Chapter Two: House of Leaves as a Filmicalized Novel

Chapter Two: House of Leaves as a Filmicalized Novel

House of Leaves (hereafter referred to as House) is Mark Z. Danielewski´s debut novel that

presents the reader with a true postmodern artifact. Relying on narrative conventions such as

metafiction, self-reflexivity, maximalism and pastiche, House unfurls a narrative world that

transfers the visceral sensations of a horror movie into 700-odd pages of technically

accomplished prose. These conventions are embedded in the text in imaginative ways:

sweeping footnotes are used to devise a story-within-a-story, creative typographyarrangements

are used to activate sensory experiences of events and a body of real and fictitious academic

commentary is implanted to parody academia and literary criticism. Taken together these

writing devices deliver a non-linear reading experience breaking up the narrative with

alternating registers, fonts and narrative levels.

House is more than a story. It is quite literally the story of a story-within-a-story. At the

heart of Danielewski’s novel is the story of Will Navidson: an award-winning photojournalist

who decides to record his family’s move into a new house on Ash Tree Lane. Relying on a

range of audio visual recording equipment such as motion activated camcorders, he films the

day to day activities of his family: his partner, Karen Green, and his two children, Chad and

Daisy. The household mood, however, takes a turn for the worse when Will Navidson discovers

an impossibility: the house is bigger on the inside than on the outside. The impossible space

transforms the house into an uncanny place and even conjures up a dark doorless hallway with

shifting walls and rooms. The remaining footage depicts five explorations of the interior of the

supernatural hallway. The group of explorers include four adventurers—Holloway Roberts,

Wax Hook, Billy Reston and Jed Leeder—later joined by Will Navidson and his brother Tom.

The final product is edited by Will Navidson (and reluctantly by Karen) and released as The

Navidson Record.

Built one level up from The Navidson Record is the narration of a story by an old blind

man named Zampanò. His narrative level mimics a collection of quasi-academic critiques of

The Navidson Record, which he had written but left unfinished at the time of his death. They

are later found by the protagonist of the third narrative level: Johnny Truant, an apprentice

tattoo artist living in Los Angeles. Truant’s story begins when he moves into Zampanò’s vacated apartment and finds the old man’s unfinished critique, which is so mysterious that he decides to collect and assemble its disjointed pieces into a cohesive manuscript. Truant’s story

is recounted in extensive footnotes to Zampanò’s text. Finally, the upper most level consists of

the Editors who have published Truant’s manuscript titled House of Leaves—allegedly the first

edition of the actual book that the reader has in his or her hands. The Editors make few

appearances and only to address the reader in the Foreword, Appendix and in a handful of

footnotes throughout the text. House opens with the narrator, Johnny Truant, describing how

he has just found an unfinished manuscript of old man Zampanò in a box in his apartment. The

multistrand stories—which are The Navidson Record, Zampanò’s critique and Truant’s

experience revising the critique—are provided to the reader only through the narrative levels

of Truant and the Editors.

House has been fortunate enough to garner praise from both academia and from a legion

of cult followers, whose presence is most visible across the internet in discussion forums and

personal blogs. In academic circles, much of the critical discourse has been guided by scholars

who see the novel as a commentary on the nature of the current digital media environment or,

in a related fashion, as a prime example of a traditional artform that succeeds in reinventing

itself in the digital age (Bilsky 137–38). Some of these critics’ opinions include descriptions of the novel as “media technical” (Hansen 598; original italics), “[a novel that] locates the book

within the remediations of the digital era” (Hayles, Writing Machines 128), or “[a novel that]

depicts both individual and family at the mercy of the nihilism of forces of mediation and

simulation (Holland 91). What each of these readings of House echoes is the sentiment that

House is a postmodern novel pressing an agenda that corresponds with the media environment

of the twenty-first century. Taking a similar point of departure, I propose to analyze House

from the perspective of how technology in the twenty-first century intersects with the novel’s narrative—more specifically, I favor a close scrutiny of the filmicmedium,with theassumption

being that its inherent characteristics and affordances underpin both the content and form of

the novel.

The genre of the filmicalized novel is precisely a novel that joins film and novel in an

intermedial “performance”involvingthe affordances of each medium. An affordance—of film,

novel or any other object for that matter—can be described “as a quality or utility which is readily apparent or available [to each medium]” (“Affordance”). To make the definition more

concrete, it is perhaps useful to understand affordances as the “perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could

possibly be used (Norman qtd. in Serpell 227). Indeed, as Chapter One attempted to show, it

has often been the case that novelists were interested in the unique properties that film could

contribute to narrative storytelling. For example, unlike the novel which relies primarily on the

poetics of language, film relies on images and thus “mak[es] its appeal to the perceiving senses (Bluestone 20). Conversely, the novel also lacks the formal affordances that film commands— namely, visual stimuli. Thus the absence of direct access to a visual component of narrative

construction is something writing can and has often strived for. Given the extent to which

lexical and filmic qualities are intermixed in the narrative world of House, there is certainly an

authorial intent to achieve some degree of cross-pollination between both media. The

understanding of just how explicitly film is foregrounded in the narrative levels of the text is

the subject of the remaining chapter.

In the midst of the complex narrative structure of House, the filmic medium crops up

in the form of filmic modes. Central to the narrative world are two salient examples of filmic

modes: a documentary film and filmic writing in the sense of camera movement evoked

typographically. Firstly, the documentary film The Navidson Record, which is mediated to the

reader through Zampanò is arguably the most predominant filmic mode because not only does

it serve as the core narrative level of House, but it is also narrated, to a large extent, mimetically

as if the film was actually being screened and watched. In a similar manner as readers are

“asked” to suspend belief in order to read a work of fiction, so too in House the reader is meant

to treat the events of The Navidson Record as sitting in on a critical film viewing. Although it

may succeed to varying degrees, the references to the filmic medium in the narrative of House

invite the reader to “see” the events of The Navidson Record as they would an actual home

movie. The verbal text, while remaining the dominant medium that conveys the mimesis of

filmic shots, purposefully delegates some of its authority over the reader’s imaginative faculties to the filmic medium. This is apparent throughout The Navidson Record because of specific

filmic words that are used time and again. These words are what Ellen Esrock denominates as

“references to visual perception” and may imply that a character’s “connection to reality is based on sight rather than sound (197). Examples in House include phrases such as “These shots are” (House 9), “It is a beautiful shot” (House 29), “With superb crosscutting” (House

56), “We can see how” (House 91), “Billy Reston glides into frame” (House 97). Scholar Ellen

Esrock, in her book The Reader’s Eye, researched the impact of mental imagery on the reading

experience. Drawing on an array of perspectives concerning readers’ response to texts as well

as studies in cognitive psychology, she provides a synthesis of some salient ways that

visualization complements the reading process: one element is how “[visual] [i]maging

positions the reader within the text” (Esrock 196). Referring to a study by C. Giesen and J.

Peeck in which readers were asked to visualize when reading a short story by Maxim Gorki,

Esrock points out that visualizing leads to better recall of concrete information and to the filling

in of details not actually present in the text (qtd. in Esrock 127). This, C. Giesen and J. Peeck

conclude positively, demonstrates that visualization affects and heightens “[a] reader’s active

involvement in the reading of literature” (qtd. in Esrock 128). From this perspective, it can be

said that the filmic medium is used as a narrative device to increase readers’ immersion in the

text. Here it functions by offering readers the opportunity to visualize The Navidson Record as

spectators along with Zampanò, who from this vantage point, becomes a quasi-voice over

narrator.

Since The Navidson Record is a filmic mode present in the narrative of House,

according to Schwanecke’s research outlined in Chapter One, it should be described and

characterized along the three factors “what”,“how”, “where”,as the opening step forextracting

meaning from filmic modes in a literary text. First, then, to address “what” characteristics of the filmic medium are represented, Schwanecke’s “four different conceptual categories” for characterizing filmic modes allows The Navidson Record to be described as constituting a

“specific media product[s]” (275)—namely, the genre of documentary film. Second, with

regard to “how” filmic modes are present in the narrative, following Rajewsky’s (2005; 2011) terminology, it can be said that The Navidson Record—a documentary film—is an example of

a direct intermedial reference given that it overtly signifies one particular element in the

constellation of technologies that are connected to the filmic medium. Third, “where”, or on

which textual level this particular filmic mode appears, it can be said that it appears in the

intradiegetic level—that is to say, “inside the story” that is narrated by Truant and which comes to be the story of Zampanò’s project or academic critique (Herman et. al 107).4 In this manner,

it is possible to systematically encircle the occurrence of filmic modes in the text. However,

4 I have borrowed the terminology from Gerard Genette’s work on narratology and classification of narrative levels. See. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E Lewin, Cornell University Press, 1988.

what is still in need of examination is the function of the filmic mode and how it relates

thematically to the narrative.

The filmicalized novel, as I have defined it in Chapter One, must engage film at the

thematic level. In House although many themes can be inferred from out of its pages, one of

the most pertinent themes is critic Mary Holland’s view that “House of Leaves recuperates a

model of the family from within postmodernism” (91). According to Holland, interpersonal

relations are threatened on all sides throughout the narrative by “mediating material [such as] appendices, photos and an index that creates its own fictions. . . constructing and reconstructing

what has come before [in the narrative]” (103). In this view, it is the various forms of

technology and other forms of media, with their multidirectionality, that cloud human

connections. As part of the constellation of recording and reproducing technologies, the filmic

medium is introduced from the outset as a strategy to destabilize the plot and the narrators, but

it is also offered as means of recuperation. The filmic mode’s destabilizing effect is extended

via Truant’s introductory passage in which he reveals a major caveat in the narrative world:

The Navidson Record is nonexistent—a rather paradoxical detail given the nature of

documentary films. Truant writes:

After all I fast discovered, Zampanò’s project is about a film that does not exist . . . no matter

how long you search you will never find The Navidson Record in theatres or video stores.

Furthermore, most of what’s been said by famous people has been made up. (House xx; my

italics).

In his research on the history of documentary film, Bill Nichols explains that “[t]he documentary tradition relies heavily on being able to convey an impression of authenticity

(Introduction xi). Thus, if authenticity is a defining aspect of this medium, it is revealing that

Danielewski elects to jeopardize its characteristic strength in the opening scene when Truant

tells readers that this trusted medium is actually fictitious. By proclaiming the nonexistence of

The Navidson Record, Truant inverts the preconceived notion that associates documentary film

with a model of authenticity and forces the reader into a position whereby he or she must, from

the outset, question the reliability of the narrative and narrators as a whole. In a sense, if the

whole narrative is unhinged even before the events of the plot unfold, then everything contained

within the narrative world is also imperiled by the surrounding entropy. Nonetheless, out of all

narrative levels, the events of The Navidson Record are the most imperiled and almost to the

point of erasure. According to Brian McHale, under erasure or the process of introducing and

then erasing “presented objects in a projected world” functions by “destabilizing the ontology of this projected world and simultaneously laying bare the process of world-construction” (100–101). The filmic mode represented by The Navidson Record, thus, becomes a narrative

device that fulfills the process of erasure, a feature in many postmodernist texts. For not only

do all the objects contained within The Navidson Record become unreal, but also the narrative

levels of Truant and Zampanò become unreliable since throughout the whole text their

intradiegetic narratives derive meaning from the narrative under erasure. By having the core

narrative layer taken away or “erased,” the reader is left with the impression that the entire narrative world of House contradicts itself. Moreover, since film is generally portrayed as a

medium of high fidelity and reliability, it is possible to surmise that the extensive use of camera

equipment to create The Navidson Record is not incidental. Rather, it is intended to suggest

that technology-based media has its shortcomings.

Other critics who have acknowledged the significance of communications media in the

narrative structure of House point to the evident juxtaposition between the written medium and

other media with affordances of recording. One such critic is Paul McCormick. He sees the

undecipherable hallway in The Navidson Record as reflecting “the failure of documentary cinema . . . to capture the Real,” with all the failed attempts by the characters to map the hallway highlighting “the crisis of the unknowable” (McCormick, “New Affordances” 65).

The filmic medium is thus portrayed as an inscription technology that comes up short

of extracting meaning from complex, indeterminate circumstances that characterize the

postmodern world. Here, apart from underscoring the unreliability of the documentary film,

McCormick touches upon the notion that the pursuit of meaning is precluded by an

ontologically unstable world. The dichotomy of stable versus unstable coexistence in the

narrative of House is not limited to the metaphysical nature of the house, but instead is

ingrained in the Navidson family’s domestic affairs. In a revealing passage narrated by

Zampanò, the reader is given insight into the state of the Navidson family’s private life: “Karen has made it clear that [Will] Navidson must either give up his professional habits or lose his

family. Ultimately, unable to make this choice, he compromises by turning reconciliation into

a subject for documentation” (House 10). Although the narrative has by this point already

disclosed that awful things will happen to the Navidson family and that the contents of The

Navidson Record are often considered “a ghost story” (House 3), this passage conveys a sense

that Will Navidson’s hesitation and his inability to reprioritize his work habits will have

negative repercussions. As will later be revealed, the impossible hallway—a space that mutates

and grows from within the house and whose uncanny presence spills over into the lives of the

home dwellers—becomes a harbinger of discord and alienation for Will and Karen.

Consequently, as he becomes “frustrated by her unwillingness to discuss the implications of

their strange living quarters” and “[she] refus[ing] to speak about the anomaly,” they both retreat into themselves (House 56). This simultaneous isolation, which is exposed by the

cameras installed throughout the house and mediated by Zampanò, turns out to be destructive

to each of their lives. Ultimately, leading to Will’s deceit (he explores the hallway when he has promised not to) and Karen’s infidelity (she kisses a guest in their home).

There are many passages in the novel that foreground the instability of relationships.

While these occur primarily on the level of the events depicted in The Navidson Record they

also extend to Truant’s narrative level and, even, perhaps to Zampanò’s. Whereas for Will and Karen the goal of their character’s arc is to mend faltering family relationships, for Truant it is

coming to terms with his traumatic childhood and, in particular, his relationship with his

institutionalized mother, Pelafina. At one point in the novel he writes: “For some reason, I’ve been thinking more and more about my mother and the way her life failed her, humiliated her

with impulses beyond her command, broke her with year after year of the same. I never knew

her that well” (House 380). Truant’s relationship with his mother is overtly mentioned in only

a few instances throughout his narrative level, however, it undoubtedly sits at the heart of his

story. This can be inferred from information contained in Appendix E of House, “The Three

Attic Whalestoe Institute Letters, ” which devotes some fifty-odd pages to all the

correspondence he received from her leading up to her death by suicide. Conversely, the life

of Zampanò and his relationship to his family is difficult to gauge because few details of his

personal life are actually provided in the text; it is noted, however, that he had “no wife, no kids, nobody at all” (House xiv), which might lead to the conclusion that his obsession with

The Navidson Record is related to fragmented relationships as well (House xiv).

The instability of the narrative world is placed at the center of a crossroad between the

threat of metaphysical erasure, the emotional breakdown of human bonds and the failure of the

filmic medium to appropriately mediate both situations. Consequently, one of the most

important themes of House is how the characters attempt to recuperate meaning in their lives

while confronted by an all-erasing, metaphysical force embodied in the symbol of the house.

No matter which narrative level is scrutinized, it becomes apparent that film, and specifically

each character’s direct or indirect engagement with it, is essential to any endeavor to work

through interpersonal issues. Katherine Hayles, in her article “Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves,” advances an interpretation for how media work to further characters’ arcs.

By invoking the concept of remediation—that is, “the re-presentation of material that has

already been represented in another medium”5 (781)—she suggests that two of the Navidson

family members, Will and Karen, who are having relationship issues, recuperate their affection

only through remediation. On this matter she writes, “When relationships are not mediated by inscription technologies they decay toward alienation, and when they are mediated, they

progress toward intimacy” (783). By this she is primarily referring to specific moments in the plot when these characters see each other’s image captured on the raw footage of The Navidson

Record and are compelled to edit the filmto contribute to the final product. Through this editing

process, they finally discover a more sympathetic side of their loved ones as well as of

themselves. Thus, it is suggested that rehabilitation is channeled through attempts at

remediation which assumes different forms throughout the narrative. These forms include the

producing and editing of The Navidson Record that is undertaken by Will and Karen, the

viewing of the film and synthesizing of the events by Zampanò and, ultimately, the revision of

all of these by Truant as he assembles the original manuscript of House of Leaves.

Thus, considering the complexity of human relationships and human perspectives, The

Navidson Record offers itself as a seemingly objective medium for recording and safeguarding

layers of compassion in people that are drowned out by the noise of individual preoccupations

emerging from the postmodern world. However, perhaps because this interpretation might be

too tidy for postmodernism’s inherent distrust for “the unified subject or universality of meaning” (Holland 8), the reader is also presented with the documentary film’s playful self-

reflexive trickery: its acknowledgement of its own fictiveness which, by implication, draws

attention to whether or not it is possible to trust what the camera’s eye mediates. From the

perspective of postmodernist fiction, it is significant that the reader is introduced to familiar

human predicaments, such as emotional and professional issues common in everyday life (e.g.,

5 The concept of remediation is first introduced in Richard Grusin and Jay David Bolter, Remediation: Understanding New Media, MIT Press, 2000.

an estranged mother, a distant partner, distant parents and so on), in relation to a documentary

film under erasure. In doing so, it succeeds to foreground the postmodernist sentiment that

Brian McHale refers to as the “ontological instability or indeterminacy” of the contemporary

world (26). By this he refers to the general postmodernist sentiment that the world exists in a

constant state of uncertainty marked by chance and where firm grounding is largely denied to

its participants. With the foregrounding of the filmic medium as the central narrative device

that develops issues of authenticity, reliability and instability, the novel reveals the extent to

which indeterminacy colors the narrative world of House. In summary, The Navidson Record

is a vital filmic mode that functions as a postmodern narrative device to foreground the

ontological ambivalence of contemporary times, and which is presented as a destabilizing

component of the narrative world of House.

While the filmic medium can be seen as a narrative device that at once highlights the

indeterminacy of the postmodern world and at the same time suggests a means to recuperate

meaning form within it, the next filmic mode—clever typesetting—is used to evoke the camera

movements of film to achieve the readerly effect of immersion. This interplay between text and

filmic elements is yet another example of intermediality in the narrative world. With

Schwanecke’s three variables in mind, if one were to describe “how” Danielewski inscribes

the filmic mode in the narrative of House using terminology derived from intermediality, then

the concept of filmic writing is arguably the most appropriate. Filmic writing, as Rajewsky

shows, can be categorized as an indirect intermedial reference because “it can only generate an illusion of another medium’s [in this case film’s] specific practices” (Intermédialités 55;

original emphasis). In the case of filmic writing, the textually enacted illusion conjures in the

reader’s mind “a sense of filmic” qualities (55); hence the camera movement is evoked typographically. With regard to the “what” or which characteristics of the filmic mode are

portrayed by the text that is evoking the filmic quality of camera movements, the classification

is, according to Schwanecke, the “semiotic symbols” of film, specifically “the conventionalized ‘language’ of film” which, includes shots, cuts, camerawork and elements of post-production (275). Finally, to address the “where” or on what textual level the filmic mode occurs, it can be stated that it is played out at the material level of page design.

In House, these typographical designs are mainly used as a strategy to enhance the

storytelling suspense in sequences of action and drama. For this reason, the typographically

evoked filmic references are located towards the middle of the novel where they crucially

coincide with the last two explorations of the impossible hallway—Exploration #4 and #5. A

prominent example of filmic writing employed can be seen in Exploration #5. In this sequence,

Will Navidson has returned to explore the hallway on his own for one last time. His exploration

takes him deeper than ever before into the dark, labyrinthine hallway. The page layout and

typographical arrangements mirror his movement through the maze by mimicking the hand-

held camera with which he is exploring the hallway. By conveying the quick, flurried emotions

of the action sequence that Will Navidson experiences through typographical variations,

Danielewski is able to heighten the reader’s sensory experience. This means that the

typography serves as a strategy to immerse the reader inthe movement of the action (see Figure

1, Appendix). On this note scholar John Bray explains that Danielewski creates visual effects

by manipulating page layout to “present mimetically the journey of the characters through a mysterious, ever-expanding hallway, with words at one point arranged in the form of a ladder” (“Concrete Poetry” 305; see Appendix, Figure 2). Danielewski confirmed this in an early

interview with McCaffery and Sinda stating that he had written “a bunch of essays concerning how cinematic grammar might be applied to text” in order to later “shape and design . . . text

not just to conjure up some static visual impression but [to] use it to further enhance the

movement, theme, and story” (106). A common thread linking Exploration #4 and #5, the

typographical arrangements and the visceral experience the reader undergoes when traversing

these sequences of text is what Alison Gibbons calls a multimodal text. Gibbons explains that

“the term multimodal suggest [the combination of different] media forms as well as sensory

modality” (287; original emphasis). In this context, the term multimodal denotes the

phenomena involved between the interaction of the meaning-conveying elements (i.e., modes)

in a text and the reader’s response to them. In the clever typesetting sequences of House,

Gibbons explains, the force at work between reader, textual mode and author is the idea that

“LITERARY EXPERIENCE IS PHYSICAL MOVMENT” (297; original capitalization). Furthermore, since all these typographically enacted action sequences are contained within The

Navidson Record, it is possible to amend Gibbon’s statement to read “literary experience is

physical movement in film.”

Chapter Three: The Raw Shark Texts as a Filmicalized Novel

The Raw Shark Texts (here after referred to as Raw Shark) is a novel that has received mixed

reviews and less critical acclaim than its forerunner House of Leaves (2000). However, at its

time of publication in 2007, Steven Hall’s novel was instantly recognized by both critics and

audiences as a novel interconnected with film. Joyce Carol Oats suggested that the novel had

the feel of being assembled by “media-savvy undergraduates” intermeshing scenes from films

such as Alice in Wonderland, Jaws, The Matrix, and Memento (“Lest We Forget” par. 10),

while other reviewers, often more unforgivingly, have seen it as a “cyberpunk mashup of Jaws,

Memento and sappy romance that's destined for the big screen” (Publishers Weekly) or “[a] book [that] may actually wish it were a film” (The New Yorker). This is because the text is

composed of a medley of references to film that propel the storyline from the first page until

the last scene where the climax becomes a mimetic exercise of the ending of the landmark

movie Jaws. In an interview given in 2007, Steven Hall was asked what film influences he used

in his debut novel. His response was unequivocal: “there’s [well] Eternal Sunshine is one

people always seem to say. Obviously Jaws and Jaws 2—the film and the novel, [are] very

important to the book— and Vanilla Sky which I think is a fantastic film” (Cazeau). With film thematized explicitly at the outset of the novel and reinforced by references buried throughout

the narrative, it is easy to state that Raw Shark owes a great deal to film. However, what is not

nearly as clear is the reciprocity between film and narrative nor the motive for theirinterlinking.

In the imaginative world of Raw Shark, Eric Sanderson, the main protagonist, comes to

on his bedroom floor after recovering from one of his many recurring bouts of memory loss.

In a haze of confusion, he scrambles for bits of information about his identity only to find a

series of automated correspondence from The First Eric Sanderson—an identity claiming to be

his former self before the onset of amnesia. The quest to fill the gaping holes in his memory

takes him on an adventure across England while all the time running from the Ludovician, a

predatory “conceptual fish which swims in the flows of human interaction” and feeds on human memories (Raw Shark 64). Through the letters from First Eric, he learns of the death of his

girlfriend, Clio, and of the mysterious Dr. Trey Fidorous, the scientist who can stop the

Ludovician’s hunt. On his journey, he will travel down into the underground world of

unspace—a world of abandoned subways, warehouses and more tunnels barricaded with books

and texts, a space of disinformation to defend against the Ludovician—and become entangled

in the unbelievable stories of Mr. Nobody, Scout and Mycroft Ward. As the narrative follows

the protagonist’s difficult quest into unspace to restore the missing pieces of his memory, the

text explores dark crevices of the digital age and the precarious position of the individual’s identity within it.

Although there is far less literature and critical engagement with Raw Shark than there

is with House (the latter having spawned two full volumes of essays),a fair share of the existing

studies has framed the book in the context of the technology mediated environment. In this

light, the studies of Jessica Pressman and Katherine Hayles—each of whom appear to have one

foot firmly in traditional literary studies and the other in science and technology linked to

digital media environment—have led the charge for reading Raw Shark as a predominantly

postmodern text that thematically and formally underscores the printed novel’s reaction to a culture of digitization. Pressman, for instance, coins the phrase the “aesthetic of bookishness” or a new trend in novels published in the new millennium that increasingly manipulate the print

page using innovative layouts, typography and spacing to heighten the experience of the book

as a multimedia format (“The Aesthetics” 456). This understanding of the role of the novel in

the new media environment is hardly a pessimistic outlook. In fact, instead of partaking in

dated notions of the death of the author, which culminated in a “‘death of the novel-debate’”

supporting the view that novel’s displacement was due to rival media such as film (Drexler qtd.

in Schwanecke 269), Pressman views Raw Shark as an example of how post-millennial novels

have learned to “harness the power and potential, as well as the fears and frustrations, of new media into print and onto paper” (“The Aesthetics” 480; original emphasis). Neither shunning

nor blindly opening up to the affordances that new media may offer to an old medium such as

the novel, intermedial novels like Raw Shark carve out a place for the paperback novel in

electronic networks of media production. Katherine Hayles’ view about Raw Shark expands in

a similar fashion. By approaching the text with her expertise in media and the materiality of

literature, Hayles stresses the novel’s power to reinvent itself; she sustains that the Raw Shark’s success lies in how it “slyly appropriates other media, including digital media, for its own purposes, instantiating itself as a distributed textual system” (“Slipstream” 125). For Hayles,

this distributed system is comprised of multimedial elements across communications platforms

like internet sites through which Steven Hall strews pieces and clues of his novel that he calls

unchapters—an extension of the narrative discourse beyond the material confines of the novel.

Here, on the internet, readers can come together and, like Eric Sanderson Two, search for more

missing bits of information that may develop new readings of the novel. Taken together, the

opinions of Pressman and Hayles about Raw Shark are significant because they provide a solid

point of departure for examining the impact that forms of media have on the textual artifact.

As will be shown the concept of “aesthetic of bookishness” has a great deal in common with

intermediality in contemporary fiction.

Raw Shark is an intermedial novel that builds a fundamental part of its content, form

and connection with the reader through intermedial references to the filmic medium. In the

Raw Shark, the filmic modes branch into several groups of intermedial references in a similar

fashion as House. The intermedial references appear in the narrative in two predominant

constellations: first, through clever typesetting in the form of a flip book section that imitates

cinematic movement; second, by evoking the whole medial genre of blockbuster Hollywood

films through direct references to famous movie lines and scenes.

In the case of the Raw Shark, the most interactive intermedial strategy is the flipbook

section spanning pages 335 through 373 which, as the reader rapidly flips through, creates the

impression of an approaching shark. Drawing on Schwanecke’s three variable model for intermedial analysis it is possible to encircle this instance using the three factors of

interrogative determiners “what”, “how” and “where”. In terms of what filmic features are

evoked in the flip book section, it can be said that it represents the “semiotic system” of the filmic medium which includes the “conventionalized ‘language’ of film,” namely, the camerawork of film and its corresponding movement (Schwanecke 275). With regard to “how” this filmic mode is presented in the text it can be said that it is an indirect intermedial reference,

because while the text medium retains its dominant position and semiotic structure “it refers to

another medial system” (Rajewsky, “Borders” 58; original emphasis), which in this instance is

the filmic medium and its affordances such as the simulation of motion, changing perspective

and sequencespeed. Lastly, the filmic mode is included in the text on the material level because

the flip book section is a production technique that is imprinted on the text to create the illusion

of a moving image. In summary, these three variables demonstrate that it is possible to prove

that a particular filmic mode is present in a literary text and, additionally, specify what aspect

of the filmic medium is intentionally being referred to in the text. What follows then is to infer

the impact the filmic mode has on the narrative’s content and how it relates to its themes.

The intermedial strategy at the heart of the flip book section (see Figure 2, Appendix)

in Raw Shark is a formal device not well-received by all critics with Steven Poole calling it “a long passage of schoolboy doodling” (par. 11). He goes on to question, “If you invent a shark made out of words and then abandon the medium of words to represent it, what is the point?” (par. 11). Although Poole’s review of the novel’s gambit with intermedial devices is reproachful of, what in his view, is an author sacrificing the written word for imagery, it sheds

light on Steven Hall’s overt interest for establishing an interface between the experience of

reading and other experiences beyond the reading process such as that of seeing moving

images. “[H]ow to tell the story, as far as I’m concerned,” writes Hall in an interview for Structo

magazine, “you have so many pages, so much ink, and the letters of the alphabet anything else

you have to help you tell the story is all up for grabs. ”The most evident elements Hall subsumes

into his text are intertextual references to other books as well as many direct and indirect

references to films. Interestingly, a large portion of these references include books and films

that deal with a protagonist’s struggle to cycle through personal loss, memories and identity

(the likes of Memento, Vanilla Sky, Eternal Sunshine and The Matrix are often cited). Although

the flip book section that depicts the Ludovician’s predatory pursuit of Eric Two does not

represent the protagonist’s struggle per se, it does, as Pressman notes, establish a symbolic

representation between concepts and words, between novel and text that bleed out into the

digital media environment to combat “claims about the death of the book that circulate within it” (“The Aesthetics” 480). From this perspective, by functioning as an instance of

intermediality, the flip book section thematizes how the affordances of film, and perhaps other

forms of media prevalent in twenty-first century environment, can grant vitality to the old

medium that is the literary text. Through the flip book section, the filmic medium is conjured

up to introduce visuality and movement into the novel which suddenly “becomes a medium through which action happens, a place wherein things live, and a physical object which readers

can manipulate” (“The Aesthetics” 471). In Raw Shark, then, the relation of the novel to its

media environment is framed as the meta-cultural issue of how print literature is to maneuver

within the new hypermediated network that it has become entangled in. One response to this

new confrontation made visible in post-millennial fiction is, as Pressman pointsout, “to explore

and exploit the interstices between the digital and the bookish” (“The Aesthetics” 477); or, in

other words, to explore the affordances of intermediality for literary fiction.

The second predominant instance of filmic modes in the narrative of Raw Shark is the

evocation of the whole medial genre of blockbuster Hollywood films. Following the

terminology of Rajewsky, these filmic modes appear as both direct and indirect intermedial

references. Examples of direct intermedial references from the opening pages of the novel

include an early conversation between Eric Two and his psychologist Dr. Randle who is trying

to get Eric Two to understand his dissociative fugue condition by asking him to remember

things:

“Good. Can you give me a line from Casablanca?” “Sorry?” “A line from Casablanca.” “I [Eric] was in danger of being seriously left behind but I did what I was told. “Out of all the gin joints in the world, she has to walk into mine.” (Raw Shark 13)

Other examples of intermedial references to the filmic medium appear frequently when Eric

Two’s memory returns time and again to moments he spent with his girlfriend Clio. In these sequences discussing film is a recurring activity between the two characters. For the sake of

brevity, the full dialogues will not be reproduced. However, the following examples

accumulate as the narrative progresses: “. . . there was something quite 1950 sci-fi about the

whole thing. Lost in Space” (39); “Everyone thought it was funny when Peter Sellers did it

[Hitler salute]; “And I can lie in it and read Fight Club?” (114); “For a girl who I know has

seen Jaws at least twice . . .” (119; original emphasis). In addition to direct references, a handful

of other indirect intermedial references—that is, references that evoke the medial constellation

of film through the verbal text—combine to lure the reader’s thoughts towards movies as they

read the Raw Shark. Among these instances are the opening scene which is mimetic of the first

scene of the movie Memento, a middle scene that rehearse the movie The Ring and the closing

pages which mimic the last sequence of the movie Jaws (see pp. 385–427).

These filmic modes presented in the form of intermedial references to film also expand

upon the meta-cultural commentary on the twenty-first century digital media environment.

However, unlike the flip book section, which is a filmic mode included in the text on the

material level in order to emphasize the “aesthetic of bookishness” or the relation between

materiality of the print novel and digital technologies, the intermedial references to film

establish a connection between writer, reader and novel, and the broader networks of cultural

memory and cultural production embedded in the mediated environment. By thematizing the

whole medial genre of Hollywood films through filmic modes, Raw Shark succeeds at making

readers continuously search for and locate pop culture images buried in their memories. Like

Eric Two, who also spends much of his time trying to control and make sense of real and unreal

images in his head, suspending belief as he goes “down a big dark [rabbit] hole” into unspace with the promise of meeting Dr. Trey Fidorous (Raw Shark 188), so too is the reader lured

forward through scenes from popular Hollywood movies with the implicit promise of a

Hollywood ending. As the reader’s imagination is pulled “out” from within the text into the realm of films and other books (there are even more references to other books than there are to

films), the intermedial references become a commentary on the position of books, culture and

communication networks in contemporary times. Adding to the idea that society’s flow of cultural information is highly mediated, Pressman asserts that “[b]ooks are not discrete,

isolated objects; rather, they are shown to circulate within a network of readers and readings,

as part of a system of distribution that connects to the larger network culture of our digital age” (“The Aesthetics” 477). All of these articulations, in short, suggest that intermediality

repurposes the traditional novel for a new, suitable delivery channel in the contemporary media

environment.

In this mediated environment, wherein there is an excess of media-based technologies

to communicate as well as store and process information, the effect is disorientating to the

individual inhabiting it. In Raw Shark, since the process of reading the novel is so pervasively

invaded by the filmic medium, it becomes questionable or even irritating for some readers

(such as Steven Poole) how the novel seems to relinquish its literariness. Poole’s interpretation

of Raw Shark is resolutely affected by its intermedial qualities and he goes as far as to question

whether or not “it indicate[s] that fiction is coming to accept a place subservient to film in

people's imaginations?” (par. 12). What is created is an uneasiness between multiple forms of

media that vie for power in the imagination of contemporary audiences.

In Raw Shark, the intermedial references to Hollywood films reveal the author’s commentary about the cultural saturation and influence of films in the contemporary media

environment. For this reason, it might be fitting to think of Hall’s deployment of the filmic

medium throughout his narrative as a clear-headed acceptance that the future of the print novel

resides in tapping into ageneration of audiences that have become comfortable with heightened

interactivity between visual, aural and textual forms of communication. These audiences are

exposed to extraordinarily rapid avenues of communication like social media and online

communities that rely on, as John Carlos Rowes points out, “different models of messaging and reception from those of the traditional novel,” and which “enable rapid employment of

multimedia effects (audio, video, photo, text, citation)” (463). From this perspective, the

consequence of Hall’s ambition to situate his novel within the context of the twenty-first

century media environment represents a shedding of traditional narratology in favor of

multimedia and intermedial strategies that resonate with a contemporary audience. It is thus

not coincidental that Julia Panko writes that “The Raw Shark Texts’ status as a media artifact

is a complex one, as the work navigates the relationship between digital technologies and

textual inscription in three levels of media networks” (267). The three levels of media networks

Julia Panko refers to include the materiality of the book itself (with its page design, typesetting,

and visual media), the references to digital technologies and storage media in the novel’s

narrative and, lastly,the campaign to create audience engagement with the novel across internet

platforms such as YouTube and discussion forums. This goes to show that Raw Shark is, in

effect, a novel that interfaces with both themore traditional human networks of communication

within which the print novel circulated and the current media technologies that impel the

digitization of print media.

The powerful influence of digital technology on publication processes has been

recognized by literary scholars and media theorists and the problematization of such

phenomenon is weaved into the Raw Shark. As Katherine Hayles points out “print books are digital files before they become books . . . [a]lthough the print tradition of course influences

how these texts are conceived and written, digitality also leaves its mark, notably in the

increased visuality [of books like House of Leaves or The Raw Shark Texts]” (“Intermediation” 99). Despite the fact that Hayles goes on to focus her analysis chiefly on electronic literature,

“literature that is ‘digitally born,’ created on a computer and meant to be read on it,” her line of argumentation helps to juxtapose computing and the traditional novel to highlight the

former’s effect not only on the final stages of the publication process but also on the early stages of composition (“Intermediation” 99). Hayles’ observation that the digital computing world has an increasingly powerful influence on the creation of a novel both in its early

conceptualization and in the writing process of the author is displayed most markedly in the

creative methods of both Danielewski and Hall. In this regard, both Raw Shark and House serve

as prime examples of novels whose form and content have anticipated the importance of these

intermedial exchanges in a text, which Hayles classifies as a system of “dynamic heterarchies characterized by intermediating dynamics” (“Intermediation” 102). Hayles goes on to use the

term “dynamic heterarchy,” which she has adopted from fields of simulation science and computational research, as an analogy (and later as a framework for literary analysis of

electronic literature) for characterizing the interaction between human and digital computer as

a symbiotic relationship with intermediating dynamics (101). While she admits that this

juxtaposition is a speculative leap from the realm of computing theory to human and

technology interactions, it is helpful for fleshing out ways in which the digital media

environment affects the reader and the production of a literary text, because it considers the

range of possibilities and experiences that occur to both sides of this interaction.

A closing instance of intermediality and filmic modes in Raw Shark occurs in the last

few pages of the novel which display a newspaper clipping, a postcard and a film still (see

Figure 4, Appendix). The significance of these images cannot be overlooked; they serve as

pivotal narrative devices that affect the interpretation of the theme and ending of the novel. In

a truly pastiche fashion, the novel concludes with an action sequence rehashed from the ending

of Jaws in which three men on small fishing boat spend their days waiting for the fearsome

shark to attack. In the novel, however, it is Eric Two, Scout and Dr. Trey Fidorous who

construct a conceptual hunting boat called the Orpheus and attempt to kill the Ludovician. After

an intense showdown, the boat is wrecked, the Ludovician is harpooned and killed, Dr.

Fidorous is dead and Scout lives. The last page of prose text has Scout and Eric Two swimming

towards an island in the distance. However, the last three pages include the following media: a

newspaper clipping that reports that Eric Sanderson’s body was found in Manchester; a

postcard from Eric to his psychologist Dr. Randle stating he is well and happy; and a film still

of Casablanca depicting a smiling couple. What this does for the narrative is foreground

indeterminacy through multiple endings. According to Brian McHale, “a double ending represents a minimal structure of a non-ending . . . [which] is quite sufficient to destabilize the

ontology of the projected world” (110). Instead of relying on the authority of prose text to

confer an ending to the novel, the narrative grants final word over the meaning-making process

of the narrativeto visual media. In doing so, the narrative once again frames the narrative world

within the realm of communications media and, in this light, the outcome is parallel to

something that is accomplished in W.G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn (1998), wherein

visual images such as photographs are used to stress “different forms of engagement with the world, different modes of reading, [a] different pace—out of the temporal, into the spatial” (Kress 18). Thus, the visualization that is incurred by way of these intermedial elements at the

end of Raw Shark serves as a bridge between the conceptual and the perceptual, between

signification through language and signification through visual imaging.

Conclusion

As the second decade of the new millennium winds down, it is apparent that intermediality has

staked out a new position in interdisciplinary discourse and in contemporary fiction. In part,

the emergence ofthis recent interestfor embracing intermedial strategies forliterary production

as well as literary analysis appears to be a consequence of an “intermedial turn” having taken

place in the humanities: this shift is visible in postmodernism wherein an aesthetic interest in

art forms that transgress medial boundaries persists (Wolf 2). This intermedial turn is not

uniquely a phenomenon of the contemporary mediated environment, because it has roots in

interarts studies that have existed since ancient times; nevertheless, the networked and

hypermediated character of contemporary society has elevated intermedaility’s relevance across different contexts including interdisciplinary studies, artistic production, distribution

and readership.

Today private life is increasingly saturated by technologies and communications media.

In fundamental ways, the hypermediated landscape has changed the avenues of communication

and interaction and even our ways of knowing—ourselves, others and the world at large. These

changes have had an ambiguous impact on literature. Some scholars argue that new

technologies have contributed to a waning engagement with serious literature. Anxieties about

audiences’ declining interest in literary texts are often linked to the advent of new media, such as film and television, and have not abated with the proliferation of even newer forms of

electronic media like digital video and the internet. This stance, which diminishes the cultural

authority of literary texts, prompted cultural critic Neil Postman to write in his book Amusing

Ourselves to Death that “We have reached . . . a critical mass in that electronic media [which]

have decisively and irreversibly changed the character of our symbolic environment. We are

now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by

the printed word” (28). The construction of meaning in the contemporary environment thus 45

depends on a multiplicity of media that destabilize and vie for power in our everyday lives.

However, other opinions show that literature is not a passive bystander in this confrontation.

In fact, intermedial novels like House of Leaves and The Raw Shark Texts are proof that the

printed word is quite successful at assimilating these new forms of media and employing their

affordances as narrative devices to counteract the perception that new media marginalize

literature’s efficacy as a communicative medium.

In view of this development, the central premise of this thesis is that House of Leaves

and The Raw Shark Texts are novels that demonstrate how the ubiquity of intermedial relations

in a literary text can be used to enhance the communicative process of that very text: first of

all, by creating a more participatory reading experience which is achieved by manipulating the

materiality of the book to work in service of visualization, and secondly, by thematizing the

importance of human connections within and outside the text. By following Christine

Schwanecke’s analytic model for identifying the presence of filmic modes in literary texts, I

have been able to establish a common thread, namely that filmic modes link these two novels

both thematically and formally. After the filmic modes were identified and located within each

narrative, it was then possible to develop a discussion about the most prominent themes of both

novels and their use of intermediality.

As I demonstrated in Chapters Two and Three, filmic modes in House of Leaves and

The Raw Shark Texts are important to the construction of their narrative worlds. In House of

Leaves, the filmic mode that is represented by the documentary film serves as a thematic

strategy to introduce what McCormick calls documentary cinema’s “supposed crisis of

authenticity” (“New Affordances” 64). I argued that there are a large number of indications implanted by Danielewski that suggest that documentary film’s crisis of authenticity is important to the narrative as a symbol that stands for the uncertainty of the postmodern world.

Examples include framing The Navidson Record as a fictitious documentary and at the same

time “asking” the reader to treat it as real throughout the entire course of the narrative; Will

Navidson’s extensive use of all kinds of recording equipment that ultimately fail to capture the essence of the shifting hallway; and a blind man’s quasi-film criticism of The Navidson Record

that serves as the primary mediation of the famed documentary. Moreover, this crisis of

authenticity, manifested by The Navidson Record which is a narrative device under erasure,

juxtaposes the ontological instability of the narrative world of House of Leaves with that of the

actual postmodern world. Here, the elements of uncertainty, instability and authenticity are

echoed in the characters’ lives through their individual preoccupations, isolation and

withdrawal from inter-human connections.

In contrast, I have demonstrated that the narrative of The Raw Shark Texts uses filmic

modes to reference the medial genre of Hollywood films. This functions as a thematic strategy

that foregrounds the permeation of information and cultural products into the lives (and minds)

of both characters and readers alike. It reflects on the wider context of what it means to be alive

and human in the often-disorientating information age that threatens the individual with a

barrage of mental stimuli. Due to the thematization of interpersonal relations via filmic modes

in both these novels, I conclude that intermediality, represented by direct and indirect

references to film, is embedded in the narrative as a double-edged sword: on the one hand,

these intermedial configurations are important tools for making inter-human connections by

offering a means for (re)mediation and renewal; on the other hand, they are symbolic of the

multiplicity of media and networks of communications that progressively dominate cultural

production and threaten to splinter individuality through the mesh of mass media.

In the context of these assertions about the increasingly mediated environment, I have

demonstrated that filmic modes also have consequences on the material form of the novel.

Filmicalized novels like House of Leaves and The Raw Shark Texts assimilate affordances of

digital technologies such as film into their narrative structure to create the actualization of

visual and sensory experiences that the traditional literary text lacks, since it is a medium that

is “conceptual and discursive” in its natural form (Bluestone vii). The affordances of the filmic

medium are evoked and simulated in these novels by means of creative typesetting, visual

media and filmic writing. In doing so, they create a “‘filmic reception’” of the text that heightens the sense of reading these narratives’ action sequences (Schwanecke 281).

Having examined the prominent instances of intermediality in the narrative worlds of

Danielweski’s House of Leaves and Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, I conclude thatthe intermedial

relations within these texts are early traces of changing dynamics between text, reader and

author. Danielewski and Hall have chosen to become thoroughly involved with the digital

environment rather than technophobic. Like the modernist novelists who were on the fence

about the proliferation of film at the turn of the twentieth century, so too today there is agitation

about the multiplication of communications media in the new millennium. Some novelists are

still on the fence; but others have already begun to mediate a way forward.