Although these examples begin to expose the medial basis informing the novel's typographic play, they in no way exhaust its engagement with media. (The adjective “medial," by now adopted as a standard term in media studies, will here mark the specificity of analyses concerned with the materiality of the medium and of media generally.) Indeed, as we shall see, these examples form so many symptoms of what can only be understood (following Danielewski's aim to reintroduce the print book for all it really is) to be a media-technical, and not simply a stylistic or formal, shift in the function of the novel.
As Kate Hayles has argued, House of Leaves is obsessed with technical mediation and the complex media ecology that has been introduced and expanded since the introduction of technical recording in the nineteenth century. The broad outlines of a theory of the media revolution in literature have already been laid out in the work of self-proclaimed "media scientist" Friedrich Kittler, who, in Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, has catalogued the disenfranchisement of literature—its "devolution" from the exalted role of universal medium" to a more humble vocation as one medium among others in a hybrid media ecology consisting of audio recording, image recording, and now digitization.i Yet, where Kittler seems content to identify the specific media forms—gramophone, film, and typewriter— as three broadly similar recording apparatuses, Danielewski takes pains to circumscribe the constitutive limitations of each and, in line with his previously stated aim, to champion the superiority of print.
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