Mazes that extended into infinity: Historical metanarrative and the labyrinth in Libra, from hell, and House of leaves

In this thesis project, I will engage the labyrinth's significance as a symbol of historical narrativization, and the traditional notions of history that its use challenges, as depicted in three works of literary fiction. The labyrinth is imagined in a variety of ways through the course of the novels examined as this project's focal point - as a conspiratorial plot in Don DeLillo's Libra (1988), as an urban landscape in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel From Hell (serialized 1991-98), and as a threatening domestic scape in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000). This thesis will demonstrate the labyrinth's enduring relevance as a visual signifier of the postmodern understanding of historiography. The labyrinth is traditionally understood as a physical construct, and the implications of applying such a concretely bounded form to the metaphysical phenomenon of history are many and varied. Rather than operating on a physical plane, the labyrinths investigated in this project are constructs that operate not exclusively in space, but time as well - a concept first engaged in Jorge Luis Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941). The challenges and failures of recording history and time arise out of the attempt to lend physicality (by means of pinpointing a subjective truth) to something that inherently rejects such boundaries because of its infinitude. In the wake of the postmodern movement, these novels revisit the notion of an authentically infinite labyrinth and continue its development as an important way of grappling with history.

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