Postmodernism And House Of Leaves

Postmodernist Anxiety in House of Leaves

Postmodernism is something of mystery until a person understands the main concerns of the postmodernists. Although I finally understood postmodernism in relation to Andy Warhol and his art, a topic that I find even more interesting is postmodernism in literature. Unbeknownst to me, I had been reading postmodern literature for years without ever realizing it. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, is a novel that contains many of the elements of postmodernism, and that illustrates the new and exciting direction in which postmodernist literature is taking us. Authors like Danielewski force us to re-examine our pre-conceived ideas about what good literature should be; his subversion of literature is parallel to the subversion found in other postmodern works of art, especially in Warhol’s art.

Even from the onset of the novel, the way in which authorship is handled is vastly different from other, more traditional novels. Danielewski’s name isn’t even on the title page: instead, underneath the title, it says “by Zampano”, and then directly underneath it says “with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant”. That wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary, if it wasn’t for the fact that Zampano and Johnny Truant are both characters in the novel. They are given authorial credit because the bulk of the novel is a critical explication on the subject of The Navidson Record, a documentary film about Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson’s bizarre encounters with (and within) his house. The only problem is that Zampano’s House of Leaves was written only on scattered scraps of paper. Upon Zampano’s death, the character of Johnny Truant finds and gathers all the scraps of paper and assembled them into a book form. Johnny then adds his lengthy footnotes to the text; some of Johnny’s footnotes tell his own story about growing up—a story that parallel’s Zampano’s eventual madness and alienation from society due to his preoccupation with The Navidson Record, especially because Johnny can never find any proof that The Navidson Record ever existed. Danielewski’s book is presented to us as the second edition that has been compiled by Johnny, but professionally edited. This idea of an absence or removal of authorship is something that was also found in Warhol’s work. When discussing Warhol’s films, David James claims that “Warhol delegated more and more responsibility until . . . he was no more than a name attached to a product. [Warhol’s] erasure of authorship [was] his most characteristic authorial gesture.” Warhol’s practice of having his friends reproduce his artwork brought the term “originality” into question, and Danielewski goes even further than that. In Roland Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author”, Barthes questions the primacy and control that the author has over the text; without placing undue importance on the author, the reader has more control and responsibility for a textual construction of meaning. By removing the author, the text becomes a signifier instead of a signified, which makes House of Leaves more interesting, thought provoking and—if we subscribe to Ihab Hassan’s binary list of the differences between postmodernism and modernism—postmodern.

The question of reality is one that much postmodern literature deals with. Zampano’s writings begin by telling us how Will Navidson moves to the country with his family in an effort to settle down, and he is granted a Guggenheim Fellowship and the New Media Arts Grant to create a documentary about the process of a family settling into a new house. Things at the Navidson house are going along fine for a long time. Then, the Navidsons come back from a trip and instinctively feel that the house has changed. “The change was enormous. It was not, however, obvious—like for instance a fire, a robbery, or an act of vandalism. Quite the contrary, the horror was atypical. No one could deny that there had been an intrusion, but it was so odd no one knew how to respond . . . what took place amounts to a strange spatial violation which has already been described in a number of ways—namely surprising, unsettling, disturbing, but most of all uncanny” (24). Zampano uses the word “uncanny” in the Heidegger sense of the word: un-zuhause, which translated from German, simply means “not-at-home.” The change in the house is simply that there is now a closet in the bedroom. The Navidsons question whether they might have overlooked it somehow, but they know they haven’t; the closet has just become part of the house overnight. Will and his wife are puzzled, but are left somewhat satisfied by the police’s suggestion that someone must have broken into their house and built this new closet into their house. Shortly afterward, something happens that the Navidsons can’t explain away. They find out that, for a reason they can’t explain, the width and length of the house inside is 1/4” more than it is on the outside. In other words, the house is bigger on the inside than the outside. The next day, however, the inside width and length of the house exceed the outside measurements by 5/16”. The family is troubled because “no matter how many legal pads, napkins, or newspaper margins they fill with notes or equations, they cannot account for that fraction. 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” (32).

The sense of unreality increases even more when the hallway is introduced. The Navidson children are playing inside the house, when the parents hear their shouts. “The terrifying implications of their children’s shouts is now impossible to miss. No room in the house exceeds a length of twenty-five feet, let alone fifty feet, let alone fifty-six and a half feet, and yet Chad and Daisy’s voices are echoing, each call responding with an entirely separate answer. In the living room, Navidson discovers the echoes emanating from a dark doorless hallway which has appeared out of nowhere in the west all.” That hallway, which is dubbed the “Five and a Half Minute Hallway” disrupts our concept of reality the more we read about it. Navidson’s video recordings reveal that the ceilings are at least two hundred feet away, and although there is an opposing wall fifteen hundred feet away, it only opens up to an even larger dark void.

If Danielewski were to merely leave in these happenings that seem impossible or unreal to us, he would have succeeded in writing a creepy novel. By introducing the element of pseudo-intellectualism, he makes the reader actually confused about what is true and what is not. In his text, Zampano touches on subjects as varied as Heidegger and Greek mythology. He also meticulously documents all his sources with footnotes. Although Zampano includes many pop culture references—“Rosie O’Donell, however, offered a different perspective when she wryly remarked on Entertainment Tonight: ‘The fact that Holloway waited that long to use a compass only goes to show how men—even explorers—still refuse to ask for directions’”—what is more impressive is the academic name-dropping that Danielewski (through the voice of Zampano, of course) does. There are elements in the novel that we realize are obviously false, such as the point in the novel when Navidson’s wife interviews Camille Paglia about the events in their house on Ash Tree Lane. Even more disturbing, the footnotes are oftentimes fake, such as Dr. Isaiah Rosen’s article “Flawed Performances: A Consideration of the Actors in the Navidson Opus.” Even the fake articles are footnoted with precision and are made to appear in established publications like New York Times or New Republic. Yet, some of footnotes and names of people in academia that you would expect to be fake (like the list of one-hundred photographer that Zampano suggest a reader should look at to get a good example of a certain type of technique) are all real. In addition to the names, there are appendices that include Polaroids and original sketches of Zampano’s manuscript, as well as contrary evidence by the novel’s supposed editors that refutes Johnny Truant’s claim that he could never find anything to prove that The Navidson Record ever existed

This blurring of the boundaries between truth and fiction serves two purposes. The postmodern concern with questioning the boundary between truth and fiction helps us to get rid of our preconceptions. Fictive forms increasingly resemble those formerly associated with fact; we think of photographs and hard evidence as proof that something is “real”, but Danielewski uses it in House of Leaves to support something that is not real. This results in this hybrid form that is neither true nor false, but something either in between or completely different. This is echoed in the manner in which the novel is disconcerting; it’s not about being scared of vampires or ghosts, but about the fear of existential dread latent in the tensions between knowing and not knowing, about 3 a.m. anxieties and about the empty spaces in our awareness and apprehension of ourselves, others, and the world. The pseudo-intellecutalism works in the same manner by forcing the reader to question our inherent and unquestioning belief in the written word and in ideas or concepts that can be traced back to a reputable origin. So many of Danielewski’s academic footnotes are real, and as for the small percentage that are not—well, how many people bother to look into the references in a book or article they read? Most people take it for granted that the author would not lie to us. Danielewski shows us how the postmodernist preoccupation with the idea of knowledge is not only a valid, but also a vital one. Finally, on a slightly more comic level, this excessive use of quotations, footnotes, appendices, etc. is known as pastiche. Although in “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” Frederic Jameson calls pastiche a “blank parody” that does not have the same intentions as parody, one still gets the sense that Danielewski is mocking academic writing and its desire to reference just for the sake of referencing.

Perhaps one of the reasons that the novel is not easily forgettable is because it requires active participation from the reader. When Johnny Truant is telling his story, there’s a footnote to his footnotes, provided by the book’s editors. It reads: “Though Mr. Truant’s asides may often seem impenetrable, they are not without rhyme or reason. The reader who wishes to interpret Mr. Truant on his or her own may disregard this note. Those, however, who feel they would profit from a better understanding of his past may wish to proceed ahead and read his father’s obituary in Appendix II-D as well as those letter written by his institutionalized mother in Appendix II-E” (72). It isn’t very often that readers are explicitly given a choice as to what parts of the text they will read. Along this vein, there are also sections of the book that require that the reader break a code in order to discover another meaning. In Chapter VIII, which begins with the definition of what SOS means in Morse code, there is undoubtedly a code to break: all the paragraphs are of varying lengths (either short or long) and separated into groups of three or four. Although it sounds simple, I haven’t been able to break the code yet. This also appears in letters written in code from Johnny’s mother, who instructs him to read only the first letter of every word so they can write to each other in secrecy. As the stories in the novel progress—and as Johnny Truants descents into madness and unreality more and more—the book’s structure begins to crumble down. There are lists that run on for pages, but only on the left hand margin of the book, there are little blue boxes that alternate between containing the text for only one footnote and between containing the mirror image of that same text on the previous page. Footnotes start appearing in the middle of the text, sideways, upside down; sometimes there will only be one page or one sentence on a page, leaving the rest blank. The text mirrors the events, also: when a person is falling, the text on the page is falling or upside down. In short, all the rules are out for structure. Besides shattering our ideas of the structure and design of normal novels, the more interesting aspect here is the reader’s participation. If we look at Hassan’s list again, he claims postmodernist literature is “readerly” as opposed to “writerly”. This makes sense in that with Danielewski’s novel, the author gives the reader the freedom to choose how involved she wants to be with the text. If she doesn’t want to invest the time to try and figure out the codes, she can continue on, undisturbed with the rest of the novel. This is dramatically different from something like an Ernest Hemingway novel in which the only way to read is linearly and completely.

House of Leaves isn’t by any means a perfect book. Like Warhol’s innovative movies, sometimes it’s just boring; the footnotes and intellectualism become tedious and excessive, even if they are making a point. Even so, I think this novel serves as a perfect illustration of what postmodernist literature aims to be. Not only is it non-traditional and non-modernist, but it also touches on important issues such as knowledge, assumptions, and beliefs. Ultimately, the novel seems to be about the deconstruction of the worlds we’ve built around ourselves in order to feel safe and sane, and an exploration of what happens to people caught in the middle of that deconstruction; these are some of the very same topics that postmodernism tries to grapple with. Although postmodernism sometimes seems theoretical and non-applicable, Danielewski scares us into reflecting on these issues in a way that is much more personal and urgent.

Bibliography: