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Text of the page (random words):
evening all afternoon house of leaves by emily on november 18 2011 8 29 pm 24 comments the plot of mark danielewski s house of leaves involves a spatially unbounded ever shifting labyrinth that sprawls beneath a suburban virginia home exhausting maddening and eventually devouring almost everyone who dares to enter and on many occasions while reading the novel i too felt in danger of getting crushed under the book s labyrinthine narrative not because of the effectiveness of the author s scene setting or even the creative typesetting which twists and writhes on the page but because of the sheer weight of the elaborate metafictional apparatus with which the novel is encrusted more than a haunted house story or an examination of family history and the beast within though it is all of these things house of leaves strikes me as an exercise in the aesthetics of excess for example danielewski not content with a straight ahead story or a single frame narrative gives us a setup wherein anonymous editors remark on the copious charles kinbote style footnoting job done by young punk johnny truant on a faux scholarly manuscript written by blind immigrant zampanò a mass of analysis on a film the navidson report which does not exist even in the world of the book being either zampanò s delusion or his fictional creation and in case this triple nested narrative in which every level of editor comments on every other level is not enough danielewski throws in an extra 200 pages of appendices containing everything from scrawled sketches to personal letters to surprisingly sophisticated poems supposedly written by johnny truant while in europe the only things missing from the appendices are of course the materials zampanò himself intended to include this is the kind of joke danielewski loves there is a film within a film within the book in which real life celebrities like harold bloom camille paglia and stephen king comment on the navidson record while trying to hit on its director s wife an section that while hilarious and well executed is also insanely self indulgent and seems at least at first to add little to the novel as a whole everything about house of leaves is so flamboyantly complicated self consciously clever and self referential that i passed through phases of eye rolling impatience and muttered imprecations until eventually emerging into a clearing of wry amusement in which i was forced to take the book on its own terms calling it overdone seems beside the point like so much gothic fiction the novel s overdoneness is part of its charm even if it is overdone in a slightly different way than most take the footnotes regular readers know i strongly dislike the foster wallace esque use of ironically overdone footnotes in modern fiction blogging friend anthony provided me with the perfect articulation of my feelings when he quoted noel coward s quip that encountering a footnote is like going downstairs to answer the doorbell while making love but in danielewski s hands the footnotes get so bizarrely baroque that the experience is more like making love getting interrupted by the doorbell going downstairs opening the door to some kid delivering a pizza you didn t order following the pizza delivery kid down to the docks getting into a fistfight stowing away and ending up somewhere in japan at which point complaining about lack of sexual satisfaction seems strangely inadequate not only are the footnotes often themselves footnoted and every possible clever footnote joke is carried out here from hiding all the sex scenes in the footnotes to footnotes on foreign language passages which refuse to translate them to footnotes that go on for several pages to footnotes that refer back or forward 100 pages from one s current textual location to footnote feedback loops that lock the reader into a referential circle to footnotes that consist of only blank lines but in one case we get footnotes six levels deep with most of the page long sixth level footnote being itself crossed out plainly at this stage criticizing the text for lack of restraint is missing some kind of fundamental precept the whole enterprise is intentionally eschewing restraint and perhaps hoping to come out the other side but why is excess so important to this novel the question plaguing all such postmodern and or experimental fiction must rear its ugly head is there any substance to house of leaves beyond all its structural pyrotechnics as karen asks her bevy of enamored experts in the film within a film within a book does it all mean anything or is it just scary for most of the novel i assumed that the whole elaborate apparatus of house of leaves was a very complex way of making the point that everything is open to interpretation that it s impossible to tell a true story because as soon as you begin documenting events you are already dealing with a simulacra and that even if you could somehow manage to speak truth it wouldn t matter as there is no meaning behind events to begin with and danielewski certainly dwells at length on points like these conjuring a heated if imaginary remember that in the real world of the book the film doesn t exist debate about the authenticity of the navidson record in which slick and grainy filmic aesthetics are exposed as equally manufactured and one of the most compelling arguments for this film s documentary reality is simply that none of the filmmakers had the money to fake it they just never had enough money sonny beauregard conservatively estimates the special effects in the navidson record would cost a minimum of six and a half million dollars taking into account the total received for the guggenheim fellowship the nea grant everyone s credit limit on visa mastercard amex etc etc not to mention savings and equity navidson comes up five and a half million dollars short beauregard again considering the cost of special effects these days it is inconceivable how navidson could have created his house strangely then the best argument for fact is the absolute unaffordability of fiction thus reality becomes a kind of default for the poor man who can t afford anything better and irs records are more convincing then the evidence of our own eyes of course given that the entire fiction of the navidson record film is created in the world of the book by an ancient and poverty stricken blind man we are perhaps meant to dwell on differences between media the resources required to create convincing simulacra in words versus images and the corresponding differences in our levels of belief is it easier to believe in the truth of a film because we see it with our own eyes or more difficult because we know all the ways in which film can be manipulated are johnny truant s dread filled and sometimes unreliable footnotes and appendices more convincing than zampanò s text since truant s commentary creates the illusion that he shares our world the world of the observer and analyst and if there is no meaning attached to any of these real or faked stories what is our investment in their reality or lack thereof besides not only can we not tell or even sometimes care what s real outside ourselves but we re likely reading little more than ourselves into a work in the first place one of the functions of all the elaborate setup is that like the panel of experts whom karen asks to respond to her film within a film within the book danielewski s hall of mirrors eventually makes it clear that most people when they look at a piece of art see only the reflection of themselves when johnny truant reads and becomes obsessed with the navidson record it s the ghosts of his own past that come back to him when harold bloom watches karen s film about the haunted house he sees his own pet theories on the anxiety of influence and when navidson himself enters the labyrinth under his house he s eventually left with absolutely no visual or tactile input except what s inside his own body and head the minotaur at the center of the labyrinth is us as all the unsuccessfully expunged footnotes indicate and we are perfectly capable of tearing ourselves into shreds or occasionally showing ourselves compassion notes on disgust for more information on the disgust project see here for a book that s ostensibly a horror story at least part time there is remarkably little explicit disgust in house of leaves less than your average edith wharton novel for example and this is interesting on a couple of levels on one hand suggests that disgust is a bit of an intermediate emotion generally characters can t be simultaneously disgusted and petrified with horror in house of leaves the characters experiences progress from domestic or mundane to slightly creepy and then straight from there to shuddering with existential dread or outright terror there is one scene for example in which our post punk narrator johnny truant is so scared that he loses control of his bowels while at work in most situations having one s pants full of shit would be a gross out but since johnny believes he is about to get ripped limb from limb by some kind of vicious monster it s not his top concern likewise by the time truant allows his apartment to generate into a filthy mess that probably would disgust us could we see or smell it his mental state is too far gone to register that disgust or communicate it to us most of the book works like this there s just not a lot of space in which the characters have the luxury of being disgusted without the disgust being trumped by terror and it s tempting to extrapolate from here some general rule about disgust on the other hand this split between fear and disgust isn t necessarily a constant there are plenty of horror films for example that combine the scary with the disgusting over twitter the past few days sarah and i have been having come great conversations about house of leaves and the aliens franchise two different unrelated conversations regular readers here probably imagine i have a strong stomach because of the disgust project but in reality i m a total wuss about gross out films and i ve been avoiding the aliens movies for that reason even though the prospect of a kick ass sigourney weaver is hard to pass up anyway it got me thinking films featuring monsters or zombies that drip pus ooze or other bodily substances while also threatening the protagonists manage to combine disgust and fear with very little problem maybe the difference is that while the film s audience can be startled and drawn into the suspense of the story they still know that they are not in real danger and so have that part of their brains free for the disgust reaction whereas even in a film when a character is in a life or death situation he or she is probably going to prioritize the fear and adrenaline over the eww factor in house of leaves in any case the horror is all pretty non disgusting unless you consider getting hit on by harold bloom or camille paglia disgusting that is house of leaves was the october selection for the wolves reading group and i am scandalously late posting about it for which i really apologize and also apologize for the several months of non posting this month nathalie sarraute s the planetarium archives search subscribe to evening all afternoon june 2012 sun mon tue wed thu fri sat 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 archives select a month november 2011 october 2011 september 2011 august 2011 july 2011 june 2011 may 2011 april 2011 march 2011 february 2011 january 2011 december 2010 november 2010 october 2010 september 2010 august 2010 july 2010 june 2010 may 2010 april 2010 march 2010 february 2010 january 2010 december 2009 november 2009 october 2009 september 2009 august 2009 july 2009 june 2009 may 2009 april 2009 march 2009 february 2009 january 2009 december 2008 november 2008 january 2008 november 2007 august 2007 may 2007 april 2007 march 2007 february 2007 january 2007 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