Immersed in paper labyrinths: How could the reader of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves be analyzed as a spectator through the scope of immersive theatre?

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immersed in paper labyrinths

How could the reader of Mark Z. Danielewski’s

House of Leaves be analyzed as a spectator through the scope

of immersive theatre?

MA International Dramaturgy: Thesis

University of Amsterdam

Iris Spanbroek

10381058

First reader: Peter Eversmann

Second reader: Ricarda Franzen

31 October 2018

Word count: 27.000 words

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3 Karen: So how would you describe the house?

David Copperfield: A riddle.

Camille Paglia: How would I describe it? The feminine void.

Douglas R. Hofstadter: A horizontal eight.

Stephen King: Pretty darn scary.

Kiki Smith: Texture.

Harold Bloom: Unheimlich – of course. Byron Baleworth: Don’t care to.

Andrew Ross: A great circuit in which individuals play the part of electrons, creating with their paths bits of information we are ultimately unable to read. Just a guess.

Anne Rice: Dark.

Jacques Derrida: The other. [Pause.] Or what other, which is to say then, the same thing. The other, no other. You see?

Steve Wozniak: I like Ross’ idea. A giant chip. Or a series of them even. All interconnected. If only I could see the floor plan then I could tell you if it’s for something sexy or just a piece of hardware – like a cosmic toaster or blender. Stanley Kubrick: I’m sorry. I’ve said enough.

Leslie Stern, M.D.: More importantly, Karen, what does it mean to you?

[End of transcript]

Cited from the transcript of the What Some Have Thought section “How would you describe the house?”

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Introduction

As I am writing this introduction, my copy of the novel House of Leaves falls apart at its seams. It literally does: I have the book here, next to my laptop, opened at page 8-9, and from the bottom going halfway up, the pages come apart. I can see the glue no longer holding the paper leaves together.

I found this book a couple of years ago, sitting on a shelf in a bookstore. I noticed it because of its unusual size: 700 pages, and bigger, broader, than the standard novel size. When I flipped through the pages, I noticed something else: different colors, fonts, languages, and a very unusual typography. Some pages only contain a few words. Some pages have entire paragraphs printed upside down or sideways or in circles. Some pages only consist of footnotes. I was so intrigued that I bought it, and read it, and fell in love with it.

House of Leaves is often categorized as an experimental novel, both in content and in

form. Over the course of 700+ pages, the reader is presented a story told through several narrative layers, each unreliable in their own way, framing the plot-events as a horror story, thriller, love story, and academic research parody. In one sentence, the novel is about a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside, and the various attempts that several narrators undertake to explore, explain, and interpret the meaning of this house being the way it is. Paragraph 1.1 will venture further into the details of the story.

The title House of Leaves is on the one hand a reference to the house in the story and how books can be seen as a house made of (paper) leaves; on the other hand, inside, the book

is typographically built like the house it describes, adding a double layer to that metaphor.1

The typography and the text almost flawlessly mimic the events of the story, and vice versa. Some examples:

• Footnotes refer to other footnotes on other pages, creating mazes and forking paths in the narratives

1_{The phrase ‘house of leaves’ is mentioned in the novel itself just once, in an untitled poem in an appendix, at}

page 563, where the house seemingly refers to the world at large: Little solace comes

to those who grieve when thoughts keep drifting as walls keep shifting

and this great blue world of ours seems a house of leaves

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• A character going down a spiral staircase is depicted as text spiraling on the page; a character walking through narrow hallways as text narrowing on the page; etcetera. • There are paragraphs and pages that do not lead anywhere, like there are paths in the

labyrinth not leading anywhere

• The reader is not always instructed which paragraph or page they should read next Adding to this, the novel includes six or more languages (English being the main language) and alphabets (such as runes, Cyrillic, and braille), text in red, blue, purple or black colors, music scales, black-outs, cross-outs, text that is encoded, and photographs and drawings, in order to tell the story beyond conventional text and storytelling in novels. For a visual impression, see the Appendix at the end of this thesis.

As I am writing this, there are currently over sixty post-it notes and tiny scraps of paper stuck to various pages in my copy of House of Leaves. All of them contain notes of things I wanted to remember, because on that page, a character revealed a secret, a reference was made to something I did or did not understand, something extraordinary happened in the narrative or the typography, a sentence was too poetic not to bookmark, or I just had an opinion I felt like adding. I tracked and traced my entire reading process, knowing for sure that that would help me understand the story. I added another layer to all the narratives in House of Leaves, a whole new materiality in the form of bright post-its, and I altered the text by tearing the book apart in my passion to understand it.

I am not able to change the words that are written, but I am able to observe, understand, and enter a dialogue with the various interpretations of the story.

Mark Z. Danielewski, the author who wrote this American novel in the 1990s and published it in 2000, once stated during an interview:

I don’t mind admitting that I was extremely self-conscious about everything that went into House of Leaves. In fact – and I know this will sound like a very bold remark, but I will say it anyway since it remains the truth – I have yet to hear an interpretation of

House of Leaves that I had not anticipated. I have yet to be surprised, but I’m hoping.2

I decided to take this as a challenge. I was intrigued enough by both the story and the unusual design of the novel, that I decided to center this master thesis around it. Not even because I wanted to find an interpretation that Danielewski had not come up with before, but because my

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relationship with the novel reminded me of the relationship a spectator enters when visiting a participatory, interactive or immersive theatre performance. The way one has to hold the book, turn it, actively search for the narrative, reminded me of performances where one has to search, climb, touch and act in order to experience to story.

So, the research question of this thesis goes as follows:

How could the reader of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves be analyzed as a spectator through the scope of immersive theatre?

In order to gain answers to that question, this research is laid out along the following route: Chapter 1 looks into House of Leaves and explores the narrative, the story, the typography and the design. It also researches how the novel has been analyzed by other scholars and the scopes they have used to categorize or dissect the novel. These scholars are, in order of publication, N. Katherine Hayles, Mark B. N. Hansen, Jessica Pressman, Brian W. Chanen, and Kathryne Hume.

N. Katherine Hayles is one of the first (writing in 2002) to take a look at House of Leaves from a medial point of view. Hayles has written a great deal about media and storytelling, the

influence of the computer and the internet, materiality, mediality, and embodiment.3 In her

article ‘Saving the subject’, she frames House of Leaves as a work of remediation.

Mark B. N. Hansen is a professor of literature at the Duke Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, and writes about a range of topics, including media studies, media philosophy and

phenomenology.4 Hansen wrote the article ‘The digital topography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s

House of Leaves’ in 2004, in which he uses the novel as a case study to research the use and

effect of fiction in paper versus digital media.

Jessica Pressman is ‘a scholar of 20th and 21st-century experimental literature, digital

poetics, and media theory’5

, and teaches at San Diego State University. In her article ‘Reading the Networked Novel’, she approaches House of Leaves as a network and researches how this network is (supposed to be) read.

Brian W. Chanen is connected to the Institute of English Studies at Warsaw University as an Assistant Professor, and to the American School of Warsaw as the head of the English

Department.6_{Chanen wrote the article ‘Surfing the text’ in 2007, in which he explores how}

3_{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._Katherine_Hayles. Retrieved 15-10-2018.} 4_{https://aahvs.duke.edu/people/profile/mark-bn-hansen. Retrieved 15-10-2018.} 5_{https://literature.sdsu.edu/people/bios/pressman.html. Retrieved 15-10-2018.} 6_{Chanen (2007): p. 176.}

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House of Leaves can be interpreted as a hypertext in printed form, and whether or not the novel

is still experienced as a hypertext, despite its lack of digital environment.

Kathryne Hume is a scholar and writer connected to Penn State University. Hume wrote the book Aggressive Fictions: Reading the Contemporary American Novel in 2012, exploring what happens when conventional and traditional relationship between the author and reader is broken, briefly reflecting upon House of Leaves as a case study.

Furthermore, chapter 1 (inspired by some of these scholars, particularly Brian W. Chanen) looks at hypertext literature, and frames how House of Leaves can be seen as a printed hypertext. In the end, it will conclude what the reader of House of Leaves looks like from a

hypertext point of view, and how they7 behave. In order to define hypertext and the hypertext

reader, this research will call upon the works of Jakob Nielsen, Marie-Laure Ryan, Anne Mangen and J. Yellowlees Douglas, amongst others.

Jakob Nielsen is described as an expert and pioneer on internet usability, with a PhD in

computer-human interaction.8_{Nielsen wrote about participation within hypertexts in his article}

‘The Art of Navigating Hypertext’ (1990), and about interfaces, usability and storytelling in the digital age in Hypertext and Hypermedia (1990/1993).

Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar mostly known for her work on the topics

of narrativity, technology, virtual reality and cyber fiction.9 Especially useful for this research

will be her book Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity and Electronic

Media (2001).

Anne Mangen is a scholar connected to the University of Stavanger, who has written about fiction in the digital environment. Her 2008 article ‘Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion’ will be looked at in this research.

J. Yellowlees Douglas is described as a pioneer in writings about hypertext fiction and the digital environment. Her work The End of Books--or Books Without End? Reading

Interactive Narratives (2001) deals with immersion and interactivity in digital fiction.

7_{Whenever this research refers to ‘the reader’, they will be referred to as ‘they’. In recent years, ‘they’ has been}

used as a gender-neutral term in the first person/singular form, in addition to ‘he’ and ‘she’. In common

language, ‘they’ is mostly used to refer to people or situations where gender-neutrality applies. This research will use this term to refer to the reader, also in singular form, as opposed to choosing the reader to be a ‘he’ or a ‘she’ or a flow-breaking ‘he/she’. It seemed like a fair middle ground. This footnote serves as an explanation to the perhaps unusual spelling that comes with this choice, such as ‘the reader find themselves’, etcetera. So, note that these are not mistakes, but intentional choices. More information on the use of the ‘singular they’ can be found on these well-sourced Wikipedia pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_language. Retrieved on 15-10-2018.

8_{https://www.nngroup.com/people/jakob-nielsen/. Retrieved on 16-10-2018.}

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Chapter 2 of this thesis turns towards immersive theatre, as a practice and as understood within its own history and definitions, and how the spectator of this form of theatre behaves.

For this reason, this thesis will have ‘immersive’ and ‘immersion’ as key terms.10 Special

attention will be paid to how ‘immersion’ can be understood in theatre. Here, this thesis will base itself foremostly on works by scholars Josephine Machon, Adam Alston and Gareth White.

Josephine Machon is a theatre and performance scholar, writer and practitioner.11 In her

2013 book Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance, she looks to theorize immersive theatre using examples of (British) contemporary performance.

Adam Alston is a theatre scholar specialized in immersive theatre and audience

participation.12 Alston quotes Machon often in his work Beyond Immersive Theatre, in which

he outlines the role of the spectator and immersive theatre in today’s cultural and economic world. He expands on this in his articles ‘Making Mistakes in Immersive Theatre: Spectatorship and Errant Immersion’ (2016), and ‘Audience participation and neoliberal value: risk, agency and responsibility in immersive theatre’ (2013).

Gareth White, lastly, is a researcher and theatre director with several publications on

immersive theatre.13 This thesis will mostly look at his article ‘On immersive theatre’ (2012)

and his book Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (2013).

Chapter 3 of this thesis, finally, will make connections between the reader of House of

Leaves and the spectator of immersive theatre, and will see how immersive theatre offers a new

perspective on the existing analyses of House of Leaves, answering how the scope of immersive theatre can be applied to this novel.

In the Conclusion chapter, a final overview, summary and conclusion will be given, with a reflection on the main research question.

On the last pages, after the Bibliography, an Appendix has been added with pictures and fragments from House of Leaves, as to provide a visual impression of the novel.

11_{https://www.mdx.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-directory/profile/machon-josephine. Retrieved 16-10-2018.} 12_{https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/adam-alston. Retrieved 16-10-2018.}

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Side-note: Absorption

This thesis takes the idea of immersion as its main starting point. The idea of immersion is used deliberately, instead of, for example, terms such as a “participation”, “interactivity” or “absorption”. Immersion is a wide-spread concept, specifically within theatre. Immersive theatre as a term is well represented in the literature I consulted. “Immersive theatre” covers more ground than “participatory theatre” or “interactive theatre”. Also within hypertext theories and literature studies, the term immersion is quite well known and provides for easier comparisons between fields, than similar but other concepts.

“Absorption”, however, deserves a bit of special attention.

The main difference between immersion and absorption would be that immersion operates from a one-way street, while absorption provides a two-way-street. While the adjective “immersive” is only applicable to a work of art, where the spectator always takes a passive position (“I was immersed in the artwork”), “absorbed” goes both way. An artwork can absorb its spectator, but a spectator can also absorb the artwork. The term acknowledges that artworks can instill differences in their spectators, and that spectators can change (the reception of) artworks.

When looking at, for example, Gareth White’s criticism of immersion in chapter 2, or Machon’s incorporation of Umberto Eco’s open works, in chapter 2 and 3, it would seem that the term absorption could have been an appropriate term for this research.

Unfortunately, my discovery of the term happened when this research was almost finished already. Secondly, although the term absorption seems very promising, not much has been written about it yet.

One of the works where the term is explored in-depth, however, is Frank Hakemulder’s work Narrative Absorption, published in 2017. As Hakemulder himself states in the introduction of this book:

Even though extensive work has been done on the topic of absorption […], there is no point of reference that brings together the available insight regarding absorption in narrative, how it comes about, what it actually is, what it feels like, and what functions

it has. Our volume Narrative Absorption aims to fill this gap.14

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Hakemulder approaches absorption much like the theorists of this thesis approach immersion, but Hakemulder expands on the qualities of immersion by introducing this two-way-street. In this book, Hakemulder has collected a handful of essays that discuss the concept of absorption in narrative stories, mostly focusing on texts, games, and film. In three parts, framed under conceptualization of the term, empirical studies, and the outcomes and impact that absorption can have, these essays provide an introduction into the frame of research absorption offers.

Because of its introductive nature, this work could easily become a standard on the concept of absorption in a way that would equalize absorption with terms such as immersion. It would not be fruitful to rewrite this thesis towards absorption, mostly because the term is not that recognized yet and does not yet have the overlapping status between art fields that immersion has, but by ways of anticipation, it seemed good to mention the concept here anyway.

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1 House of Leaves in literature studies

1.1 About House of Leaves

In order to understand all the references that I will make to House of Leaves’ narrative, subplots, and interpretations in the chapters to come, I would like to devote one paragraph to explaining the narrative of House of Leaves and the franchise surrounding the novel.

House of Leaves was written in the 1990s and published by Pantheon Books in 2000.

Parts of the novel had been circulating online and allegedly ‘underground’ at tattoo parlors and

acquaintances of the author, for a brief time prior to publication.15 The edition I have been

using, is the Second Edition, Remastered Full-Color Edition. This matters, since other editions may not have certain colors, graphics or text fragments. On the copyright page, the following different versions of the Second Edition are noted: Full Color, 2-Color, Black&White, and Incomplete. Whereas the Full Color version contains ‘The word house in blue, minotaur and all struck passages in red; the only struck line in purple in Chapter XXI appears in purple; Xxxxxxx and color plates’, the Incomplete version is listed as ‘No color; No Braille; Elements in the

exhibits, appendices and index may be missing’16_{. It is not specified what exactly is missing.}

Other than the novel, there are three entities that are connected to the novel.

Firstly, there is an official website plus discussion forum. The book refers to this website via www.houseofleaves.com (copyright page), although at the time of writing of this thesis

(October 2018), the website is run through

http://forums.markzdanielewski.com/forum/house-of-leaves. On this forum, most theories about and around the novel are being discussed. The novel itself makes explicit (through the copyright page) and implicit (in the narrative) references to this forum.

Secondly, the sister of author Mark Z. Danielewski, under her stage name Poe, has released a music album titled Haunted that cites passages from and makes references and allusions to the novel. She herself is cited in the novel as well, at page 360.

15_{According to the official forum, via}

http://forums.markzdanielewski.com/forum/house-of-leaves/house-of-leaves-aa/6009-distribution-history-of-house-of-leaves. Retrieved 16-10-2018.

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Thirdly, a part of the book, a section titled The Whalestoe Letters, has been published as its own novel in 2000. This section, or this novel, focuses on the relationship between Johnny Truant and his mother Pelafina Lièvre.

In terms of narrative layers, House of Leaves is laid out as follows:

Layer 1: Will Navidson, his wife Karen Green and their kids Chad and Daisy, move into a house on Ash Tree Lane somewhere in Virginia (USA). The house turns out to be bigger on the inside than on the outside, containing a labyrinth with black walls that move and shift at their own will. It is strongly suggested that there is a minotaur in the labyrinth, although no one ever sees it. ‘Navy’ calls upon his brother Tom, friend Reston, and explorers Holloway, Wax and Jed to explore the house. Navy is a prize-winning photographer and filmmaker, and documents everything that happens. This film is published as The Navidson Record.

Layer 2: The Navidson Record, the film, as its own entity, which (according to Zampanò) has played in cinemas, and has been the subject of numerous theses and articles.

Layer 3: Zampanò, a blind academic who analyzes the entire film, having other people transcribe his words, and scribbling them himself on papers, napkins, the walls of his apartment, and more. He dies of unknown causes.

Layer 4: Johnny Truant, tattoo apprentice, drug and sex addict, and heir to his mother’s insanity, who finds Zampanò’s body. He also finds the manuscripts (and napkins, papers, etc) of his work and starts piecing it all together. In doing this, he adds his own footnotes to the analysis, calling Zampanò out on inconsistencies and laying down incredibly personal and terrifying stories of his own life. The manuscript (or his childhood traumas, or his own mental illness?) drives Johnny insane, which causes him to contradict himself a lot. Bit by bit it is revealed that Johnny’s mother Pelafina tried to strangle him when he was young and he has grown up in foster houses after that, often suffering from abuse. Pelafina ended up in a sanatorium, obsessed with her son, and eventually committed suicide.

The lion’s share of the novel consists of Zampanò’s analysis (retelling the events of the Navidsons through the film) and Johnny’s footnotes. A big thread here is that Zampanò incorporates as many academic viewpoints for the film as possible, including: sociology, psychology, dream analysis, quantitative research, geology, history, film and theatre studies, natural sciences such as biology and sound vibrations, mythology, journalism, architecture, feminism, theology, and more. These viewpoints do not just apply to fields where the film could reside, but also function as fields that could help understand the meaning of the house. Why is the house the way it is, and what is the right way of analyzing this house, are questions that pop up frequently.

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In doing so, Zampanò also cites and quotes hundreds of experts, academics, scholars, articles and books. Some of these sources actually exist, some of them do not. Johnny goes out of his way to falsify or correct the things Zampanò quotes, questioning whether or not the film exists, the events really happened, and which source rings true and which one does not. Eventually, Johnny packs his bags and goes searching for the house himself, leaving the narrative for a few chapters, only returning during and after experiencing a severe psychotic break. Because of Johnny’s mental instability (and Johnny’s admission that he changed Zampanòs’s words without letting ‘you’, the reader, know), his corrections of Zampanò can also be questioned.

Layer 5: The Editors of the publishing house that Johnny sends the eventual manuscript to. They quietly explain, translate, falsify or verify things Zampanò or Johnny put in the work. They grow increasingly more subjective, but stay very much in the background. They bridge the gap between Johnny and the reader. The Editors have published a First Edition of the novel online, much like Danielewski himself did, before publishing the Second Edition that ‘you’ are reading right now. The Editors also added copyright pages, an index, and appendixes for both Johnny and Zampanò, consisting of letters, photo collages, documents and additional proof regarding their characters, their motivations, and the existence of the house and the Navidson events.

Arguably there is another layer between 3 and 4, or 4 and 5, consisting of Pelafina, Johnny’s mother. Danielewski published a separate book on her story titled The Whalestoe

Letters. Some fans believe, and Danielewski has alluded to this, that Pelafina plays a bigger

role in Johnny’s experience of the manuscript/the house than the reader is aware of, although

this is never explained further.17

Arguably there is another layer between 4 and 5, which can be seen on page 151 and 263: people who have met Johnny and read the First Edition, have e-mailed The Editors. In those e-mails they corrected and reflected on the text, and asked what happened to Johnny and

17_{The theory that Pelafina has a bigger influence on the house, is looked at more closely by scholar Molly}

Throgmorton in her 2009 honors thesis House of Leaves: Navigating the Labyrinth of the Deconstructed Novel. At pages 17-18 she states:

‘Danielewski describes the novel as “a three-character play”. He refers to this again in an interview with Sophie Cottrell: “I like to look at House of Leaves as a three character play: a blind old man, a young man, and a very special, extraordinarily gifted woman”. These three characters are Zampano, Johnny Truant, and Pelafina Lievre. […] Several subtle clues hint at a possible connection between Zampano and Pelafina. Specific repetitions in the novel, Zampano's poems, and Pelafina's letters suggest this connection.’

The repetitions Throgmorton refers to, are particular phrases, words, citations and spelling errors that occur in both Zampanò’ and Pelafina’s texts. These repetitions occur a handful of times.

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‘what was all the crazy stuff in the introduction about guns and blood?’18_{. This e-mail has ended}

up in the book (perhaps between the First and Second Edition). Johnny’s entries are dated from December 1997 to October 1998. The e-mails are dated April-June 1999, while the novel was published in 2000.

Although the typography of House of Leaves is all over the place, and it is more often inconsistent than that it follows a strict code or dramaturgy (see the Appendix for fragments and examples), there are a few instances that remain true throughout the entire novel. For example, every mention of the word ‘house’ is colored blue. Every mention of the minotaur, or

of events Zampanò mentioned but crossed out later, is colored red and struck through (like this).

There are three instances where the text is struck through and colored purple: the words “a novel” on the cover, the “First Edition” in the copyright page, and a sentence during one of

Johnny’s monologues, “what I’m remembering now”, followed by a memory.19_{A common}

interpretation of these colors, is that they refer to hyperlinks. Blue links are live, one can click on them and they lead to other webpages. Red links are non-active, they will lead to non-existent or no longer existing pages, and purple links are live hyperlinks that have been clicked on before. All of these interpretations could be said to line up with the instances in which they were used; Zampanò tried to delete certain passages; Johnny revisits a memory; the house gives way to several interpretations of its meaning.

The typography has a mimetic quality, as both Hayles and Pressman in paragraph 1.2 allude to as well, where the typography mimics actions in the novel, or vice versa, where the narrative follows a theme set out by the typography on the pages. The more important Johnny’s story gets, the more space his footnotes take up on the page; when characters enter the labyrinth, the text is spaced out all over the novel, complete with dead ends. This aspect makes that typography and narrative are connected in such a way that it becomes almost impossible to view the design as separate from the narrative.

The novel contains a lot of so-called Easter eggs: tiny, seemingly unimportant references, that seem to be there to make the reader wonder whether they have importance or not. Mostly, these references happen between layers. For example, in one of her letters to Johnny, Pelafina asks him to place a check-mark in the corner of his next letter to him, so that

she knows he has understood her coded message. In a completely different part of the novel20,

in one of Zampanò’s analyses, a random check-mark appears. Another example: for the entire

18_{Danielewski (2000): p. 263.} 19_{Danielewski (2000): p. 518.} 20_{On page 97.}

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novel, it is suggested that there is a minotaur in the labyrinth of the house. This is never confirmed. Instead, in the end a completely new reference is made to not Greek, but Norse mythology, mentioning Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil is the tree of the world that connects everything. This tree is supposedly an ash tree, and the house is located on Ash Tree Lane. This suggests that it was not about a minotaur at all in the end, since his existence is no longer touched upon. There are numerous more examples, too many to list, that connect unconnected parts of the story.

Lastly, an important aspect of the novel is that none of the narrators are given a clear conclusion to their storyline, making it impossible to determine who spoke the truth after all.

Will Navidson and Karen Green make it out of the house and are implied to live happily, if not traumatized, ever after. What they did with the house is never stated. Only in an added photograph in the appendix someone claims that they did not sell it, but built a fence around it. Someone tried to set fire to it (who?) but that failed.

Zampanò dies at the start of the novel, but what he died of, why he was so scared and paranoid and left his house a mess, what happened to the cats in the neighborhood, who the lover is he misses so much, how he went blind, why he was so obsessed with The Navidson Record… that is never touched upon.

Johnny Truant somehow managed to deliver the manuscript to a publisher and managed to get it published, but did he ever get rid of his nightmares and his paranoia? Did he move out of LA? Did he survive at all? He implied he was happy and carefree in the end, but can we trust the word of the insane?

The Editors slowly grow more subjective in their notes. Who are they? Why did they publish the novel as it is? Why did they add those strange clues to the index?

The book itself. This is a Second Edition, but has there ever really been a First Edition? Is there a version without colors and braille, like they mention at the copyright page, and if so, why is it not possible to buy this edition or find it anywhere? Does that mean there is a third edition with even more information?

Because no resolutions are given, there is no way to pin down the verifiability of these narrative layers. If one learns in the end that Johnny was admitted to a mental institution like his mother, one can assume that his additions to the novel were written during a period of hallucinations, and can therefore not be relied upon. Similarly, if it turns out that Zampanò made The Navidson Record up because he was insane, the conclusion is that all his

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contributions are untrue. But none of this happens. Danielewski never lets his readers out of the maze.

1.2 House of Leaves analyzed by scholars

Since its publication, House of Leaves has often been subject of analyses and interpretations from an academic point of view. Some of these works have been dealing with perspectives that I believe are useful for this thesis, such as readership, (hyper)mediality and (hyper)textuality. This paragraph serves as an introduction into the framing of House of Leaves as a hypertext in print form. This will be developed further in the third paragraph of this chapter, with literature about hypertexts, and the fourth paragraph, which will analyze if and how House of Leaves can be experienced as a hypertext.

Mostly, this paragraph shows how House of Leaves has been analyzed throughout the years and how scholars have influenced each other in understanding this novel, impacting how this thesis will understand the novel.

1.2.1 N. Katherine Hayles (2002)

In ‘Saving the subject: Remediation in House of Leaves’ (2002), Hayles starts from the philosophical point that through the lens of postmodernism and poststructuralism, the subject has been deconstructed; but that non-academic novel writers obviously still make use of characters in their (fictional) storytelling. According to her, Danielewski both constructs and deconstructs his subjects in House of Leaves, using remediation. Remediation is ‘the

representation of one medium in another’21_{, illustrating that a medium cannot be seen apart}

from its content, and that different (old and new) media constantly influence each other and learn from each other.

House of Leaves, Hayles argues, is remediation in print form: both within the narrative

and the storytelling, and in the design of the book material. She also presses for new methods of analyzing literature, since the semiotic models provided for story analysis are no longer sufficient.

How are subjects in House of Leaves both deconstructed and inserted into the story at the same time? This is mostly because the subjects – the characters and the events they are

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going through – only exist through vast layers of remediation. One only perceives the subjects through the eyes of many others.

It is made more complex when one learns that the existence of objects (the film The Navidson Record, the house, Zampanò’s manuscript, but also the guns that Johnny does or does not own) are also questioned through their remediation. Much of the story within the narrative

is represented through different media as well.22 Remediation as a theme is woven throughout

the story. It is most obvious in the narrative layers through which one reads the story, since every event is presented through another event: Johnny is editing a found manuscript, written

by Zampanò, who analyzed a film made by Navidson, and so on.23 This means that one reads

about the house through a number of different people, who all question their predecessor about the truth and nuances of the events. Johnny is convinced the film nor the house actually exist, yet Zampanò cites over a hundred academic sources that all verify that it does. But instead of this being a case of several unreliable narrators, Hayles frames this as a variety of remediated narrators: each of the characters and their narrative layer draws attention to the ‘inscription

technologies’24_{that they are using and existing through. These media ‘evacuate consciousness}

as the source of production and recover in its place a mediated subjectivity that cannot be conceived as an independent entity’. An unreliable narrator can be questioned as a subject still; but the narrators only exist through mediation, making them much more difficult to grasp.

All in all, House of Leaves is still a printed novel, but Hayles argues that it shows the reader exactly what a book can do in the digital age.

What distinguishes House of Leaves is the way it uses familiar techniques to accomplish two goals. First, it extends the claims of the print book by showing what print can be in a digital age; second, it recuperates the vitality of the novel as a genre by recovering, through the processes of remediation, subjectivities coherent enough to become the foci

of the sustained narration that remains the hallmark of the print novel.25

House of Leaves learns from the newer media and ‘attempts to eat all the other media’26. But these numerous representations and remediations leave narrative and design-related stains on how the story works and how it is shaped. The result is something that is more than a novel, but

22_{Hayles (2002): p. 780.} 23_{Hayles (2002): p. 780, 783-784.} 24_{Hayles (2002): p. 785.} 25_{Hayles (2002): p. 781.} 26_{Hayles (2002): p. 781.}

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‘it is an open question whether this transformation represents the rebirth of the novel or the

beginning of the novel’s displacement by a hybrid discourse that as of yet has no name’.27

The remediation overcomes the boundaries of the medium of the novel itself. The eventual story as a whole is presented to the reader as a novel, one book written by one author, but even the book itself seems remediated – largely because of the shape, size and typographical design of the book. The narrative may be all over the place, but so is the typography. Hayles concludes that it is impossible to view the design apart from the narrative (as stated in paragraph 1.1 as well): both are part of the same remediation technique. It is not that the typography highlights or simply illustrates the story; one reads the story through the remediation of the book material. This starts from the point that Zampanò, in the Times New Roman font, makes up the body of the text; Johnny adds his comments through footnotes in this text, using Courier New, who in turn is commented upon through The Editors, using Bookman. As the story deepens and twists, the positions of the texts change. Their positions start to blur and mix, evoking the narrative to start blurring too.

Hayles also states that this form of typography and storytelling is affecting the reader’s body and the temporal experience of reading the novel. Ascribing a temporal element to a non-temporal work is one of the reasons she presses for new methods of analyzing literature: there are new ways of writing and experiencing printed storytelling on their way, she says.

Whether excruciatingly slow or amazingly fast, the time it takes to read a page functions as a remediation of the narrative action in the life-world of the reader, linking real-time decoding with the intensity and pacing of the represented events in a correlation that itself is a remediation of eye tracking in cinematic action. Here the materiality of the page is mobilized to create a cybernetic loop that runs from the page through the reader’s body and back to the page, a process that links the temporality of reading with the

emotional pacing of the narrative.28

A telling element of texts like House of Leaves, is that the concepts of looking through a page (focus on content or story when reading) and looking at a page (focus on form and design when reading), are becoming two sides of the same coin: in order to get at the story, one needs to

27_{Hayles (2002): p. 781.} 28_{Hayles (2002): p. 797.}

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focus on the design, and vice versa.29 Remediation in House of Leaves gives way to a more

complex way of looking at materiality and its relation to the reader:

Focusing on materiality allows us to see the dynamic interactivity through which a literary work mobilizes its physical embodiment in conjunction with its verbal signifiers to construct meaning in ways that implicitly inscribe readers as well as characters. It gives us a way to think about the construction of subjectivity as something that happens

outside as well as inside the text.30

[…]

Participating in a medial ecology from which it could not isolate itself even if it wanted to, House of Leaves makes a strong claim to reposition (remediate) the reader in relation to the embodied materiality of the print novel. It implies that the physical attributes of the print book interact with the reader’s embodied actions to construct the materialities

of the bodies that read as well as those that are read.31

This in itself is a direct link to this research, because here, in her conclusion, Hayles offers up a question that this thesis repeatedly focuses on: how does House of Leaves redefine ‘reading’? Or, rather: what are the effects of House of Leaves on its reader, and how can these be analyzed?

1.2.2 Mark B. N. Hansen (2004)

In his article ‘The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves’ (2004) Hansen starts from a comment that Danielewski himself made about the book, namely his intention to reinvent what authors can do with the medium of the novel. Hansen goes on to state that in the development of mediums, Danielewski gives the book a special place because of its

relation with the body.32

The effort to document or make sense of this physically impossible object generates a series of mediations which quite literally stand in for the void of referentiality at the

29_{Hayles (2002): p. 794.} 30_{Hayles (2002): p. 803.} 31_{Hayles (2002): p. 804.} 32_{Hansen (2004): p. 597-599.}

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novel’s core. Lacking the force of indexicality, these mediations can only acquire the

force of conviction by eliciting embodied reactions in their fictional and actual readers.33

The layers and layers of mediations, narratives and interpretations of House of Leaves make that at the core, there is no “truth”. Therefore the novel is not directed inwards, but outwards. It is not about what is at the heart of the story, but about the effects that the story has on its readers; according to Hansen, this is a bodily effect.

Furthermore, these layers are not unreliable because they are factually wrong or right: they are unstable because each layer interferes with another. Because of this unstableness, the reader is denied an authentic text: everything has to be interpreted by the reader, who cannot take anything for truth. Danielewski himself says that this, interpretation itself, is at the core of

the novel: the undermining of the existence of a truth or objective in a story or memory.34

Everything in this complex and rich novel – including everything that smacks of traditional realism (the investment in disturbed family dynamics, the oscillation among various focalizers, and so on) is in the end subordinated to the task of posing the challenge of interpretation to the reader. The novel works, on the far side of orthographic recording, not by capturing a world, but by triggering the projection of a world – an imaginary world – out of the reader’s interpretive interventions and accumulating

memorial sedimentations.35

Hansen states that the house in House of Leaves is the digital, or the otherness, for the analogue of the novel. All recordings and representations of the house are distorted and mediated, they objectively and subjectively do not run true, yet they still have a tremendous impact on the lives

of the inhabitants and readers inside and outside the novel.36 The house undermines the

stableness of the analogue, the paper story that is not digital.37

In short, the digital becomes a stronger tool to capture fiction, to be fiction, than orthographic tools.

From fiction to reading: Hansen defines reading in the case of House of Leaves as copying with a difference, adding one’s own subjectivities, with Johnny being the first reader.

33_{Hansen (2004): p. 599.} 34_{Hansen (2004): p. 602.} 35_{Hansen (2004): p. 603.} 36_{Hansen (2004): p. 607-608.} 37_{Hansen (2004): p. 610-611.}

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He read the text, and during his act of reading, he created a singular experience that is different from the text. When the reader reads his copy of the text, they copy it with their own difference as well: reading is an active series of choices and interpretations, although, according to Hansen, Johnny lays out the path for readers to come, since every reader follows his words and

interpretations before forming their own.38 Of course, readers to come also have to take in

Johnny’s words; the plot thickens every time a new reader ‘copies with difference’.

Hansen ends with connecting Johnny’s and the reader’s reading experience to an embodied activity:

Just as the novel undergoes bodily deformation as a result of its confrontation with recording media, so too does the reader undergo an embodied transformation which, in this most curious of mediations, manages to stand in for the referential absence at the core of the novel and thereby to confer reality on the physically, materially – and perhaps even logically – impossible fictional world projected by this truly curious house of

leaves.39

The mediations do not stop at the covers of the novel: they happen inside us, according to Hansen, referring back to his earlier statement that the novel does not focus inwards, but outwards: the effect of the novel is that one ‘copies with difference’ when reading.

1.2.3 Jessica Pressman (2006)

In her 2006 article ‘Reading the Networked Novel’, Jessica Pressman looks at the House of

Leaves franchise as a network. The novel, the music album Haunted created by Mark

Danielewski’s sister Poe, the second novel The Whalestoe Letters, and the website forum are all connected to each other. Pressman adds two important points to this observation: one, the franchise itself is aware of the network it is positioned in (for example, in references the novel makes to the songs on the album) and two, there exists a network within the novel as well. The consequence for the reader is that this novel cannot be read like a conventional novel: the novel encourages a networked way of reading.

In terms of the novel’s awareness of its own position, Pressman says that the novel is one thing, the album is a second thing, but together they create something else altogether. ‘It is

38_{Hansen (2004): p. 620-621.} 39_{Hansen (2004): p. 635.}

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this third “thing” that interests me: the connections across and between media forms that forge

a networked aesthetic’40, Pressman states, citing Hayles’ ‘Remediation’ article as one of her

sources. This simulated network is structured like a specific type of network: the internet. It imitates the internet through its hyperlink-like blue words and its jump-cutting across pages,

but it also exists in direct connection with the internet, via the official website.41

The presence of the universe of the franchise outside the novel, brings part of the feedback loop alive, mostly through the website: readers discuss theories and events in the novel and debate interpretations. A strange side-effect is that this can position the reader against the word of the author. The most obvious example is the following. Most readers and scholars (including Pressman) allude the blue color-coding of the word ‘house’ to the blue color of hyperlinks on the internet. But Danielewski himself says the reason for the blue color is because of cinematography:

In interviews, Danielewski claims that the blue color of ‘house’ is not meant to invoke digital technology but rather to represent cinematic effects. Indeed, he is downright gleeful when asked about the influence of digital media on his novel: “This is one of those moments when I get to say, ‘HA!’ […] because I didn’t write House of Leaves on a word processor. In fact, I wrote out the entire thing in pencil!” Taking Danielewski at his word is seductive but dangerous, particularly for an author who claims not to have read Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, two of the

most clear literary influences on House of Leaves’s hypertext.42

Pressman is skeptical of the author’s interpretation and has no problem rejecting his words on other matters as well. Readers themselves can decide about the meaning, in this case simply because they cannot afford to trust the author. The author himself has become one of the unreliable narrators, and the reader has to depend on themselves to decide what they take for truth. This openness and this agency of the reader is something also touched upon by Umberto Eco, which will be explored in chapter 2.

In terms of the network existing within the novel, Pressman looks at a few examples to illustrate this claim. At a certain point, during a psychotic break, Johnny enters a bar where a band plays songs with titles and lyrics containing phrases from Zampanò’s manuscript (one of

40_{Pressman (2006): p. 108.} 41_{Pressman (2006): p. 108.} 42_{Pressman (2006): p. 120.}

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the songs also appears on Haunted, suggesting it is the same song). When he asks them about this, they hand him a First Edition of House of Leaves, with his own notes included. The notes he is currently editing into the story. The only thing missing is the chapter in which he describes walking into a bar and encountering this. Note that this is also the chapter in which he completely loses his mind, so the truthfulness of the event is questioned from the start. The version of House of Leaves that was actually published by Danielewski is a Second Edition. There never has been an actual First Edition without that chapter, only in Johnny’s mind. Only inside the novel – a network within a network.

Pressman also describes the struggles of the reader to keep up with this networking. Not just the reader of the novel total, but also the readers within the book – most notably Johnny. Pressman hints at what Hansen outright states: that Johnny is the designated first reader of this horror-story. He experiences the horror firsthand; the reader of the novel total experiences it thirdhand (the Editors being the in-between stop). The experience of reading Zampanò’s manuscript and reading about the house push him over the edge and into madness.

House of Leaves promotes a networked reading strategy not only by rewarding the

reader with clues contained in its multimedia assemblage, but also by providing, in its central text, a pedagogical example of a reader learning to navigate the system. Truant is the novel's representative reader, and it is through him that House of Leaves’s reader witnesses what is at stake in adopting appropriate reading practices for approaching networked narratives. The reader witnesses Truant’s deterioration as he descends into isolation and illness due to his obsession with authenticating the text through

hermeneutic study.43

So, in this article, Pressman eventually comes back to the symbolic and intrinsic hypertextual elements and effects of the novel, pointing out the navigating strategies the reader needs to employ. She also highlights that the reader of the novel is provided with an embedded example of such a reader: Johnny, who researches and navigates his way through the manuscript. It is almost a horror-genre-like warning: in order to experience the novel the way it is intended, one needs to read it like Johnny did – with a chance you go insane. A chance that is supposedly quite big, because one is not just reading what Johnny read, but also his madness. The first

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reader’s experience is remediated into the final work, linking the idea of the network back to Hayles.

1.2.4 Brian W. Chanen (2007)

Chanen’s main question in his 2007 article ‘Surfing the text’ is if House of Leaves can be read and experienced as a hypertext. Are the effects still the same, even though House of Leaves is technically not a hypertext? Chanen says: yes, the effects are largely comparable to the experience of reading an actual hypertext.

Chanen explicitly looks at the time House of Leaves is published in: the digital age, the information age, where readers are getting more and more accustomed to navigating and ‘media

overload[s]’44_{. This has an impact on storytelling, as Chanen says. ‘With ubiquitous computing}

and the proliferation of the World Wide Web there has been a concurrent rise in theoretical

interest in the possibilities of fiction in the digital environment.’45

He immediately follows this up with the two main concerns within hypertext fiction: one, the tension between the freedom and/or autonomy of the reader, and the extent of control

over the text of the writer. Two, ‘the (inter)action of the reader with(in) that space’.46

Chanen specifically looks at Chapter 9, in which Navy and comrades enter the labyrinth in the house and explore it. In this chapter, the typography is most challenging and labyrinth-like. This labyrinth-like network of words is where Chanen most of all sees where the reader is

called upon their new, digital skills and less so on their traditional literary skills.47 One has to

skip, jump, interconnect and link blobs of text in order to read the story. Following the paragraphs in a traditional style is no longer an option.

The reader is confronted not only with long footnotes that overtake the main text (as in the rest of the book) but also encounters footnotes that run backwards through the pages, footnotes printed on the sides as gloss, notes written in reverse or upside down, notes written on one side of the page and reprinted on the other side of the page as a mirror image, as if one were reading text printed on a window, and an interesting note printed in a box which seems to function as a tunnel as it runs through several pages. It is taxing

44_{Chanen (2007): abstract.} 45_{Chanen (2007): p. 164.} 46_{Chanen (2007): p. 164.} 47_{Chanen (2007): p. 167.}

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to follow the directions of the print or the logic of the design, let alone read the text. This very design element, almost completely created through the manipulation of

footnotes, establishes a relationship between the chapter and hypertext.48

The relation between the reader and the text is here about position. According to Chanen, scholars Bolter and Grusin compare hypertext to collage art: the viewer always comes back to the surface. For printed hypertext, it is the same. The design keeps the reader at the surface, focused on the infrastructure, puzzling and figuring out how to approach this text. The reader finds their way in partly through the footnotes. The notes direct where to go next (or not!) and form a narrative but also a visual tracing of position. They direct where the eye goes. Chanen is happy to state that the footnotes intend to do the direct opposite of a collage: they draw the reader into the labyrinth and act like a web, impossible to get out of. The second they seem to make sense, is the second where they stop making sense altogether, leaving the reader stranded not at the surface, but in the midst of this labyrinth. The reader having to figure out their own

way, is of course the point of the entire chapter49_{, more so than the narrative of Will Navidson}

and friends:

It is a text that requires physical effort on the part of the reader. Just as the exploration of a labyrinth requires physical effort, it takes physical effort to follow the paths within the chapter: the book needs to be turned sideways and upside down in order to read certain notes and the callouts (the numbered footnote references) can send the reader backward and forward within the chapter and beyond to other chapters, the appendix, and thus to other notes in these places as well. The footnotes form an explicit linking to

the nest of texts swirling around House of Leaves.50

This is a very useful and fascinating point regarding this thesis, and Chanen fleshes it out even further. He argues that because of the choice the reader is offered here (which footnote to follow, which nest of text to read next), there is a sense of freedom. Every new reader will read a slightly different text, depending on the paths they take. Readers are free – or, phrased differently, obliged – to make their own choice. But according to scholar Robert Landow, this exact point is also the limit of the authority of the author. The author can no longer decide on

48_{Chanen (2007): p. 167.} 49_{Chanen (2007): p. 168-169.} 50_{Chanen (2007): p. 169.}

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the experience or at least the order of the narrative for the reader. This fragmentation is where

the reader slips the author’s control.51 Then again, even a labyrinth with lots of choices and

freedom has of course, ultimately, been constructed by an author.52

Furthermore, Chanen brings up the question, like Hayles did, whether to look at or look through the page (reading for the material and design or reading for the plot and narrative), linking it here to Marie-Laure Ryan instead of Landow, and ending at a different phrased conclusion. While Hayles said that the answer lies in a combination of reading for the plot and the material simultaneously, Chanen says that the reader relies on their knowledge of digital

navigation53:

In the case of House of Leaves narrative is recoverable because of a strategy of navigation but also because of some general features of profuse linking structures in a complex network. As the reader navigates the space of the chapter and picks up various

objects, meaning is constructed.54

Lastly, Chanen takes a second to point out the function of Johnny in the narrative, much the same way Pressman did.

Faced with endlessly shifting links and connections he is unable to represent coherently and to hold onto his own life. Interestingly, though, Truant gives up control. He slips into his disturbed state because of the irresistible desire to read, analyze and remediate Zampanò’s text. This desire is precisely mankind’s desire to tell stories and to read stories. Though the complex technotext offers the distinct possibility of being lost forever, it is the metaphor of getting lost in a good book that perhaps describes our ideal

reading experience.55

This focus, in the end, connects Johnny (as the designated first reader), and the reader of the novel total, back to the question of who is in control of the experience of the story: the author or the reader. 51_{Chanen (2007): p. 171, 174.} 52_{Chanen (2007): p. 174.} 53_{Chanen (2007): p. 172.} 54_{Chanen (2007): p. 173.} 55_{Chanen (2007): p. 175.}

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30 1.2.5 Kathryne Hume (2012)

In her book Aggressive Fictions, scholar Kathryne Hume looks at pre-modern and contemporary novels that attack the reader. She describes in her introduction that there exists a contract between author and reader: the author will create something that is entertaining and/or

useful for the reader.56 There is a traditional reward for reading: the plot is resolved, one can

sympathize with the characters, the story leaves food for thought, one learns new perspectives… Hume takes on works that depart from this. She discusses how they are “aggressive” and how readers respond to them. She defines the idea of a book attacking its reader as

shorthand for attacking their society’s economic structure, their class beliefs, lifestyle, philosophy, and literary expectations. Attack has the effect of making ordinarily

competent readers wish to stop reading […] The term “attack” might also be applied to

the element that makes those who did read a book wish they had not’.57_(original

emphasis)

Aggressive fictions differ from other works, because in most works, there is a pleasure for readers in figuring out the difficulties or hostilities the artwork offers. This pleasure comes from the reward at the end. Aggressive fictions hold out on that reward, making the process of reading frustrating to a level where readers are almost encouraged to stop seeking this reward.

Hume looks at the ‘ordinarily competent reader’ from a generalized point of view, categorizing them according to their ‘economic structure, their class beliefs, lifestyle, philosophy, and literary expectations’. By doing this, she overlooks the differences between individual readers. What theoretically is a conventional contract between reader and author, can take on different forms for individual reader. There are always people who do like a challenge and for whom such an attack is experienced as a motivation to keep on reading.

One of the books Hume discusses, in the chapter ‘Attacking the Reader’s Ontological Assumptions’, is House of Leaves. According to her, House of Leaves is a work that attacks the

reader’s intellect, one’s ‘sense of what is real’58_{, one’s ontological assumptions. In the case of}

House of Leaves, the reader is confronted with what Hume compares to Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe painting: a work invoking reality and then denying that they represent or imitate

56_{Hume (2012): p. 1.} 57_{Hume (2012): p. 8.} 58_{Hume (2012): p. 141.}

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reality. The work calls the reader out on believing that the story printed on paper has anything

to do with actual life.59 The novel does this through its various narrative layers, story-elements

contradicting each other, and constantly falsifying every element the story or the characters give the reader. Yet the reader keeps reading about the labyrinth inside the house, even though it cannot possibly be real, not in our universe nor in the universe of the novel. ‘We are certainly drubbed into recognizing that nothing in a written text is “real”, that all we have is just words in play, and yet the palpable representational detail of description of corridors and stairs keeps

insisting on reality.’60

The urge of the reader to make sense of it all, to bring the plot to an end – it does not even have to be a satisfactory end where the protagonists fulfill their quest, just any solid end at all – persists, only to have Danielewski endlessly make fun of the reader for still looking for

this ending.61_{Hume ends her article by stating that no matter how aggressive House of Leaves}

is, it still does not scare its readers away:

Presumably part of the fun for Danielewski is to anticipate as many interpretations as possible, leaving academic critics feeling belated useless. He may also enjoy readers’ attempts to rationalize and tame the text. He creates a text we can never “own” as we tend to feel that we own texts we have explained to our satisfaction. For an author creating an untamable text that we nonetheless wish to read is presumably a challenge

and a pleasure.62

This is where her generalization of ‘the’ reader backfires on the point she is trying to make. Whereas House of Leaves can feel like a text that should be tamed for one reader, it can come across as a work of complexity that can be studied without deciphering that complexity, for another reader. The reader that understands that no resolutions will be given, could find a sense of closure for the novel’s plot in that realization; they will stop behaving in the way Hume assumes to be universal. In short, her argument only flies for the particular reader she describes. For readers who approach the novel differently, this generalization cannot be made.

59_{Hume (2012): p. 143.} 60_{Hume (2012): p. 155.} 61_{Hume (2012): p. 155.} 62_{Hume (2012): p. 155-156.}

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32 1.2.6 Conclusion

In conclusion, these five scholars offer a solid framework in which one can talk about House of

Leaves. It is a novel that breaks traditional literary conventions both in content and form.

Danielewski sets out different narrative pathways in his story and the typographical design, which can be interpreted as forms of remediation, internet-inspired networks, mediality and mimesis. This has an effect on how the novel is experienced.

As one can see in paragraph 1.3, the conclusions drawn by Hayles, Hansen, Pressman, Chanen and Hume fall in line with the concept of the hypertext and the hypertext reader.

1.3 Hypertext (in printed form) and the hypertext reader

1.3.1 Hypertext and the hypertext reader

What exactly is a hypertext? When speaking about a hypertext, one usually means an electronic or digital text that consist of several (pieces of) texts, that are linked together, and that can be accessed directly and in an order determined by the reader. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is a well-known example of a database based on the principles of a hypertext: webpages with information contain hyperlinks to other Wiki-pages. (A printed encyclopedia could therefore be seen as a printed form of a database hypertext; the printed hypertext as its own entity will also be discussed later on.)

Scholar Jakob Nielsen took a look at the why and how of the hypertext in the mid-nineties, when the internet and the networking model of the computer became more commonplace in society. This is one of the reasons why his book Hypertext and Hypermedia is an interesting read: Nielsen draws conclusions that, read through today’s eyes, seem logical and foregone. But back when he drew up these words, nothing about the computer and about the way hypertexts work, was obvious. Nielsen’s habit of explaining what seems obvious now, is a welcome quality when researching what makes a hypertext a hypertext.

Nielsen’s definition of what a hypertext is, starts with a position of the hypertext against a text in a printed book. A traditional text is sequential and follows a linear order. A hypertext

is nonsequential, meaning that there is no single linear order in which to read the text.63 This

Immersed in paper labyrinths: How could the reader of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves be analyzed as a spectator through the scope of immersive theatre?