Maybe it’s a copout to focus on absence, because what novel has everything? House of Leaves, however, seems to delight in its own absences, and furthermore build upon them. The absence of ¼”, for example, sets the obsession with space rolling. The whole phenomenon described is that of impossibility, that of the house being bigger than itself, or at least not easily contained.
And one of the biggest absences is that of a complete story. While the supposed narrators supposedly make every attempt possible to leave in everything and cite all sources, we can’t help but notice the absence of, say, the movie itself. Truant says plainly that many of the footnotes aren’t even accurate and that one of them is covered by an ink stain and others unintelligible. You get both the detailed analysis of a movie you’ll never see by an unreliable dead blind man, and the reactions of a slowly maddening Truant by way of disjointed footnotes. There’s this whole question of authenticity, noted upfront on page 3, which brings in the idea of artifice vs. reality. Even the introduction is written by a fictional person. The book seems to pretty much be a self-proclaimed fraud drenched in painstaking details to deny its fraudulence.
Here we have a photographer/moviemaker, a person skilled at manipulating light and space in order to “capture reality.” Someone in the book mentions Escher at some point, and I’m reminded of anamorphosis, that weird process of playing with perspective to create space that isn’t there. Take, for example, the St. Ignatius church in Italy, where the dome is painted so as to appear, when you’re standing at a certain point on the floor, to exist. Really the church ceiling is flat on the outside:
There is also the famous Ames room, an optical illusion where part of a room extends further than it appears, so when two people stand on either side of it, one looks tiny and the other like a giant. This is an illusion. Observe the creepy children:
Anamorphosis is a centuries-old technique (if I remember right, it started as a way to obscure political cartoons from kings), and has practical purposes (arrows and directions drawn on streets are distorted so as to look normal from a driver approaching in a car). It shows up in film, such as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Jim Carrey as a disproportional child under a table). It’s also used in sidewalk art:
Product placement!
Getting back to absence, I’d just like to point out there seems to be absence of feeling, especially with Karen (“she has no room for him” p. 12), and Navidson’s and Truant’s absent childhood families which supposedly lead to an absence of love and conflicted emotions later on.
There is also an absence of grammar. I realize that’s a bad segue. But seriously. Errors occur most often in Truant’s footnotes. For example, he keeps saying “I should of..” or “I could of”. While these seem to imply he’s just not a grammarian or that the “editors” hesitate to lose the contrived authenticity of the thing, there are also those which seem more intentional.
On page 31, Zampanó gets flowery about coffee spilling over until there is “nothing more than a brown blot on the morning paper” and then Truant footnotes it, saying the passage is unnecessary but left in so as to avoid absences, keep it authentic. However, Truant misspells morning, saying instead: “Easily that whole bit from ‘coffee arcing tragically’ down to ‘the mourning paper’ could have been cut.” Not only does the substitution of mourning for morning seem intentional, but it also serves to target Truant as unreliable (not that his drug-infused rants and ramblings don’t already do so).
There are at least two places where the word “pieces” is represented with “pisces.” What is this about? On page 41, Zampano’s talking about Echo and says Pan “tears her to pisces.” In the appendix of Johnny’s mother’s crazy letters, she says “such terrible news tore me to pisces.” (599)
There is also some discussion on page 45 of the substitution of “care” for “caves”. I wonder if these misspellings are meant to have the effect of echoes. Aloud, mourning sounds the same as morning. Later Daisy says “Always” is a game, which the narrator notes might echo “Hallways”. He also says: “An echo, while implying an enormity of a space, at the same time also defines it, limits it, and even temporarily inhabits it” (46). Maybe this has something to do with the hallways which constantly redefine and shift outside and inside of the house, carrying the person within them along.