What this passage so clearly shows is how Navidson's character encompasses both sides of the paradox of orthography. His history as a Pulitzer-prize-winning photographer, for example, stands just as clearly behind the desire that causes the family to retreat from the public domain as it does his inability to do so without documenting every step of the process.
Like character, relations between characters are also a direct function of the agon of media. Such relations develop only because and to the extent that they come together in the common task of documenting the impossible house. One striking instance appears in the renewal of Navidson's relationship with his brother, Tom-—a relationship that, we are told, has been strained “for over eight years" (31). Although we might expect the coincidence of the house's transformation to occasion a reconciliation between these characters, this possibility is soon put to rest by nothing other than the house: “... the moment and opportunity for some kind of fraternal healing disappears when Tom makes an important discovery: Navidson was wrong. The interior of the house exceeds the exterior not by $1 / 4 ^ { \dprime }$ but by $5 / 1 6 ^ { \mathrm { { \infty } } }$ (32).
This pattern holds for the remainder of the narrative, as if offering an allegory for the capacity of the house—because of the orthographic crisis that it occasions and figures—to subsume all possibility of independent character relations: at each point at which Will and Tom begin to address the substance of their estrangement (Will's success, Tom's drinking, etc.), some more pressing need related to the documentation of the house supervenes.
In an even more direct expression of its obsession with the problem of orthography, the novel enacts a subordination of face-to-face relations between characters in favor of ever more highly mediated forms. For example, Karen and Navidson communicate best across the distance of media interfaces: they speak to each other through Hi8 video diaries and learn more about one another, not to mention themselves, from viewing their documentations of the other than from any form of direct contact. One need only consider Karen's perspective on the relationship: her estrangement from Navidson mounts as his orthographic fervor intensifies, to the point that she feels compelled to abandon Navidson and the house. Only after having assayed her own documentation, "A Brief History of Who I
BODIES IN CODE
234