- BODY
If print nevertheless enjoys a certain privilege in the context of this representational impossibility, it must stem from something other than its orthographic capacity.x Indeed, it can hardly come as a surprise that, in addition to the deformation of the generic and typographic conventions of the novel, the house also elicits fundamental changes in how we understand the novel as a process or, in other words, in how the novel—or rather how the activity of reading the novel—generates meaning.
If we bear in mind that the text we are holding in our hands has been transcribed by Johnny Truant, we can immediately appreciate how the "original" we are reading is already a copy and—given Johnny's addition to the text of footnotes recounting the personal transformation it elicits in him—how it is a copy with a difference. Simply put, it is a singular embodied reading of a “text" that does not exist in any other form, or at least that cannot be passed on to us in such a form. Indeed, Truant's mediation here presents a counterpart, within the domain of text, to the proliferating layers of orthographic mediation thematized in the narrative. As a postorthographic analogical mediation, Truant's narrative figures the act of reading as an act of copying with a difference—a difference borne directly by the body of the reader.xvi
Consider, in this respect, Truant's encounter, late in the text, with a group of musicians who had written song lyrics, "I live at the end of a Five and a Half Minute Hallway," based on a text they found on the Internet—the alleged first edition of House of Leaves. Given that this text includes an introduction and notes by Johnny Truant, the encounter creates a mise-en-abîme effect; specifically, it underscores the paradoxical existence of two different versions of the novel, only one of which (the one we are reading) could include Truant's notes about this encounter.
We are thus compelled to ask after the status of this section of the novel (Chapter XXI) and, more generally, whether Johnny's notes are properly located inside or outside its frame. As in the earlier mentioned passage in which Navidson reads House of Leaves by match and paper light (see endnote vii), here, the transfer of focus from postmodern epistemological play to orthographic critique is staged. In this respect, it is hardly surprising that Truant's interest in this text concerns the marginal notations added by the musicians and the larger question of orthographic exactitude they raise:
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