Johnny's intuition that he is "made up" by someone he cannot see opens onto the higher ontological level of Danielewski, the creator of this fictional world.

While not denying these effects, Danielewski pointed out a subtler correspondence between reading speed and the emotional pacing of the narrative. Drawing an analogy with filmmaking techniques that correlate the intensity of the scene with how much the viewer's eye has to move across the screen, he suggested that the typography creates a similar correspondence between how much time it takes to read a page and the represented action.

age position also serves as an important linking mechanism, especially in chapter 9, enabling the reader to follow one path (for example, the potentially infinite list in the blue-lined boxes on pages 119 through 144) or skip between paths.

the hermeneutic circle

the name I gave to the girl in the photo that won me all the fame and gory [one of the significant typos Danielewski inserts]

the story's architecture is envisioned not as a sequential narrative so much as alternative paths within the same immense labyrinth of fictional space-time that is also, and simultaneously, a rat's nest of inscription surfaces. Moreover, these surfaces prove as resistant to logical ordering as the House is to coherent mapping. Locating itself within these labyrinthine spaces, the text enfolds together the objects represented and the media used to represent them.

us, the putative viewers, who of course read words rather than see images and so add a fifth layer of mediation.

House of Leaves, in a frenzy of remediation, attempts to eat all the other media. This binging, however, leaves traces on the text's body, resulting in a transformed physical and narrative corpus. In a sense, House of Leaves recuperates the traditions of the print book—particularly the novel as a literary form—but the price it pays is a metamorphosis so profound that it becomes a new kind of form and artifact.

Johnny Truant adds to these "snarls" by more obsessive writing on diverse surfaces, annotating, correcting, recovering, blotting out

hyperparasitically

most of what's said by famous people has been made up. I tried contacting all of them. Those that took the time to respond told me they had never heard of Will Navidson let alone Zampanò." 1

the ontological status

the subject as a palimpsest

a physical artifact

may be projected upon large white screens in our own homes. Scenes described in works of fiction and romances of adventure will be imitated by appropriately dressed figurants and immediately recorded.

the Kinetograph of Thomas Edison

Journalism will naturally be transformed; the highest situations will be reserved for robust young men with strong, resonant voices, trained rather in the art of enunciation than in the search for words or the turn of phrases

they may intoxicate themselves on literature as on pure water, and as cheaply, too, for there will then be fountains of literature in the streets as there are now hydrants.

nourishing their minds while exercising their muscles for there will be pocket phono-operagraphs

"Hearers will not regret the time when they were readers; with eyes unwearied, with countenances refreshed, their air of careless freedom will witness to the benefits of the contemplative life. Stretched upon sofas or cradled in rocking-chairs, they will enjoy in silence the marvellous adventures which the flexible tube will conduct to ears dilated with interest.

the art of utterance will take on unheard-of importance. Certain Narrators will be sought out for their fine address, their contagious sympathy, their thrilling warmth, and the perfect accuracy, the fine punctuation of their voice.

as for the novel, or the storyograph, the author will become his own publisher.

There will be registering cylinders as light as celluloid penholders, capable of containing five or six hundred words

the man of leisure becomes daily more reluctant to undergo fatigue, that he eagerly seeks for what he calls the comfortable, that is to say for every means of sparing himself the play and the waste of the organs. You will surely agree with me that reading, as we practise it today, soon brings on great weariness

the book, the pamphlet, and the newspaper — printing, which since 1436 has reigned despotically over the mind of man, is, in my opinion, threatened with death by the various devices for registering sound which have lately been invented, and which little by little will go on to perfection.

"If by books you are to be understood as referring to our innumerable collections of paper, printed, sewed, and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work, I own to you frankly that I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg's invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude

illustrated books, will suffice for the gratification of the masses

museums will be burned down

We see nothing but copies of all sorts; copies of Old Masters accommodated to modern taste