Danielewski's The Familiar and the Concept of the Bibliotrope

Introducing the concept of the bibliotrope, this article offers a multimodal retooling of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope that seeks to incorporate the entire expressive apparatus of the multimodal novel into its framework. Whereas the conventional notion of the chronotope is defined by the ways temporal and spatial indices come together as an expressive unity to demarcate the physical parameters and generic functions and other recurrent elements in works of fiction, the bibliotrope incorporates the ways in which combinations of recurrent and highly stylized visual and textual configurations represent physical and social environments as well as the thoughts and actions of characters. The concept is applied to Mark Z. Danielewski’s The Familiar, which I take to be an exemplary bibliotropic text. I frame my analysis of bibliotropes in Danielewski’s pentalogy within the broader context of Danielewski’s signature multimodal poetics, highlighting some of its most salient features, and provide a case study of the character Isandòrno’s bibliotrope. I conclude by outlining some potential research questions for further analysis of bibliotropes in The Familiar and beyond.