More specifically, House of Leaves demonstrates how embodiment furnishes a medium for the passage between language and image, and thus how new linguistic formations—here, the deformation of the novel's body—can yield new experiences and thereby, as Ricoeur puts it, shape reality." By tapping the power of the imaginary, of the imaginary as a bodily power, House of Leaves thus catalyzes the genesis of a myriad of bodies-in-code, each one corresponding to the concrete actualization of the text by a specific reader. Here, indeed, the role of code as a source of exteriority becomes synonymous with the role of the imaginary as an excess of embodiment, as a surplus intrinsic to individuation that furnishes the source for new acts of embodiment
Given the novel's obsession with media and mediation, it is hardly surprising that the first of its many mediations is a film, The Navidson Record, compiled by Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson from videos made by him, his wife, Karen Green, and several of the characters involved in exploring the new house they moved into in order to begin afresh—the curious, “warped" house on Ash Tree Lane that turns out to be larger on the inside than on the outside. The events captured by this film come to us through the mediation of one Zampanò, a Borges-like figure, apparently named after the protagonist in Fellini's La Strada, who possesses a diabolical penchant for mixing real and fictional sources in an apparent bid to garner verisimilitude for his enterprise. (House of Leaves, in consequence, is littered with footnotes, an indeterminate number of which are pure inventions of its author.)
Left unfinished at his death, Zampanò's narrative in turn comes to us through yet another layer of mediation: that of the young tattoo artist's assistant, Johnny Truant, who assembles the pieces of the manuscript into a cogent order, and, in the process, adds a series of footnotes and appended documents that detail the destabilizing effects of the narrative on his already confused personal life. In yet another iteration of this framing structure, all of this material is said to come to us thanks to the efforts of a group of mysterious “editors," who have taken the work of Zampanò and Truant that initially—or so we are told—circulated on the Internet, and bound it together in book form, adding supplementary material allegedly worthy of the title of "second edition."
As if this bewildering proliferation of mediations were not enough, several further twists intensify the referential void at the novel's center.
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