This generic recursivity appears most strikingly in the digression on echo that opens Chapter V. Initially presented as a consideration prerequisite for understanding the importance of space in the film (and hence, by implication, of the house as an impossible labyrinth), the analysis of echo leads into a consideration of the Borgesian technique of indiscernible difference, a foray into the mythological resonances of echo, and a pseudoscientific exploration of the physiology of the echo. It finally culminates in a synaesthetic transformation of the process of hearing—a recalibration of hearing as sight—which testifies to its strongly embodied basis.
Distributed across these various interpretative domains, the figure of echo begins to take form as a model for the process of reading triggered by House of Leaves. Specifically, by articulating the mythic with the physical, Zampanò's analysis of echo correlates the act of reading with a hermeneutics of embodiment in which meaning simply is the entirety of the physiological impact of that act. In this articulation, the text's analysis of the physical conditions of echo functions to specify the embodied thresholds which serve to constrain the sonic phenomenon of the echo; the analysis of Echo's mythic heritage—from Ovid to John Hollander—re-envisions echo as a mode of analog repetition—that is, a conception of response marked by the différance of the body. The figure of Echo serves to introduce the maxim that will guide our construction of the novel as a copy with a difference: find the analog within the digital—that is, let your body re-enliven what is merely an exact copy, an orthographic inscription of the past as past.
Interweaving mythological and scientific accounts, the analysis of echo purports to unpack the “echoes reverberating within the word itself" (41). Together, the mythological and scientific accounts articulate “space” and "love” with one another:
Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics make Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate.
And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love.
There is only silence. (50)
BODIES IN CODE
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