When Navidson returns to the window, he cannot believe his brother is standing still. Unfortunately, as Tom demonstrates, whenever he takes one step forward, the floor drags him two steps back. Navidson quickly begins to crawl through the window, and oddly enough the walls and ceiling almost instantly cease their oscillations. (346)
It is hardly insignificant that Tom's final disappearance is explicitly figured through photographic metaphors: "Only the after-effects create an image commensurate with the shutter like speed with which those walls snapped shut"; "In less time than it takes for a single frame of film to flash upon a screen, the linoleum floor dissolves, turning the kitchen into a vertical shaft. Tom tumbles into the blackness." Nor is it incidental that the narration of this event is tainted with the fragmentizing effects of mediation, as we learn from footnote 308: because of darkness and limitations of the Hi-8 video cameras deployed, the film had to be supplemented by Billy Reston's narrative, which is simply the retelling of what Navidson had earlier recounted to Reston.
One theory for why Navidson makes Reston “the sole authority" here concerns Navidson's insight into the incommensurability of pastoriented orthography and future-directed experience:
By relying on Reston as the sole narrative voice, [Navidson] subtly draws attention once again to the question of inadequacies in representation, no matter the medium, no matter how flawless. Here in particular, he mockingly emphasizes the fallen nature of any history by purposefully concocting an absurd number of generations.... A pointed reminder that representation does not replace. It only offers distance and in rare cases perspective. (346, note 308)
As always in this text of ever proliferating mediation, after the many layers have been sorted, the one thing that remains “true"—“indubitable' in a perversely Cartestian sense—is the bodily impact of the effort to interpret. Thus the orthographic desire that forms the motor of the novel's plot sets the context for the singularity of embodied response. Likewise, the figuration of the house's subjective spatial mutations through media effects leads to an entirely different modality of conviction: the physiological.
Consider, in this respect, how Zampanò directs the discussion of subjective space toward more primitive processes of proprioception and somatic expression:
No doubt speculation will continue for a long time over what force alters and orders the dimensions of that place. But even if the shifts turn out to be some kind of absurd interactive Rorschach test resulting from some peculiar and as yet undiscovered law of physics, Reston's nausea still reflects how the often disturbing disorientation experienced within that place, whether acting directly upon the inner ear or the inner labyrinth of the psyche, can have physiological consequences. (179)
THE DIGITAL TOPOGRAPHY OF HOUSE OF LEAVES
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