xiii. “... The motion sensors were never triggered.... Virtually a week seamlessly elided, showing us the family as they depart from a house without that strange interior space present only to return a fraction of a second later to find it already in place, almost as if it had been there all along" (28). Mediated through Navidson's surveillance system, the house's transformation registers as a deformation of the temporality of daily life, an erasure of the duration of lived experience that leaves instead a practically seamless punctual transition: life compressed to fit the limits of recording.
xiv. This theme of the superiority of writing to technical recording is reiterated countless times throughout Zampanò's narrative, always in close correlation with the impossible figure of the house. Thus, for example, the drawings of Navidson's children are celebrated for their capacity to capture “the awfulness at the heart of the house". In contrast to the stark, sanitized perfection of the photographic renderings, "the shallow lines and imperfect shapes" of these drawings “narrat[e] the light seeping away from their lives" (315). Embodying the force of imagination over the merely reproductive, these examples attest to the truth of (invented?) photography critic Kadina Ashbeckie's claim that “technology's failure is over[]un by the onslaught of myth” (335).
xv. I must therefore take issue with Kate Hayles' reading of the novel as a celebration of the medial flexibility of print. "The computer," Hayles writes, "has often been proclaimed the ultimate medium because it can incorporate every other medium within itself. As if learning about omnivorous appetite from the computer, House of Leaves, in a frenzy of remediation, attempts to eat all the other media" (781). Beyond its implicit (and in my opinion, inadequate) view of the digital computer as a mere extension of the orthographic project of technical recording media, Hayles' reading significantly downplays the way in which the deformations of the text point to the failure of print and the novel as recording technologies (or, in the terminology Hayles borrows from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin [and, ultimately, from Marshall McLuhan], "remediations" of such technologies). Hayles can thus remain blind to the extraorthographic vocation of the text which, as my reading suggests, can only be worked out through a consideration of embodied response.
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