Occasionally I have cause to comment not upon what’s going on outside the blog but on the blog itself and while usually this means I’m apologising for not updating it in over a year, this time it’s to explain a change you might have noticed in a couple of previous posts.
I temporarily altered my footnote style such that the footnotes were linked using clickable tags, so if you click the number it takes you to the footnote, and clicking the footnotes number takes you back to the text. This was to facilitate a cleaner user experience and following footnotes as the reader progressed through the text. I now have at least 2 readers after all and I have to continually refer to them in order that they keep coming back.
This was quite difficult to do especially as I do almost all of my blogging on my phone and typing html on a touch screen keyboard is an absolute nightmare, and when I finished off my post about hypnotism, faced with the task of adding all these links I decided not to bother. Not because it was too much effort, but because I had read House of Leaves.
Spoilers ahead for House of Leaves I guess, as if most people didn’t know about it entirely from internet videos explaining the entire plot.
Right off the bat, as I know the internet is full of gushing praise for Houseof Leaves, I want to state that I did not like Houseof Leaves. I enjoyed reading it, I thought it had some interesting imagery and a clever premise but for me it ultimately did not stick the landing.
I first heard about House of Leaves from a friend who was reading it 20 years ago. he said it was an incredibly scary book, one which would have a long lasting psychological effect on readers, but when I flipped through it my primary impression was “Haha, text goes wheeeee”. It was only last year when I saw some youtube videos about a doom mod called myhouse.wad, based on the book, that I decided I should buy a copy and give it a proper shot. Having now read it cover to cover, flipping back and forth to follow the footnotes between chapters and through holes in the page, missing appendices, full colour illustrations and all the rest that I can now give a full appraisal of House of Leaves, and my final judgement is “Haha, text goes wheeeee”.
Let me explain.
House of Leaves is a work of ergodic literature. That is to say it tells a story non-linearly and using an unconventional layered plot. The house in the title refers to a suburban home owned by a documentary film maker called Will Navidson who sets cameras up in every room in order to record the day to day activities of a family, his own family, moving house. A sort of character piece if you will. This film is watched¹ by a character called Zampano, who had written a long detailed examination of the film and what it could mean. Shortly after Zampano’s death a character called Johnny Truant helps to clean up Zampano’s apartment, and finds a trunk containing all of Zampano’s notes, which he then reads and assembles, alongside a diary of his own actions throughout, into the text you the reader are holding.
So just to recap, House of Leaves is a diary about an essay about a film about a house. For good measure the book also contains amongst its appendices a collection of poems written by Zampano in his youth and letters written by Jonny Truant’s mentally ill mother.
Up until this point I have buried the lead so to speak by not mentioning that the house is an eldritch architectural abomination, starting with a door appearing between two rooms when no one was home, then the realisation that the house is slightly larger on the inside than on the outside, and finally with another door appearing; this one leading into a long corridor and eventually a massive labyrinthine set of halls, all made of featureless black stone, in a place where the door ought to just lead into the garden. These cavernously large rooms are impossible to fully illuminate, constantly changing in layout, and actively reject any kind of trail being left behind, healing scratches and decaying marks or signs.
Oh and maybe there’s a minotaur.
In his extensive documentation about this film, which even in the text no one had ever heard of, despite assertions that it had won awards, Zampano apparently went mad an died of a heart attack, except that doesn’t explain why there were long claw-like scratches in the wood near his body, or what happened to his cats.
As Johnny writes about this he begins to have visions of a creature stalking him, experiences of missing time and violent hallucinations. In the end he decides to seek out the house itself and investigate its mysteries.
CHAPTER II
What makes House of Leaves an interesting read is it’s strict adherence to form over function. The story is three texts layered on top of each other, four if you count the frequent excerpts transcribed from newspaper clippings, five if you count the notes from the editor who is working through Johnny’s diary to produce the final book. These texts are connected through footnoteᴮ markings, at first linking to actual footnotes at the bottom of the page, then to footnotes on other pages, then other chapters, then referencing the appendices, and finally leading to boxed out seconds over multiple pages which have to be read as a 3 dimensional stack inserted into the text, ending with a paragraph that must be read in a mirror.
Some people described this as disorienting but I found it quite invigorating, along with the occasional nonsense acrostic embedded into the text, all of which gives the impression that anyone who visits the house is cursed with a kind of madness forcing them to inject a little bit of its eldritch non-euclidean nature into their own writing about it, and then reading these texts further infects the reader. Suggesting that the madness of the house has been spread from the house to Navidson Record, to Zampanos notes, to Johnny’s diary, then to the very text you are reading. Perhaps it even predates the house and had infected the architect. Maybe now as a reader of the book I carry the madness. Maybe as a reader of this blog, you have been afflicted too⁺.
So how does it end?
Johnny never finds the house. We never find out what happened to Zampano. We never learn what’s going on with the house. In fact whilst its never stated, it is strongly implied that Johnny made up the whole thing.
In the final moments of the Navidson Record, Will Navidson is lost inside the depths of the house, his torches are all dead, his matches are almost entirely gone, by his calculation he has fallen down a staircase which since grew so tall that it is deeper than the diameter of the earth.
He’s fucked.
So with nothing else to do, or live for, he gets out the book he brought with him to read on his expedition, and decides to use his final moment to tear out the first page, set it alight, and use it’s flame to read the next page, which will befall the same fate, continuing in this manner until he has read the whole thing, then fling himself off a ledge into darkness. The name of this book he is reading?
House of Leaves.
Oooooohhhhhh spooky
Except… wait no, that’s not spooky. That’s just further reinforcing that not only did Johnny make up the whole thing, Johnny himself is fictional because he didn’t know he was writing House of Leaves, only the compiling editor did. So the editor made it up⁺.
Except the editor is just the author Mark Z. Danielewski.
So the answer to any question about of what’s going on that in fact you are reading a work of fiction so no answer could ever truly satisfy you, because it isn’t realⁱ.
Chapter X
Imagine if any other work of fiction ended that way? You turn the final page of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventure of the Empty House⁵ and instead of the murder being explained it’s a scene where John Watson stops writing the book and can’t decide how to end it, with a footnote from the editor apologizing.
What’s truly fascinating however is that when you look into the fan community for House of Leaves, the people who say their lives have been changed by it, for whom it took over their minds and never let go, what you find is a strange obsession with the idea that the book is not a narrative book but is in fact a puzzle to be unpicked. Many theorise that the actual author is not Navidson, Zampano, Johnny or the Editor but is in fact Johnny’s mother, the one who writes him the letter in the appendices. That the madness of the house is not infectious to the reader but fed into the characters by her⁼.
One youtuber I watched was obsessed with the idea that the various codes, acrostics, and hidden symbolic references were hinting at locations in the real world, apparently a common belief. Her copy of House of Leaves was densely annotated with translations and bristling with colour coded page markers for ease of reference.
From the way people react to it, you’d be forgiven for thinking that some of them actually believe the house is real. I wonder if any of them fear they are being chased by the creature?.
The mindset of these people is not much different to my own mental state shortly after finishing a videogame called The Witness by Thekla inc. That’s a game with a very similar vibe, where the story is that of an island with puzzles grafted onto it by an unknown third party. This is despite the fact that puzzles naturally occur on the island (if you look for them). This setup is later discovered to be part of a virtual reality project by a group of unknown individuals who left behind hidden developer logs (if you know where to look) and if you find the exit (the actual exit not the fake exit which resets the island) you learn that you are in fact someone who was participating in the testing and development of The Witness. The final cutscene has you stumbling in first person through the Thekla Inc offices, your perception forever altered by your time on the island.
After playing the Witness, seeing both endings and achieving the mythic 100% of all clams opened, all fountains activated, all leaves sunken, all lotus flowers bloomed and all candles lit, I stared at the final candle, which flickered unlike the others, thought about the game as a whole. What I thought was: Why is that candle flickering. Is it not fully lit? Is there more to do? Do the pillars do anything else when they’re all white? How come nothing ever happens on the peninsula with the Grail? Every other inch of the map is packed with content but there’s nothing there other than a statue of a man reaching for the golden chalice, in whose shadow it appears he has already grasped it. There are grills in the floor at the bottom of one secret room suggesting something is below it, a tunnel to the peninsula maybe? Like the tunnel in the desert except but you never get down there. Your save file says 523, +135, +6, which adds up to 664. But if you’ve got that far you’ve watched The Secret of Psalm 46 and you think “Why not add up to 666 like the numerological shenanigans described by Moriarty⁸?”
Of course I had fallen into the same trap. No ending would ever be as satisfying as the process undertaken to get there. Even the mind bending final secret ending hadn’t sated meⁱ⁵, and it never would.
Perhaps this is House of Leaves’ downfall. The reason I enjoyed reading it was the wild traversal of footnotes and referencesᴮ, narrative elements that branch and loop back on themselves, the intellectual equivalent of lift up flaps in Spot The Dog. No ending would have matched the joy of mere traversal. A true case of the journey mattering more than the destination.
That’s why I kind of like having my blog peppered with footnotes. Originally inspired by the works of Terry Pratchett, I started to add them for the purpose of both extra information and humour. If this is all they were for, putting hyperlinks between them is simply a quality of life improvement. Having read House of Leaves however I think the act of having to seek out the references and backtrack afterwards has a tactile and kinaesthetic pleasure all of its ownᴭ.
I’d like to add some of that spice to my performances I think. Magic is quite a unique artform in that it brings fictional elements into people’s conception of reality, like a madness in a book that extends beyond the page, but actually delivering on that promise.
In future blog posts I may expand upon that without all the footnoteᴮ theatrics. For now though I want to end with my reviews.
House of Leaves : 5/10
Rick and Morty: 7/10
BBC Sherlock : 2/10
The Witness : 9/10
The Secret of Pslam 46: 10/10
¹ Zampano is in fact blind but we later discover he hired a number of women to watch the Navidson Record with him and describe the visuals so that he could write his essay about it.
ᴮ if you recall, it was through mention of footnotes that this post began, so you can take this reincorporation of the opening topic as a sign that things are coming together into a conclusion soonᴭ.
ᴭ But you would in fact be wrong – Ed
⁺ See Chapter X
ⁱ This same final conclusion is also reached at the end of the Rick and Morty episode Claw and Hoarder: Special Ricktim’s Morty in which a talking⁶ befriends Jerry and refuses to say how it gained the power of speech. This question is reinforced several times through the episode, each time with the response that no answer would be satisfying enough to the viewer to be worth explaining. Indeed at the end Rick and Jerry both find out the truth and are so revolted by it that Rick offers to wipe Jerry’s memory of it, but the audience never finds out what it is, deepening the mystery.
⁵ The Adventure of the Empty House is the first Sherlock Holmes novel written for the character’s return, after his death at the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem. Though I’ve never read it I chose it here for the stylistic fact that it has the word house in the title. What makes it so apt however is that this book gives a fairly plain explanation for Holmes’ survival of his fall at Reichenbach. When adapting the post mortem return of Sherlock Holmes’ for the BBC television series Sherlock, the episode chooses to throw several conflicting accounts⁷ at the audience with the truth never being fully revealed, since no explanation given would ever satisfy the viewerⁱ. But the way House of Leaves chooses to resolve this same issue would be like if Sherlock pulled out a copy of the complete works of Arthur Conan Doyle and told Watson the viewers could look it up in their own spare time if they really cared.
⁶ Okay this one is indulgent of me but there are several places in Houseof Leaves where the word cat is notably absent in a way which renders the sentence nonsensical. This is another of those infectious madness things where it supposedly mirrors the disappearance of Zampano’s cats. I never noticed this myself and had to be informed of it by later watching youtubers describe why they actually liked the book⁺.
⁷ One of which hinges on Watson being hypnotised on the spot by Derren Brown, and you know how I feel about hypnotists⁰
⁰ See my previous post on the subject.
⁼ This hypothesis is apparently lent additional credence by The Whalestoe Letters, an expanded compilation of the letters from Johnny’s mother, some of which are in the appendix of House of Leaves. Maybe they’re worth reading, I don’t know. Truth be told I don’t think I’m ever going to read another word penned by Mark Z. Danielewski. I’d rather spend my time with works that at least try to end.
⁸ Moriarty in this context refers to Brian Moriarty, author and narrator of The Secret of Psalm 46 – Ed