explaining house of leaves
What the hell is a house of leaves, anyway?
It's been about fifteen years since I last read House of Leaves. It is, famously, a convoluted, pretentious book with nested footnotes where the text, in parts, is printed like a labyrinth, requiring you to turn the book over in your hands to read it properly, and has, as such, developed the reputation for being impenetrable. The word "house" appears in blue text, the word "minotaur" and struck out text appears in red.1 It's earned a reputation as something very bizarre and difficult to understand; I am here to explicate the inexplicable.
House of Leaves has several layers of narrative. It goes something like this: a man named Johnny Truant has inherited a manuscript called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampano. The Navidson Record is a critical analysis of a film that is also called The Navidson Record, along with some associated films. Truant has taken it upon himself to edit and publish the manuscript as a book, and Truant himself has editors who, for the most part, seem to be meant to be viewed as our only reliable narrators in the text.
Johnny Truant is the sort of person who lives in the cracks of society, a guy who tries to keep his poor mental health in check with sex, drugs, and rock and roll and isn't doing a great job of it even prior to the start of the story; discovering the manuscript sends him down a spiral of obsession that goes to some dark places. He kind of sucks but I think that's deliberate.
The main point of Johnny Truant is that he is a self-admittedly unreliable narrator. He messes with the text of The Navidson Record to more closely parallel the things that are happening to him in his life as he works through the manuscript; he makes up stories wholesale. We are not meant to trust Johnny Truant, and since he is the vehicle through which we're seeing the rest of the text, we're not meant to trust anything.
The Navidson Record, the book Truant is editing, is about a film that, within the framework of the fiction, does not exist. The text of House of Leaves goes out of its way to make sure that we understand that this film cannot exist. The characters don't exist, the place doesn't exist, the film doesn't exist, and while of course blind people can enjoy cinema, Zampano's critical analysis of the film doesn't read as if it were written by someone who could not see. It reads, rather, as if it were entirely made up. (Again, all of this is within the framework of the fiction.)
The book Record doesn't have as much presence as Truant's layer or the film layer; Zampano is present but he acts as our guide to this bizarre land. I think the book might actually explicitly call him our Homer, but even if not, his blindness makes me confident that he is meant to represent the famous Greek poet. He is present more as a guide than a character, though he certainly has a few moments.
The Navidson Record, the film the book is about, is the story of Will Navidson, a man who buys a house where he can settle down with his family, and discovers that it is bigger on the inside than on the outside; it only gets weirder from there. The film's narrative is what you would consider the narrative heart of this book: it's the story about exploring the house, and about its impacts on the people who come into contact with it.
All of this is fairly straightforward; you've got Truant's story, Navidson's story, and Zampano as the medium by which Truant experiences Navidson's story. Somewhere over the top of that are the mysterious Editors, who for the most part don't do much but occasionally correct Truant when he's wrong about something; they are there, I believe, to fuck with us. More on that later.
What makes this so weird?
Okay, I hear you asking, so where does this get weird? I'm very glad you asked, my hypothetical reader. It starts with the presentation of the text: Zampano appears in one font, Truant in another, the Editors in a third2; Truant usually tells his story through footnotes to the main text of The Navidson Record, but these footnotes often go on for paragraphs, if not pages. So you'll end up with multiple bits of story happening on the same page at once.
Truant's footnotes aren't the only ones, of course; Zampano cites his sources, many of which are actual books and movies that you can actually go find in the real world, and many of which are entirely made up. The Editors appear occasionally. Footnotes get footnotes. You can see how things get convoluted.
And then, as the story gets weird, as Truant's grip on reality slides, as exploring the house gets more bizarre, the layout and typography gets . . . weird. Labyrinths of text, pages where only one or two words appear . . . it's very easy to grab a page and show it to someone and say "see! see how weird this is!", and they're not wrong, but these sections are the exception, rather than the rule.
But there is another way in which this book is weird, and gets its convoluted reputation. And that is this: Danielewski just . . . hides little secrets in the book for you to find. There are some hidden acrostics, some of which are jokes, some of which hide things that people are probably still arguing about on the internet, and one of which is there to fuck with the sort of reader who goes looking for these secrets.3 And there are . . . probably other secrets? I never got deep into the Finding Secrets scene, but the point is, the act of reading the book was meant, in some way, to mirror the characters' exploration of the house. The house is the book, the leaves are the paper it's printed on.
Personally, I think a lot of the secrets exist in the same way that the lore of Dark Souls exists. It's not that no thought went into it--indeed, a great deal of care and planning clearly went into this book, and it is, if nothing else, exquisitely crafted--but it is meant to suggest the presence of a grand plan, to allow the audience the pleasure of exploring and creation; there is no grand plan to discover because no grand plan is better than the sense that you have found something brilliant, not realizing that you have just created it yourself.4
No, really, what the hell is this book?
House of Leaves is many things. It's an existential horror novel; it's a parody of academic and critical analysis; it's a story about love; it's a story about the impossibility of knowing yourself; it's a story about confronting the unknown; it's some loose stream-of-consciousness writing from the point of view of a fucked up little guy.
Navidson's story, as I said, is the heart of this story; it is where we can most clearly see all of its themes at play. We can see Navidson become obsessed with understanding this impossible house he has purchased, and the cost that this obsession, and the proximity to the house itself, extracts from him, his relationships, his family. But the story is ultimately resolved by Navidson and his wife (partner? it's been fifteen years and I ain't looking that up now) confronting the house with courage and conviction; so much of the rest of the story is about denying the impossible, about exploring the house in order to understand and thus diminish it; in the end, happiness and healing come not from battling the impossible but from accepting it, and learning to live in spite of it. There are secrets to be found in this story, things to be gleaned for those who are willing to delve, but at its heart it really is that straightforward.5
And to a large extent, I think this is the point. We are shown the impacts of the house and all of its existential horror not in huge, world-shattering implications, but in the effects it has on individual people who come into contact with it. And so our journey through the text mirrors the characters' stories: does it get under your skin, make you dig around and try to see if you can figure it out? Do you write ninety five percent of an essay fifteen years later as a reaction to a friend's throwaway joke, stop because you're struggling to find a conclusion, and then come back over a year later when you realize that this, too, is House of Leaves?
In the end, we learn and we move forward not by trying to find the external force that gives this meaning, but but accepting that there is none. The house is impossible, and absurd, and terrifying, and that's okay. There doesn't have to be a puzzle to unravel.
I considered for about three seconds doing that here. That's too much work.↩
I think probably Truant's mother, who has some letters in the appendices, gets a fourth?↩
Fairly early on there are a sequence of footnotes, the first letter of each reads out "MARK Z DANIELEWSKI." This is not very remarkable on its own, except that at least one of the footnotes is made by the otherwise reliable Editors. I love this because there is no explanation that doesn't break the fourth wall, but that doesn't stop people from trying to find one.↩
My favorite anecdote about this book: on the old official forums, at one point Danielewski wandered into a discussion thread and said something to the end of "You're doing well, but you haven't found the grand staircase yet," and then, of course, refused to elaborate. This is truly masterful trolling.↩
Truant's story, too, is about exploring a fractured relationship, in his case with his mother, who has been living in a mental institution for many years. She has very little presence in the actual text, but we can read some of her letters in the appendices and while there is a lot of bullshittery in this book I don't think it's bullshittery when Truant suggests that she has an implied presence through the entire narrative. Also there's a followup book with more of her letters, but I never read that one. Maybe I should? Who knows.↩