I’m about halfway through Understanding Comics, but I’ve already come across some interesting ideas, one of which I felt had a connection to House of Leaves. In Chapter 3, McCloud discusses closure, which is basically the reader filling in textual gaps, such as imagining what happens in between panels or even seeing something as simple at this :o) as a face. I think that closure also applies to House of Leaves. One part in particular which struck me was the section on Holloway’s tape where most of the words had empty brackets in them where missing letters should be. Without closure, in this case the reader literally filling in those blanks, this section would have been completely unreadable.

Overkill, Literally

With Barthes, Foucault, Nesbit, and now Marchessault, we have extensively discussed authorship in terms of life and death. For me, this is slightly dramatic and very dichotomous. It’s overkill. I really appreciated that Marchessault pointed out the need to move beyond such black-and-white thinking. She writes that confronting the exclusionary role of the Author “might be done by exploring alternative notions of subjectivity not bound to a dialectic of masters and slaves or life and death” (89). She suggests a way to break this dichotomy that is actually in direct opposition to Barthes’ call for the death of the author. Based on the ideas of Felski, she explains the possibility of “a sphere that would bring together both the author and the reader…as a discursive political community” (87) through a shared identity, here gender. This is an issue of collective representation. She continues, “The affirmation of female authorial voices can be understood as widening the political scope to take account of differences between women (class, race, nationality and sexuality) with the view towards larger political coalitions” (89). The patterns of individual recognition lead to large-scale group power dynamics, and are therefore crucial to societal democracy. To bring “death” to the author in order to bring “life” to the reader makes no sense when you consider how the two are inextricably bound together, especially among minority groups.