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Space and Sound: (Re)Composition in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves Tiffany Wu Advisor

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Space and Sound: (Re)Composition in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves Tiffany Wu Advisor Space and Sound: (Re)Composition in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves Tiffany Wu Advisor: James J. Hodge Honors Coordinator: Evan Mwangi May 3rd, 2019 English Department Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences Northwestern University Submitted in Fulfillment of the Requirement for English Honors Abstract In a world that consumes and is consumed by technology, the examination of media ecology and the relationship between print and digital media has never been more important. Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel, House of Leaves, redefines the role of print literature within a technologically mediated world by stitching together a network of multimedia and intertextual allusions to tell the tale of a “monster” house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside (360). Recent scholarship vivisects the novel to examine its mechanical and visual idiosyncrasies, focusing on the role of its unique typography and tangle of narrative voices in subverting traditional narrative trajectories. However, less has been said about the novel’s use of music, sound, and silence within and outside of the text. Allusions to a variety of musical works sculpt a literary soundscape that redefines a traditional understanding of space and sounds, and challenge the ways we seek to orient ourselves through a formal, academic manner. The novel references Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and concept of différance to aid in a critical examination of the internal workings of language and the process of meaning-making. Jacques Attali’s examination of the political economy of music and John Cage’s emphasis on the collaborative nature of composition extend these analyses to the musical world. Using these lenses, I argue that House of Leaves uses typographical oddities and technology in a cinematic and musical manner to direct reader attention to a multimedia work that explores the failure of sound in language and music. Keywords: postmodern fiction, music, sound, silence, typography, composition Table of Contents Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1 Narrative and (Non)sense: Speaking Through Music and the Body.............................................. 8 Echoes: Reiteration, Transformation, and Decay......................................................................... 17 Recomposing Silence.................................................................................................................... 26 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 34 Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... 36 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 37 1 “Maybe all my novels are not novels at all but sonatas and fugues, symphonies without strings, trying to find their way back to a language that leaves them uncaged.” – Danielewski1 Introduction The 1952 premiere of American composer John Cage’s provocative three-movement composition, “4’33,” signaled not only an abrupt departure from traditional taxonomic analyses prevalent in music theory and composition, but also a burgeoning of interest in postmodern concepts within and across the humanities and artistic fields. While Cage is often associated with modernist ideals, scholars such as Henry Sayre and Nancy Perloff draw attention to his inconstant aesthetic ideals, and consequent approach to composition and the world of sound, as distinctly postmodernist ventures. Cage’s dismantlement of traditional linear forms of music, redefinition of the act of composition, and emphasis on the collaborative nature of music and performance resonate with postmodernist queries about indeterminacy and the adequacy in representations of expression. This paper aims to explore how the indeterminacies articulated in his avant-garde aesthetic ideals are brought into conversation with French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s postmodernist deconstruction of text and sound in Mark Z. Danielewski’s multimedia novel, House of Leaves (2000).2 The term “postmodernism” began to gain currency in the 1970s and 1980s, and characterized a departure from modernism marked by a questioning of traditional value systems and knowledge claims, and a rejection of metanarratives in favor of a fluid interplay between signifiers and their signified. The terms “signifier” and “signified” aid in tracing the developmental trajectory of the relationship between semiotics, French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and différance, and Cage’s “purposeless play” and musical 1 Mark Z. Danielewski. Interviewed by Christopher O’Riley. BOMB Magazine, January 1, 2013. 2 Danielewski worked on the production of the 2002 Derrida documentary, and has cited Derrida’s works as an important influence on House of Leaves. 2 indeterminism. 3 Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure derived these terms to confront the incongruities between text and meaning. He defines signifiers as words or forms that denote things or concepts as definable or knowable, while the signified is the represented thing or concept to which the signifier refers. Words, therefore, are defined or understood through the compilation of other words, a cyclical characteristic that points to the repeated failure of signifiers to articulate their perceived objects. Derrida’s approach to deconstruction emerged from recognition of this relational discrepancy between words and their meanings, and investigates the relevance of the reader’s visual and aural perceptions of texts in meaning making. He emphasizes the space between these discrepancies as the “contrast-effects” words have with each other, expanding on Saussure’s conceptualization of language as nothing more than differences. Consequently, there is no unmediated, inherent meaning to a word, even those that serve as the expression of a non- linguistic form. Derrida unpacks the infinitely divisive and untranslatable characteristics of a single statement: each one [interpretation of the statement] divides again, is grafted and contaminated by all the others, and you would never be finished translating them. [...] you [...] cannot dominate the situation, or translate it, or describe it [...] cannot report what is going on in it, or narrate it or depict it, or pronounce it or mimic it, or offer it up to be read or formalized without remainder.4 He further explores this continually divisive nature through the term différance, a critical concept in his deconstructionist approach to text and meaning, in his book, La Voix et le Phénomène (1967). Translated as Voice and Phenomenon, the book compiles Derrida’s arguments concerning philosopher Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Within it, the essay “Différance” gestures at an assemblage of graphic and historical incongruities that complicate 3 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 95. 4 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (University of Chicago Press, 1978), 2. 3 the development of textual meaning. Its first distinction rests in the binary relationship between words; the quest for meaning is infinitely deferred through a continual reference to other signs.5 The second notion elaborates on this deferment by scrutinizing spatial and temporal differences between such references and, in so doing, instigates the establishment of dichotomous or opposing hierarchies between meanings. Though pronounced the same way, the term différance is a deliberate misspelling of the English word “difference,” a distinction meant to underscore the aurality of the written form, and subsequently the discrepancy between the sensible and the intelligible. Composers and writers like Cage and Jacques Attali further explore this synesthetic conceptualization of a work-in-progress ad infinitum using music, noise and silence. Unsurprisingly then, philosopher Roland Barthes cross-applies Derrida’s terms to music, hailing Cage’s new music as a “shimmering of signifiers,” whose shifting meanings and affectation of the listening process mimic the experience of reading a modern text, which “does not consist in receiving, in knowing or in feeling this text, but in writing it anew.”6 Though it is a printed text, House of Leaves physically exemplifies the aural and fragmentary nature of postmodernist thought through its structural and narrative polyvocalities, and engagement with a variety of multimedia works. The novel dogs the steps of experimental literary works such as Tristram Shandy (Sterne), Pale Fire (Nabokov), and Infinite Jest (Foster Wallace) and presents itself as a startling product of the collision between media and print culture. Its allusion to the Internet’s blue hyperlinks through the blue coloring of the word “house” not only positions the novel and the house within the novel as entryways to ideas and information beyond the body of its own text, but also uncovers and challenges the circumscribed boundaries of distinctive media forms. Indeed, literary critic N. Katherine Hayles figures the 5 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 50. 6 Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation (Hill and Wang, 1985), 259, 265. 4 chimeric novel as an “exemplary technotext” for the ways in which it “strengthen[s], foreground[s],
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