Several posts have been about Danielewski’s lack of presence– dare I call it his silence?– \u00a0in the novel. \u00a0I was certainly struck by this as well. \u00a0 However, Danielewski’s voice, like so much of the postmodern literature that we have studied, is buried under layers of intertextuality–editors, Truant, Zampano, Navidson, Karen, etc. The only way we “hear” Danielewski’s voice is through layers of\u00a0fictitious\u00a0characters. \u00a0While we\u00a0occasionally\u00a0hear Navidson, he is presented through a film clip, or through a critic’s interpretation, or through Zampano. \u00a0Even Zampano’s voice, which is primarily heard through footnotes, is being interpreted through Truant. And Truant’s voice (or absence like Susanna pointed out) is also qualified by the editors. \u00a0All of these layers of distance and absence are important to simulation of reality. \u00a0I don’t feel like I quite understand Baudrillard’s successive phases of the image (or even if they can be successive), but the bit about the Moebius strip splitting in two and always calling into question the real by the imaginary seemed to fit in this case. \u00a0Isn’t Danielewski using the imaginary, the intertextuality, to define exactly who he is?<\/p>\n
Another layer (real or imagined) was the lengthy and sometimes tangential comments about echoes in chapter v. \u00a0The very nature of an echo is imaginary, even mythic as the opening to the chapter suggests. \u00a0The echo isn’t the actual voice, but the mimicking of a voice– calling to mind the very strategy that Danielewski is using in crafting his book. \u00a0 Many moments of the echoes arise in this chapter, mainly in regard to the hallways. \u00a0“In the living room, Navidson discovers echoes emanating from a dark doorless hallway which has appeared out of nowhere in the west wall” (57). These echoes are the voices of his children lost in the hallways. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not\u00a0only do the echoes add a type of layering to the story that mimics the structure of the story, but they also add to the eerie tone. “Delay and fragmentation repetition create a sense of another inhabiting a necessarily deserted place” (46). \u00a0After the children’s shouts are heard throughout the living room, Karen “freezes on the threshold,” paralyzed by fear of the unimaginable. \u00a0This same sentiment is brought up a few chapters later when Navidson is lost in the hallway at 3:19 am. \u00a0Instead of the echoes being created by the hallways,”suddenly immutable silence” takes its place (67). \u00a0After hearing the growl, Navidson makes vain attempts to call out to his wife and brother, but his shouts are met again by silence. \u00a0Couldn’t this absence of words be relate to the echoing of words? \u00a0Each is missing some sort of reality of words. \u00a0Is Danielewski trying to do as Baudrillard suggests and define something according to its binary? \u00a0<\/p>\n
By way of a tangent, it’s interesting to note that “Simulacra and Simulations” is the article being read by the character Neo early in the film “The Matrix.” \u00a0The movie contains multiple other references to the essay, including the phrase (uttered by Morpheus upon his revealing the wasteland that is the ‘real world’ of the future earth) “the desert of the real”– a direct quote from the essay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Several posts have been about Danielewski’s lack of presence– dare I call it his silence?– \u00a0in the novel. \u00a0I was certainly struck by this as well. \u00a0 However, Danielewski’s voice, like so much of the postmodern literature that we have studied, is buried under layers of intertextuality–editors, Truant, Zampano, Navidson, Karen, etc. The only way … Continue reading Layers of echoes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[33,39,10,35,36],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-5-mzd","tag-baudrillard","tag-danielewski","tag-film","tag-reality","tag-simulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions\/283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}