From roots to routes: Mark Z. Danielewski’s "House of Leaves", a new perspective on readability

Publishing Business has been the mirror of a significant social miscommunication problem for a few decades now; the difficulty of having a proper and harmonious dialogue between Publisher and Reader has made critical exchange more and more confusing and uncertain, leading to a complete flattening of thoughts, opinions and values and, therefore, to an alleged crisis in the publishing industry. “Is the aforementioned alleged crisis a real thing or is it just the natural product of a post-truth information era?”, “what is the real story?”, “what kind of Humanities do we need in the twenty-first century?” Digital native Millennials and Generation Z often consider the book as something boring, detached and hence somehow hostile to the reader and what Mark Z. Danielewski offers to Publishing is certainly a non-traditional, non-linear, but visible and vibrant new perspective on the “object-book”, forcing us to face the uncanny reality of recontextualization. Losing the delicate balance between well-rooted reading proxemics and heuristic and new “routes” of interpretations puts us in the spotlight with a new need of framing the apparent contrast between tradition and innovation. 2000 – 2020, "House of Leaves". Mark Z. Danielewski’s "House of Leaves" certainly represents the challenge that can give us access to the key of a new publishing strategy in the years to come: to overcome crisis, the author, the text and the reader need to form a triadic structure prepared to listen to the "voice" of the book: “What is its voice? What is it trying to say? How does it speak?”, we need to listen carefully and get to know all of its voice textures and volumes, so to boost new levels of assimilation of its content. It is necessary that we adapt to a new body, that of the book, so that the book itself can adapt to us in a complex vortex of emotions that conveys us the possibility to finally complete that process of much needed "transcorporeality" that lies at the base of a new way of reading aimed at nurturing and fulfilling our doubts and uncertainties about life and relations, helping us to overcome Leopardian "fences", opening our minds to Baudelairean "correspondances" and encouraging us to never give up on striving to better understand what "the real story" is. The conscious contemporary reader is, in fact, now asked to choose his own path in reading and his attempt to go back to the safe roots of an academic, traditional and unique understanding of texts is completely challenged by the postmodern literary frame; when utterly caught off guard, the only way of surviving the text is to improvise new forms of inspiration and interpretation, which generate from gaps and blank spaces in reading time and spaces. A new value is now given to the text, a “new grammar of image” aims at taking the reader to a whole new level of understanding of what is written on paper: the text, once comparable to a fine line, is now more similar to a "cube", a house, with many black and unknown faces and spots that have to be discovered and enlightened; once serving the “art of letters” as something parallel to one’s reading activity, the author is now totally immersed in giving a brand new value of consecration to every "portable" and "durable" page of the book. ​