Perennial Presence

Winning "House of Leaves"

House of Leaves is a very good book by Mark Z. Danielewski published in 2000. You should read it, preferably in hardback and colour if you can. This blog post is going to spoil the entirety of it.

Come On Up To The House

I do not know anybody who read House of Leaves neutrally. Everyone who comes to it tends to have a few operating assumptions from hearsay:

None of these points, in the event, are wrong! Point three, around narrative and the dreaded l-word, is to me the most interesting and contentious.

House of Leaves is undeniably fantastic at making you feel. There are a great many books you can read largely detached and academically, studying their structure and predicting their plots — applauding the author for particularly intelligent twists and tut-tut-ing at the disappointing turns.

Danielewski's book is different. Everyone I know who has read it struggles to describe the experience of reading it. House of Leaves demands the reader juggle the parallel plots of Johnny Truant and the Navidson Record while indulging in the utter inanity of both of them. The former frequently sexually digresses into drug-and-fuck-fuelled hazes the relevance of which is impossible to predict in advance, and the details of which are difficult to remember, but which excellently contribute to the book's atmosphere (people get very surprised by how much of the book's uneasy feeling comes not from impossible geometry but by Johnny's weird-ass inexpert narration of his possibly-freaky life). The latter far more obviously defies understanding. Characters and pets come and go, pages of narration get undercut by absurd interviews with movie directors, and sometimes when a list of items is called for, Zampano will plumb for filling the page with hundreds. None of these bizarre formatting traits are possibly compatible with their in-universe existences (blind man Zampano didn't choose the batshit formatting! it was written by his assistants!), or with the fact that the book exists as a thoughtfully edited and published manuscript (the editors leave footnotes!).

The main linear narrative is, on the other hand, surprisingly easy to understand! Johnny Traunt's pages are lousy with characters, but only some of them actually reoccur. The events of the Navidson Record are plainly impossible, as is its composition, but the mental gymnastics we're being asked to undertake are barely a roly-poly. Man house big, man explore house, man estrange wife, man explore house again, man love wife. It's genuinely one of the greatest books I've ever read. But the disconnect between the full-body incomprehensible experience of reading the book, of getting lost in its description and structure and literal turns, and the relative comprehensibility of its plot is immensely interesting.

And, indeed, when I finished reading it, I thought about it a lot too. Perhaps I had missed something? I enjoyed it a lot, but all of that stirring feeling, coming from some relatively mundane physical horror, not much worse than "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS"? The psychological horror rocked, but a lot of that was through the lens of Johnny Truant, so how am I going to really be able to unpick that? I barely remember most of it?

And... what about the checkmark?

Devil In The Details

The checkmark, at the bottom of page 97, in the middle of a Navidson Record section? Just like Pelafina told Johnny to write her to let her know that he'd received a secret message? When I ran into this, it set my heart racing. I think I might have actually out-loud yelled?

Was Pelafina reading this? Was she reading House of Leaves as published by Johnny Truant, or Zampano's Navidson Record? Is this in response to Pelafina, or to someone else? There's no secret message on the page, it looks innocent enough...

The book is full of little bits of grit that defy a plain explanation and sum up to an as-yet-impossible collection of facts. One of Zampano's footnotes links to Johnny's narration, with a footnote that itself to a footnote in the Navidson Record. Many of Johnny's translations are inexplicably incorrect, as pointed out by the editors, who are themselves not entirely reliable. Passages related to the Minotaur are written in red, struck through, without objection by the editors. Zampano's narration at one point leaves out character names entirely, blanks pointed out as not being filled in. Some footnotes are not numbers, but odd symbols: some of them have corresponding footnote entries, but some go nowhere at all.

Why fixate on any of these little details at all? The formatting of the entire book is all screwed up, in total contrast to the otherwise-straight-laced nature of Zampano's film critique. The blue, shifting word House obviously has no practical reason for existing the way it does. Zampano's record of Navidson is not only derivative of real-world people, the story cuts the wires on its own suspension of disbelief by explicitly pointing this fact out. A blind man is writing a movie critique!

And Navidson owns his own copy of House of Leaves!

Hey, isn't there someone else who struggles to describe the experience of exploration to those around them?

Macbeth Isn't Real

There is no mystery to House of Leaves. This isn't a horror indie game, with an ostensible "Lore" waiting to be solved if only the tiny details can be made to sing. There isn't actually the pretension of a mystery: only the appearance of one. If the reader incorrectly draws the conclusion that the thing which looks like a mystery might actually be a mystery, egged on by the book's reputation, they haven't misplayed, but they only actually have themselves to blame. The book lets you in, but it also makes no secret of showing you the door.

The strange footnotes do not mean anything or go anywhere. The checkmark on page 97 does not mean anything about Pelafina or Johnny Truant or Zampano. The crossover between the Navidson Record and Truant's narration implies no connection between them.

When I was studying for my English GCSE, we had to look at Macbeth, right. It was also very good: a bit less esoteric than House of Leaves. On one of the first pages, the teacher asked some question I don't remember about what we can learn about Macbeth from X passage. I responded with something about, "Macbeth wants reputation and is upset that he isn't getting it". (I actually answered lessons in class, I was a total square).

The teacher responds with, "Macbeth doesn't want anything. The writer wants us to feel a certain way about the character of Macbeth, but Macbeth is words on a page. Macbeth isn't real."

He was an arse in many ways and he then proceeded to spend the rest of term taking Macbeth's existence credulously as given, because it's hard to run a lesson any other way, but the sentence stuck.

There is no contradiction in the fact that Zampano's footnotes cross mediums, because Mark Z Danielewski can put superscript numbers basically wherever the hell he likes. The inconsistent translations don't necessarily point to a conspiracy in Johnny to mislead the reader: they point to the author attempting to create the feel of a conspiracy.

House of Leaves is a book about reading House of Leaves. That isn't facetious, Navidson literally reads House of Leaves during the final expedition, but it's also a bit facetious. The book's jacket is too small, as is the exterior of the Navidsons' house; it's face is emblazoned with a dark map that you could interpret as lining up with Danielewski's description of the expeditions; it's pages constrict as the House's hallways do.

The experience of reading House of Leaves is so difficult to describe because the experience of reading House of Leaves is nothing more or less than the experience of reading House of Leaves!

This isn't some absurd meta-analysis. This is clearly what the book is driving at. Characters within the book obsess over details and point out impossible traits, just as people discussing the book online do. Johnny's description becomes harder and indistinct just when his life does and when the book does and when the Zampano record does. The characters are constantly in thrall to details, interpreting inconsistencies, and going mad or being killed by both. This is not through anything being a direct parallel to the experience of reading it: Navidson cannot be like us because we are human beings while Navidson is words on a page. But the milieu that the story builds around what it says about discovery is the same as the feeling of discovering what the story has to say about discovery.

Perhaps that is why it's so hard to describe House of Leaves. It's impossible to do so accurately without self-reference. Maybe there's something in here about how Navidson's evangelising about the House gets Holloway and others killed, too, but I don't know how to bend that point into shape.

The only answer to be found about House of Leaves is that you need to stop trying to find the answers in House of Leaves. Again, the book is clear on this point. Navidson, dying of frostbite and being crushed alive by the House, is sustained and eventually saved by his decision to burn his own copy of House of Leaves. Similarly, before his disappearance, Johnny Truant's life picks up out of its paranoid spiral when he publishes the mythical first edition online, and gets engaged in the wider fandom of it who appreciate it as nothing more than disposable, enjoyable fiction — even if only briefly. The book is impossible, not because we aren't smart enough to see the mystery, but because Mark Z. Danielewski wrote an impossible book. As Navidson finds with his life and his regret over his photo's subject, or as Johnny seems to fail to find with regards to his mother, the only way forwards is forwards.

Or, at least they were written to find that.