Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

That such a transition can only be gestured at by both text and film becomes clear from the ensuing passage which, once again, unfolds over the space of several pages: "Here then— / the after / math /of meaning. / A life / time/ finished between / the space of / two frames. / The darkline where the / eye persists in seeing /something that was never there / To begin with" (193-205). In this case, the gradual unfolding of the text differentiates it from the filmic expression that it is attempting to simulate. Yet, it does so entirely to the advantage of the print medium; by contrasting its simulation to the filmic phenomenon of the afterimage—where what is seen is something·extraorthographic, something imagined—this passage brings a depth and complexity to the representation of death that, as the novel suggests, simply cannot be achieved in a mechanical medium like film.

Certainly, we could follow Hayles's lead and add to these examples the many moments in which the typographical arrangement of the text functions to mimic the action depicted in the film (e.g. when the word “snaps" is stretched out over the space of three pages in imitation of the stretching of the rope holding the gurney as the stairway expands [294-296]). We could focus on moments when typography serves to produce cinematic effects of temporal acceleration and deceleration (e.g., the suspense generated by speeding up the turning of pages during the confrontation with Holloway [213-238] or the stasis achieved by the dense superimposition of several layers of footnoted text in Chapter IX). Yet, despite the undeniable testimony these typographical deformations lend to the mimetic flexibility of print text, we cannot overlook their prevailing mediatechnical function. More than signs of the text's capacity to subsume the function of other media, these deformations in the body of the novel are symptoms of the impossibility of representing the digital, of its resistance to orthographic capture.

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1. BODY

If print nevertheless enjoys a certain privilege in the context of this representational impossibility, it must stem from something other than its orthographic capacity.x Indeed, it can hardly come as a surprise that, in addition to the deformation of the generic and typographic conventions of the novel, the house also elicits fundamental changes in how we understand the novel as a process or, in other words, in how the novel—or rather how the activity of reading the novel—generates meaning.

If we bear in mind that the text we are holding in our hands has been transcribed by Johnny Truant, we can immediately appreciate how the "original" we are reading is already a copy and—given Johnny's addition to the text of footnotes recounting the personal transformation it elicits in him—how it is a copy with a difference. Simply put, it is a singular embodied reading of a “text" that does not exist in any other form, or at least that cannot be passed on to us in such a form. Indeed, Truant's mediation here presents a counterpart, within the domain of text, to the proliferating layers of orthographic mediation thematized in the narrative. As a postorthographic analogical mediation, Truant's narrative figures the act of reading as an act of copying with a difference—a difference borne directly by the body of the reader.xvi

Consider, in this respect, Truant's encounter, late in the text, with a group of musicians who had written song lyrics, "I live at the end of a Five and a Half Minute Hallway," based on a text they found on the Internet—the alleged first edition of House of Leaves. Given that this text includes an introduction and notes by Johnny Truant, the encounter creates a mise-en-abîme effect; specifically, it underscores the paradoxical existence of two different versions of the novel, only one of which (the one we are reading) could include Truant's notes about this encounter.

We are thus compelled to ask after the status of this section of the novel (Chapter XXI) and, more generally, whether Johnny's notes are properly located inside or outside its frame. As in the earlier mentioned passage in which Navidson reads House of Leaves by match and paper light (see endnote vii), here, the transfer of focus from postmodern epistemological play to orthographic critique is staged. In this respect, it is hardly surprising that Truant's interest in this text concerns the marginal notations added by the musicians and the larger question of orthographic exactitude they raise:

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I thumbed through the pages, virtually every one marked, stained and red-lined with inquiring and I thought frequently inspired comments. In a few of the margins, there were even some pretty stunning personal riffs about the lives of the musicians themselves. I was amazed and shocked and suddenly very uncertain about what I had done. I didn't know whether to feel angry for being so out of the loop or sad for having done something I didn't entirely understand or maybe just happy about it all. There's no question I cherished the substance of those pages, however imperfect, however incomplete. Though in that respect they were absolutely complete, every error and unfinished gesture and all that inaudible discourse, preserved and intact. Here now, resting in the palms of my hands, an echo from across the years. (514)

Beyond signifying the author's loss of authority over his text and the merging of author and reader functions, this passage attests to Truant's simultaneous recognition of the singularity of his “reading" and the singularity of every other act of reading that might concretize his text. That is precisely why the pages he holds in his hand are at once “incomplete" and “absolutely complete."As the potential trigger for subsequent acts of reading—a trigger whose potential stems precisely from the failure of an orthographic fixing of the events recounted in the text—these pages are necessarily incomplete; however, as a cipher of Truant's experience of reading the text—an experience that exists only in his embodied actualization (as the perception of an inaudible echo from the past)—they are perfectly complete. As in the earlier "Navidson-matchlight" episode, the point here is not so much to introduce epistemic logjams as it is to foreground the correlation between the postorthographic condition and the role of singular readerly embodiment. This correlation yields a model of reading that I propose to call copying with a difference.

Not surprisingly, given the thematic and theoretical focus of House of Leaves, the reconfiguration of the novel as a copy with a difference is the direct payoff of the text's agon with other media. If the novel appears to be the victor in this agon, it is because it undergoes a fundamental transformation in its function. Liberated from its vocation as a means to stabilize, resurrect, and pass on the past-that is, to cash in a referential promise—the novel in its postorthographic form operates as a kind of machine for producing what we might call "reality affects" in the reader.

The payoff—or the realization—of the reader's singular concretization of House of Leaves, such a reconfiguration is anticipated from the very first page of The Navidson Record, where Zampanò urges the reader to ignore debates concerning the veracity of the film and to dwell instead on what is actually in the film: "Though many continue to devote substantial time and energy to the antinomies of fact or fiction, representation or artifice, document or prank, as of late the more interesting material dwells exclusively on the interpretation of events within the film" (3).

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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.

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Following this transformation, however, the intentionality of the necessarily real" impact undergoes a basic shift of orientation; no longer fixated on the past, it becomes emphatically future directed. In this sense, it is most significant that the digital—and the postorthographic text—correlates with the body in a fundamentally different way than does, for example, photography. Indeed, the flexibility of text—and hence its privilege—stem directly from this difference: whereas the orthographic function of technical recording emerges from a preexistent analogy with the body, the digital (and the postorthographic text) has no such ground.xvii Barthes' depiction of the photograph as an emanation from the body simply cannot characterize recording in the digital age:

The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed. (80–81)

By contrast, what is at stake in technical recording today is no longer an analog registration rooted in the correlation between technology and the body. In the age of Photoshop, the basis for Barthes' depiction—the profound tie linking the analog with the body—no longer holds.

Accordingly, we must fundamentally reconceptualize the relation between the body and technical recording. If, in Barthes' imagining, the body—direct carnal transmission—ensures the orthographic function of photography, today the body's no less fundamental mediating role must be introduced from the outside as a supplement to recording. The body must create analogy where there no longer is any or, more exactly, where none is pregiven. Rather than an inscription of the body as a stable trace of the past, what mediation in a digital environment involves is a supplementary, future-directed process of embodiment in which a carnal analogy with the digital is, as I put it in New Philosophy for New Media, forged as an “original" supplement (Chapter 6). Most important in this transformation is the liberation of the body from its function as a support or host for orthographesis. For this reason, it is hardly surprising that House of Leaves takes pains to champion the singularity of experience, whether of the characters within its several fictional frames or of readers situated outside some—but importantly, not all—of these frames.xviii

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Consider, for example, the text's assertion that the various explorations of the house should be viewed less as collective experiences than as a conjunction of a host of singular ones: “As with previous explorations, Zampanò informs us in Chapter IX,

Exploration #4 can also be considered a personal journey. While some portions of the house, like the Great Hall for instance, seem to offer a communal experience, many inter-communicating passageways encountered by individual members, even with only a glance, will never be re-encountered by anyone else again. Therefore, in spite of, as well as in light of, future investigations, Holloway's descent remains singular. (188)

This insight on Zampanò's part mirrors the conclusion of contemporary scientific researchers who, we are told, "believe the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it." Thus, "Dr. Haugeland asserts that the extraordinary absence of sensory information forces the individual to manufacture his or her own data" and "Ruby Dahl calls the house on Ash Tree Lane a solipsistic heightener, arguing that the house, the halls, and the rooms all become the self—collapsing, expanding, tilting, closing, but always in perfect relation to the mental state of the individual" (165).xix All of this leads Zampanò to conclude that in the case of Navidson's house:

Subjectivity seems more a matter of degree. The Infinite Corridor, the Anteroom, the Great Hall, and the Spiral Staircase exist for all, though their respective size and even layout sometimes changes. Other areas of that place, however, never seem to replicate the same pattern twice, or so the film repeatedly demonstrates. (178)

Further evidence for this claim can be found, for example, in the chaotic and complexly mediated scene during which Tom, Navidson's brother, disappears for good as Navidson helplessly looks on. Here the correlation between singularity and spatial mutation creates a situation in which Tom's actions generate “spatial affects" that are subsequently countered by the variant spatial affects generated by Navidson's actions. Having retrieved Navidson's daughter, Daisy, from the house, Tom has we are informed, "found his limit"; out of breath, he stops, kneels, and heaves for air, at which point:

[The] floor carries him backwards ten or fifteen feet more and then for no apparent reason stops. Only the walls and ceiling continue their drunken dance around him, stretching, bending, even tilting.

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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)

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As Johnny's response makes clear, these embodied, nonconscious, practically autonomous processes confer the feeling of reality on mediated experience: "No doubt about that," he adds with wry irony, "My fear's gotten worse" (179, note 211).

This correlation between the house's spatial mutations and the singularity of experience finds an apt emblem in the figure of the Labyrinth. "In order to consider how distances within the Navidson house are radically distorted," Zampanò notes at the beginning of Chapter IX, we must address the more complex ideation of convolution, interference, confusion, and even decentric ideas of design and construction. In other words the concept of a labyrinth" (109). Citing Penelope Reed Doob's The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, Zampanò notes how the distinction between those who are inside the labyrinth and those who view it from the outside breaks down in considering Navidson's house, "simply because no one ever sees that labyrinth in its entirety." As a result, "comprehension of its intricacies must always be derived from within"—that is, through the singular experience of those inside it (114).

If this is true for the film as well, it is because the film is also an unsolvable labyrinth: there simply is no transition possible from the continually devolving discourse" of the film—a discourse that promises discovery "while all along dissolving into chaotic ambiguities too blurry to ever completely comprehend"—to an embodied navigation of the house it mediates (114). In a now familiar pattern, this brush with the limits of technical orthography almost immediately shades into an account of the house as a figure for the digital. This house, Zampanò notes, defies the traditional means of escaping a labyrinth—for example, by keeping one hand on a wall and walking in one direction—because it would probably require an infinite amount of time and resources" to be solved (115). This house, in other words, is a labyrinth of unprecedented impossibility: it presents truly irresolvable obstacles, rendering futile any "permanent"—that is, objectively mappable—solution: "Due to the wall-shifts and extraordinary size, any way out remains singular and applicable only to those on that path at that particular time. All solutions then are necessarily personal" (115).

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This comparison of the house with the figure of an unobservable Labyrinth furnishes the genetic schema for House of Leaves' critique of orthography. Crucial here is the move, exemplified in the comparison, to flip over an initial aporia between mediation and experience in a way that reinvests the bodily dimension of experience that the aporia is designed to undermine. Thus, if experience is necessarily mediated by orthographic recording (film as exact registration of the past) and if such recording is necessarily incomplete (film as labyrinth), then there simply can be no transition from mediation to embodied experience. However, if what we are dealing with in the first place (the house as a figure for the digital) is something that cannot in principle be recorded—and here is where the flipping over occurs—then the aporia is a vicious one: no more adequate recording apparatus could potentially reconcile mediation and experience because the object in question absolutely resists orthographic capture to begin with.

If the house-labyrinth comparison forms an exemplary instance of this schema of reversal, that is because it takes the reader through this process (flipping over the aporia). The act of recognizing the house as a figure for the labyrinth of the digital—for an impossible, unsolvable labyrinth—catalyzes a fundamental shift of approach, an abandoning of the project of orthographesis thematized in the novel and a renewed concentration on the embodied, and thus necessarily partial, framing of information by the reader. To put it in the terminology of systems theory, which is germane here, the impossibility of an external, first-order observation of the entire system functions to ennoble second-order observations that take this impossibility—always from their singular standpoint within the system—as their content.xx No wonder, then, that Ruby Dahl, Zampanò's invented expert on space, "fails to consider why the house never opens into what is necessarily outside of itself" (165, note 202).

The reinvestment of what we might call bodily observation correlates directly with the reconfiguration of the novel as a copy with a difference. As yet another analog of the impossible, unrecordable house, the novel can only be said to exist through the series of embodied second-order observations to which it gives rise. If House of Leaves is able to speak exemplarily of this reconfiguration that is because it poses itself as one “medial presence” among others—as a specific medium (a house of leaves) with no pregiven privilege within the larger media ecology to which it necessarily belongs;xxi House of Leaves thereby opens itself to the infinite matrix of information outside it in a way that is almost unprecedented, even among contemporary novels. In this way, moreover, the novel is able to take the question of its specificity as its content.

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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)

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