I think that House of Leaves more than any other book we have read so far invites us to consider what Hassan meant by what he called the “Rhetoric of Dismissal.” For Hassan the rhetoric of dismassal was related to the way that the establishment tried to keep down anything new or daring that was going on.
House of Leaves would be most easily dismissed as “The Fad,” which according to Hasssan is not accepted becaused it “implies permanance as absolute value. It also implies the ability to distinguish between fashion and history without benefit of time or creative intuition,” (9). I could easily see people writing this novel off as a fad. Or something cool to do once, but really not anything with any real future. Which would mean future works that are similar to House of Leaves would fall under the “The Safe Version” dismissal, which Hassan says claims “the entrance fee has been paid, once and forever.”
Anyway, my point is, I think Danielewski is daring us to dismiss his work. He wants us to put it down in disgust, or frustration. Look at how many times the book starts, then stops, then goes back to the beginning again, or just starts a completely new beginning. We start with the Truant letter, the first one which seems to lead us to believe that we will be reading a book about Zampano writing this book. Then we stop, go back, start learning about The Navidson Film, which begins to interest us. Then on page 18, we stop and go back and begin Truant’s story (and it is not like you can ignore it, Danielewski makes it long enough that you would have to skip 3 pages to get back to The Navidson Record, which no reader will do). Then with Chapter 3, we stop and go back and learn Navidson’s history and psychology. Think about how many times we stop and go start new somewhere else: learning the histroy of echoes, Truant’s mother’s letters, Henry Hudson, Magellan, Karen’s short, Lude’s List, Zampano’s poems, the Pelican Poems, Zampano’s Letter to the Editor, etc.. They all just lead to us stopping what we are reading and beginning again.
Danielewski wants us to get angry, he wants us to be mad. He is literarally daring us to come at him. I think he feels he is like Truant with the Gdnask man fight, he is going to let us come at him with all we’ve got. just sreaming “706 PAGES OF THIS? ARE yOU SERIOUS? AND WHAT THE F IS UP WITH THE FOOTNOTES?” then he is going to take our punishment and wait till we turn our backs and hit us in the head with a jack daniels bottle, and possible rape and murder our girlfriends.
Someone brought up that Danielewski may have put in all the Truant sex scenes because he wanted to be cool by proxy. I think there is something to that. Originally I thought it was purposefully absurd to point out the unreliability of Truant, but the nerd porn theory holds up just as well. Especially as I read the end of the book, I got the idea that Danielewski just thinks he is so cool, and it bothered me. But I do not want to give anything away, and I need something to talk about next week.
Oh, I actually liked the book by the way. It may not seem like it by what is above, but I dug it.