That such a transition can only be gestured at by both text and film becomes clear from the ensuing passage which, once again, unfolds over the space of several pages: "Here then— / the after / math /of meaning. / A life / time/ finished between / the space of / two frames. / The darkline where the / eye persists in seeing /something that was never there / To begin with" (193-205). In this case, the gradual unfolding of the text differentiates it from the filmic expression that it is attempting to simulate. Yet, it does so entirely to the advantage of the print medium; by contrasting its simulation to the filmic phenomenon of the afterimage—where what is seen is something·extraorthographic, something imagined—this passage brings a depth and complexity to the representation of death that, as the novel suggests, simply cannot be achieved in a mechanical medium like film.
Certainly, we could follow Hayles's lead and add to these examples the many moments in which the typographical arrangement of the text functions to mimic the action depicted in the film (e.g. when the word “snaps" is stretched out over the space of three pages in imitation of the stretching of the rope holding the gurney as the stairway expands [294-296]). We could focus on moments when typography serves to produce cinematic effects of temporal acceleration and deceleration (e.g., the suspense generated by speeding up the turning of pages during the confrontation with Holloway [213-238] or the stasis achieved by the dense superimposition of several layers of footnoted text in Chapter IX). Yet, despite the undeniable testimony these typographical deformations lend to the mimetic flexibility of print text, we cannot overlook their prevailing mediatechnical function. More than signs of the text's capacity to subsume the function of other media, these deformations in the body of the novel are symptoms of the impossibility of representing the digital, of its resistance to orthographic capture.
THE DIGITAL TOPOGRAPHY OF HOUSE OF LEAVES
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