(Untitled Fragment)
Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
as walls keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves
moments before the wind
According to his author bio, Mark Z. Danielewski is the son of a famous avant-garde filmmaker and that seems to at least partially explain why House of Leaves is such an ambitious avant-garde work of fiction. Experimental film goes right over my head, but as literature is the primary artform through which I interpret the world, this book totally spoke to me; but it won't speak to everyone; art's like that.
Right from the introduction we're warned that House of Leaves is not standard fare: written by a hard-partying, consummate liar named Johnny Truant, he explains that when the old man who lived next door to his best friend died, Truant was invited to inspect the dead man's weird-looking apartment, and when he discovered a disorganised manuscript in a battered trunk, Truant decided to take it home and sort it out. What follows is this manuscript – entitled The Navidson Record – which is an academic treatment of a cinéma vérité film of the same name; the manuscript written over many years on scraps of paper large and small by the deceased, known only as Zampanò. Zampanò dissects every sequence of the film, with hundreds of footnotes that quote everyone from doctoral dissertations to Rosie O'Donnell – it would seem that the original film has been dissected ad nauseam already – and interspersed with Zampanò's academic footnotes are Truant's own: sometimes providing translations for foreign language quotes, sometimes explaining missing passages, and sometimes going off on pages-long rants about his own history or his deteriorating mental state as he works on the book. In addition, there are also footnotes from an unnamed editor who later polished up Truant's work. The film at the heart of the book is a documentary (in the style of The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity) made by a Pulitzer winning photojournalist who discovers that the house he has moved his family into has a weird anomaly: it's bigger on the inside than its outer dimensions would suggest, and as he brings in friends and experts to clear up the enigma, the house presents increasingly malevolent mysteries. In the introduction we learn two more quirky facts: Zampanò was blind – had obviously never actually seen the film and relied on the young women who would come read for him to both do his research and transcribe his thoughts – and search though he might, Truant could never prove the film, or the criticism it inspired, ever actually existed.
In one passage (that I wish I could find now), Zampanò claims that the satisfaction that viewers receive from watching The Navidson Record derives from the harmony of its opposites – the film's exploration of light/dark, inside/outside, etc. – and much of my own satisfaction in this book comes from the harmony of having two opposite voices on every page. Zampanò and Truant are yin/yang, left brain/right brain, ego/id and, instead of finding their opposing styles jarring, I found they did make for a strange harmony. Zampanò would write:
Because the enormous narcissism of their parents deprived Will and Tom of suitable role models, both brothers learned to identify with absence. Consequently, even if something beneficial fortuitously entered their lives they immediately treated it as temporary. By the time they were teenagers they were already accustomed to a discontinuous lifestyle marked by constant threats of abandonment and the lack of any emotional stability. Unfortunately, "accustomed to" here is really synonymous with "damaged by”.And Truant – often writing about his drug use or brawling or womanizing – sounded like:
Two kisses in one kiss was all it took, a comfort, a warmth, perhaps temporary, perhaps false, but reassuring nonetheless, and mine, and theirs, ours, all three of us giggling, insane giggles and laughter with still more kisses on the way, and I remember a brief instant then, out of the blue, when I suddenly glimpsed my own father, a rare but oddly peaceful recollection, as if he actually approved of my play in the way he himself had always laughed and played, great updrafts of light, burning off distant plateaus of bistre & sage, throwing him up like an angel, high above the red earth, deep into the sparkling blank, the tender sky that never once let him down, preserving his attachment to youth, propriety and kindness, his plane almost, but never quite, outracing his whoops of joy, trailing him in his sudden turn to the wind, followed then by a near vertical climb up to the angles of the sun, and I was barely eight and still with him and yes, that was the thought that flickered madly through me, a brief instant of communion, possessing me with warmth and ageless ease, causing me to smile again and relax as if memory alone could lift the heart like the wind lifts a wing, and so I renewed my kisses with even greater enthusiasm, caressing and in turn devouring their dark lips, dark with wine and fleeting love, an ancient memory love had promised but finally never gave, until there were too many kisses to count or remember, and the memory of love proved not love at all and needed a replacement, which our bodies found, and then the giggles subsided, and the laughter dimmed, and darkness enfolded all of us and we gave away our childhood for nothing and we died and condoms littered the floor and Christina threw up in the sink and Amber chuckled a little and kissed me a little more, but in a way that told me it was time to leave.And as for the point of the book, I think there's a clue in this footnote about Navidson's uneasy relationship with attempts to capture pure truth:
By relying on Reston as the sole narrative voice, he subtly draws attention once again to the question of inadequacies in representation, no matter the medium, no matter how flawless. Here in particular, he mockingly emphasizes the fallen nature of any history by purposefully concocting an absurd number of generations. Consider: 1. Tom's broken hands -----> 2. Navidson's perception of Tom's hurt -----> 3. Navidson's description of Tom's hurt to Reston -----> 4. Reston's retelling of Navidson's description based on Navidson's recollection and perception of Tom's actual hurt. A pointed reminder that representation does not replace. It only offers distance and in rare cases perspective.In addition to these distances, we have 5. Zampanò discoursing on the scene -----> 6. In a manuscript that was collated by Truant -----> 7. Created by the author Danielewski, and if it's not too indulgent -----> 8. Now being written about by me. The exploration of these layers and filters of perception are perfectly suited to the literary form, and brilliantly, Danielewski can collapse them in the opposite direction as well: Right from the start, Truant warns us that the film entitled The Navidson Record probably doesn't exist, and by including letters from Truant's asylum-bound mother in an appendix, you have to wonder, as Truant's mental condition begins to collapse (which he blames on the influences of the manuscript and the house at its core), is Truant also schizophrenic? Or, less dramatically, is this entire enterprise just another of his elaborate confabulations? Does Zampanò's manuscript, or even Zampanò himself, exist? Or is everything as substantial as a house of leaves?
I also liked the way that this entire project seems to make a gentle mockery of “serious criticism”. As Zampanò attempts to gather all of the academic response to the film, he's quoting authors who have examined the sociological imperative for two women to build a bookshelf by themselves or the feminist agenda behind forcing men and children to live in houses or he summarises three different academic papers that attempt to explain why Navidson would put himself in danger to explore the house. If it's meant to be cinéma vérité as captured by wall-mounted cameras, why would there need to be any more meaning to building bookshelves than the simple need for bookshelves? I kind of love that the sheer volume of academia quoted here is an argument against its existence.
Danielewski plays constantly with form, including many pages with a single sentence or excerpts of unreadable lists running alongside the narrative – and links to “missing” exhibits at the end of the book could be frustrating – but honestly, I found this structure to be much less exhausting (and more entertaining) than that in Infinite Jest: this isn't a hard book to read, you just need to open yourself to the experience. I understand that there are multiple internet forums devoted to unlocking further clues in House of Leaves, and although I chuckle at the added layers of distance to the original narrative that this adds (or does it serve to collapse distance?), I'm satisfied to end my experience on the page. I loved this book: thanks for the recommendation, Kennedy.
