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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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…<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.theonion.com\/content\/node\/27769 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 … Continue reading this might be a rant<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[65,73,69,71,72],"class_list":["post-190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-1","tag-danielewski","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-lodge","tag-puzzles","tag-pynchon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":194,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions\/194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/414\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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