The plot machine as an annihilator of sense
(«House of Leaves» by Mark Z. Danielewski)

The paper is devoted to the role of the plot in the literature in the second degree. «The literature
in the second degree» is the term of G. Genette. It means that the content of the literary text is
directed to the literature itself but not to the reality. Like that, the immanent nature of the literary
text includes in its structure such potential elements as intertext, paratext, hypertext, metatext and
archetext. The hero of the literature of the second degree becomes not a personage, but the language.
In this case, the plot loses the independent nature and turns into the plot machine. The text
turns into the commentary of the other text, but not into the fragment of the reality. As a result,
a common sense disappears from the text. This tendency originated in the first part of the
20th century in the literature of the modernism, for instance in the novel «Gift» by V. Nabokov
or in the tale «Garden of diverging tracks» by J. Borges. Later, in the literature of postmodernism,
the text loses the signs of structure order and submits to the principles of a rhizome. The paper
deals with the novel «House of Leaves» by Mark Z. Danielewski. On the basis of the novel, the
method of divergence of six languages (semiotic codes) inaugurates. The first code is connected
with the history of the Navidson family, which has found itself in the house-transformer constantly
changing the spatial coordinates. The second code appears in consequence of the intersemiotic
translation of the narration to the code of movies. The third language is connected with the transformation
of movies into scraps of sheets, written by different people after blind Zampanò’s dictation.
The fourth code is the metalanguage of the commentary to these scraps and virtual film. The
fifth code belongs to the reader of these scraps – Johnny Truant, who becomes the lunatic in the
process of the reading. At last, the sixth code discovers pure semiotic basis. It consists of the diverse
of prints, emptiness, photo, insertions, etc. Thanks to the decentralization of these codes, the
specific game, which leads to the annihilation of common sense and stereotype language, arises.