The Tree "Yggdrasil" as a Symbolic Key to the Interpretation of the Novel by Mark Z. Danilevsky's "House of Leaves"

Novikau Artur Viktorovich Postgraduate student, Department of Foreign Literature, Gorky Literary Institute. 123104, Russia, g. Moscow, ul. Tverskaya, 25 str.1 art14ek@tut.by Other publications by this author

The "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" calligraphy and the postmodern context

The mythological component of the novel is viewed through a conventional tuning fork – the last page of the House of Leaves, which is crowned by a poem of the following type:

•

Igg

d

r

but

with

and

l

b

What kind of miracle is this? It's a huge tree.

It rises to three thousand meters,

But it does not reach the ground. However, it's worth it.

His roots must be holding up the sky.

About

^{[5, p. 749]}.

The poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" is an inverted tree, mechanically composed of text: the root is a solid black dot (also appears on page 315 in The House of Leaves); the trunk is the word "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l"; crown – the direct text of the poem; the crown is crowned by a certain sign in the form of a circle or the letter "O".

This poem is, using the terminology of M. L. Gasparov, "poems for the eye" ^{[4, p. 29]} or "figurative poems". (Figured poems are poetic texts graphically designed so that the outlines of an object are formed from the arrangement of lines or letters highlighted in the lines (forming acrostics, etc.): a monogram, a triangle, an axe, an altar, etc. ^{[11, pp. 1139-1140]}). Poems that are "associated with the graphic explication of a verbal image" ^{[13, p. 113]}, or the genre of visual poetry in which the image is born through the synthesis of an internal drawing (disegno interno) – "a verbal semantic scheme [which] is not only a thought form, but also a semantic super-task of the poet" ^{[13, p. 113]}, and external drawing (disegno estremo) – "graphic printing, the purpose of which is to encrypt semantics using a certain code and further decoding by the reader of this encrypted message" ^{[13, p. 113]}.

Considering that the poetics of postmodernism does not imply keys to interpretation – nonsense wants to be meaningless, since it does not imply didactics, subtext, morality, etc. – the very presence in the novel of the figurative poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l", which opens the way to a mythological understanding of "Home leaves", takes the novel away from postmodernism: this poem and the consequences of its presence turn the novel from an ontological perspective to the side of an epistemological, i.e. modernist context. Which corresponds to the concept of the dominant novels of modernism and postmodernism by B. McHale ^[28].

Arguing that "the dominant of modernist literature is epistemological" ^{[28, p. 9]}, and "the dominant of postmodern literature is ontological" ^{[28, p. 10]}, McHale described cases of changing the status of the dominant from epistemological to ontological and back using the example of Samuel Beckett, Alain Rob-Grillet, Carlos Fuentes, Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon and he called such literature the term "Limit-modernism" ^{[28, p. 14]}. Applying this tool to the "House of Leaves" will give a similar result, since the contexts of ontology and epistemology in Danilevsky's novel are tightly soldered.

At the point where presumably (as shown above, this point is the poem "Igg–dr-a-s-i-l-l") the epistemological context of the "House of Leaves" arises, the question also arises whether the poem "Igg-dr-a-with-I-l-l" authentic symbol.

Symbols that have no semantic meaning are symbols of postmodern poetics, "empty signs" [See: 18, pp. 640-642]. And the location of the poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" on the very last page, i.e. outside the novel, may mean precisely the emptiness of this symbol, which leads to the loss of the field for hermeneutics, because Danilevsky provided a sufficient number of interpretations already in the novel itself, thereby stating lack of interpretation.

The answer to the question about the completeness of the semantic and symbolic content, as well as about the meaning of the image of the Yggdrasil tree in the poem "Ygg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" and about its relationship with the history of culture makes it possible to better understand the nature of the novel "House of Leaves", which allows you to do qualitatively new conclusions about the properties of the poetics of this work.

Sebastian Huber and the Mythology of the House of Leaves

Sebastian Huber's work "Own House: The House of Leaves as a Modernist Text" is partially devoted to the above problem ^[27]. Huber says that if we consider a work of art within the framework of any "literary classification", then the emergence of a "sense of imposition, limitation of potential" is inevitable. For example, Huber notes that, although The House of Leaves is often perceived as postmodern literature due to its formal features, the novel can also be read "as a nod towards the Gothic tradition" ^{[27, p. 123]}.

On the other hand, attempts to consider the novel in the context of various, often competing aesthetic systems, "expand the cultural artifact, making it bigger outside than inside" ^{[27, p. 123]}.

Huber's essay is a kind of experiment, an attempt to "expand the perimeter of the House of Leaves" by examining the novel through the paradigm of modernism in order to find out "what can be obtained with the help of such decryption" ^{[27, p. 123]}.

According to the researcher, the theoretical position of postmodernism in relation to the concepts of "space", "internal connections", "myth", "epistemology" and "ontology" is radically at odds with that taken by Roman Danilevsky.

Huber calls the "emphasis on space" an obvious aspect of the "House of Leaves", which implies precisely a "modernist" reading of the novel. Huber appeals to Joseph Frank's argument in "Spatial form in modern literature" ^[17] – "modernist literature describes its own narrative spatially, reducing temporality" ^{[27, p. 124]}. Comparing the space in the imagistic poetry of Ezra Pound and in the stream of consciousness of the "Waves" of Virginia Woolf, as well as the space of the parallax view in James Joyce's Ulysses, Huber states that in the modernist novel "the narrative procession stops in a freeze frame, while focusing through various observer figures" ^{[27, p. 124]}.

According to Huber, such a space "opposes the spatial form of modernism to postmodern spatiality, as Frederick Jameson or Michel Foucault argued... modern narratives still assume ontological stability beyond the epistemological unreliability of the subject" ^{[27, p. 124]}. While the opposite situation is observed in the works of postmodernism: "postmodern narratives fundamentally question the existence of spaces that transcend subjective understanding: that is, in postmodernism, the subject creates spaces, cities, worlds" ^{[27, pp. 124-125]}.

This means that Huber needs to reliably establish the "ontological basis" of the novel in order to justify with the greatest degree of accuracy the belonging of the "House of Leaves" to modernism or postmodernism. To do this, "it is necessary to decide whether there is a space beyond the empirical understanding of the characters, or whether the house is only discursively created and mediated by the subjects" ^{[27, p. 125]}. That is, the answer to the question "what is space and what are its manifestations" in the House of the same name ^{[27, p. 125]} will be the central question of Huber's research.

Returning to Frank, it should be emphasized that he is interpreted somewhat ambiguously by Huber. One of Frank's statements says that modernist writers "ideally expect that the reader will perceive their works not in chronological, but in spatial dimension, at a frozen moment in time" ^{[17, p. 197]}. It must be assumed that we are talking here more about the fact that a "frozen event" is depicted: a certain period of time is depicted, occurring simultaneously at different points in space or at different levels of it, and it is from these different levels or points of space that it is presented to the reader.

So, Frank gave an example of the scene of the Agricultural Congress in Flaubert's Madame Bovary: there is a tie (Emma and Rudolph meeting), a climax (Emma and Rudolph's seclusion on the second floor of the city hall, Rudolph's confession, "involuntary intertwining of hands") and a denouement (presentation of a medal, exit of Madame Bovary on Rudolph's arm from the city hall, a festive lunch). Also, each spatial level has clearly defined boundaries: "On the lower level," Frank writes, "an agitated, crowding crowd in the square mixed with cattle delivered to the congress; somewhat towering above the square are official speakers pompously uttering platitudes to a diligently listening crowd. And above all this, Rudolf and Emma are watching what is happening from the window and conducting a love conversation in expressions as pompous as the speeches with which they regale the crowd in the square" ^{[17, p. 200]}.

This scene from Flaubert is really cinematic and indeed suggests possible parallels in comparison with the cinematography of individual scenes of The House of Leaves. For example, the episode with Karen's jewelry box, the meaning of which is revealed to the reader only after several hundred pages (pp. 11-373) ^{[5, pp. 11, 372-373]}. However, at the same time, Flaubert's artistic world, unlike the "House of Leaves", does not open, is not complemented or expanded by a paratext; it does not reflect the relative other artistic world or itself, etc. The scene of the Agricultural Congress is a cinematically designed separate episode taken from a holistic narrative without violating the general temporal sequence of the movement of plot events; it is a diegesis described by a non–kinetic narrator, where space and time do not violate the boundaries of the "fictional world". The "House of Leaves" is not a single event frozen (fixed by specific coordinates) in time, viewed from various spatial points: although the plot is based on a single artifact – the film "The Nevidson Film" – the plot of the "House of Leaves" at the level of diegesis is oversaturated with events both in the narrative of Zampano and in the narrative of Truent; and not only the characters (characters) change in time here, but also the space itself: the space of the house on Yaseneva Street, the geographical coordinates of the characters, textual space (technotext).

Presenting events to the reader through subjective focal points (for example, Zampano's narration) and other "subjective" overview perspectives – for example, "The Story of Tom Nevidson" ^{[5, pp. 271-279]} or watching celebrities and their comments on the film "Expedition No. 4" edited by Karen ^{[5, pp. 379-393]}, – all this functions in conjunction with the cinematography of the episodes. These viewing points are located inside the diegesis itself and give an idea of the original artifact (the "Nevidson Film"), but they are not the main principle of representing the space-time structure of the novel, since they are only one of the components of the representational apparatus of the Zampano narrative, not even the novel. As for Truent's narrative, it is an interpretation of events through a single focal point: Truent's consciousness, which gradually disintegrates as the plot moves. Thus, the part of the novel (epistolary novel) entitled "Letters from the psychiatric hospital "Three Attic Waylostow" ^{[5, pp. 620-676]} gives a look not at the artifact under study itself (at the "Nevidson Film"), but, after the fact (depending on the reader's chosen sequence of reading the novel), expands the recipient's knowledge about the process of forming the "optics" of Truent's consciousness. "Letters from the Three Attic Waylost Psychiatric hospital" reveal previously unknown episodes from Truent's childhood and clarify a lot about his relationship with his mother, which could not but affect the formation of a subjective worldview and, consequently, Truent's consciousness. Consciousness, which is a focal point in relation to the reader. Thus, the "Letters from the Three Attic Waylost Psychiatric hospital" serve as an additional "lens" superimposed on Truent's narrative, as a result of which the material already perceived by the reader is modified. In other words, "Letters from the Three Attic Waylost Psychiatric Hospital" is a kind of psychological retrospective given after the fact to the reader in order to bring new meaning to what he has already read and create another, additional level of understanding and interpretation of Truent's narrative.

Turning to Proust, who "episodically, fragmentally, in bursts portrays heroes" ^{[17, p. 205]}, Frank describes a frozen space in which heroes appear who once left this space, but appear in it in a time-altered form. Frank says that Proust does not trace the fate of the characters throughout the novel, they disappear and sometimes appear only after a hundred pages in another period of their lives, already changed. "Instead of plunging into the flow of time and observing the characters," Frank writes, "depicted in a linear sequence, in a continuous series of events, the reader finds himself in front of a variety of snapshots taken at different stages of the characters' lives" ^{[17, p. 205]}. It is in the juxtaposition of these episodes that the reader can only feel the passage of time. And then Frank comes to the conclusion that Proust's concept of "time" and the concept of "space" can be equated: time is space. This space, according to Proust, is "pure time", which opens up to the subject when he rises above the past and the future and embraces them in a single moment.

But, as Davidson has shown quite convincingly through the space-time paradigm of Castells ^[24], "timeless time" prevails in the "House of Leaves", functioning in the spaces of streams, this is not the time of a frozen freeze frame, not "the past and the future captured in a single moment", namely a flowing continuous stream capable of change the speed of its own flow, but flowing simultaneously without breaks through different spaces. In this stream (in these streams) there is no one-time view of the past and the future, there is only a multiple present in it.

Based on the above, the shape in the "House of Leaves" does not interrupt the flow of time, but serves as additional optics: either brings the recipient's gaze close to the flow of time itself, distorting space at the same time using ergodic writing (a few words on the entire page of the sheet, for example, chapter X), or distances the gaze, slowing down time to the maximum possible significance (Chapter IX, which contains a list of buildings that the house on Yaseneva Street does not look like, or a list of names of architects, etc.).

On the other hand, in the part of the "House of Leaves", where space and time are not oriented to form, the principle of episodically fragmentary depiction of heroes in bursts really functions. For example, the reader observes the ongoing changes in Karen's character through alternating conditional freeze frames or cinematic scenes taken in the same spatial dimension (in the house on Yaseneva Street), but at different times. In addition, since the "Nevidson Film" is a "documentary" film assembled from fragments, the time of the film is indeed discrete, but the time gaps are insignificant. The most significant of them is six months.

However, one cannot deny the fact that it was the "space" of the house that changed. At the same time, the changes occurred due to the ontological mobility of the space itself, which led to the development of Karen's character. That is, not time, as it happens in Proust, but space, which partly corresponds to Jamison's postmodern space ^[12]

The development of Karen's character in romantic time, that is, the sequence of this development is linear, but the initial impulse to change Karen's character is set precisely by spatial intervention: the intersection and convergence of narratives, the violation of the physical boundaries of the house on Yaseneva Street, the repeated return of Nevidson to the house on Yaseneva Street. Often, the subsequent freeze frame with Karen's participation continues the previous one interrupted by the spatial violation from the interrupted moment. The recipient sees Karen's character in the process of its development or formation, or Danilevsky shows the reader Karen's actions through retrospection, revealing one or another possible reason that influenced her character – time at the same time retains integrity, it does not work to break, – all changes in her character sooner or later reveal their own cause. Whereas in Proust, the characters fall out of the "straight line" of time and appear having already undergone changes at a point located on the "time line", spaced by the nth number of time points from the one in which the "dropped out" hero was last time.

Warning against possible contradictions, Huber says that although the narrative strategy of the House of Leaves "clearly echoes the disorientation of the inhabitants of the house, one can also read the juxtaposition of various discourses as a hint of synchronicity, which encourages us to perceive the novel as a simultaneous totality, although we practically cannot do this" ^{[27, p. 125]}.

Huber demonstrates the impossibility of the recipient's perception of the novel "as a simultaneous totality" using the example of chapter IX "Labyrinth". For Huber, the very layout of the page space, its layout, in other words, the use of technotext to mediate the events of the "Nevidson Film" will become another argument exposing the modernist poetics of the "House of Leaves".

Huber describes the layout of the construction of chapter IX as follows: "... footnotes at the bottom of the page comment on the narrative, footnotes in the left margin list architectural styles that the house on Yaseneva Street does not look like, footnote 147 in the right margin, lists in inverted form (in reverse order) on eight pages the names of influential architects, and, most characteristically, a blue square (the color of the House), which is filled with everything that is not exactly contained in the house on Yaseneva Street" ^{[27, p. 125]}. According to Huber, if we were talking about a modernist narrative, the reader would have to put together "a bunch of broken images", mostly resembling a chaotic collage, and "thus create a mosaic in which the whole becomes larger than its parts" ^{[27, pp. 125-126]}.

Here, for the sake of contrast, it is appropriate to draw a parallel with the interpretation of Art Nouveau by G. G. Gadamer, who describes the signs of modernism that have passed from literature to painting in the following way: "... we no longer see in them representations preserving the integrity of the image, the meaning of which could be identified. Rather, in these paintings, certain hieroglyphic signs and strokes are simply written down, that is, arranged in a row, what should be perceived one after another in order and eventually fused together" ^{[3, p. 232]}. And with this reading, Huber turns out to be right, since the reader is physically unable to perceive the above chapter as a simultaneous totality. For there is no totality associated with the temporal dimension in front of the reader: space determines the content, which flows into the form, and the form loses its temporal sequence. The text turns over, requiring reading in reverse order; the text is busy listing what is not in the house, listing names and styles – there is no time here (the order of reading names and styles does not matter). There are sequences that do not need to be sequenced, and there are spaces that do not depend on time and do not have a meaning tied to the content. This is an untimely time, a gap, that is, a category of postmodern reality, which somewhat contradicts Huber's initial position.

Huber also cites the following elements of modernist poetics, which are exemplified by the House of Leaves: "... the use of different fonts in the House of Leaves indicates, in my opinion, an attempt to protect various independent and stable discursive levels" ^{[27, p. 126]}. Referring to the study "Drawing(s): The rubric of the Deconstructed Era in the House of Leaves" by Martin Brick ^[22], Huber notes that in medieval writing "the font functions as the autograph of its author" ^{[27, p. 126]}. So, in the "House of Leaves", each text level is equally assigned a certain font: for Johnny Truant – "Courier"; for Zampano – "Times", for "Editors" – "Bookman"; for Pelafina – "Dante" ^[22],[27].

According to Huber, the essence of this technique in Danilevsky's novel is that, despite the cases when different narrative layers intersect both on the substantive and typographic levels (a secret tick from Pelafina's narrative ^{[23, p. 97]}; the penetration of the SOS signal from the diegetic level of the Nevidson expedition into the world of Truent ^{[23, p. 103]}), the novel "tries to maintain a specific correlation between the speaker and the spoken" ^{[27, p. 126]}. Thus, the reader is faced with a "modification of the speaking name", or, according to Huber, "speaking fonts" that establish a clear connection "between what is being said and who is saying it" ^{[27, p. 126]}. The use of various fonts, as well as colors, becomes Danilevsky's "organizational tool" ^{[22, p. 19]}.

Huber fixed the next element of the novel's modernist poetics no longer on a formal, but on a "diegetic" level: the main message of the novel: "the house is bigger inside than outside" – "emphasizes the depth of the inner, but not the outer surface" ^{[27, p. 126]}. Which cannot but evoke associations with psychoanalysis, which became widespread and developed at the beginning of the twentieth century. And Huber quite legitimately says that Freud's psychoanalysis had a significant impact on expanding ideas about the subject, opening up the space of the unconscious, which, among other things, is "another endless series of empty rooms and corridors, with potentially hidden walls hinting at a possible exterior, although invariably ending as another boundary of another interior" ^{[23, p. 119;],[27, p. 127]}. Thus, a modernist theme arises again in the novel, which, "instead of spatially defining the interior of objects using psychological literary techniques, projects the discrepancy between the inner and outer world onto the architectural structure of the house" ^{[27, p. 127]}. This means, according to Huber, that the "House of Leaves" has a rhizomatic variable structure, capable of modifying and controlling those who find themselves inside it. Through this control, the characters lose the independence of their inner content (here the voices of Jung's analytical psychology are heard: they lose their selves in the struggle with the shadow). The depth of the subject is questioned and replaced by "mediated products of discourse" ^{[27, p. 127]}.

Accordingly, according to Huber, the key question of the "House of Leaves" is the question "is the House and, consequently, its physically impossible interior a critique of scientific rationality, an extension of a subject–centered ontology" or, as Huber insists - and with which we agree – the "House" and its "interior" are "the manifestation of a meta-narrative that surpasses epistemological research and ontological fabrications of characters" ^{[27, p. 127]}.

In this case, Hales' statement that "there is no reality outside of mediation" is questioned in the process of "clarification" ^{[27, p. 127]}, that is, in the process of cognition, hermeneutical interpretation, perhaps deconstruction of the novel as "a complex structuring pattern that revives pre-postmodern ideas about the order of things" ^{[27, p. 127]}. On our own, we note that if the "House of Leaves" approaches the meta-narrative in such an interpretation, then the above rhizomatic interpretation acquires the status of only one of the possible interpretations or, at least, can be reduced to a "reception", an exemplification of the concept, which Danilevsky has already done more than once in the novel. In this case, the novel again moves away from the pure methodology of postmodernism: the epistemological will of modernism absorbed the postmodern theory of rhizome, reducing it to acceptance.

The interaction of the subject-oriented consciousness and the house on Yaseneva Street is highlighted by the question posed by the text inside the work: "Is it appropriate to understand this place [the house on Yaseneva Street – A.N.] as "deformed" by human perception?" ^{[23, p. 173]}.

Some episodes of The House of Leaves, as Huber notes, provide an answer to the above question, for example: "... mutations of the house reflect the psychology of everyone who enters it" ^{[23, p. 165]}; fictional critic Jeremy Flint on Holloway's expedition: "In Holloway's case, the house with all that was in it became an extension of himself..." ^{[23, p. 330]}; another fictional critic Ruby Dahl: "... the house, walls, rooms become a personality – collapse, expand, unfold, close, but always in an ideal ratio with the mental state of a person" ^{[23, p. 165]}.

The key to solving this problem can be considered an episode from chapter XV. Here, the interpretation of the events of the house on Yaseneva Street, given in Zampano's narrative, surpasses the subject-oriented consciousness, reveals itself: "On Yasenevaya Street there is a house permeated with darkness, cold and emptiness" ^{[5, p. 397]}. But – we read here – in the film "Expedition No. 4" edited by Karen: "On a 16-millimeter film we see a house permeated with light, love and colors" ^{[5, p. 397]}. As Huber notes, such an overlap or juxtaposition of two different types of representations, one mediated by Zampano's discourse "a house permeated with darkness, cold, and emptiness", the second is Karen's film, where "we see a house permeated with light, love and colors" – such an overlap "represents a crack between the "original" referent and its indirect representation, which hints at the mutual conjugate, but does not insist on it" ^{[27, p. 128]}. Huber cites a similar episode of subject-oriented mediation of reality from John D. Passos's novel "Manhattan", where the subjective focus of the character reveals to his gaze "exhausted revived spirits", while external focalization describes the situation quite dryly and objectively ^{[27, p. 128]}. The researcher concludes that there is a dual spatiality formed in both novels through internal focalization, characterized by obvious psychological shades: "... one objective is stable and external; the other subjective is unstable and internal" ^{[27, p. 128]}.

Huber cites the novel's use of myth as one of the main arguments in favor of the dominance of the poetics of modernism in the "House of Leaves". This makes it possible to perceive the "House of Leaves" as an all-encompassing unity. "The acceptance of myths by modernism," writes Huber, –according to Eliot, is used to "build continuous parallels between modernity and antiquity" ... which serve as fundamental structures establishing ordering principles, thanks to which existential experiences about orderliness and disorder are eliminated" ^{[27, p. 128]}   

However, Huber omits the possibility that the myth in the "House of Leaves" exists outside the context of "establishing a connection between antiquity and modernity." Although the myth in the novel is one of the "bearing walls" of its integrity, "House of Leaves" can be freely read outside the mythical context. The myth exists here rather as one of the branches along which humanity moved, and this branch is imprinted as a historical document in its artistic execution. The myth in the House of Leaves can be read as a "game of literature", where its manifestations in the text are formal: only modest clues remain on the surface, only by pulling on which you can pull out the mythological leviathan. The myth does not organize the plot, because, as such, there is no plot.

Huber draws attention to the fact that the "House of Leaves" "crosses out" organizing myths. "The Greek narrative of the Minotaur is rejected by the Derridianist gesture, which excludes the presence of a mythical creature: "The myth is the Minotaur" ^{[27, p. 129]}. "Nevertheless," Huber writes, "like the inexorable impossibility of transcending discourse, the novel cannot abandon the myth by ignoring or erasing it. The Minotaur, although denied as an integral part of the house, still haunts him and his tenants" ^{[27, p. 129]}. According to Huber, the mythological plots appearing in the "House of Leaves" are selectively displaced from the work by the house on Yaseneva Street itself. That is, if Greek mythology falls under the "striking out gesture", then objects symbolizing oriental practices simply disappear (an attempt to organize Karen's space according to Feng Shui): "... the disappeared tiger, the disappeared marble horses and even the disappeared vase" ^{[23, p. 316]}. However, as Huber notes, there is still a "master myth" in the "House of Leaves", which "can be considered as dominating the House both in its diegetic and formal manifestations" ^{[27, p. 129]}. Huber considers the poem "Yggdrasil" located on the last page (after the appendix, glossary and acknowledgements) ^{[23, p. 709]} as a kind of organizing structure indicating the priority way of reading and perceiving the novel: the novel of knowledge (epistemological novel). The novel of knowledge, in this case, can be characterized in accordance with the interpretation of A. N. Andreev: "In a novel of this type, there is everything: events, situations, and characters determined by spiritual, socio-moral and natural factors (reflecting the information structure of the personality: body – soul – spirit). These factors turn into causal series, creating a polyphonic, internally contradictory texture of the “content plan" of the work. However, the self-worth of characters and situations here gives way to the well-known self-worth of the process of (self) cognition. Actually, this process turns into an endless and global existential situation.

[…]

By cognition (artistic or scientific), we do not mean reflections of varying intensity, not a demonstration of the art of inference, which abound in intellectual or “thinking” novels. Very often, “deep reasoning" becomes a form of delusion.

[…]

Cognition refers to an adequate reflection of reality (essence) with the help of an instrument of cognition – consciousness, carried out through a special language – abstract logical concepts that develop into systems that tend to systems of systems – to wholes. As a rule, knowledge is framed in the form of articles, essays, monographs – not in the form of novels, which is fundamental. The connection of the figurative system with the conceptual one: these are the formal signs of the novel of knowledge. Here, articles and essays "implanted" into the novel fabric can purposefully complement the artistic discourse, be included in it as a necessary component" ^{[1, pp. 59-60]}.

However, this term in relation to the "House of Leaves" should be used with a certain emphasis, that is, with emphasis on the "motive of knowledge", derived, among other things, from the "connection of Yggdrasil with the Christian concept of the Tree of Eden..." ^{[27, p. 129]}. This emphasis is also inextricably linked to the hypothesis proposed by Huber that "spatial simultaneity, manifested in the juxtaposition of discourses, in the appeal to mythical parallels, indicates not only modernist poetics, but also that the sum – the novel, the House, the reading process – can be equated to the act of archiving" ^{[27, p. 133]}.

Considering the central plot of the Edd about the origin of the world, the reference point of which is the ash Yggdrasil, Huber draws parallels between the snake Nidhegg and the monster living in the labyrinth of the house; between Odin's attempt to comprehend secret knowledge and the last descent of Nevidson into the labyrinth; between the correspondences in the "House of Leaves" when the theme of "root/roots" and the root the Yggdrasil system ^{[27, pp. 129-130]}.

From the above, Huber deduces the theoretical opposition of the tree-like and rhizomatic structure of the novel: "The House of Leaves" rather covers the "hierarchical" book of roots" ^{[27, p. 131]}. Thus, according to Huber, if postmodern novels undermine ideas about the origin, teleological progress and metastructure of narrative threads, then in the "House of Leaves" the motif of a tree can be used as a hermeneutic explanation ^{[27, p. 131]}. And the location of the poem "Yggdrasil" at the very end of the book "demonstrates its essential function and represents a myth superior to those depicted in the diegetic world" ^{[27, p. 131]}. According to Huber, this means that the novel is based on the idea of "unshakable structure, expansion of internal space, as well as synchronicity of discourses", which allows us to consider the "House of Leaves" as "the embodiment of an architectural structure" that distinguishes the novel from postmodern texts, since the "House of Leaves" also "expands the position of modernism in relation to knowledge" ^{[27, p. 131]}.

Huber gives an example of another fundamental structure underlying the "House of Leaves" and having an ontological status: the labyrinth. The validity of this statement is confirmed, in Huber's opinion, by the self-interpretation of the novel, the visual design of the cover in the form of a maze, and the layout of chapter XI. In addition, says Huber, "the reference to Daedalus emphasizes the equality of the novel and the labyrinth" ^{[27, p. 131]}. In the same context, Huber reproduces Hales' statement, according to which "the architecture of the narrative is considered not as sequential, but as alternative paths in the same huge maze of fictional space-time" ^{[26, p. 784]}.

According to Huber, it is precisely due to the stable ontological structure underlying the "House of Leaves" that the novel can be considered as an archive "that asserts, but does not deny knowledge" ^{[27, p. 131]}.

"While," Huber writes, "the accumulation of knowledge by the literature of modernism calls into question any kind of truth status that can be seen symptomatically in Ulysses' chapter on Ithaca, the House of Leaves assimilates these forms of epistemological knowledge into a closed structure" ^{[27, p. 131]}. This means that when reading The House of Leaves as an archive, its "modernist memory" expands, which makes the novel different from other modern works.

According to Huber's theoretical description, Danilevsky's novel does not attempt to challenge human cognitive abilities, but "projects various layers of information in a certain order" ^{[27, p. 131]}. Realizing that the structure cannot be stable, Danilevsky's novel, according to Huber, organizes a foundation that "holds together and constructs an epistemological meta-narrative: an archive" ^{[27, p. 131]}.

This interpretation, according to Huber, also highlights the description of the etymological root of the Derrida archive in "Archive Fever" ^[25], where the word "archive", according to Derrida's analysis, has a dual origin. On the one hand, it comes from "arche", meaning "beginning" and "commandment" ^{[27, p. 132]}, on the other hand, from the Greek arkheion: "originally a house, dwelling, address, residence of the highest magistrates, archons – managers" ^{[27, p. 132]}. And as Derrida writes about the archons: "By virtue of their publicly recognized authority, it is at their home, in the place where their house is located (private house, family house or employee's house), that official documents are submitted. Archons are primarily custodians of documentation. They not only ensure the physical security of what is being deposited for storage, but are also responsible for preserving the substrate of information. They also have hermeneutical law and competencies. Their power allows them to interpret archives" ^{[25, p. 2]}.

In addition, Huber highlights another important privilege that the archons are endowed with: they have the right to "consignment, that is, to "gather together [signs]" – a right that "aims to coordinate a single corpus in a system of synchrony, where all elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration" ^{[27, p. 132],[25, p. 3]}.

In The House of Leaves, Huber identifies several levels that can be considered as "uniting archontic power": archiving of Zampano's "Nevidson Tapes"; the practice of archiving Zampano's research by Johnny Truent (his desire to collect and organize), Truent's attempt to bring his personal experience arising from problems with self–identification into the archive – "self-archiving"; and the last level of archiving is the desire of editors to fix the house in a specific place, "assign it a fixed name", that is, in the nomological sense, to give the House a stable name / signifier ^{[27, p. 132]}.

Huber concludes that "unlike the postulates of deconstruction, where signifiers are always only different and do not have a positive identity, Danilevsky's novel really suggests that the word "house" in all its manifestations (haus, maison, domus, etc.) share a common identity, which is hinted at by its color" ^{[27, p. 132]}. Huber draws attention to the fact that, unlike reading the word "house", which always appears in blue and is understood in the spirit of a hypertext link, it seems incredible that the network formed in this way around the word "house" does not affect "either the syntagmatic (mouse, rouse, hour, etc.) or the paradigmatic axis (home, building, shelter, etc.)" ^{[27, p. 132]}. Through this technique, according to Huber, the novel creates a unified language network that functions in accordance with certain rules that are not subject to discussion.

Thus, the "house" is assigned a specific and stable topological place, which, however, "should not be understood at the level of content, because "The House of Leaves"really challenges spatial categories), but rather within the framework of mediation" ^{[27, p. 132]}.

In this context, the "localization" of the "House of Leaves" initially (on the first page) finds a place in the annotation given to the publication by the editors: "many years ago, when the "House of Leaves" first appeared and passed from hand to hand, it was nothing more than a pile of poorly folded papers, some fragments which periodically appeared on the Internet. [...] Now this amazing novel is available for the first time in the form of a book, supplemented with original–colored words, vertical footnotes, and added new second and third appendices" [text located on the wing of the front cover - A.N.] ^{[27, p. 133]}.

For Huber, this statement by the "editors", read by him in the context of "hypertext archives such as the Internet", carries a semantic intention "about the superiority of the book as a media, since it collects and organizes a "poorly folded pile of paper" into a seemingly full-fledged source of knowledge, which is enhanced by the harmonious fusion of the novel into a single whole" ^{[27, p. 133]}. The materiality of the "House of Leaves", its "bookishness" ^{[21, p. 2]}, as well as the novel's persistent insistence on the specifics of the printed text, which manifests itself in "increased self-awareness of one's own materiality" ^{[27, p. 133],[26, p. 784]}, according to Huber, "suggests that knowledge is best It is presented here in the form of textual and visual discourses, since this is how it occupies a specific physical place" ^{[27, p. 133]}.

This means, according to Huber, that The House of Leaves complicates both postmodern and modernist ways of thinking, since the novel modifies familiar and stable structures for the accumulation and presentation of knowledge. And so far, the literature of modernism and postmodernism "undermines any way of reliable knowledge of the world… “The House of Leaves", on the one hand, accepts unstable ontologies (manifested in physical changes of the House on Yaseneva Street or in its dispersed typography) and nevertheless seeks to impose a dominant structure that tries to restore the very possibility and expand the dimensions of knowledge" ^{[27, p. 133]}.

That is, we are talking about the fact that Danilevsky, taking mythology as a basis, structuring different narrative layers, built the ontological structure of the novel in such a way that it represents precisely a material (book) epistemological archive. Thus, according to Huber, the novel "House of Leaves" implicitly carries a convincing base of modernist poetics.

As an exemplification in the novel "archive fever", in which the reader is also involved through the act of reading, Huber cites an episode of the final act of reading by Davidson ^{[23, p. 467]}, and Truent's epistemological insanity: "This is not me. This can't be happening. Everything I wrote, I immediately forget. I have to remember. I have to read. I have to read. I have to read" ^{[23, p. 498]}.

These are forms of "archive fever," Huber states. This is what Derrida called "burning with passion. To know no rest, endlessly searching for the archive right where it is slipping away. Chasing the archive, even if it is already present in abundance somewhere where something is busy with self-archiving. This is an obsessive, repetitive and nostalgic desire for the archive, an uncontrollable desire to return to the origins, homesickness, nostalgia for returning to the most archaic place of the absolute beginning" ^{[25, p. 91],[27, p. 133]}.  

Such a pathological desire to return to the beginning is an attempt (although not a problem–free one) capable of "offering various ways of understanding and caring for a book as a means that, despite numerous statements, has not yet completely turned to ashes" ^{[27, p. 134]}.

All this brings us back to the idea that "House of Leaves" is an encyclopedia of techniques, practices, concepts, etc., and, ultimately, it is a novel claiming to be a meta–narrative striving to the plane of the term "Limit-Modernism" by McHale.

Such an ambiguous position of the "House of Leaves" in the research environment requires clarification of some controversial points of poetics and interpretations of this novel. In particular, a more thorough analysis of the mythological component embedded in the "House of Leaves" by the author is required. At a minimum, we should figure out whether the myth in the "House of Leaves" is really a foundation element or is it an "empty" symbol, sign, concept, construct into which any essential content, semantic content, epistemological "knowledge" of the novel "House of Leaves" escapes. 

The "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" calligraphy, the cosmogony of ancient Egypt and the Scandinavian myth of the world tree

The Yggdrasil tree came to world culture from Scandinavian mythology, from Old Norse songs about gods and heroes collected in the poetry collections "The Elder Edda" and "The Younger Edda". Where the name "Yggdrasil" is literally a Horse (drasil) Odin (Ygg) [see: 8, p. 245] – carries the world tree or, in other words, the tree of the limit: "I remember the giants, / born before the age, / they gave birth to me / in ancient years; / I remember nine worlds / and nine roots / and the tree of the limit, / not yet sprouted" ^{[15, p. 9]}.

From the "Elder Edda" we know that the tree of the limit is the "world ash Yggdrasil, the world tree. Its branches are spread over the whole world and put a limit to it in space. The world tree probably had a sacred pillar as a prototype... (Irminsul – “great pillar")... Such pillars are considered, in particular, a means of communication with the afterlife. One hung himself on this tree once to acquire secret knowledge" ^{[15, p. 216]}.

It is also known that the first Scandinavian houses were similar to the tents of the "Tipi" – the dwellings of the nomadic Indians of the Great Plains of a portable type. It is also known that "The oldest of the discovered settlements in Norway (Trena in Helgeland) dates back to about the 5th millennium BC. The houses, which had an oval shape (4-6 m in diameter), apparently rested on wooden pillars" ^{[7, p. 81]}.

The prototype of these wooden pillars could serve as a world tree, as evidenced, for example, by the saga of the Volsungs: "... the Volsung King ordered to build a glorious certain chamber, and ordered to build so that a huge tree grew in the middle of the chamber and the branches of that tree with wonderful flowers spread over the roof of the chamber, and the trunk went down into the chamber, and they called him the ancestral trunk" ^{[14, p. 99]}.

The "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" in the "House of Leaves" performs a similar function: the poem is like the center of the house, its sketch, a bearing support or "a means of communication with the afterlife." Its figurative execution probably symbolizes the internal scheme of the house on Yaseneva Street: "black dot" is the entrance to the portal, the beginning of the journey, the beginning of the beginning (unknown door in the bedroom); "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l" (the trunk of the poem) is the connecting space (a spiral staircase in the center of the "great hall"); the "crown" of the poem is a "timeless" space, another dimension; the symbol "O" is a symbolic reproduction of the motif of death–rebirth, an indication of the continuity of the life stream through cyclic renewal or, probably, a symbol of ouroboros. (The Ouroboros is a ring–shaped figure depicting a snake biting its own tail, a symbol of eternity, indivisibility, as well as the cyclicity of time. The symbolism of this figure is interpreted in different ways, as it combines the creative symbolism of the egg (the space inside the figure), the earthly symbolism of the snake and the heavenly symbolism of the circle ^{[19, p. 264]}).

If the symbol "O" is identified with the ouroboros, then the symbol "black dot" can mean a solar disk in accordance with the mythology of ancient Egypt. This connection can be traced by referring to the "Book of Caves", which describes the descent of Ra into the underworld.

When Ra descends into the afterlife, he addresses Osiris: "This is Henty-Ur [the afterlife serpent], who resides in his cave, encircles and preserves him [Osiris]. Here I enter and penetrate into your plans and secrets when you are resting in your place. You are the only one who came out of myself, because I gave you the rays of my solar disk to see" ^{[9, p. 84]}.

In the underworld, Ra will experience the process of transforming his own lifeless body into a new living form – the scarab Khepri, rolling a solar ball in front of him ^{[9, p. 80]}. Similarly, the Book of Caves, describing the descent of Ra – the source of light and life – into the afterlife, into the kingdom of Osiris, tells that Ra will go through several stages of renewal and will revive Osiris himself with the help of the power of the word and the light of the solar disk. Since Osiris is identified with the deceased, the sun here is a force that resurrects not only God, but the deceased: "He is reborn to life through the intervention of Ra, participating in the sacrament of resurrection: he, together with Osiris, becomes a new sun, which rises as Ra" ^{[9, p. 80]}.

According to the solar myth of Egypt, there was no time before the great formation took place – heaven and earth, the state and the cult of the Pharaoh. The very event of the creation of the world formed the original time. This solar myth generates a time of eternal circulation in the continuous past, present and future ^{[20, p. 20]}.

However, the ancient Egyptians did not take sunrise and sunset for granted. They put a lot of effort into making the sun appear in its usual place: this event was "evoked" and "sustained" both ritually and symbolically. In their opinion, the Sun's journey and its cyclical rebirth were "continuously threatened by an opposing force: the attraction to non–existence, stopping and ceasing - which was symbolically embodied in the figure of a giant water snake" ^{[20, p. 21]}. The snake Apop carries the threat of swallowing the waters of the primordial ocean and throwing Ra's boat ashore. Therefore, with the support of the accompanying gods, in particular the god Set, Ra had to defeat Apophis in order to travel through the sky again in the morning.

However, the battle of Ra with Apophis is not the only event that shaped the cyclical time course of ancient Egypt. Since in the main cosmogonic myth of the origin of the world among the ancient Egyptians, chaos is not considered as a state preceding the order, which should be replaced by space: "Nun, the primordial water from which the sun first rose; Cook, primordial darkness, boundless expanse of air; Niau, the primordial non-existence, which constitutes the Egyptian idea of pre-existence, continues to be present in the existing the world" ^{[20, p. 21]}.

According to Egyptian cosmogony, the pre–world does not represent chaos or emptiness, but it is a kind of embryonic pleroma, which, after the creation of the world, continues to dominate the peripheral part of the created world. It is to this pre-worldly sphere that the sun god returns every night to restore the energy spent during the day, "passing from childhood through maturity to old age" ^{[20, p. 21]}. In this process and in the very presence of pre-Mirsky lies the "mystery of cyclic time, reversibility and rebirth" ^{[20, p. 21]}.

The final image of the "Book of Gates" ^[30] depicts the sunrise from pristine waters and darkness:

The Sun God in the form of Khepri with a disk, in a boat supported by Nun and accepted by Chickpeas ^[30].

 Against the background of the water space, a male figure appears from below with arms outstretched above his head, pushing up a solar rook. The rook is occupied by various gods, including Isis and Nephthys, who lift a scarab pushing a solar disk in front of them. Two figures descend from the top of the image, in the opposite direction to the rising sun: "On the head of a male figure, whose back and legs bend like an Ouroboros, there is a female figure who meets the sun rising from below with her hands" ^{[20, p. 22]}.

The forces that "come from above" ^{[6, p. 10]} are, according to the explanatory inscriptions, "Osiris, who surrounds the underworld" (it is he who is bent by the ring of Ouroboros), and the goddess Nut standing on the head of Osiris, who "accepts the sun god Ra" ^{[20, p. 22]}.

Thus, three energies participate in the sunrise: outstretched arms pushing the rook with the gods up; Isis and Nephthys lifting the scarab; and the scarab rolling the solar disk in front of itself ^{[20, p. 22]}. Sunrise – i.e., the resurrection of Osiris (symbolizing also the resurrection of the deceased); rebirth and renewal of Ra, the source of life and light – is carried out by the forces of three energies resting and rising from the primordial ocean. And after birth, transformation and ascension into the sky, the forces of conditional "darkness" meet and accept the "three energies": the goddess of the sky Chickpeas and Osiris resurrected at night. This is how God is born and a new solar cycle begins. There is a clear parallelism with the events in the "House of Leaves", namely: the repeated return of Nevidson to the house on Yasenevaya Street, and the descent of the latter into the boundless, timeless space under the house, i.e. the descent of Nevidson into the conditional "afterlife".

Nevertheless, for the poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l", the fact is fundamental that, according to Egyptian cosmogony, the sun god stands at the beginning of all things, since he appeared from himself. The symbol of the idea of spontaneous self-generation is the scarab (kheper in Egyptian ^{[20, p. 24]}), because it "arose by itself, without any sexual intercourse" ^{[20, p. 24]}. The verb kheper means "to become", "to transform oneself", to develop. And in Egypt this concept occupied the same absolute place as in Greece the concept of "being" ^{[20, p. 24]}.

Air and fire, then earth and sky also arise from the self-nascent, self-generated sun, and at a late stage of cosmogony, heaven and earth separate from each other, the sun is carried away to the sky and moves through it during the day, and through the underworld at night. In the second phase of cosmogony, cyclic time is born, which contains the whole essence of the myth of the journey of Ra or the Sun ^{[20, p. 24]}.

This means that the basis of the poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" is "being" as such, since it is symbolized by the solar disk of Ra: self-generating, self-generating energy from which, or separating from which, the world originated. For, as it was shown above, the gods of the second part of the cosmogony perform the function of "servicing" the cyclicity of the subsequent existence of the divided energy, i.e. the world as the ancient Egyptians knew it.

Thus, Danilevsky's poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" literally combines the Scandinavian myth of the world tree and ancient Egyptian cosmogony, i.e. self-arising being (the black dot in the poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l", she is also the solar disk in the images in the "Book of Gates", in the "Book of Caves", etc.), which did not know time, but was subsequently divided and renewed through the presence or continued presence of the "primordial pleroma" in the back of the world. This "connection" is carried out, including through the "figurativeness" of the verse: the calligraphic image of the "solar disk" in place of the root of the tree, combined with the location of the ouroboros above the crown of the tree, as if they loop the space around the tree of the limit. The tree of the limit is located between the sun and the infinitely regenerating and self-regenerating energy. Thus, based on the position of parallelism, which is hinted at by the symbol "O" (ouroboros) and the symbol "•" (solar disk), it can be concluded that Nevidson, descending into the "world under the house", in some way repeats the route of the sun god Ra: he always finds himself in the kingdom of Osiris, where, faced with the "primordial pleroma", a certain initial matter of "being", withstands a battle with a "monster" (the serpent Apop, whom the heroes of Danilevsky's novel hear, but do not see), dies and is reborn to a new life.

Symbolic reproduction of archetypal, semantic, and mythological plot elements

It should be noted that the symbolism of the world tree is present not only on the last page of the House of Leaves, but is implicitly, by hints, hidden in some other inconspicuous details of the novel.

On the first textual (third numbered) page of Zampano's book "The Nevidson Film" (the book that forms one of the parts of the entire novel "House of Leaves"), the name of the street on which the "House of Leaves" is located is given – "Ash Tree Lane": "... disputes about flying saucers filmed Billy Mayer, completely replaced by the mystery of the house on Ash Street" ^{[5, p. 3]}. Here the name of the street refers the recipient specifically to "Ash", in other words, to the genus of woody plants, to which "Yggdrasil" belongs in Scandinavian mythology.

Further, in chapter XI of the "Nevidson Tapes", where, in the context of the events that took place on Ash Street, Zampano discusses the biblical brothers Esau and Jacob: "Esau (Esau) comes from the root ash, which means "to hurry", and Ya'akov – from the root basis akov, which means "to linger" or "abstain" (i.e. literally Esau saw the light first, Jacob after him). But Esau is also associated with the root asah, which means "to cover", and Jacob – with the base aqub, "heel" (in other words, Esau was "covered" with hair, and Jacob was born clinging to his brother's heel, detaining him)" ^{[5, p. 267]}.

Thus, the root "ash", which in English (the original language of the "House of Leaves") means "ash", "ashes", "sprinkle with ashes", appears in the text of the "House of Leaves" through a biblical legend, where Esau, among other things, is the ancestor of the Edomites (Edomites; Genesis 361-8), i.e. it is the root – "ash" (ash lane) of the family tree, etc.

However, at the time of reading, the street name or the semantics of the root of the street name do not work on the mythological context – at the time of reading it is not updated. But when the recipient gets to the last page of the novel, where the poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" will "wink" at him, the context of the myth will be updated, and the novel will receive a new dimension, where the name "House of Leaves" will acquire another allegorical meaning. In addition to "leaves" – pages; "houses of leaves" – an unstable model of a shaky world; a book-model "house of leaves" – a world tree will arise, and "leaves-pages" become the crown of this tree. The name "House of Leaves" becomes synonymous with the ash tree Yggdrasil, the novel could be called "Yggdrasil".

The intersection of the above-described meanings and images in one sign indicates the unity of the meaning (idea) and the image in this sign. In other words, the poem "Igg-d-r-a-s-i-l-l" is nothing but a symbol. Thus, in the Dialectics of Myth, A. F. Losev describes this property of the symbol in detail: "... in the symbol, both the "idea" brings new things to the "image", and the "image" brings new, unprecedented things to the "idea"; and the "idea" is identified here not with a simple "imagery", but with the identity of the "image" and the "idea", just as the "image" is identified not with just an abstract "idea", but with the identity of the "idea" and the "image"" ^{[10, p. 40]}.

This means that "Igg-d-r-a-s-i-l" is a symbol given in its immediate existence, this poem becomes, in fact, not a poetic text, but a mythical reality given in the form of a symbol.

The poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" is precisely, in Losev's words, "an independent reality where one cannot see either an "idea" without an "image" or an "image" without an "idea"" ^{[10, p. 40]}. The idea and image in the poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" are also graphically embodied, using ergodic writing ("technotext" in the terminology of K. N. Hales: technotext - texts that demonstrate an increased sense of their own materiality ^{[26, p. 794]}), or, in other words, the idea and image are embodied in the mechanical organization of the text of the poem literally depicting a tree.

Mythological layers of the "House of Leaves"

However, with a more thorough analysis of the poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" at the formal and substantive level, it becomes difficult to determine what exactly is the "image" and what is the "idea" here.

In "Dialectics of Myth" Losev states: "Although this (the being of the symbol – A.N.) is the meeting of two planes of being, but they are given in complete, absolute indistinguishability, so that it is no longer possible to indicate where the "idea" and where the "thing" are. This, of course, does not mean that the “image” and “idea” in the symbol do not differ in any way. <…> …They differ in such a way that the point of their absolute identification is visible, and the sphere of their identification is visible" ^{[10, p. 40]}.

Since, according to Losev, the image and the idea are inseparable in the symbol, then in the interpretation of the poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" as a symbol, a logically established "point of absolute identification" of the image-idea, allowing to see the sphere of their identification, will make it possible to define both "image and the idea of the "symbol of the poem "Igg-d-r-a-s-i-l-l".

The location of the point of absolute identification should be sought based solely on the deep idea of the Yggdrasil tree and the correlation of this idea with the world mythological context, since this will not allow the analysis to go aside due to the formal semantic layers that have accumulated around this symbol over many centuries.

The idea of the tree of life in ancient mythology is presented not only as the idea of a world axis, but also as the idea of a portal between worlds, the idea of a "center of transformation", "where the walls and laws of the transitory world can dissolve and reveal some kind of miracle" ^{[8, p. 240]}. Which is in tune with the "House of Leaves" in terms of the "dissolution of the laws of the transitory world", which we observe in the novel at the level of the plot.

A detailed analysis of the image-idea of the tree of life itself was carried out by Joseph Campbell in the work "Mythical Image", where the analysis began with a cursory description of the properties of a certain "sacred place", the existence of which "apparently coincides with the period of existence of the human race" ^{[8, p. 240]}. Campbell finds an example of such a "sacred place" in the Old Testament story of Jacob's dream: "And he saw (Jacob – A.N.) in a dream: behold, a ladder stands on the ground, and its top touches heaven; and behold, the Angels of God ascend and descend on it. And behold, the Lord stands on it and says: I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac... Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, "Truly the Lord is present in this place; but I did not know! And he was afraid and said: How scary this place is! This is nothing but the house of God, this is the gate of heaven... (Gen.. 28:10-14, 16-18)" ^[2].

It is interesting to note that Danilevsky also cites the biblical myth of Esau and Jacob in the "House of Leaves", although in a different context and calls through the narrative of Johnny Truent to "read the Book of Genesis, ch. 23-33" ^{[5, p. 265]}. In addition, it was this biblical plot that served as a prototype for building a relationship between the main character of the novel, Will Nevidson, and his brother Tom Nevidson, as discussed in chapter XI of the "Nevidson Tapes". But unlike the biblical plot, in the "House of Leaves" the culmination of reconciliation between the brothers will take place only posthumously.

After mentioning this biblical story, Campbell cites the oldest known mythological texts, the Texts of the Pyramids (2350-2175 BC), where it says that "the deceased ascends the ladder of Ra, his father, created for him (Sayings, 271:390a); A ladder is erected for the deceased… He ascends the hips of Isis, he ascends the hips of Nephthys. His father, Atum, offers his palms to the deceased (480:995a-c, 996c–997a); The deceased goes to his mother, Nut [Heaven]; climbs up her, for her name is "Ladder" (974:941a-b); Every spirit, every god who offers his palms to the deceased, will be on the ladder of God. Those who merged for his sake are his bones; those who gathered for his sake are his members; the deceased ascends on the fingers of God, the lord of the ladder (748:980)" ^{[8, pp. 240-241]}.

Campbell cites these texts, among other things, as an argument in support of the theory that "according to Egyptian ideas, each tomb was the support of a heavenly ladder, along which the soul of the deceased ascended to its last offended in the eternally moving boat of Ra" ^{[8, p. 240]}.

Further, Campbell will note that not all mystical places of this kind lead upwards. As an example, he cites a sacred site in the northern part of the Arunta desert in Australia, where "at the dawn of the world, the totemic ancestor of the Bandicoot people rose from the ground, leaving behind a huge gaping pit filled with the sweet dark juice of honeysuckle buds" ^{[8, p. 242]}. Campbell will show a photo showing three tribesmen from Northern Arunta sitting in front of a sacred drawing of the Ilbalintya swamp on the Berta Plain. The drawing depicted on the ground is a solid black circle with white circles radiating from the center. According to the legend of the Bandicoot tribe about the creation of the world (which has much in common with the myth of the creation of the world among the peoples of the north), "in this place at the beginning of time, when everything was plunged into darkness, the totemic ancestor of the Bandicoot Karura lay down to rest and fell into eternal sleep. The soil above him turned red with flowers, everything was overgrown with herbs, and from the center of a patch of purple flowers, directly above his head, a sacred pole rose swinging in all directions. It was a living creature, covered with skin as smooth as a human's, and Karura's head rested at its roots.

Despite the dream, the ancestor was thinking; desires flashed in his head, and then bandicoots began to emanate from his navel and armpits. Breaking through a layer of turf, they appeared into the light, and at the same moment the first dawn broke. The sun rose and flooded everything with its light. And after that, Karura also decided to get up. He turned the earth that covered him, and the gaping hole that remained after his departure turned into the Ilbalintya swamp – the place where the Bandicoot totem and the sun itself arose" ^{[8, p. 244]}.

According to Campbell, in many cases such a holy place or center "is considered as a vertical axis (axis mundi), rising to the North Star and going down to some cardinal point in the abyss. Iconographically, such an axis can be represented as a mountain, a ladder or steps, a pole or, as is most often done, a tree. <...> Equally, this axis is personified with a cross" ^{[8, p. 245]}.

The house on Yaseneva Street is located on a territory that has a rather strange, if not mythological historical background. And the house on Yaseneva Street itself has managed to acquire its own mythology in a short time of its existence. This is how, for example, the story of the former owners of the house looks like, of whom there were many: "There have been four in the last eleven years. Over fifty– almost twenty. It seems that no one has stayed in it for more than two or three years. Someone died of a heart attack or something like that, and someone just disappeared." ^{[5, p. 440]}.

Further, it is assumed that the house is located on the territory of an old Indian cemetery, but it turns out that "the area is too swampy, well, next to the James River. Not the best place for a cemetery" ^{[5, p. 440]}.

However, a fundamental fact is still revealed: "... the only thing that we managed to find out about the past of your house for sure (appeal to the Nevidson family – A.N.) – and there is no mystery here – it is located on the territory of the Jamestown colony" ^{[5, p. 440]}.

Jamestown was the site of the first successful establishment of a permanent English settlement in North America. Since 1601, settlers in this territory have been dying from hunger, cold, epidemics, tomahawks of Indians; the so-called "Jamestown Massacre" of 1622 took place in 1676. Jamestown was burned down altogether as a result of the farmers' revolt, led by Nathaniel Bacon, an uprising against English colonial rule. And as Danilevsky himself quotes a certain Davis Mantok, speaking about the final destruction of the remains of the city in 1934, when "they dug up the land for the laying of the park: "Swampy lands swallowed what remained of the colony" ^{[5, p. 441]}.

No matter how Danilevsky lulled the vigilant reader with exhortations akin to "and there is no mysticism here," the fact is obvious that he chose one of the most mystical and significant places in North America for his home.

To build a connection between the territory of the former Jamestown colony, the history of its existence with the house on Yaseneva Street and the events with which the reader is dealing, Danilevsky leads a document into the novel, the authenticity of which is very difficult to establish: "All this is important (this is the history of the Jamestown colony – A.N.) only because the library has rare The Lacuna books at Hornew College, South Carolina, contain a strange manuscript" ^{[5, p. 441]}. This manuscript is a diary kept by one of the three hunters who left the Jamestown colony in the winter of 1610 in the hope of getting game.

It is probably precisely because of the last sentence left in this diary that Danilevsky builds the chapter so that the story of the first successful English settlement of Jamestown appears before the reader in all the splendor of mystical intonations.

The diary tells how in the hungry winter of 1610, hunters who left the colony came across a frozen field where they set up camp. In the spring, when the snow melts, the bodies of two hunters will be found there, with whom someone named Varr will discover the mysterious diary. The body of the third hunter will not be found.

Starting from January 18, 1610, diary entries about the difficult situation of hunters tell about the deterioration of the weather, about a snowstorm, about a premonition of imminent death from hunger and cold. So, on January 20, 1610, one of the hunters named Verme "had terrible dreams at night"; on January 21, 1610, it was noted that "the blizzard does not abate, the wind whistles terribly in the forest, but strangely enough, Tiggs, Verme and me this sound calms down. <...> Werme said that he dreamed of Bones. I dreamed of the Sun"; on January 22, 1610, the owner of the diary wrote the following: "We are dying. Tiggs dreamed that the snow around us turned red with blood"; and the last and most important entry from January 22, 1610: "Steps! We found the steps!" ^{[5, pp. 442-445]}.

As you might guess, the hunters found the steps of the very house on Ash Street that Nevidson would deal with almost four hundred years later. It is these steps that serve as part of the mosaic that makes up the symbolic layers of the novel "House of Leaves", creating its mythology.

This happens as follows: steps, stairs, railings and other architectural structures permeate the novel at every narrative level.

In the book "The Nevidson Film" about stairs:

"And three more frames. A dark corridor. A room without windows. Stairs" ^{[5, p. 18]};

"... all that Nevidson will have a year later are the vague silhouettes of Karen and the children jumping down the stairs... and the house itself, a vague silhouette lurking at the corner of Sukkot and Yaseneva Streets, bathing in the midday glow" ^{[5, p. 18]};

"... Holloway reports that in the center of the Great Hall they found a spiral staircase sixty meters in diameter, which descends into nowhere ... <...> …Jed tries to describe the staircase: "It was something huge. We fired several flares, but did not hear how they reached the bottom, i.e. this place itself is so empty, cold and quiet that the pin will fall – it must be audible, the darkness just swallowed the flash, and that's it" ^{[5, p. 92]};

"Jed and Vox reach the spiral staircase in forty–five minutes-and for the next seven hours they try to descend it. When they finally stop and launch a flare down, not only does it not illuminate the bottom, but it does not even sound like it has reached it. Jed also draws attention to the fact that the diameter of the stairs has grown from sixty meters to almost one hundred and fifty" ^{[5, p. 93]};

"...Holloway hopes to explore the Spiral Staircase after spending four or even five nights inside" ^{[5, p. 102]};

"... if we proceed from Holloway's messages, then the stairs lead down to an unimaginable twenty-odd kilometers" ^{[5, p. 177]}.

Chapter XII of the "Nevidson Tapes" reflects an unprecedented event: The spiral staircase in the center of the Great Hall, in front of the researchers, which is captured by cameras, stretches from a height of 30 meters to, if you trust Zampano's calculations, up to 88,000 kilometers. (If D (in feet) = 16t2, where time is calculated in seconds, the coin should have flown almost 44,000 kilometers, which is four thousand kilometers longer than the length of the earth's equator. And if we proceed from the acceleration of 9.8 m/s2, this figure increases to almost 88,000 kilometers ^{[5, p. 325]}). This distance is determined based on the time of the fall of a coin thrown from the top of the stairs: "And then I (Nevidson – A.N.) suddenly heard something tinkle behind my back. I turned around: there was a third quarter lying on the floor, away from me. <...> If Tom threw a coin, say, a few minutes after Reston reached the top step, it fell for at least fifty minutes" ^{[5, p. 325]}.

Next, the staircase in Truent's narration: "All the materials are stored in the pantry, in order to get to it, you need to overcome eight steep steps. <...> I'm rocking head over heels, counting all eight steps… They will not see any signs of a fall – my fall – because I am covered in black ink, my hands are completely black, the floor around me is also black... for a moment it seemed to me that the hand had disappeared, that I myself had disappeared..." ^{[5, p. 77]}.

Here Danilevsky depicts a man, i.e. Truent, literally "disappearing" after falling down the stairs, finding himself "engulfed" by the inky and surrounding darkness: he passes into another space.

Further, the ladder in the epigraph: "The poet is in prison, sick, unshaven, emaciated, / Trampling the leaves of the unborn poem with his foot, / Watching in despair, as into the abyss, trembling all over, / His soul slides down the terrible ladder. Charles Baudelaire" ^{[5, p. 264]}.

All the above stairs that appear and change in the "House of Leaves" somehow perform the same symbolic role: they are portals to other (other) dimensions. However, the question "which ones exactly?" leaves the House of Leaves open, although it indicates some possible directions: hell, nothingness, emptiness, subconsciousness, etc. The poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" also indicates one of the possible options - a mythical dimension.

In this dimension of the "House of Leaves" there is another mythical layer, not previously identified, which can be opened with the help of the poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l".

In the chapter "Science" of Zampano's book "The Nevidson Film", Danilevsky gives some "scientific" data obtained by the characters of the novel as a result of "research" of samples of materials from the walls of the labyrinth under the house on Yaseneva Street: "Sample A is quite young, it is several thousand years old, sample K is several hundred thousand years old. In the case of Q, the bill has been going on for millions of years, and these from MMMM to XXXX are several billion. These pieces are clearly meteoric. <...>...Rubidium-87/strontium-87 is the best dating method we have for rocks between 4.4 and 4.7 billion years old. If we assume that the age of the Earth is about four and a half billion years, then it is quite obvious that these samples are not from here. <...> Your latest sample XXXX is definitely the oldest and most interesting. It is an alloy of a younger material, which is 4.2 billion years old, with particles rich in deuterium and possibly (I emphasize, possibly) indicating that it is older than the Solar system" ^{[5, p. 406]}.

Turning to the mythological stories about the creation of the world, which are carried by the symbol "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l", the period of time "before the emergence of the Solar System" can be attributed to the period "when everything was plunged into darkness", and "the totemic ancestor of the bandicoots Karura lay down to rest and plunged into eternal sleep," or by the time: "Ymir's flesh / became the earth, / bones became mountains, / the skull / of cold Tours became the sky, / and his blood became the sea," etc." ^{[15, p. 32]}.

This is exactly what the actualization of the next mythical layer of the "House of Leaves" looks like, where the poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" refers the recipient to the archetypal plot about the creation of the world. The house on Yasenevaya Street becomes a consequence of the act of creation of the world, let us recall: "... from the center of the spot of purple flowers, directly above his head, a sacred pole rose swinging in all directions. It was a living creature, covered with skin as smooth as a human's, and Karura's head rested at its roots."

Ash Street, on which the house is located, runs through a swampy area, unsuitable, for example, for an Indian cemetery, where, according to the Varr manuscript, back in 1610, when this area was an open field, hunters who wandered for about a week found steps (recall the Old Testament story about Jacob's dream, as well as stairs from Pyramid Texts). Which obviously couldn't lead anywhere but underground. Samples of materials from the vast space under the house, where these steps descended, are samples that have already been studied in our time, perhaps "older than the solar system". Such a reproduction of the components of archetypal plots about the creation of the world indicates that the "House of Leaves" is either trying to turn on, capture and try on this archetype, or this archetype underlies the text itself.

In addition, the house on Yaseneva Street has its own unique spatial and temporal characteristics, has some psychological impact on those who find themselves in it, and does not have, as such, a rational interpretation. It is obvious that the house on Yaseneva Street, in addition to all possible acceptable interpretations, is "a center of transformation where walls and laws of the transitory world can dissolve and reveal some kind of miracle" ^{[8, p. 240]}. And this "center of transformation", once its doors are opened with the help of the symbol "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l", is teeming with archetypes.

Also, the house on Ash Street, thanks to the symbolism of the inverted tree of life, has an additional mythical layer associated with the Katha Upanishad, where it is said about the inverted tree: "At the top [of it] is the root, at the bottom are the branches, this is the eternal fig tree. It is pure, it is Brahman, it is called immortal. All worlds are established in this, no one goes beyond it. Truly, this is it" ^{[16, p. 110]}.

Commenting on this passage, Campbell says the following: "The Sanskrit name for the fig tree, ashwattha, comes from the word ashwa, meaning "horse." Let's compare it with Yggdrasil, "Odin's Horse" ^{[8, p. 634]}. Which closes in on the archetypal story of the creation of the world, embedded in the "House of Leaves".

And further, continuing the plot about the inverted tree of life in Campbell, who gives a description of the efforts of the mystic described by Jan van Ruysbroek (1293-1381): "And he must climb the tree of faith, growing crown down, for its roots go into the divine" ^{[8, p. 250]}.

Further, the medieval text of the Kabbalah "Zohar" (c. 1280 AD): "Happy is that part of Israel in which the Holy One, blessed be He, rejoices and to which the truth of the Torah, the Tree of Life, is bestowed. Whoever knows it will find life in this world and in the next. The Tree of Life extends from top to bottom; it is the all-illuminating Sun" ^{[8, pp. 250-251]}.

In addition, in Dante's "Divine Comedy", an inverted tree on the sixth ledge of the world mountain of purgatory: ""The tree, blocking the road, Captivating with the smell of fruits, like a fir tree, everything is already up a little, So it is down so that you cannot climb. At least even to the lower prison.” From this tree came a voice forbidding anyone to eat its fruits. Then, in the Earthly Paradise on the top of the mountain, where, as on the top of the Mayan pyramid or the Mesopotamian ziggurat, heaven and earth close together, a tree is discovered from which Adam and Eve plucked the fatal fruit; as the poet says, “... a tree whose branches Neither leaves nor flowers were decorated. His namet, the higher, the more powerful it was, expanding to the right and to the left, it would have surprised the Indians with its height" ^{[8, pp. 251-252]}.

The symbol of the inverted world tree is as valuable for the novel "House of Leaves" as this same symbol is important for the Upanishads, for Kabbalah, for the Divine Comedy, and is not just valuable or important, but performs a specific function: it actualizes the mythological context embedded in the novel, as well as the intertext appealing to history references.

Conclusions

The house on Yasenevaya Street is an idea–an image of a tomb, the stairs of which lead to the eternally moving boat of Ra in a circle. In this interpretation, the symbol crowning the crown of the poem "Igg-d-r-a-s-i-l-l" is actualized, namely: the symbol "O". Which is also crowned by ankh, a symbol of rebirth, an unchangeable attribute of the Egyptian Sun God with the head of a falcon, who travels through the Afterlife every night in a solar barge and leaves it at dawn (it is also important that there is a theory that Ankh is a tuning fork).

The death-rebirth motif is also associated with the Tibetan Wheel of Becoming, which reproduces this motif at the level of a system of several circles having a common center and symbolizing the forces that set in motion the cycles of death-rebirth, as well as containing symbolic designations of sins and the six kingdoms in which one can be reborn, etc. Such a symbolic series can be continued (e.g., the Bardo Mandala from the Nyingmapa tradition), etc.

From the point of view of the mythological reading of the House of Leaves, the novel, thanks to the poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l", becomes a place of intersection of the most significant forces and laws of the universe: time, eternity, movement, rest, integrity, multiplicity. The result of such a "meeting" in the "House of Leaves" is the novel text itself. Where the poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" symbolizes the world axis, portal or center of transformation, combining an idea and a mythical image – this is the "point of absolute identification" we are looking for. For "in essence, this is an image (the image of an inverted tree – A.N.) of an axial point or pole, which is intended to symbolize the way or place of transition from movement to rest, from time to eternity, from separateness to unity – but at the same time and vice versa: from rest to movement, from eternity to time, from uniqueness to plurality" ^{[8, p.: 255]}.

That is, ideologically, the poem "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" serves as a node or intersection of various mythical and literary plots related to the world tree. These plots, in addition to intertextual connections (for example, Nevidson repeatedly descends into the "lower world", as he is attracted by the "whisper of Beatrice", and, as a result, losing his eye, acquires the features of a mortal god similar to Odin, who voluntarily hanged himself on Yggdrasil for the sake of comprehending wisdom) are presented in the "House of Leaves" directly, in the form of quotations and mentions.

Semantically, "Igg-d-a-r-s-i-l-l" performs the same function that is assigned to the tree of the limit in the "Eddas" – it is the foundation on which various worlds rest, in our case, the semantic, symbolic, plot content of the "House of Leaves", as well as It is the symbolic axis of the material book, "penetrating" through the "House of Leaves".

"Igg-d-a-r-s-i-l-l" is a miniature model of the skeleton of both the "House of Leaves" and the house on Yasenevaya Street: the vertically positioned name "Igg–d-a-r-s-i-l-l" - stairs in the center"The Great Hall", the four lines of the poem symbolize the space into which this staircase leads, including the labyrinth. The black dot is a portal between this world and the world into which "Igg-d-a-r-s-i-l-l" leads; the symbol in the form of a circle or the letter "O" is a symbol of the continuity of life – continuity, which is carried out through the cycle of "death–rebirth".

Such a significant layer of mythology (this article considers far from all the mythological plots to which Danilevsky appeals in the novel: it was ignored, for example, the "Myth of the Minotaur") combined with a truly bottomless intertextuality – to which, for example, the study of Joseph B. Noah ^[29] is devoted – suggests Tom, Danilevsky is trying to "build" the novel "House of Leaves" as a functional node that incorporates not only the history and theory of literature, but the history of culture as a discourse going back to the history and theory of philosophy, architecture, music, cinema. The author's attitude of this kind seems to be an attempt to overcome or repeat James' Ulysses Joyce, but with the difference that the "House of Leaves" functions according to other laws lying in the field of Limit-modernism, using McHale's terminology, in the space of flows and in timeless time ^[24].

"House of Leaves" is a work that embodies both the aesthetics of "premodern" and "modern" and "postmodern", as evidenced by the unusual dominance of pluralism within the work. Therefore, the question of whether the novel belongs to one or another system of philosophizing, or to one or another language of describing the epoch, does not have an unambiguous or definitive answer. On the other hand, it is impossible to imagine the very possibility of the emergence of such a novel in the era preceding postmodernity, since this novel is not feasible without a hyperreal dimension, without the space of flows and timeless time. In this regard, Danilevsky managed to create a text that is in a state of continuous formation, the artistic world of which is not closed and is not outlined by a clear boundary, but continuously penetrates into reality, where it lives either in the present moment, then in the mythical past, then leaving the place of its "construction", then returning to its own roots.

This means that D. B. Noah's statement that the novel "House of Leaves" marked or revealed the "end of postmodernism" ^[29] cannot be final and the only true one. For the reader, "blowing off the leaves", blows away only the bricolage form, blows away, as it were, an "encyclopedia" of postmodernism techniques, which turns out not to lack their own existence, but precisely mythology, while its central plot is the plot of the creation of the world. I.e., the characters of the novel are and act in the immediate vicinity of the tree of life, they they are in contact with him. The epoch of the flow space, the space of a high-tech society, collides with the space of myth, which as a result leads to the transformation of the laws of time and the heroes themselves, to the transformation and endless formation of the text, which continues to change already in hyperreal space through, for example, a reader's forum or an increase in research on the "House of Leaves". In this regard, it probably would not be a mistake to classify this novel as works, using McHale's terminology, "Limit-modernism"-ma.

If we consider the myth of the world tree as something underlying the novel, then the "House of Leaves" can be described as follows: the world ash is a stable, eternal, immovable modernist structure that forms the unshakable inner foundation of the "House of Leaves", whereas the outer, outer part of the "House of Leaves" is the unstable walls of postmodernism which are modified under the influence of the very space of postmodernism.

The "House of Leaves" has something in common with the pyramid of Cheops, which contains encrypted mathematical, geographical, astrological and other information.

However, if we take into account that the symbol "•" may not mean "solar disk", and the symbol "O" is not necessarily an ouroboros, then the idea of "unselfishness", in other words, emptiness, is also deduced from the above. That is, if we assume that "Igg-dr-a-s-i-l-l" is a symbol of pure postmodernism, where "O" means only "O", or zero, or emptiness inside and emptiness outside (white space inside, white space outside), and reverse attention to the fact that the calligraphic "root" of the world tree is not the root at all (it is enough to look at any available image of Yggdrasil to make sure of this), but only a black dot – nothingness, darkness, absence – then the reader finds himself again in the moment of "blowing off the leaves". But this time, not the leaves of postmodernism, but the leaves of mythological strata, which were actualized through archetypes at the time of reading the book.

Thus, not only the "leaves of postmodernism" are "blown away", but even the "leaves of mythology", "leaves of archetypes", because they all have no root, they are emptiness. A textual simulation that does not have a "primordial pleroma" as a source of life. A huge, massive building of mythological strata and postmodern techniques is blown away not even by an effort of thought, by doing mental work, but by an elementary "literal" perception of reality, i.e., in the case of the "House of Leaves", by the perception of the symbol "O" – as emptiness outside and emptiness inside; and the symbol "•" – as a black dot of matter, which is located in the place of the root, i.e. actually means its absence. Which leads the reader into the space of postmodern irony.

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