Non-Narrative Fictionality: A Narratological Approach to Materiality and Immersion in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves

RMA Literary Studies

MA Thesis

Non-Narrative Fictionality

A Narratological Approach to Materiality and

Immersion in

Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

By José Maximiliano Jiménez Romero

Email: maximiliano.jiro@gmail.com

June 2019

Examiner:

Dr. Carrol Clarkson

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ON

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ARRATIVE

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ICTIONALITY

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ARRATOLOGICAL

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PPROACH

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ATERIALITY

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MMERSION

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ARK

Z.

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ANIELEWSKI

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H

OUSE

OF

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EAVES

José Maximiliano Jiménez Romero

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Acknowledgments 4

INTRODUCTION 5

CHAPTER I

CONCEPTSOF NARRATIVEAND FICTION 11

Text, Story, Narrating 12

Fiction and Fictionality 14 Mimetic and Diegetic Theories of Narration 18

The Narrator 22

CHAPTER II

THE NON-NARRATIVE FORMOF HOUSEOF LEAVES 26

Generic Competence 26

House of Leaves: Form and Structure 29

Johnny Truant 31

Zampanò 33

The Editors 35

CHAPTER III:

INTOTHE HOUSEOF LEAVES: MATERIALITY, FICTION, AND IMMERSION 40

Formal Mimetics 40

The Open Work 45

The Novel within the Novel 47 Immersion and the Location of Fiction 52

CONCLUSION

FICTIONALITYINTHE 21ST CENTURY 58

Acknowledgements

The writing of this thesis was possible thanks to the financial support of the Mexican National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA) and the Mexican National Council on Science and

I

In a review published in The New York Times, writer Jorge Carrión suggests that Netflix’s production of the latest Black Mirror installment has been crucial for the global democratic interest in interactive narrative. Bandersnatch, a feature film framed in the popular science-fiction show, gives its viewers the possibility to decide what the protagonist of the story, an amateur video-game programmer in the 1980s, should do when he faces choices that go from what to have for breakfast to whether he should kill his father. Since these options are presented as visual verbal cues that prompt the viewer to click on one of two alternatives without interrupting the narrative flow, the general interactive appeal of such a massively consumed work is evident. As Carrión claims, the “most commented, viral, and historical of

Black Mirror’s episodes” has already become a “monstrous cultural phenomenon. The

novelty of its format, the quality of its script, and its mass distribution have challenged both cultural criticism and the collective intellect” (“Bandersnatch”; my translation). Although the actual formal innovation and narrative quality of Bandersnatch ought to be regarded, at least, skeptically, hardly can it be contested that Black Mirror’s incursion in narrative interactivity is salient not only because of its broad audience, but also because of how its structural and technological principles—in agreement with its science-fictional interests—transgress certain tenets of narrative theory.

According to Ian Christie and Annie van den Oever, “the twenty-first-century display devices and new screen technologies . . . all typically used by individuals, intimately and repetitively, [create] large cohorts of well-trained users in the process” (14). Bandersnatch could be regarded as the next logical step in the development of these narrative forms and users, for it incorporates the structural interface of web navigation and screen technology not only into its narrative form, but also into the story presented. Like many video games, the film relies heavily on the logic of trial and error, given that some of the narrative paths that the viewer can explore lead Stefan, the protagonist, to impasses that force the narrative to be retraced and resumed in a different direction. What is particular about this process, though, is that such repetitions and reconsiderations seem to be perceived by the character: as the narrative progresses, he has the increasing sensation that not only are the events reenacted, but also that he is not in complete control of his decisions. In one of the possible storylines, the viewer has the option to “communicate” with Stefan and confide to him that he is being controlled via Netflix, a streaming platform from the 21st century. This potential plot twist,

along with the fact that for Stefan and the viewer the whole narrative process is constructed and perceived linearly, necessarily draws attention to the actual science-fictional story presented by Bandersnatch. By addressing its own mechanisms and, particularly, its medium, the film becomes less about Stefan’s obsession with programming an innovative video game and more about the fictional and narrative affordances of our interaction with Netflix’s technology. In a way, the story is extended to the viewers’ here and now and constitutes them as its participants—its characters.

Tempting as it is to claim that Bandersnatch constitutes a new narrative mode, such an idea needs to be closely inspected and put to the test, since the potential for generalization and readily acceptance of that idea can also be limiting. That is what happens, for example, when Carrión wonders whether Bandersnatch is a series, a video game, or a book, prompted by the fact that the interactivity of the narrative, along with its arguable non-linearity, is dissonant with certain generic tenets of specific narrative forms (“Bandersnatch”). Therefore, in order to identify fully the broad reaches of a narrative innovation that is thought to rely on our current technologies, it seems necessary first to analyze the particular effects and suggestive reconceptualizations that interactive works, regardless of their medium, make of some of our basic concepts of narrative theory and practice. Although this thesis aims to suggest a theoretical frame which might help to address some of these reconceptualizations, its main focus lies on a particular literary work whose innovation, similar to that of Bandersnatch, brought to the fore almost twenty years ago aspects of narrativity that have not been made completely visible by literary criticism: Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000). Given its year of publication and its very peculiar form, this novel has been hailed as a prominent example of 21st-century literature, as various studies that deal with the work’s exploitation of its material qualities in an increasingly digital context and with the post-postmodern thematic concerns of a novel obsessed with deflecting interpretations evince.1

While my approach to the novel considers many of the aspects previously explored by other scholars, I analyze Danielewski’s book with attention to the ways in which it challenges and subverts narrative conventions in terms not only of content and structure, but also of its evincing the complex ways in which we have learned to interact with narrativity in different media. Rather than focusing on the diverse thematic and structural dimensions of the text— which, like those of Bandersnatch, might not be innovative in themselves, despite their transgressive form—I study the execution of the novel with an eye on the general implications

1 See Gibbons, Timmer, Van de Ven, Letzler, and Taylor for some examples of the ways in which House of Leaves has informed discussions on the aesthetic, rhetorical, and thematic dimensions of the novel in the 21st-century.

that such narrative experimentation has for the conception of literary narrative per se, particularly concerning the idea of immersion.

It is not gratuitous that I introduce my analysis of House of Leaves through a reference to the state-of-the-art technological interface of Bandersnatch, an audiovisual work of 2018. The arguments I advance might be deemed more suitable for a comparative analysis that considers a larger multimedia corpus. However, in focusing solely on Danielewski’s novel, one of my main objectives is to show how certain approaches to audiovisual narrative—films and video games, in particular—are not only applicable to House of Leaves, but also serve to signal the ways in which the novel stretches the general notions of narrativity and fictionality, arguably to test their limits. Specifically, I want to direct attention towards the spatial notion of fictionality, which, as I will explain, is the ultimate element that more decisively unifies novels, films, series, games, and other forms of narrative.2 _{As I show in the present thesis,} House of Leaves remains a relevant and useful work for contemporary literary history because

its innovative treatment of form, more than its form itself, underscores aspects of our ability to make sense of narrative patterns even when they are not explicitly presented. These claims might suggest a research partially based on the broad field of cognitive science, but what I argue is that House of Leaves evinces and takes advantage of our capacity and need to identify and trace stories to present a narrative whose effect heavily relies on the idea of immersion and interaction, very much in the way in which works like Bandersnatch more explicitly do. Ultimately, one of the objectives of this investigation will be to signal the process of immersion that House of Leaves exemplifies and that can be identified and analyzed in relation to other narrative discourses in different media.

I will approach House of Leaves from a narratological perspective since I am interested in underlining how the text deviates from certain norms. The particular theoretical framework I am interested in is Gérard Genette’s conception of narrative theory, given the many nuances that he spots for what he considers a system of wide reaches. Furthermore, the attention I pay in this thesis to House of Leaves is motivated by an interest similar to

2 I do not directly engage with the notion of hypertextual narrative as a unifying, trans-genre principle, although that would certainly be echoed in the approach that I propose. In fact, given the way I establish my methodology, it could be argued that the interactivity associated with hypertextuality—as defined and applied, for example, by Jay David Bolter and José Luis Orihuela (q.v.), respectively—is one of the reading strategies that amount to the experience of reading the kind of fiction I analyze here. Consequently, it is also important to say that, though the reading processes I will outline in the second and third chapters relate to the idea of interactive fiction—defined by N. Katherine Hayles and Nick Montfort (in the digital context) as “a text-based narrative in which the user is offered navigational possibilities, assets to pick up or refuse, virtual objects to view of manipulate, and a framework in which the user can win or lose” (452)—I am also avoiding this term for practical reasons.

Genette’s. By exploring the ways in which this 21st-century work deviates from the norms that Marcel Proust had helped Genette identify in his Narrative Discourse, se could establish that Danielewski also draws our attention to particular theoretical principles that have to be reformulated with the inception of new technologies that suppose, if not new modes of narration, at least new narrative boundaries. Ultimately, in this thesis I want to propose that

House of Leaves, given its transgressive execution, achieves an altogether different form of

literary storytelling. The narrativity of House of Leaves poses challenging questions concerning general assumptions of narrative theory and practice, so I argue that it is strikingly innovative because it addresses and stretches its own conceptualization as a feature endemic to all narrative texts in any medium.

In order to explain how House of Leaves subverts the basic tenets of narrative discourse according to what Genette and other theoreticians have established, I will devote the first chapter of this thesis to a revision of certain basic concepts of narratology to establish a common ground, at least terminologically, for what I explore. These concepts are narrative,

story, text, fiction, diegesis, mimesis, and the narrator, and their relevance for this analysis is

justified primarily by the fact that, in my reading of House of Leaves, they become problematic. Although the revision of such concepts might seem unnecessary—or too unwieldly—it is not aimed at presenting conclusive definitions; the immediate intention will be to expose the extent to which these concepts are usually taken for granted and how their reframing inside a work that does not conform to “traditional” narrative modes topples over the supremacy of such elements of narrativity. Nevertheless, of the concepts explored in the first chapter, fiction is the one to which I devote most attention since the idea of immersion I pursue touches on the spatial-like qualities of fictional worlds. This is why I explore the idea of fiction in terms of its direct relation to “material,” spatiotemporal qualities, as I will clarify. Overall, this revision of concepts is not meant to suggest that House of Leaves completely changes how literary texts are now written and read—even less so considering that, almost two decades after its publication, hardly can a literary text claim, to my knowledge, a similar degree of subversion like the one exposed here. House of Leaves shows the need to broaden the notions of narrativity.

In the second chapter, I will explore House of Leaves as a “play test” for narrativity. An attempt at a narratological analysis of the novel will allow me to outline the elements of narrative theory that are subverted, as well as to determine how the novel manages to make up for such alterations in order to still function as a novel. In fact, the initial emphasis of the second chapter will be placed on how House of Leaves complies with its generic classification

as a novel while challenging the basic principles of the genre. For this I will recur to Alastair Fowler’s theory of genre and then pay attention to the self-awareness of Danielewski’s work not as a novel but, at best, as a book. This chapter will establish that the construction of a unifying narrative is virtually impossible given the indeterminacy of the story itself, so more than a detailed close reading of the text I will refer to the general mechanisms and strategies that constitute specific interpretative paths.

In the third chapter, I develop from the lack of a single story—which is in itself a subversive move—to explore certain theoretical takes that help explain the implications of

House of Leaves as a novel that is structured as something unlike a novel. The main

theoretical frame that will serve as backbone to this analysis is Michał Głowiński’s concept of “formal mimetics,” as well as Umberto Eco’s idea of the “open work.” After dissecting the narrative mechanisms of Danielewski’s novel in the second chapter, here it will be possible to establish in what ways House of Leaves functions like Eco’s open work, and how it is that, by extension, the novel “contains” more than one possible story. Simple as this sounds, given our post-structural precepts regarding the plurality of meaning that can be stretched to suggest a variety of “texts,” I will delve precisely into the innovative execution of the book, which demands a high degree of engagement not only in hermeneutical terms, but also in relation to the novel’s completion. Given this specific type of reading process, the third chapter will also explore the broader theoretical suggestions of my critical analysis of the novel’s narrativity since its participatory dimension approaches the logic of immersion that I intend to outline. This last chapter will therefore connect the formal aspects of the novel and its complex narrativity with the spatiotemporal conceptualization of fictionality that I introduce in the first chapter. Developing mainly from the idea of immersion in video games, I address the almost literal implication of such a concept when grounded on the spatiality of fiction.

Finally, the conclusions of this thesis will briefly emphasize the relationship between Danielewski’s novel and the conceptualization of fiction and, by extension, the implications of reshaping the very idea of fiction in the 21st century. Specifically, I address how the narrativity of House of Leaves, supported by the metafictional and paratextual qualities of the book, along with the other aspects revised in the second chapter, constructs a seamless distinction between fiction and reality. Along with this idea and in order to propose a wider application of the methods and concepts to which House of Leaves gives way, I will also establish connections not only with other contemporary literary works, but also with works of other media that similarly engage with a subversive approach to fictional worlds. These links suggest a current general artistic interest in the notion of fictionality. Ultimately, in exploring

the ways in which House of Leaves reshapes and stretches the idea of fiction with which I am working here, such an analysis can add relevant insight not only to the study of the novel in the 21st century, but particularly to the broad cultural and artistic understanding that we have of fiction in its very broad, flimsy, and all-comprehending meanings.

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To begin exploring the ways in which House of Leaves subverts and stretches the aspects of narrativity that make it so innovative and relevant for narrative theory nowadays, it is necessary to outline the concepts which Danielewski’s book draws attention to by means of its noncompliance. This chapter focuses on identifying how such concepts have been generally established and the different uses that critics and theoreticians have given them. Logically, these notions cannot be said to have fully reached “definitive” meanings, so rather than determining an ultimate definition for each one, here I simply want to problematize some of the possible understandings of the concepts to signal how these terms become helpful for my analysis. Therefore, in order to better introduce the analysis of House of Leaves that I present in the second chapter, I will determine which acceptations I will adopt or I will suggest my own approach to the concepts, since such a methodological move goes hand in hand with the propositions I advance in this thesis.

I begin by explaining Gérard Genette’s conceptualization of narrative and narrative discourse as the amalgamation of three different concepts identifiable in narrative texts: the narrative, the story, and the narrating. This will be the main distinction from which my analysis of House of Leaves will draw its force, particularly aimed at exploring how the novel subverts Genette’s claims and the consequences that this subversion has for the general understanding of fiction. While such a concept—fiction—is the one that will ultimately guide the broader claims of this thesis (specifically in the third chapter), here I will only try to establish a terminological common ground to explain what I mean when I write about fiction. For this revision, Dorrit Cohn’s The Distinction of Fiction is helpful, so I will adopt to a certain extent her proposed conceptualization, which focuses on generic identification. Nevertheless, given that fiction is one of the most unstable concepts of narrative and literary theory—perhaps even up there with “literature” or “literariness”—I will also explore how “fiction” tends to be used and understood, let us say, instinctively. Since “fiction” is widely used and misused not only in the field of literary studies but also in everyday communication (Cohn, Distinction 2-9), I want to explore what fiction has come to mean and whether that meaning and its use align with how the concept is employed and theorized by literary critics. I will present a definition of fiction that serves as the backbone of my argumentation and which necessarily touches on Genette’s concept of diégèse—a concept that, very tellingly, the

narratologist adopted “from the theoreticians of cinematographic narrative” (Lewin in Genette, ND 27n2). After establishing the connections between my understanding of “fiction” and Genette’s “diégèse,” I will analyze how both concepts relate to the different modes of representation that theoreticians like Genette and David Bordwell describe—namely the distinction between mimésis and diégésis, Plato’s Greek words for two different narrative modes (Genette, ND 162). In doing this I intend to set the ground for a revision and theorization of the narrativity of House of Leaves in the second chapter, which will approach a discussion on mimésis and diégésis regarding the construction of a very peculiar type of

diégèse.3 _{Finally, following from the precepts that these modes of narration suppose, I will}

very briefly reflect on the notion and use of the narrator as a concept of narrativity; this exploration will be crucial for the understanding of my broader claims regarding how the narrative of House of Leaves is innovative in its incorporating and relying on the notion of immersion.

Text, Story, Narrating

As Genette clearly explains at the opening of Narrative Discourse, his early attempt to structure the study of narrative into a coherent system of concepts, “narrative” is a difficult and ambiguous term that begs clarification. Genette’s separation of narrative into three different terms to denote the main acceptations of the word remains useful because of its theoretical potentiality. First, he employs “narrative” to refer to “the oral or written discourse that undertakes to tell of an event or a series of events” (ND 25: my emphasis); specifically, this refers, in the case of literary printed texts, to the textual, linguistic component we come in contact with, for it represents “the signifier, statement, discourse or narrative text itself” (27). In the second place, Genette identifies the use of the word narrative to mean “the succession of events, real or fictitious, that are the subjects of this discourse” (25), and thus suggests the term “story” to signal this usage (27). Lastly, narrative is seen to mean “the event that consists of someone recounting something: the act of narrating taken in itself” (26), so Genette

3 Although in this paragraph I recur to the Greek and French terms, it is important to comment on the confusion that the similarity between diégèse and diégésis has brought about, particularly considering that both words tend to be translated as “diegesis” in English (Genette, NDR 18). This confusion might be credited for the fact that, despite what I consider the very helpful notion of diégèse to understand the innovation that interactive narrative works imply, the word remains “a term generally unfamiliar” in Anglophone theory and criticism (Lewin in Genette, ND 27n2). I provide more details regarding this discussion below, in another footnote. In the present thesis I will recur, whenever possible, to the Greek and French terms given that both notions are key aspects of my argument; employing the translation “diegesis” for both concepts would be confusing or require clarification with every incidence.

proposes “to use the word narrating for the producing narrative action and, by extension, the whole of the real or fictional situation in which that action takes place” (27).

In other words, Genette establishes a theoretical division of the term to come up with three different concepts that, as he demonstrates in his book, are useful not only because they have allowed critics and other theoreticians to identify the various formal nuances of narrative discourse, but also because it predisposes us to systematically recognize those very divisions.4

Therefore, in order to be able to explain the ways in which House of Leaves poses an important general consideration about narrative theory, I will use Genette’s division of concepts in principle, but I will make one change to the nomenclature to help make my arguments clearer in the following chapters. Whenever I say “narrative” I will mean the somewhat broad notion which revolves around narrative form and genre (narrative as something in which novels, films, short stories, video games, history books, or news reports participate, therefore not necessarily bound to an oral or written mode, as Genette has it). To avoid confusing this use of the generic term “narrative” with Genette’s own concept, in order to denote the textual instance which amounts to a specific literary work—i.e., the discourse as it is written, printed on the page—I will use the word “text,” which would in this case need to be emptied of its broader and more abstract acceptation.5 _{Whenever I refer to “the text” in}

analyzing House of Leaves, I will mean the words arranged and printed on the page, those that are quotable and carry the possibility of narrative and other hermeneutical approaches.

Although the aspects that this set of terms addresses are somewhat easy to spot— especially since narrative theory gained enough prominence in literary studies—it is important to specify that if “narrative” will be here used to denote every and any instance of a form of 4 Certainly, different critics have adopted different terms to refer to the same aspects, as Robert Dale Parker explains (62). He, for example, recurs to the trinomial tale-telling-narration, which reflects Genette’s story-narrative-narrating. In any case, “the binary opposition between the tale and the telling takes its inspiration from the Russian formalists [who] proposed a distinction between what they called . . . the fabula and the sjuzet . . . rendered in English as story and plot” (Parker 62). Yet, even if Parker’s terms “flow more easily across an English-speaking tongue and have a noticeable logic that makes them easier to remember” (62), I will stick to Genette’s terms mainly because I follow his own systematization of narrative discourse closely.

5 This seemingly innocent and superficial word-choice is not unproblematic. In “From Work to Text,” Roland Barthes suggests that “[t]he Text must not be thought of as a defined object” (74). Although my use of the word text, non-capitalized, does carry with it an important reference to the materiality and visualization of narrative discourse, it does not necessarily clash with Barthes’ understanding of Text. Nevertheless, since I intend to highlight the literal presentation of narrative discourse in the form of a text, I partially disagree with Barthes when he says that “[i]t would be useless to attempt a material separation of works and texts” (74). I say partially because, while he equates Text with the product of an “active collaboration” between the reader “who executes the work” (80) and the work itself, I use “text” specifically in relation to what Genette names “story,” “narrating,” and “narrative.” Simply put, for Barthes “the work is concrete, occupying a portion of book-space (in a library, for example); the Text, on the other hand, is a methodological field” (74). For me, the text is the printed language on a page. For the time being I will not delve into why I stubbornly intend to overemphasize the material separation of this aspect of narrative or why I recur to a word so theoretically (and ideologically) loaded, so for now let us merely establish that my use of “text” is not gratuitous.

discourse—literary, visual, cinematographic—that communicates a “story,” it is then necessary to further specify what qualifies as a story. In Narrative Discourse Revisited, tellingly, Genette further elaborates on what he considers a story:

For me, as soon as there is an action or an event, even a single one, there is a story because there is a transformation, a transition from an earlier state to a later and resultant state. “I walk” implies (and is contrasted to) a state of departure and a state of arrival. That is a whole story . . .” (19)

In pointing this out I simply want to draw attention to the fact that, although we know and

understand that stories and narrative are a phenomenon apparently related to their

communication and, thus, to language (any type of language), this does not mean that the potentialities of storytelling per se are subordinated to or conditioned by language. In fact, as Antonio Damasio explains, “the ‘natural pre-verbal occurrence of storytelling’ may be why drama and later written narratives emerged, ‘and why a good part of humanity is currently hooked on movie theaters and television screens’ . . . ‘movies are the closest external representation of the prevailing storytelling that goes on in our minds’” (Christie and Van den Oever 11). I do not intend to engage with these issues regarding the origins of storytelling, but I do want to establish, for the sake of the analysis below, that stories are not necessarily anchored to the narrative discourse—such as a text—that communicates them: the elements that constitute a story can exist outside of language—events occur, actions take place—but once such elements are reported in (what then becomes) a narrative, they amount to a story.6

Fiction and Fictionality

As I established in the introduction, the concept to which I give more prominence in my analysis of House of Leaves is fiction. I explore this only after determining what I understand by narrative—and the elements of narrative discourse—because the definition I will present in this section is clearly dependent on the abstraction of “story” that Genette suggests. Moreover, here I develop from the concept as explored by Dorrit Cohn, who “surveys the unsettling semantic multiplicity of the term fiction” (Distinction, viii). She claims that there are four specific uses given to the term—“fiction as untruth, fiction as conceptual abstraction, fiction as (all) literature, and fiction as (all) narrative” (2-9)—before explaining why the literary-critical meaning of fiction “needs to be limited to the genre of nonreferential narrative” (viii). Simply put, Cohn’s use of fiction has generic qualities that spring from the common

6 This will become clearer in the second chapter, since House of Leaves is the paradigmatic example which illustrates this idea in the present thesis.

distinction between fiction and nonfiction in terms of categorization. As she explains, there are texts that are narrative but are not to be included in the category of fiction, such as “historical works, journalist reports, biographies, and autobiographies, [which] are subject to judgements of truth and falsity” (15). Contrarily, nonreferential narrative works, “which include novels, short stories, ballads and epics, are immune to such judgements” (15).7

Although the term can be deemed specific and clear enough, I want to draw attention to a characteristic of fiction that I find crucial for any definition framed by the generic acceptation of the term—its general conceptualization, first and foremost, in relation to a world.

Dorrit Cohn’s own explanation of what nonreferentiality means already suggests the understanding of fiction I propose: “it signifies that a work of fiction itself creates the world to which it refers by referring to it” (Distinction 13; my emphasis). Cohn’s use of the word “world” clearly intends to help clarify her definition: the stories communicated by works of fiction do not seek to refer to “real” events that have taken place and which can be verified, for example, by historical records. To further examine this distinction, Cohn uses Paul Ricoeur’s words to explain that “literary narrative achieves something entirely alien to historical narrative: it creates for the reader ‘imaginary worlds’ that open ‘an unlimited career to the manifestation of time’” (Cohn, Distinction 9). Although Cohn seems to mirror Ricoeur’s conceptualization of fiction as necessarily related to “imaginary worlds,” she does not explore the implied spatial metaphorizing of the notion of fiction. In fact, though she notices Thomas G. Pavel’s specific use of the word “fiction” “in apposition to such words as

monde, univers, cosmogonie, espace, and distance” (Distinction 7), she dismisses the

relevance of such an understanding of fiction (it does not even make it into the four main competing meanings she explores). Such a deliberate neglect seems to be motivated by Pavel’s apparent use of “fiction” as “synonym for l’imaginaire and as antonym of le réel, referring to cultural phenomena that range from the dramas of Corneille to the palace of Versailles” (Cohn, Distinction 7). Yet, even if Pavel is “guilty” of such an unwieldly conceptualization of fiction,8 _{his Fictional Worlds, which addresses how the “theory of fiction}

7 This distinction is clear enough and somewhat easy to accept; nevertheless, it also poses a problem when confronted with what Cohn sees as the “considerable ideological freight” that equates “fiction” with narrative in general: “The motive force behind it is nothing less than the contemporary critique of the entire intellectual foundation of traditional historical practice—of the entire practice that is based on belief in the factuality of past events” (8). Without implying a rejection of such important philosophical concerns brought about by poststructuralism and postmodern thought, I will align with Cohn’s generic distinction of fiction mainly because I do not intend to question the fictionality of Danielewski’s novel.

8 The work to which Cohn refers here is the epilogue of Pavel’s L’Art de l’éloignement: Essai sur l’imagination classique (1996). Based on Cohn’s succinct description, it seems that the arguments presented in that book directly address some of the aspects of fictionality that I seek to explore; unfortunately, to my knowledge there is no translation of this book available in English or Spanish, but it would be a good source to consider for the

can respond . . . to the world-creating powers of imagination and account for the properties of fictional existence of worlds, their complexity, incompleteness, remoteness, and integration within the general economy of culture” (Pavel, Fictional 10), is a case in point that accounts for the inevitably spatial perception of fictional stories.

Pavel frames his study in the “recent philosophical work of fiction” hoping “that the result will enhance the interest of literary scholars” in said field (Fictional 10). I do not particularly develop from his analysis, but his general notion that “[p]ossible worlds can be understood as abstract collections of states of affairs, distinct from the statements describing those states, distinct thereby form the complete list of sentences kept in the book about the

world” (Fictional 50) further supports my understanding of “fiction.” Moreover, Pavel’s

claim echoes what I explained at the end of the previous section pertaining to how stories can in principle be abstracted without being anchored to the languages that ultimately (re)present them. Although the existence of a story can only be realized via its communication, its pre-verbal—or perhaps extra-verbal—occurrence goes hand in hand with how we understand “fiction” as a world. Simply put, if we understand fictionality as the quality through which a given work constitutes a possible world, it becomes increasingly evident that our use of spatial nouns to make sense of what fiction constructs—worlds, universes, realms, spaces— necessarily predisposes us to relate to fiction as if it referred to a place equivalent in tangibility to our empirical world. At a basic level, even the implied distinction between “a possible world” and “the real world”—or the more commonly employed formulas that insist on confronting “fiction” and “reality”—suggests that both are at the same level of abstraction. We clearly do not think that fiction constructs an actual material place, but we conceive and explain the concept as if it entailed a physically concrete space.

This idea can be further explained from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. As Gorge Lakoff and Mark Johnson elaborate in their influential Metaphors We Live by (1980),

[o]ur concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities . . . [M]ost of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. . . . The essence of metaphor is

understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. . . . Our

conventional ways of talking about [a concept] presuppose a metaphor we are hardly ever conscious of. The metaphor is not merely in the words we use—it is in [the] very concept . . . The language of [a concept] is not poetic, fanciful,

or rhetorical; it is literal. We talk about [concepts in a certain] way because we conceive of them that way—and we act according to the way we conceive of things. (3-5)

Following from this, I want to suggest that fiction can also be understood, at least for the sake of this thesis, as pertaining not only to nonreferential narrative, but also to the essentially “concrete” world, universe, or space which is constructed via narrative discourse. “Though it is no doubt futile,” as Cohn puts it, “to campaign for lexical reform” (Distinction 12), it is important for my argument to introduce this nuance to the generic acceptation of “fiction” for two main practical reasons. First, as I have established, I want to highlight and insist on the spatial-like metaphorizing of what fictional discourse does, so by equating this aspect of fictionality directly to the word “fiction” I intend to maintain such a feature at the very surface of the concept. In the second place, by deciding to connect the notion of spatial worlds to a term that is common currency to both academic and nonacademic contexts, I suggest that said notion is not simply a theoretically informed explanation of the nature of fiction, but rather a somewhat generalized implicit agreement rooted in the word itself. The understanding of

fiction as an (imaginary) world where the events narrated take place entails very little

theoretical knowledge: any person familiar with the notions of storytelling and fiction, in its generic sense, understands and conceptualizes the term, unconsciously, precisely according to a spatiotemporal metaphor. This is also why I opt to append this understanding to the term “fiction” instead of coming up with a different word or, for that manner, recurring to an already existing concept that seems to cover exactly what I am describing—Genette’s diégèse. Commonly rendered in English as “diegesis,” Genette adapted this French term from a concept, introduced by Etienne Souriau in “La Structure de l’univers filmique et le vocabulaire de la filmologie” (1948), which sought to contrast “the diegetic [diégétique] universe (the place of the signified) with the screen-universe (place of the film-signifier)” (Genette, NDR 17). Under this logic, “[diégèse] is the spatiotemporal world designated by the narrative” (Genette, Palimpsests 295); “the diégèse is therefore not the story but the universe in which the story takes place—universe in the somewhat limited (and wholly relative) sense in which we say that Stendhal is not in the same universe as Fabrice” (Genette, NDR 17-18). Despite the correspondence between this concept and the meaning of “fiction” that I am proposing, I have decided not to employ Genette’s word for two reasons that further insist on why adapting the word “fiction” is useful for my methodology. On the one hand, the term

“diegesis” already seems to have been rejected as a basic term of literary theory9_{; on the other,}

even if I find Genette’s concept helpful and inspiring for my theoretical approach to fiction, what I am proposing is a generalized democratic notion of “fiction” that goes beyond its being an exclusively theoretical tool.

Mimetic and Diegetic Theories of Narration

Although the confusion between Genette’s diégèse and Plato’s diégésis is a good enough excuse to revise the two different concepts, in this section I do not intend to insist on their dissimilarity; rather, I want to present the basic understanding of mimésis and diégésis as forms of “storytelling” because the distinction between the two lies at the core of my argument. My use of scare quotes in the previous sentence aptly highlights the issue, and H. Porter Abbott’s succinct definition of “mimesis” is a good place to begin addressing it. For Abbott, mimesis is “[t]he imitation of an action by performance. According to Plato, mimesis is one of the two major ways to convey a narrative, the other being diegesis or the representation of an action by telling. By this distinction, plays are mimetic, epic poems are diegetic” (193).10 _{In other words, “[d]iegetic theories conceive of narration as consisting}

either literally or analogically of verbal activity: a telling. This telling may be either oral or written. . . . Mimetic theories conceive of narration as the presentation of a spectacle: a showing” (Bordwell, Narration 3). Bearing such a distinction in mind, then, it is crucial to realize that “story-telling” can also be thought of as “story-showing,” when the medium requires it.

9 As far as I know, Brian McHale is one of the few theoreticians that uses “diegesis” in the sense that Genette proposes, which is logical—and useful—given McHale’s work on postmodernist literature and its characteristic narrative strategy of “embedded or nested worlds” (McHale 113). In turn, Mieke Bal acknowledges and uses concepts like “diegetic narrator” (Narratology 2nd ed. 163), “diegetic focaliser,” “diegetic . . . and the extra-diegetic world” (“Over-writing” 349, 374), “extra-diegetic universe,” “extra-diegetic level,” and even the types of narrator as determined by the narrator’s “position” in the story-world—hetero-, homo-, auto-, extra-, and intradiegetic (“The Narrating” 236-238). Although her use of such terms has tellingly decreased, judging by the latest edition of her Narratology (4th ed., 2017), as far as I can affirm, never has she used the word “diegesis” to mean the fictional world. The same happens in Cohn’s The Distinction of Fiction. Another case in point is Thomas G. Pavel, who despite being familiar with Genette’s terminology of diegetic levels—as evinced in an article published in 1985 (“Literary Narratives” 38)—does not recur to the term “diegesis” in his already quoted Fictional Worlds (1986). As a last example, Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon do understand, via Gerald Prince, the notion of “diegesis” as “the (fictional) world in which the situations and events narrated occur” (Prince 20), and accordingly they elaborate on the categories of extra-, hetero-, homo-, auto-, and intradiegetic narrators (Bortolussi and Dixon 63-64). Yet they present this very understanding of “diegesis” in opposition to “mimesis,” which for them refers to “the manner in which the story is presented, that is, the discourse” (63)—clearly a confusion between the French diégèse and the Greek diégésis, such as Genette tried to avoid (NDR 17). 10 After this, Abbott says that “Aristotle . . . used the term ‘mimesis’ as simply the imitation of an action and included in it both modes of narrative representation” (193). Instead of trying to outline and get involved in the not-unimportant controversies that such terminological instability regarding “mimesis” has given way to, for the following analysis I will stick to Plato’s basic distinction.

From this basic distinction it can be established that the main aspect to consider when determining whether we are dealing with mimésis or diégésis has to do directly with how the

story is communicated: if we read it or hear it told by someone—i.e., verbally—then the mode

of narration is diégésis. If in contrast we see the story—the actions, the characters performing those actions—represented before our eyes, then we have mimésis. Consequently, mimesis tends to be associated with the practice and product of imitation, which in this context needs to be understood as a copying that, in accordance with the Platonic notion of mimesis, focuses on visual, material, and/or auditory aspects. Realist paintings, for example, seek to represent objects, situations, and people found in “concrete reality” (Barthes, “Reality Effect” 14) by means of the visual similarity between the things imitated and the shapes rendered in the painting. Similarly, a play (re)presents a story via real people—the actors—who are pretending to be the characters who perform certain actions and enunciate certain dialogues. In turn, a literary text cannot present us a story via objects, characters, or actions in a visual, auditory, or material way; we can visually recreate these elements in the metaphysical world constructed by the narrative, but the means by which the story is communicated remains verbal—i.e., literary narratives are the quintessential form of diégésis.11

And yet, even if the Platonic theory of modes of representation seems to be categorical in its distinction, literature has been subjected to a mimetic approach. Nevertheless, Genette considers that, when applied to the novel, “the barely transposed terms of showing and

telling” have to be more closely examined and questioned:

the very idea of showing, like that of imitation or narrative representation (and even more so, because of its naively visual character), is completely illusory: in contrast to dramatic representation, no narrative can “show” or “imitate” the story it tells. All it can do is tell it in a manner which is detailed, precise, “alive,” and in that way give more or less the illusion of mimesis—which is the only narrative mimesis, for this single and sufficient reason: that narration, oral or written, is a fact of language, and language signifies without imitating. (ND 163-164)

Wayne C. Booth also elaborates on the imitative aspect of narrative and, after analyzing how certain literary strategies can be explained and accepted with reference to their “visual” (re)presentation—such as the concept of “point of view”—he insists that this type of narration is always subjected to the ever-present authorial judgements that determine which parts of a

11 This is one of the main principles that I associate with the innovation of House of Leaves, for Danielewski’s novel works as a counterexample to this generalization. This I explore in the second chapter.

story are communicated and how they are presented (20). In other words, both Genette and Booth help us establish that “narration, by definition diegetic, cannot be mimetic, that it can only create a stronger or weaker illusion of mimesis” (Bal, “The Narrating” 235).

Clear as this principle seems to be, Genette then takes it as an excuse to explore what he considers the only way in which a novel can actually imitate, and that is when “the object signified (narrated) [is] itself language. . . . The truth is that mimesis in words can only be mimesis of words” (ND 164). This suggestion motivates Genette to establish a distinction between a “narrative of events” and a “narrative of words,” which I find important to detail here—still subordinated to the concepts of mimésis and diégésis—because this idea aptly connects to the reading of House of Leaves that I present in the next chapter. Developing still from the Platonic distinction, Genette argues that

[t]he narrative of events . . . whatever its mode, is always narrative, that is, a transcription of the (supposed) nonverbal into the verbal. . . . The strictly textual mimetic factors [in a narrative text] come down to those two data already implicitly present in Plato’s comments: the quantity of narrative information (a more developed or more detailed narrative) and the absence (or minimal presence) of the informer— . . . the narrator” (ND 166).

Genette establishes that “‘[s]howing’ can be only a way of telling” and that “this way consists of both saying about it as much as one can, and saying this ‘much’ as little as possible” (ND 166). In other words, Genette considers that the less visible a narrator is, the stronger the illusion of mimesis will be—as in Hemingway’s “The Killers,” which Genette takes as a canonic example of the “transparency of the narrator” (166).

Genette then explains that “[i]f the verbal ‘imitation’ of nonverbal events is simply a utopia of illusion, the ‘narrative of words’ can, by contrast, seem condemned a priori to that absolute imitation which . . . would, it if truly presided over the creation of words, make of language a reduplication of the world” (ND 169). Genette’s own example of this principle is helpful to clarity how he understands the “narrative of words”:

When Marcel [in A la recherché du temps perdu] declares to his mother, “It is absolutely necessary that I marry Albertine,” there is no difference between the statement present in the text and the sentence purportedly spoken by the hero other than what derives from the transition from oral language to written. The narrator does not narrate the hero’s sentence; one can scarcely say he imitates it: he recopies it, and in this sense one cannot speak here of narrative. (ND 169)

Genette’s notions are problematic in these respects because in trying to stick to Plato’s conceptualization of mimésis and diégésis, he understands literary narrative texts to be of a “mixed” nature: “[d]iégésis . . . is contrasted with mimésis. Diégésis is pure narrative (without dialogue), in contrast to the mimémis of dramatic representation and to everything that creeps into narrative along with dialogue, thereby making narrative impure—that is, mixed” (NDR 18). What this position disregards, nonetheless, is the fact that Genette is taking textual narrative strategies—such as dialogue—to stand for the medium which grants the novel, for instance, its categorization as a form associated with diégésis. Verbal narration does allow a narrator to render the words of a character “directly,” but if we stick to the notion of mimésis than entails a form of visual, auditory, or material imitation, then Genette’s concerns regarding the imitation of language fall outside the logic of the conceptualization here adopted. After all, even if Genette pays special attention to what he considers the most extreme instance of this “mimesis of speech” (ND 173)—the consciousness of a character in the form of an “interior monologue”—it is still the case that the means by which we are told what happens in the minds of these characters remains verbal.

My point is therefore to establish that the telling of a story is generally an affair of written or oral language. A novel composed mainly of words (the text) that communicate a series of events (the story), regardless of how visual its narrative verbal techniques are, ought to be regarded as an exercise of diégésis. Therefore, although I disregard Genette’s notion that the dramatization of dialogues or of mental processes in written form is to be considered an instance of mimésis, the following analysis of House of Leaves suggests that there is another aspect of the “mimesis of words” that Genette does not take into account and that is clearly the main principle behind the narrativity, singularity, and innovation of Danielewski’s novel. Because while Genette is right in saying that language can act “mimetically” only when language itself is the object of imitation, he focuses on the oral and “psychological” (Cohn,

Transparent 77) dimensions of language and neglects another dimension that is more prone to

be actually imitated in written form: written language. Obvious as this might sound, when

House of Leaves is considered paying attention to this mimetic principle which highlights,

first and foremost, its written textuality, its narrative particulars are brought to the fore: as I show in the next chapter, House of Leaves employs mimésis in a way that entirely relies on the imitation of the visual and somewhat material aspects of language, since far from recurring to detailed descriptions that “hide” the telling of the story, Danielewski constructs a text that entails the “dramatization” of a story. Seen in this way, House of Leaves aligns more directly to the “showing” of a story than to its “telling.”

The Narrator

Lastly, and in direct relation to the Platonic modes of narrative representation, it is important to make a few remarks about the role and function of the narrator to establish a common ground and problematization. I develop this explanation mainly from Seymour Chatman’s given that in his analysis of the discourse of narrative he considers the figure of the narrator in relation to the imitation of written language that Genette overlooks and which is key for my analysis of House of Leaves. Wondering about the ways in which an audience comes in contact with a particular “narrative statement”—i.e., “[a] certain posture in the ballet, a series of film shots, a whole paragraph in a novel, or only a single word” (146)—Chatman holds that the direct and mediated forms of presentation align with “Plato’s distinction between mimesis and diegesis . . . between showing and telling” (146). A direct representation would be “mimetic” and a mediated one would be “diegetic.” Equating this basic principle with what I explained before—that literary narration cannot be mimetic inasmuch as it is dependent on verbalism—it follows that “[i]nsofar as there is telling, there must be a teller, a narrating voice” (Chatman 146). The presence of the narrator, then, is such an imperative for any literary narrative text that we might even wonder whether there can be diegetic narration without a narrator.

Simply put, the narrator is “[t]he one who narrates, as inscribed in the text” (Prince 55). This vague definition gives way to many possible spaces of indeterminacy, but understanding the notion of narrator as separate from the concepts of real author, implied author, real reader, implied reader, and narratee is useful to pinpoint the essentially discursive,

textual presence of narrators. Chatman delves into an exploration of all these terms because

“[t]o understand the concept of narrator’s voice (including its ‘absence’) we need to consider three preliminary issues: the interrelation of the several parties to the narrative transaction, the meaning of ‘point of view’ and its relation to voice” (147). For the sake of the present study it is not necessary to repeat what Chatman suggests, yet it is important to draw attention to his notion of “nonnarrated stories” (146) because in suggesting the “absence” of a narration, and thus of a narrator, this idea helps me to delimit further the conceptualization of the narrator that I pursue.12

12 In fact, Chatman comments: “I say ‘nonnarrated’: the reader may prefer ‘minimally narrated,’ but the existence of this kind of transmissions is well attested” (147). In other words, Chatman seems to recognize the impossibility of actually having a novel with no narration, which makes sense considering that the examples from which he develops his arguments, as I will further explain in this section, do include narrators that directly present the stories in question. However, I am interested in adopting Chatman’s concept of “nonnarrated story” to more fittingly apply it to House of Leaves in the next chapter, so it is still pertinent to elaborate on why

According to Chatman,

[o]f all the forms of literary narrative those that pretend to be constituted by found letters and diaries least presuppose a narrator. If we insist upon an agent beyond the implied author, he can only be a mere collector or collator. . . . He is not even responsible for direct reports of characters’ physical actions, but presents only their literal written artifacts. . . . His presence can only be made known by means of footnotes or a preface. (169)

Epistolary novels are indeed one of the paradigmatic examples that serve to highlight the essential separation between a narrator in charge of telling a story and a character whose writing activity does not necessarily intend to relate the story that a work seeks to tell, even if a given letter or entry communicates certain happenings, impressions, and overall personal points of view that inform the plot. In other words, “[t]hough letters or diary-entries may and often do narrate, they need not. A story can be cast in epistolary form in which every sentence expresses only the then-and-there relationship between the correspondents. In this instance, it is no less ‘dramatic’ than if the interchange were through pure dialogue marked off by quotation marks” (Chatman 170).

Chatman refers for example to Pierre Choderlos De Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782), a paradigmatic epistolary novel. In the Editor’s Preface of this work, the (clearly fictive) editor affirms: “When I was commissioned to collate these letters by the persons into whose possession they had come and who, as I was aware, were intending to have them published, my only request in return for my effort was to be allowed to prune anything which I considered superfluous” (Laclos). While the presence of these “persons” to whom the letters supposedly belonged could be vaguely associated with the notion of an authorial figure, this editor further claims: “In fact, I have retained only those letters which seemed to me necessary for the understanding of the events or the development of the characters” (Laclos). To a certain extent, the editor then becomes a sort of narrator since he is the one determining the means by which the “plot” and the development of the “characters” are to be executed. Furthermore, the suggestion that there are letters that are not necessary for the story indicates that the characters writing the letters are not deliberately engaging in the telling of a story as much as the editor is—or at least not the story the editor is perceiving. The writers of the letters are mere characters who could be regarded as intradiegetic narrators, but none of them becomes the narrator of Laclos’ novel. In this respect, what Chatman qualifies as “dramatic”

of an epistolary exchange is to be understood in relation to a dramatic representation, more akin to the mimetic notion of storytelling (storyshowing). As such, the nonnarrated aspect of a novel like Les Liaisons dangereuses resides not in its lack of narrative discourse—each letter contributes, to a higher or lesser degree, with the retrospective narration of specific events from the perspective of each writer-character—but rather in its lack of a narrator that directly

tells the story of which such writers are characters. In other words, the story is constructed by

means of the fragmentary accounts of various narrators that are, at the same time, the characters of a broader story in which their exchanging letters is one of the events. They become clear intradiegetic narrators.

It can be established, then, that the notion and presence of the narrator is tightly weaved into the mode and, therefore, the means of narration. Despite the fact that the epistolary novel and other similar literary forms that develop from the trope of “already written documents” (Chatman 169) play with the concept of dramatization, the intrinsically narrative nature of the verbal discourses contained in such texts necessarily anchors the “showing” of the story to the telling of said story by means of one or more character-narrators. The mimetic dimension that is related to the dramatic is exclusively seen in terms of the “imitation” of a written document, not of the showing of a story. This is clearly not the case in cinema, a useful example of the mimetic mode of representation, for instance. As Bordwell affirms, “the narrator, whatever its status in literature, is an unnecessary and misleading personification of the narrative dynamics of film” (Poetics 122). In fact, he goes as far as to counter a general theoretical take that argues that “[n]arrative as a concept, regardless of medium, requires a narrator” (Poetics 123). His proposal, rather, is “that in cinema, narration as a process encourages us to build up the story, including the voices and behaviors of narrators, but no narrator comparable to those agents is logically required to give us narration as a whole. . . . Who produces the narrational process? The filmmakers” (Poetics 123).

Bordwell’s conceptualization of the narrator—or lack thereof—in cinema, which identifies the filmmakers as the ones constituting the narrative process, is similar in essence to Chatman’s “agent beyond the implied author” whose presence is evinced by seemingly paratextual elements—i.e., also “outside” of the narrative discourse per se. Nevertheless, it is important to realize that while in cinema the narration is constituted by everything audiovisual, in literary narration the story is presented, however fragmentarily, only by the verbal accounts of characters/narrators. The question is then not so much one of who is/are telling the story, but rather of how said story is communicated. In Laclos’ novel, even if we

have an external agent who collects and edits the letters to better present the story, the actual events and progression of the narrative discourse is directly associated with what the characters relate; there is still a notion of reporting on actions to communicate precisely the

events. In other words, it can be established that to every narrator corresponds an imperative

ingredient of intentionality: whether hetero- or homodiegetic, narrators are in general knowingly relating a story.13 _{In the case of epistolary narrative, even if the different characters}

are not engaging in the telling of one specific story, what they write still becomes the constituting element of the broader story in which they participate: the reader still knows what occurred and gets a notion of the progression of events because of what the characters recount. The writing characters of epistolary narrative can thus be logically regarded as “the narrators,” even if there is a broader, more absent agent in charge of arranging and highlighting the narrativity of the collection of texts.

*

As I established before, the execution of House of Leaves directly engages with the theoretic narrative principles and concepts that I addressed in this chapter. Having provided more or less detailed explanations of the general ways in which these concepts can be understood, I now turn to Danielewski’s work paying special attention to the novel’s compliance and noncompliance with these narrative precepts that, I believe, are decisive for the conceptualization of narrative as a form of discourse in different media.

13 Take, for example, Tristram Shandy, Nick Carraway, or Humbert Humbert, who are not only characters in the novels to which they belong, but also the narrators that willingly engage in the action of recounting certain aspects of their lives. Consider as well the paradigmatic cases of the narrators in Pride and Prejudice or Mrs. Dalloway; although these do not directly state or evince any awareness of their being in the act of telling a story, their role as narrators is constituted by the fact that they are clearly telling a story, and that that is their sole purpose in the sense that their “existence” would not be possible were it not for the fact that they are relating a story.

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Having explained what I consider to be the general notions of narrative and fiction, I will now analyze how House of Leaves deviates from the theoretical norms and then proceed to address where exactly its narrative subversion lies. In order to do so, it is important first to draw attention and acknowledge the importance of generic classification because that is, after all, what motivates the need to identify a narrative discourse and a story in House of Leaves. Since questioning the generic classification of Danielewski’s work as a novel would be off the point, by revising the workings of genre theory I intend to signal the ways in which this book poses certain considerations for the conception of the novel as a genre. This analysis will aim not only to explore the innovative narrative potential of the book’s form but also to determine how this take on narrativity already suggests a different type of novel and unconscious reading mechanisms. Simply put, the questions that I am interested in addressing in this chapter are the following: Is there narration in House of Leaves? Would this question not cast doubt over the simplest notion that might establish the fictionality of the book? How correct is it to refer to Danielewski’s novel as a novel, without first questioning the concept? As I hope to clarify, these particulars are enough to argue for a decisively different mode of narration, so the aim is to revise how House of Leaves implicitly manages to stretch the generic and conceptual precepts of the novelistic genre.

Generic Competence

According to Marthe Robert, critics tend to avoid questioning the generic distinction of the novel because the concept is somewhat “undefined and virtually undefinable” (5). Yet, such questioning can be omitted precisely because genres are, rather unconsciously, recognized and recognizable. To better explain this principle, Alastair Fowler presents a theory of genre that derives from the notion of family resemblance developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Fowler suggests that there are no formal elements indispensable for the association of a given work with a specific group of texts, given that the characteristics of a work are always shared among others that, similarly, include other components that connect them to other genres (39). After all, even the idea that novels are always written in prose is a generalization that does not stand when the existence of novels in verse, for example, is considered.

Instead, as Fowler establishes, “[i]n literature, the basis for resemblance lies in literary tradition. What produces generic resemblances, reflection soon shows, is tradition: a sequence of influence and imitation and inherited codes connecting works in the genre. As kinship makes a family, so literary relations of this sort form a genre” (42). Vague as this proposition sounds, it accounts for the altogether “naturalized” way in which genres are understood, produced, and made sense of: “Acquisition of generic competence appears to be a complicated and lengthy process. As with language acquirement, it is never complete. A mature and competent reader of literature finds many works unidentifiable generically, at any level of consciousness, and still cannot respond to certain genres, even after they have been identified” (Fowler 45). Moreover,

the theory of family resemblance also suggests that we should be on the lookout for unexhibited, unobvious, underlying connections between the features (and the works) of a genre. As with heredity, with generic tradition too we have to expect quite unconscious processes to be at work, besides those that readers are aware of. It would be strange if genre did not in part operate unconsciously, like other coding systems within language and literature. (Fowler 43)

Fowler’s theory makes a point for the porous, artificial boundaries between genres, further elaborating on Jacques Derrida’s idea of generic “participation without belonging” (Derrida 59) and rightly arguing that “[i]n literary communication, genres are functional: they actively form the experience of each work of literature” (Fowler 38). Ultimately, Fowler claims that genre theory is “properly concerned, in the main, with interpretation. It deals with principles of reconstruction and interpretation and (to some extent) evaluation of meaning. It does not deal much with classification” (38). It is under this logic that paying attention to genre becomes stimulating; therefore, when thinking about House of Leaves in these terms, I am dealing more with the question “What does it mean for the genre to consider House of Leaves a novel?” than with the less fruitful question “What does it mean for House of Leaves to be considered a novel?”

In any case, following Fowler’s idea that literary family resemblance has tradition and inheritance at its core, the raise of the novel needs to be understood in relation to the development of fiction. In her essay “The Rise of Fictionality,” Catherine Gallagher affirms that “[n]o feature of the novel seems to be more obvious and yet more easily ignored that its fictionality” (336). She elaborates on the reasons why fictionality tends to be overlooked