Surfing the text

Abstract

The creation of and search for meaning in a remediated narrative is the subject of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. The novel problematises identity formation through narrative in an age of endless information and media overload. Chapter 9, or the Labyrinth Chapter, is an example of the ways in which the novel takes advantage of a reader's navigation strategies. Lev Manovich writes in relation to the digital environment, ‘if there is a new rhetoric or aesthetic possible here, it may have less to do with the ordering of time by a writer or an orator, and more to do with spatial wandering’ (The Language of New Media, MIT Press, 2001: 78). In a sense, Chapter 9 both is and represents the digital format; it is an intricate web of nodes presented for the reader to explore. Though the computer has offered a new form of freedom to both reader and writer, early experimentations in digital media have been influenced by the narrative form of print text. Further, the experimentation in digital fiction can be compared to experimentation in earlier print novels as varied as Finnegans Wake or Raymond Federman's surfictionist Double or Nothing. At the same time, through an investigation of the ways in which contemporary texts call for what N. Katherine Hayles calls a ‘cyborg reading’, it is apparent that print texts are beginning to take on a digital structure that is becoming more prevalent in all aspects of culture and may affect the fundamentals of narrative.

Keywords:

• narrative
• Danielewski
• network
• media
• structure
• hypertext

Notes

1 It is, in fact, difficult to say there is a main text at all. The reader is tempted to treat a passage that appears central as the main text but it is technically footnote “k” (or a sign resembling “k” from air traffic signalling code) running throughout most of the chapter.

2 A term Hayles (2002: 25) defines as ‘literary works that strengthen, foreground, and thematize the connections between themselves as material artifacts and the imaginative realm of verbal/semiotic signifiers they instantiate’.