Genealogy, discourse and the "death of the author" as figures of poetics in 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

Objectification and metaphorization of concepts and theories of philosophical thought of the period of poststructuralism in the "House of Leaves"

This article considers poststructuralism as a philosophical toolkit of postmodernism. In this regard, the author of this article should emphasize that the main theorist of Western postmodernism, F. Jamieson, in his fundamental work "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" ^[1], addresses and uses the developments of the philosophy of the period of poststructuralism precisely as a theoretical apparatus of postmodernism. Ihab Hassan also acts in a similar vein, who, according to Perry Anderson, "turned an almost complete catalog of poststructuralist ideas into a detailed classification of the differences between modern and postmodern paradigms" ^{[2, p. 30]}.

At the same time, Hassan emphasizes the non-identity of postmodernism and poststructuralism: "Although postmodernism and poststructuralism cannot be identified, they clearly reveal many similarities" ^{[3, p. 96]}. Thus, the existing internal contradiction within the postmodern paradigm regarding the philosophy of poststructuralism is solved by the author of this article in the direction of considering poststructuralism as a theory of postmodernism. The right to take such a step is seen precisely in the works mentioned above.

At the same time, it is obvious that the stated statement – considering poststructuralism as a philosophy of postmodernism – contradicts the opinion of many scientists and researchers (probably the majority opinion).

For example, the above statement contradicts the thesis put forward in A.V. Pavlov's doctoral dissertation "Philosophy of Culture in post-postmodernism: a critical analysis" ^[4].

"Firstly,– Pavlov writes, –as we have repeatedly stressed, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard (and even Lyotard) cannot be called postmodernists. At best, they “had an impact”, which most authors agree with today (but, to be fair, we note that not all). In general, some of the mentioned philosophers have a very indirect relationship to postmodernism and belong to the philosophical trend known as poststructuralism" ^{[4, pp. 328-329]}.

However, postmodernist theorists often turn to and use the terminology and categories of poststructuralism and the associated period of thought production to describe postmodernism and, more broadly, postmodernism. For example, in Jamison: the end of history (one of Jamison's themes), deanthropologization, discourse (Jamison's working tool), simulacrum (one of Jamison's themes), collage (Jamison's more complex term "pastiche"), schizophrenia (crisis of the subject) (one of Jamison's themes), deconstruction (one of the themes Jamieson), intertextuality (Jamieson's instrument and category), the crisis of the metaphysics of presence (one of Jamieson's themes), time shift (following Lacan, one of Jamieson's themes), syntagma, surface, signifier/signified, trace, irony, consumer society, desire, etc., etc. (all these terminological particulars and Jamieson has concepts).

So, today it seems impossible to remove the legacy of poststructuralism from the theoretical field of postmodernism. Such an action will lead to the destruction of almost any theory of aesthetic and philosophical production within the postmodern. The author of this article does not assert the identity of poststructuralism and postmodernism, but argues, following Jamison, that poststructuralism is the "theoretical discourse" of postmodernism: "poststructuralism" or, as I prefer to say, "theoretical discourse"..."or "what is today called modern theory – or, more precisely, theoretical discourse is also, as I would like to show, exactly a postmodern phenomenon" ^{[1, pp. 101-102],[1, p. 444]}.

Since the tasks of this article do not include proving the involvement or non-involvement of poststructuralism in postmodernism, we will fix only some theoretical relativity in the issue of the interaction of postmodernism and poststructuralism.

Now, being in the field of this uncertainty, we will analyze the novel "House of Leaves" with the help of "theory"; to be more precise, resorting to the basic concepts and special cases of poststructuralism.

The scheme for analyzing the novel "House of Leaves" in the theoretical field of poststructuralism is partially and in a revised form taken from Dmitry Khaustov's book "Lectures on Postmodern Philosophy" ^[5], but within the framework of this article we address only three of its topics: discourse, genealogy and the "death of the author".

Discourse as a figure of the poetics of the "House of Leaves"

The concept of discourse is one of the key concepts of the theory of postmodernism, and positive work on solving the problems of this article without explanation and subsequent operation of this term is impossible.

L. M. Makarov in the monograph "Basic Theories of discourse" ^[6], which is a fundamental work conceptually describing linguistic communication from the point of view of linguistics, psychology and socio-cultural theories, offers several approaches to defining the concept of discourse: firstly, the distinction along the lines of formal and functional definitions of discourse; secondly, the distinction according to lines of (oral) discourse, (written) text and situation; thirdly, the definition of discourse from the point of view of the opposition "discourse/dialogue/process" and "text/monologue/product" and D.R. ^{[6, pp. 85-90]}.

Let us also fix the position put forward in Makarov's monograph that discourse is a speech activity that is simultaneously "a linguistic material" ^{[6, p. 90],[7, p. 29]}, "moreover, in any of its representations sound or graphic" ^{[6, p. 90]}.

What is the "text" in this case? Text is "linguistic material fixed on a particular material medium using descriptive writing (usually phonographic or ideographic). Thus, the terms speech text will be specific in relation to the generic term discourse uniting them"^{[6, p. 90],[8, p. 5-6]}.

In the above provisions, Makarov notes the absence of oppositions and pronounced dichotomies, and also fixes the "generalized nature of the concept of discourse", where "any limitation of monological/dialogical, oral/written signs is removed" ^{[6, p. 90]}. And then the concept of discourse can be approved as a "generic category in relation to the concepts of speech, text, dialogue" ^{[6, p. 90]}.

Then, for this article, discourse is a generic category in relation to the concepts of speech, text and dialogue, existing in a certain way of thinking consisting of a system of concepts that is expressed through a system of speech. It is in this sense that we use the concept of "discourse" in the subsequent analysis of the novel "House of Leaves".

Now let's turn to M. Foucault's theory of discourse, presented in the 1969 book "The Archaeology of Knowledge" ^[9]. To put it extravagantly, we need this in order to fix the "Foucault trace" in the "House of Leaves".

In the Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault argues that the basis of humanitarian knowledge is the analysis of discourses, that is, the method, that is, archaeology – the search for the origin, the source. While there is a meta-discourse about discourses in the field of a certain global Logos, such a meta-discourse is humanitarian knowledge. And we "in the name of methodological rigor" should realize that in a postmodern situation we "can only deal with a community of scattered events" ^{[9, p. 24]}.

Understanding knowledge as a community of scattered events, Foucault abolishes knowledge as a totality formed by the "ideology" of the interpreter. An event is now associated with another only in discourse, that is, in the "community of scattered events". Thus, any book is inscribed in discourse and therefore cannot be a kind of integrity, globality; it cannot be a "source" (a source in discourse is impossible: discourse is rhizomatic): "The boundaries of a book are never outlined strictly enough: in its title, in the first and last line, in internal configurations and in Its isolating forms contain a system of references to other books, other texts and phrases, which form the nodes of the language grid" ^{[10, p. 25]}.

That is, as soon as a judgment about a book appears, the book becomes part of the discourse from which it is spoken about. The very "talking" about the book weaves it into the discourse from which this "talking" is carried out. This is where postmodernism comes into play, that is, the community of singularities (singularities) that opposes totality. Everything is fragmented and devoid of progressive movement towards totality, instead historical "leaps" occur, where there is no single connected historical movement, the meta-narrative disintegrates. For there are an infinite number of discourses from which one can talk about a book (or about some event), and there is no meta–narrative unity that brings them together (into uniqueness). And in order to be scientific, you need to talk about a book only "from the book", but not from the discourse, otherwise positive knowledge, free from the ideology of discourse (from which it is "said"), will not work.

The logic described above also "proclaims" a prohibition on interpretation, since any interpretation is necessarily subordinate to discourse, and therefore is not factual. But after all, a fact outside of language (outside of discourse) does not exist; a fact that is not perceived by consciousness is absent (at least in the same consciousness). Therefore, it does not belong to discourse in general; and this means that such a fact is not in the position of the Logos in general. Therefore, it remains to be recognized that a fact can only be understood as a fact of a particular discourse (of a particular language).

This means: "the place of speaking", "the place of fact", "the place of interpretation" is always a place in discourse, in the synthesis of reality and language, located in the consciousness of the individual. Being in this logic, we begin to analyze the novel "House of Leaves". And let's start with the ordering of "places of speaking", "places of facts" in the formal structure of the work.

The scheme of the artistic world of the "House of Leaves", describing some discursive communities that keep the construction of the novel in balance, can be described as follows:

a) the internal discourse of the documentary film "The Nevidson Film" (documentary-pseudo-documentary film)

b) the internal discourse of Zampano's book "The Nevidson Film" (scientific-pseudoscientific)

c) the internal discourse of Johnny Truant's comments on Zampano's book "The Nevidson Film" (literary)

All the rest – comments from the publisher, epistolary fragments, photos, etc. – we will not refer the formal layers of the book to internal discourses, since they arise on the borders of the discourses mentioned above and do not represent individual communities.

Thus, it can be argued that the very concept of discourse as a kind of linguistic community is "encrypted" in the form of the "House of Leaves": at least three discourses coexist and interact in it.

These same discourses, due to various formal and essential internal elements (genre, style, theme, etc.), add the "House of Leaves" as a community to other discourses that are outside the artistic world of the work.

Genealogy as a figure of poetics in the "House of Leaves"

At this point, we rely on two works by Michel Foucault: the article "Nietzsche, genealogy, history" ^[11], and the book "The Archaeology of Knowledge" ^[9].

The article on "genealogy" (the doctrine of origin) is for the most part a comparative analysis of the use of the central terms "To the genealogy of morality" by Friedrich Nietzsche ^{[12, pp. 231-381]}.

"The color of genealogy is gray; it is distinguished by thoroughness and patient documentation. She works with parchments – scratched, erased, rewritten many times" ^{[11, p. 533]}, – this is how Foucault began his 1971 article "Nietzsche, Genealogy, history".

When writing The House of Leaves, Danilevsky did not ignore this statement of Foucault and realized it both inside the artistic world of the novel at the level of allusive citation, and as a structural component of the form of the novel itself.

In the second case, Danilevsky introduced the "Varr Manuscript" (and some others) into the text of the "document" ^{[13, p. 410]}. This document is an element of poetics that plays out the genealogy or archaeology of knowledge in accordance with Foucault's understanding of "historical truth". In addition, Zampano himself (who signs the manuscripts, as if they were documents, with the symbol "Z") calls "this whole enterprise" – that is, the manuscript "The Nevidson Film" – nothing but a "document" ^{[13, p. xix]}.

Let us add that Foucault fixed the historiographical crisis of knowledge (consonant with the Lyotard crisis of metanarratives) and shifted the view of the researcher of the historian from the integrity of the historical metanarrative, from its centripetal totalizing aspirations to (now postmodern) gaps, facts, literally – documents speaking through a desubjectified researcher ^{[9, pp. 7-19]}. In such a crisis of the integrity of the historiographical meta-narrative, there is an important movement for us from modernity to postmodernity, which we still record in the framework of Foucault's genealogy, as another tick for the postmodern poetics of the "House of Leaves". For this kind of movement is quite successfully recorded in Danilevsky's novel by means of documents introduced by the author, historical and pseudo-historical facts, as well as by assigning the function of researcher to Nevidson, Zampano and Truent.

Thus, in the novel "House of Leaves" one can fix the metaphorization of the Fucoldian "displacement of the researcher's view" from the totality of the event stream to the countless gaps in the artistic world of the work. For example, the "manuscript" itself, entitled in the editorial office of Zampano "The Nevidson Film", is shown as "An endless tangle of words, sometimes distorted by meaning, sometimes meaningless at all, often falling apart, always branching into other fragments... each fragment completely covered with a coating of years of ink statements; layered, crossed out, corrected; handwritten, typed; legible, illegible; impenetrable, clear; torn, stained, taped; some pieces are crisp and clean, others have faded, burned, or folded and unfolded so many times that the folds have erased entire passages of God knows what–meaning? The truth? Deception? prophecies or madness or something like that? And all this reached, designated, described, recreated... – find your own words, for mine are over; and even if there are many of them left, what can they say?" ^{[13, p. xvii]}.

The main event behind these facts is hidden, that is, we are talking again about the absence of a reliable original of the event: genealogy "opposes the search for the "origin" [origine]" ^{[11, p. 533]}. That is, we have before us the beginning of the metaphorization of the concept of "genealogy" in Foucault's interpretation, as a method of poetics in Danilevsky's novel.

Foucault insists on moving from the meta-narrative of history to short narratives, a multiplicity of stories, to islands of history separated from the global meta-narrative of history by oceans of unknown events. "History will be 'valid' to the extent," says Foucault, "to the extent it can introduce discontinuity into our very being" ^{[11, p. 547]}. And if we look at the structure of the "House of Leaves", we will see that it consists entirely of fragments at all its levels, including genre ones. And the so-called "documents" and "facts" introduced by Danilevsky into the art world are precisely what create gaps.

If the shape of the "House of Leaves" is considered as a whole, then it should be noted that it consists of fragments that are "glued together" by the "researcher" Truent. The fragments glued by Truent, in turn, consist of fragments "glued" by the blind "researcher" Zampano, which also represent fragments of a "documentary" film "glued" by researchers Karen Green and Nevidson and other heroes of the "Nevidson Film".

Let's list some of these "documentary" fragments: "A corridor five and a half minutes long", "which appeared seven years ago" ^{[13, p. 4]}; "Expedition No. 4" – a fragment that came out "less than a year later" ^{[13, p. 5]}; this episode, in in turn, it is also "glued" from several fragments by Davidson: "ragged, intermittent; judging by the roughness of the glues, the author was in a hurry" (but this "glued" part of the film just demonstrates the "gluing" of naked facts, without any reflections within its own content) ^{[13, p. 5]}; "Expedition No. 1", "Expedition No. 2", "Expedition No. 3" ^{[13, pp. 84-87]}, "Expedition No. 5" ^{[13, pp. 423-490]} and many others.

Foucault also records the fact of the crisis of the object of history along with the crisis of the subject of history, that is, the subject cannot trust his own view of the historical material, and the material itself is, according to Foucault, a field of fragments unsuitable for building a meta-narrative. For the "patchwork quilt" of history, glued together from disparate fragments, fills the places of missing fragments with ideology ^{[11, pp. 547-549]}.

Danilevsky also throws out a similar thought in the novel: "Most often, the almost wordless fragments selected by Nevidson reveal what the explication can only show approximately" ^{[13, p. 10]}. That is, something explicit, factual, according to Danilevsky – approximately; whereas the wordless, fragmentary – has the potential of "disclosure".

Also in Danilevsky's text there are fragments of authentic (real) history, historical documents, etc., which become elements of the poetics of the novel, appearing as separate islands of events for the reader, which fully corresponds to the Foucault principle described above.

Here are some of them.

The film is by Abram Zapruder, an American businessman, a manufacturer of women's clothing, who on November 22, 1963 shot a 26-second amateur documentary depicting the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy ^{[13, p. 193]}.

Danilevsky superimposes the cards of Zapruder's film on the frames of the "Nevidson Film", that is, he superimposes the real famous shots of the Kennedy assassination – which are certainly in the reader's visual memory – on the image of the murder of Jed Leader (the character of the "House of Leaves" ^{[13, pp. 192-193]}) becoming – forming in the reader's imagination. In this way, enhancing the "picture" in the reader's imagination. And at the same time, referring to the historical memory of the reader, causing the effect of feeling the reality of the murder and the distant presence of the historical background. Here is another example of the capture of a real human figure by a simulacrum: Jed the Leader, a character, captures and turns into an "interactive image" a real figure – John F. Kennedy, or rather the famous 26 seconds that captured the death of the latter.

Another similar technique: Danilevsky's reference to the 1997 bestseller of scientific literature "In thin Air" by John Krakauer ^{[13, p. 435]}, which tells about the death of an expedition on Everest (8 dead, 4 missing, 2 injured), whose guide was Robert Edwin Hall (Eng. Robert Edwin "Rob" Hall), who also died during the expedition.

The appearance of Krakauer's text in the "House of Leaves" indicates – implies, likens, hints – the correspondence of the expeditions in the "House of Leaves", led by the "intrepid hunter and explorer" and, apparently, the polar explorer ^{[13, p. 80]} Holloway Roberts (eng. Roberts Holloway) and the fatal expedition to Mount Everest Robert Edwin Hall.

Recall that Holloway Roberts, the character of the "House of Leaves", also died as a result of the expedition, thereby repeating the real fate of Robert Hall not only through phonetic allusion of names, but also at the event level in the artistic world of the novel.

Such elements of poetics – genealogical flashes of "real" history, accompanied by the capture of their event series by a simulacrum – can also include the appearance of a reference to the world's largest Sarawak grotto in Malaysia ^{[13, p. 125]}. And the psychological impact that the group of speleological researchers who first penetrated it was subjected to: ""The sudden realization of the immensity of the black void caused one of the speleologists to have an acute attack of agoraphobia, fear of open spaces. None of the three later told who panicked, since silence in such matters is an unwritten law among speleologists" (Planet Earth: Underground Worlds. pp. 26-27)" ^{[13, p. 125]}.

The same element of poetics – the poetics of "genealogy" – includes the description in the novel of the rebellion raised by Gaspar Quesada and his servant Luna de Molino, and the bloody suppression of the uprising by Magellan, as well as drawing a parallel between the "rebellion" of Jed and Vox during "Expedition No. 4"; this also includes the expedition of Henry Hudson 1610 ^{[13, pp. 135-137]}.

Probably, the events related to Magellan and Hudson were invented by Danilevsky, but the "crisis of the subject of history" along with the crisis of the "object of history" in postmodernism – these two "crises" really "cloud" the facticity, that is, the historical authenticity of the events described by Danilevsky. The real names of "Magellan" and "Henry Hudson" are enough to create a historical background of "facts" that never existed.

That is, a real name is enough to erect a simulacrum image that captured a real figure and built an alternative branch of a historical event that exists only on the island of the artistic world of the "House of Leaves" - not in the metanarrative unity of History, but penetrating into the metanarrative of history at the expense of real historical figures. The names Magellan and Hudson are references to "places" in the discourse. Danilevsky rewrites these very places in a way that is beneficial to the "House of Leaves" – and the rewritten places of the meta-narrative of history become the background of the artistic world of the novel.

In this case, the effect of the novel form is approximately the same as in the previous examples: the image [as if] of a real event or person is superimposed on another event or person, from which a sense of "reality" of the passage being read, episode, etc. is born. So, the historical "truth", fragments woven into the narrative of the "House of Leaves" It forms not only the poetics of the "House of Leaves" and helps the plot move, but also builds a real, authentic, real historical background completely independent of the artistic world of the "House of Leaves" (even the fact that half of the events used are fiction does not interfere with this formation), which works as a background when reading the "House of Leaves".

This also includes the appearance in Danilevsky's novel of a reference to the work of Raymond Bernard "Hollow Earth: The greatest geographical discovery in History" (1964) ^{[13, p. 378]}. The appearance of this "document" in the "House of Leaves" also creates the effect of form described above: the creation of a historical background – the emergence of an island (fragment) of history – in the reader's imagination, the superimposition of the real world on the artistic one. The emergence of a kind of double genealogical and artistic image appealing to historical truth (conditionally).

Summing up the intermediate result, we can say that both in Foucault's theory and in Danilevsky's, the "document" – Zapruder's film, Krakauer's book, the story of Magellan and Hudson – is transformed into a vague trace of the event. This metamorphosis of a historical fact entails the transformation of a researcher in Foucault or a reader in Danilevsky into a pathfinder, in front of whose eyes fragments of a fragmentary obscure world are unfolded, which cannot be restored in its original integrity without introducing a subjective ideology. The task of the writer in this case is to build this fragmentary implicit world through the word in the novel; the task of the reader is to fill the gaps with his own "ideology", because this is a natural human need: to generalize, link, organize, explain (of course, if he wants to understand).

If we talk about the metaphorical description of Foucault's concept of genealogy in Danilevsky's novel, then the following passage can be used for these purposes: "What struck me first of all was the smell. It wasn't just a strong unpleasant smell. It was an extremely layered patina on a progressive plaque of odor, the actual source of which had long since evaporated. Then I was stunned, there was so much cloying, bitter, rotten, even vile in it. Nowadays, I can't remember the smell anymore, only my reaction to it. Nevertheless, if I had to give it a name, I think I would call it the smell of human history..." ^{[13, pp. xv-xvi]}. Probably, the following definition will not be an exaggeration: "the smell of human history" is the "foggy trace of an event" that remains to the pathfinder–researcher who does not have the opportunity to get to the "source". Obviously, this is Foucault's genealogy.

In conclusion, it should be added that some of the chapters of the "House of Leaves" – for example, the chapter "SOS" ^{[13, pp. 97-106]} – are "fragments" captured on internal surveillance cameras at home. It is through the "Glass Eye" of the camera that the reader penetrates into the events taking place. And, just like Foucault, the reader does not have the original source (impossible, according to Foucault), but already something mediated – the trace of the event (but not the event itself) left by the document, that is, in a particular case, the film.

Also, the chapters of the appendix ^{[13, pp. 549-552, 569-572, 582-583, 658-662]} are filled with all kinds of photographs, collages, comics, etc., which again fall under the interpretation of "historical documents", traces of events that play out Foucault's genealogy.

The above is a good guide for the main motive of postmodern philosophy: "postmodern philosophy, at least one of its parts, while a very significant part, is addressed specifically to science and tries to comprehend its provisions and its results at the level of thinking about thinking" ^{[5, p. 63]}.

A comment is required here: the classical model of cognition operates at the level between the material world and thinking, simultaneously including both one and the other. But in the House of Leaves, the referent in the form of the real world is distant, clouded, as this chapter shows; the reader has numerous "traces" of the real world and the reflection of the discourses of Nevidson, Zampano, Truent regarding these traces and relative to each other, that is, the reflection of discourse on another discourse from discourse. Events – no, there is only "the morning after the scattering."

"The Death of the Author" as a figure of the poetics of the "House of Leaves"

The "crisis of subjectivity" is an idea already embedded in the classical model of the self–conscious subject by Rene Descartes: "oblivion and expulsion from the structure of the subject of the figure of Another, who, nevertheless, returns in his frightening, paranoid guise of an "evil genius" capable of gradually interfering with the work of consciousness, thereby "stealing" the autonomy of the subject" ^{[14, p. 6]}. That is, an idea indirectly present in the Cartesian Cogito operator, in which a certain pure "I" thinks, excluding any temporal mode except the present, and also excluding any "place" of the subject's gathering in the present, except the "pure I".

The philosophy of continental postmodernism begins precisely with the "decentralization" of the subject (the loss or partial loss of autonomy by the subject), that is, with the loss of the subject's "time" and "place" of gathering the subject himself. In non-classical philosophy, this circumstance caused a whole series of deaths: the death of an individual text, the death of language, the death of meaning, the death of the author, the death of the reader, the death of literature, the death of book civilization, the death of speech, the death of man, the death of humanism, etc.

In this regard, we can refer to the study of K. V. Kondratiev "The crisis of the idea and phenomenon of the subject in the space of modern socio-philosophical discourse" ^[14].

In this work, the author notes that the beginning of the problem of decentralization of the subject, that is, "criticism of the subject's claims to autonomy", was laid in the works of K. Marx, F. Nishtse and 3. Freud ^{[14, pp. 2012: 12-67]}. As for the variety of approaches and authors on this problem in the twentieth century, Kondratiev identifies the following authors among others: M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, M. Merleau-Ponty, K. Levi-Strauss, J. Lacan, L. Althusser, M. Foucault, J. Derrida, J. Deleuze, F. Guattari, S. Zizek and others ^{[14, p. 5]}.

The theme of the "death of the author" is one of the manifestations of the idea of the "crisis of the subject", "death of the subject", "death of a person", etc., but already in literary studies, worked out by R. Barth in the essay "Death of the author", 1968 [15:384-392] and M. Foucault in the report "What is an author?", 1969 ^{[16, pp. 7-47]}.

In general terms, the concept of the author's death rests on the assertion that any present moment of "speaking" of an individual subject has a deeply pre-individual origin, such as: unconscious experience originating in Freudianism; the biological will to power described by Nietzsche; Marxist class or economic interest; or, as Barth writes, romantic psychology, universal wisdom, etc. ^{[15, p. 387]}.

Let's also name the article "The evolution of the idea of the "Death of the author"" by N.I. Beresneva and E.A. Kokareva ^{[17, pp. 9-16]}, where Barth's essay and Foucault's report have already been conceptually analyzed. The concepts formulated in the article by Beresneva and Kokareva are convenient to use when analyzing the "House of Leaves".

The "death of the author" in both Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, metaphors aside, means fixing a change in the intentional essence of the concept of "author" – the essence that it was endowed with in the culture of Modern Times. The concept of "author" is no longer substantial, but is replaced by the author function: the "new" author, performing certain operations - being inside the discourse or moving from discourse to discourse – at the point of language – which is the author himself (the place of discourse) – is engaged in organizing the internal space of discourse, creating a certain linguistic semiotic grid through discourse inside the discourse ^{[17, pp. 9-16]}.

The working hypothesis, which determines the methodological necessity for the subsequent development of our article, looks like this: in the novel "House of Leaves", at the level of form, "Truent's discourse" plays out the concept of the "author" of Barthes, and "Zampano's discourse" plays out the concept of the "author" of Foucault. Thus, the "Truent discourse" metaphorizes the "birth of the reader": inside the "Truent discourse", the "scriptorist" Zampano dies – and the "reader" Truent is born. Whereas Zampano is the author in Foucault's concept: the place from which the discourse itself is spoken.

What is Foucault's author? As already mentioned, this is a certain function within the discourse (in our case, Zampano is the author within the "Zampano discourse") engaged in organizing the symbolic order of this discourse, based on the conditional "linguistic will".

Let's highlight the aspects in Foucault's report, starting from which we will have to understand the "author-function" in Zampano's discourse:

a) "Writing" is a "game of signs", ordered by the nature of the signifier, whose main activity is aimed at unfolding the signified content externally with an eye to the fact that "modern writing has freed itself from the theme of expression: it refers only to itself," while the writing subject continuously disappears ^{[16, p. 13]}. Further, Foucault asks an interesting question in this context: what comes into the space vacated after the author's death, what places, faults and functions can be found in this space? ^{[16, p. 18]}.

The answer to this question is given in "House of Leaves"; in a way, the novel "House of Leaves" itself is the answer.

On a metaphorical level, it will not be difficult to find in Danilevsky's work a confirmation of the above-described principle of "continuous disappearance of the writing subject". The novel itself begins with the death of the old man Zampano and the assignment to him of the status of the author of the "endless growl of words" ^{[13, p. xvii]}. In other words, the starting point is disappearance (dissolution in writing) Zampano is the author, that is, the transformation of the subject into a writing function: Zampano breaks down into a "growl of words" accompanying the act of reading.

As for the identity of Zampano, it is only known that he has no family, no friends, no banking history, no passport, no driver's license; his nationality is unknown, it is not even fully clear what his real name was, that is, Zampano does not have a real name ("this is the relation of the letter to death also reveals itself in the erasure of the individual characteristics of the writing subject" ^{[16, p. 14]}). Besides, he's blind. And, probably, it would be possible to call Zampano's blindness his distinctive feature, but what about the function? Can a function really be sighted?

Thus, the personality of Zampano in Danilevsky's novel is really "erased" and brought to the state of function. What is known for sure about him is that he wrote the text "The Nevidson Film". This is confirmed both by witnesses – Zampano's nurses and nannies, whom Truent finds during the "collection" of the Zampano manuscript – and by the fact that the manuscripts were found in Zampano's apartment, in which he spent years alone and surrounded by cats. That is, Zampano has no other fate or characteristic, except for an endless letter – everything is written in the apartment: from napkins and postage stamps, to endless stacks of sheets – and a strange name that has little in common with an ordinary human full name.

"The author's name, therefore, is not the same proper name as all the others" ^{[16, p. 20]}, Foucault says. And, of course, the name Zampano plays along with him with pleasure. What do we see behind this name? The blind storyteller Homer or the librarian Borges? The traveling circus performer Zampan? from Federico Fellini's film The Road (1954)? An absurd critic describing in his blindness a film that he could not physically see? The speculation of Mark Z. Danilevsky? Or Danilevsky himself: "Damn it, I didn't care at all about the words of old man Z" ^{[13, p. xviii]} ("Zampan?" is probably one of Danilevsky's own masks: Mark Z[ampano – A.N.] Danilevsky); or, perhaps, Van Gogh, Andy Warhol, etcand Jamison: "As for his things, they were very different: battered furniture, unused candles, old shoes (in particular, the latter looked sad and shabby...) ^{[13, p. xvi],[1, pp. 93-107]}?

However, the discourse of "Z's" letters will spread far beyond both in time and space, and in a cultural context (in detail about this article by A.V. Novikov "Mark Z. Danilevsky's "House of Leaves": the poetics of simulacra"). The author-function, dissipating in the text, creates a linguistic intertextual network and at the same time a serious semantic subtext, behind which the unconscious, structural, traumatic, etc. looms undividedly ^[19].

b) "the affinity of writing and death" – the "legend" becomes a ransom for accepted death, the writing process pushes back death, which should close the mouth of the speaker: "Writing is now a voluntary erasure, which should not be presented in books, since it takes place in the very existence of the writer. The creation, whose task was to bring immortality, now has the right to kill – to be the murderer of its author" ^{[16, p. 14]};

How did Zampano die? This happened, according to Truent, at the end of 1996, when the "stray" Zampano cats, of which there were about eighty, began to die one by one (Danilevsky puns: "curiosity killed the cat." Most likely, this is a hint that what killed Zampano also killed his curious cats.), as much as, according to the "doctors", it was Zampano himself, who was found lying face down on the floor.

The penetration – it is difficult to call it another word – of Truent into the apartment of Zampano (whose body was taken out of it the day before) is somewhat reminiscent of a transition into the dimension of a Gothic novel or into Dante's forest, or to that place, for example, which was vacated after the death of Zampano-the author: "The way the keys of the People rang like bone bells when he opened the main gate; how suddenly the hinges screeched, as if we were entering not a crowded building, but some ancient, moss-eaten crypt. Or the way we stumbled through the damp corridor, drowning in shadows, with the lamps above strewn with sparkles of light, which, now I'm ready to swear, were the work of gray spiders. Or perhaps the most important of all, the way People whispered when they told me endless things that I didn't care about then, but now, now, well, my nights would be much shorter if I didn't have to remember them" ^{[13, p. xiv]}. People– both here and further on –are Truent's guide, a kind of Virgil. The result of the work of Deconstruction in relation to Dante.

Next, Truent talks about what attracted him to this apartment? He thinks about banal curiosity – which, as we already know, "killed the cat" – or "inertia" ^{[13, p. xiv]}. This word, used by Danilevsky, is interesting because "inertia", in some way, can be interpreted as a "trace". In the beginning there was a trace, in the beginning there was inertia. The past, which carries the inertia of the past, determined the future, which subsequently becomes a trace of the present. So the function of the Zamapano-author overtakes the Truent-reader.

And further: "Whatever determined the path of all my yesterdays, that night it was strong enough to lead me past all these sleeping, securely isolated living, locked behind their sturdy doors, until I stood at the end of the corridor facing the last door on the left, also an unremarkable door, but that's it the same doors to the dead" ^{[13, p. xiv]}.

Of course – Gothic, harsh Dante, Odysseus, etc., but also the entrance to the space of the deceased author. The entire subsequent text of the "House of Leaves" after this transition will be located "behind" this door, on the other side, that is, by the dead. The reader will see an extensive panorama of the "world of the dead", built according to the patterns of Los Angeles, in which Truant will look for his Beatrice, passed through the meat grinder of deconstruction: now it is a stripper Temper, with a tattoo of a baby deer Bambi in the most indecent place. And the author of this world will be Johnny Truant, glaring at the Zampano manuscript.

Behind the "dead door", Truant discovers "the smell of human history", "a pile of growling words", not a single cat (except for the story of People about the cats eviscerated and disappeared before Zampano's death), boarded-up windows, barricaded doors to the courtyard, taped ventilation and four long marks on the floor right in the center of the room, left by unknown people with claws. It is into this space vacated after the death of the Zampano author - the space behind the dead door – that the Truent reader enters. And wherever Truent goes now, this space will follow him or arise around him, which will be especially noticeable in the further analysis of the scene, where there is a "synchrony" (as we will call it) between the discourses of Zampano and Truent.

This is how Zampano, the author, dies: slowly, painfully and for a long time. The reader is left with his manuscript and a trace of four marks on the floor of the space from which the author Zampano withdrew. And they are left by the space into which the Zampano-author went, or which "erased" him. For these marks are the only thing that does not belong to the natural space of the isolated Zampano room. Whoever left this trail took Zampano's life. And now Truent is in a rift between realities – in limbo, between writing and life–between the discourses of Zampano and Truent.

In turn, Zampano, as a decent author, left a will precisely and only about the manuscript he created, in which he called for his own death and the "scattering" of his own ashes among the pages of the manuscript: "Whoever finds and publishes this work will be entitled to all dividends. I only ask that my name take its rightful place. Perhaps you will be lucky and you will prosper. If, however, you find that readers are not interested and immediately dismiss the whole enterprise, then let me suggest that you drink more wine and dance on the sheets of your wedding night, because–whether you know it or not–you are really thriving now. They say the truth stands the test of time. I cannot think of a greater consolation than to know that this document did not pass such a test" ^{[13, p. xix]}.

Zampano calls his manuscript a "document", expresses hope for the failure of the "truth" of this document in time, actually renounces his name as the author's for this document (for what is "I only ask that my name take its rightful place?" Is Zampano counting on the decency of a random person who found the manuscript?) and – literally – he dies: both as a name and as a claim to truth – that is, totality – as an author and a person. The speaker's mouth is closed, but thanks to the death of Zampano, his manuscript has a reader-a scriptwriter – Truent. And Truent's "legend of Zampano" becomes a ransom for the death accepted by the "last".

c) "the writer's marker now is nothing more than the peculiarity of his absence"; "he should play the role of the dead in the game of writing..." ^{[16, pp. 14-15]}.

Such metaphorical Foucault probably gives us the right to allow ourselves some artistic arbitrariness and point out that the death of Zampano for the "House of Leaves" is a sacred death. Zampano was sacrificed to the god of Writing, and from this death grow all further events in the fate of Truent the reader, in the fate of the readers' forum (as well as countless personal blogs dedicated to HoL), in the fate of the author of this study and others like him. The Zampano function is fulfilled, the reader is born.

Danilevsky's own marker in the letter is again the "objectification", if I may say so, of metaphor: the discourse of "Z's" writing.

So, Zampano has no characteristics except for the "Name" – a kind of mysterious flicker around the function "zampano" (this flicker is his name, no more) – and the Letter he left, but nevertheless Zampano is present throughout the text in the text. He is regularly resurrected by the Truent reader: rummages through his thoughts, translations, finds his nannies and nurses, tries to understand the course of his thoughts, comprehend his lifestyle, biography, passions and sufferings, death, etc. In addition, strange "shape effects" begin to occur with Truent, a kind of synchrony: the events described by Zampano in the "Nevidson Film", the incidents that happen to the main character of the "Nevidson Film", Nevidson, happen in a similar way to Truent, or facts of strange coincidences are discovered in the biographies of Truent and Nevidson.

So, Truant's childhood – the death of his father, the madness of his mother, physical mutilation, wandering through foster families, fleeing to Alaska, the death of a comrade at sea – echoes Nevidson's childhood: homelessness, a mother who ran away and eventually disappeared, his father is an eternally wandering and disappearing salesman suffering from alcoholism and a craving for violence, a rampage, throwing red-hot frying pans at the wall (footnote. No. 27) ^{[13, p. 22]}.

 The synchrony between the discourses of Truent and Zampano will manifest itself with special force if you superimpose one discourse on another and look at the coincidences. With such an "overlap", a "panic" or "neurotic" resonance" of episodes occurs: Truent, mediating the "panic experience" of Nevidson already known to the reader, experiences in his own reality the same "panic experience" as Nevidson, but in that layer of the text that is "closer" to the reader, closer in the sense of absence intermediate mediation, since Truent's discourse is the most "superficial" layer of mediation ^{[13, pp. 70-72]}.

In this article, we will consider in detail only one "resonating" scene through the touching layers of the palimpsest, by superimposing the discourses of Zampano and Truent on top of each other. This "synchronization" scene begins with "Expedition A" ^{[13, p. 63]}.

In parentheses, it should be noted that Danilevsky uses a cinematic technique to develop the plot precisely on the eve of the events of "synchrony": the wife's ultimatum to her husband, the violation of which creates a precedent for further actions that would have been impossible if the ultimatum had remained undisturbed. Due to the violation of the ultimatum, new characters, characters, and spaces appear in the text – as well as in the plot.

Setting an ultimatum:

"Karen: "But I'll say this: if he goes in there, I'm out of here. I'll take the kids and everything.”

Davidson: "If she continues this Cold War, I answer, I will climb there" ^{[13, pp. 62-63]}.

Then a small, purely functional scene is introduced, which serves to violate the terms of the ultimatum and leads to the desired result for the plot: "Karen is so furious that she sends Nevidson to sleep on the sofa, closer to his "favorite corridor"" ^{[13, p. 63]}.

Even the names of the characters acting in this scene are not spelled out, they are replaced by dashes: "____" ^{[13, p. 63]}.

Can these omissions mean anything? Perhaps Zampano is hinting that voids are already beginning to appear in the text itself. Like a gap between a thought and another thought. In this tiny moment – between a past thought and a new thought – an abyss begins to peep through. And Danilevsky demonstrates it with the help of a typographic tool inside the novel. But we can object, because in this case proper names are omitted. Is this another metaphor for the "death of the subject/s"?

However, it is likely that Danilevsky – or Zampano (since this happens inside Zampano's discourse "The Nevidson Film") – deliberately emphasizes with these omissions the purely functional meaning of the entire scene (names do not play any role: the scene function will work without them): violation of the ultimatum and, as a result of the violation, the opening of the opportunity to enter the "favorite corridor" (again, we are talking about curiosity, which pushes Nevidson there): "You can consider me impulsive or just curious," Nevidson mutters, thrusting his sore feet into a pair of shoes (Van Gogh-Andy Warhol-Jamison shoes again ^{[13, p. xvi],[1, pp. 93-107]} – A.N.), but it won't hurt anyone if I look around a little"" ^{[13, p. 63]}.

After getting into the shoes, Nevidson, a researcher and photographer, goes on "Expedition A". Through the eyes of Nevidson, the reader for the first time penetrates, looks through the door leading into the labyrinth of the house on Yaseneva Street (recall the "door to the dead" described above, through which Truent looks at the beginning of the novel – this is the moment of synchronic contact between Truent and Zampano discourses). At first, Nevidson discovers a small corridor about seventy paces long behind the door, but soon notices another door leading to an even larger corridor. This continues until Nevidson discovers an arch, behind which a space opens, the walls and ceiling of which are at such a distance that the light of his flashlight no longer reaches them ^{[13, pp. 63-64]}.

Then, for the first time, a "growl" appears, as if it becomes clear that "something dwells" in this corridor-maze: "a pile of growling words"? The minotaur? "echo"? "frozen music" that is released when the architectural space changes?..

One thing is for sure – this space is changing under the gaze of an observer: "All of Nevidson's attention is focused on the floor, and it's because he keeps peering that the floor begins to take on a new meaning. Gender is no longer something unambiguous. It is possible that something is hiding under it. For example, some kind of crevice that is about to open up" ^{[13, p. 67]}.

Something that lies behind the fabric of the text, something that Nevidson (and with him the reader) expects or does not expect to see peering at the floor, at the base, at the text, into the abyss, into the blackness of the quantum field- something comes to the surface, objectifies: "Suddenly interrupted The unbreakable silence again replaces with lightning speed what destroyed it for a moment.

Nevidson freezes, trying to figure out if he really just heard some kind of growl" ^{[13, p. 67]}.

Zampano probably describes some kind of quantum dimension where particles behave in accordance with the observer's expectations: the ominous "roar" is objectified in the text precisely under the observer's gaze (note that the events of the "Nevidson Film" exist as if "under the observer's gaze", since everything described is described only because there were cameras whose gaze I was constantly following every event unfolded in front of the reader).

In the chapter "Houses of Leaves" under consideration, we should also pay attention to the list of names of photographers, the list of which stretches for three pages ^{[13, pp. 64-67]}. After the list, Truent's comment No. 76 is given ^{[13, p. 67]}, which actually asserts the validity or exemplifies the term of the representative of the philosophy of science, said in the direction of postmodernism, Paul Feerabend: "Anything goes!". The list of names of photographers in Zampano's text and the commentary on Truent's list are again an exemplification of one of the characteristics of postmodernism: collage.

Given: the body of the concept is a list of names; the description of the concept is a comment by Truent and one of Zampano's nurses, Alison Adrian Burns: "... this list was completely random.  <…> “We just chose the titles from several books and magazines that he had lying around.” ..." ^{[13, p. 67]}.

Further in the story, Nevidson tries to get out of the corridor, hears growling several times again, tries to call for help, draws attention to a strange echo; as a result, after another turn, he suddenly stumbles upon a quadrangle glowing with warm lamp light, into which the figure of his daughter Daisy is inscribed. This is the first episode of Nevidson's rescue from "hell" by a woman carrying light ^{[13, pp. 67-68]}.

Then, in Danilevsky's text, there is a brief description of the Khumbu space at the foot of Mount Everest, where ice columns are modified and settled during the day. In addition, the text provides a comparative set of characteristics that distinguish the Khumbu space from the maze space of the house on Yaseneva Street. Here, Zampano cites a phrase that Truent also transfers to his commentary in the form of a quote: ""no reasons available to the eye" is a phrase suitable for describing what happened" ^{[13, p. 69]}. It is with this phrase in comment No. 77 that the synchronization of Truent's narrative layer with the above-described Zampano narrative layer begins. This phrase now belongs to both discourses at the same time; it also breaks up the narrative, or rather connects two parallel narrative layers: the Zampano layer before it, Truent's layer after it.

To begin with, the Truent episode opened with the above phrase is also not devoid of the "man-woman" line. The stripper Temper (who went through the meat grinder of Beatrice's deconstruction) appears in Truent's erotic dream, wrapped in blankets, which falling off her and hanging in the air, create the initial feeling of weightlessness for the entire subsequent scene. Then the dream abruptly ends, and Truant goes to work, where he will sort needles for his boss's tattoo machine.

The process of sorting needles ^{[13, pp. 69-70]} and the subsequent "shading of the skin" is quite a suitable metaphor for describing the "shading" of a page (the skin of a book) by text using dots that remain from the tips of the needles. If we recall Barth's text "The Pleasure of the text" ^{[18, pp. 462-518]}, then we can draw a parallel between the "materiality" of the text described in this work and what Truent says (we will leave the development of this topic to those who follow in our footsteps). Soon, Truent's boss sends him to the storeroom to get ink. So Truent finds himself in front of a door, stepping through which, like Nevidson, he goes into another space, where he has to climb eight steps in the dark, because the light bulbs burn out the moment Truent touches the light switch.

Events are developing rapidly: like Nevidson, who was peering at the floor, Truent also begins to "peer", but no longer just into the darkness, but into the purple ink for tattoo needles, into their texture, imagining that he "can really distinguish the vibration of their spectral frequencies" ^{[13, p. 70]}. As in the case of Nevidson, this leads to the fact that what (idea, meaning, substance) is (hidden) "behind" the ink (behind the body of the text, behind the fabric of the text) does not take long to wait and manifests itself in reality.

The light falling on Truent's palms turns into a blade and cuts them. Truent finds himself, as he put it, in a "trap"; he begins to have a neurotic seizure: he is "lost" or "lost." Fear and neurosis give rise to the feeling in Truent's mind that someone or something "is" here. He, like Nevidson, first hears a "sound", then sees eyes, then the door slams shut, he falls down the steps, drops bottles of ink, which are poured over him. Truent feels that he is beginning to "fall apart", crumble into blackness. It literally breaks down into "text", fragments, words, syllables and letters.

"Something is leaving me. Parts of me. // Everything is falling apart. // Once heard, but forgotten stories. // And letters. // Words fill my head. They scatter like artillery shells. Fragments – syllables– are flying everywhere. Terrible syllables. Sharp. Broken ones. They are rushing at a killer speed. They tear everything to shreds – now there is nothing to put back together, nothing to connect" ^{[13, p. 71]}.

So, Truent is "filled" with terrible words, syllables, letters; and now "The shape of the face shape is being taken right before my eyes" ^{[13, p. 71]} – in one sentence, following from the above episode, the metaphor of the simulacrum and the metaphor (allusion) "de (con) are placedstructures". In front of us, so to speak, the artistic "work" (activity) of postmodernism is deployed in real time.

But still, after accidentally seeing the "ghost" of his own reflection in the ink tray, and also noticing dark spots on himself from overturned vials, Truent realizes that thanks to the ink that absorbed him from head to toe, he became distinguishable, which means that he can be saved.

Here is probably the key paragraph of this scene in full: "Here I will die, I think. And indeed, a premonition of imminent suffocation takes possession of me. At least that's what the boss and the others, who came running to the noise, see. However, what they cannot see is the omen indicated in the fall, in my fall; now I am covered in black ink, my hands are completely obscured, I see that the floor is black, and – did you foresee this or should I put it more specifically? – a jet laid on a jet; for one blinding moment I watched my hand disappear, as in fact the whole of me disappeared – a hellish act of disappearance: the already foreseen dissolution of the “I”, lost due to lack of contrast, slipping into oblivion… Until suddenly, in the middle of exhaling, I notice my reflection in the mirror – the back of the tray, the ghost is already on the road: it seems I haven't left yet, not really. My face is splattered with purple, as are my hands – this is how the contrast was created, the difference that defined me, marked me and, at least for the moment, preserved me" ^{[13, p. 72]}.

The entire paragraph above is a rich and vivid metaphor for the "death of the subject", but in this particular case, the death of Truent, the reader, and the birth of Truent, the author. The return of the deconstructed Truent, where the opposition "reader" is replaced by the opposition "writer", as required by the unspoken rules of deconstruction. The return of the repressed "evil genius" in the letter, let us recall Kondratiev's quote already mentioned earlier: "oblivion and expulsion from the structure of the subject of the figure of Another, who, nevertheless, returns in his frightening, paranoid guise of an "evil genius" capable of gradually interfering with the work of consciousness, thereby "stealing" the autonomy of the subject" ^{[14, p. 6]}.

So, let's describe the general logic of the above-mentioned episodes, taken from the discourse of Zampano and from the discourse of Truent. Recall that this logic is based on the effect of form, which we call "synchrony". Truent, the reader, interacted with Zampano's discourse; since Truent does not just "read", but creates comments, that is, he is engaged in "meaning-making", he simultaneously passes into the category of "author". And, having in his own experience already one death of Zampano the author, mediated by this moment, faced with the same events that Zampano was busy "making sense of", Truent himself approached the "death of the author". And the synchronous convergence of the episodes of Nevidson's wandering through the darkness of the labyrinth of the house on Ash Street and Truent's "descent" into the black basement for ink worked as a resonator that amplified the "emptiness" laid in the foundation of the "House of Leaves".

And now the Truent reader, who survived the literal death of the subject, was reborn as the Truent author, "thanks to the ink that identified, marked him, preserved him." That is, thanks to the text. Or a letter.

Actually, this is also hinted at by a phonetic allusion, which Truent unconsciously hears and reproduces in the dark: "Known. Some. Call. Is. Air. Am?». As the editors comment on the Russian translation of the book: "Phonetically, Some salle is air and m is a distorted Non sum qualis eram: this Latin phrase represents the beginning of the title of the famous poem by Ernest Dawson (1867-1900) "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae" – "I am no longer the same as I was in the reign of the good Kinara" and, in turn, goes back to the line of Horace (Odes IV, 1) " ^{[20, p. 78]}.

Thus, Truent's "transformation" took place, based on the reception of the "synchronicity" of the discourses of Zampano and Truent. (Transformation as a result of descent into the space under the house on Yaseneva Street opens up another level of interpretation of the entire novel. Read more about this in the article by A.V. Novikov "The Yggdrasil Tree" as a symbolic key to the interpretation of the novel by Mark Z. Danilevsky “The House of Leaves"").

It is worth noting that for Nevidson, the "entry" into the maze also did not pass without a trace. His relationship with Karen has not changed for the better, and Nevidson's attitude to the "labyrinth" has changed: obsession has settled in the heart of Nevidson. A tragic outcome is now inevitable.

 In conclusion, a few words about the transition from Zampano, the author in Foucault's concept, to Truent, the reader in Barthes' concept. The form of the novel is based on a dialogue of discourses, the laughter of which is briefly described in the chapter "Discourse as a figure of the poetics of the "House of Leaves"" of this article. The introduction of the novel "House of Leaves" by Johnny Truent ^{[13, pp. xi-xxiii]} reveals the process of Truent's birth as a reader, unfolds on the first pages of the novel the mechanics of the process of this birth.

A certain Zampano dies, Truent becomes aware of this, who penetrates into the former home of the deceased, gets acquainted with his habits, remembers the smells in his room, sees windows clogged and taped from the inside, learns about dead cats, discovers marks on the floor, but does not see the old man himself, as well as does not see his death itself. But, having occupied the space vacated after streak's death, he conveys impressions of what he saw, fixes in the textual fabric, more precisely, somewhere behind it the presence of a certain author Zampano and his death; this is so because Truent's letter is always an "imitation" of Zampano's letter, it is always a reflection on Zampano's letter, which is also a reflection on by Another Person's letter: so Truent the reader and Truent the author are, if I may say so, the dialectical unity of what writing is in principle (taking into account all that was mentioned above).

Let us turn once again to Barth's text with the question of the role of the reader in the concept of the "death of the author". At the moment, it already seems commonplace that Bart says about the Letter: "... in the letter, just every concept of a voice, of a source, is destroyed. Writing is an area of uncertainty, heterogeneity and evasiveness where traces of our subjectivity are lost, a black–and-white labyrinth where all self-identity disappears, and first of all the bodily identity of the writer" ^{[15, p. 384]}. What was discussed above, namely the metaphorical nature of Zampano's "death" and Truent's "disintegration" fully fit the description of Barth's Letter and stopping at this point is unlikely to bring us anything new. Therefore, let's go straight to the reader.

Barth says, returning to a phrase from Balzac's Sarrazin ^{[15, p. 384]}, that "if she [the phrase – A.N.] has a source and a voice, then not in writing, but in reading" ^{[15, p. 390]}. And that "the text is composed of many different types of writing originating from different cultures and entering into relations of dialogue, parody, dispute with each other, however, all this multiplicity focuses on a certain point, which is not the author, as has been claimed so far, but the reader" ^{[15, p. 390]}.

Undoubtedly, this is one of the fundamental points in the concept of the "Death of the author" by Barth, since it is hereby announced that now the reader is a meaningful substance in relation to the text, but not the author-creator. Which is what the "House of Leaves" demonstrates on a formal level. Truent is literally the assemblage point of the entire Zampano discourse, since the original text of Zampano is an unordered "pile of papers" ^{[13, p. xvii]}. It is the function of Truent the reader that gives this "pile" integrity, form, orderliness, defines its structure and, providing commentary, lets it into "reality"; Zampano's text acquires a "purpose" – the meaning of its own existence – in the form of a future reader.

Probably, on such a pretentious note, it would be nice to remember about the Z Brand itself. Danilevsky, whose total absence in the novel the reader does not notice in principle.

The reader forgets that the text "House of Leaves" has a real author, only the "Z" icon reminds either of him or of Dzamapano. The "Z" becomes the coordinate of the place of the discourse from which it is spoken, nothing more. False authors can be seen from under the fabric of the text: Zampano, Truent, Nevidson, Karen, Pelafina Heather Lievre (Truent's mother), Derrida, Homer, pen "Pelican", etc.

This means that Danilevsky himself falls under the category of Bart's "scriptwriter", the scriptwriter who replaced the Author. Let's remember that the scriptwriter "does not carry passions, moods, feelings or impressions, but only such an immense dictionary from which he draws his writing, which knows no stopping; life only imitates the book, and the book itself is woven of signs, it imitates something already forgotten, and so on indefinitely. ^{[15, p. 389]}.

The above quote is quite a novel "House of Leaves" reduced to a definition. Blind Zampano writes endlessly from memory (if he has ever seen the "Nevidson Film" at all), until death stops him; writes and losing his mind, and with it memory and reality Truent; writes Pelafina Heather Lievre, writes "Pelican" – they all write about something, It will never be possible to remember completely and fix it holistically on a letter. And the writing inside the novel turns into an endless recollection, devoid of the original referent on each separate layer of the narrative, palimpsest, discourse. In this inconsolable search for an abstract, discourses are mixed, their interpenetration occurs, which, however, does not solve the problem – the original source cannot be found; so an empty infinity appears in the text: the poetics of unattainability, which has grown on the search for a non-existent referent.

Let us recall Barth again: "Indeed, in multidimensional writing everything has to be unraveled, but there is nothing to decipher; the structure can be traced, "stretched" (as a lowered loop on a stocking is pulled up) in all its repetitions and at all its levels, however, it is impossible to reach the bottom; the space of writing is given to us for a run, not for a breakthrough; writing constantly generates meaning, but it immediately disappears, there is a systematic release of meaning" ^{[15, p. 389]}.

The metaphorical nature of Barthes, as well as Foucault, however, as the whole "theory" of postmodernism in comparison with classical philosophy, allows us to develop topics such as the death of the author, subject, reader and person indefinitely, therefore we will stop here.

And finally, let's say a few more words about the temporary change of the "House of Leaves", which is opened with a key named "Roland Barthes".

Let's turn to the text of the "House of Leaves". In one of the episodes of the novel, Truant will get the book "House of Leaves by Zampano with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant Circle Round A Stone Publication First Edition" ^{[13, pp. 513-514]}.

This strange circumstance confuses Truent, since he is currently still working on the book he is holding in his hands: it turned out to be finished, moreover, published, and his name is listed among the authors. But let's leave Truent and think about what such a time paradox in itself can mean for a literary text.

Probably, the above-mentioned time mode of the novel introduced by Danilevsky just reflects Barth's statement that "the scriptwriter is born simultaneously with the text" ^{[15, p. 387]}. Such a time mode is another "form effect" of the novel: "simultaneity". Johnny Truent writes (literally writes down thoughts reflected on Zampano's discourse) in front of the reader's eyes a book (the reader is always in the present moment of Truent's life: the latter speaks from the present moment, looking into the past from time to time), which he has already written (as it becomes clear to us from the episode where Truent reads an already published a version of the "House of Leaves"), and inside of which he is the author and hero of this book.

Therefore, both Truent, the author, and Truent, the reader, do not exist before the book itself appears in the book itself. For the book has already "realized" itself, without the knowledge of Truent, the author (he is amazed by the existence of the finished book that he holds in his hands), it is present, exists before his eyes at the moment of writing and reading itself, which he, Truent, alone carries out. Therefore, this book does not need an author, namely, it does not need a Truent author or a Truent reader to "be". Therefore, Truent's presence in the text, his "inscribability" in the text, is, roughly speaking, the result of the work of the "will" of the Letter. And Truent, the author, fully corresponds to the concept of Barth's "scriptwriter": the author "has no existence before and outside of writing" ^{[17, p. 6],[15, p. 387]}. Truent, strictly speaking, exists only as an act of writing. Therefore, time is one thing for him: the immanent timelessness of writing. The eternal universal – tomorrow never comes, because Truent's present already includes both the future and the past. This is the unenviable lot of Truent the scriptwriter.