House of Significations: Space, Experience
and Cognition in Mark Z. Danielewski’s
House of Leaves
MA Thesis Research Master Literary & Cultural Studies (Literary Studies),
2013-2014, University of Groningen (Netherlands)
Name student: Marco R. S. Post
Student number: sXXXXXXX
Name first supervisor: dr. Marco Caracciolo
Name second supervisor: dr. Miklós Kiss
Course code: LWR999M30
Workload: 30 ECTS
Date of submission: 18 June 2014
Abstract: This thesis explores the meaning(s) of the house in Mark Z. Danielewski‘s novel
House of Leaves by means of examining it as a generator of and catalyst for meaning-making
Table of contents:
1.) Introduction 3
2.) Epistemology & ontology
2.1 – Narration = mediation 9
2.2 – The interpenetration of the narrative layers and the
consequential problematization of authorship 14
2.3 – Postmodernism vs. post-postmodernism 17
3.) The house: beyond interpretation?
3.1 – ―Incontrovertibly there but inviable to interpretation‖ 22
3.2 – Meaning-making and meta-cognition 26
3.3 – The mythology of House of Leaves 33
4.) House vs. labyrinth
4.1 – Domesticity under siege 37
4.2 – Relativity 41
5.) Personal significance: the tenants of the house
5.1 – Spatial and emotional proximity 46
5.2 – The construction and deconstruction of gender 51
6.) Personal significance: the readers and editors
6.1 – Personal involvement with the house: fear of space itself 57
6.2 – Space and problems with emotional intimacy:
1.) Introduction
―In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space.‖ (Foucault, ―Of Other Spaces‖)
In many ways Mark Z. Danielewski‘s debut novel House of Leaves is a literary work that aims to dazzle the reader with its complexity, eye-catching visual rhetoric and abundance of enigmas. The novel consists of various narrative layers which are intricately intertwined, and in addition it contains a highly experimental usage of paratexts,1 an ironic self-referentiality and the inclusion of various encrypted codes hidden within the book. As a result, one could say that House of Leaves is at least as much of a labyrinth as the maze the book is narrating about. Rather than one coherent narrative fitting nicely into a neat category, the novel continuously flirts with transgressing boundaries, as can be seen in its incorporation of elements from various genres while slightly modifying and parodying them in the process of adaptation. As such, House of Leaves somewhat resembles postmodernist pastiches as in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Italo Calvino, although the novel simultaneously popularizes these highbrow postmodernist features and makes these accessible to a broader audience, so that Danielewski‘s novel could be classified as ―Avant-Pop‖ (Hemmingson 275). The range of sources from which House of Leaves borrows is too wide and eclectic to be contained in an exhaustive list, but some noteworthy influences are Homer, Dante and James Joyce (for the mythological part), Borges (with respect to House of Leaves’ narrative complexity), and of course the Gothic literature around the trope of the haunted house.2 The novel that most closely resembles House of Leaves is often said to be Vladimir Nabokov‘s Pale Fire, even though Mark Z. Danielewski himself denies ever having read the book (Danielewski, in McCaffery & Gregory 114).
House of Leaves is a novel very difficult to summarize succinctly, but one way to
formulate such a summary would be to say that it is a story about ―a family that moves into a small house in Virginia, where they discover that the inside is bigger than the outside by only
1
One of the effects of the clever experimentation with the paratexts is that the reader is now forced to be physically engaged in reading the novel, as the book frequently has to be flipped or turned because of the unstable lineation of the text. For a scholarly treatment of the physical experience of reading House of Leaves, what is often called “ergodic” literature, see Chanes 169.
2 For a contextualization of House of Leaves within the literary trope of the haunted house, see Monica
a quarter of an inch‖ (Danielewski, in Borders Vision). As this family, the Navidsons, move in, they encounter various physical impossibilities and spatial paradoxes which lie at the very heart of the structure of the novel. The events in this house have been made into a
documentary film called The Navidson Record by the members of that family, about which a profusion of commentaries have been written, all of which are integrated into a bundle of loose papers called The Navidson Record by a blind old man called Zampanò. Upon his (i.e. Zampanò‘s) death, a young apprenticing tattoo artist named Johnny Truant picks up these documents and transforms them into a (more or less) coherent book called House of Leaves, while weaving in between his own autobiography in the footnotes of this text. To complicate matters even further, there are also the Editors, who (allegedly) transformed the Internet version of Johnny Truant‘s book into a novel for publication. In addition to that, there is also Johnny Truant‘s mother, who has a pervasive influence on events and characters in the novel and whose letters addressed to her son can be found in Appendix II.D (The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute Letters). This summary might seem complicated as it is, but it is in fact a gross oversimplification, as there are countless loopholes, paradoxes and metalepses which blur the general distinctions I‘ve just made. However, all these narrative layers refer back to the house in Virginia, and this lies at the very heart of the novel, as all the narrative layers around The Navidson Record contain reverberations of the house and are about the effects the house has on them.
This prominent position of the house in House of Leaves, then, is also the reason why I have chosen to write my thesis on the thematic signification of the house. Even more so perhaps than in most other novels, space plays a very significant role in this literary work, as a large part of it consists of either walking though the labyrinth inside the house or on reflecting on the effects of the house. However, if one is to write a thesis on the signification of the house in House of Leaves, one runs into several problems which seriously undermine such an endeavor. One of these is that the novel already contains on its own much exegesis of the events occurring, and in many respects has incorporated some fictitious scholarship. As Zampanò writes:
Film periodicals frequently publish reviews, critiques and letters. Books devoted entirely to The Navidson Record now appear with some regularity. Numerous
many universities already claim that dozens of students from a variety of departments have completed doctoral dissertations on the film. (Danielewski, HoL 6)3
There is indeed within Zampanò‘s text a genuine dialogue occurring between multiple scholars who all discuss from various angles of approach the events in The Navidson Record, so that the novel mimics and sometimes even parodies scholarly research conventions.4 It is for this reason that some critics have even accused Danielewski of hostility towards literary scholars; Danielewski, however, when being asked the question whether he thinks his novel is intimidating to critics, answers:
And I hope it‘s intimidating! It would never occur to me to apologize for having written a book that critics might feel at least somewhat intimidated by. You know, I‘ve heard quite a few people say they sense a certain amount of antagonism in me towards critics, but quite the opposite is true, really. I wanted to write a book that would raise the bar, something that people would feel deserved to be approached with the kind of respectful wariness and willingness that all great art demand. I wanted to announce, ‗Look, if you‘re going to interpret this in a scholastic way, you‘d better be ready for the long haul!‘ And I do feel confident that engagement will eventually happen, and I am honestly looking forward to seeing what finally comes out. Encouraging a critical engagement with my book – that was at least one challenge I set for myself.
(Danielewski, in McCaffery & Gregory 107)
Of course, House of Leaves is not the first work of literature with any complexity to have been written, and I am not claiming that, in comparison to for instance James Joyce‘s
Finnegan’s Wake, House of Leaves is in any way unique with respect to its complexity.
Nonetheless, this does not take away the fact that if one is to meet the challenge of reading
House of Leaves in a critical fashion, one is faced with a work that is very much self-reflexive
and that one has to approach the literary work dialogically (in the Bakhtinian sense of the word). I do not claim to offer a definitive reading of the novel, but I am quite confident that by means of a dialogical and equally self-reflexive manner of research some sort of further contribution to the understanding of the novel can be made.
This caveat might seem superfluous at first glance, as it would apply to most literary criticism, in the sense that hardly any interpretation of a work of literature can truly claim to
3 Hence forward, the title of the novel in in-line references will be referred to HoL. 4
be definitive, yet I would still argue that House of Leaves is considerably more self-reflexive than the vast majority of literary works with respect to theprocesses of criticism and
meaning-making. As I will demonstrate later on in my thesis, the manner in which House of
Leaves prompts and immediately refutes interpretations of various kinds, or even offers
completely contradictory interpretations simultaneously on the same topic, demonstrates that the novel has laid various ‗traps‘ for the critic unaware of the novel‘s sophisticated level of self-reflexivity. Unfortunately, many flesh-and-blood critics (and all the fictional critics within the novel as well) have fallen in these ‗traps‘ exactly for their neglect of the novel‘s self-reflexivity in this respect.
One of the main problems to be tackled in the interpretation of House of Leaves is that, because of the many loopholes, epistemological uncertainties and ontological paradoxes in the text, the relation between the house itself and what it is supposed to signify at a thematic level becomes unstable and problematic. When Will and Tom Navidson, an inhabitant of the house who makes a documentary film about it and his brother, are perplexed at the sheer
impossibility of their readings of their measurement devices, it is the following in particularly that bothers them: ―One incontrovertible fact stands in their way: the exterior measurement
must equal the internal measurement. Physics depends on a universe infinitely centered on an
equal sign‖ (Danielewski, HoL 32).The equal sign functions here as emblematic for rational Enlightenment thinking and its faith in the consistency and non-contradictory nature of the universe, which however is put into question by the what at one point Bill Reston calls the ―goddamn spatial rape‖ occurring the house (Danielewski, HoL 55). Just as numerically the measurements of the dimensions of the house do not add up, though, so in a more general manner do the various interpretations that people impose upon the house do not add up into a logically coherent understanding of the house. As such, the logic-defying physical dimensions of the house symbolically represent the impenetrability of the house towards rational
understanding. Effectively, the house is a protean entity, which defies any easy classification at a thematic level, so that the question what the house is really about is both stimulated but also forever just beyond reach.
What this concretely means for my research project is that, rather than focusing on the thematic meaning of the house in absolute terms, it will be my primary research aim in this thesis to investigate in the personal experiences that the characters have of the house, instead of giving yet another supposedly definitive interpretation of the ‗true‘ meaning of the house. What does the house mean to the main characters in the novel, how is it related to their
are the underlying mechanisms and dynamics of meaning-making that the characters employ when confronted with the house? In this sense, the (personal) experience of space and the manner in which this resonates with personal issues of the characters is the subject of my investigation, rather than the house itself in absolute, physical or logocentric terms. As such, my research project will be partly a hermeneutical endeavor, and partly what I will later define as ‗meta-hermeneutical‘: hermeneutics interested in the hermeneutical processes as textually exhibited by the characters and fictional critics within the novel.
It is the claim of this thesis, which I will now put forward as a preliminary hypothesis but which I will substantiate with proper evidence in the course of this paper, that the house functions as a generator of and catalyst for meaning-making, and that the personal act of interpreting the house is more important than any definitive meaning attributed to the house itself, so that the house on Ash Tree Lane is in effect primarily a house of significations. As will become apparent later on in my thesis, it is chiefly through the lived experience of space that (the importance of) meaning-making processes are foregrounded: in House of Leaves, space and thought are intertwined in a mutually reinforcing manner, resonating with each other powerfully. As such, space is never neutral in the novel, but often functions as an allegory for latent thought patterns made manifest through the meanings that the house is invested with. Consequently, the importance of the personal act of interpretation is, rather than a hallmark of arbitrariness and relativity, a first step in the rebirth of the subject out of its demise in postmodernism: subjective meaning-making processes can have a potentially restorative or perhaps even cathartic function for the individual who engages with them. The emphasis on meaning-making over meaning itself, moreover, implies that the novel is very much a self-reflexive novel on the processes of interpretation, so that it effectively functions in more than one manner at a meta-level. Of course, this also entails that House of Leaves is a fictional work which holds up a mirror to the reader and critic in his/her own interpretative processes. However, as a result of the strengths and weaknesses of the methodology of (meta-)hermeneutics, this research project will focus primarily on how the self-reflexivity with respect to meaning-making processes is presented within the novel itself at a textual level.5
Having put forward my thesis statement in the previous paragraph and the research question it aims to answer in the paragraph before, I would now like to offer the reader a succinct overview of the structure of this project. In chapter two I will examine the
epistemological and ontological issues with regard to (re)mediation and narration. It has been
5 For a detailed justification of the decision to adopt (meta-)hermeneutics as opposed to reader-response
frequently argued that due to the manner in which the novel problematizes these issues, no thematic reading of the novel is possible whatsoever, as the novel is too self-referential and elusive to allow for any meaning or narrative to establish.6 Before engaging in an elaborate thematic reading of House of Leaves, I feel these hurdles need to be overcome with some counterarguments first, to clear the bedrock of my project, so to speak. In chapter three I would like to explore the underlying mechanisms of meaning-making that the characters in the novel and some critics both inside and outside the fictional realm have employed vis-à-vis Navidson‘s house and I will expound here on my basic assumptions regarding how best to interpret the house. Put simply, in chapter two I have asserted that a thematic reading can be done, in this chapter I proceed to clarify how it can be done. In a sense, this chapter forms the methodological foundation for the rest of my thesis, as chapters four to six are elaborations on the core issues expounded in this chapter. These latter three chapters will be sequenced inside-out, which is to say from readings very close to the actual house itself to more loose and personal reflections on the house by the characters. Chapter four remains as close to the house itself as possible, in which via an examination of the distinction between the de facto
antonyms ‗house‘ and ‗labyrinth‘ I will reflect on how the physical space of the house is experienced. Chapter five will be an elaboration on the personal resonances of the house on the characters actually inhabiting it, specifically focusing on the effects it has on the
relationship between Karen and Navidson. Chapter six investigates personal resonances of the house as well, but then with respect to characters outside the intradiegetical The Navidson
Record. Finally, chapter seven will conclude my thesis and provide a short synthesis plus
some critical reflection.
6 Some critics who are of this opinion are Mark Hansen, Rune Graulund and Julius Greve. See chapter two for a
2.) Epistemology and ontology
2.1 – Narration = mediation
House of Leaves is a polyphonic novel, as it contains various narrators who are all involved in
a dialogue and out of whose collaborative effort the novel consists; what is problematical about this, however, is that not all these narrators and characters share the same level of narration, but that like a Russian doll or Chinese box various narrative layers are embedded in one another, in which each outer layer mediates all layers internal to it. Moreover, every single narrative layer contains a plethora of loopholes and self-undermining statements that make it difficult for the reader to take for granted what has been written there. In this chapter I will explore in what manner this narrative layering and continuous remediation seriously problematizes a thematic reading of the novel, but how, nonetheless, out of the structure of the novel some sort of thematic reading can be possible, only on the condition, though, that one adheres to several ontological and epistemological caveats.
First there are the events in the house on Ash Tree Lane as experienced by Will ―Navy‖ Navidson and Karen Green, their children (Chad and Daisy), Will‘s brother Tom, Navy‘s acquaintance Bill Reston, and a group of explorers (Leeder, Wax and Holloway).Will Navidson (usually referred to in the narrative as simply Navidson) is of profession a
photojournalist, and he has installed throughout the house cameras to monitor the events occurring. Although initially intending to film how the Navidsons settle in into their new home, it eventually evolves instead into a The-Blair-Witch-Project-like horror movie about the terrifying spatial aberrations that the house contains. However, despite Navidson having won worldwide fame and many awards for his expertise in photojournalism, on several occasions the novel mentions the inadequacies of film and photography to capture what is going on in the house. On page 344 in House of Leaves, Navidson critically evaluates on his own filming results:
Zampanò, the self-acclaimed The Navidson Record scholar, affirms this in his comment on Navidson‘s intimation:
Those last words in particular may sound a bit glib, especially coming from such an esteemed photographer. Nevertheless, in spite of numerous Hi 8s mounted all over the house, Navidson is right: all the images recorded during this segment are inadequate. (Danielewski, HoL 334)
Additionally, there is also the problem that not everything that happens in the house has actually been filmed, but that very significant portions of the narrative layer The Navidson
Record must be deduced from supplementary interviews. Between Exploration #4 and #5, the
house wreaks havoc on the people inside and even kills Navidson‘s brother Tom. None of this is on film though (at least not of viewable or comprehendible quality), but one has to hear about this through Bill Reston, who was not even an actual witness himself but only heard about it from Will Navidson.
This is odd, especially since Reston saw none of it. He is only recounting what
Navidson told him himself. The general consensus has always been that the memory is simply too painful for Navidson to revisit. But there is another possibility: Navidson refuses to abandon the more perspicacious portion of his audience. 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 purposely 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. (Danielewski, HoL 346)
The precarious status of representation and mediation is heightened by the fact that the events captured on film are mediated by Zampanò throughout the entire novel, so that the reader has to rely on yet another layer of mediation. Even though Zampanò quotes a plethora of scholarly references about The Navidson Record and so appears well-versed, even he cannot judge for certain how much credence should be given to what the film portrays:
For the most part, skeptics call the whole effort a hoax but grudgingly admit The
Navidson Record is a hoax of exceptional quality. Unfortunately out of those who
accept its validity many tend to swear allegiance to tabloid-UFO sightings. Clearly it is not easy to appear credible when after vouching for the film‘s verity, the discourse suddenly switches to why Elvis is still alive and probably wintering in the Florida Keys. One thing remains certain: any controversy surrounding Bill Meyer‘s film on flying saucers has been supplanted by the house on Ash Tree Lane. (Danielewski, HoL 3)
Despite Zampanò‘s assertion that ―as of late the more interesting material dwells exclusively on the interpretation of events within the film‖ (Danielewski, HoL 3), he cannot dispel the doubt entirely, as he consequently revisits the topic despite this intimation on pages 140-149.
The problem of Zampanò‘s mediation is in fact considerably more complicated than that, though, as even the very credibility of Zampanò himself in put in question. When Johnny Truant edits Zampanò‘s notes on The Navidson Record, he is troubled by the fact that he cannot find any reference to it whatsoever outside Zampanò‘s work, which seems to suggest the whole affair has been made up by Zampanò himself:
After all, as I fast discovered, Zampanò‘s entire project is about a film which doesn‘t even exist. You can look, I have, but no matter how long you search you will never find The Navidson Record in theaters or video stores. Furthermore, most of what‘s said by famous people has been made up. (…) As for the books cited in the footnotes, a good portion of them are fictitious. (Danielewski, HoL xix-xx)
In fact, underneath Zampanò‘s scholarly endeavor to write a book about the film The
Navidson Record lies the deeply ironic paradox that Zampanò was ―blind as a bat‖ and
―hasn‘t seen a thing since the mid-fifties‖ (Danielewski, HoL xxi), so strictly speaking he was incapable of watching the film and giving any reliable commentary on it. Now one might because of this simply dismiss The Navidson Record as mere bogus scholarship,7 but it lies in
7 In fact, Michael Hemmingson even calls Zampanò because of all these blatant inconsistencies in narration “a
the very nature of House of Leaves to be open-ended and indeterminate about these affairs, and consequently it offers some counterarguments demonstrating the authenticity of The
Navidson Record in an appendix at the very end of the novel called ―Contrary evidence,‖
containing actual references to the film outside Zampanò. For instance, Johnny Truant asserts that The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XVIII is a fictitious source (Danielewski,
HoL xx), whereas in Appendix III,‖ Contrary evidence,‖ a Xerox of the book‘s title page is
shown (Danielewski, HoL 658), demonstrating that the book really does exist.
As if all these epistemological and ontological problems were not enough, on top of Zampanò‘s layer of mediation is yet again another layer of mediation, this time provided by the clubbing and pill-popping youngster Johnny Truant (I already briefly referred to him in the previous paragraph), who edits Zampanò‘s chaotic and unstructured work into a novel. However, this layer of mediation as well is not entirely pristine and objective: in footnote 18, situated in chapter II, as he is telling about the fabulous and enthralling yarns he is used to spin when going out to captivate a female audience (and consequently informing us of his story-telling capabilities), he makes a frank admission about what seems at first a minor and insignificant detail:
Now I‘m sure you‘re wondering something. Is it just coincidence that this cold water predicament of mine also appears in this chapter?
Not at all. Zampanò only wrote ―heater.‖ The word ―water‖ back there – I added that. Now there‘s an admission, eh?
Hey, not fair, you cry.
Hey, hey, fuck you, I say. (Danielewski, HoL 16)
The ramifications of this minor editorial confession are huge: in effect, it means that the reader cannot take Johnny Truant on his word for any piece he edited of Zampanò‘s, as he has proven himself here an unreliable editor. The same holds true for Johnny Truant‘s
undermined immediately afterwards, such as his anecdote of a collision as a pedestrian with a truck, only to assert later that it in fact did not happen at all. Although it is never mentioned explicitly, one could infer from this that these are in fact hallucinations, a reading which is reinforced by the fact that his mother Pelafina was a schizophrenic institutionalized in mental hospital. The very outer shell of narration – the Editors – though, occasionally alter or
comment upon Johnny Truant‘s notes as well, but as characters they are too elusive to
adequately assess their reliability. They do, however, impose upon the novel yet another layer of mediation.
All these layers of mediation, each in its turn altering or possibly even completely fabricating the material at a more intradiegetic level, significantly complicate a reading of the novel, as each new level of narration and mediation never transmits the content of the
narrative levels it contains in any reliable or transparent fashion. Consequently, the reader (or critic) trying to construct some sort of meaning of what happens in the novel on the basis of the text has to take these issues into consideration. As Mark Z Danielewski himself has formulated: ―Let us say there is no sacred text here. That notion of authenticity or originality is constantly refuted. The novel doesn‘t allow the reader to ever say: ‗Oh, I see: this is the authentic, original text, exactly how it looked, what it always had to say‘‖ (Danielewski, in McCaffery & Gregory 121). The ramifications of these words are easily underestimated; one example of this I would like to put forward here is Mark Hansen‘s application of the quotation above on a fragment of House of Leaves. On page 465 of the novel one reads how Will
Navidson is within the labyrinth in the house and reads a novel, more specifically, House of
Leaves. However, as his batteries have run out, he uses the light emanating from the
incineration of the pages of his own book to proceed reading the rest of it. Hansen concludes from this that the burning of the physical book of House of Leaves as mentioned in the novel is a clear example of Danielewski‘s statement that there is no sacred text (606). I do not say that I disagree with Hansen‘s reading, but I would just like to underline here that Hansen‘s claim is based on the assumption that we can trust the narrator that it is in fact House of
Leaves which is being burned. On page 551, however, part of Appendix C ―… And Pieces,‖
we find evidence that undermines such a reading. The Appendix incorporates some snippets of Zampanò‘s original book that Johnny Truant has used to edit. I would like to incorporate a part of one of those snippets to demonstrate why it complicates Hansen‘s reading:
plague him. Is he floating? falling? or rising (Flying up?)? Is the right side up? Upside-down? Or on his side? Eventually, however, the spins (? [ROTATE THEME?]) stop and Navidson accepts that the questions are sadly irrelevant. Taking a tiny (X or small?) sip of water and digging (himself) deeper into his sleeping bag, He (h? Navidson?) turns his attention to the last possible activity (?) the only book he possesses: __________________
(SPACE?)
[For whatever reason the tape cuts off here.] (Danielewski, HoL 551)
As can be seen, Zampanò himself never specified what novel it is that Navidson reads and eventually burns, so how the title of the novel Navidson is reading came to be specified as
House of Leaves is quite puzzling (maybe an editorial lapse of Johnny Truant?). In a sense
this is of course immensely ironic, as the fragment that is supposed to indicate that there is no sacred text can even itself not be fully trusted and must ultimately be regarded with suspicion.
2.2 – The interpenetration of the narrative layers and the
consequential problematization of authorship
In the previous section I have outlined the multiplicity of problems that emerges due to the inherent uncertainty caused by the various layers of narration in the novel, but what even further complicates the structure of the novel is that the various narrators do not stay at their own level of narration, but paradoxically enter other diegetic strata as well, so that House of
Leaves is rife with metalepses. I have already mentioned the perplexing detail of Will
Navidson reading about his own adventures in the novel that contains him, but this is merely symptomatic for a broader pattern emerging in House of Leaves. It falls outside the scope of this thesis to map this in detail, but in this section I will attempt briefly to illustrate the ontological instability of the novel by giving some (although perhaps admittedly arbitrary) examples. Basically, the pattern that will emerge is that, just as the house itself challenges the often-taken-for-granted dichotomy between container and contained in the fact that the house is larger on the inside than on the outside, so too this very dichotomy is inverted repeatedly in manipulations of the narrative structure.
One clear example is the peculiar nature of the relationship between Johnny Truant and Zampanò: the reader is being told that Zampanò and Johnny Truant are complete
heritage to edit. Nonetheless, in the process of the editing work a very intimate relationship comes into being that closely resembles a father-son relationship. So immersed at one point Johnny Truant finds himself in reading and editing The Navidson Record, that he starts to lose sense of what belongs to his own diegetic layer and what to the diegetic layer of Zampanò‘s work. There is a motif of the Minotaur recurring in the intradiegetic narrative of the film, with which Johnny Truant starts to identify as if it were he himself who is the Minotaur inside the labyrinth. He has very vivid hallucinations of roaming though a labyrinth with a monstrously deformed but beastly strong body, in which he encounters a youth set out to kill him. At this point, he reflects:
And even though I have no idea how I got to be so deformed, I do know. And this knowledge comes suddenly. I‘m here because when I speak my words come out in cracks and groans, and what‘s more I‘ve been put here by an old man, a dead man, by one who called me son though he was not my father. (Danielewski, HoL 404)
The father figure mentioned here is reminiscent of Zampanò. What one sees here is an inversion of the container-contained polarity, as now it is the narrative Johnny Truant is editing, and to which he should have ontological primacy, which is in fact containing him, so that the editor finds himself entrapped in the book he is editing. One reading of this
admittedly would be to interpret this as a metaphor for Johnny Truant‘s obsessive engagement with editing The Navidson Record. However, N. Katherine Hayles also noted various parallels between Johnny Truant and the Minotaur, and has even hypothesized that ―The Minotaur‖ is in fact an anagram for ―O Im He Truant‖ (798). However, Zampanò himself also writes about a longing for a son, and quite uncannily his description of this wished-for son almost literally coincides with Johnny Truant‘s curriculum vitae:
Perhaps in the margins of darkness, I could recreate a son who is not missing; who lives beyond even my own imagination and invention; whose lusts, stupidities, and strengths carry him farther than even he or I can anticipate; who sees the world for what it is; and consequently bears the burden of everyone‘s tomorrow with
The very boundaries between container and contained are violated repeatedly
throughout the diegetic levels: Zampanò writes about a monster lurking inside the labyrinth of the house, but eventually ends up dead, presumably killed by that very same monster he wrote about. The paramedics could not find anything violent about Zampanò‘s death, but next to his corpse are claw marks in the floor reminiscent of the claws of the monster inside the
labyrinth. The first version of The Navidson Record film to appear is a teaser called ―The Five and a Half Minute Hallway,‖ whereas the scene in which Johnny Truant says goodbye to his mother as she is institutionalized also takes five-and-a-half minutes. Inside the labyrinth, there is a mysterious growl haunting the place, but when Pelafina tries to suffocate her son Johnny, his father (simultaneously her husband) roars out of exasperation, and the sound of this maddened howl is referred to as a ―growl‖ as well. As for Pelafina, she is sedated by pills with the same colors (―madder, azure, celadon, gamboge‖ [Danielewski, HoL 615]) as the colors of the locks on the door that is to abjure the horrors of the labyrinth in the house (red, yellow, green and blue [Danielewski, HoL 61]). More startling, however, is the encrypted allusion to her being acquainted with Zampanò even though no mention of this acquaintance is to be found on any other place in the novel, nor is an explanation offered how the two should have got to know one another. In one of her letters to her son, she writes ―many years destroyed. Endless arrangements – re. zealous accommodations, medical prescriptions, & needless other wonders, however obvious – debilitating in deed; you ought understand – letting occur such evil?‖ (Danielewski, HoL 615), which – if one were to decrypt it by means of a key she herself provides, e.g. acrostics (HoL 619) – translates as ―my dear Zampanò, who did you lose?‖
The fluidity of the boundaries between these various layers of mediation has caused people to question whether there might perhaps be one narrator which is more important than all the others and that lies at the foundation of all the narration. Could the entire The Navidson
Record perhaps be a hallucination by Pelafina? Could it be possible that Johnny Truant is a
undermining the ontological certainty of the narrators and also by emphasizing how they have lost any claim of authenticity of their narration, House of Leaves underlines the importance of free play and personal interpretation towards narration, similar to the absence of any sacred text (as discussed in Section 2.1).8 Moreover, all these metalepses effectuate playful
transgressions with the distinction between container and contained (just as the house itself, which is larger on the inside than on the outside, does this). This is important as it
demonstrates a key feature for an understanding of the novel, namely the affirmative
celebration of various aspects of reality that coexist even though they seem to be principally at odds with one another, something which challenges our everyday conception of reality at a fundamental level. House of Leaves is a novel that abounds with paradoxes and logical
impossibilities, and is in this sense reminiscent of other logic-challenging works of art such as the novels by Jorge Luis Borges or the drawings by M. C. Escher.9
2.3 – Postmodernism vs. post-postmodernism
It is the aim of this thesis to explore the signification of the house and the experience of space in House of Leaves, but how can this question be answered if not a single description by a narrator, not a single utterance ascribed to a character, can be taken at face value? Naturally, the unreliability of the text and of the narrators render any attempt at a thematic, hermeneutic reading of the novel problematic. Furthermore, how is one to go about in interpreting a novel that embraces aspects of reality that are so fundamentally at odds with one another? If the novel is more rule-defying than rule-bound, and if logic in it is challenged and played with rather than adhered to, would not any endeavor to impose some sort of logic on it be failed from the outset? In this section, I will demonstrate that answering these questions largely depends on whether one is to classify House of Leaves as a postmodernist or as a post-postmodernist work of literature.
For those who classify the novel as postmodernist, any definitive thematic reading of the house seems out of the question. As Mark Hansen asserts: ―the important point here is that any effort to recuperate a level of thematic interpretation falters in the face of the
8
I do of course realize that this seems to conflict with my own incorporation of quotations from interviews with the author to substantiate my readings of the novel. However, I mainly made use of Danielewski’s commentary on his own work because his personal readings were very intriguing and thought-provoking, I do not wish to claim that his own opinion on House of Leaves is in any way definitive (as this would of course violate the main premises operating in the novel regarding interpretation).
9 For a thorough analysis of the influence of Borges’ oeuvre on House of Leaves, see Natalie Hamilton. “The
epistemological-ontological hurdles the text insistently sets into place everywhere the reader turns‖ (619). His analysis is a very medium-specific reading of the novel, focusing on the significance of the meaning of the various levels of narration and recording, as not only this has primacy over a thematic reading, but even makes any thematic reading redundant. Hansen therefore argues that because of the inextricable epistemological and ontological intricacies there can only exist a personal, singular and highly-subjective interpretation and reading of what the house is about, and any reading transcending the personal level is unwarranted (634-635). Rune Graulund more or less adheres to this point when she argues that the house is the signifier for the epistemological uncertainties of post-modernity itself: ―Danielewski‘s tale of the haunted house is therefore a parable for the postmodern realization that the concepts of the real, the authentic and the true – once stable and familiar concepts – now ring uncannily hollow‖ (387). In such a reading, the house can only be interpreted as a mere absence: the absence of knowledge, of objectivity and of any ultimate Truth.
There are good reasons for classifying House of Leaves as a postmodern novel, as its almost infinite self-referentiality, the continuous self-undermining of the text and the logic-defying paradoxes assert. The fact that not a single fragment of the text can be seen as
ultimately definitive but is always reliant on other texts and narrators and seems to refer back to them, makes House of Leaves very much like a text in the Derridean sense of the word, that is to say as a ―signifier to the signifier,‖ and so on ad infinitum (Derrida 7). The Chinese-box-like layering of intradiegtic layers of narration indeed closely reflects the acts of reading and writing as processes mise en abyme. The challenging of the often-taken-for-granted polarity between container and contained, too, certainly has roots back into Derrida‘s
conceptualization of exteriority: ―The outside bears with the inside a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority. The memory of the outside was always present within the inside, imprisoned outside the outside, and vice versa‖ (35). Taken to its extreme, a complete Derridean reading of House of Leaves would imply that the novel is nothing but a system of signs that seems to refer to itself infinitely without any anchoring whatsoever in reality (Derrida 50); however, would such an interpretation be justified?
One way of challenging such a claim would be to assert that House of Leaves is a post-postmodernist novel instead. However, before exploring the nuances of such an argument, I would first like to explore briefly the distinction between postmodernism and
postmodern literature, such as those by Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Beckett, William
Burroughs and Italo Calvino, which were very much anti-establishment not only in content but also clearly in their ironical and self-referential style. The same can be said, naturally, of the ‗canonical texts‘ of postmodern theory as well, such as those by Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. These certainly were radical books which caused a major rupture in Western thought and which debunked the very conceptualization of reality (McLaughlin 65). However, today postmodernism has become mainstream and
self-debunking is more fashionable than ever: ―Nowadays, it is hip to put everything within parenthesis and to debunk everything without making a single statement, so that in effect postmodern irony has become conservative.‖ (McLaughlin 66). Indeed, by undermining any attempt at constructing narratives or signification, no challenges to the status-quo are allowed, as no alternatives to the hegemonic mindset can be formulated in a culture of pervasive irony and self-undermining which debunks any positive affirmation of out-of-the-box thinking or social criticism. Post-postmodernism (in the manner it is defined and adhered to by authors and critics inspired by the current) is a move away from that, as it endeavors to move away from the paralysis of postmodernist self-referentiality back again to the construction of narratives. However, it certainly is not a reactionary trend, as, firstly, it does not disregard the pitfalls of meaning-making as established by postmodernism (McLaughlin 67); secondly, it has arisen out of the realization that, these days, to create a story with signifiers signifying a concrete signified would be effectively avant-garde (McLaughlin 65).
Josh Toth is one critic who agrees with such a post-postmodern reading of the novel. Although he does not ignore the countless twists and subtle references by which House of
Leaves destabilizes itself epistemologically and ontologically, one can find hidden within
these postmodern ironies a longing for some sort of closure. For example, The Navidson
Record and Johnny Truant‘s autobiography are in themselves (that is to say, deprived from
couple. Johnny Truant, too, finds some form of closure at the very end of his autobiography: as he encounters a band that sings about events from the book he has edited, he feels some contentment over his work and senses his job has been fulfilled satisfactory:
There‘s no question I cherished the substance of those pages, however imperfect, however incomplete. Though in that respect they were absolutely complete, every error and unfinished gesture and all that inaudible discourse, preserved and intact. Here now, resting in the palms of my hands, an echo from across years. (Danielewski,
HoL 514)
As a consequence, according to Toth, House of Leaves is not a novel with an infinite postponement of any form of closure whatsoever as is typical for postmodernism (192). Furthermore, he argues:
For all of its fluidity and layers of remediation, House of Leaves has a static and foundational core. It is about a house and a blind scholar and a photographer and a young miscreant. It is not, for instance, about motorcycle gangs. Such an interpretation exceeds its limit. Likewise, the space at the heart of House of Leaves has its own limits: ashgray walls, hallways and rooms, a staircase. It has absolutes. (190)
On the basis of these premises, Toth concludes that in spite of all its paradoxes and ontological and epistemological incongruities, ―House of Leaves is far less invested in the postmodern repudiation of teleological truth claims than it is in the recovery of, or return to, the possibility of such claims‖ (182). In light of this, the novel ―can thus be understood as so many (non)returns to the subject, the family, the novel, and (perhaps, most subtly) the truly American‖ (Toth 182).
The arguments Toth offers are persuasive enough to refute a reading of House of
Leaves as a postmodernist novel pur sang, but there is yet another important argument to take
into consideration: if everything in the novel is a mere simulacrum, why then are so many characters in the novel so obsessed by the house? As Johnny Truant reflects on the flaws of the text that are inherent to its mediated nature and the seemingly unbridgeable paradoxes that haunt the narrative, he says: ―Add to that my own mistakes (and there‘s no doubt I‘m
not take the story very seriously, he is quite dramatic in describing the effect reading about the novel has on him:
[N]o matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you‘ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You‘ll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or
unconscious. And then for better or worse you‘ll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you‘ve got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmare will begin. (Danielewski, HoL xxiii)
3.) The house: beyond interpretation?
3.1 – “Incontrovertibly there but inviable to interpretation”
The house on Ash Tree Lane, situated somewhere in the state of Virginia, is at first sight in many respects a very ordinary house. It is only after a few weeks since the Navidsons have moved in, though, that a closet room suddenly emerges that was not there earlier. This prompts Navidson to call his brother Tom to measure the exact dimensions of the house, which results into the discovery that the house is ¼‖ larger on the inside than on the outside. As the Navidsons become more and more obsessed with the peculiar spatial dimensions of the house, the closet room expands into a hallway and eventually into a labyrinth of infinite size and complexity. Subsequently, a series of explorative expeditions (Exploration A and #1 up until #5) is launched in an attempt to penetrate and demystify the obscurities of that labyrinth. However, as the characters venture through the hallways of the labyrinth, they find their mental condition radically destabilized due to the effects of the maze, just as it amplifies the preexisting tensions in the relationship between Karen and Navidson. Despite the repeated endeavors to clarify the mystery surrounding the labyrinth, though, it ultimately remains beyond definition. In the words of Zampanò: ―The monolith in 2001 seems the most appropriate cinematic analog, incontrovertibly there but virtually inviable to interpretation. Similarly the hallway also remains meaningless, though it is most assuredly not without effect‖ (Danielewski, HoL 69). The unwillingness of the labyrinth to fit into any neat
categorization, to be domesticated by means of a suitable label to put on it as to disavow any of its uncanniness, sparks a vehement discussion amongst both the characters in The Navidson
Record as well as scholars commenting on the film to interpret it. This chapter examines this
very dialectic between on the one hand the house and the labyrinth within it defying any form of meaning and on the other hand the characters trying to impose meaning upon them.
does not think about for some time eventually disappear, such as Velcro and shoelaces. Furthermore, most devices to measure the place, such as compasses and altimeters, do not function there, just as radios have only limited range inside, even though odometers seem to function more or less normally.
However, the house also has several features which simply defy logic and violate the physical laws currently known to humans: the size of the hallways is inconsistent, varying from no larger than a closet room to what at one point is measured to be even larger than the circumference of the earth. The entry point of the maze is also subject to change: on page 4 it is described to be on the north wall of the house, whereas on page 57 the very same wall, at the very same moment in the narrative, by exactly the same narrator (Zampanò) is said to be situated on the west wall. On page 319, however, a character claims that the entrance is to be found on the south wall. The age of the labyrinth, too, is quite perplexing, as wall samples taken from its hallways indicate that it probably outdates the age of the Solar system.
Consequently, despite the fact that it has some regular patterns, in many ways it is a structure that simply cannot exist, yet it is there, hence its very presence is mind-boggling.
Because of the fact that the labyrinth inside the house defies all the laws of logic and physics, it transcends understanding, and is effectively unchartable. This aspect is also emphasized in chapter IX, which is called by Zampanò in Appendix A, ―Possible Chapter Titles‖ as ―The Labyrinth.‖ In this chapter IX, one can find on pages 113-114 a reference to Penelope Doob‘s The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiquity through the Middle
Ages, in which a distinction is made between those who wander inside the labyrinth and are
struggling to make sense out of it, and those who view it from above and to whom it is an ordered structure. However, Zampanò hastens to add that this distinction is inapplicable here, as there is no possible position above the maze on Ash Tree Lane to grant a superior position of knowledge and insight. There is a marked contrast, then, between the desire of those who walk through the labyrinth and who want to know it and the labyrinth itself which is
principally unknowable:
Nonetheless, due to its perplexing nature, the labyrinth sparkles curiosity and a desire among those who walk through it to map it and to impose some structure upon it:
It would be fantastic if based on footage from The Navidson Record someone were able to reconstruct a bauplan for the house. Of course this is an impossibility, not only due to the wall-shifts but also the film‘s constant deconstruction of continuity,
frequent jump cuts prohibiting any sort of accurate mapmaking. Consequently, in lieu of a schematic, the film offers instead a schismatic rendering of empty rooms, long hallways, and dead ends, perpetually promising but forever eluding the finality of an immutable layout. (Danielewski, HoL 109)
There is, then, an ongoing and never-resolved dialectic between the curiosity of the maze-treaders versus the epistemological resistance of the labyrinth itself.
It is highly interesting, though, to see how this dialectic is expressed in textual terms, as if it is not so much the incomprehensibility but the illegibility of the labyrinth which is really at stake here. The map or bauplan of which the previous quotation speaks of is effectively a graphic construct, just as the epistemologically superior vantage point from above mentioned by Penelope Doob usually refers to looking at graphic representations of labyrinths. These mentions are in fact part of a recurring pattern in the novel of emphasis on the textual aspects of the labyrinth.. Consequently, in Exploration A, when Will Navidson walks through the mysterious hallways for the first time, one reads the following description:
Still, no matter how far Navidson proceeds, down this particular passageway, his light never comes close to touching the punctuation point promised by the converging perspective lines, sliding on and on and on, spawning one space after another, a constant stream of corners and walls, all of them unreadable and perfectly smooth. (Danielesski, HoL 64, my italics)
The maze is metaphorically equated to a text here. Further on in the novel, when the
labyrinthine aspects of the house intrude upon the domesticity in the house and the house is about to swallow Tom, one can read the house being described in similar terms:
Penelope Doob emphasizes that labyrinths do not have to be physical structures, but that verbal or textual labyrinths frequently can be found as well (82). The subtle references
provided in the quotations above therefore obscure whether the labyrinth on Ash Tree Lane is a physical structure or perhaps even a textual one.
That the maze is textual as much as physical is expressed as well in the very layout of chapter IX, in which the text is structured as a labyrinth. Here, the page is split up into various boxes containing a profusion of information which overwhelms the reader and in which a plethora of footnotes are given with an overkill of information that instead of providing clarity only obscures our comprehension of the text. The flow of the text on the physical pages runs amok and becomes discontinuous and erring, up to the point that the footnotes refer to themselves and to points back in the text, as if it were a closed and self-referential system, which thus provides the reader a variety of paths that s/he can choose to read, so that the chapter itself effectively becomes a labyrinth, in which one needs to navigate one‘s way (Chanes, passim).10 However, the footnotes going haywire do more than to construct a textual labyrinth, they, too, refer to the labyrinth as illegible: every footnote attempts to provide some sort of information by means of sorting the information of the maze into some cognitive schema or frame (in Goffman‘s sense of the word). Footnote 144 attempts to explain the labyrinth by providing a list of everything that is not present in the maze (a list that is of course potentially infinite and hence doomed to fail from the outset), footnote 146 provides a list that attempts to be comprehensive in all the architectural sources that do not resemble the house (again, a list which contains a myriad of information but which by its very nature cannot be complete) and footnote 167 goes into all the literary sources that are echoed in the manifestation of the labyrinth: a long list with a plethora of sources which by its abundant nature obscures more than it clarifies. This profusion of information and vast gamut of possible schemas to understand the maze fails to capture the essence of the labyrinth, as it overwhelms the reader with an excess of information while at the same time being far from comprehensive. In short, the chaos of the footnotes is an expression of the inability of human conceptualization to process and categorize what is going on inside the maze. Of course, the inability of Navidson to read the walls of the hallway and the incoherence of the footnotes to form a legible explanation are two things on separate layers of narration, but the effect they
10
bring about is principally the same: incomprehension is expressed in terms of illegibility, which indicates that the maze on Ash Tree Lane is more a textual construct than a physical edifice. The spatial layout of chapter IX can therefore be seen as an expression on the physical page of the very same incapability of schemas and frames to clarify and convey to the flesh-and-blood reader outside the novel the confusion of the potentially infinite complexity as is described by the characters‘ incomprehension of the maze, or the lack of consensus amongst (fictional) critics discussing The Navidson Record.
In light of the frequent appearance of references to Derrida in the novel, the repeated emphasis that the maze is a text in combination with its transcendence of conceptual
frameworks make it seem highly probable that the labyrinth is portrayed in House of Leaves as a Derridean text. The maze is presented as a self-referential and closed system, inviable to interpretation, and the words in the text of the labyrinth are equally unreadable as the
Derridean archi-écriture. Implicitly, therefore, the maze is textually represented in the novel as symbolic for post-modernity itself. On page 390 Navidson writes in a letter to Karen that the labyrinth is God itself, as a figure of speech to underline how it is infinitely beyond human understanding, infinitely self-enclosed and self-referential. This of course immediately brings to mind Derrida‘s transcendental signified, as if solving the mystery of the house were to solve all problems regarding meaning and interpretation.
3.2 – Meaning-making and meta-cognition
Probably the hegemonic system of thought the 21st-century Western person relies on for the clarification of the unknown would be science; however, it seems utterly unable to make sense out of the house. As I have mentioned in the introductory chapter already, the strength of the science lies on the validity of the equal sign, where this falters science loses its say. This is also probably the reason why instruments measuring the house, such as
of course a severe indictment of the inefficacy of science, as it is assigned here the same level of efficacy as a pseudo-science.11
It must be said here, though, that not only science, but also all other systems of
thought are incapable of clarifying the mystery of the house. Zampanò has incorporated in his analysis of The Navidson Record the analysis of countless scholars giving their own
interpretation of the film, yet there is hardly any consensus between them, and in fact they offer more confusion than certainty. For instance, on the question why Navidson decided to revisit the house in Exploration #5, no less than three distinct theories exist: the Kellog-Antwerk Claim, the Bister-Frieden-Josephson Criteria and the Haven-Slocum Theory. Within
The Navidson Record, too, some of this academic controversy surrounding the signification of
the house is present, particularly in chapter XV, where Karen Green has interviewed a variety of famous intellectuals to offer their analysis of the house. The ―Partial Transcript of What Some Have Thought‖ underlines the thematically protean nature of the house, as every scholar projects something of their own preconceptions on the house, but the sum of their interpretive efforts is dissonance and ambiguity. Camille Paglia, a feminist, interprets it as the symbol for the superiority of women over men; Jacques Derrida, for whom the
conceptualization of ‗the Other‘ is at the core of his philosophical oeuvre, naturally sees it as a manifestation of the Other too, and Stephen King, the popular horror writer, underscores how it is ―pretty darn scary‖ (Danielewski, HoL 364), whereas Steve Wozniak, the inventor who contributed significantly to the technique of Apple computers, perceives the house as a
conglomerate of computer chips. In effect, it seems as if the house were merely a blank screen on which people interpreting it project their own preconceptions. Such a reading of the house would be underlined by the fact that the word house and its variants in other languages (i.e.
Haus, casa, domus, maison) are colored in blue ink. N. Katherine Hayles has suggested that
this is a reference to the practice in films to use blue screens as a backdrop to project imagery
11
In all fairness it must be said, however, that up to some degree the various layers of mediation are to blame for the apparent inefficacy of science as well. Zampanò’s manuscript contained originally an excerpt of all the scientific findings on the house about two dozens of pages, but most of this was lost in the process of
upon it, e.g. maps used by weathermen for presenting their forecast, so that it in effect refers to the characteristic of the house for people to project their own ideas upon it (792).12
What all these scholars have in common with one another, though, is the fact that they try to impose upon the house a linear thematic reading, in which they attempt to attribute a single symbolic significance to it, reducing it to a signifier of whatever personal issue they project upon it. However, every new thematic reading offered becomes this way just another thematic reading, offering nothing structurally new and in fact obscuring things even further, as the larger the amount of interpretations becomes, the more difficult it is to guess which one should be definitive in any way. It is because of this that Julius Greve concludes that House of
Leaves already contains so much criticism and is already so self-reflexive that it in principle
makes the task of the critic redundant, as there is nothing further of value to add to the debate of the house. Greve argues that it in effect demonstrates the superfluity of criticism and hermeneutics, as the profusion of opinions and interpretations it generates is so overwhelming that it only serves to demonstrate the futility of the task (passim).
Nonetheless, some critics external to the book (i.e. outside the fictional story world of the novel and in our own physical universe), have worked along the same lines as the critics in ―A Partial Transcript of What Some have Thought by Karen Green,‖ supplementing the already large gamut of thematic readings with yet another one. It should never be forgotten that there is of course a sharp ontological distinction between the critics within and outside the novel: House of Leaves has incorporated both fictional and real sources in an attempt to undermine this distinction as much as possible, but it should be kept in mind that the criticism within the novel is an image presented by the novel of what criticism is. This image may be mirroring criticism as it actually is, but it does not need to be so, as flesh-and-blood critics have a will of their own and are theoretically free to frame the novel in lines of thought different from how the novel presents criticism. Nonetheless, it is therefore all the more remarkable that real-life critics outside the novel frequently have taken over some aspects of criticism that are portrayed as ineffective in the fictional criticism inside House of Leaves. Anaïs Guilet, for instance, offers in her article ―Du Chaos Domestique à l‘Impossible
Domestication du Chaos dans House of Leaves de Mark Z. Danielewski‖ an extensive reading in which she interprets the house as a signifier for chaos theory. The analogy is not wrong, but it does not offer any further clarification as the house is textually constructed in such a way to
12
be open to potentially an infinite amount of readings. Nele Bemong goes even further than this by not only reflecting whether yet another thematic reading would not perhaps be
redundant, but by even taking the thematic readings offered by the critics in Karen‘s transcript very seriously.13 Her analysis of the labyrinth is based on the theories by Freud and Lacan, in which she by means of a psychoanalytical reading interprets Navidson‘s desire to go into the house as an expression of a mixture of subconscious desires: a craving of mastery over the feminine combined with a significant dose of Thanatos. To substantiate her argument, she incorporates quotations from Camille Paglia as offered in Karen‘s transcript. In doing so, Bemong disregards the fact that the juxtaposition of all the thematic readings in that section effectively render them problematic and in addition she also overlooks the satirical aspects of some of these comments, taking them seriously instead. For instance, the fictitious Paglia‘s making a pass at Karen and her comment to Johnny Truant‘s inquiry to ―get lost, jerk‖ (Danielewski, HoL 354) ridicule her militant-feminist attitude. As a consequence, I would argue that ―A Partial Manuscript of What Some have Thought‖ is more a parody of meaning-making and scholarly interpretation than a helpful tool for a linear, definitive thematic analysis of the house.
When critics are confronted with the incongruities of the house and the manner in which it defies all logic, two options present themselves: either to attempt to fit the house into some frame (in Goffman‘s sense of the word) or to state that the house is beyond framing and hence beyond meaning and interpretation. In the first case, commentators have to integrate various elements that are unbridgeable according to physical and logical laws; consequently, they are bound to experience some sort of cognitive dissonance,14 which has to be soothed by reducing one aspect of the thematically polymorphous house and by cramming the rest of it into some sort of frame to classify the phenomenon and to mitigate the cognitive dissonance. Classification, or any form of reducing the house to a single thematic reading, is soothing to the critic, as it deprives the house of its unsettling characteristics. In the words of Goffman: ―Let me repeat: in our society the very significant assumption is generally made that all events
13 In this paragraph, I have not incorporated in-line page references to her article, as I consulted it digitally and
it did not have pagination.
14
– without exception – can be contained and managed within the conventional system of beliefs. We tolerate the unexplained but not the inexplicable‖ (30.) Goffman attributes to Western thought the maxim that some sort of frame must exist to capture and explain the event entirely (111), even though any objective grounds for verifying or falsifying the validity of such a frame in absolute terms is missing (200). It is clear that such an approach is overly reductionist towards the complexity of the house. The second option, however, would be merely another flawed strategy to cope with the paradoxes of the house, namely denial. By denying the house of any meaning, the critic refuses to meet the challenge of meaning-making that the house presents: irrespective of whether the events on Ash Tree Lane as presented in
The Navidson Record are genuine or a hoax, they present a contestation of the manner in
which reality is framed, and because of this very fact alone cannot be insignificant or meaningless. This can be explained analogously by an analysis of the function of circus freaks, who, according to Goffman, quintessentially serve to illustrate to circus patrons the very structure and limitations of their frameworks (31). So, too, the house is of interest to the critic because of the very cognitive dissonance that emerges from it, because of the very limitations of frameworks that it illustrates. In short, the house is of interest as a generator of and catalyst for meaning-making.15
If one were to proceed with analyzing the house from this perspective, though, the question whether there is any ultimate or definitive frame to fit the house in does not become redundant, but it is replaced by an even more urgent question, namely in what manner the house prompts and catalyzes meaning-making. It is in this respect that my approach differs from that of Catherine Hagood, who also interprets the house as a generator of meaning-making. However, she has a somewhat different take on what this entails for the manner in which to analyze the house: Hagood simply concludes from this fact that no claims to a definitive meaning of the house can be made, whereas I proceed from that point on to analyze the meaning-making processes at a meta-level and from those points on move back again to what the house means as a generator of meaning-making. Rather than merely concluding from this that no definitive truth-claims can be made with respect to the house, as she does, I am interested in what the deferment of definitive meaning and the subjective evaluations of the house mean for the house itself and the way it functions. If one were to apply such an approach to the interpretation of the novel, it would be necessary to look at the processes of
15
meaning-making generated by the house at a meta-level: in which ways does the house incite people to generate meanings, how do these meaning-making processes occur, how are existing frames in these meanings attributed to the house either challenged or validated? These are the questions I intend to explore for the rest of this thesis. However, it is not my goal simply to map the various reactions the characters in the novel have towards the house, as the possible reactions the house can engender are potentially infinite, and surveying this would only lead to a broad kaleidoscope of interpretations. Rather, it is my aim to analyze the manner in which these reactions and framings are formed to clarify the house itself, in the way it functions as a generator of meaning-making. Because I would like to go back to the meaning of the house through the meanings that the characters project upon it, this thesis is partly hermeneutic and partly hermeneutic at a meta-level. When mapping the lived
experience of space as textually presented in the novel, on basis of which these meaning-making processes occur, it is important both to give close readings of the presentation of space itself and to scrutinize the manner in which the characters react to it. The first of these requires hermeneutics, the second analytical goal necessitates me to operate more at a meta-level.
Let me be clear, though, that I absolutely agree that in an ideal research project, the claims of how the house in the novel functions as a generator of meaning-making should be backed up, in addition to the hermeneutical and meta-hermeneutical approach I adopt in this thesis, by empirical reader-response research to verify if the same processes of meaning-making that occur inside the novel are also applicable outside the fictional world for the reader as well. However, there are two reasons for not doing do. First of all, the novel is in itself already very self-reflexive on the processes of reading, as the various layers of narration and editing in effect (up to some degree) shows reading as a phenomenon mise en abyme: each new level of mediation in the novel contains parenthetical remarks on the importance of the personal act of reading and interpreting it. As such, the act of reading is never presented in the novel as exhaustive or finite but as a potentially infinitely recursive process. This
