Mark Z. Danilevsky's "House of Leaves": the Poetics of Simulacra

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

A novel by Mark Z. Danilevsky's "House of Leaves" tells the story of the Nevidson family, who purchased a house on Ash Street in one of the unnamed cities of Virginia. Will Nevidson is a professional photographer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for a photograph of a dying girl, next to whom a vulture landed, taken in war–torn Sudan.

Nevidson videotapes the process of moving and settling into a new house. After a short trip of Nevidson and Karen Green to Seattle for the wedding, it turns out that during their absence, another room inexplicably appeared in the house.

The subsequent tragic events are directly related to the room, which grows to limitless dimensions as the plot develops, and to the supernatural phenomena that created it.

Davidson, having assembled a team of relatives and friends, tries to explore the inexplicable new space of the house. All the "expeditions" were filmed and edited by Nevidson and his wife into the documentary film "The Nevidson Film", released in 1993.

This film is analyzed in detail by the blind old man Zampano, his research is also called the "Nevidson Film". It forms the main plot-thematic foundation of the novel; and it is also the only source from which it is possible to obtain information about the film "The Nevidson Film", since it is impossible to find the film itself.

The next or another level of the narrative is rendered in footnotes. A certain Johnny Truant discovers a pile of scribbled papers in Zampano's apartment after his death and begins to study an unusual find. And, bringing its form to a single text, while not forgetting to leave his own autobiographical comments, one way or another reflecting on Tex Zampano, he gradually goes crazy.

The first successful publication of the novel "House of Leaves" took place on the Internet, on the website www.houseofleaves.com and after its release in book format, the novel turned into a bestseller. To date, Danilevsky's official website is available at https://www.markzdanielewski.com /, where a forum continues to function where readers can discuss the "House of Leaves".

In the official book edition of the novel, published by Pantheon Books New York, 2000, along with the output information about the printed edition, the domain name of the House of Leaves is also indicated (www.houseofleaves.com ). In this way, the meeting point of two types of reality is indicated: a material one, that is, a book, and an information communication node located in the vastness of the Global Network. And so that the reader does not forget about linking the text of the book publication to this communication node, the word or root of the word "house" always appears on the pages of the novel in a font different from the main text and invariably in blue, imitating a link to the official website. And since even on the cover in the title "House of Leaves" the word "house" retains the color of the address link, it can be said that it is with this technique of "visual communication" that the process of blurring the boundaries of reality begins in Danilevsky's novel "House of Leaves".

In the article "Simulacra and simulation in the House of Leaves" [Naveed 2017] by Aroy Navid also draws attention to these blue words, which, in his opinion, are not only address links, but also "color signifiers" or "textual acts of remediation," in accordance with the terminology of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusen" [See: Naveed 2017:17]. Who use this term "to describe how old media, such as books, are rebuilding themselves to meet the challenges of new media" [Naveed 2017:17].

Navid also concludes that "the novel itself is a simulacrum of a website" because "it consists of a system of interconnected narratives intertwined through hundreds of footnotes", and the colored hyperlink "house" "simulates the navigation structure of a website" [Naveed 2017: 18].

Danilevsky did not ignore the back cover of the book either: there is a logo of the singer "Poe" – Danilevsky's sister – who released her second studio album "Haunted" in 2000. The album features the song "Hey pretty", which managed to rise to the 13th position on the US AltRock music chart in 2001. In the song "Hey pretty", Danilevsky himself reads a passage from "House of Leaves" on behalf of one of the characters in the novel – Johnny Truant – and appears in the frames of the video clip filmed later for this song.

Thus, located on the back cover of the book, a small "red round icon surrounded by text [which] encourages the reader to "listen to the house"" [Naveed 2017: 18], is a node of communication between the book, reality and the Global Network, since the address of the official website of the singer "Poe" is placed next to it ("www.realpoe.com "), the title of the album "Haunted" is also posted there.

It is from the colored sign "house", from the hypertextual connections that this sign hides behind itself, from the red round icon on the back cover, even before reading begins, the hyperreal space of the novel "House of Leaves" arises.

The starting point, a source with inexhaustible potential that feeds the root system of the hyperreality space of the "House of Leaves", the meaningful and semantic center from which the semiotic field grows, is the simulacrum, which appears in the artistic world of the work as the documentary "The Nevidson Film".

It is the "Nevidson Film" that defines and preserves the inner unity of the "House of Leaves", while using a navigation system of footnotes and links inside the novel, and an intertextual and hyperreal space outside it. Such a system of footnotes and references is a system of lines of force along which meanings move and circulate, and the initial potential contained in the "Nevidson Film", due to which information moves along these lines of force, is simultaneously in the body of the novel and in the vastness of hyperreal space.

In other words, the "Nevidson Film" performs the function of a symbolic exchange both within the artistic world of the work – between the discourses of Johnny Truent and Zampano – and between the artistic world of the work and reality: nodes of communication with the text in the Global Network (forum, logo with the address link "Poe", blue link "house", etc.).

Such a complex structure of the novel, its simultaneous location in several information fields, and continuous expansion as a sign system are factors that reliably fix the "House of Leaves" in the space of hyperreality – in a space that, according to Jean Baudrillard, "is not just something that can be reproduced, but something that has always been reproduced" [Baudrillard 2019: 151]. Thus, the "Nevidson Film" acquires immanent properties in relation to hyperreality, since from now on it remains in this space "here and now", always.

And if the "Nevidson Film" is the semiotic core of the "House of Leaves", and from any fragment of it all thematic threads lead to it, then Navid's thesis that "the novel itself is a simulacrum of a website" is appropriate to expand as follows: the novel becomes a simulacrum of a website as a result of the proliferation of simulation as The consequences of the symbolic exchange are at the level of the "original" simulacrum, that is, at the level of the "Nevidson Film".

The "Nevidson film" belongs to the simulation model that Baudrillard described using "three orders of simulacra" – forgery, production, simulation: "The first–order simulacrum operates on the basis of the natural law of value, the second–order simulacrum - on the basis of the market law of value, the third-order simulacrum - on the basis of the structural law of value" [Baudrillard 2019: 113].

Since "the current state of hyperreality is characterized by the flourishing of third–order simulacra" [Pankratova 2018: 32], and because "the difference between third-order simulacra from the first two levels of simulation is that now the simulacrum has ceased to be a material material object" [Pankratova 2018: 32], from the system of three orders of simulacra designated by Baudrillard, consider first of all, it is a simulacrum of the third order that is needed, since the "Nevidson Film" is obviously not a tangible material object, but is located in the space of hyperreality and is directly related to the creation of a simulation in the "House of Leaves".

The "Nevidson Film" appears in the art world of The House of Leaves through a statement put into the mouth of a character in the book by Johnny Truant. He claims that hardly anyone will be able to confirm the authenticity or discover the "Nevidson Film". Russian Russian prose writer and literary critic of the 20th century, representative of the Russian formal school V.B. Shklovsky (1893 – 1984), means an artistic device. In this way, the problem of exclusion is raised to a new degree (Exclusion, about the word "strange") – the concept introduced into the theory of literature by the Russian prose writer and literary critic of the 20th century, representative of the Russian formal school V.B. Shklovsky (1893 - 1984) descriptions of any phenomenon as seen for the first time [Cit. according to: Literary Encyclopedia of terms and Concepts 2001: 704]) of the real and unreal in the "House of Leaves". "...Zampano's book,– Truent says, –is written about a movie that never happened. ...You will never find a Nevidson Film either in cinemas or in video libraries" [Danilevsky 2016: xxvii].

It should be clarified here: the fact that the "Nevidson Film" cannot be found does not mean that the film does not exist in principle. This is how the question of the boundaries of the real and the fictional in the "House of Leaves" arises for the first time. The question of how much reality depends on the subject, interpretation depends on the interpreter. Through Johnny Truent, the reader is offered an idea that calls into question the very principle of reality – this doubt in many ways becomes the main imperative of the entire "House of Leaves": "The irony is that the degree of authenticity or even documentality of this book [talking about Zampano's book "The Nevidson Film"] does not matter at all. Zampano knew that there was not much difference between the real and the unreal. The consequences, in any case, are the same" [Danilevsky 2016: xxviii].

It is in this game moment that the "Nevidson Film" for the first time encroaches on reality: in addition to the direct denial of the difference between the real and the unreal – which in itself is manipulation – the reader is informed about certain "consequences". Up to this point, the reader has no reason to assume the very possibility of certain consequences. But here they are spoken of as something that has already happened, inevitable and inescapable. Such hypothetical "consequences", where the very possibility of "consequences" is an illusion, but an illusion shrouded in a halo of fear that forces you to obey the will of the illusionist, is what Baudrillard called deterrence (Deterrence is the exact analogue of the term dissuasion often used by Baudrillard ("dissuasion, disbelief, dissuasion" and at the same time "intimidation, scaring away", as well as "deterrence, retention, prevention") is not in Russian, I had to turn to Greek.

The exact analogue, which contains all the meanings, is the apotropee. To distance oneself from the meaning that deterrence has acquired in the Russian language (amulet, amulet), this word is used in the feminine gender: deterrence [Cit. by: Baudrillard 2018: 215]).

Throughout the novel, deterrence is fueled by such "warnings" and is reinforced by the fact that the reader is dealing directly with the mysterious text of Zampano: with a monograph entitled "The Nevidson Film". That is, with a book, decoding and reading which Johnny Truant loses his mind in front of the reader. Obsessed with the "Nevidson Film", he cannot sleep, loses touch with reality, almost commits murder, his best and only friend dies, and the answer to the question of whether Johnny Truant himself remains alive, and whether he lived at all, will depend only on the position of the interpreter. And the fear of repeating the fate of Johnny Truant creeps into the reader's mind and no longer leaves him: the reader becomes a victim of the deterrence that inhabits the "House of Leaves".

As an example of the most extensive simulacrum, where deterrence interferes with the relationship between a person and his daily life, influencing the mechanisms of decision-making and action, Baudrillard named the nuclear threat as the apotheosis of simulation [See: Baudrillard 2018: 50].

According to Baudrillard, the fundamental fact is that it is not the simulacrum itself as such that interferes with decision-making mechanisms, but precisely the deterrence that reaches its maximum value, which it "develops": "It is not the direct threat of atomic destruction that paralyzes our lives – it is deterrence that drains us of blood" [Baudrillard 2018: 51].

Although the elements of threat or fear in the "House of Leaves" are not comparable in scale to this example, they have a similar nature.

The book opens with a single sentence on an empty page: "This is not for you" [Danilevsky 2016: xvii]. That is, even before the reader has managed to get at least to the introduction, a certain ominous and ironic tuning fork sets a cautionary, embarrassing, but therefore fascinating "tone" with which the deterrence system is launched, and the simulation begins to build. And when the reader is faced with the subsequent vast semiotic universe, which, as it seems to him, presupposes a choice – to read in one way or another, to put aside, etc. – in fact, freedom of choice is already limited by the action of deterrence, and "no disturbance, no incident can no longer unfold in accordance with their own logic, because that there is a risk of destruction in this" [Baudrillard 2018: 52].

The primary task facing deterrence, which "lives" inside the "House of Leaves", is to attract and keep the reader precisely in the space of the hyperreal, built around the novel. At the same time, Danilevsky "plays" with deterrence, reducing the suspense technique within the horror genre to irony, since he stretches Johnny Truant's "Introduction", which continues the warning, to several pages. Which cannot but cause the reader to feel "overkill". Such an ironically comical use of "caution" should remove the effect of deterrence, but the removal leaves doubt, a grin, the description of which the attentive reader will find in the same introduction by Johnny Truant: "... so they grin, twitching the corner of their mouth, at the outpost at night, before the last battle, when it is already clear that help will not come. Only vultures will flock at dawn" [Danilevsky 2016: xxviii]. This is the sneer of the notorious irony of postmodernism.

Speaking of deterrence mixed with irony, it is appropriate to cite an analogy from the non-literary sphere, namely: the analogy of Disneyland, which "exists to hide that Disneyland is actually a "real" country ... (roughly the way prisons serve to hide that the whole society ... is a place of detention)" [Baudrillard 2018: 21]. Similarly, the House of Leaves claims to be a saving "victim" who takes the "blame on himself" in order to hide that the world has long been ruled by simulacra and simulation, and is permeated with the hyperreal so much that it becomes more difficult to draw the line between simulation and reality every day.

However, the "House of Leaves", unlike Disneyland, is not limited only to the regeneration of the real in the opposite plane – "The imagination of Disneyland ... is a machine of deterrence designed to regenerate the fiction of the real in the opposite plane" [Baudrillard 2018: 21], that is, inside its own space outlined by the text. "House of Leaves" unfolds a direct expansion of hyperreality into reality, while blurring the boundaries of the real and creating material and hyperreal artifacts at the levels that the simulation can reach: from books, tattoos, music to amateur fakes of the "Nevidson Film", a forum, fan clubs, etc.

The unreality of Disneyland and any artifacts illustrating it are forever doomed to deliberate artificiality and infantilism [See: Baudrillard 2018: 21], whereas the real and unreal "House of Leaves" is in a state of unstable equilibrium, never falls into infantilism, but always leads an open, then disguised as madness struggle with artificiality. The recipient of Disneyland understands exactly what he sees, and therefore for him the world outside of Disneyland is real a priori; the recipient of the "House of Leaves" is confused, and in this regard he gradually loses understanding of the boundaries of the reality of the "House of Leaves", because he loses the feeling of the most real, unreal, unreal, hyperreal – everything becomes one, as if it were acceptable and available.

Thus, the "House of Leaves", returning to Baudrillard, is a map that liberates, occupies and creates for itself a new territory, where the laws laid down in the map preceding this territory by its creator apply.

Danilevsky builds the imagination of the "House of Leaves" in such a way that reality is either unable to absorb the simulation of the "House of Leaves", or simply does not notice the attempt on reality itself, since the novel uses resources belonging to reality itself to expand its own presence in it. And reality turns out to be unable to distinguish simulation from itself.

It is on such a rift of the real, in the insane hyperreal space that arises around the "House of Leaves", in its very center, that the "Nevidson Film" is located – the very "core" through which the iconic exchange of the real with the hyperreal takes place. Otherwise, according to Baudrillard, hyperreality is the result of this exchange: "... hyperrealism is the highest form of art and reality by virtue of the exchange taking place between them at the level of a simulacrum..." [Baudrillard 2019: 151].

In addition to deterrence, creating conditions for the emergence and implementation of "exchange at the level of a simulacrum," Danilevsky uses hoaxes, falsifications, games with meanings. And the system of footnotes and links serves, among other things, to blur the boundaries of the reality of the "House of Leaves" and form a pan-linguistic reality around it. Through this system, Danilevsky's novel appeals to such really existing publishers as NewYorker, Scientific American, Harvard University Press, The Louisiana State University Press, Backpacker (magazine), Ohio University Press, etc. These publishers allegedly published materials on the "Nevidson Film" research.

The expansion of the "House of Leaves" into reality is also expanded by comments that celebrities from various socio-cultural spheres allegedly gave to the "Nevidson Film": Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King, Stephen Wozniak, Jacques Derrida, Walter Mosley, David Copperfield, Hunter S. Thompson, Camilla Paglia, etc. Such a technique is an attempt to endow the "Nevidson Film" with the properties of a real–life object that has been subjected to comprehensive study: from cinematic analysis to the study of mythology, psychological research, research on sound, etc.

Visual "evidence" of the existence of the "Nevidson Film" can also be found in "Appendix III" [Danilevsky 2016: 691]. There Danilevsky places materials that create a context for "implying" reality or "implying" the existence of the "Nevidson Film": a freeze frame from Expedition No. 4; an illustration by Tyler Martin "Salvation: The Nevidson Film", allegedly published in Magoo-Zine. Santa Fe, New Mexico. October 1993"; painting "Another Large Hall on Yasenevaya Street", artist Mazerin Diacen; image of the "Conceptual model of the Nevidson House" by Sarah Newbury.

These images visualize some of the architectural features of the house directly in the novel, as well as simulate individual episodes from the "Nevidson Film". The presence of such "evidence" in the "real" world, apparently, should indirectly confirm or "imply" the reality of the "Nevidson Film."

It is also important that not all texts, authors, photographers and other "characters" of the "House of Leaves" are fictional. In addition, Danilevsky uses numerous allusions (Charlotte Bronte "Jane Eyre"; Sigmund Freud "Sinister"; Robert Heinlein "The House that Teal Built"; Stephen King "The Shining"; H. L. Borges "The House of Asteria", etc.); direct quotations (John Milton "Paradise Lost"; Dante Alighieri "The Divine Comedy"; Johann Goethe, Blaise Pascal, Carl Gustav Jung, Charles Baudelaire, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, etc.), quasi-quotations (Leo Tolstoy "War and Peace"; Jerome Salinger "Above the Rafters, Carpenters", etc.), mentions (Washington Irving under the pseudonym "Dietrich Knickerbocker") , etc .

Thus, a fairly wide intertextual field arises around the "House of Leaves", drifting through which the reader unwittingly finds himself in a familiar, as if existing territory, which only fuels his doubts about the reality of what is happening and contributes to the proliferation of the "Nevidson Film" as a simulacrum with the simultaneous spread of simulation to the real world.

Moreover, to create the main character of the novel by Will Nevidson, Danilevsky uses a fragment of the biography of Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Kevin Carter (eng. Kevin Carter; September 13, 1960 – July 27, 1994). He took a real photo with a vulture and a starving Sudanese girl. In the novel, the photograph is attributed to Nevidson and bears the name "Delila", haunting Nevidson like an obsession. Davidson is a concrete example of the expansion of a simulacrum into reality, an example of a fictional figure capturing a real fact or an act of a real person.

Thus, the "Nevidson Film" has several simulacrum characteristics theoretically described by Baudrillard: generation by models of a real, devoid of origin and reality: hyperreal; territory is preceded by a precession map of simulacra – now it (carat) generates territory; divine unreality of images (to simulate does not mean just to pretend) [See: Baudrillard 2018: 5-8]. Transferring these statements to the plane of the analyzed novel, we can say that the "Nevidson Film", which contains a symbolic structure, will be the "map" preceding the novel, through which the artistic world of the work is formed, through discourses and intertextual connections. The "divine unreality of images" demonstrates the impossibility of proving the non-existence of the "Nevidson Film", since the novel itself is a symptom of its existence.

Also, the "House of Leaves" has ergodicity – by using the mechanical organization of the text, Danilevsky seeks to reproduce the architectural features of the house on Yaseneva Street and illustrate (literally) changes in the mental state of the characters: their disorientation in space, acceleration of step, running, etc. In short, the mechanical organization of the text seems to reproduce in real time what is happening on the "Film It creates interactivity, visualizes the "reality" here and now – which is called simulation.

All of the above properties of the simulacrum are designed to impose on the reader a sense of reality of what is happening along with a sense of the existence of the "Nevidson Film" itself, whereas in reality there is a direct opposition to the Aristotelian principle of mimesis.

In the "House of Leaves" we are no longer talking about imitation of the real, but about the simulation of "reality", where the initial element of imitation is missing. If Aristotle in "Poetics" distinguished between a certain "what" (the object of imitation) and a certain "how" (means of imitation), then it is either impossible to distinguish and differentiate this conceptual pair in Danilevsky, or the construction of the "what" and "how" around the "House of Leaves" can be continued indefinitely, as long as there is enough reserve of reality.

And since we are talking about the claims of fiction to the right to structure reality according to its own motivation and eventually become reality itself, replace it, absorb it or, at least, modify it to the necessary extent, then there is the primacy of a certain volitional aspiration aimed at creating similarity or, conversely, at affirming difference, but so far-reaching and indefinable, so that any perceiving consciousness can be knocked off the "trail" of reality.

If we take into account, referring to Gilles Deleuze, that "the observer is not able to grasp the huge scales and depths that the simulacrum carries" [Deleuze 2011: 335] and it is for this reason that "the observer gets the impression of similarity" [Deleuze 2011: 335], then the goals pursued by Danilevsky become obvious when he builds a work in such a way that the reader is unable to grasp and comprehend it with his consciousness, because "the observer becomes part of the simulacrum itself, and his point of view transforms and deforms the latter" [Deleuze 2011: 335]. When confronted with the text of the "House of Leaves", the reader gradually becomes part of the "unlimited becoming" [Deleuze 2011: 335], which is occupied by the "Nevidson Film".

Here again, the irony of Danilevsky can be traced, warning the reader through the mouth of Johnny Truant: "If you are a little lucky, you will close this book, as Zampano hoped…

But there is a chance that you won't do it.

<…>

You will find that you no longer trust the walls of your own house, which you have always hoped for so much. And even the corridors that you have walked so many times will suddenly seem longer and deeper, much, much deeper.

<...> You will focus only on the darkness, you will see it for hours, days, or even years, in the vain hope of believing that, peering into the darkness, you will restrain, stop it..." [Danilevsky 2016: xxx].

This reasoning can be interpreted as an artistic exemplification of Xavier's postulate An ode to the properties of a simulacrum: simulacra are "constructions that include the angle of view of an observer so that at any point where this observer is located, an illusion is reproduced..." [Cit. by: Deleuze 2011: 335]. That is, the simulacrum is then plausible when it is total, and Danilevsky will warn the reader: "... you will look at yourself, looking in vain for evidence that you ever lived in the world. You will watch from the sidelines as the great mystery bursts in, rips apart your automatic or conscious, but helpless resistance" [Danilevsky 2011: xxxi].

Returning to the Odoir, the globality of the simulacrum is the more effective the less noticeable the imitation: "... the emphasis is not on a certain status of non-existence, but rather ... on a barely noticeable distortion of the real image occurring at the point occupied by the observer, and making it possible to build a simulacrum..." [Cit. by: Deleuze 2011: 335]. This is exactly how the simulation works both inside the "House of Leaves" and "outside" it – global distribution, starting from an information node on the Internet and ending with clothes, music, a script for a movie, tattoos with the text of the house, etc. In the House of Leaves, simulation is "no longer a simulation... of a referential being, a substance. She is the product of models of the real without the original and reality: the hyperreal" [Baudrillard 2018: 5].

Getting into such an "environment", the reader's consciousness almost inevitably gets involved in the game with the signifier and the signified. In this sense, the "Nevidson Film" in the text is a sign, and in the reader's mind is the signified, that is, the meaning, as far as possible, of the sign. The author's play with the reader's consciousness is the beginning of the death of the sign's reference: the sign inevitably dies where simulation comes into conflict with representation. For "while representation tries to absorb simulation, interpreting it as a false, "damaged" representation, simulation embraces and cracks the entire structure of representation, turning the representation into a simulacrum of itself" [Baudrillard 2018:12].

Such a "hack" is unlikely to leave untouched the recipient's consciousness, which since the time of the poststructuralists has been the sum of texts, that is, the sum of signs, as I. P. Ilyin writes: "Since ... "nothing exists outside the text," then any individual in this case is inevitably "inside the text," i.e. within the framework of a certain historical consciousness, as far as it is available to us in the available texts" [Ilyin 1998: 55]. And, since "postmodernism synthesized the theory of poststructuralism" [Ilyin 1996: 199], and "the main concepts used by supporters of this [postmodernism] trend are: "the world as chaos" and "postmodern sensitivity", "the world as text" and "consciousness as text", "intertextuality"..."[Ilyin, Tsurganova 1999: 246], – the consciousness surrounded by a sign space again finds itself face to face with the total power of the simulacrum, which was discussed in the analysis of the "construction of the simulacrum" of Odoir. But with the caveat that if nothing exists outside the text, and any individual is "inside the text", then a simulation that "covers and cracks the entire structure of representation", turning "representation into a simulacrum of itself", respectively, and textual consciousness – outside of which the "structure of representation" cannot exist – the simulacrum hacks and "turns itself into a simulacrum." At least, the part of consciousness that is in interaction with the simulacrum. In other words, consciousness finds itself at the mercy of the play of the language to which it is subordinated.

To demonstrate the totality of such linguistic power and – in the context of the "House of Leaves" – the totality of simulation, M. M. Bakhtin's article "The Problem of speech genres" will help, in which the author described – indirectly or not, intentionally or not – various ways of imposing will in author-reader communication (speaker-listener/responder), as well as the possibility the given interpretation within the given communication. Which, for the context of the "House of Leaves", means that both participants in communication (both the reader and the author) are equally subordinated to the totality of simulation.

The ontological and historical continuity of language is a condition for establishing mutually subordinate relations in the communication of the author and the reader, because at these two levels there are those components that are involved in communication subordinate mechanisms.

The idea of ontological continuity of language is deduced from Bakhtin's statement that "language enters into life through concrete statements (realizing it), through concrete statements life enters into language" [Bakhtin 1997 (5): 163]. This axiom is based on the idea that the existence of language is a continuous process unfolding parallel to life itself, and its integrity comes true in statements following each other.

In The House of Leaves, the discourses of Truent and Zampano, which are in a state of dialectical tension, can be viewed through the prism of dialogue. Despite the seemingly fragmented and fragmented structure, the order of change of speech subjects within the novel is observed: the "replicas" of Truent's discourse are, as a rule, "answers" to the "statements" of Zampano's discourse. The latter is a literary image of scientific discourse, whereas Truent's discourse is a literary image of literary style, that is, dirty realism. At the same time, closer to the middle of the novel, Truent's discourse violates the code of material determinism inherent in realism (realism retains mainly the conventionality of an outwardly realistic manner of narration), which causes the transition of Truent's dirty realism into quasi-realism or pseudo-realism.

The structure of the latter, in addition to direct comments on Zampano's discourse, is like a collection of short stories, short stories, anecdotes and diary prose, subordinated to the general storyline of Truent's discourse, which, in turn, is a reflection of literary style – dirty realism (quasi–realism) - on the discourse of scientific (quasi-scientific) monograph by Zampano.

Truent often gives names to some conditional novels himself: "I drank on the theme of Pears, boxing and birds of Paradise" [Danilevsky 2016: 16-15, 20], "The Best Place in the World" [Danilevsky 2016: 52-55], "The Story of my Pekingese" [Danilevsky 2016: 284], "Minotaur" [Danilevsky 2016: 433-436]; others can be distinguished and named according to Truent's expressions and phrases used in them, which either put an end to conditional novels, or reflect their thematic quintessence: "The guy from Gdansk" [Danilevsky 2016: 94-97], "Raymond" [Danilevsky 2016: 100-101], "And what?" [Danilevsky 2016: 114], "Poems for Natasha" [Danilevsky 2016: 127-130], "Ghost" [Danilevsky 2016: 145-150], "Love on the line" [Danilevsky 2016: 167], "The child died" [Danilevsky 2016: 553-555]. Truent's discourse also includes a fragment of diary prose [Danilevsky 2016: 523-553].

At the same time, as the plot develops, the content of conditional novels gradually changes from "stories about unheard-of incidents" to the mystical and creepy. The line between real events and their refraction in Truent's mind is blurred, psychologism increases, elements of horror and tragedy are included, which again works to blur reality.

Also, the epistolary novel "Letters from the Three Attic Waylestow psychiatric hospital" [Danilevsky 2016: 620-676], the section of lyrics "Poems of the Pelican" [Danilevsky 2016: 607-614], the section of lyrics "Poems" [Danilevsky 2016: 591-600], the sections "Quotations" [Danilevsky 2016: 677-690] and "Collages" [Danilevsky 2016: 615-617]. However, Truent's discourse refers to these sections, establishing communication of genre codes in case of clicking on these links.

The author himself has always been hidden behind the mask of metatextuality and is now completely unafraid of a "communicative failure" [See: Ilyin 1998: 165]. Perhaps Danilevsky needed to build a metatextual structure resorting to the constant multiplication of genre code because he was afraid that he would not be able to involve the reader in the communicative process, in other words, in a dialogue.

However, the most significant thing is that inter–genre communication within the novel testifies to the continuity of its linguistic flow, its ontological unity, that is, "entering through statements into the language of life" – such unity is the "glue" that holds the metatextual polyphony of the "House of Leaves" in harmony, pursued by cacophony.

The same continuity is deduced from the understanding of language as a historical phenomenon: "Utterances and their types, that is, speech genres, are the driving belts from the history of society to the history of language" [Bakhtin 1997 (5): 166]. It is obvious that here Bakhtin assigns speech genres the main connecting role between the history of society and the history of language.

The most complex machinery of the "House of Leaves" is kept in balance due to the presence of a permanent linguistic environment, on the surface of which both interaction and collision of both primary and secondary speech genres take place – which is, according to Bakhtin's statement above, a statement of the fact that there is a common historical context of language and society in the novel (here it is appropriate to consider specifically -historical, recognizable not only for a person of the corresponding epoch, but also rhetorically (culturally) mastered and thus intelligible to other readers, details in the novel).

When the speaker changes, that is, at the end of his remark, but before the beginning of the reply, an insurmountable abyss of silence does not form between the participants of communication due to the continuity of the language flow (ontological and historical context, boiling with connotations) – in place of this conditional gap, the subordination and dependence of author-reader communication can be witnessed.

So, if "the transition of a style from one genre to another not only changes the sound of a style in an unusual genre, but also destroys or renews this genre. ... Both individual and linguistic styles prevail over speech genres" [Bakhtin 1997 (5): 167], then in the conditions of inter-genre dialogue in the "House of Leaves" such transitions are inevitable, as is the establishment of dialogical tension in the text of the novel with subsequent subordination of the recipient: following the latter along the trajectory of the transition of the individual style of the speaker from a given genre to another genre, and vice versa, involves, at least, a change in the thesaurus of the next one, depending on the will of the speaker (self-aware or not), which entails a change in the context in which the perceiving consciousness is located, each time adjusting to a new context.

The impulse of subordination can also be given to the recipient from the position of the speaker due to the volitional desire of the latter, aimed at "forcibly" changing the speech genre, and, consequently, at the same time involving the will of the person responding in the individual style of the speaker, in a style "appropriate to the speech genre".

Some indirect compulsion, both of the speaker and the responder, is deduced from the very specifics of the official genre (for "House of Leaves" it is a quasi–scientific monograph of the Dzampano discourse): "These genres – especially high, official ones – have a high degree of stability and compulsion. The speech will is usually limited here to choosing a certain genre, and only light shades of expressive intonation ... can reflect the individuality of the speaker (his emotional and speech intention)" [Bakhtin 1997 (5): 183]. Accordingly, the author's verbal will, being within the genre boundaries of the Zampano discourse, is subordinated to the determinants of the (quasi-) scientific genre, but is liberated when the replica passes to the discourse of Johnny Truent (since it is freed from rigid determinants and from taboos of emotional intensity, warmth of tone, intonation, etc.), to dirty realism, which, on the contrary, it assumes exactly emotionality, variability of warmth or disdainfulness of tone, but at the same time it requires them. It also requires directness and simplicity of presentation of thought, depravity and everyday life, construction and demonstration of the hero's way of living, etc., that is, it means new conditions that the author's will has to reckon with, thereby removing the "emancipation" established earlier, and so on until the next return to scientific discourse. Such isolation in the textual space perfectly demonstrates the subordination of the author and the reader following him in the footsteps of the textual environment, and also illustrates the central thesis of postmodernism, taken by the latter from Nietzsche, who suggests understanding the world as a text.

If we consider the novel as a single statement, while being in the position of the metatextual construction of the "House of Leaves", then can we say that the metatextual structure of the novel, behind which the author's attitude stands, frees the reader's understanding from the inner ideology of the novel. That is, it frees the novel as a statement from the genre specification in which the selection of words for its construction took place ("When we choose words in the process of constructing an utterance, we do not always take them from the language system, in their neutral, dictionary form. We usually take them from other statements, and above all from statements related to our genre, that is, by topic, by composition, by style; therefore, we select words according to their genre specification" [Bakhtin, 1997 (5): 192]). Or, by spoiling, bringing down a multi-genre avalanche in the act of a single utterance, the author's verbal will deprives the recipient of the opportunity to freely select words according to their genre specification to construct a response statement, because the author, anticipating possible genre contexts suitable for forming the reader's response, pronounces these contexts inside the novel, so as to convey them to the reader already encoded. And since "every understanding of a living speech, a living utterance, is actively responsive ... – every understanding is fraught with an answer and in one form or another necessarily continues it: the listener becomes the speaker" [Bakhtin 1997 (5): 169], then the reciprocal understanding in the case of the "House of Leaves" is either prepared on a basis freed from ideology the genre of the territory, or, on the contrary, leaves no room for the appearance of a deep, purely personal retaliatory statement.

An important factor in the selection of words for the construction of an utterance is also the emotional intensity, which is fixed for the word within the boundaries of the existing genre: "... the expressiveness of individual words is not a property of the word itself, as a unit of language, and does not follow directly from the meanings of these words, this expression is either a typical genre expression, or it is an echo of someone else's individual expression, making the word, as it were, a representative of the whole of someone else's utterance, as a certain evaluating position" [Bakhtin 1997 (5): 194].

Since the "House of Leaves" is a multi-genre or metatextual phenomenon, is it possible to assume that under the influence of the "stability and compulsion" of a multi-genre speech utterance, a transition of a qualitative degree of compulsion into a quantitative degree of freedom is possible for both the reader and the author due to the multi-genre nature of the "House of Leaves" as an utterance? After all, the recipient and the author are in a certain polyphonic sound of genres, alternately replacing each other, then sounding one in the other, and this happens in the sphere of linguistic existence with the consequences that follow from this. That is, there is a transformation of the immanent qualities of the "sound" of the novel, which creates the possibility of a "liberating" polyphony at the genre level.

If we correlate the reader's answer with what the novel "House of Leaves" carries as a simulacrum, then the author's speech statement will be determined by simulation (deterrence, manipulation, illusory, phantasm, totality). It is now not so much authorial as hyperreal: nothing more remains of the author than the author's attitude, the barely perceptible author's will, the name. The position of the responder correlates with the play of language, or rather, with language, which in its continuity plays with reciprocal understanding, and thus creates a work of art, where the transition of the sign from the real world to the world of simulation and hyperreal is carried out just as continuously, and vice versa. And both participants in the author-reader communication supposed at the beginning turn out to be performers of the total hyperreal simulation space that dominates their will.

A description of the functional of a similar process using the term "simulacrum" is also present in Baudrillard, who formulates this functional as follows: "The main simulacra ... move from the world of natural laws into the world of forces and force stresses, and today into the world of structures and binary oppositions..." [Baudrillard 2019: 126]. Due to the "force stresses" (otherwise, the source of "being") of the hyperreal, the simulacrum acquires in modern reality some function of a binary code and no longer belongs to the material world: the request of consciousness is the response of the simulacrum, the speech utterance of the simulacrum is the response of another. In the case of the House of Leaves, both the statement and the answer are limited to the simulacrum universe, that is, the "Nevidson Film". This means that when forming an "abstract moment of a real holistic active-response understanding" [Bakhtin 1997 (5): 169], followed by a "loud response", an act of subordination to the intentional tasks of the "universe" of the simulacrum and those "power stresses" that stand behind it is inevitable. From now on, the code of the simulacrum controls everything, and behind it, as some kind of extreme, but already ghostly instance, the author's attitude or the will of the author is hidden, but now the subordination of the recipient depending on the goals of the author, and the subordination of the author and the recipient depending on the goals of the simulacrum is inevitable.

As a result, the "House of Leaves", recalling the "One–dimensional Man" by G. Marcuse [See: Marcuse 1994: 25-26], is a reflection on the social instance of our time, a reflection fixed and framed as a product from the world of literature. However, the product is of high quality and, of course, with a "plus" sign, despite the deterrence and all kinds of manipulations with the reader's consciousness. And if you remember that "House of Leaves" is also a satire ("... the novel is actually an essay by Johnny Truant… An essay functioning as a satire of academic discourse..." [Noah 2012: 4]), an interactive game, simulation and at the same time a novel, then it is legitimate to conclude that the "Nevidson Film", interacting with various levels of postmodern sensitivity, although divorced from reality, has sufficient "charge" to arrange a semiotic an extravaganza of code that can fascinate the reader and impose its own information environment on him. That is, as a product, the "House of Leaves" has "suggestive and manipulative power" [See: Marcuse 1994: 16]. According to Marcuse, such products, becoming available, carry with them "an impact on consciousness", which "becomes a way of life" [See: Marcuse 1994: 16]. In the case of the "House of Leaves", this is not a bad impact, and not a bad lifestyle. The House of Leaves copes with the task of opposing modern means of representation, while relying on the tradition of world literature, philosophy and science, which it sells to the reader or, to put it another way, imposes.

Here it is appropriate to cite the opinion of V. I. Demchenko, who in the article "Simulacrization of socio-cultural space", speaking about the properties of the simulacrum to shape reality, argues that "simulacra permeates socio-cultural reality, therefore, the question of its value and semantic structure becomes more relevant than ever" [Demchenko 2009: 106]. The question of the "value-semantic structure" in the case of Danilevsky's work seems almost paramount, since we are dealing with a bestseller, which is quite capable, if not to become a "way of life", then to a large extent to influence it.

Summing up, it can be argued that the "Nevidson Film" is precisely the fundamental simulacrum in the "House of Leaves", which immanently contains the codes necessary to fix the novel in both real and hyperreal space. The text based on the simulacrum turns out to be absorbed by the simulation and eventually becomes a simulacrum due to the continuous formation and spread of the simulation, located "on the other side of true and false, on the other side of equivalence, on the other side of rational distinctions" [Baudrillard 2018: 33]. The play of textuality and consciousness, the sign system and the signified inevitably leads to the transformation of the real – a marker of any society faced with the reality of postmodernity.

However, it should be recognized, using the example of the "House of Leaves", that deterrence, which activates the machinery of the simulacrum, can be used not only as a global means of controlling societies under the glass dome of threat, but also as a tool to counteract these control systems. The main condition is the totality of the simulation, which is able to replace reality and include the perceiving consciousness in its own boundless formation, transferring the recipient's consciousness from the real world to the hyperreal world.

The language serves as a tool for the formation and maintenance of the functionality of this totality. Thus, the deterrence developed within the boundaries of the simulation space of the "House of Leaves" penetrates into the very structure of the language, seizing its ontological and historical context, which entails subordination of the participants in the author-reader communication.

Sources

Danilevsky 2016 — Danilevsky M. Z. House of Leaves / Translated from the English by D. Bykov, A. Loginova, M. Leonovich; predisd. D. Bykov. Yekaterinburg: Gonzo, 2016.

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