First, he reads a few lines by match light and then as the heat bites his fingertips he applies the flame to the page. Here then is one end: a final act of reading, a final act of consumption. And as the fire rapidly devours the paper, Navidson's eyes frantically sweep down over the text, keeping just ahead of the necessary immolation, until as he reaches the last few words, flames lick around his hands, ash peels off into the surrounding emptiness, and then as the fire retreats, dimming, its light suddenly spent, the book is gone leaving nothing behind but invisible traces already dismantled in the dark. (467)
We experience here an inversion of the postmodern topos of the mise-en-abîme: stripped of its epistemologically debilitating impact, this episode of Navidson reading the text in which he figures as a fictional character functions to foreground the equivalence between the two forms of consumption—reading and material destruction— thematized here. The point then is to emphasize the absence of any sacred text"—literally instanced by the destruction of Navidson's copy of House of Leaves—and the primacy of the singular act of reading that forms its necessary correlate.
viii. Here, to avoid confusion, we should note that House of Leaves is not a science fiction novel, which makes its engagement with the impossible distinct from that engagement constitutive of science fiction as a literary genre.
ix. For a useful discussion of this uneasy correlation in the world of today's so-called "cyberarchitects," see Kloft (198–205). Kloft conceives this tension as that between form and performance:
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