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Monday, March 10, 2025

Choice Theory, My Master's Thesis

“Reading [. . .] is a creative act, a discovery of the meaning of things” (164). – John Preston, The Created Self

“[B]ooks are fundamentally interactive reading devices whose meaning, far from being fixed, arise at the moment of access” (147). – Amaranth Borsuk, The Book

“In fact, a tic-tac-toe program I have written shows that there are 211,568 possible tic-tac-toe games—211,568 paths through the game tree of this simple game” (60). – Jesper Juul, Half-Real

 

Proposal

            Recent years have seen the rise of choice-driven texts. Video games are a powerhouse of the media world, Choose Your Own Adventure stories have spread to multiple media, and tabletop games are more popular than ever. What do these choice-heavy texts tell us about their readers/players/viewers/listeners (hereafter referred to as “participants”)? For one, they reveal the appeal of choice—choice allows the reader access to the stories they want, not just what an author has prepared. For two, they reveal that once the technology was readily available, developers begin to take advantage of the potential of these texts. And finally, they reveal that participants have the ability and willingness to create alongside the creators of the text. Together, these ideas tell us that all modes of artistic creation allow room for collaboration, which I argue has strengths that traditionally written media simply does not.

            The development of choice-driven texts extends back at least 80 years to Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Million Billion Poems, and yet essentially nothing has been written on texts like it and their ability to involve the participant. Choice-driven texts represent a huge uninvestigated world of media, and I believe that is due to two key reasons: (1) choice-driven texts are regarded by many to be novelty and not serious art, and (2) because of the complexity of participant choice, the majority of writing on the subject is about scientific studies on the psychological effects of making choices—but not the texts themselves. My research attempts to combine these scientific findings and approaches to literature in order to find the true value of these texts.

            Utilizing a wide variety of media, including tabletop game manuals, podcasts, graphic novels, several highly different books and video games, and performance art pieces, my work seeks to investigate the ways that choice operates in different media. But while the texts themselves are varied, and the ways they use choice are varied, I argue that choice is essentially consistent throughout most every choice-driven text: it invests in the participant and allows them to curate their own experience.

Research Questions

·         How do choice-driven texts utilize choice to empower the reader?

·         Do different media use choices differently? Why?

·         Can a choice-driven text rely more on the participant than on the creator?

·         How have choice-driven texts developed since their first widespread development? What have the changes done to shape modern choice-driven texts?

·         What is common among choice-driven texts? What is divergent?

·         Is the participant truly an author of the text they make choices in?

·         Why have choice-driven texts defied serious study despite their history and prevalence?

·         Does a choice that subverts our understanding of choices in a text still represent what a choice that follows our understanding does?

·         Why include choice in a text? How much is meaningful? How much is too much?

Primary

4’33” [John Cage, 1952, musical performance] – This experimental composition is over four and a half minutes of silence. The audience, seated before a silent performer, is the only source of sound during the duration of the performance, placing the “reader” of the performance in the role of performer while the pianist sits silently, listening. While the audience is not directed to participate, they are given the space to exercise agency in the performance.

House of Leaves [Mark Danielewski, 2000, novel] – Amillionbluepages.net is home to a variety of art inspired by House of Leaves. The eclectic collection showcases how invested people are in the work itself and the ways that they use their own art to make meaning of and enjoy House of Leaves, constructing a public archive of collective creativity. Additionally, the role of meaning-maker is forced onto the reader, involving them deeply in the process of understanding how the text communicates. The book is also structured so that the reader must choose between reading paths (as when there are as many as four multi-page text components on each page together), in effect composing the order of the book.

Batman: A Death in the Family [Jim Starlin, 1988, graphic novel] – This installation of the Batman saga posed the run’s end as a reader vote. They asked whether Jason Todd (one of Batman’s Robins) should die during the final issue or survive, using a hotline to count the votes. Over 10,000 votes were cast, and fans determined that Todd should die, determining the narrative course for the next Batman story. This direct binary choice represents the first instance of reader agency on the continuum.

Six Cold Feet, season two [J.M. Donellan, 2019, podcast] – This season of the podcast focuses on a mysterious singer, slowly uncovering the secrets she kept throughout her life. Listeners of the podcast are able to call in and record themselves describing memories of the passed singer, which in turn forms the narrative of who she was. The listeners, then, take an active role in determining the shape of the narrative, as edited by the podcast’s production team.

Bandersnatch [directed by David Slade & written by Charlie Brooker, 2018, film] – The first mainstream use of CYOA style in television format, allowing the viewer to determine the order of the story. This movement of the CYOA formula to the television format represents a new way for viewers to interact with texts which was previously limited to written materials and video games. The choices determine not the story’s content but the order that set narrative units are displayed, resulting in Bandersnatch’s relatively agency-less position on the continuum.

Building Stories [Chris Ware, 2012, graphic novel] – The fourteen bound works which are found in the box that is Building Stories can be read in any order, which allows the reader to construct the form of the story, if not the content. Several of the contained works challenge narrative form, including a poster, a book of wordless landscape drawings, and a 52-page book with no markings. This experimental work allows the reader to participate in an experiment regarding what a comic book actually is.

Life in Sonderville [Mark Swift, 2017, podcast] – This podcast features a running narrative with simple choices at the end of each episode which direct the listener to select a particular episode as their next, advancing the story in a CYOA style. The constantly-branching nature of the podcast results in the listener having basic control over the narrative regularly throughout the podcast.

Space and Beyond [R.A. Montgomery, 1980, novel] – Because the earliest Choose Your Own Adventure books offered the most elaborate plots of the series, I have chosen the third to be published. It includes the most possible endings in the official CYOA series (44), offering maximum differentiation of narrative experience and thereby reader agency. Reader blurbs written by children: “I like it because it is all about you.” (Robert, 9) “I like Choose Your Own Adventure because it feels like you’re actually in the real book.” (Alexander, 9)“These books make you feel like you are making the life-risking decisions, not reading about somebody making all the choices as they write the book.” (Matthew, 10) These kids are doing the work for me.

Spec Ops: The Line [Cory Davis, 2012, video game] – The game creates a situation in which the player must respond to feelings of guilt for their decisions in the game, including moments in which the game speaks directly to the player, giving the player ownership of their actions and guilt within the context of the story. The game also uses standard video game shorthand to present apparently simplistic choices which are actually more open than appearances suggest. 

The Stanley Parable [Davey Wreden, 2013, video game] – This experimental video game explores choice in video games and what it means to design a game with the player in mind. Every element of the game is intended to make the player question the structure of video games, with creative explorations of a game world with a narrator who tells the player what to do—but will the player listen?

Hundred Thousand Billion Poems [Raymond Queneau, 1961, poem] – Queneau creates individual pages for each line of a single sonnet, allowing the reader to compose a colossal number of poems from the available pages. On the continuum of reader agency, this text is notable in that it explicitly tasks the reader with the process of writing, much like a tabletop game does, but more literally.

Quiplash 2 [Steve Heinrich and Ryan DiGiorgi, 2016, video game] – Quiplash is a party game which provides the players with brief humorous prompts and directs the players to take turns writing and judging answers; the best-liked answers win. As a result, the game is at least half-written by the players, and the game depends on a group of players who write answers and players who vote, creating a system in which each “reader” is directly involved in creating the game’s experience.

Stardew Valley [Eric Barone, 2016, video game] – The game provides opportunities for the player to curate the game experience for themselves by using a sandbox-style framework with many different elements. By choosing which of these activities to pursue in the game, the player determines the shape and form of the game itself, creating a narrative unique to the player. Additionally, thousands of player mods allow for endless customization and further control over the gameplay experience.

Lost Mine of Phandelver [Richard Baker & Chris Perkins, 2014, game module] – Numerous podcasts have used this Dungeons & Dragons module, allowing for illustration of how a reader-directed text can change drastically depending on the readers. It is more a framework for player (reader) input than a narrative in itself, and it is in fact designed for the reader to play a role in storytelling. It is noteworthy that the Dungeon Master is both reader and author of the text, converting the story fragments in the module into a coherent narrative which is also written by the players, who read the text in a very different fashion. The first page of the guide offers the advice, “When in doubt, make it up!” illustrating that the DM is in control of the narrative more than the book itself.

Rhythm 0 [Marina Abramović, 1974, performance art] – Abramović curated a collection of 72 items which her spectators were allowed to use on her while she stood completely passively. The audience timidly offered pleasant items at first, such as honey or tickling with a feather, but soon became more violent, using rose thorns, a whip, and nearly even a gun on her. The piece observed how spectatorship informs audience participation and depended directly on “reader” involvement to take form as a work of art.

Don’t Rest Your Head [Fred Hicks, 2006, game manual] – The manual for the game consists of a brief explanation of game rules and a relatively lengthier discussion of suggested game lore and possible interpretations of the rules. The later publication Don’t Lose Your Mind is a collection of suggested character powers that is longer than the game manual itself. The emphasis with everything written is to give the players (including the game master) access to as much agency as possible in terms of the narrative. “The King certainly has some kind of deal going on with the Bazaar, where he buys the memories that don’t sell, in bulk” (61). This is not typical game instructions. “. . . Don’t Rest Your Head games are about the stories of the protagonists at they strive to realize the goals of their path” (64).

Secondary

Reader Response Theory

Davis, Todd F. and Kenneth Womack. Formalist Criticism and Reader-Response Theory. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave 2002.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. Hill and Wang, New York. 1974.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Johns Hopkins UP, Baltimore, 1974.

Holland, Norman N. The Dynamics of Literary Response. Oxford UP, New York. 1968.

Fish, Stanley E. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth Century Literature. U of California P, Berkeley. 1972.

Thiselton, Anthony, C. Hermeneutics: An Introduction. William B. Erdmans Publishing Co. Grand Rapids, MI. 2009.

Preston, John. The Created Self: The Reader’s Role in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Heineman, London. 1970.

Games Literature

Rettberg, Scott. Electronic Literature. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA, US. 2018

Green, Melanie C & Keenan M. Jenkins. “Interactive Narratives: Processes and Outcomes in User-Directed Stories.” Journal of Communication, vol. 64, p. 479-500, 2014.

Moser, Christopher & Xiaowen Fang. “Narrative Structure and Player Experience in Role-Playing Games.” International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 31, no. 2, p. 146-156, 2015.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine” ADE Bulletin, 2010 No. 150. 62-79.

Salovaara, Perttu and Matt Statler. “Always Already Playing: Hermeneutics and the Gamification of Existence” Journal of Management Inquiry, 2019, Vol. 28(2) 149–152. https://doi.org/10.1177/10564926187921

Aarseth, Espen. “A Narrative Theory of Games.” Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games - FDG 12, Jan. 2012. Research Gate, doi:10.1145/2282338.2282365.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 1, 2004, pp. 67–90.

Yu, Hong & Mark O. Riedl. “Personalized Interactive Narratives via Sequential Recommendation of Plot Points.” Ikee Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, vol. 6, no. 2, June 2014.

Kartsanis, Nikolaos and Eva Murzyn. “Me, My Game-Self, and Others: A Qualitative Exploration of the Game Self.” 2016 International Conference on Interactive Technologies and Games. 2016. DOI 10.1109/iTAG.2016.12

Ferchaud, Arienne and Mary Beth Oliver. “It’s my choice: The effects of moral decision-making on narrative game engagement.” Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. Vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 101-18. doi: 10.1386/jgvw.11.2.101_1

Tancred, Nicoletta, Nicole Vickery, Peta Wyeth, & Selen Turkay. “Player Choices, Game Endings and the Design of Moral Dilemmas in Games.” CHI PLAY'18. Oct. 28–31, 2018. Melbourne, Australia. Conference Presentation.

Murray, John Thomas. Telltale Hearts: Encoding Cinematic Choice-Based Adventure Games. UC Santa Cruz, PhD Dissertation. 2018.

Choice Meaning

It may be observed that choice-driven texts are similar in form to games. Therefore, each choice-driven text has procedural rhetoric, and we can consider each text in terms of what it incentivizes its “player” to do.

Choice is not novelty: using multiple parts of the brain to make sense of a choice driven object utilizes more of our minds to make sense of than traditional reading.

When a reader/player/viewer/listener—a participant, in the terms of Rhythm 0—is given access to choice, they are allowed the ability to “create” a narrative of their own design (to varying extents, depending on the text). Collaborating with the author(s) means that the participant has transcended simply observing and has begun to think along the lines of what story they would like to experience, not how they will react to a static text.

In today’s world of increasingly popular choice-driven texts (video games are a more lucrative industry than any other artistic medium), it is more important than ever to consider the subversion of choice. Games like Spec Ops: The Line and The Stanley Parable exist in order to communicate the implied rules of choice in texts and then break them. While some texts sell themselves on the notion of choice itself (Batman: A Death in the Family), others seek to say something meaningful about the groundwork laid by earlier texts.

When a reader encounters a choice in a text, they are faced with multiple psychological impulses: they may want the most interesting story, the story in which their avatar character is best off, the story which breaks the rule of narrative. While the discrete outcomes may be predictable in that they can be mapped to the available options, readers’ experiences are far more complex.

Glossary

Choice-driven text: A text which cannot be experienced without reader input affecting the content of the text.

Intentionality: A reader’s ability to accurately predict the outcome of their choice. If the outcome cannot be at least partially relied on, the reader’s choice is effectively random, and there is no intentionality.

Agency: A reader’s ability to exert control over the direction of the text.

Participant: A catch-all term for the person experiencing a text which is non-medium-specific and reinforces their role in making choices.



“The Collective Product of Every Inhabitant’s Agonies”: House of Leaves and Resistance to Controlling Meaning

“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

Blake, Linnie. “Neoliberal Gothic.” Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edited by Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes. Edinburgh UP, 2019, pp 60-71.

Botting, Fred. “Dark Materialism: Gothic Objects, Commodities and Things.” The Gothic and Theory. Edited by Jerrold E. Hogle and Robert Miles. Edinburgh UP, 2019, pp 240-59.

Botting, Fred. Gothic. London and New York, Routledge, 2014.

Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New York, Pantheon Books, 2000.

Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. Columbia UP, New York, 1997.

Ilott, Sarah. “Postcolonial Gothic.” Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edited by Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes. Edinburgh UP, 2019, pp 17-32.

Kozlovsky, Roy. “The Architectures of Childhood.” The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities. Edited by Anna Mae Duane. U of Georgia P, 2013, pp 105-120.

Rickels, Laurence A. “Economies of Leave-Taking in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.21st-Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels Since 2000. Edited by Danel Olson. Scarecrow Press, 2010, no pages numbers in text.

Sederholm, Carl H. “The New Weird.” Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edited by Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes. Edinburgh UP, 2019, pp 159-73.

Wester, Maisha. “The Gothic in and as Race Theory.” The Gothic and Theory. Edited by Jerrold E. Hogle and Robert Miles. Edinburgh UP, 2019, pp 53-70.

Choice Theory, My Master's Thesis

“Reading [. . .] is a creative act, a discovery of the meaning of things” (164). – John Preston, The Created Self “[B]ooks are fundament...