device the air of a detailed technical specification while bending technical vocabulary into the book’s characteristic verbal play.

The apparatus is powered by a magazine battery, identified as the Mimmim Bimbim patent, number 1132, and tuned through twin-triode pipelines. A gain control ranges across vast stretches of time, from the antediluvian to the distant future. The receiver’s signal is ultimately directed through an earpiece into a sleeper’s ear: the complex assembly does not merely collect sound but delivers it to a body suspended between hearing and sleep.

A Collective Listening System

The Mole is not described as an isolated invention with a single operator. A plural group causes it to be worked, and its reception extends across an astonishing roster of people and associations. Signals associated with Naul and Santry, the forty routes of Corthy, and various guilds and crowds are drawn into the apparatus’s reach. The result is a many-voiced stream gathered around the sleeper, in which distant communities and organizations become part of one listening field.

That collection of voices links the device to the book’s broader media landscape. Elsewhere, television competes with telephony for the brothers’ attention, a postal unionist bears an envelope assembled from seven stages of ink, and public speech and song carry stories from one listener to another. The Mole belongs to this same world of overlapping channels, but its distinctive function is to make remote signals converge on a sleeping recipient.

Sound, Sleep, and Narrative Meaning

The receiver’s destination matters as much as its technical reach. Its signal enters the sleeper’s ear and feeds the course of his bodily life, so listening becomes an intimate process rather than a detached act of surveillance. The apparatus’s many incoming transmissions suggest a world in which private sleep is permeated by public and distant voices, and in which the boundary between an individual body and the communications surrounding it is porous.

The Mole therefore gives material form to a central difficulty of the narrative: how voices are transmitted, combined, and received when speakers and listeners are dispersed, and when waking certainty gives way to dream. Its intricate machinery promises to organize distant sound, yet the book’s surrounding language remains crowded and shifting. The device is at once a receiver in the imagined world and a model for the text’s own work of tuning in to fragments of speech, history, and collective memory.