“Now”: The Crip Time of Literary History in Mark Z. Danielewski’s

“Now”: The Crip Time of Literary History in Mark Z. Danielewski’s

This essay proposes crip time as a useful tool for challenging our overreliance on linear periodization. As defined by Alison Kafer and Ellen Samuels among others, crip time designates the experiences of people with disabilities who live their lives against the normative clocks of biological development, productive labor, capitalist consumption, and reproductive futurity. These imposed temporalities infiltrate literary periodization, which, like the clinician’s work, is remedial and often prescribes progressive linearity as cure. But crip time has no cure. Far from straightened out, its timelines refuse teleologies of betterment and completion. The essay explores alternatives to these in Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel/media assemblage House of Leaves (2000). The parenthetical date hardly conveys this text’s place(s) in time, not to mention its disruptive, yet accommodating, reorganizations of literary history. While critics have debated its modernist, postmodern, and postpostmodern credentials for years, House of Leaves has yet to be examined (and deperiodized) from a disability standpoint. Doing so unveils a strategy I call“temporal retrofitting,”through which Danielewski’s crip narrators embrace, as their temporal marker, a struckthrough“now”undone by the same forces that constitute it.