MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI
Dios es una casa
Tengo por costumbre no escribir sobre los libros que traduzco, creo que por una razón comprensible: trabajo con muchos editores, todos magníficos, y no me gusta dar publicidad al trabajo de unos sobre el de otros. Sin embargo, he decidido hacer una excepción con La casa de hojas de Mark Z. Danielewski (de próxima publicación en Alpha Decay/Pálido fuego), por varias razones. No solamente porque es un libro absolutamente extraño y fascinante, y además uno de los más divertidos de traducir que me he encontrado nunca. Principalmente quiero escribir unas líneas porque conozco la historia de este libro, el fanatismo de sus seguidores y su capacidad para generar controversia y hacer correr ríos de tinta en las redes. Conociendo también la escena literaria española, imagino que el libro dará que hablar, aunque sea en un contexto restringido, y me apetece adelantarme a cualquier posible debate con mis propias opiniones. En los doce años que hace que se publicó la primera edición en Estados Unidos, ha habido en nuestro país varios intentos de publicar esta obra (yo por lo menos tengo conocimiento directo de varios), frustrados por cuestiones diversas asociadas con adelantos, costes de producción y demás, y el anuncio de su publicación final a través de un consorcio de dos editoriales independientes despertó el año pasado cierta expectación entre los aficionados españoles a la literatura estadounidense. Estoy convencido de que la edición española no defraudará esa expectativa. Personalmente no me convence demasiado la dirección que Danielewski tomó después de La casa de hojas, pero es imposible no reconocer la originalidad y el interés de su obra de debut.
La casa de hojas es famosa por varias cosas. En primer lugar, por su uso complejo y profundo del formato del libro. De hecho, pese a que en muchos sentidos es una de las cimas del hipertexto literario, La casa de hojas me parece absolutamente inimaginable en formato electrónico. Es un libro irreductible al e-book. Sus múltiples cadenas y niveles de autorreferencialidad se apoyan firmemente en su condición de falso aparato de notas a una falsa disertación académica, con los distintos niveles de metatextualidad señalados con cambios de tipografía y color de la tinta. Por otro lado, los vínculos entre cadenas de apéndices al texto o notas al pie a menudo están rotos, de la misma manera que el texto está incompleto y constituye en todos los niveles el opuesto del formato académico que él mismo satiriza. Además de esto, La casa de hojas es famosa por ser de las pocas obras mainstream de los últimos tiempos que han empleado con éxito “texto liberado”, por usar la expresión de Marinetti, es decir, que no tiene una maqueta preestablecida sino que crea continuamente caligramas y dibujos con el texto. Por último, y esta es una de las peculiaridades de la novela de Danielewski que le han conferido una extraña e inquietante segunda vida en Internet, La casa de hojas está plagada de supuestas “claves secretas” dentro del texto, escondidas en forma de anagramas, acróstico y acertijos, que sus fans discuten acaloradamente en los foros que el propio autor, con gran astucia, ha ido abriendo en Internet a lo largo de los años. Todas estas razones han convertido La casa de hojas en el gran libro-objeto de la narrativa americana de las últimas décadas, en sus distintas ediciones (la primera edición americana, por ejemplo, no incluye una buena parte del material de los apéndices, mientras que existen ediciones expandidas y con distintos patrones de colores de tinta). El hecho de que esta condición de libro objeto se tenga que retener en las distintas ediciones traducidas a otras lenguas es en gran medida la clave de las dificultades y costos que plantea su traducción.
Existe –al menos en nuestro país– una percepción de la tradición en la que se sitúa La casa de hojas que me parece no exactamente errónea, pero sí incompleta. Muchos que la han leído la sitúan sin dudarlo en la tradición de Pynchon, Gaddis y Barth, que tiene en David Foster Wallace a su apóstol más reciente. Es obvio que hay algo de verdad en todo esto, y ciertamente La casa de hojas es uno de los grandes hitos del gafapastismo literario de la década pasada, junto con La broma infinita, Submundo o Stone Junction. Yo, sin embargo, debo de ser el único que ve la novela de Danielewski un poco al margen de esa tradición. En gran medida, cuando digo que La casa de hojas es una primera obra tremendamente original me estoy refiriendo a la dificultad de encontrarle una genealogía de progenitores literarios; es un libro que se parece muy poco a nada. La crítica ha señalado el parecido indudable, tanto argumental como conceptual, con Moby Dick (la obsesión de Navidson con su casa se compara explícitamente en el mismo texto con la de Ahab), además de su sección de extractos, su condición calidoscópica y su exceso de material. También está la comparación obvia con Pálido fuego, por el hecho de que ambos son una falsa edición anotada.
Yo añadiría como precedente a varios niveles Fascinación de Don Delillo. Y obviamente, aunque no salga en los manuales, El resplandor de Stephen King. En general, el propio libro consigue despistar bastante bien de su naturaleza obvia de novela de terror. No en vano, estamos hablando de una novela que consiste en la introducción y las notas que un loco escribe a una disertación académica que hace otro personaje ciego y desequilibrado sobre un documental que nadie encuentra y que probablemente no existe acerca de una familia que compra una casa encantada. La parte de la casa encantada queda un poco relegada a un segundo plano en las explicaciones de la novela, pero La casa de hojas es totalmente una novela de casa encantada. Su poder reside ahí. Su manejo del género, que adapta con tremenda pericia elementos del simbolismo y del expresionismo, desde Mallarmé, Rilke y Kafka hasta el propio Melville, le permite convertir la casa de Navidson en un vórtice poderosísimo de asociaciones simbólicas que deben mucho más al legado literario del fin de siglo y el primer modernismo que a la tradición postmoderna. Explotando esas asociaciones por medio de una técnica literaria basada en explicitar sus propias referencias, citas y patrones y explotarlas hasta un punto de sobresaturación, la casa se convierte en un nodo metafórico que escapa con éxito (gracias a esa misma saturación) de toda interpretación mecánica o fácil: representa la vida familiar, es cierto, y también representa la propia idea de casa en un sentido atávico, en tanto que polo de un binomio dentro/fuera cuyo trastorno es uno de los grandes ejes argumentales del libro.
Sin embargo, pese a que sus ramificaciones interiores y su oscuridad son representaciones de los fantasmas en el armario de la familia Navidson, del romance familiar freudiano y de los traumas de todos sus integrantes (la novela tiene una lectura psicoanalítica apasionante, que Danielewski deja esbozada), el autor consigue escaparse de esa esclerotización del sentido. La casa de Ash Tree Lane es todo y nada, es una ballena blanca capaz de asumir todos los significados y ninguno, un símbolo hermético y mallarmeano, una divinidad a la que se accede a través de la negación absoluta de todo, al modo místico, y una incapacidad para articular. Gran parte de ese éxito de representación, creo yo, viene de su descripción de la casa. De las partes “de género”, las que parecen una película de terror, los infinitos cambios de la casa, sus expansiones y sus ataques (yo pasé miedo auténtico la primera vez que leí el libro). La imaginería de terror de La casa de hojas es fresca y poderosa, y de las pocas que no han sido cooptadas y vulgarizadas por el cine, precisamente por su condición intrínsecamente textual y resistente a la traducción.
No sigo lo bastante la escena literaria como para calibrar la importancia relativa de un libro como La casa de hojas en el contexto americano o internacional de las dos últimas décadas. Hay quien la considera un hito narrativo de primera magnitud o hasta la obra de un genio. La dificultad de su publicación puede sin duda magnificar su leyenda. La leyenda existe, sin duda, y una parte de ella se puede achacar a las virtudes de la (auto) promoción. En España creo que puede despertar pasiones entre una parte del público de la misma manera en que las ha despertado en Estados Unidos, en Alemania o en Francia. De la misma manera, no hay duda de que habrá quien reaccione de forma escéptica y hasta defensiva, conociendo el panorama, y máxime teniendo en cuenta las idiosincrasias de sus editores de aquí. Pero para mí la novela tiene una magnitud y un poder irrefutables y hablo de poder de fascinación, en el sentido de no poder salir del libro y de su mundo, de que tu imaginación quede absolutamente atrapada por él, durante meses, y que después ya nunca se vaya del todo de tu cabeza. Como he dicho antes, no soy muy fan del Danielewski posterior, especialmente del de Only Revolutions, pero me quito el sombrero ante lo que hizo con su primera novela. La gran mayoría de lanzamientos editoriales se pierden en las mesas de novedades, y especialmente la narrativa traducida por editoriales pequeñas y colecciones literarias. Es por eso que escribo unas líneas para decir la mía y llamar en la medida de lo posible la atención de los lectores que puedan estar interesados en esta extraña obra.
— el blog de Javier Calvo
House of Leaves
The book and the labyrinth were one and the same....
There's a funhouse along the Ocean City Boardwalk called "The Pirate's Cove." I'm not sure how old it is -- it certainly looks ancient. The second I step past the faded chests of gold and shabby parrots and enter its haunted interior, I feel as if I've stepped into another world, some timeless place where my childhood fears share a queasy coexistence with my adult sense of irony. Here is a labyrinth of illusions and frights familiar to myself and probably my grandfather's grandfather -- mirrors of warped glass, hallways that rotate disorientingly, unstable floors that rock and tilt. And of course the dread dioramas; frozen tableaus of horror that seem all the more evil for their dusty seediness, as if the adult in me senses the intent behind the hands that crafted their black-light bones and bloodspattered walls, nameless hands, surely by now long dead, hands disturbed by the desire to introduce children to a world of torture and cannibalism. Halfway through the funhouse the lights go from merely dim to completely extinguished, leaving you at the beginning of a dark corridor. The first time I visited The Pirate's Cove was during the off-season, and I was alone. Thinking that the corridor would quickly lead to illumination, and perhaps another cheap thrill, I entered it without hesitation. But after a few tricky turns, I found myself in total blackness, and suddenly there was no corridor, no walls -- just a curving iron rail, slightly too low for comfort. I discovered that I was in the center of a spiraling maze. Truth be told, I was suddenly terrified. I couldn't believe they were still allowed to do this -- someone could panic, maybe get hurt. Nervously I moved ahead, blindly following the twisting rail. What if they had placed another tilting floor ahead of me? What if the rail suddenly vanished and I were left in empty space? And, of course: What if I were not alone? The thought of a masked carny lurking at the end of the maze, or even some punk kid who had it in his head to stay behind and mess with people...or you know, maybe something worse...? I mean, this is a Boardwalk carnival; it doesn't exactly radiate a sense of wholesomeness. Finally I made it out of the maze, but for just a few moments, for a few exhilarating moments, I was close to actual panic. And you know what? It was worth every penny of my two-dollar ticket.
I don't know much about Mark Z. Danielewski, but it wouldn't surprise me if he kept collection of tickets from his favorite funhouses. Or, more to the point, if he were that masked carny I was so sure was lurking in the maze, biding his time to snatch at my ankle. Or maybe he would just jump up and thrust a copy of his debut novel into my hands, laughing like Zampanò as he slipped back into the dark.
Which brings me, finally, to House of Leaves. Imagine, if you will, The Blair Witch Project as a book, written by this masked carny -- a very erudite masked carny -- after bingeing on Borges' Ficciones and Nabokov's Pale Fire. And imagine if the "witch" haunting the work were really a materialization of dread, a disorientation slowly blooming from the 3 a.m. spaces at the edges of your bedroom, feeding on your doubts and fears during the insomniac hours before dawn. All the carefully constructed meanings you've created in your life seem under invasion by an encroaching emptiness, winding its way closer to your center as you wonder, increasingly nearer to panic, "Is this just me?" There is a lurker at the threshold, and whether it's your own personal emptiness, a shared void common to all, or Lovecraft's Yog Sothoth himself, is perhaps just a matter of perspective.
That a review of House of Leaves should start off with metaphors and comparisons is not to take away from its breathless sense of invention. Big, bold, beautiful and arrogant, a near-reckless energy hums from every page -- in short, the exact kind of book destined to become an instant cult classic. This is a book that invites comparisons, a vast bibliovore swallowing up its predecessors and digesting them in its rumbling bowels, using influence as fuel, reference as bloodstream, and textuality itself as a skeletal system. It is insufferably postmodern, maddeningly hip, and utterly in love with itself; and like a Boardwalk funhouse, it's filled with shameless tricks, distorted mirrors, and not a few genuine shocks. Oh yes, Mark Z. Danielewski has produced one hell of an ambitious first novel; and one that succeeds on a surprising number of levels.
Any account of House of Leaves must certainly deal with the unique structure of the book -- indeed, part of the pleasure of reviewing the novel lies in the simple desire to describe it. House of Leaves has many layers, and like the film The Blair Witch Project, or Borges' Encyclopedia of Tlön, it comes pre-packaged in the middle of its own fictional mythology. The book purports to be the revised "second edition" of an earlier version, originally loosely bound and passed along an Internet-savvy counterculture. The edition you are now reading has been "professionally edited," binding together the work of two "authors," the late Zampanò and his accidental protégé, Johnny Truant.
The bulk of the novel is Zampanò's critical explication of a fictional documentary film. Called The Navidson Record, the film was made by Will Navidson, who one day discovers that his house has more space on the inside than it does on the outside. His curiosity engaged, he begins to probe this impossibility deeper, but the more tools he brings to his exploration, the more willfully impossible the house becomes. Finally a new door appears, behind which likes a black corridor into another dimension. Calling upon the help of some friends and relations, he begins documenting his explorations using film, video, and audio tape; and as the corridor expands into an entire labyrinth, his life is changed forever. The Navidson Record is the final product of his explorations, a professionally edited chronicle of the house and its effects on himself and his family.
Like Danielewski's novel, Zampanò's book about The Navidson Record is also called House of Leaves, and is a masterpiece of inflated academic pomposity, riddled with personal observations, obscure reference material, and countless footnotes. Most, but not all, of these footnotes are apocryphal, reminiscent of David Foster Wallace and of course Borges. In fact, Zampanò himself may be a thinly veiled Borges figure, like Umberto Eco's Jorge of Burgos (The Name of the Rose) or Gabriel García Márquez' Melquíades (One Hundred Years of Solitude). The old writer is blind, writes lonely poetry, has a penchant for languages, and, like the fictional Borges of "El Alef," counts a "Béatrice" among the great loves of his life. Also like Borges, he is fond of mixing real sources and fictional sources in order to provide an academic veneer to his work. (Or is that Danielewski and not Zampanò? Oh, my....) The notations occasionally veer into the realm of the surreal and the encyclopedic. In the chapter known (informally) as "The Labyrinth," certain footnotes wind their way around and through the text like twisting worms of pure data, catalogues so comprehensive as to approach an unreadable Joycean Gigantism. The text itself often mirrors the narrative events, looping into spirals, crossing up and down pages, or unfolding word by word across a dozen near-blank pages. Wordplay and textual games abound -- even the word house appears consistently in blue type, as if to evoke the multi-dimensional topography of a hyperlink. Again Borges comes to mind, with a line from "The Garden of Forking Paths": "No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same." Danielewski, however, puts it right out in front: the book is the labyrinth, a textual reflection of the warped interior of the Navidson House, which itself may reflect the subterranean twists of our (collective?) unconscious.
As Zampanò relates the events occurring in The Navidson Record -- which is apparently a world-wide phenomenon, generating nearly as much scholarship and populist commentary as a Finnegans Wake by Stephen King -- we as readers are allowed access to the primary story, that of the Navidsons and their eerie home. Herein lies the basic narrative tension of the book. Frame by frame, Zampanò leads us through the film as if we were watching it, and the Navidson family becomes quite real. Despite the constant chatter of (often-conflicting) secondary commentary, Will and Karen Navidson emerge as very well-drawn characters who easily gain our sympathy. Will, a photojournalist accustomed to the suffering hot-zones of the world, becomes obsessed with the labyrinth folded into his own home. His urge to explore and document this dark abyss is directly counter to his wife's wishes -- Karen has the safety of their children and the very well-being of their relationship in mind. Her choice is simple: get the hell out of there. As a reader, we are pulled between these two equally compelling poles, and as Danielewski starts moving them further apart, the stresses on the Navidsons and their circle of friends become as dark, scary, and consuming as the house below -- or perhaps, as dark, scary and consuming as the widening spaces between any relationship. It is here that Danielewski produces his best characterizations, moving his tortured characters through complex emotional states that ring true -- this, one feels, is how real people may very well react to such an extraordinary situation. Though reconciliation is just as a powerful theme as alienation, and our attention is constantly beggared away by Zampanò's commentary, Danielewski does a credible job of keeping a sense of suspense building through the textual chaos. The ending of the film will reveal the fate of the Navidsons, and that desire keeps us frantically turning the pages.
Zampanò's work was left uncompleted at his mysterious death, however, which is an ingenious device for bringing in a third level of narration, that of Johnny Truant. Brought to Zampanò's death-room by a friend, Truant is amazed at the hermit's collection of weird antiques, his mania for isolation, and especially his final end: Zampanò was discovered on the floor, with deep claw marks gouged into the surrounding wood. Also of interest is a large trunk, where Truant finds the manuscript fragments of House of Leaves scrawled across reams of paper, napkins, envelopes, matchbooks, and anything else Zampanò could find. Intrigued, Truant quickly becomes obsessed with the project, and begins the tedious process of assembling the fragments into a coherent work. As he does so, he adds his own layer of footnotes; perhaps better described as intensely personal digressions. These long passages tell Truant's story, a parallel tale of alienation, of creeping madness, and even the doubt he feels regarding the Zampanò manuscript -- in Truant's universe, as in ours, there has never been a film called The Navidson Record! Through his reflections on Zampanò's work, questions begin emerging about the old man, the project, and Truant himself. Why did Zampanò, a blind man, invent of all things a film? And why write a book about an imaginary documentary? If the house a metaphor for his own hollow darkness, why vicariously project that metaphor onto the "Navidsons?" And of course: What happened to him, and will the same thing happen to Johnny Truant?
Whereas Zampanò remains something of an enigma, Truant's story provides a second serious narrative thread. Quite different from Danielewski's other, "internal" characters, Truant has more of an semi-autobiographical feel, or at least comes closest to being the kind of guy who might be found reading Danielewski's book on the subway. Apprenticed to a tattoo artist in LA, he is a hip yet pathetic figure, moving through an unfocused world of sex, drugs, and the emptiness these pursuits often bring. The only child of a marriage filled with tragedy, his overbearing mother languishes in an insane asylum, alternating between periods of madness and hyper-lucidity. (Her story -- told in a series of letters from the asylum -- is one of the highlights of the novel.) Though world-traveled, Truant seems stricken by a basic disenchantment with life, but is too ironically self-aware to fall into a clinical depression.
Oddly, despite Truant's "realism," some of his earlier sections feel a bit labored -- Danielewski seems at times unsure how to balance Truant's intelligence and erudition with his street persona. But when Truant begins probing deeper into his own fears and anxieties, not to mention hallucinations, his words start acquiring a believable urgency, conjuring a chilling image of a young man descending into his own dark labyrinth. Fueled by his obsession with Zampanò and the house, Truant is heading for a crisis in every sphere of his life -- moral, intellectual, social; even his health is in danger. And yet the fact that Truant is aware of this is not enough to halt the downward spiral; there is also the fact that he may not be able to control his descent. Whether he is afraid of responsibility, or genetically predestined for madness, or just more sensitive to a primal existential dread shared by us all, is a question left unresolved, and this central ambiguity denies the reader any easy answers.
When all is said and done, House of Leaves is essentially a horror novel, but less about things that go bump in the night, and more about the empty spaces in our awareness, the tension between certainty and uncertainty, and the ambiguities in our apprehension of ourselves, others, and the world. Like Lovecraft with alien creatures abstracted even further into modernist anxieties, the overall feeling one gets from reading House of Leaves is simply that there is more out there than we know. All our efforts to catalogue and quantify the universe may be simple parlor tricks played by the anxious mind, fabrications to distract us from the void at the heart of our being, from the simple chaos that lies at the borders of our consciousness. It is a bleak message; and yet Danielewski manages to relate it with great style, delicious humor, and remarkable inventiveness. It is worth every penny of the ticket.
— The Modern Word
O Révolutions
Objet livre autant que livre objet, O Révolutions prolonge le travail de Mark Z. Danielewski dans une direction plutôt inattendue. Malgré son aspect officiellement « bizarre » (qualifié souvent à tort de branchouille), le roman fait dans l’expérimentation sage, l’ensemble du récit fonctionnant dans un cadre éminemment rassurant. Là où La Maison des feuilles se permettait à peu près toutes les audaces (mise en page, style, narration), O Révolutions ne s’autorise rien, ou si peu : scénario axé autour de deux personnages principaux qui vivent la même histoire (et dont on suit alternativement les aventures par blocs de huit pages à mesure que l’on tourne le livre sur lui même) et… Et c’est tout. Le reste n’est que fioritures et accessoires, ce qui ne veut surtout pas dire inutile. Impossible, évidemment, de s’affranchir de l’objet. Beau livre à la couverture double (un demi iris à chaque fois), O Révolutions se lit autant qu’il se regarde. Par un jeu symbolique des plus évidents, Danielewski développe un cadre qui a tout de la barrière : 360 pages composées chacune de 4 blocs de 90 mots (90 x 4 = 360), 2 blocs à l’envers, 2 blocs à l’endroit. Ce qui renvoie au cercle, à la « révolution » du titre et aux 360°. La police de caractère décroît doucement en taille, accentuant la chute « physique » des deux personnages principaux, tandis que le retournement incessant du livre (8 pages du récit 1, 8 pages du récit 2, chacun jouant le rôle du miroir de l’autre) produit un effet de tourbillon. Tourbillon + décroissance = inexorable spirale qui débouche sur… le vide, le néant, la mort. En plus de cette équation somme toute classique malgré sa présentation pour le moins innovante, Danielewski joue sur la graisse des caractères, leur couleur (des obsessions déjà présentes dans La Maison des feuilles) et autres gimmicks qui reviennent comme autant de refrains musicaux. Une musicalité évidente qui renvoie au traitement même du texte, beaucoup plus orienté poésie en prose que roman narratif standard (on renverra à l’image de Lautréamont scandant ses Chants de Maldoror au piano pour tester leur finalité, même si la comparaison s’arrête là). Une poésie légère et décalée, subtile autant qu’explosive, inventive, drôle, loufoque et parfois indigeste. Difficile de terminer ce rapide tour du propriétaire sans évoquer une incongruité majeure dans cette belle architecture (et qui relève ironiquement du saccage méthodique de l’Œuvre organisée par un sale gosse rigolard): la présence d’une colonne de texte par page qui rappelle les dépêches AFP par leur sécheresse et leur concision, tout en dérapant vers la déviance suite à l’amputation systématique de phrases clés. Moralité, le lecteur se retrouve avec un texte parasité par un autre, même si le cadre temporel (décalé d’à peu près un siècle pour les deux personnages) propose une lecture plus éclairante des situations décrites dans le corps principal du récit. Curieuse tentative qui surprend, agace, mais qui finit par emporter l’adhésion, tant la structure du récit fonctionne impeccablement.
Et l’histoire, au fait ? On y vient. On la résumera d’ailleurs en une seule petite phrase : O révolutions développe le road-movie (car c’en est un, couché sur le papier, certes, mais road-movie quand même) de deux adolescents, Sam et Hailey, dans leur traversée fantasmatique et fantasmée d’une Amérique tordue, au volant d’automobiles plus ou moins rêvées, vers un destin sombre et tragique (destin qu’on voit venir très vite suite au signes physiques que nous envoie Danielewski du haut du promontoire rocheux sur lequel il vit tout nu en se nourrissant de la déliquescence des nuages). Pas de quoi s’affoler, donc, d’autant qu’on peut y voir une allégorie de l’Histoire des Etats-Unis ou plus sobrement de celle de l’humanité tout court. Alors, vain, Danielewski ? Prétentieux ? Certainement pas. D’abord parce que l’animal ne manque pas d’humour, ensuite parce que le roman (?) se lit vite et bien, l’ensemble donnant une formidable sensation de légèreté tourbillonnante (c’est d’ailleurs ce qui arrive physiquement au livre pendant la lecture, ah tiens) à la fois digeste et souriante. Souriante ? Parfaitement. Malgré sa fin dramatique, O Révolutions redonne le moral. Le problème principal du livre, c’est le contrat implicite que l’auteur passe avec son lecteur potentiel (contrat que l’on peut retrouver dans les textes de Léa Silhol, par exemple, ou de Ted Chiang, pour citer deux auteurs dont les préoccupations stylistiques ou conceptuelles n’ont strictement rien à voir avec Danielewski) : O Révolutions s’adresse aux convaincus, et à eux seuls. C’est d’ailleurs toute sa faiblesse. Aimez-moi ou laissez-moi vous susurre le texte. A prendre ou à laisser. Soyez contents avec ce que vous en tirez. Après pareil préambule, l’amateur est flatté et content. Le sceptique, lui, repart non seulement déçu, mais fâché… Autant le savoir avant de commencer.
[On ne clôturera pas cette chronique sans évoquer la traduction titanesque de Claro, traduction qui peut agacer, mais dont les partis pris (véritablement nécessaires, pour le coup) et les fréquentes inventions se justifient à tous les coups. Il est clair que O Révolutions est plus l’adaptation française de Only Revolutions que sa traduction littérale. Mais dans le domaine poétique (car c’est bien de ça qu’il s’agit), le traducteur est seul au monde. Solitude dont Claro s’est étonnamment bien tiré. Respect.]
— Le Bélial
Looking for Writing after Postmodernism
Everyone is tired of talking about postmodernism. This is especially the case with literature, where few writers ever embraced the term enthusiastically. Today calling yourself a postmodernist novelist seems to mean picking a fight with Joyce and Hemingway that everyone else has lost interest in, like an uncle who insists on trying to get everyone worked up about Iran Contra every time the family gets together.
Regardless of how we imagine that thing that comes after postmodernism, Mark Danielewski is likely to be one of the central authors around which the definition of a post-postmodernist literature will be built. It is no surprise, therefore, to see a collection of essays like this devoted to his work. After all, House of Leaves can rightfully be considered a contemporary classic, a novel that has quickly established itself as essential reading for those of us who want to understand the place of the novel in the contemporary media ecology. Danielewski’s oeuvre is, however, small. It consists of Leaves, the similarly innovative Only Revolutions, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the currently out-of-print novella The Fifty Year Sword. In Manchester’s Contemporary American and Canadian Writers series, Mark Z. Danielewski is the only book focused on such an emerging writer. Others include books on Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Louise Erdrich. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is the only book in this series that is a collection of essays instead of a single author monograph. Where many of the books in this series strive to present a unified vision of their authors, Mark Z. Danielewski seems more interested in framing the possible ways that this writer can be understood. This is testament to his liminal position within the literary world today. Most of us feel that whatever comes after postmodernism is embodied in House of Leaves — even if we can’t quite agree about what that is.
Given the mission of defining the various ways that Danielewski’s oeuvre can be approached, this collection largely succeeds. The book itself is divided into three sections: the first focuses on House of Leaves, the second on Fifty Year Sword, and the third on Only Revolutions. The distribution of these essays might seem a little surprising. While the fairly obscure Fifty Year Sword only gets a single essay, the editors have assigned an equal five essays to House of Leaves and Only Revolutions. In fact, given that one of the essays in the House of Leaves section is focused on online discussion forums and another studies rather narrowly the theoretical implications of the novel’s first line, readers will find more extensive and concrete analysis of Only Revolutions than of House of Leaves. If nothing else, this balance of coverage works to displace House of Leaves from the center of Danielewski criticism, and to cast his body of work in a fresh light.
Collections like this focused on an emerging author are always works of canon formation, pedagogical devices that teach readers how to interpret and situate their subjects. In this regard, some of the design and framing decisions of this collection become especially significant, since they describe how we can begin to assemble a post-postmodernist literature. The introduction provides only passing biographical references - in fact, it begins in media res with the publication of House of Leaves in 2000 - and includes none of the biographical material or interviews that are common in other introductory collections. Although the title of this book begins and ends with the author’s name, the collection itself treats Danielewski less as a person than as the source of three innovative texts. Where biographical facts are discussed - for example, in an interesting chapter on the relationship between House of Leaves and Danielewski’s sister’s album Haunted - those details emerge from interpretational necessity rather than inherent biographical interest. This is appropriate for an author who has consistently played with the issue of the text’s source - most obviously in the multiple framing of House of Leaves - but it is somewhat disconcerting in a book of essays organized around the author’s name. Katherine Hayles provides a summary of the collection’s attitude towards authorship in her commentary on Only Revolutions: “The distributed author function implies that neither the human creator nor his fictional creatures can credibly claim to be the text’s sole author(s)”.
More specifically, these three works are read within a very specific and contemporary media framework. Paul McCormick calls House of Leaves a “cinematic novel”, Hayles invokes John Johnson’s concept of “information multiplicity” in reading Only Revolutions, and Mel Evans cites Jessica Pressman’s theory of the “network novel” in investigating the relations between Haunted and House of Leaves. Danielewski’s postmodernist and modernist precursors get relatively little attention. Even though the manipulation of page space to create multiple paths of reading was a common feature of writing by Ron Sukenick, Raymond Federman, and Steve Katz - just to remain in the U.S. - those intertexts get no attention in this collection. The strong desire to define the contemporary novel as some new beast distinct from the postmodernism is on clear display in the way that Danielewski’s precursors are handled in this book. This is perhaps most explicitly stated by Hayles, whose use of Johnson’s theory (rooted in postmodernist standards like Gravity’s Rainbow) seeks to distinguish Only Revolutions from the work that came before: “OR simply assumes the information explosion that Johnson saw as a formative force on contemporary literature. Information has migrated from a foreground figure where it functioned as a causative agent to the background where it forms part of the work’s texture”. Hayles’s framing of this novel is distinctly her own, but the desire to see Danielewski as a central figure within a contemporary literature defined by the internet and other media rather than by modernism or postmodernism runs throughout this collection.
It is on this point that this collection has the most to tell us about how we envision a literature after postmodernism. The classic criticism on postmodernism in writing tended to imagine a unified spirit of the age. We might think of Ihab Hassan’s lists of modernist and postmodernist qualities in Paracriticism: modernist impersonality vs. postmodernist self-reflexivity, modernist eroticism vs. the “new sexuality” of postmodernism, modernist urbanism vs. the postmodernist global village, and so on. From foundational criticism on postmodernist fiction like McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction and Hutcheon’s Poetics of Postmodernism, though broader cultural studies like Harvey’s Condition of Postmodernity and Jameson’s Postmodernism, there has been an underlying assumption that defining postmodernism means identifying a shared set of beliefs and attitudes that result in specific formal features in these art forms.
There is still evidence of a search for a contemporary weltanschauung in this collection—perhaps most obviously in Hayles’s idea of a “media explosion” that is part of the backdrop of Danielewski’s work. But what is striking about Mark Z. Danielewski as a condition of our post-postmodernist moment is how often analysis of writing today becomes a discussion of the networks in which that writing is located. Of course, evoking the “network novel” can turn the connection into just this kind of old-fashioned unifying cultural theme. But an interest in networks can also do very different work in framing contemporary writing. Let’s recall Matthew Fuller’s gloss on the popular critical concept of the media ecology: “‘Media ecology,’ or more often ‘information ecology,’ is deployed as a euphemism for the allocation of informational roles in organizations and in computer-supported collaborative work”. An interest in media ecology has, of course, been an important element of thinking about contemporary literature at least since Tabbi and Wutz’s 1997 collection Writing Matters, but the change in critical attitude is dramatically evident in this collection of essays on Danielewski. Interest in the “allocation of informational roles” prompts us to look not for unifying cultural themes but instead for causal, material links between literary works and their institutional and commercial context. In other words, our contemporary moment seems less inclined to ask “what is writing today?” than “what are the things that people do with writing today?” As I read through this collection I can’t help but wonder if we are entering a time of post-periodization where our old ways of talking about modernism or postmodernism as historical attitudes are replaced by an interest in the multiple roles that literature can play at a given time.
Given that our ideas about how to periodize literature might be changing, and given that Danielewski is himself a key figure within this change, it should be no surprise that the search for an appropriate literary context for reading these three stories is a subject of some discussion in this collection. Finn Fordham’s reading of House of Leaves contrasts it to two other “ambitious complex” U.S. novels: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Don Delillo’s Underworld. Dirk Van Hulle reads Only Revolutions against Finnegans Wake. Conversely, other essays eschew interest in literary context and instead emphasize formal features. Both Brian McHale’s and Hayles’s separate essays on Only Revolutions provide rich and very specific analysis of not only the explicit design of this story, but also its internal rhythms and symmetries - what Hayles describes as “each topographical form articulat[ing] an ideational cluster”. In fact, whether because of its relative unfamiliarity to the audience or because it is less explicitly located within an institutional context that gives it specific uses, the readings of Only Revolutions are consistently more engaged with the specifics of the text.
There are, of course, disadvantages to the variety of style and focus in the essays that make up a collection like this. Quite a few of the essays speak to each other effectively. McHale’s and Hayles’s readings of Only Revolutions do so explicitly. McCormick’s reading of media in House of Leaves resonates effectively as well with Hayles’s emphasis on information multiplicity. Taken together, these three essays provide the most coherent articulation of the place of Danielewski’s writing within the contemporary media ecology. Although somewhat less central to the collection, Mel Evans’s reading of the musical album Haunted addresses issues common with McCormick’s analysis, and speaks indirectly to McHale’s chapter as well.
Other chapters seem disconnected from this main thread. Bronwen Thomas’s discussion of the Danielewski author forums seems like a natural part of a book on such an internet-aware author, but its concrete analysis of reader behavior seems at odds with the remainder of the book, and it is unfortunate that other essays did not engage with this broader reception context for the novel. Similarly, Alison Gibbons’s very technical analysis of the novel’s opening line, “This is not for you,” is an interesting discussion of the theoretical issues surrounding textural reference and worlds, but the style of the essay is out of keeping with the remainder of the book, and the questions raised by a novel that is “an entrance into a place we are being forbidden to enter” never translate to concrete observations about the novel itself. The tendency of the essays to spin off into questions independent of Danielewski’s writing is evident even in McHale’s engaging chapter, which is as much about Rachael Blau DuPlessis’s definition of poetry as “segmentivity” as it is about Only Revolutions or Danielewski’s oeuvre.
In the end, Mark Z. Danielewski embodies Danielewski’s own problematic place within contemporary literary culture, and in turn suggests why defining a post-postmodernist literature has been difficult. Even though this collection implicitly argues that here is an author who deserves sustained attention to a whole body of work, the essays themselves are frequently the most engaging when they are allowed to illuminate the distinct concerns of these individual critics. Those concerns are part of what many of us think of as the current media ecology — the disposition of various literary roles and functions within culture today. Whether those roles eventually cohere into something that looks like romanticism or modernism, or whether it is a condition of our transitional moment that literature should have many and various uses, remains to be seen.
— Electronic Book Review
La Maison des Feuilles
Comme Le Mage, c’est un livre qui a révolutionné ma conception de la lecture en m’offrant une expérience jamais goûtée jusqu’alors.
La Maison des Feuilles est un objet curieux avant d’être un livre: format atypique, polices de caractères différentes, mise en page surréaliste (un premier feuilletage du livre montre des lettres en escargot, des notes de bas de page qui envahissent le texte, des pages presque blanches, des mots barrés, du texte à l’envers, un index labyrinthique, des couleurs, des reproductions de photographies, etc.)… Le support lui-même intrigue et excite l’imagination avant même que le lecteur plonge dans sa structure en poupée russe.
S’y entrecroisent plusieurs couches de récit: celui de Johnny Errand, un jeune homme à la vie et à la raison dissolues, qui découvre le manuscrit d’un vieil aveugle, Zampano, quelques jours après sa mort; celui de Zampano lui-même, vieil aveugle aussi érudit que pédant, dont le manuscrit analyse une sorte de film “amateur” à la renommée mondiale: The Navidson Records; le Navidson Records lui-même; des notes des éditeurs ; des notes du plus génial traducteur qui soit (Claro, dont je compte analyser l’œuvre dans ces pages un jour).
Au centre de toutes ces préoccupations, un film autour d’une maison à la géographie improbable: ce qui devait être le «home movie» de Will Navidson, célébrant son emménagement dans une nouvelle maison offrant un nouveau départ pour lui et sa famille, se transforme vite en film cauchemardesque quand, prenant de simples mesures, il se rend compte que la maison est plus grande à l’intérieur qu’à l’extérieur. Cela commence par quelques centimètres de trop, puis un couloir qui perturbe la géométrie euclidienne, cela se prolonge rapidement en jeux de couloirs obscurs qui apparaissent du jour au lendemain, cela se transforme en une autre dimension, labyrinthique, que Navidson décide d’explorer, caméra au poing. Ce sont ces films que les autres personnages (et certaines sommités convoquées, comme Derrida) commentent avec fascination, doutant de la réalité physique de la maison voire de la réalité du film lui-même…
Le thème du lieu impossible pourrait paraître classique : c’est un des topos de la littérature gothique et de ses héritiers, comme Lovecraft, et un thème déjà exploré par Borges (La bibliothèque de Babel, La demeure d’Asclérion, texte tutélaire pour comprendre la maison) ou par Kafka (Le Château, Le Terrier). Mais la forme du livre lui-même, tant dans son brassage des genres – l’écriture hésite entre le roman, avec sa part de péripéties et d’angoisse, et la thèse, largement soutenue par une pléiade de citations ; elle s’offre des détours par la poésie, le genre épistolaire ou encore le journal intime- que dans sa conception physique même transforme radicalement l’expérience de lecture. Car au vertige métaphysique que crée l’idée même du dédale
Tourner le livre dans tous les sens, se placer devant un labyrinthe, rester perplexe devant des rangées de X et de blancs, brouiller l’esprit avec des notes de bas de page qui éclairent autant qu’elles distraient (les errances de Johnny viennent régulièrement injecter des grammes de folie supplémentaires), rien ne nous est épargné. C’est une lecture qui plonge dans un état de confusion permanent et nous fait tomber de pièges en pièges, comme les pèlerins au sein de la maison, tant le texte imite, par sa forme, les formes tortueuses de la maison : mots en colimaçon pour les escaliers qui s’enfoncent dans les profondeurs, mots écrasés en bas de page quand les explorateurs se trouvent opprimés par de vastes salles vides, mots se tassant sur les bords quand la géographie se fait non-euclidienne (un terme cher à Lovecraft – presque autant que «squameux»)…
L’expérience en devient si intense que le lecteur finit par croire à la réalité de cette maison : la dispersion du texte finit par créer un état second où notre perception de l’espace est aussi bouleversée que celle des personnages (j’ai même fini par oublier complètement la dimension matérielle du livre lui-même, malgré les contorsions qu’il m’imposait, tant j’étais engluée dans le texte). Comme chez les explorateurs, confrontés à un espace qui demeure insaisissable et ne semble mener qu’au meurtre, à la folie, au suicide, Danielewski crée du chaos en nous, nous faisant douter de l’issue du livre : le film lui-même existe-t-il, comme semble se le demander Errand (au nom si parlant) ? La maison existe-t-elle ou n’est-elle que le reflet de nos confuses psychés ? Le Z. intercalé dans le nom de l’auteur renvoie-t-il à Zampano ? Parmi les citations de toutes langues qui constellent le texte, lesquelles sont vraies, lesquelles sont fausses, lesquelles apportent une information supplémentaire sur le mystère, lesquelles ne sont là au contraire que pour créer un effet de réalisme ou pour susciter des échos grondants en nous (par exemple, pourquoi faire intervenir Stephen King si ce n’est pour nous rappeler le labyrinthe hôtel Overlook de Shining ? Pourquoi convoquer Duras si ce n’est pour évoquer ses phrases qui tremblent au bord du gouffre de la folie et ses expérimentations cinématographiques décalées?)
L’auteur, dès la première page, prévient: «ce livre n’est pas pour vous». Cet avertissement s’adresse-t-il aux amateurs de lecture linéaire ou est-il un défi lancé au lecteur «moderne»? Sans doute un peu des deux. Pour ma part, j’aime y voir une provocation à la lecture: vous aussi, si vous l’osez, entrez ici et, serais-je tentée de dire, citant Dante: «abandonnez ici tout espoir». Eprouvez les limites de votre raison. N’imitez pas Holloway, incapable de concevoir la nouveauté et la modernité de la maison, cherchant désespérément à se forger un fil d’Ariane classique, linéaire, pour s’en sortir plutôt que d’accepter de se perdre. Accepter la complexité de la maison, c’est accepter la complexité du monde et, au delà-, de la littérature, accepter de ne pas le/la réduire à des schémas simplistes et convenus – schémas qui font de l’actualité selon le goût du jour une histoire en miniature à réinventer chaque jour, avec ses coups d’éclats pailletés ou larmoyants, et de la littérature qui se vend, hélas, le mieux, une longue suite de « déjà lus » desservie par un style à la portée de tous, dont le trio gagnant, «sujet- verbe- complément», m’arrache de longs soupirs outragés.
Aussi, si vous parvenez à vous procurer (à un prix décent) ce livre hélas épuisé, plongez, avec crainte, humilité et délectation. Vous aurez peur. Vous expérimenterez la schizophrénie, le vertige. Mais vous vivrez, intensément.
— De Litteris
A Visual & Textual Labyrinth: The Eyes' Dilemma
Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel House of Leaves opens with the extraordinary admonition, “This is not for you” (Danielewski ix). This caution initially appears to be a strange tactic by the author designed to deter readers. However, as the story unfolds, as the reader turns page after page, it becomes clear that this epic novel is highly unusual. Danielewski issues his readers with both a warning and a challenge. This book is not for the faint-hearted or escapists among us, but for those who are prepared to negotiate new reading paths, delve beyond the ostensible surface of the page, and actively engage with the text. In his introduction, Truant describes what awaits the reader:
Endless snarls of words, sometimes twisting into meaning, sometimes into nothing at all, frequently breaking apart, always branching off into other pieces… each fragment completely covered with the creep of years and years of ink pronouncements; layered, crossed out, amended; handwritten, typed; …impenetrable, lucid…
As Truant suggests, Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a ‘Literary Labyrinth’ with an advanced emphasis on visual innovation.
A Literary Labyrinth, in my conception, is any literary text that embodies key characteristics of the namesake, resulting in readers’ experience of a text paralleling the experience of maze walkers. Just as “the text itself is a labyrinthine artefact, so its creation and reception are labyrinthine processes” (Doob 65). House of Leaves embodies the literary labyrinth in its most complex form, the Rhizome, which takes its name from Deleuze and Guattari’s conception:
A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes… Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretions into bulbs and tubers. (Deleuze and Guattari)
The rhizome’s basic principles provide key features of its labyrinthine parallel. It creates an open-ended configuration with no single, linear channel; a “system of ramifications” (Hoffman) that cannot be compounded under a unified interpretation. “The rhizome is so constructed that every path can be connected with every other one. It has no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially infinite” (Eco Reflections). At first, the rhizome may appear to be a distortion of the maze concept. Since it has no periphery and no exit or entrance, one may wonder if there is a point to the decisions it asks its participants to make. With the literary rhizome, it is the process rather than emergence (that is, total completion of the novel) that is important. Consequently rhizomatic novels are often cyclical; they provide numerous reading paths and prevent an absolute conclusion of the story/s. Even when the reader has taken in every single path, page, and/or sentence of this literary maze, s/he can reread the novel again in an alternative order, making it seem like a different story and appear endless. House of Leaves is rhizomatic in its employment of a multitude of reading paths and insistence upon readers’ decision-making capacities, enticing them to lose their way and above all, encouraging them to explore. Like the labyrinth, it “unfolds its creative negentropic potential in unending paths, infinite twists and rewindings, rendering the maze as narrative structure inexhaustible” (Hoffman).
The labyrinth emerges as a central theme in the novel, with its conceptual focus, the Ash Tree Lane house, taking on the terrifying traits of a maze. There is even explicit discussion of the labyrinth and its famous Myth. Conversely, whenever this occurs it is shown crossed out with a single line striking through it:
This is an example of what Derrida called sous rature or ‘under erasure’. Placing something under erasure creates a ‘double play’, obliterating the word yet simultaneously allowing it to be read, undoing and challenging its authority while acknowledging its significance. Postmodern novels place under erasure “presented objects in a projected world; and their purpose is… that of laying bare the processes by which readers, in collaboration with texts, construct fictional objects and worlds” (McHale Postmodernist). As the structural foundations and content of House of Leaves rely so heavily upon the idea of the labyrinth, Danielewski appears to be confessing the artistic origin and model of the text. By portraying these roots sous rature he pays homage to this heritage, whilst demonstrating that the traditional (unicursal) concept of the labyrinth has become an anachronistic paradigm, one that should be innovated for the renewal of fiction.
The Ash Tree Lane house represents a fearsome unknown labyrinth with its dark corridors, shifting unknowable proportions, and often-inescapable depths. Similarly, the fictional film The Navidson Record executes a twisting trail of images through its complex network of shots and edits (Danielewski). Danielewski organises the layout of his text on the page to emulate this motif, with chapter nine providing the finest example. It is a montage of material including endless lists, footnotes, pseudo-criticism, and Johnny’s crude contemplations, arranged intricately into boxes and columns that traverse the page in all directions . Thus Danielewski’s novel can be said to demonstrate Spencer’s model of the mobile architectonic book, making maximum use of spatial form by defying conventional ordering of words on the page. In “architectonic books, [words, sentences, discourses,] bear the same relationship to the whole as do bricks, stones, steel rods, and concrete blocks to a building. This relationship is more accurately structural than expressive” (Spencer). Danielewski exceeds these expectations, as while his careful arrangement of words shapes the composition of a labyrinth upon the page, it additionally conveys and embodies the conceptual space of the house and experience of the film.
Danielewski foregrounds the book as physical artefact by playing with the reader’s most basic suppositions concerning novels. Footnote 144’s tunnelling of pages has been described as “a kind of shaft which has been drilled through the central text…let’s call it [a] “ductnote” (Fordham). For the majority of the ductnote, the reverse side of the page displays the text backwards. Hayles analyses this:
The box calls into question an assumption so commonplace that we are not normally aware of it: book pages are opaque, a property that defines one page as separate from another. Here the back of the page appears to open transparently onto the front, a notion that overruns the boundary between them and constructs the page as a leaky container rather than an unambiguous unit of print. (Hayles Saving)
Danielewski’s novel refuses to be contained within designated frames, interrogating the printed form and its conceptual space. When reading, a book is often disregarded as a material article as the reader becomes engrossed in its imaginative realm. This novel contains a dual vision. Richard Lanham distinguishes between “looking through a page (when we are immersed in a fictional world and so are scarcely conscious of the page as a material object) and looking at the page, when innovative [designs] encourage us to focus on the page’s physical properties” (Hayles Saving). Hayles argues that the ductnote collapses the two perspectives so the reader performs both actions simultaneously. Thus House of Leaves “disrupts our notion of how a book should look and behave before our eyes” (Bolter History).
Spatial form has a considerable effect on the way a novel is read, placing “greater burden on the reader’s synthesizing power than do more conventional temporal narratives” (Smitten). Danielewski’s experimental designs place House of Leaves in a tradition of ‘antibooks’, such as Derrida’s Glas and Ronell’s The Telephone Book. Antibooks work against the conventions of print medium, testing new spatial orientations and teasing out subversive potential from typographical tricks. Chapter nine, a visual mosaic in which text bursts apart into fragments which scatter the page with deceivingly chaotic precision, affects the eyes’ movement across the page. One cannot scan a single column from top to bottom and left to right since there is no longer a linear progress to the text. Derrida pondered the possibility of “beginning to write without the line” (Derrida qtd. in Bolter History). Danielewski achieves this as each section of text competes for the reader’s attention, offering “multiple pathways in a new kind of textual space whose successful navigation requires multiprocessing” (McCaffery and Gregory). The reader must decide which ocular route to take. The disjointed textual space creates an interaction between sections, content, and blank areas while the reader’s eye darts about navigating this maze of meanings. The effect is “to highlight the physicality of the printed word’s presentation and to establish new non-linear connections between words” (Poynor), readers and text.
Danielewski encourages readers to find exceptional routes through his novel, ignoring paginated order. The particles in chapter nine are the result of a layering of footnotes that overcome the (main) narrative. Usually, a footnote acts as a blind alley, a simple shoot from the text that “returns us to the main track immediately afterward” (Aarseth). In this case, the reader uncovers “a series of footnotes stemming from a single footnote” (Fordham), spiralling successively away from the main path. Furthermore, Danielewski uses footnotes to direct readers to various sections, instituting a nonlinear movement through the book. For instance, footnote 175 and 176 refer the reader to appendix E and B respectively (Danielewski), sections which provide insight into Truant’s character. The reader’s choice of which direction to take, either moving to designated sections or reaching them according to pagination, changes his/her comprehension of the novel. The maze motif emerges “as a trope for the way in which we as readers experience the novel, [and] is compelling because of the implications that no two people will manipulate their way through the labyrinth or the novel the same”. In traditional books, while the reader is physically able to bypass pages or chapters, they risk losing a vast chunk of important narrative detail. House of Leaves, brimming with supplementary material, bestows upon the reader a greater degree of control. As Johnny suggests, “if there’s something you find irksome – go ahead and skip it” (Danielewski). Some readers may attempt to find the quickest way through chapter nine, others may wish to absorb every possible detail. Danielewski also includes an index in (Danielewski), highlighting the rhizomatic space of House of Leaves. This subtly infers that readers may ignore the chronology of pages, even Danielewski’s own disruptive suggestions like footnotes, journeying instead through the book in any pattern they wish using whatever connection they desire to ‘write’ their personal experience of the novel in an arrangement out of the author’s control.
Danielewski’s textual experimentations are interspersed throughout the book. It seems consistent that this deconstructive thrust permeates other issues. Design scholars suggest:
when the deconstructionist approach is applied to design, each layer, through the use of language and image, is an intentional performer in a deliberately playful game wherein the viewer can discover and experience the hidden complexities of language. (Chuck Byrne and Martha Witte qtd. in Poynor)
Nowhere is this clearer than when the rope pulling Reston up the stairwell breaks, leaving Navidson stranded at the bottom. Danielewski’s phrasing here is simple, “the rope snaps” (Danielewski), but its positioning is more complex. The word ‘snaps’ is separated into three parts, so that it performs its meaning optically, as in concrete poetry. By making the word visually embody its connoted action, Danielewski attempts to refresh the written form. Furthermore, as Danielewski explains, the fragmented word takes on new significance when the reader realises that backwards it becomes ‘spans’, an action it fulfils as each segment is placed on a separate page. While the “word is a literal, thematic, and semantic representation of all that’s happening at that moment in the novel” (Danielewski qtd. in McCaffery and Gregory), it also embodies two opposing meanings simultaneously, thus exposing the relationship between words.
Danielewski’s inventive spatial engineering is transformed from page to page, keeping the reader alert to the challenges ahead and injecting the novel with a dynamic impression of movement. He places words upon the page in patterns that form pictures, creating a “double vision” (Hayles Saving) as the reader’s imagination unites the conceptual action with the visual design. For example, Danielewski creates is a ladder that bridges horizontally across a double page spread (Danielewski). As we read the words, our eyes journey upwards in a movement analogous to Navidson’s climb of the fictional ladder. Fordham affirms this as “an experiment in mimetic form, when the narrative content… is being projected into the reader’s experience of the text.” (Fordham). The changing topographical layout of House of Leaves subjects the reader to an ordeal comparable to the undertakings of the fictional characters, forcing her to participate in the novel with a sentience absent when reading other fiction. Indeed, House of Leaves demonstrates “that novelists have as yet barely scratched the surface of the story-telling options that have always been available to writers” (McCaffery and Gregory).
House of Leaves, a novel that cannot be passively perused whilst lazing in bed, demands a high level of involvement fromits readers. Numerous sections see the text being organised in varying, often conflicting, directions from one page to another, sometimes even upon a single page. “Through a bizarre form of reader activity, the reader is literally… manipulating the physical object that contains the text: turning it over and round and upside down, thumbing backwards, rifling through to other disparate sections” (Fordham). The changing textual configurations causes tumultuous revolutions in the reader’s interaction with the novel. Indeed, these labyrinthine “games of orientation are in turn games of disorientation” (Hans Magnus Enzensberger qtd. in Calvino Cybernetics). Not only is the reader forced to engage with the text physically, she is beckoned to interpret and decode it cerebrally. A letter from Pelafina to Johnny provides a clear example (Danielewski). This letter has been encoded and to decipher the hidden message the reader must follow the previously suggested instruction: “use the first letter of each word to build subsequent words and phrases” (Ibid.). In doing so, the reader uncovers Pelafina’s atrocious confession of her rape by the institution’s attendants. Discussing contemporary fascination with surfaces and concealed profundity, Fordham explains that postmodernism “celebrate[s] structural depth and coincidence, density and complexity, and reaffirm[s] the possibilities of textuality, the pleasures of a reader’s engagement with the textual” (Fordham). This novel is quite literally layered with meaning. In Johnny’s words, “It’s like there’s something else, something beyond it all, a greater story still looming in the twilight which for some reason I am unable to see” (Danielewski). This is a book daring the reader to probe beyond the veneer of the page, search for its secrets within the covers, pages, words, to enrich the reader’s experience, alluring her into a committed relationship with the novel.
House of Leaves offers the reader an intense encounter, physically and mentally, in which s/he must almost become a player, a walker, actively unravelling its tale and trail of words. Johnny Truant introduces the story, forewarning the reader of what to expect. When he seems to be stuck for further ways to describe the book he resigns, “find your own words; I have no more”. In what appears to be a flippant comment emerges a poignant truth as readers moving deeper into the volume, immersing themselves in the stories. When we, as readers decode Pelafina’s letter, how do we keep track of her horrific admission? Do we scribble it on a scrap of paper, a leaf, folding it into the pages of the novel? Scrawl it in the margins? As academics, students, readers willing to take on Danielewski’s challenge, temptation has us writing notes into the empty spaces of the page; in short, we add our own words; we carry out Johnny’s plea; we create an additional layer to the novel, so that it becomes our rendered copy of a book introduced and noted by Truant, written by Zampanò. It is as though we become the next in line of a legacy. The length, weight, and time it takes to read this seven-hundred-page novel triggers within us an uncanny sensation reminiscent of Johnny’s daunting account of having begun to “feel its heaviness, sensed something horrifying in its proportions, its silence, its stillness” (Danielewski). Just as it grows into an obsession for Johnny, and Zampanò before him, reading (and writing) this novel becomes an exhaustive preoccupation, consuming the reader’s thoughts and time. The novel “escapes from its prison of paper and creeps into [the] mind, making it one of few fiction genuinely to approach the nightmarish.” (Monster)
Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a remarkable novel that makes unprecedented demands upon its readers. Its audacious use of textual space and inventive visual designs add an additional layer to its maze-like conceptual and structural conceit. Its spatial transformations take another step in the evolution of the literary labyrinth as “House of Leaves recuperates the print book – particularly the novel as a literary form – …the price it pays is a metamorphosis so profound that it becomes a new kind of form and artifact” (Hayles Saving). This rhizomatic novel offers the reader an intimate textual experience, in an age in which printed books are thought by some to be archaic, challenging the limits of the novel and printed word. House of Leaves’ proves that books “are not going the way of the dinosaur, but the way of the human, changing as we change, mutating and evolving in ways that will continue, as a book lover said long ago, to teach and delight” (Hayles Writing).
— Route57
Introduction: Ergodic Literature
The Book and the Labyrinth
A few words on the two neoteric terms, cybertext and ergodic, are in order. Cybertext is a neologism derived from Norbert Wiener's book (and discipline) called Cybernetics, and subtitled Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948). Wiener laid an important foundation for the development of digital computers, but his scope is not limited to the mechanical world of transistors and, later, of microchips. As the subtitle indicates, Wiener's perspective includes both organic and inorganic systems; that is, any system that contains an information feedback loop. Likewise, the concept of cybertext does not limit itself to the study of computer-driven (or "electronic") textuality; that would be an arbitrary and unhistorical limitation, perhaps comparable to a study of literature that would only acknowledge texts in paper-printed form. While there might be sociological reasons for such a study, we would not be able to claim any understanding of how different forms of literature vary.
The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than even reader-response theorists would claim. The performance of their reader takes place all in his head, while the user of cybertext also performs in an extranoematic sense. During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of "reading" do not account for. This phenomenon I call ergodic, using a term appropriated from physics that derives from the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning "work" and "path." In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.
Whenever I have had the opportunity to present the perspective of ergodic literature and cybertext to a fresh audience of literary critics and theorists, I have almost invariably been challenged on the same issues: that these texts (hypertexts, adventure games, etc.) aren't essentially different from other literary texts, because all literature is to some extent indeterminate, nonlinear, and different for every reading, the reader has to make choices in order to make sense of the text, and finally a text cannot really be nonlinear because the reader can read it only one sequence at a time, anyway.
Typically, these objections came from persons who, while well versed in literary theory, had no firsthand experience of the hypertexts, adventure games, or multi-user dungeons I was talking about. At first, therefore, I thought this was simply a didactical problem: if only I could present examples of my material more clearly, everything would become indisputable. After all, can a person who has never seen a movie be expected to understand the unique characteristics of that medium? A text such as the I Ching is not meant to be read from beginning to end but entails a very different and highly specialized ritual of perusal, and the text in a multi-user dungeon is without either beginning or end, an endless labyrinthine plateau of textual bliss for the community that builds it. But no matter how hard I try to describe these texts to you, the reader, their essential difference will remain a mystery until they are experienced firsthand.
In my campaign for the study of cybertextuality I soon realized that my terminology was a potential source of confusion. Particularly problematic was the word nonlinear. For some it was a common literary concept used to describe narratives that lacked or subverted a straightforward story line; for others, paradoxically, the word could not describe my material, since the act of reading must take place sequentially, word for word.
This aporia never ceased to puzzle me. There was obviously an epistemological conflict. Part of the problem is easily resolved: hypertexts, adventure games, and so forth are not texts the way the average literary work is a text. In what way, then, are they texts? They produce verbal structures, for aesthetic effect. This makes them similar to other literary phenomena. But they are also something more, and it is this added paraverbal dimension that is so hard to see. A cybertext is a machine for the production of variety of expression. Since literary theorists are trained to uncover literary ambivalence in texts with linear expression, they evidently mistook texts with variable expression for texts with ambiguous meaning. When confronted with a forking text such as a hypertext, they claimed that all texts are produced as a linear sequence during reading, so where was my problem?
The problem was that, while they focused on what was being read, I focused on what was being read from. This distinction is inconspicuous in a linear expression text, since when you read from War and Peace, you believe you are reading War and Peace. In drama, the relationship between a play and its (varying) performance is a hierarchical and explicit one; it makes trivial sense to distinguish between the two. In a cybertext, however, the distinction is crucial--and rather different; when you read from a cybertext, you are constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard. Each decision will make some parts of the text more, and others less, accessible, and you may never know the exact results of your choices; that is, exactly what you missed. This is very different from the ambiguities of a linear text. And inaccessibility, it must be noted, does not imply ambiguity but, rather, an absence of possibility--an aporia.[...]
— The John Hopkins University Press
