Postmodernism And House Of Leaves<\/p>\n
Postmodernist Anxiety in House of Leaves<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s art.<\/p>\n
Even from the onset of the novel, the way in which authorship is handled is vastly different from other, more traditional novels. Danielewski\u2019s name isn\u2019t even on the title page: instead, underneath the title, it says \u201cby Zampano\u201d, and then directly underneath it says \u201cwith introduction and notes by Johnny Truant\u201d. That wouldn\u2019t seem out of the ordinary, if it wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s bizarre encounters with (and within) his house. The only problem is that Zampano\u2019s House of Leaves was written only on scattered scraps of paper. Upon Zampano\u2019s 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\u2019s footnotes tell his own story about growing up\u2014a story that parallel\u2019s Zampano\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s work. When discussing Warhol\u2019s films, David James claims that \u201cWarhol delegated more and more responsibility until . . . he was no more than a name attached to a product. [Warhol\u2019s] erasure of authorship [was] his most characteristic authorial gesture.\u201d Warhol\u2019s practice of having his friends reproduce his artwork brought the term \u201coriginality\u201d into question, and Danielewski goes even further than that. In Roland Barthes\u2019 essay, \u201cThe Death of the Author\u201d, 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\u2014if we subscribe to Ihab Hassan\u2019s binary list of the differences between postmodernism and modernism\u2014postmodern. <\/p>\n
The question of reality is one that much postmodern literature deals with. Zampano\u2019s 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. \u201cThe change was enormous. It was not, however, obvious\u2014like 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\u2014namely surprising, unsettling, disturbing, but most of all uncanny\u201d (24). Zampano uses the word \u201cuncanny\u201d in the Heidegger sense of the word: un-zuhause, which translated from German, simply means \u201cnot-at-home.\u201d 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\u2019t; the closet has just become part of the house overnight. Will and his wife are puzzled, but are left somewhat satisfied by the police\u2019s 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\u2019t explain away. They find out that, for a reason they can\u2019t explain, the width and length of the house inside is 1\/4\u201d 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\u201d. The family is troubled because \u201cno 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\u201d (32). <\/p>\n
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. \u201cThe terrifying implications of their children\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.\u201d That hallway, which is dubbed the \u201cFive and a Half Minute Hallway\u201d disrupts our concept of reality the more we read about it. Navidson\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
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\u2014\u201cRosie O\u2019Donell, however, offered a different perspective when she wryly remarked on Entertainment Tonight: \u2018The fact that Holloway waited that long to use a compass only goes to show how men\u2014even explorers\u2014still refuse to ask for directions\u2019\u201d\u2014what 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\u2019s 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\u2019s article \u201cFlawed Performances: A Consideration of the Actors in the Navidson Opus.\u201d 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\u2019s manuscript, as well as contrary evidence by the novel\u2019s supposed editors that refutes Johnny Truant\u2019s claim that he could never find anything to prove that The Navidson Record ever existed<\/p>\n
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 \u201creal\u201d, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s academic footnotes are real, and as for the small percentage that are not\u2014well, 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 \u201cPostmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism\u201d Frederic Jameson calls pastiche a \u201cblank parody\u201d 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. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s a footnote to his footnotes, provided by the book\u2019s editors. It reads: \u201cThough Mr. Truant\u2019s 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\u2019s obituary in Appendix II-D as well as those letter written by his institutionalized mother in Appendix II-E\u201d (72). It isn\u2019t 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\u2019t been able to break the code yet. This also appears in letters written in code from Johnny\u2019s 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\u2014and as Johnny Truants descents into madness and unreality more and more\u2014the book\u2019s 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\u2019s participation. If we look at Hassan\u2019s list again, he claims postmodernist literature is \u201creaderly\u201d as opposed to \u201cwriterly\u201d. This makes sense in that with Danielewski\u2019s novel, the author gives the reader the freedom to choose how involved she wants to be with the text. If she doesn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n
House of Leaves isn\u2019t by any means a perfect book. Like Warhol\u2019s innovative movies, sometimes it\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
Bibliography:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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