Oscillations of Literary Theory by A. C. Facundo

Author:A. C. Facundo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2016-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

IV. Failure and the Reparative

Like the physical explorations themselves, all academic exposition about the house exacerbate rather than satiate the reader’s desire to know. The novel’s object of desire that rational argument defers through its very efforts to contain it is a queer but disembodied “figure”: the Minotaur. Halberstam’s Skin Shows theorizes the gothic monster as the queer abjection that both haunts and structures normative identity. Subjects in gothic narratives experience terror through their struggle between fear of and desire for the monster.

Unlike the subject of Halberstam’s queer gothic, Danielewski’s monster never shows its skin. The Minotaur functions as a point of arrival, a completion of the labyrinth, which is coextensive with the explorer’s death. The Minotaur haunts every corner of the labyrinth as an amorphous force of impending destruction, one that can never be “known” but that affectively structures the labyrinth. The Minotaur resides in a queer space just beyond the fields of vision, provoking the subject’s scopophilic and epistemophilic drives. Danielewski illustrates the monster as a visual negation. In the main text, the Minotaur appears in traces, but its effects fragment the material signifiers on the page: “[ ]t d[ ]d have claws, they were made of shadow and if it did have te[ ]th, they were made of darkness. Yet even as such the [ ] still stalked Holl[ ]way at every corner until at last it did strike, devouring him, even roaring, the last thing heard, the sound [ ]f Holloway ripped out of existence” (Danielewski 338). The reader witnesses similar traces of an invisible beast: the deep claw marks beside Zampanò’s body; the flashing claws as Truant falls down the attic stairs at the tattoo parlor; and the horrid stench.

The Minotaur intermittently peeks out in the text. The red text struck-through in black ink signifies the theme of the Minotaur. The blue-lined window footnote that Holloway punches through ends queerly. Its last line stands alone in red text: “Picture that. In your dreams” (Danielewski 141). The next recto page shows a blank, white window, its verso page reveals a black window, and the following recto page presents a visibly larger white window, without the confines of a blue border. This visual moment parallels Truant’s panic attack in the parlor attic, when the beast’s presence causes him to spill tattoo ink all over himself as he falls down the stairs. Hayles notes, “the ‘foreseen’ dissolution of [Johnny’s] identity connects with the beast as a signifier of absence, a negation that spreads like an inkblot to encompass his subjectivity” (789). She remarks that after his panic subsides, he finds “himself” again, doused in ink, marking a return of the subject after a moment of re-inscription. The oscillations between negation and presence are very much closely aligned with the invocation of the Minotaur. The black/white/bleeding window repeats this pattern as the central footnote that becomes the vanishing point of Chapter 9. It calls the beast into being through the reader’s dreams—the reader must “picture” the beast—and emphasizes that the base material of writing, ink, leads to a proliferation of absence.

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