In what amounts to a compact allegory of its ironic, if not selfundermining, impact, the text's first reader, Johnny Truant, is unable to stick to such an interpretative strategy, despite his best intentions. Confronting Zampanò's later observation that “the best argument for fact is the absolute unaffordability of fiction," Truant makes a prescient observation of his own: Zampanò has, despite his hermeneutic injunction, managed to wander into “his own discussion of the antinomies of fact or fiction, representation or artifice, document or prank' within The Navidson Record. 196" (149, note 195). Yet, rather than bringing clarity, this observation brings only confusion: "I have no idea whether it's on purpose or not. Sometimes I'm certain it is. Other times I'm sure it's just one big fucking train wreck” (149, note 195).
The paradoxical impact of Zampanò's new critical asethetic is subsequently allegorized at the level of textual materiality, as Truant's observation is literally pierced from the outside—by the footnote that interrupts it only in order to continue it, but even more forcefully by the indecipherable, because utterly singular, free association it inspires from Johnny (which forms the content of that footnote):
196 195 (cont.) Which, in case you didn't realize, has everything to do with the story of Connaught B. N. S. Cape who observed four asses winnow the air ... for as we know there can only be one conclusion, no matter the labor, the lasting trace, the letters or even the faith—no daytime, no starlight, not even a flashlight to the rescue—just, that's it, so long folks, one grand kerplunk, even if Mr. Cape really did come across four donkeys winnowing the air with their hooves.... (149, note 196)
In this expanding jumble of nonsensical associations, we encounter an effort—Truant's effort-to concentrate on interpreting events within the text that, paradoxically, can only succeed to the extent it abridges its imperative. Put another way, what appears to happen, from the moment the reader (with Truant as model) decides to concentrate on what is given, rather than on the veracity of what is given, is a shift in emphasis from the text (or film) as a referential object to the, as Barthes might say, "necessarily real" impact it has on the embodied life of its reader.
BODIES IN CODE
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