Thus, although it playfully alludes to the capacity of text to mimic the effects of technical recording media, this culmination also foregrounds a deeper engagement of the text with digital technology. Made to coincide with a citation championing the improvements in real-time (analog) orthographic recording technology, the abrupt growth of the text box into an unwieldy blank field obstructing the text beneath hints at the potential disjunction between textuality and technical recording media.xi Here we can see clearly how the novel's thematic interest in coupling orthographic recording with textual deformation is a pretext for a more important argument concerning the rehabilitation of fiction in the wake of the digital.
That is why the previously invoked passage championing improvements in orthographesis goes on to conclude with a consideration of how the digital differs categorically from "low-end"—that is, analog, technology. Rather than extending the scope of orthographic recording, digital manipulation threatens to suspend the orthographic function of recording per se: "Digital manipulation allows for the creation of almost anything the imagination can come up with, all in the safe confines of an editing suite ..." (144). The digital here signifies the wholesale substitution of the productive imagination for the registration of the real—the triumph of fiction over documentation. It is in this sense that the fictional house can and must be understood as a figure for the digital: it challenges techniques of orthographic recording and, by evading capture in any form, reveals the digital to be a force resistant to orthothesis—the force of fiction as such.
THE DIGITAL TOPOGRAPHY OF HOUSE OF LEAVES
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