IVIV rooms, buildings, vehicles bigger inside than outside

[James Kyllo]

See also the Heinlein story "And He Built a Crooked House"

J



On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 2:17 AM,  <malignd at aol.com> wrote:
> House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski plays with this idea as well, but very
> differently.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: dougmillison at comcast.net
> To: pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sun, Nov 29, 2009 8:28 pm
> Subject: IVIV  rooms, buildings, vehicles bigger inside than outside
>
>
> http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/quadraturin.html A Soviet-era,
> Polish-born, Ukrainian-raised writer named Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky was the
> subject of a short profile and review over at The Nation last week. The
> article focuses on one of Krzhizhanovsky's stories called "Quadraturin"
> (which you can read in full online). The basic gist is that a man named
> Situlin, a "Soviet city dweller" who owns an impossibly cramped apartment,
> is convinced by a stranger who comes to his door one day to "take a free
> sample of an experimental substance that is supposed to make rooms bigger."
> This "substance" is Quadraturin. "Sutulin begins to apply the Quadraturin to
> his walls," The Nation explains, "as the instructions on the tube advise,
> but he accidentally spills the entire contents of the tube on his floor." He
> wakes up the next morning in a "faintly familiar, large, but ungainly room,"
> where his furniture looks awkward and the angles of the walls are uneven. He
> enjoys the novel pleasure of strolling from one end of his room to the
> other, but he must enjoy it in secret, for like other citizens he is legally
> allotted only ninety-seven square feet of living space, and owning more than
> his share could mean losing his apartment. After he stands there for a
> moment, in awe of his apartment's new, slightly bulbous dimensionality, he
> begins "rearranging the furniture to fit the new space," as Krzhizhanovsky
> himself puts it. "…But nothing worked: the abbreviated rug, when moved back
> beside the bed, exposed worn, bare floorboards; the table and the stool,
> pushed by habit against the head of the bed, had disencumbered an empty
> corner latticed with cobwebs and littered with shreds and tatters, once
> artfully masked by the corner's own crowdedness and the shadow of the table.
> With a triumphant, but slightly frightened smile, Sutulin went all round his
> new, practically squared square, scrutinizing every detail. He noted with
> displeasure that the room had grown more in some places than in others: an
> external corner, the angle of which was now obtuse, had made the wall askew;
> Quadraturin, apparently, did not work as well on internal corners; carefully
> as Sutulin had applied the essence, the experiment had produced somewhat
> uneven results.…"Sensing that something has gone horribly wrong and that he
> might soon face the wrath of his building superintendent, he "realizes he
> has to buy curtains to hide his apartment from the eyes of passers-by." And
> "it only gets worse from there," The Nation adds: "every time Sutulin leaves
> the room, he returns to find that his apartment has grown still bigger." …He
> realizes that he forgot to apply Quadraturin to the ceiling, so his
> apartment is only growing outward, not upward, the dimensions increasingly
> oppressive even as the room becomes larger. It outgrows its electric
> circuitry and Sutulin is trapped in the darkness. "He knew that there,
> behind his back, the dead, Quadraturinized space with its black corners was
> still spreading."…It's an amazing image—I'm particularly struck by the idea
> of a space outgrowing its electric circuitry , like a body grown so
> monstrous it leaves behind its old ……
>
>



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