Tag: Danielewski

three times

so i’ve read the book house of leaves three times now and each time i’ve gotten something different out of it.

the first time i read it without reading any of tyhe appendixes but just as the story existed on its own. it went a lot faster but i feel like i didn’t get the depth i did with my second reading.

the second time i read it i read each appendix when a footnote sent me there. i got much more depth into johnny’s character and was able to understand his actions a lot better. it gave the book less of a narrative sense because the characters didn’t have too much back story but you could find it out from other stories. it was as if they existed and though the plot only presented you with one moment of their lives you were able to find out the rest.  actually, the quotes and letters were about the only part of the appendix and exhibits that i thought added something. the incomplete ones did nothing for me and i didn’t get much more out of zampano’s character.

this time when i read it for class it seemed a little long winded and that searching for so much depth and interpretation in a book where it’s already laid out took away from the experience. when i read books i see the text existing as something on it’s own and, personally, i don’t get much out of literary analysis. some authors write their books for the stories and ideas and some [james joyce – finnegan’s wake] write stories academia will read it over and over trying to find the hidden meaning. i think with house of leaves danielewski is parodying this with the over-abundance of footnotes.

and the footnotes…each time i started reading i told myself i would read them all, but less than halfway through each time, i gave up because i rarely got any more out of them.

this might be a rant

House of Leaves is a trashbag full of puzzles, riddles, and codes, bits of information, all begging to be sniffed out and put together by extremely curious minds set in the heads of people with not much else to do or think about. It wants to take minds captive, make them dwell on seemingly important bits of information that feign being integral parts of the big puzzle that exists only to annoy, not to be solved. But its purpose cannot be known until all of the pieces that are found are put together, exposing all of the gaps and missing pieces that don’t even exist in the text in the first place. This is why Danielewski should be exiled.

Since starting House of Leaves, I have noticed numerous people carrying around the book, pages tagged throughout, and I have to say that this sight gets me just about as sad as I get when I see my younger brother and his friends playing computer games all day long. I’ve actually wondered if Danielewksi created this maze with the opening line “This book is not for you” because he knew it would be like creating a playground that he would be able to watch people playing on often (often, because to explore every in and out, every footnote, one would have to carry the book everywhere they went for months or maybe longer). My guess is he gets off watching people trying to solve all the puzzles, big and small, in House of Leaves that fit together to make a big nothing! Being a book is like a promise that all of a readers quanderings and explorations of a text will eventually pay off to reveal the true meaning and reason of the text, but I think that House of Leaves may be one of those that can’t be detangled rationally.

Lodge talks of many postmodernists texts as being laberynths without exits. “Endings, the ‘exits’ of fictions, are particularly significant in this connection. Instead of the closed ending of the traditional novel, in which mystery is explained and fortunes are settled, and instead of the open ending of the modernist novel, ‘satisfying but not final’ as Conrad said of Henry James, we get the multiple ending, the false ending, the mock ending or parody ending.” Lodges gives Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 as an example; however, The Crying of Lot 49 is less than 200 pages and has no footnotes. And it is funny, unlike House of Leaves, or at least in my opinion, which is radical but stubborn, so even though I haven’t finished the book yet, I can say that it’s just plain unsavory for my taste and I probably wouldn’t even finish it if it wasn’t for class. Not even to tell other people that I had. I probably feel a lot like this girl I mentioned in class…

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27769

disorienting reading

Mapping out a definite way to read House of Leaves has become a seemingly impossible task, and I’ve begun to think that Danielewski meant for it to be this way. For the first hundred or so pages I was find my way around the book just fine, reading from left to right, page to page, stopping at footnotes and flipping back to appendices whenever I was referred to them. However, many of the footnotes run on for whole pages, forcing you to go back and reread/relocate the place in the text where you left out. This going back and forth between footnotes and text, especially between appendices and text, where we are forced to flip all the way to the back of the book and sometimes stay there for near a hundred pages before going back to the text, seems to be a simulation of the constant back and forth, incongruous Explorations in the Navidson Records.

Danielewski creates a way for readers to physically feel disoriented along with the men on the Explorations, swanning our way through the book House of Leaves as they swan their way through the labyrinths in the house of the title. He also creates for readers a sort of spacial perception as we are many times forced to flip the book all the way around itself to read upside-down passages, and for many pages, there are only a couple of words per page amongst a white backdrop, undefined and empty.

I hate to make this comparison, since I hated the movie when it came out and I wouldn’t put myself through watching it again today to confirm my hatred of it, but House of Leaves seems sort of Blair Witch-esque to me. I don’t know it anyone else got that. It is a pretty unsavory piece of cinematic crap, but my comparison is only insofar as both achieving to make their audiences feel as lost and disoriented, probably among other feelings as well, as the characters in their plots.