House of Leaves & Space

I haven't been living up to my promise to write something new every day. Most days I haven't had much of an excuse. Lazyness mostly. Other than writing an essay this time last week I have been focusing my attention on deciphering the various puzzles in my life right now. Some personal, some superficial. Street Fighter 4 is a superficial time sink that has recently imposed itself on my life but I think after tonight I'll be spreading my time out a little more evenly amongst the things that are keeping me busy these days. It's really quite amazing just how much has happened in the past week, though it would probably be more accurate to say that I'm looking around with a greater appreciation of things I usually take for granted, if not ignore completely.

But that's a discussion for another day. Tonight I want to go over a few aspects of House of Leaves. I am still reading it, however infrequently I actually turn a few pages. Going into the book I was afraid that it would be needlessly complicated. I guess I was half right. It's complicated but obvious enough about explaining it's own complexity as you attempt to navigate it. The thing I have been really enjoying about it is that there's a fairly obvious parallel between the themes of the book and the way it presents them to you, that is, the paths it opens up that the reader can travel on. During this writing I'll be using a lot of the language of movement. If you've read the book you can probably see why. It has a lot to do with space and paths, both physical and mental. Before I go any further I should note that I'm still fairly early in the page count of the book, but this doesn't mean that I'm not well into the story. The book looks big, but in reality, the space it occupies is not what it seems. Many pages contain less than a paragraph. Others are packed with dense overlapped piles of words that are essentially dead ends.

House of Leaves is able to create a sense of space in another way, which is the thing I really wanted to discuss. If you try to read straight through the main text of the book you will miss everything, and then when there is no clear way forward you will be lost. At the onset it is a formatted and familiar document. There are parts of personal narrative from one editor, clearly separated from other parts that appear to be an academic paper, complete with footnotes. For most people this is a known quantity and likewise the subject of these parts is of the normal life of a family who have bought a new house. As the story progresses it is revealed that something is not quite right about the house. It is larger on the inside than the outside. As the essay portion of House of Leaves delves into the mystery of the house the familiar format we have become used to starts to fall apart. Lengthy sections of personal anecdotes divert us from the main body of the essay which itself often goes down bizarre paths. As a reader our attention is constantly redirected towards footnotes, appendices, sections that had been eliminated completely then brought back until eventually we find ourselves in a labyrinth of footnotes, some relevant, some not. You may chase a note down several pages only to find that at the end it references another note that starts on the same page but is printed upside down and goes back the way you came. There are footnote pits that lead to nowhere and show you the mirror image of the words as you "climb back" to your original page. Sometimes it will tell you to read an appendix, or direct you to the wrong note. Navigating this section of the book disorients you and you find a way to mark your place so you know where to return to if you get lost amongst the words.

Ordinarily this would be a mess but just prior to this maze you can find in footnotes printed in red with a strikethrough (denoting a piece deleted then recovered) that the author was discussing the myth of the Minotaur and the labyrinth. The main text of the section also discusses a maze.

It's getting late so I'll have to cut this short, but the point I'm trying to make is that it is amazing that Danielewski has managed to make me think of his words as representing a physical space and that it actually works well. I can only hope that this idea is a fertile ground for other parallels in his writing mechanics and content.