The great paradox of House of Leaves is that the house in the book remains “virtually inviolate to interpretation” (60), while the book itself goes to great lengths to anticipate every conceivable interpretation of itself.
Therefore many of my interpretative approaches toward the text tend either to getting entirely outside the novel (e.g. the mapping project) or to reading the book very literally against itself. In the myriad of made-up and real intertextual references, for example, can we find some surprising framework that casts the novel in a new light?
I’m very interested in the recurring presence of anxieties and phobias in the novel. Karen Green, we find out, has a history of claustrophobia, and one footnote even references her “results on the Sheehan Clinician Rated Anxiety Scale as well as Sheehan Phobia Scale” (59, f69). These are, it turns, out, real clinical diagnostic tools. I’m toying with the idea that we could take something like these real-world rubrics and somehow use them as a lenses to look at House of Leaves. Below is a summary of the Sheehan Disability Scale (SDS), which psychologists often have patients use to self-report their social anxieties. Does something like this have any interpretative potential, or is it just a false lead?
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