![]() From this video footage he made The Navidson Record, which then becomes the subject of an extensive commentary by the solitary Zampanò. Precisely the opposite happens when the House is revealed as a shifting labyrinth of enormous proportions, leading to the horrors recorded on the high-8 videos Will installed throughout the house to memorialize their move. Its putative subject is the film The Navidson Record, produced by the world-famous photographer Will Navidson after he, his partner Karen Green, and their two children, Chad and Daisy, occupy the House of Ashtree Lane in a move intended to strengthen their strained relationships and knit them closer as a family. Rather than trying to penetrate cultural constructions to reach an original object of inquiry, House of Leaves uses the very multilayered inscriptions that create it as a physical artifact to imagine the subject as a palimpsest, emerging not behind but through the inscriptions that bring the book into being. ![]() ![]() It instantiates the crisis characteristic of postmodernism, in which representation is short-circuited by the realization that there is no reality independent of mediation. ![]() In House of Leaves, Mark Danielewski has found a way to subvert and have his subject at the same time.Ĭamouflaged as a haunted-house tale, House of Leaves is a metaphysical inquiry worlds away from the likes of The Amityville Horror. Is it possible to save the subject now that it has been imploded by Jean Baudrillard, deconstructed by Jacques Derrida, and pronounced dead by Fredric Jameson, only to be revived as a schizophrenic? (Not to mention its re-creation as an infinitely malleable information pattern by biomedical practices like the Visible Human Project.) For writers who hope to make a living from their work, the problem with such high-tech and high-theory exercises is that the majority of mainstream, nonacademic readers continue to believe they possess coherent subjectivities moreover, they like to read about characters represented as people like themselves, which the recent success of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections demonstrates. ![]()
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