In “The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves,” Mark B.N. Hansen argues that the novel is designed to emphasize-both thematically and formally-the “singularity of experience.” Hansen says:
In an age marked by the massive proliferation of (primarily audiovisual) apparatuses for capturing events of all sorts, from the most trivial to the most monumental, House of Leaves asserts the nongeneralizability (or nonrepeatability) of experience-the resistance of the singular to orthography, to technical inscription of any sort (606).
It’s easy to see how this plays out in the book. There isn’t just one way to read the book-both in terms of the physical act of following the words on the page as well as the mental processing of the information. For example, you can read all the footnote first or the main text first. You can choose whether to go to the appendixes when prompted or choose not to. And there are also several ways to react to the book, Johnny Truant’s disturbed reaction being one of them.
There’s an obvious correlation between the “singularity of experience” in reading the House of Leaves and the experience of reading the new media assigned for next week. For example, in “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War,” the more you click on the images or on the text, the more boxes appear. There aren’t obvious guidelines for which boxes of text to click first. There isn’t an apparent linear order in the narrative. You can click on all the bigger boxes first to have the smaller boxes pop up; you can click on one smaller box until it runs out of choices and then move onto the next smaller box until it too runs out of choices. You can click on boxes randomly, clockwise, down in rows. You can assume that every reader will make different choices, that their experience will be singular.
Whereas I can see how the House of Leaves has the singularity of experience as one of its main themes (as Hansen argues), I’m not quite sure why “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War” uses such a narrative technique. The “plot” is basically what the title implies, a girl’s boyfriend comes back from the war, and they deal with issues that arose from their long separation. It’s implied that the girl cheated on the boyfriend while he was away. At times, it’s not so clear who is talking. For example, “My mother told me you could change” could have been said by either the boyfriend or girlfriend. Also, it seems like some lines from one box could be connected to a line in different box, forming a new meaning altogether.
I’m hoping that looking at the other new media pieces (and doing Inquiry #3) will help me figure out what this is all about.