Formal elements of postmodernism: a comparative analysis of the novels House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski and 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

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

The object of research in this article is the novels of Mark Z. Danilevsky's "House of Leaves" ^[1] and Roberto Bolagno's "2666" ^[2] as literary works of postmodernism, viewed through the prism of philosophical concepts characteristic of the postmodern era.

The subject is the peculiarities of the display of key post-structuralist and postmodernist ideas in the novels "House of Leaves" and "2666", including the following concepts and/or works: discourse and genealogy in the interpretation of M. Foucault ^[3],[4],[5]; " the death of the author" in the interpretation of M. Foucault and R. Barthes ^[6],[7]; "Mythologies" by R. Barthes ^[8]; "Society of Consumption and consumption of catastrophes" by J. Baudrillard ^[9]; deconstruction, voice, phenomenon, distinction by J. Derrida ^{[10],[11],[12],[13]}; rhizome, desiring machines, a body without organs. Deleuze and F. Guattari ^[14],[15]; "The Logic of Meaning" by J. Deleuze ^[16]; "Understanding Media" by M. McLuhan ^[17].

The present study is based on the methodology previously applied by the author in the analysis of the novel "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danilevsky. Some of the results of the testing of this approach have been published in four scientific articles of the Higher Attestation Commission, the conclusions of which will be partially integrated into the current analysis, and links to relevant publications will be included in the work. ^{[18],[19],[20],[21]}.

The purpose of the study is to experimentally verify, therefore, to apply the previously proposed methods of analyzing the novel "House of Leaves" by Danilevsky to the novel "2666" by Bolagno in order to identify the specifics of the implementation of key post–structuralist and postmodern ideas in the text of the latter. In addition, the study aims to capture the common and distinctive features of Bolagno and Danilevsky's poetics within the framework of a comparative analysis based on methodological developments taken from the above-mentioned articles. ^{[18],[19],[20],[21]}.

The discourse in the "House of Leaves" and "2666"

The concept of "discourse" in this analysis is used in the same way as it was applied to the "House of Leaves" in the article "Genealogy, discourse and "death of the author" as figures of poetics in the novel by Mark Z. Danilevsky “House of Leaves"" ^[19].

It should be noted that, as in The House of Leaves, in 2666, discourse acts as a key analytical tool that allows us to consider a work not as an integral meta-narrative, but as a multiple interweaving of layers in which facts, interpretations and forms are mutually conditioned and mutually transformed.

The first step of this analysis is to identify the discursive layers of the text. So, in the "House of Leaves" these are: the documentary and pseudo-documentary discourse of the film "The Davidson Film"; the scientific and pseudo-scientific discourse of Zampano's book; the literary discourse of Johnny Truent's commentary ^[19].

Bolagno's novel "2666" has a lot in common with "The House of Leaves" in a discursive sense. Thus, "2666" is built as a complex polyphonic structure, where each of the five parts unfolds in an independent discursive register, and together they create a multidimensional model of modern culture, violence, madness, and the crisis of knowledge (compare with "House of Leaves" as an epistemological archive of postmodernism ^{[22, p. 132]}).

The first part of "2666", the "Part about Critics", is dominated by (pseudo)academic discourse. The narrative focuses on a group of researchers immersed in the search for the incognito writer Arcimboldi. Through a deconstructed depiction of intellectual obsession, Bolagno reveals the limitations and conventionality of the scientific approach, pointing to the gap between theoretical thinking and living reality.

In the second part, "The Part about Amalfitano", the discourse of madness is revealed (running through the leitmotif of the entire novel – Ingeborg, the Sinner, the "poet of Dew and Imma", the artist with a severed brush Edwin Jones, Gustave, who "fell ill" with schizophrenia, etc.). The gradual mental splitting of the protagonist of this part, his fears, voices in religious and absurd rituals create an atmosphere of disorientation and decomposition of the internal order. This narrative shows how logic collapses under the onslaught of the irrational, and subjectivity is threatened.

The third part, "The Part about the Fairy", is built in a journalistic way (journalistic discourse). A black reporter who has arrived in a Mexican border town is trying to understand and record what is happening. However, his observations are powerless in the face of indifference, hidden interests and systemic brutality, which official reports have no influence on.

In the fourth part, "The Part about the murders," a documentary-police discourse is implemented. The repetitive enumeration of victims and procedural reports creates a rhythm in which individuality is lost. This stylistic detachment emphasizes the impersonality of evil and destroys any hope of understanding or justice.

The fifth part, "The Part about Arcimboldi", unfolds in the mainstream of historical and political discourse. The writer's biography is intertwined with the traumatic history of the 20th century – from the war to the post-industrial world. Through the prism of personal destiny, the logic of the great processes that determine the face of the modern era is revealed.

Outside of these structured layers, there are additional discourses in the novel that permeate the text and connect the individual parts. One of them is fictitious: the subjective narratives of the characters constantly intersect with "objective" chronicles, with epistolary inserts, with all sorts of formal stylistic techniques of postmodern literature, thus violating the boundary between fiction and document. Schizophrenic discourse (partially mentioned before) manifests itself in images of mental disintegration, splitting of consciousness, repeated mentions of psychiatric institutions, violence sprouting on the basis of abnormality, etc. The metafictional level of discourse allows the novel to comprehend its own form, raising questions about the nature of narrative and authorship. Finally, ethical discourse sets the fundamental tension of the text.: how is it possible to represent violence without turning it into an aestheticized spectacle?

In the next step, we will try to analyze the relationships between discourses within novels: do they conflict, support and expand each other, are they scalable, "raise" the truth to the surface, or, on the contrary, destabilize the perception of the text, etc.

In the case of the House of Leaves, the discourses have a "vertical" arrangement.: they often overlap each other, forming a "palimpsest" or "rat's nest of inscriptions", using the terminology of K.N. Hales, taken from the authoritative article "Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves", which examines in detail, among other things, the issue of the structure of the novel "House of Leaves" ^[23].

In addition, the discourses in the House of Leaves can be described in terms of dialogicity and "synchronicity": the discourses do not act in isolation, but are in constant dialogue (although they can be read separately from each other). Fragments of the film ("The Davidson Film"), Zampano's (pseudo) scientific arguments and Truent's literary comments are intertwined, superimposed, complementing and correcting each other at the same time. Each level, in fact, addresses the other, creating a network, intertextual structure ^[19].

Also, the discourses in the "House of Leaves" mutually reinforce and destabilize each other: on the one hand, the discourses enhance the authenticity and multilayeredness of the narrative, on the other – their stylistic and genre differences cause tension. The scientific and pseudoscientific layer tries to impart objectivity, while the literary commentary constantly emphasizes the subjectivity of perception. Such an ambivalent attitude creates the effect of constant doubt about the "integrity" of the text, typical of the deconstruction strategy. This may indicate a "deconstructivist" relationship between discourses ^[19].

At the same time, the "place of speaking" is constantly shifting in the "House of Leaves": the interaction of discourses leads to the fact that the boundaries between the "author", "reader" and "text" are blurred. The function of the author (Zampano) is gradually giving way to the reader/interpreter (Truent), which is one of the key moments of postmodern poetics in connection with the concept of "author's death" ^[19].

The novel "2666" also contains similar discursive elements. The text of the novel is a complex polyphonic structure in which each section is deployed in a special discursive register, which not only form the content of the parts, but enter into a tense relationship with each other, reflecting the postmodern poetics of multiplicity, fragmentation and instability of meaning. Unlike strictly hierarchical or vertical models (as in the House of Leaves), a horizontal structure prevails here: discourses are not isolated, but they do not overlap each other, they interact at the level of structural rhymes, motional intersections and mirror reflections.

Thus, the literary-critical discourse in the "Part about Critics", where a group of European researchers is immersed in the search for the writer Arcimboldi, resonates with the documentary-journalistic layer of the "Part about Murders". Both discourses are driven by the desire for knowledge: the former seek truth in texts, the latter in investigative and newspaper chronicles. However, the result in both cases is frustration. Neither scientific analysis nor journalistic (forensic) fixation leads to definitive knowledge. Bolagno builds a space where the very pursuit of meaning does not lead to ordering, but to a demonstration of the chaotic nature and resistance of reality to any interpretation.

The dialogic nature of the discourses in "2666" is less demonstrative than in "House of Leaves", but the mutual reflection remains. Bolagno uses the mirror motif as a metaphor for the interaction of narrative levels. In the scene with Liz Norton standing between two mirrors ^{[2, p. 127]}, a doubling effect is created in which the reflection does not match the original. This is a metaphor for narrative strategy: each discourse seems to "reflect" the other, but it does not confirm, but distorts it. A similar duplication occurs in documentary and journalistic discourse, for example, in the episode with MP Asusena, who saw in the mirror "a woman who was not her" ^{[2, p. 635]}. Thus, reflections become not a clarifying element, but a mechanism for destabilization, substitution, and loss of authentic perception.

A significant moment of discursive interaction is the use of "intermediary objects", such as the book "Geometric Testament". She appears in different contexts: first as an object of academic attention ^{[2, p. 150]}, then as a symbol of mental disintegration in the "Part about Amalfitano" ^{[2, p. 206-210]}, and finally as an accidental element of the narrative in the "Part about the Fairy" ^{[2, p. 358-359]}. This is an example of how the same text takes on different meanings depending on the discursive framework. Knowledge, therefore, is not a fixed category, but is formed within an interpretative field where meaning is determined by context.

The relationship between the discourses in the novel is twofold: on the one hand, they mutually reinforce each other, creating layers and the appearance of complexity; on the other, their stylistic differences cause internal tension. Literary-critical (academic) discourse strives for interpretation and understanding, but it encounters a fragmentary, monotonous chronicle of the documentary layer, in which meaning is dissolved in repetition, or it encounters a discourse of madness, where the very process of searching for truth becomes impossible due to the destruction of rationality. The epistemological contradiction between the desire to explain and the inability to achieve knowledge becomes the internal engine of the novel, manifesting itself in a discursive form, including in the "Part about Arcimboldi", where the historical chronicle turns into a kaleidoscope of violence, madness, intertextual influx and existential splitting of characters, and the story itself turns into unreliable genealogical islands in the midst of textual gaps.

One of the central discursive effects is the displacement of the "place of speaking" in the novel. In the spirit of cliched postmodernism, "2666" "blurs the boundaries" between the author, the text and the reader. The analytical function of critics, the narrative voices of journalists, the subjective stories of minor characters – all of them do not receive priority, but become equivalent elements of the network structure. The reader is forced or privileged to independently build possible connections, interpret fragments, recreating meaning from disparate narratives. Of course, this seems to emphasize the inner desire of the text itself to decentralize author's control, which highlights the "death of the author" in the spirit of Barthes.

Further, an effective way of interpretation and analysis is also to consider the boundaries and transitions between discourses, where the thematic, stylistic, genre and other features of the discourses used by the author are most distinguishable.

Thus, the House of Leaves is characterized by stylistic and genre differences, formal (typographic) and structural transitions, and discursive transitions as moments of synchronization ^[19].

In Bolagno's 2666, stylistic and genre differences between discourses are marked by both vocabulary and structure. The academic speech of the first part is distinguished by precision and detachment, whereas the schizophrenic discourse, embodied in the image of Amalfitano and Lola's letters (madness and extreme sexuality in conjunction with the epistolary genre), destroys the logic and sequence of the narrative. Journalistic and police materials are framed as a chronicle or protocol, creating the illusion of objectivity, which is soon undermined by repetition and meaninglessness. The historical and political level in the "Arcimboldi Part" combines individual biography, diary prose, oral narratives with a background of collective trauma, emphasizing the gap between personal and historical.

The formal transitions between discourses in the novel are shaped through a change of narrative voices, tonality, and stylistics. Each part is designed in its own speech style – from academic register to dry reportage and internal monologue. Bolagno actively uses quotations, structural breaks, epistolary genre, diary prose, techniques of estrangement, etc., marking boundaries that simultaneously become permeable. These transitions capture not so much the separation as the mobility of the narrative, which corresponds to the idea of interdiscursivity as a key feature of postmodern writing.

The synchronization of discourses in "2666" is carried out through the resonance of themes and motifs. Critics' reflections on the nature of literature from the first part are unexpectedly reflected in the descriptions of serial murders in the fourth. The theme of violence running through the novel takes on a different sound depending on the narrative form.: as a theoretical problem, as an empirical fact, as a symptom of insanity, or as a historical pattern. This reappearance of themes allows us to talk about non-obvious intersections, where discourses overlap, forming a complex textual resonance.

In analyzing the discourses in 2666, it is important to take into account that they are not fixed, but dynamic, as described in Foucault ^[3],[4]. The text constantly creates, destroys and reassembles discourses, questioning their authority and boundaries.

Instead of searching for a single structure of the novel, one should analyze the fragmentation and intersection of discourses. It is useful to consider meta-discursive elements: the moments when a text recognizes itself as a text, enters into a dialogue with other works, quotes or parodies other styles. It is also possible to study the mechanisms of power in discourse: which elements of the text seem "authoritative" (for example, academic language), and which, on the contrary, destroy the credibility of the narrative.

At this stage, it can be argued that the methodology of analyzing the postmodern text applied to the "House of Leaves" proves to be effective for studying "2666". In both novels, discourse functions as a dynamic system in which different layers – literary, critical, documentary, historical and political - not only coexist, but also interact, come into conflict and destabilize each other.

Transitions between discourses are formed through stylistic, typographic (in the case of the "House of Leaves") and structural breaks, creating the effect of layering. This approach is typical of postmodern deconstruction, where the text does not strive for integrity, but rather emphasizes discontinuity, multiple interpretations, and instability of meaning.

Thus, "2666" is not just a collection of plots, but a large-scale discursive conglomerate in which literary, philosophical, political and psychopathological registers interact, undermine and complement each other. This turns the novel into a truly global space of semantic stratification and at the same time into an inexorable chronicle of a world where truth, truth, and reason are subject to disintegration, while violence prevails.

Genealogy as an element of poetics in "2666" and in "House of Leaves"

In the novel "2666" by Roberto Bolagno, as well as in "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. A genealogical methodology is being implemented based on the principles of Michel Foucault, set out in the article "Nietzsche, Genealogy, history" and the book "Archeology of Knowledge" ^[19]. In this context, genealogy is a way of working with historical material that does not seek primary sources and total truth, but reveals gaps, fragments and transformations of meanings in time ^[5],[3].

In "2666," Bolagno turns to documentary, but this documentary turns out to be destroyed, fragmented, and unreliable. If Danilevsky creates a confusing structure of "manuscripts", "tapes" and "historical references" ^[19], then Bolagno acts differently: he creates a mosaic picture of violence, loss, disappearance, madness, in which there is no single point of reference, and the "truth" dissolves into chaos, where a fragmentary structure prevails, built according to the principle of narrative gap. This technique directly inherits the post–structuralist tradition, in particular, Foucault's genealogical approach. In Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, Foucault emphasized that genealogy rejects the idea of a linear, integral historical narrative, replacing it with a multitude of mismatched fragments, documents, and testimonies that forever obscure access to the source, to the true truth ^[5]. Bolagno develops this strategy in the structure of a novel consisting of five parts, each of which presents its own version of what is happening. However, instead of synthesis, they form a split, multiple space in which there cannot be a single center.

The first part, "The Part about Literary Critics," is built around an academic search – an attempt to reconstruct the figure and work of the writer Arcimboldi. However, this pursuit of truth turns into endless interpretation. Critics are unable to approach the essence of the object of their research, and their activities lose their focus. The meaning literally slips away, and the search becomes an end in itself. Thus, literary criticism is depicted here as a simulation of cognition, undermined by the lack of a solid ontological support.

In the second part, "The Part about Amalfitano," attention is focused on a man who has lost the ability to navigate the world of cultural references and intellectual schemes. Professor Amalfitano is a figure reminiscent of Borges' librarian, but in the postmodern paradigm he has lost access to a holistic system of knowledge. He lives in a space where cultural memory is disoriented, and texts no longer lead to understanding. His madness is not the result of a loss of knowledge, but of an overabundance of it, a loss of the ability to structure it into a coherent narrative.

The third part, "The Part about the Fairy", introduces into the novel the figure of an external observer – an American journalist, whose presence resembles the position of an ethnographer who explores not only cruelty, but also his own place in an alien environment. The themes of violence, racial identity, and postcolonial adaptation are touched upon here. The hero is driven by the desire to understand someone else's, but each step only increases the distance between the subject of observation and the object. The violence in Santa Teresa appears not as something explicable, but as irrational, unrepresentable.

The fourth part, "The Part about the Murders," implements perhaps one of the most radical gestures to destroy the historical and criminal narrative. There is no plot development, climax, or denouement. It presents an endless chronicle of the murders of women, described in a dry, detached style, where each death is absorbed by the next, and the victim's personality is erased in the rhythm of repetition. This is not just a demonstration of violence, but its banalization and structural dissolution. The narrative proves unable to transform events into knowledge, and the chronicle becomes a kind of anti-genealogy.

The fifth part, "The Part about Arcimboldi", at first glance, approaches the historiographical narrative. A wide historical context appears here, covering both Arcimboldi's personal biography and historical events of the 20th century. However, this context breaks down into memories, diaries, fragmentary descriptions, embedded stories, allusions, images of madness and violence. Individual scenes – from traumatized children participating in shootings to Ingeborg's wife going mad and subsequently dead – do not create a generalizing historical field, but, on the contrary, exacerbate the effect of chaos. History is not reconstructed here, but dissipated, being permeated by subjectivity, traumatism and aesthetic uncertainty.

Thus, the structure "2666" functions as an anti-historical machine. Each part demonstrates not a movement towards the truth, but its constant distance. Disparate narrative acts do not add up to a single plot, but interact at the level of gaps, delayed meanings, and disorienting intersections. This corresponds to the Fukoyan understanding of history as a set of "breaks, pauses and rewrites" ^[5], rather than as a linear and teleological process. Bolagno's novel undermines not only narrative expectations, but also the very idea of a possible unified knowledge of man, the world, and literature.

Another concept implemented in "2666" (as in "House of Leaves" ^[19]) is history as a field of fragments, using the example of the crimes in Santa Teresa.

Foucault wrote: "History will be 'valid' to the extent that it can introduce discontinuity into our very being" ^[5]. This principle is most vividly realized in the fourth part of "2666", where the narrative turns into a catalog of murders. However, this is not a traditional criminal story with increasing intrigue, but a kind of genealogy of violence devoid of causal logic. The crimes in Santa Teresa are described with pseudo-documentary accuracy, but they do not add up to a meaningful whole. The victims are presented as traces, not as subjects. Their deaths are recorded, but not explained, and thus the very possibility of interpretation is undermined. The chronicle turns into a meaningless archive, in which the figure of the criminal disappears, and with it any idea of investigation and restoration of justice.

The structure of the narrative here denies any form of centralization: there is no main character, no detective, no single narrator, no ending. The entire narrative is torn into independent, repetitive episodes devoid of hierarchy. This is the exact embodiment of Fukoyan's criticism of classical historiography, which, in his opinion, can no longer claim universality and objectivity ^[5]. Bolagno, in fact, does not just depict violence – he forms it in the form of a textual archive, in which the possibility of a holistic reconstruction of the past disappears. In this sense, the novel implements the genealogical method, offering not a search for truth, but immersion in an endless series of interrupted narratives and empty signs.

The fifth part of the novel, "The Part about Arcimboldi," unfolds a different but related strategy: an attempt at biographical reconstruction, which is doomed to failure from the very beginning. Bolagno offers the reader the writer's story in the form of disparate fragments – diaries, memoirs, letters, and third-hand stories. Arcimboldi, as a character, disappears into the archive, becoming not the subject of the narrative, but its simulacrum. His life is presented not as a complete biography, but as a set of interpretations, none of which has the status of final. The history of the Second World War in this fragment also appears not as a coherent and explained process, but as a bundle of torn memory populated by semi-fantastic figures: drunken child executioners, missing women, traumatized bodies, Dracula's castle, a crucifixion. The entire historical stratum is presented not as an archive of knowledge, but as a field of trauma and vague images devoid of center or truth. Symbols, meanings, images, memory – everything seems to float in time and space of the artistic world.

The image of Arcimboldi thus becomes an integral part of the poetics of the gap. He does not exist as a "complete" figure, but, like Zampano from The House of Leaves, disappears in the text, in allusions and references. In our opinion, this motif of the subject's dissolution in archives and documents is related to "2666" with the poetics of postmodern historiography proposed by Foucault, in which the idea of an authentic, fixed past disappears. The story here is not an objective reality, but a network of traces that are constantly reproduced and shifted in interpretation.

Thus, the comparison of "2666" and "House of Leaves" through the concept of Foucault's genealogy allows us to talk about the formation of a special literary form, which can be designated as "genealogical poetics." Both works deny linear, cause-and-effect narration. History becomes an archive of footprints, neither reconstructible nor explicable. Danilevsky implements this strategy through playing with documents, pseudoscientific treatises, editorial edits, and distorted versions of events. Bolagno adds to this an impossible archive of violence, in which the repetition of events devalues each individual crime, depriving it of significance.

In both cases, the reader finds himself in the position of a pathfinder who is faced not with the task of interpretation, but with its impossibility. Fragments of narratives do not add up to a single knowledge – on the contrary, any desire for understanding leads to endless shifts and losses. Thus, "2666" and "House of Leaves" embody a genealogical model of writing in which the subject disappears, the story is destroyed, and the text turns into a maze with no way out.

The crisis of the subject in the "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danilevsky and "2666" by Roberto Bolagno

The phenomenon of the subject/subjectivity crisis occupies a central place in postmodernism in postmodern literature. It is expressed through the blurring of the boundaries between the author and the reader, through the deconstruction of the personal identity of the characters and the destruction of traditional narrative forms. In the novels "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danilevsky and Roberto Bolagno's "2666" present this crisis in various forms, but in both cases it is framed as the loss of an autonomous subject in the context of textual or historical hyperreality.

In the House of Leaves, subjectivity is depicted as a fundamentally unstable structure, split and destabilized by a multitude of competing discourses. The figure of Zampano, the alleged author of the analysis of the "Davidson Film," is initially devoid of personality: he is blind, his biography is unclear, his name is nothing more than a label. His authorship turns out to be dissolved in the text, which after his death passes to another character– Johnny Truent. Zampano loses control over the perception of his own work, becoming more of a follower than an actor. His image correlates with the cinematic figure from Fellini's La Strada (1954), further emphasizing his status as a disappearing, independent character.

Johnny Truent embodies another type of crisis of the subject, associated with the progressive disintegration of personality. His narrative becomes an arena of conflict between memory, hallucinations, and simulation. Gradually, he loses the boundaries between the fictional and the real, the text and interpretation penetrate into his daily life, destroying his psyche. His subjectivity doesn't just weaken – it transforms into a function of the text. Initially acting as the editor of Zampano's manuscript, he eventually finds himself as a character in the same book he is reading. Thus, the subject in the "House of Leaves" becomes a product of the text, while the text itself closes in on itself, forming an auto-reflective structure with a special type of postmodern chronotope. This process is analyzed in detail in the work "The House of Leaves and the problem of the postmodern chronotope" ^[18].

No less revealing is the figure of Will Davidson, the hero of the film analyzed by Zampano. His encounter with the anomalous space not only physically changes him, but also destroys his identity. He gradually turns into an object passively subordinated to the structure of the maze, in which logic, memory and control disappear. Space absorbs his subjectivity, turning the hero into a simulacrum. The image of Davidson is a vivid example of how textual and spatial structures erase the personal "I", capturing it in the mechanism of interpretation, while also capturing the real figure with a simulacrum: the "capture" of the fate of a real person, photographer Kevin Carter, by the image of Davidson ^[21].

In "2666" Roberto Bolagno demonstrates a different model of the subject's crisis. Here, the disappearance of the "I" does not occur within the text, but against the background of historical, social and institutional reality. The novel is initially constructed as a set of parallel narratives, none of which has the status of a center. All the characters lose their autonomy: their subjectivity is undermined either by the fragmentation of the narrative or by their inability to act. Bolagno abandons the dominant point of view, creating a structure in which no one voice has the privilege.

Arcimboldi is a figure in which the principle of the disappearing subject is particularly clearly expressed. His biography turns out to be inaccessible: it is reconstructed by other characters, but remains split, opaque, made up of rumors, texts, and archival fragments. He exists in discourse as a myth, a shadow, an image. His nephew perceives him as a giant; in childhood, he is represented as an algae, an amphibian; in adulthood, as a soldier, judge, murderer, pilgrim, writer. This image is constantly being reformatted, sliding between roles, without becoming a whole person. Arcimboldi functions as a condition for the appearance of other discourses – he organizes the text, he generates the text and generates discourses both within the artistic (fictional) world of the novel "2666" and at the formal level of Bolagno's real text, but is not a subject within it.

The group of literary critics active in the first part of the novel is devoid of subjective force. Their search for Archimboldi does not lead to the discovery of the truth, but on the contrary, it triggers the process of scattering meaning. The academic discourse in which they function is a closed system incapable of transforming reality: knowledge here does not discover new things, but only reproduces its own mechanisms. The characters do not act, but interpret, gradually losing touch with the material world and turning into functions of a discursive field.

Their subjectivity is finally blurred in the love line built around literary critic Liz Norton: her relationship with each of the band members closes sexuality on the inner contour of the community, thereby emphasizing the lack of differences between its members. In this structure, intimacy does not serve to form individuality, but rather transforms subjectivity into functionality, confirming the interchangeability and representativeness of each.

The most radical theme of the loss of subjectivity is revealed, of course, in the part devoted to the murders of women in Santa Teresa. Here, victims are often deprived of even a name – they are recorded in police documents, but do not receive an individual voice. Their fates are reduced to statistics, to the death register. The story of these women turns into an endless list, in which the distinction between personality and body, between the subject and the object of violence disappears. Bolagno demonstrates how human life is devalued in conditions of structural, institutional evil. Unlike Danilevsky, who places the subject's disappearance in a textual maze, Bolagno shows his dissolution into the mechanisms of power, history and collective trauma.

Thus, in the "House of Leaves" and "2666" the subject loses stability, but this process is implemented in different ways. In Danilevsky, the crisis of the subject manifests itself as the absorption of the personal "I" by the text, as an autoimmune failure of the narrative, where the reader, author and character cease to differ. For Bolagno, the disappearance of subjectivity is associated with historical chaos, institutional brutality, and the impossibility of building a whole self in a world where knowledge has lost its footing, and discourses do not construct, but destroy identity. In both cases, the subject is presented not as a beginning, but as an empty space occupied by traces, quotations, reflections in which there is no longer a face.

In the framework of this study, the topic of the crisis of the subject will receive its logical continuation in the section "Deconstruction in the House of Leaves and 2666".

"Death of the Author" as an element of the poetics of "2666" and "House of Leaves"

The concept of the "death of the author", formulated by Roland Barthes and developed by Michel Foucault ^[7],[6], occupies a central place in postmodern poetics and becomes the methodological basis for a radical rethinking of the literary text. The rejection of the idea of the author as a sovereign source of meaning leads to the decentralization of the narrative and the shift of the interpretative focus to the reader or to the discursive structures in which the text is embedded. In the novels "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danilevsky and Roberto Bolagno's "2666" this setting is implemented through different strategies, each of which demonstrates its own version of the author's disappearance as a metaphysical and structural category.

In Danilevsky, the author's death is formalized literally and textually. The nominal creator of the main text, Zampano, dies before the narrative begins, and his manuscript becomes the object of subsequent compilation rather than a completed work. His authorship has nothing to do with narrative control: he is blind, has no biography, and exists only in the form of footnotes, quotations, collages, and notes. The text itself cannot be correlated with the intention of a particular subject, and therefore the author turns out to be not a person, but a discursive function. This structure radically embodies Foucault's idea that the "author" is not a person, but a position in the text (a function within the discourse) that regulates its interpretation and organization ^[6].

After Zampano's death, the manuscript falls into the hands of Johnny Truent, who himself becomes a secondary author – not because he writes a new text, but because he organizes someone else's, comments on, and multiplies meanings. His participation destroys the boundary between interpretation and composition: he does not so much explain what he has read as is drawn into its hypnotic field. Becoming first a "reader" in Foucault's terminology, and then an author in Barthes' terminology ^[19]. His mental and narrative disintegration is another way of affirming the principle: the author disappears, but his absence becomes a condition for the existence of the text. Moreover, the third authorship figure, Pelafina, Truent's mother, whose letters are part of the structure of the book, demonstrates the literal death of the author, culminating in suicide, mental disorder and marginalization. Thus, in the House of Leaves, the death of the author is realized by a triple gap: symbolic, functional and biographical.

The form of the novel reinforces this gap. A maze of footnotes, inserts, blank and inverted pages, superimposed texts and other people's fragments turns the novel into a system devoid of a center. The reader takes the place of the absent author, but not as a sovereign interpreter, but as a figure involved in a game of meanings, where any attempt to clarify only multiplies new versions. The author disappears, and the text exists as a self-referential structure referring to itself rather than to an external intention.

Bolagno's "death of the author" takes on a different dimension. If Danilevsky's author is lost in the text, then Bolagno's is lost in history. The author's disappearance does not occur within the framework of an interpretative model, but in the context of social and historical chaos. The five-part structure of "2666" does not follow a single narrative plan, and none of the characters performs the function of organizing consciousness. This lack of a center, according to Foucault, destroys the concept of "the author is the principle of a certain unity of writing" ^[6], and in this sense, Bolagno conducts a parallel deconstruction of authorship.

The central figure is Benno von Arcimboldi/Hans Reiter, the writer around whom the plot axis of the first part is built. However, he turns out to be radically removed from the text itself: he is not visible, he does not speak, his works are discussed but not reproduced, his personality is reconstructed through other people's guesses and archival traces. He is a function within the text, more a myth than a subject. His figure is a metaphor for an empty place, a symbol of how literature loses the figure of its creator, but continues to function as a network of discursive echoes. By the time he finally appears in the last part of the novel, he can no longer be perceived as a complete subject – his biography crumbles into masks: a soldier, a brother, a writer, a murderer, etc. He does not speak out, but is reflected – through the remarks of others, documents, hints, literary reminiscences.

The same logic of the author's death extends to other components of the text. In the "Part about the Murders," subjectivity disappears at the level of the victims: the women killed in Santa Teresa are recorded in reports, but they do not have a voice. Their stories are not told, they are presented through statistics, fragments, protocols. Here, the writer abandons the traditional author's role of narrator, conveying meaning: he captures the disappearance, silence, and systemic repression of subjectivity. In this case, the author is not only silent, but also refuses to fill the void, allowing it to remain in the structure of the text as a structuring vacuum. It is possible to raise the question of the authorship of this part even more radically.: who really is its author – Bolagno, police officers, journalists, or the elusive killer himself? Each of them participates in the creation of discourse, but none takes on the function of interpretation. The author does not speak out here – he constructs a space where subjectivity is no longer possible.

In both novels, the author's death serves not as a metaphor, but as a structural principle. In Danilevsky's work, it is framed as a deconstruction of the act of writing and a disavowal of the author's status at the level of typography and composition. Bolagno has both a stylistic and philosophical attitude, which consists in rejecting the dominant narrative center and in the demonstrative silence of the main "author" within the text. In the first case, the reader inherits the chaos of writing, in the second – the emptiness of the historical narrative, in which the author's authority is no longer possible.

Thus, "House of Leaves" and "2666" represent two models of the "death of the author": textual and historical. The first is related to the collapse of the idea of the author's intention and the transformation of the text into an autonomous game of signs. The second is with the disappearance of the author's figure within the social, political and cultural mechanisms, where literature can no longer rely on the author's "I" as a fulcrum. In both cases, the work continues to exist, but no longer as an expression of the author's voice, but as a space in which the author disappears forever.

Myth as a secondary Semiotic system of Barthes in the House of Leaves and in 2666

In the postmodern context, the concept of myth loses its traditional function as a sacralized narrative structuring cultural reality and acquires the status of a self-reflexive and unstable semiotic construct. This transformation is theoretically preceded by Roland Barthes in the section "Myth Today" from Mythologies^[8], where he defines myth as a secondary semiological system in which a sign of the primary level becomes a signifier in a second–order system, that is, in a system existing above the language of everyday communication ^{[8, pp. 265-323]}. Within the framework of this model, the sign of the primary system (synthesis of the signifier and the signified) in myth turns into a free (from the signified meaning) signifying form that requires a new content, which is already drawn from the field of mythology, that is, ideology ^{[8, p. 270-271],[24, p. 70]}.

The novel "House of Leaves" by Mark Danilevsky demonstrates one of the most sophisticated examples of the implementation of the Bartian mechanism in an artistic form.

So, following Barth's logic, Zampano's discourse can be considered as a primary language, and Johnny Truent's discourse as a secondary system. Truent interprets Zampano's texts, turning them into a form that he fills with his own meaning, "ideology" – thus creating a new mythological sign. This process fully corresponds to the mechanism of transformation of the primary sign into a mythical one described by Barth ^{[8, p. 271]}.

Similarly, Zampano's discourse can be interpreted as a secondary system to the "Davidson Film." Zampano, describing the events of the "Davidson Film", transforms it into a form that he saturates with his interpretations, and thereby creates another mythical sign. Thus, at the structural level, the "House of Leaves" is a chain of superimposed semiotic systems, where each new level interprets the previous one as a signifier. K.N. Hales rightly defines this structure as a palimpsest ^{[23, pp. 779-780]}, noting at least six levels of mediation.

Going down to the base of this system, we come to the "Davidson Film", the primary layer that does not contain reflection on previous discourses. What makes up her sign? According to Danilevsky himself, Davidson managed to capture emptiness as such: "Zampano's piece centers on a documentary film called The Navidson Record made by a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who must somehow capture the most difficult subject of all: the sight of darkness itself" ^{[25, p. xxi]}. Thus, the signified is absence, nothingness, nihilism. In a semiological sense, the "Davidson Film" becomes a form that carries emptiness as its content. This empty signifier, according to Barth, requires filling, but any attempt at such filling turns out to be doomed, since the form captures not the presence, but the loss.

This void in the heart of the "House of Leaves" turns into a structural vacuum – a center into which all possible meanings escape. This is how the logic of nihilism is built, embedded in the very fabric of the novel: it lacks not only a subject or truth, but also the very possibility of a semantic conclusion. Any attempt at interpretation turns into a movement along an empty signifier that is unable to gain a foothold in any fixed meaning.

It is appropriate to make a comparison with Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce, despite his fragmentariness and perspectivism, still has a center – culture as a repertoire of quotations and references. In Danilevsky's case, even this center is annulled: cultural codes are drawn into the void, lose their stability, and each sign becomes "half empty" – it retains its shape, but loses its stable reference.

In this context, the elution effect becomes not just a property of the text, but the very form of its operation. Danilevsky builds what Deleuze would call an "abstract machine" ^[14] – a structure capable of "playing out" any discourse or meta-narrative, but none is fixed as final. Since there is an empty signifier at the core of the novel, any meta–narrative embedded by the reader works as a temporary filling of this void. Hence the paradox: when reading The House of Leaves, we are ultimately reading ourselves – that is, we are filling the void in the House of Leaves with our personal ideology.

It is this structure that makes it possible to apply any conceptual models to Danilevsky's text – from mythological to post-structuralist, from psychoanalytic to media-theoretical. The "House of Leaves" becomes a mirror that endlessly reflects interpretations, without bringing any of them closer to the "truth". And this is a figure of postmodern deconstruction, where centering on emptiness becomes impossible, and myth is not a way of ordering reality, but a mechanism for its destruction.

In Roberto Bolagno's 2666, emptiness (nihilism) and myth also form a central link, but they are organized according to a different logic. Unlike Danilevsky, Bolagno abandons the interpretive game and moves into the field of post-mythological writing. The myth in 2666 is not so much an explanatory structure (a linguistic superstructure over the primary language) as a symptomatic form reproducing violence, insanity (denitration of the subject) and disappearance – that is, myth as a form of violence.

Thus, in the Part about Critics, Bolagno builds a mythology of literary space through the use of a secondary semiotic system, where the language of everyday scientific communication – articles, studies, conferences, symposiums – functions as a new superstructure over the primary signifier (Arcimboldi). In this context, Arcimboldi becomes a sign that, without discursive processing, would be a self-sufficient text or subject, but within the secondary system it turns into a mythical figure.

The narrative is built as a parody of a mythical journey, reminiscent of the movement of Odysseus, but devoid of heroic mythology. The search for Arcimboldi is not a movement towards the source of meaning, but a process of increasing dispersion and loss of the original content. The first scene of violence, the beating of a taxi driver ^{[2, pp. 87-90]}, is not accidental here. She marks the initial shift: at the moment when the scientific desire to understand gives way to unconscious structures of aggression and repression, the discourse of the secondary system exposes its fundamental inconsistency. The research interest, which seemed neutral, reveals its affiliation to violence hidden under the guise of the search for truth.

Thus, already in the first part of the novel, Bolagno demonstrates how the discourse of scientific rationality can be mythologized, losing the distinction between research and violence, communication and repression. Scientific language turns out to be not a means of comprehension, but a mechanism of alienation, where the original signified disappears under layers of violence, crisis subjectivity (it was shown earlier), etc.

In the "Part about Amalfitano," the language of letters from Lola, Amalfitano's wife, assumes the role of a secondary semiotic system. The language of madness is fragmentary, affective, and disruptive of cause-and-effect relationships. Lola's letters, the central sign of the primary language system, are filled with crazy, fictional, tragic images, spatial and temporal gaps and semantic gaps, forming a new field of meaning in which reality disappears and takes on the appearance of a waking nightmare. This is what turns her figure into a "place in discourse" that initiates the disintegration of the rational subject. It is no coincidence that Amalfitano, rereading Lola's letters, says: "Madness is contagious..." ^{[2, p. 191]}. The mythical motif of this part is a journey, but unlike the "Part about Critics", here the journey is not made for the sake of finding knowledge, but as a form of escape from trauma and subjective disintegration. Lola and her companion Imma partially repeat the matrix of the ancient journey, but in a broken, painful form. Their path can be read as an allusion to the myth of Medea, a figure of maternal repression and madness in which destruction acquires a sacred status.

In the "Part about the Fairy", the secondary language system becomes a set of ideological narratives – postcolonial discourse, social inequality, criminal structures, political and institutional violence. Faith's world is a space where the language of mass culture and medial perception displaces subjective experience. Interviews, TV reports, and conversations about betting and fighting turn reality into a stream of secondary signifiers that lose touch with physicality and ethics. Faith, despite her attempt to "fit in" this world, finds herself outside its code, and therefore outside the language itself, which determines its alienation and isolation.

In the "Part about the Murders," the secondary language system becomes the language of the archive, which builds up over the endless murders of women – police reports, court documents, medical reports – and functions as the ultimate form of fixation. However, fixation loses its representative function here: it does not testify, but archives without interpretation. This archival reproduction of violence, according to Foucault's logic, turns into a "machine of oblivion", devoid of subjectivity and orientation. In the spirit of Derrida, this can be defined as a state of "archival fever" of paralyzing redundancy, in which the archive ceases to be a repository of memory and becomes a topos of endless displacement ^[26].

Santa Teresa is a city where disappearances do not generate narrative, but only multiply documentation. Here, the nature of violence becomes so total that language loses its descriptive power. The chronicle, having lost its function as evidence, turns into a form of emptiness: myth, according to Barthes, no longer hides the truth, but demonstrates its unattainability. This is the reverse side of the "House of Leaves", where the reader constructs the myth himself. In the "Part about the Murders," the myth self-destructs, losing even the pretense of interpretation. As a result, a structure arises that can be characterized by Baudrillard as a simulacrum – a form without content, a sign without a referent ^[28].

In the Arcimboldi Piece, this trend reaches its climax. Archimboldi is not a subject, but a discursive void – anological to the void under the house on Danilevsky Yaseneva Street – a phantom of authorship around which the entire system of signs is organized. His texts are split, his figure is historically blurred, and his biography has been turned into a series of voids. He is a sign without a signified, a mythical object that exists exclusively in a system of interpretations. The biographical efforts made in the last part do not lead to a reconstruction of the subject, but only confirm the impossibility of such a reconstruction. Arcimboldi becomes not a writer, but a mechanism that absorbs projections – academic, political, personal – without returning in return anything but another form of silence. Arcimboldi in "2666" is the name of nihilism.

Thus, in the context of Barthes' "Myth Today," the novels of Danilevsky and Bolagno intersect: both texts demonstrate that a myth devoid of a signified becomes a form of emptiness that reproduces itself as absence. In Danilevsky– through the void under the "House of Leaves," in Bolagno, through archetypes of violence, travel, madness, and chronicles of disappearances. If the House of Leaves provides an opportunity for an interpretive game (albeit endless), then "2666" is rather a denial of the very possibility of interpretation: every document, every character, every structure is involved in reproducing the loss. The mythologization of Arcimboldi is not an act of memory, but a form of collective amnesia, the encrustation of nihilism with a name and mythological plots.

Consumer society and disasters in the "House of Leaves" and "2666":

Jean Baudrillard's concept of consumer society ^[9] allows us to consider the "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danilevsky and Roberto Bolagno's "2666" as two examples of disaster representation in literature based on the logic of media consumption of signs. In Baudrillard's work "Consumer Society", the chapter "Dizzying consumption of catastrophe" is crucial as an interpretative tool for this study ^{[9, p. 14-18]}.

Both novels demonstrate ways of absorbing and processing catastrophic events in a society in which information and visual images replace the very experience of reality. However, the mechanisms of operation of these texts are fundamentally different: if Danilevsky's catastrophe becomes the object of a symbolic game, processed in multi-layered narrative structures, then Bolagno's it functions as a monotonous, mechanical structure of violence and madness, devoid of catharsis and interpretative outlet.

In the House of Leaves, the catastrophe is structured through a palimpsest system in which real or fictional events are repeatedly reworked at various levels of discourse. The disappearance of Davidson, his immersion into the endless corridors of the house, the loss of reason by Truent and Pelafina, the deaths of members of the expeditions – all these events appear not as direct narrative material, but as an object of reflection, commentary, intertextual stratification and rewriting. The reader is faced not with the catastrophe itself, but with its representations – textual, visual, academic, documentary, and simulacra. Each layer of the narrative simultaneously distances itself and draws attention to the catastrophe, creating the effect of delayed presence, which Baudrillard defined as "dizzying consumption of catastrophe": experiencing a catastrophe becomes possible only through its iconic simulation ^{[9, p. 15]}.

This effect is achieved due to the stylistic and structural features of the "House of Leaves". The use of documentary discourse – pseudoscientific comments, footnotes, and archival materials – makes the disaster part of the academic and media field. Like news reports or criminal chronicles, the text invites the reader to explore, but it constantly eludes a fixed interpretation. The media–centricity of the novel is expressed in the manipulation of signs of reality: Danilevsky includes references to real events in the text – the assassination of Kennedy, the war in Sudan, the death of the expedition on Mount Everest, mythological narratives - but transforms them, creating the illusion that reality turns out to be part of the literary text, and not vice versa. In this regard, the "House of Leaves" is a model of a simulacrum in which representation precedes and replaces the real ^[21].

In "2666," Bolagno uses a different mechanism for dealing with disaster and disaster consumption. Here, the catastrophe is not mediated by iconic structures to the same extent as in Danilevsky, but is presented in the form of a monotonous, cyclical narrative imitating a documentary style, where all dialogues and direct speech are removed either into indirect speech or into inappropriate direct speech. The apotheosis of "disaster consumption", as one might expect, is the center of gravity of the novel – a series of murders of women in Santa Teresa, which are described with mechanical precision, turning into statistics. The murders follow one another, their details are reported without emotional emphasis, creating the effect of serial, rather even conveyor belt consumption of violence – violent consumption of violence. The reader is faced not with depth that can be analyzed, as in The House of Leaves, but with the endless repetition of the same act of violence, which leads to blunted perception and the impossibility of catharsis.

This effect is consistent with Baudrillard's concept of media representation of violence in consumer society. As Baudrillard noted, violence does not disappear in modern culture, but becomes part of a symbolic system in which events are processed into news formats, documentaries, and criminal reports. Thus, violence becomes a familiar element of the information space, which does not require an emotional response, but is only fixed as another information fact ^{[9, p. 15]}. In "2666," Bolagno takes this process to the limit, eliminating the possibility of interpretation and leaving the reader alone with the mechanical reproduction of cruelty. In this sense, the novel offers not a reflexive immersion in the text, but a forced participation in the consumption of catastrophe, where the reader is forced to witness, but does not get the opportunity to comprehend what is happening.

The difference between these two novels can be explained through the ways in which the catastrophic experience is organized in the text. In the House of Leaves, the catastrophe is aestheticized, turned into an object of intellectual analysis and structural play. The reader experiences a catastrophe as an artistic phenomenon in which fear and horror are subordinated to the narrative logic of expectation, surprise, and intellectual search. In this sense, Danilevsky builds his poetics on the principle of horror films, in which fear is created through dosed information and a deliberate delay effect. In 2666, fear is not a part of the game structure, but an inevitable consequence of the monotonous reproduction of violence, its symbolic excess, and the emergence of hyper-violence. Here, the catastrophe is not a violation of normality, as in the "House of Leaves", but represents precisely that norm, a structure in which people, victims, murderers, police officers and journalists become functions of a social mechanism that produces death and abnormality.

Nevertheless, both novels demonstrate that in a consumer society, disaster loses its uniqueness and becomes part of the media stream. Danilevsky's catastrophe is integrated into a textual game, acquiring the features of an intellectual attraction in which fear is processed into interpretive pleasure. For Bolagno, the catastrophe loses its interpretative significance and simply exists as a fact that cannot be changed or comprehended. In this sense, both authors record the crisis of perception of reality in conditions when signs of violence circulate in culture without reference to real experience. If Danilevsky suggests catastrophe as an object of research, then Bolagno demonstrates it as a hopeless reality in which the reader is deprived of the possibility of choice – he can only plunge into a stream of violence, but cannot find a way out.

Thus, "House of Leaves" and "2666" represent two models of the interaction of literature with catastrophic experience in the era of simulacra. In one case, a catastrophe becomes a material for iconic recycling, in the other, an unavoidable structure that cannot be recycled. Both approaches capture the inability of literature to directly reproduce real horror: either it turns into an intellectual game or into a mechanical repetition. Both novels show that in a postmodern society, a catastrophe is not an exceptional event – it becomes part of a cultural order that either uses it as a tool of textual reflection or reproduces it in a continuous flow of information.

Deconstruction and distinction in "House of Leaves" and "2666"

The reference texts through which deconstruction should be viewed are the works "Positions" ^[13], "Letter to a Japanese Friend" ^[10], "On Grammatology" ^[12], as well as "Voice and Phenomenon and other works on Husserl's theory of Sign" ^[11]. The central concept organizing the deconstructivist reading of texts is differance ("distinction"). This term indicates the mechanism of simultaneous postponement and differentiation of meaning, generating an endless chain of signifiers and not allowing to establish a fixed presence of the signified. In postmodern literature, this concept manifests itself as a fundamental instability of the sign, demonstrating the blurring of boundaries between reality and its representation.

"House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danilevsky and Roberto Bolagno's "2666" represent two radical embodiments of the deconstructive logic of differentiation: the first implements it through the destruction of textual structure, the second through the undermining of the narrative logic of reality itself.

In the House of Leaves, deconstruction is expressed in the form of a palimpsest of discourses, where each new narrative dimension destroys the previous one, causing not only instability of meaning, but also the impossibility of unambiguous reading. The narrative is refracted through the texts of Zampano, Truent, and inserted comments, turning the search for the center of the work into a deliberately disastrous process. The meaning of the text always slips away here, leaving behind only traces of corrections, deletions and voids. Davidson's letter to his wife Karen becomes a vivid example of the implementation of différence: "I do not (deserve – crossed out) expect your forgiveness" ^{[25, p. 389]}. In this fragment, the meaning is destroyed by the very format of the utterance, not allowing us to give a definitive answer about the intentions of the hero.

The most important form of manifestation of diffrance in Danilevsky is the deconstruction of voice, which, according to Derrida, is a fundamental category of the metaphysics of presence ^{[11, p. 102]}. The voice as a living word is considered a direct manifestation of the subject at the moment of speech, but Danilevsky turns it into a trace of the speaker's absence. A striking example is the "roar" in the maze of the house ^{[25, p. 67]}: a sound that has no source, indicating something present (a conditional Minotaur), but cannot be identified. Thus, the voice becomes a "phantom presence", devoid of a center, but without losing its power over the characters and the reader ^[27].

Bolagno's novel "2666" develops the same logic, but his deconstruction ceases to be just a literary game and becomes evidence of the ontological disintegration of the world. The structure of the novel is fragmented and breaks up into disparate parts, in which the narrative constantly breaks off, preventing a holistic interpretation. In the novel, the mechanism of the poetics of "unattainability" is triggered: Murders multiply without explanation, each character is potentially guilty, and any understanding is impossible.

Santa Teresa, a city transformed into a space of hopelessness and chaos, becomes an important spatial embodiment of différence in "2666". If the Danilevsky maze still presupposes the possibility of movement and the search for meaning, then the topography of Santa Teresa defies logical description and is a zone of endless violence. The movement here loses its meaning, and the subject finds himself in a state of constant ontological and existential disorientation, the extreme expression of which is the figure of a madman "Sinner" who kills priests and desecrates temples ^{[2, p. 385]}.

The figure of Oscar Amalfitano demonstrates in Bolagno's novel the natural outcome of life in a world devoid of any logic: his mind is cyclically destroyed and reassembled until it is absorbed by the meaninglessness of the surrounding reality. A symbolic expression of his madness is the act of hanging a book by Rafael Diesta on a clothesline ^{[2, p. 205]}, which demonstrates the book's loss of its function as a source of knowledge and turns reading into a meaningless gesture. Amalfitano hears the ghostly instructions of his late father, turning into an intermediate figure between reality and delusion, emphasizing the impossibility of a clear separation between the real and the fictitious.

Differentiation is also evident in the phenomenon of Bolagno's split voice, most vividly represented in the episode with a clairvoyant delivering fragmented revelations about crimes in Santa Teresa on television ^{[2, pp. 452-453]}. Like Danilevsky's roar, her voice becomes a disembodied trace, sounding but not carrying a definite meaning. Thus, the clairvoyant's voice indicates not the truth, but the fundamental impossibility of achieving it.

Both novels demonstrate how différence affects the structure of subjectivity. The characters of the House of Leaves dissolve into discursive practices (Zampano is blind, Truent is part of the manuscript, Davidson is a function of the labyrinth), and in 2666 the subject disappears through historical and existential annihilation. Victims become statistics, literary critics become faceless mediators, and the writer Arcimboldi becomes a ghost, whose text absorbs other people's stories, becoming a space of death of voice and meaning. This archival principle of narrative in Bolagno emphasizes not the explanation of events, but their fixation as traces of disappearance.

Thus, "House of Leaves" and "2666" are two radical limits of deconstruction. The first textually implements différance as a game in which the reader is involved in interpretation, constantly encountering the escape of meaning, while the second makes différance a mechanism for destroying the very possibility of understanding, demonstrating the disappearance of the subject, the destruction of the voice as the coordinates of presence. Ultimately, both novels transcend the traditional narrative and transform diffrance into the only possible principle of storytelling in a post-metaphysical world where any meaning is just a trace of a vanished presence.

Rhizome in "House of Leaves" and "2666": Structure, Chaos, and Deconstruction of the Singularity

The philosophical concept of the rhizome, developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in the work "A Thousand Plateaus" ^[15], becomes a productive tool for analyzing the postmodern novels "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danilevsky and "2666" by Roberto Bolagno. Both works demonstrate pronounced non-linearity, decentralization of narration and complex intertextual connections, which corresponds to the conceptual model of the rhizome, opposed by Deleuze and Guattari to a tree-like hierarchical structure.

In the House of Leaves, the rhizome is expressed through a multiplicity of discourses: the text consists of several independent levels of narration (Zampano, Johnny Truent, fictional editors and readers), which interact with each other according to the principle of horizontal communication without a central organizing core. This structure turns the text into a maze of interpretations, where each discourse simultaneously continues and distorts the meaning of the other. The space of the house on Yaseneva Street also acts as a rhizomatic structure that has no fixed center, constantly changing its shape and generating new spaces and meanings. Thus, "House of Leaves" is a text organized according to the principle of an infinite set of relationships that create new entry and exit points into the narrative.

In the novel "2666" by Bolagno, the rhizome manifests itself differently. The work consists of five independent parts that intersect not at the level of cause-and-effect relationships, but through associative and thematic interlacing. Characters, events, and themes arise, disappear, and reappear without logical explanation, creating the impression of a chaotic and infinitely expanding narrative space. The city of Santa Teresa, the site of the serial murders of women, is becoming a kind of scattered center in which there is no single point of support or a clear semantic anchor. Thus, the rhizomatic structure in "2666" is expressed through an endless and chaotic expansion of the narrative, where the reader himself is forced to build semantic connections without receiving definitive answers.

Both novels, using the principle of rhizome, abandon the traditional understanding of the central plot or the main character. In the House of Leaves, all the characters are interchangeable and are only vehicles of meaning, and the central space of the house is illusory and constantly changing. In "2666", the figure of Arcimboldi, seemingly central, remains elusive and unattainable, and violence and uncertainty become the main semantic background of the narrative. The absence of a central organizing element in both novels is an intentional device that emphasizes the idea of infinite interpretations and the impossibility of reaching the final truth.

An important aspect of the rhizome in both works is its transversal connection with the external cultural context. The House of Leaves actively interacts with cinema, philosophy, mythology, and hyperreality, constantly connecting to new external discourses. "2666" also demonstrates broad intertextual and intercultural connections, crossing geographical and temporal boundaries, combining different literary genres and storytelling styles. Thus, both novels function not just as independent literary texts, but also as elements of a broader cultural rhizome capable of interacting with various social and intellectual contexts.

As a result, both novels – "House of Leaves" and "2666" – are vivid examples of the rhizomatic organization of a literary text, demonstrating the absence of hierarchy, the rejection of the center and the infinity of semantic interpretation. However, while "House of Leaves" creates a rhizome through the formal and structural complexity of the text itself, "2666" embodies a rhizome in the large-scale expansion of a narrative that does not reach completeness and exists as a constantly open, chaotic and self-sufficient system of meanings.

"Desiring Machines" and "Body without Organs" in the context of "House of Leaves" and "2666": the production of desire and the space of emptiness

The philosophical concepts of "willing machines" and "a body without organs", introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in the work "Anti-Oedipus" ^[14], open up the possibility of a new look at the structure of the novels "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danilevsky and "2666" by Roberto Bolagno, as well as on the principles of desire production and the organization of semantic spaces in these texts.

Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "willing machines" is associated with the constant movement and generation of semantic flows, where desire does not reproduce ready-made meanings, but generates them anew. In Danilevsky's novel, the text itself becomes a willing machine: numerous discourses (the voices of Zampano, Truent, editors, and readers) create cyclical and infinitely branching lines of interpretation. Here, the desire manifests itself in the endless attempt of the characters to explore and understand the emptiness, the space of the house on Yaseneva Street, which in itself has no specific meaning, but constantly stimulates the production of new meanings. The text engages the reader in this process, forcing him to actively participate in the creation of meanings and support the work of this machinery.

Bolagno's concept of willing machines is expressed differently: here it is the very reality of the novel, an endless stream of events not aimed at achieving a specific meaning or resolution. The serial murders of women in Santa Teresa, presented in the novel, constantly stimulate the characters' desire to find an explanation and meaning. Nevertheless, this desire remains unfulfilled, as events do not lead to a final semantic resolution. Thus, the text functions as a machine of endless generation of meaning, but this meaning always turns out to be incomplete, elusive and not fixed.

The concept of a "body without organs" (a term dating back to Antonin Artaud) also plays an important role in both novels. For Danilevsky, the void under the house is a "body without organs" – an active space without an internal structure, capable of destroying traditional connections and creating new lines of escape. The characters, faced with this space, lose their usual landmarks and are forced to rebuild their perception of reality. This body without organs is not just chaos, but a special active field that triggers the production of willing text machines, as it destroys and reassembles their connections.

In Bolagno's novel, "a body without organs" is manifested through the image of Santa Teresa, a city without clear coordinates, absorbing all explanations and meanings. This space becomes not just a backdrop for events, but an independent force that absorbs and dissipates meaning. If for Danilevsky a body without organs is an inner void that requires filling with new meanings, then for Bolagno it is the very structure of the text that destroys any logical connection and creates the effect of uncertainty and meaninglessness.

Both novels demonstrate fundamentally different mechanisms of operation of these concepts. Whereas Danilevsky creates a text as a machine for the endless generation of new interpretations, using the "body without organs" as a space of constant semantic renewal, Bolagno, on the contrary, shows how reality itself turns "into a body without organs" in which all attempts to consolidate meaning disappear. Thus, "House of Leaves" becomes a willing text machine, open to endless readings and extensions, while "2666" is a "body without organs" of reality, constantly dissolving meaning and resisting final interpretation.

Both novels can be considered as open textual systems confirming the Deleusian logic of the rhizomatic structure of the world, where meanings are not fixed in one center, but exist in constant motion and transformation. Their comparison shows different ways of embodying the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari, allowing for a better understanding of both the mechanisms of production and disappearance of meaning in postmodern literature, as well as the very nature of desire and emptiness in modern culture.

"House of Leaves" and "2666" in the Logic of Meaning by Gilles Deleuze

The novels "House of Leaves" by Mark Danilevsky and "2666" by Roberto Bolagno are not just texts that are complex in composition and multilevel in meaning, but they are radically decentered narratives that involve the reader in a continuous game of interpretations. If traditional literature presupposes a deep meaning that can be revealed and comprehended, then in both novels under consideration the meaning is not fixed, but constantly glides along the surface, disintegrating and reassembling in unexpected combinations. This characteristic makes them especially interesting for analysis through the "Logic of Meaning" by Gilles Deleuze ^[16].

Deleuze considers meaning not as a phenomenon of depth, but as the result of the interaction of various semantic series that intersect but do not merge with each other. In The House of Leaves, such a serial structure is revealed in several interrelated levels: on the first level, the "real" events of the "Davidson Film" are presented, capturing a space beyond physical perception; on the second, an analysis of these events by a character named Zampano, involving non–existent quotes and sources; on the third, interpretations by Johnny Truent, passing the text through the prism of their own fears and paranoia; finally, the fourth level is represented by a publishing discourse that calls into question the very nature of the document. The more these layers appear in the text, the more the delay and uncertainty of meaning become apparent, which fully corresponds to Deleuze's concept of "delayed truth".

Bolagno's novel "2666" is also based on a series of overlapping but not coincident semantic layers: the disappearance of the writer Arcimboldi, the serial murders of women in Santa Teresa, numerous investigations by journalists, literary critics and police officers. Each of these layers offers a new attempt at constructing a narrative, but it never leads to a single semantic center. The reader, as in the case of The House of Leaves, is doomed to form connections between the series on their own, without receiving a complete explanation. At the same time, if Danilevsky creates a maze of meaning through the text and the physical properties of the book, then Bolagno does it through narrative distraction and fragmentary narration.

Another important aspect of the analysis is the "depth paradox". Deleuze points out that the depth of meaning is just an illusion generated by the play of differences on the surface. In The House of Leaves, the reader is constantly confronted with the apparent mystery of the deep essence of the house of Davidson, but the deeper this "labyrinth" is explored, the clearer the lack of any definitive meaning becomes. The house exists solely as a set of representations and signs. In the novel 2666, the same illusion of depth is associated with the Arcimboldi mystery and the murders of women: the more details and information the reader receives, the more meaningless any attempt to build a complete picture of reality turns out to be.

The principle of the "semantic gap" is especially significant, which Deleuze illustrates with the scene of Alice's size change in Alice in Wonderland. This instability of the sign system is clearly evident in both novels. "House of Leaves" literally rebuilds itself in the process of reading through changing fonts, page formats, and false references to fictional sources. "2666" constantly changes its genre and thematic context: a detective story is replaced by a political thriller, a chronicle of murders turns into philosophical arguments. Both authors play with the instability of the text and the reader's perception, but Danilevsky does it formally (through the physical space of the book), and Bolagno – through the narrative structure and genre game.

Finally, both novels embody Deleuze's thesis about the paradox of meaning, which is born where the logic of the narrative collapses. In the House of Leaves, such a paradox is the physical space of the house, which defies measurement and rational explanation. In 2666, the detailed description of the murders of women reaches such an extent that it destroys the very concept of narrative meaningfulness, turning the novel into a set of meaningless facts and an anti-narrative.

Thus, the novels of Danilevsky and Bolagno are exemplary realizations of the Deleusian understanding of meaning as a superficial and infinitely postponed structure. "House of Leaves" explores the play of meanings through an experiment with text and form, while "2666" explores the fragmentation of reality and the destruction of narrative logic. Both texts act not only as a demonstration of Deleuze's theoretical positions, but also as an illustration of the infinite openness of meaning, where the very act of reading becomes the most important creative event demonstrating the infinite potentiality of interpretation.

Comparative analysis of "House of Leaves" and "2666" through the prism of Marshall McLuhan's media theory

Marshall McLuhan, the author of the concept of "media is a message", presented in the work "Understanding Media" ^[17], considers media not only as a means of transmitting information, but also as a tool that changes a person's perception, his interaction with reality and society. Based on this approach, the novels "House of Leaves" by Mark Danilevsky and "2666" by Roberto Bolagno can be considered not just as literary works, but as independent media objects with their own unique message.

Danilevsky's novel is becoming a prime example of a media experiment. The House of Leaves consciously uses the hypertextuality techniques inherent in digital media through complex nonlinear construction, multiple footnotes, variable text placement on the page, and printing techniques. This makes the reading process interactive and reminiscent of working with digital interfaces, while the book not only imitates, but also expands the traditional perception of the text. In this case, the very means of communication (the novel as a physical object) is a message: it changes the usual forms of perception of the text and requires the reader to interact with the content in a different way.

In turn, Roman Bolagno's "2666" deconstructs the traditional perception of media as a source of knowledge about the world. Bolagno shows information overload and the inability of modern media to provide clear and definitive answers to important questions. The serial murders of women in the fictional city of Santa Teresa are presented in the novel as a chaotic media stream of reports, newspaper chronicles and television news, which, however, do not add up to a coherent picture and do not lead to knowledge of the truth. Thus, Bolagno presents the media as a mechanism of impotence, documenting, but unable to penetrate into the essence of reality, which remains uncertain and amorphous.

Both novels also fit into another key thesis of McLuhan, which is that any media is an extension of human sensory organs, their amplification and expansion into the external environment. Danilevsky demonstrates this using the example of the main character Will Davidson, who perceives the world around him exclusively through media devices.: photo and video cameras, sound recording equipment. The house on Yaseneva Street turns out to be a space that cannot be fully mediated and captured with the help of these media tools, marking the boundaries of human organs of perception and their expansion. The media in the "House of Leaves" turn out to be not only a tool for fixing reality, but also a means of partially creating it, turning the novel into an expansion of human consciousness and perception.

In 2666, on the contrary, the media become not an extension of human possibilities, but a space for their exhaustion. Journalists, detectives, and researchers are powerless in the face of chaos that defies explanation through the existing media. Information ceases to serve as a tool of cognition, becoming only a meaningless stream of data, unable to restore the true meaning and nature of reality. Thus, Bolagno's media act as a barrier rather than a tool, emphasizing the limitations of human cognition in conditions of information overload.

The architectural dimension in both novels also becomes an expression of McLuhan's media concept. The house on Yaseneva Street near Danilevsky is a dynamic structure, the physical space of which changes depending on perception. This architecture becomes a metaphor for a media space that is constantly changing and unstable, where human means of fixation are insufficient.

Bolaño's Santa Teresa is a static and empty architecture, a space of violence and uncertainty that cannot be measured and cognized through traditional media tools. Here, the media, on the contrary, do not expand perception, but dissolve into emptiness, unable to fix and comprehend reality.

Thus, Danilevsky and Bolagno, using different approaches, integrate into McLuhan's theory, demonstrating how media can be not just a means of transmitting information, but also actively shaping elements of reality. If "House of Leaves" acts as a media that expands and changes perception, creating a new architecture for the reader's interaction with text and space, then "2666" shows media as a tool that has lost its ability to explain the world, has become part of the chaos of the information flow and highlights the crisis of human cognition.

In both cases, novels cease to be only literary texts, turning into media objects that clearly demonstrate the transformation of human consciousness and perception under the influence of the modern media environment. Analyzing these works through the prism of McLuhan, we see how the literature of the 21st century not only reflects reality, but actively participates in its creation and reinterpretation.