The most startling thing about David Lodge’s essay, “Postmodernist Fiction,” was how old it was; it was published in 1977. As I read it, I thought his insights were as apropos to House of Leaves as to John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, published in 1969. It was astonishing to me that this essay was written more than 30 years ago! It also reminded me of the discussion we had in an earlier class where Professor Sample pointed out that every 15 years or so someone decides that the novel is finished and that there is nothing new to invent, but then something new always comes along in spite of the predictions.
My first “recognition” of a connection between Lodge’s essay and House of Leaves was when Lodge discussed the writing of Beckett, which, he noted, had reached a stage where first-person narrators were “increasingly isolated and deprived of sensory stimuli, desperately trying to make sense of their experience by recalling it” (255). This is exactly what seems to be going on with the various narrators, most notably Johnny Truant, in House of Leaves. Also, the multiple footnotes and digressions into every permutation of literary criticism contained in House of Leaves seem to be reflected in Lodge’s observation that postmodernists tend to resist compulsive attempts of the human consciousness to interpret the world and operate from a point of view about the general absurdity of the human predicament (255). There is a of absurdity in House of Leaves, and if nothing else, the novel lays bare (and thus defies) all attempts to interpret it by anticipating (and parodying) every possible style of literary criticism.
In terms of the various alternatives to the “metaphoric or metonymic” poles of language that Lodge says may be indicative of postmodernism (258), House of Leaves is a poster boy for them all: contradiction; permutation (i.e., “alternative narrative lines” [259] like Johnny’s “revised” list of Lude’s conquests); discontinuity (chopped up texts, including unusual layouts of the text); randomness; excess (the list of photographers beginning on page 64 of the novel and the even longer list of “houses” that begins on page 120, to name just two); and the desire to “short circuit,” that is, “to administer a shock to the reader and thus resist assimilation into conventional categories of the literary” (269). Ways of doing that, he suggests, include “combining in one work violently contrasting modes—the obviously fictive and the apparently factual; introducing the author and the question of authorship into the text; and exposing conventions in the act of using them” (269). That’s our House of Leaves, for sure.
Finally, one passage that struck me was Lodge’s discussion of a theory (Jakobson) about the nature of discourse, noting that “if you attempt to group topics according to some other principle, or absence of principle, the human mind will nevertheless persist in trying to make sense of the text thus produced by looking in it for relationships of similarity and/or contiguity; and insofar as a text succeeds in defeating such interpretation, it defeats itself” (258). Wait, isn’t that what we’re doing in our attempts to “map” themes or motfis within House of Leaves? Is our mapping exercise a postmodern endeavor itself, or is it just a new twist on our traditional, hard-wired-in-our-heads basic human need to interpret and make sense of the novel? It’s just a rhetorical question; obviously sitting in an English class and resisting attempts to interpret a text would soon prove to be unprofitable, not to mention no fun at all.