Danielewski’s book is one of those books that defies being summarized, which is good because I think the least interesting thing one can say about a book is rehashing the plot. That said, here’s an attempt at a summary: the book is a text describing a movie; the text itself has two different editors — one scholarly and the other decidedly not — and an extensive set of footnotes. The plot of the book, in so far as it has one, is about a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
The books is unique, although, later in this essay, I do suggest some important influences. Reading Danielewski’s book is a unique experience. In the words of Tom Le Clair New York Times:
I don’t know any secret handshakes, but I consider “House of Leaves” the most ingenious, profound and important novel published by an American so far this century. Its fun-house games and Escher-like tricks — lists, footnotes, photo collages, poems and typographical experiments not imagined by Sterne in “Tristram Shandy” — all contribute to the novel’s exploration of the abyss beneath the prison house of language, film and, possibly, life. “House of Leaves” demonstrates that the methods of concrete poetry and Internet hypertext can alchemize line-bound, hidebound fiction and thereby attract a large cohort of passionate young readers who might otherwise be playing video games.
Here are a few quotes from the book I wrote down while reading that, I think, say something about what the book is about:
“I wanted a closed, inviolate and most of all immutable space (p. xix).”
“Zampano’s entire project is about a film which doesn’t even exist (p. xix).”
It makes no difference that the documentary at the heart of the book is fiction… what’s real or isn’t doesn’t matter here. The consequences are the same (p. xx).
The inpossible is one thing when considered as a purely intellectual conceit. It is quite another thing when one faces a physical reality the mind and body cannot accept (p. 30).
… if this stuff is hard for you to stomach … then you should come to grips with the fact that you’ve got a TV dinner for a heart and you might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of an idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to crawl into (p. 53).
“There is no such thing as the last straw. There is only hay (p. 95).”
“Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say (p. 545).”
(Untitled Fragment)
Little solace comes
to those who grieve
when thoughts keep drifting
as wells keep shifting
and this great blue world of ours
seems a house of leaves
moments before the wind (p. 563).
“A professor’s view: “It’s the commentaries on Shakespeare that matter, not Shakespeare.” Anton Chekhov Notebooks (p. 646).”
“A book is a vast cemetery where for the most part one can no longer read the faded names on the tombstones (p. 646).”
“Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters. Henry David Thoreau Walden (p. 656).”
“Yeah well, sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand. Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson Cool Hand Luke”
“If there was a clue worth holding onto it was the nail, the strongest point that alone, at first, fixed and recreated the house (p. 580).”
Let me now say a few words about the pacing in House of Leaves.
Sometimes I raced though the book, with , at times, a single word on a page; other times I read the book at regular novel speed; and, occasionally, I read the book at truly slow speed. This pacing, of course, does not include the days and even weeks when I stopped reading to read other things or live my normal, non-reading, life.
In addition to the pace, House of Leaves is best read in print, rather than electronic form. And for me this fact is significant because much of what I read these days is in electronic form. Danielewski takes full advantages of a number of print techniques: different fonts, extensive footnotes, color (every time the word house is used it appear in blue, a fact I have yet to comprehend), text printed in different directions, more or fewer words per page (as few as one word per page at times), even a few pages with the text printed in reverse (mirror) format, as well as a few pictures, drawings, and other, non-textual, items.
In some ways a book is about re-reading rather reading because a person usually interprets a book, in part, based on other books (and texts such as movies, tv shows, family experiences) he or she has read before. However, having said that, allow me to quote a couple of lines from Nick Hornby’s collection of essays about reading books, Ten Years in the Tub: a decade of soaking in great books:
OK, I should have read David Copperfield before, and therefore deserve to be punished. But even the snootiest critic/publisher/whatever must presumably accept that we must all, at some point, read a book for the first time. I that the only thing really brainy people do with their lives is reread great works of fiction, but surely even james Wood and Harold Bloom read before they reread? (Maybe not. Maybe they’ve only ever reread, and that’s what separates them from us. Hats off to them.)
and
The last refuge of the scoundrel-critic is any version of the sentence, “Ultimately, this book is about fiction itself/this film is about film itself.” I have used the sentence myself, back in the days when I reviewed a lot of books and it’s bullshit: invariably all it means is that the film or novel has drawn attention to its own fictional state, which doesn’t get us very far, and which is why the critic never tells us exactly what the novel has to say about fiction itself. (Next time you see the sentence, which will probably be sometime in the next seven days if you read a lot of reviews, write to the critic and ask for elucidation.)
Moving on…
In my opinion, the following books could be seen as influences and related books on House of Leaves:
- Shirley Jackson The Haunting of Hill House
- Cervantes Don Quixote
- Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire
- Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths
- Plato Symposium
- David Foster Wallace Infinite Jest
- Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose
- David Markson Wittgenstein’s Mistress
- Mark Leyner Et Tu, Babe?
- Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow
- James Joyce Ulysses
- Homer The Odyssey
Let me spend a few minutes talking about these books and why I thought of them while reading House of Leaves.
Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is a subtle tale about a house that, slowly with subtle textual clues, becomes quite scary. But there is no monster or other obvious source of terror; the book works by linking the loneliness and awkwardness of the character with an occasional sound or sight that works on the mind of the main character and the reader. Danielewski’s book also is about a house with some small odd characteristic that produces a strong psychological effect on the main character and the reader.
Don Quixote is one of the first works of postmodern fiction or metafiction, well before the concept was more fully developed by Borges and Nabokov. At one point, the character does not like what the author plans to do and races to try and meet him and change his mind. The point is not what happens in the story, but the point is that what happens in the story draws attention to the fact that the story is a piece of fiction written by a person and the characters are not real.
Having mentioned postmodernism and Nabokov and Borges, let me spend a few minutes talking about them. Nabokov’s masterpiece, in my opinion at least, is Pale Fire. Pale Fire is a 999 line poem with an introduction, endnotes, and an index written by a person who did not write the poem. The poem is about one thing. The endnotes are an entirely different story about a person who claims to be an exiled king from a land called Zembla which may or may not resemble pre-Bolshevik Russia. Like Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Pale Fire has two different narrators and one of the challenges or joys of reading the book is trying to figure out how to read the story and which narrator to pay attention to (or the possibility that neither is actually the narrator).
Danielewski’s book, if it is about anything is about a house somewhere in Virginia, that, at first appears ordinary, later appears slightly bigger on the inside than on the outside, and, as time wears on, becomes more and more unusual, eventually resulting in catastrophe for the residents of the house. Even the printing of the word house is just a little odd. Every time the word house appears in the text, it is printed in blue. I also noticed that the words nuthouse and crack house appear in blue. However, the word apartment never appears in blue, only in standard black.
The book contains a long index that goes from page 661 to page 705. The list includes quite a number of words including:
action, address, again, air, ail, alone, always, and, April, army, aspirin, back, bag, blue, bookshelf, breath, brother, change, city, claw, close, closing, coffee, coincidence, cold,
as well as a whole host of other words. I am not at all sure why there is an index for this book; I can not think of when someone might use it. I suppose one reason for such an index is that it helps to add to the artifice that House of Leaves is some sort of scholarly text. Clearly, it is not.
The index also includes a number of words that, instead of having page numbers include the term DNE:
arterial, ballerina, buckles, bundle, buttress, canine, capricious, cartouche, claps, collagen, collector, condemn, confuse, copacetic, crab, custodian, dazzle, defenestration, denounce, denunciation, detritus, diner, disclose, discombobulating, disintegrate, disposess, dopphin, domus (black) eject, embalm, embarass, entomb, fiend, flaws, float, galleries, glean, hallucinate, hallucination, haus (black), hippo, house (black), immaculate, Immelmann, imminence, infanticide, Iran, janitorial, Jerusalem, lime, lubricants, maison (black), mast, masturbate, Minotaur (black), miscreant, mis-read, molest, muddle, mutilation, nudes, offends, perplexed, pigments, plummet, plywood, poach, profuse, ramp, rend, retire, schwarz, snowball, sprockets, stains, surreptitious, swivel, toad, triangle, tulip, turtle, umlaut, unsettled, whine, whore, willow, willowwisp, wrench, yank.
The DNE, I am guessing, means does not exist. The idea of an index in a book referring to things one can not find reminds me of Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire. One of the entries in the index of that book is crown jewels with the phrase “see Hiding Place”; loooking up Hiding Place one sees Potaynik (q.v.); Potaynik points to Taynik; and looking at the entry for Taynik one sees Russ., secret place; see Crown Jewels. Whether one should find the crown jewels or whether they are a red herring Nabokov gives to the reader obsessed with finding deep meaning where there is none, I can not say. But I can say that one can spend hours reading about this question on the Internet.
Lest one dismiss the idea right away, let me suggest that there is some virtue in looking for meaning in something that is not there. When I was teaching a freshman composition course using a fieldwork approach to research (you go out as a participant observer rather than doing archival/library research) one book introduced the concept of The Zero, although the term is just a shorthand for a sign that is not there. Generally, one interprets signs that are there such as thinking about how a red sign that says stop means one should stop the car before proceeding. But what does one make of an intersection with no stop sign: does the absence of a sign mean one can drive through without stopping. Or what happens when a traffic light is there but does not display any lights at all, say, after a storm? Does the absence of a light mean that one should just drive through without stopping? Probably not
Getting back to Danielewski’s book, what is one to make of the long list of items in the index with the DNE sign. I think it is fair to guess that DNE means does not exist or something similar. But why put items in an index that are not in a book. Are they like Nabokov’s hidden crown jewels, artifacts that some search for convinced they must be somewhere while others are convinced that the mention of them is just a ruse intended to send the reader on a wild goose chase? I have no idea.
Continuing with influences, I would suggest that virtually any book published in the second half of the twentieth century or in the twentieth century that can be considered experimental owes a debt to Jorge Luis Borges. Danielewski’s book is encyclopedic; all of Borges’s work is not. In fact, one of Borges most famous stories, “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is about a fictional world described in an encyclopedia. But Borges, out of economy, laziness, and, later in life, blindness, did not create that encyclopedia; instead, he just refers to it in a few pages in the story. However, the effect is the same.
A few days ago I began reading Harold Bloom’s book How To Read and Why. Bloom considers Borges to be one of the masters of the short story and has the following things to says about him in his book:
Borges, a skeptical visionary, charms us even as we accept his warning: reality caves in all too easily. Our individual fantasies may not be as elaborate as [his story] Tlon, nor as abstract. Yet Borges has sketched a universal tendency, and fulfilled a fundamental yearning as to why we read (p. 60).
Borges’ [stories] insist always upon their self-conscious status as artifices … one is not going to hear the lonely voice of a submerged element in the population, but rather a voice haunted by a plethora of literary voices, forerunners. “What greater glory for a God , then to be absolved of the world?” is Borges’ great outcry, as he professes his Alexandrianism … fir Borges, the world is a speculative illusion, or a labyrinth, or a mirror reflecting other mirrors (p. 57).
Someday in the next six months I will read Danielewski’s The Familiar, the first book in a projected twenty-seven volume work. Before that, the next book I will read will be Don Quixote on my kindle.
scott lives in Jersey now 