Article

Name: The plot machine as an annihilator of sense («House of Leaves» by Mark Z. Danielewski)

Authors: Yu. V. Shatin

Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation, Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract: The paper is devoted to the role of the plot in the literature in the second degree. «The literature in the second degree» is the term of G. Genette. It means that the content of the literary text is directed to the literature itself but not to the reality. Like that, the immanent nature of the literary text includes in its structure such potential elements as intertext, paratext, hypertext, metatext and archetext. The hero of the literature of the second degree becomes not a personage, but the language. In this case, the plot loses the independent nature and turns into the plot machine. The text turns into the commentary of the other text, but not into the fragment of the reality. As a result, a common sense disappears from the text. This tendency originated in the first part of the 20th century in the literature of the modernism, for instance in the novel «Gift» by V. Nabokov or in the tale «Garden of diverging tracks» by J. Borges. Later, in the literature of postmodernism, the text loses the signs of structure order and submits to the principles of a rhizome. The paper deals with the novel «House of Leaves» by Mark Z. Danielewski. On the basis of the novel, the method of divergence of six languages (semiotic codes) inaugurates. The first code is connected with the history of the Navidson family, which has found itself in the house-transformer constantly changing the spatial coordinates. The second code appears in consequence of the intersemiotic translation of the narration to the code of movies. The third language is connected with the transformation of movies into scraps of sheets, written by different people after blind Zampanò’s dictation. The fourth code is the metalanguage of the commentary to these scraps and virtual film. The fifth code belongs to the reader of these scraps – Johnny Truant, who becomes the lunatic in the process of the reading. At last, the sixth code discovers pure semiotic basis. It consists of the diverse of prints, emptiness, photo, insertions, etc. Thanks to the decentralization of these codes, the specific game, which leads to the annihilation of common sense and stereotype language, arises.

Keywords: postmodernism, plot, the plot machine, rhizome

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