In his introduction to the manuscript, Truant gives voice to his suspicions that the film does not exist:
As I fast discovered, Zampanò's entire project is about a film which doesn't exist. You can look, I have, but no matter how long you search you will never find The Navidson Record in theaters or video stores. Furthermore, most of what's said by famous people has been made up. I tried contacting all of them. Those that took the time to respond told me they had never heard of Will Navidson let alone Zampanò. (xix-xx)ii
This mind-numbing evidentiary quandary is compounded by the even more startling revelation that Zampanò was "blind as a bat" and thus physically incapable of performing the job of mediation he has allegedly performed (xxi). Finally, jumping up a logical level, it has recently been suggested that Zampanò's identity as the main character in Fellini's La Strada makes him a fictional character within the fictional world of the novel, a fiction to the second degree.i In the wake of this thorough imbrication of the fictional and the real, any effort to mark this separation is, in principle, impossible.
Far more important, however, than the epistemological hurdles these twists introduce are the ontological indifference underlying them and the definitive departure that it signals away from the tired postmodern agonies bound up with the figure of simulation. It is as if mediation has become so ubiquitous and inexorable in the world of the novel (which is, after all, our world too) that it simply is reality, is the bedrock upon which our investment and belief in the real can be built. “See,' Truant announces with the confidence of embodied hindsight, "the irony is it makes no difference that the documentary at the heart of this book is fiction. Zampanò knew from the get go that what's real or isn't real doesn't matter here. The consequences are the same" (xx).
Far from an invitation to wax poetic about the simulacral pseudofoundation of contemporary media culture, this deceptively flippant maxim betrays a disturbing willingness on Truant's part to accept the waning of the orthographic function of recording. As the reader soon discovers, this willingness-far from betokening a curiosity stemming from Truant's (admittedly curious) psychological profile—is simply a necessary consequence of the novel's play with mediation and undermining of any "sacred text." From Truant's sustained alterations of the text to the reported interventions of the unidentified editors, from Zampanò's impossible perceptual acts to (Truant's mother) Pelafina's unreliability as a conveyor of her own voice, the novel insistently stages the futility of any effort to anchor thę events it recounts in a stable recorded form.
THE DIGITAL TOPOGRAPHY OF HOUSE OF LEAVES
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