There were a number of things that I felt that I grasped from the literary analysis that went with the reading this weekend for House of Leaves. Kind of a relief of sorts as it made me feel a little less dense. From Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well:
Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. (186)
The idea of making trifles from terrors kind of struck me as applicable to the academic writing and footnotes in House of Leaves. They come from a multitude of angles but succeed in reducing what really is lurking in the house to something less real. There is concentration placed on everything but the vastness of the hallway, the darkness, or the creature that growls. Instead Navy and Tom are compared to Jacob and Esau, or the materials that the hallway is not composed of are listed, or some aspect of some character’s personality is thoroughly analyzed while this larger presence that is a source of terror is skirted around. The elephant in the room. To deal with the nature of the house gives it a reality perhaps and so one of the occasions that the properties of the hall has an opportunity to be analyzed, it passes by. In not looking closer at the hall’s imperviousness toward the cat and dog, the academic criticism and Zampano don’t make much of it, maybe so to ignore a reality or the implication of such a thing if it were indeed real, and move it from a trifle to a terror. Johnny catches the lack of commentary even from Zampano and his mention further highlights this oddity to the reader. He claims to give his thoughts on what it means that the cat and dog run into the hallway only to instantly appear in the backyard, but I’ve had a hard time extracting his thoughts on the matter from the story he proceedes to tell. Maybe it should be inferred from the quote at the beginning of the passage about the consciousness of animals, or maybe it is layered further down.
