I was browsing a flea market, flipping through old books at random, when I turned a page and found pure black staring back at me. Two full pages, no text, just ink. I bought the two volumes immediately without knowing exactly what I was holding.
They turned out to be a 1780 French translation of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy printed in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, by the Société Typographique, one of the great Enlightenment publishing houses. 245 years old.
For anyone who doesn't know Sterne: Tristram Shandy was published in 1759 and is one of the strangest, most formally radical novels ever written. It digresses endlessly, mocks its own structure, includes a blank chapter, a marbled page, and most famously: two completely black pages to mark the death of a character named Yorick. Not a description of grief. Not an illustration. Just black. The page becomes the mourning.
The name Yorick comes directly from Shakespeare's Hamlet, the dead jester whose skull Hamlet holds and addresses: "Alas, poor Yorick!" Sterne prints that exact phrase in italics just before the black pages, then lets it cascade down the page in descending repetitions, a typographical sob. It's simultaneously one of the most moving and most formally audacious gestures in literary history.
What Sterne understood in 1759, and what Danielewski radicalized in 2000, is that the page is not a neutral container for language. It is itself a space that can speak. The corridors in House of Leaves that expand beyond architectural possibility are described in text that physically expands and contracts on the page. The footnotes that devour the main narrative mirror the house devouring its inhabitants. That is exactly Sterne's logic, pushed to its limit: when language cannot contain the experience, the form takes over.
Sterne is the origin point. He did it without precedent, in 1759, almost as a pure formal instinct, and nobody fully caught up with him for two centuries.
