“The Collective Product
of Every Inhabitant’s Agonies”: House of Leaves and Resistance to Controlling Meaning
In
Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, the
reader encounters page after page of frustrated meaning. Whether the denials of
meaning are internal, as in the novel’s own assertions that each layer of
authorial voice is fabricated, or narrative, as in the impossibilities within
the plot, the end result is that the reader must create meaning for themselves.
This is paired with an emphasis on asserting control over that which may
threaten a person: the residents of the titular house try to control the dangerous
house, which responds by controlling them, and the authorial voice of Johnny
Truant’s asserted command over the internal text The Navidson Record marks
him as a controlling editor in the face of a manuscript which drives him mad.
Together, these ideas are opposed to one another: the ability to create meaning
necessarily indicates that the reader asserts control over the text itself.
Thus House of Leaves demands that its
reader engage in the behavior which it criticizes narratively. By doing so,
Danielewski forces the reader to contemplate the limits of both meaning and the
drive to control what we do not understand.
Key
to the narrative workings of the novel is its troubled relationship with the
Gothic genre. Fred Botting writes,
“[j]ust
as its central location attends to variations on haunted houses, [House of
Leaves’] composition is ludogothic in the extreme, using an array of
different texts, forms and media. Purporting to be a discovered heavily
annotated dead man’s manuscript about a lost documentary film, the novel
includes letters, photographs, descriptions of film, multiple quotations from
numerous cultural and critical sources, further annotations, index and a range
of fonts, colours, typographic settings and spacings, all of which draw
attention to a highly wrought composite of texts” (Gothic 197).
The use of a composite of texts establishes the
multitude of creative voices it takes to create the novel’s framework, which
underscore the ludogothic with its emphasis on boundary-crossing (via the
novel’s narrative centered around stepping over thresholds which are best to be
avoided) and on play (via the game-like puzzles of meaning the reader
encounters). The emphasis on this ludo- aspect of the text is reinforced by
author/editor Johnny Truant’s best friend’s name (Lude), which alludes to both
his lewd behavior and his perspective on life (that life is only a game to be
played, no matter what boundary is crossed). By embracing elements of the
Gothic, House of Leaves engages with certain
other elements that interact with the genre (specifically childhood, race, and
time) to explore the ways that notions of control are tied up in explorations
of the Gothic. Specifically, the novel illustrates that crossing the boundaries
set concerning childhood, race, and time results in a backfiring of the control
asserted on them.
A
brief summary of the novel and its fictional writers demonstrates how each
element of the text works together (and against each other) to depict these
failed attempts at control. Arguably the main text of the novel is called The Navidson Record, a scholarly
analysis (by the mysterious Zampanò) of a film by the same name; the film
depicts the Navidson family and their struggles with a house which defies
reality and threatens the stability of the family. That scholarly analysis is
in turn annotated by self-appointed editor Johnny Truant, whose notes range
from translations and commentary to lengthy personal anecdotes and his own
experience reading Zampanò’s text. The Navidson family, Zampanò, and Johnny all
approach madness in their own ways as a consequence of their interactions with
the house—which exists within the film but does not appear to exist in the
Johnny’s reality—and the texts surrounding it. This establishes that the house
is both vessel and agent of trauma and the way that interacting with it will
control those who seek to control and comprehend it.
In
order to understand the ways that elements including childhood, race, and time
are interrogated by the novel, one must begin with an understanding of the ways
that House of Leaves resists meaning,
forcing the reader to construct meaning for themselves. In Johnny’s
introduction to the text, he writes, “Hopefully you’ll be able to make sense of
what I can represent though still fail to understand” (xv). Before the actual body
of the novel has begun, Danielewski suggests to the reader that what follows
will challenge even a committed reader to fully grasp what the novel represents.
This early indication that meaning will be elusive establishes that the reader
will be challenged to make sense of the novel’s components and that
understanding cannot be taken for granted, which is significant for the
characters in the novel as well as for the reader themselves. In particular,
Johnny’s alignment as a fellow reader of The
Navidson Record reinforces that his frustrated search for meaning will echo
the reader’s.
Such
resistance to meaning assaults the reader before the novel has even officially
begun—in the introduction, Johnny negates the reality of the whole project: “After
all, as I fast discovered, Zampanò’s entire project is about a film which
doesn’t even exist” (xix). Here the reader must choose to believe either
Zampanò or Johnny, and they know little of the former and only untrustworthy
traits of the latter. Further, Johnny claims that Zampanò was “blind as a bat”
(xxi), which makes his commenting in detail on a film practically impossible.
With the knowledge that even the novel asserts its own non-reality, the reader
must be prepared to determine meaning for themselves via continuous research in
and out of the novel, adding a considerable amount of interpretive work to a
reader’s ordinary role in a text. It is worth noting that even this early
portion of the novel reflects concerns about control; Johnny’s assertion of
what about Zampanò’s text is true or untrue is a form of writerly control,
declaring sovereignty over the meaning of the manuscript.
The assertion
that various parts of the novel are impossible even within the frame of the
novel itself argues that Zampanò’s text cannot be trusted from Johnny’s
perspective. But Johnny admits early in the novel that he has manipulated Zampanò’s
manuscript to serve his own purposes (16), which suggests that Johnny’s writing
cannot be fully trusted by the reader of the novel either. Such narrative
duplicity destabilizes the reader’s relationship with the text, which is a
classic element of Gothic texts. Fred Botting writes in Gothic,
“In
gothic fictions and films duplicity emerges as a distinctly reflexive form of
narrative anxiety. It involves a pervasive cultural concern, characterised as
postmodernist, that things are not only not what they seem: what they seem is
what they are, not a unity of word or image and thing, but words and images
without things or as things themselves, effects of narrative form and nothing
more” (181).
By casting doubt over both the primary
in-text authors of House of Leaves, Danielewski
aligns his novel with the Gothic, forces the reader to seek meaning on their
own terms, and reveals that Johnny exercises writerly control by manipulating Zampanò’s
text for his own purposes, which implies that meaning may be impossible to
conjure within the novel.
Midway
through the novel’s twists and turns, Karen Green (a main character in the film
The Navidson Record) interviews a
series of experts on what has happened in the twisted house; of particular note
is the fact that she presents the story to the experts as a work of fiction. As
a result, she poses questions about her real (within the text) experiences in
terms like, “What about my character’s fear of darkness” (358) when she
is actually trying to understand her own real fear. This signifies an attempt to
discover meaning through fiction rather than reality, which House of Leaves itself performs. The
interviewees (real people speaking fictionally) cast doubt on the construction
of this “fictional” story, critiquing its apparent nonreality. The reader,
then, is reading House of Leaves (containing
a manuscript claiming to be real but which is demonstrably invented), in which
Karen interviews “real” people about a film which is real within the context of
The Navidson Record but which she claims is fictional, so that she can
determine the real meaning of the real events of her (fictional) life. This is
all to say that layers of reality and unreality are dizzyingly stacked on one
another, each layer trying to create meaning for and against the other layers.
It is up to the reader to determine which of these layers work with or against one
another, but the immediate effect is that even within the novel, certain meaning
is always several steps out of reach. Additionally, the creatives to whom Karen
speaks demand that the meaning of the film be more apparent, even saying things
like “You need to refine how the house itself serves as a symbol” (360), asserting
that the rules of fiction must be honored to create meaning. House of Leaves, however, asserts that meaning
must be worked for, as it operates on the principal that the manuscript is
“real” within its own context—Zampanò asserts its reality, and his is arguably the
main voice in the novel. Only “Stephen King” realizes the house is “real”
within the context of the manuscript (362)—someone experienced with thinking
abstractly about fear can see that the fear is real to Karen. Thus, it is a
fiction writer who sees the reality of a purported fictional work. These layers
of reality/unreality and meaning/non-meaning assert that getting to any kind of
“true” meaning requires seeing beyond what is supposedly real or not, and this implies
that meaning from fiction is at least as valuable as meaning from fact—without
this assertion, House of Leaves would be a pile of meaningless
contradictions. It is also worth noting that Karen’s assertions of what is real
or fictional place her in the role of controlling editor, and she determines
the meaning of her own experience, even when it contradicts her own reality.
A
final note on the novel’s tense relationship with consistent meaning comes
toward the end of the novel. After providing nearly a month’s worth of journal
entries in which Johnny experiences a miraculous recovery from his madness and
the health problems his madness creates, Johnny writes, “Are you fucking
kidding me? Did you really think any of that was true? September 2 thru
September 28? I just made all that up. Right out of thin air” (509). Johnny has
transitioned from adding a word to Zampanò’s text in order to align it with his
own life to fabricating entire portions of his own text. His resistance to
creating meaning has mounted to the point that he deliberately misleads the
reader, in a way controlling the reader’s mind and experience of what the novel
represents as real. Many readers will feel betrayed by this revelation, finding
that their own attempts to locate meaning have been frustrated by Johnny’s misrepresentation
of his truth.
Once
the reader of House of Leaves has
accepted that the novel resists meaning to the point of contradicting its own
realities, the text itself must be interrogated for internal meaning. The key
to understanding the novel lies in its gothic nature, including its use of
childhood, race, and time, which each are refracted by a gothic lens to reveal
meaning. To access these details, the reader must understand how the novel is
situated within the gothic model, which frames how each of these elements work
together as statements on meaning and thereby how they make statements about controlling
behavior.
To
situate House of Leaves as a gothic
novel, consider that Teresa A. Goddu
writes, “Cobbled together of many different forms and obsessed with transgressing
boundaries, [the gothic novel] represents itself not as stable but as
generically impure” (5). House of Leaves
is indeed cobbled together of different forms (horror, documentary, journals, the
epistolary); as established above, it transgresses the boundaries of what is
real or unreal, meaningful or meaningless. And through its resistance to
meaning and its constantly changing typographical representation, the novel is
decidedly unstable. That House of Leaves so
directly constitutes a gothic novel indicates that Danielewski consciously
created it to fit the bill, even as he experimented with how it would transcend
and transgress that label. Indeed, the novel functions as a meta-gothic tale. In
the introduction, Johnny describes his experience with the text in terms that
describe essentially every gothic work: “I felt like I was losing control.
Something terrible was going to happen. Eventually something terrible did
happen” (xviii). The reader’s awareness of the Gothic as an active trope in the
novel primes them to respond to House of
Leaves as a gothic story, even when it defies those conventions. These
defiances, which include segments of the novel which lack meaning altogether,
such as lists of building materials and architects, or long passages simply
marked “missing,” imply meaning within the context of the Gothic; they suggest
to the reader that an understanding of architecture will reveal a key truth
about the house, or dangle meaning out of reach by representing it as having
existed, but, ghostlike, disappearing. These gothic defiances assert that
meaning is not assured even after the reader has worked to determine meaning
within the established framework of the novel.
That
House of Leaves embodies classic gothic
storytelling is vital to The Navidson
Record’s role as a central, gothic text, which in turn establishes
Danielewski’s intentions for the reader. Fred Botting writes of gothic tales in
“Dark Materialism” that “[e]ven buildings defy the laws of nature, crashing in
ruins without identifiable cause, manifesting strange animations on and in
walls, or contravening the laws of physics (Walpole 1996; Poe 1986: 138–57;
Gilman 1992; Jackson 2005; Danielewski 2001)” (240). The citation of
Danielewski’s name affirms that Botting considers House of Leaves to be an
ideal example of this particular branch of gothic stories, and the conscious
construction of a modern gothic tale creates a framework to analyze the novel
relative other stories. From this position, Danielewski then combats the very
label he has worked so hard to earn.
Categorizing
House of Leaves as a gothic tale
creates resistance for the reader. On the first page of the text of the novel
following the introduction, Zampanò writes of The Navidson Record: “If finally catalogued as a gothic tale,
contemporary urban folkmyth, or merely a ghost story, as some have called it,
the documentary will still, sooner or later, slip the limits of any one of
those genres” (3). At this point, the reader is for the first time encountering
the text that forms the bulk of the novel, and they are directly told that House of Leaves will not fit cleanly
into the genre it apparently embraces—the reader’s first impression is that the
meaning associated with the confines of a genre will yield no meaningful
results. As a result, the reader must be able to make meaning without relying
on structure, or at least defining meaning on the unstable ground of
inconsistent structure.
If House of Leaves both embodies the gothic
mode and resists it to create and resist meaning, the elements of the childhood,
race, and time reveal the tensions of that meaning. Each element plays
particular roles in gothic stories, reflecting societal anxieties about the
ways each is lived and portrayed. Specifically, Danielewski depicts the manners
in which each of these elements is affected by asserted control. The novel
routinely portrays acts of control as fundamentally wrong, especially through
the mechanism of gothic storytelling, which is to say by punishing the
characters who assert control. Just as any gothic tale punishes the wicked, House
of Leaves threatens to destroy anyone who asserts control for their own
purposes.
Having established that the novel
resists simple meaning and even creates challenges to constructing complex
meaning, it grows apparent that House of Leaves is a meta-gothic work in
that this resistance to meaning is itself psychologically unsettling. Uncertainty
is an expression of the gothic mode—it evokes an uncanny sense having no
reference point. That this novel both adopts the model of a gothic work and
leaves the reader with a sense of uncertainty means that both its content and
form are of the Gothic. This further indicates that the reader of House of
Leaves experiences the novel in a psychologically enveloping manner, being
caused to feel the same way the characters do—this only amplifies the effect of
the novel’s critical examination of control and its negative consequences.
When
control is asserted on elements such as childhood, race, and time, the
consequences of that control become apparent, revealing what sorts of control
result in cosmic retribution. In House of
Leaves, childhood is most often portrayed as a site of trauma. The house
itself is a site of trauma, as will be seen in the section on race below, but I
begin with childhood in order to illustrate the central framing concept of control
as applied to these elements. In “The Architectures of Childhood,” Roy
Kozlovsky addresses the transformation of sites of trauma such as bombed
buildings into sites of childhood innocence like playground; he quotes Marie
Paneth, who writes, “It is a damaged bit. Its very existence is a reminder of
damage and destruction. A sore spot and harmful to all of us. But it could …
have a very healing effect if one were allowed to build upon the very spot
where damage has been done” (109). This notion of healing applies to many
stories in which childhood is a rejuvenating force, but House of Leaves and recent
developments in childhood studies and trauma studies view childhood
differently. The novel’s traumas affect children more than the children affect
the traumas. Acts of control aimed at healing only backfire, tarnishing the
childhoods of those involved (and sometimes the childhoods of those nearby but
otherwise innocent). This inversion of expectation signals that the house is
corrupted, or else it would not inflict trauma on innocent children.
Though
Johnny is an adult in House of Leaves, his
childhood is referred to with regularity. His childhood is explained to have
been atypical and traumatic: “at the age of thirteen I went to work in Alaska
and at the age of eighteen had already slept in a whorehouse in Rome” (20)—this
is followed by a description of frightening burn scars he obtained as a young
boy, which the reader will later learn were the product of his mother spilling
burning oil on him. Johnny’s troubled adult life is implied to be a
continuation of his childhood traumas, which also include the early and
untimely death of his father and a series of abusive foster parents. This
suggests that trauma does not simply go away—it remains with us throughout our
lives. If the meaning of traditional narratives hinges on overcoming trauma, House of Leaves argues that trauma
cannot be escaped—only lived with. This is a resistance to traditional meaning,
and a revelation that childhood is not a healing force. Attempts to overcome
that trauma are presented as controlling efforts to erase what cannot be
denied.
Within
The Navidson Record, Navidson’s
children suffer the trauma of the house along with the adults, but notably
because of the actions of the adults. When an expedition into the house (attempting
to control its curious physical properties and turn it into a home) goes
horribly wrong, Zampanò explains, “Of course during all of this, the children
are once again abandoned, left to look after each other, with no one around to
help translate the horror of the afternoon. They hide in their room, rarely
saying a thing” (319). Through Navidson and his crew’s efforts to control the
house, the children are not only abandoned, but their only sanctuary is the
house itself, the cause of their trauma in the first place. This is to say that
the house fills them with the anxiety to create disturbing pictures of their
home (313-14), deprives them of their parents, and imprisons them. The
innocence of childhood is thus destroyed; the children suffer due to the
adults’ assertion of control as though they themselves had committed some
wrongdoing. This suggests that children learn to replicate the traumas of their
parents, creating a legacy that corrupts innocence for generations.
Trauma
marks the adults, limiting them in ways that lead either to their downfall or
further suffering. Navidson is recklessly obsessed with the house, Karen
becomes estranged from her family, explorer Holloway goes mad and kills a
fellow explorer and shortly thereafter himself, Navidson’s twin brother Tom has
substance abuse issues, Johnny is traumatized in a variety of ways too numerous
to name here, and the list goes on. But the children have no such limitations.
Aside from their age difference, the main distinguishing factor between the
children and adults is that the children do not try to control anything over
the course of the novel, while all of the adults do. This suggests that acts of
asserting control rightfully traumatize the controllers, and not even the
children can avoid such suffering through their innocence; they inherit the
traumas of the adults around them.
House of Leaves’ depictions of childhood
reveal that innocence does not protect those who resist controlling behavior;
meanwhile, the novel’s depictions of race suggest that dominating behavior most
adversely affects those who act with white supremacist intentions. To address
this distinction, I refer to Linnie Blake’s writing on the Neoliberal Gothic
because House of Leaves’ depiction of
control is fueled by neoliberal conceptions of capitalism. Blake writes:
“This
is the function of the Neoliberal Gothic: to proffer a challenge to dominant
ideologies of identity and dominant modes of social and economic organisation
through the purposeful adoption of the mode’s extraordinary happenings, its
heightened emotions, impossible creatures and overblown stylistics. For these
are best suited to capture the peculiar terrors of the present and to show us
how monstrous and how victimised we have become.” (69)
It is through
the drive to support capitalistic notions of economy and self that characters
create trauma for themselves and others. This is expressed through the ways
that many of the adults in the book see in the impossible house a way to boost
their careers, whether via documenting it or exploring it—these characters
experience the most severe consequences for their meddling with the house.
Race
in House of Leaves is essentially
always a site of trauma. Early in the novel, Zampanò reveals that the
mysterious house was built in Virginia in 1720 (21). This means the house was
built during a time of American slavery, which further implies that the house
was built by slaves for their masters. Zampanò goes on to say, “If the house were
indeed the product of psychological agonies, it would have to be the collective
product of every inhabitant’s agonies” (21). In this passage, Danielewski does
not directly address slavery by name, but it is historically probable that
“every inhabitant’s agonies” refers at least in part to the suffering of
slaves. This is a history of white supremacist-driven trauma, fueled by the capitalistic
need to have increased production at the cost of racially-defined human life.
The
positioning of the house as a site of the traumas of slavery characterizes the
house’s vengeful response to white supremacy (an extreme form of asserting
control) as a reaction to an element of American history that many attempt to
resist. Teresa A. Goddu writes, “Identified with gothic doom and gloom, the
American South serves as the nation’s ‘other,’ becoming the repository for
everything from which the nation wants to dissociate itself” (3-4). Danielewski’s
discussion of the house in the context of slavery is marked by his refusal to explicitly
name slavery, leaving it to the reader’s pursuit of meaning-making to reveal in
the first place. It is this idiom of unspoken trauma that marks the house as violent
and repressed. Meanwhile, Sarah Ilott quotes Alison Rudd, who writes “that
the Gothic furnishes postcolonial writers with ‘a means, in narrative and
idiom, to expose and subvert past and continuing regimes of power and
exploitation, and to reinscribe histories that have been both violent and
repressed’ (2010: 1–2)” (emphasis mine) (21). The house reacts to the controlling
behavior of Navidson and his team by consuming multiple people, leaving no
trace of them behind—this both suggests the continuous throughline of slavery’s
impact on the modern day and mimics the way that slavery consumed enslaved
people, leaving no trace of them either. This is to say that the house, having
been built on a consuming trauma, has taken on that form and reacted vengefully
against those who act with controlling intentions.
Perhaps
the most important consideration of race in House of Leaves is the
character of Billy Reston, a paraplegic Black man who assists Navidson in
exploring the house. When Reston is introduced in the novel, he is described as
having lost the use of his legs due to an engineering accident in India. Zampanò
attributes this accident to an “inexperienced crane operator” (37), but gives
no further details because the true culprit of Reston’s trauma is the nationalist
(controlling) project he was a part of—this is to say that even a person
restrained by white supremacy via his race can be an enactor of control (and
suffer for it). This suggests that Reston is a product of the trauma in which
he is both victim and transgressor. This complicates House of Leaves’ portrayal of race, but it also firmly states that white
supremacy’s role in the history of race is a greater force of trauma than race
inherently carries. Later, when Reston enters the treacherous hallway of the
house leading to the dizzying Spiral Staircase, he is unable to easily descend
it because of his wheelchair, a symbol of his restricted mobility and
(physical) trauma. But Reston commits to descending, and uses only his arms to
move down at least one hundred feet of stairs (160). As he descends, he grows
increasingly nauseated, which is to say that a Black man traumatized by white
supremacy and nationalism grows ever sicker and less mobile as he goes further
into a house built by slaves. Meanwhile, Navidson (a white man) is unaffected
by the same journey. Reston reacts to the trauma of the past, and that trauma
seeks to both immobilize and cause suffering to him—the legacy of trauma lives
on.
Reston’s
time in the house can be best understood through Maisha Wester’s conception of
the construction of racialized bodies. In “The Gothic in and as Race Theory,” she
writes, “Building upon these early theorists, from Du Bois to Fanon and
beyond, later generations of black Gothic writers explicitly critique the
construction of whiteness and nation through and against black bodies” (57).
Danielewski adopts this strategy by using Reston’s body as a critique of white supremacy;
that Reston would not be injured without nationalist and white control in India
conveys to the reader that such control is a destructive force which harms
Black bodies like Reston’s but not white bodies like Navidson’s, because
enactors of racialized control are white and the objects of control are Black. But
even as Reston’s body is used as a symbol, his mind is given privileged status
within The Navidson Record: when
the house opens up and nearly consumes the entire Navidson family (and does
consume Navidson’s twin brother Tom), Navidson does not offer his own version
of events; he lets Reston be the “sole authority” on the event (346). This is
to say that Reston, a disabled Black man who is a victim of both white
supremacist and nationalist efforts, is the authority when it comes to trauma.
By allowing Reston’s voice to be the primary and indeed only source for the
event, Navidson signals that he cannot articulate trauma as well as someone
more personally acquainted with the kind of trauma associated with the house, the
exploration itself being an act of asserted control along with its connected
trauma.
Finally,
no conversation about race in House of
Leaves could be complete without addressing Delial, the Sudanese child whom
Navidson photographed, a photograph which won him the Pulitzer Prize.
Danielewski describes Delial as abject and alone, remarking that she died within
minutes of being photographed, and he explicitly connects this to the notion
that she may have survived had Navidson helped rather than set up his shot
(420). Sudan itself is described as rife with “violent, disease-infested
streets,” a place where it takes “courage” just to travel (419). Sudan’s bleak portrayal
is a product of control by the British, which is to say that America’s history
of white supremacist and nationalist control stretches back to these same nationalist
roots, and American photographer Navidson capitalizes on that vulnerability by
snapping a picture instead of helping the child. Laurence A. Rickels writes in “Economies
of Leave-Taking in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves” that
Navidson’s photograph was based on “an actual photograph taken by his real life
model, Kevin Carter, who killed himself three months after winning the prize
for it” (4). The real life history of Carter informs Navidson, who is so
recklessly self-destructive after taking Delial’s picture that Carter’s suicide
was a clear inspiration. Notably, Navidson does not commit suicide, but rather
lives with the trauma he inflicted by recording but not helping the child. His
drive to be an accomplished photographer overwhelms his instinct to act
humanely, which is fueled by racial difference and the influence of neoliberal control.
While
portrayals of childhood and race inform the ways that control affects
interpersonal interactions, portrayals of time inform the ways that control
affects the natural world and human perceptions of it. In particular,
distortions of time represent a breaking of the laws of reality, which in turn
represent a destructive act by humans that would rupture the world as
understood by humanity. These breakages in time illustrate human efforts to exert
control that cannot be sustained—when people grow arrogant enough to try
controlling the laws of nature, the result is a reciprocal backfire which
asserts controlling dominance over the people.
At
the beginning of the novel, the very concept of the house breaking the laws of
nature is tethered to a conception of time. When the mysterious hallway that
leads to ever-expanding and –contracting physical spaces is described, it is
termed the “Five and a Half Minute Hallway” (4). The hallway is so named because
the structure is physically impossible (the inside is larger than the outside)
and defies direction or dimension—only the temporal length of the film can be
used as orientation. But distortions of time are not limited to violations of
physical laws. Danielewski also utilizes casual references to time to remind
the reader that nothing can be taken for granted: “Navidson is an exceptionally
gifted photographer who understands how one sixtieth of a second can yield an
image worth more than twenty-four hours of continuous footage” (10). In this
line, a fraction of a moment is greater than an entire day, suggesting that
time (like the house) can defy our understanding of the world. Notably, 24
hours of footage would necessarily contain the same single frame as the
photograph, which suggests again that something contained is larger than its
container. Without a simple reference point like time, the reader must assert
their own meaning, and creating meaning is treacherous without a reliable
reference point. This also recalls the effects of trauma, which can separate
the traumatized from a consistent understanding of their reference point, such
as the expansion or contraction of time that people with post-traumatic stress
disorder commonly experience.
Before
long, time begins to be distorted in literal ways in addition to these
suggestions of warped time. On their exploration of the house’s growing
hallway, militaristic Holloway and his team take “forty-five minutes to reach
the Spiral Staircase,” descend the staircase for “seven hours,” and it takes
them “over eleven hours” to return to the doorway (86). The distance for each
leg of the journey changes, which directly impacts the time it takes to travel
the space. Time itself is thus unpredictable and no longer a reliable measure,
even though it was once the source of the name “Five and a Half Minute Hallway.”
In his “The New Weird,” Carl H. Sederholm writes, “W. J. T. Mitchell suggests
that ‘when new objects [like fossils] appear in the world, they also bring with
them new orders of temporality, new dialectical images that interfere with and
complicate each other’ (2001: 183)” (171). When the house changes shape, it
brings such a new order of temporality with it, and the affected passage of
time has ripple effects which include Holloway’s madness and his resulting murder
of his crew member Jed. This is to say that when time falls apart, so does the
human mind, and the broken mind of a man bent on controlling the world around
him is perhaps the most dangerous entity in the novel, precisely as Holloway’s
violence begins at the moment he realizes that despite his efforts, he cannot
control the house.
Eventually, when all of the
expeditions into the hallway fail and Navidson’s brother Tom is consumed by the
house, Navidson decides to enter the hallway alone. The further he makes it
into the house, the less time holds together as a meaningful measure of
anything. He considers continuing his journey into what he believes to be
night, but “[i]nstead, he decides to spend the night, or whatever time of day
it is—for some reason the time stamp on the Hi 8 is no longer
functioning—within the confines of that unanticipated shelter” (437). The lack
of meaningful time affects even technology, implying a force that allows the
camera to capture images but disables the timing apparatus. This suggests that
time no longer exists within the house. As Navidson remains inside the hallway
for longer and longer, Zampanò writes, “Who knows how many hours or days pass
between each flare. Navidson’s watch stopped functioning long ago. But as he
freely admits, he no longer cares about the meaning of a minute or even a week”
(465). As Navidson makes a last-ditch effort to control the house, time becomes
a complete non-issue, effectively ceasing to exist for him. His attempt to control
the house results in becoming lost without the markers that delineate human
life.
While
most of the distortion of time takes place in The Navidson Record, Johnny too feels the threat of time becoming
untethered. Near the end of Johnny’s story, he attends a musical performance by
a band called Liberty Bell, the members of which tell Johnny they have read a
book called House of Leaves “with
introduction and notes by Johnny Truant,” although Johnny at this point in the
plot hasn’t published his notes (513). Time has been completely ruptured even
outside of the house and The Navidson
Record, suggesting that the house has controlled Johnny’s life simply through
the act of his reading it. The impossibility of this occurrence leaves Johnny
shaken, but he ultimately accepts it as another element of the way that
Zampanò’s manuscript has dominated his life, even as he asserted control on the
manuscript. Time throughout House of
Leaves’ constituent texts is broken, always in association with actions
taken to control a world that resists such control and even understanding.
Through the novel’s resistance to meaning, House of Leaves invites the reader to
construct meaning from an incomplete and contradictory text (not unlike the
process of living), in effect leaving the reader to manage the contents of the
novel via control over meaning. The reader thus does not simply contemplate
meaning—by creating it through readerly control, they actively engage in the
process which provides the dramatic tension in the novel. This direct
engagement gives the reader a sort of firsthand experience with the novel’s
subject matter, but it importantly also makes the reader complicit in the
traumas of the novel. The reader’s recognition that they have transgressed the
boundary they have come to associate with trauma and breakage is likely to
inspire them to question the arenas of their own life in which they have
asserted undue control, at least causing uncertainty about the ways they have
considered the text itself. This complicity is another aspect of the horror of
the book—a reader who feels they have stepped from observer to participant will
encounter a variety of feelings about the drive to control, which is a more
effective way of engaging readers than presenting them as second-hand tales of control.
These ideas illustrate for the audience that it is impossible to both be a
studious reader and respect the limits of what is read without asserting
control over something which cannot be controlled. House of Leaves asserts
that readers have dual obligations which are in tension with one another, which
reflects the same dual obligations we have in life—we must make our own
meaning, but at the peril of disregarding the autonomy of others. Ultimately,
Danielewski warns his reader that few things can be trusted, but they can rest
assured that obsession with control is the least trustworthy of all.
Works Cited
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Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New
York, Pantheon Books, 2000.
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Ilott, Sarah. “Postcolonial Gothic.” Twenty-First-Century
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