A ‘snippet’ from my Hauntologies book-in-progress. Part of my chapter on House of Leaves, expect errors, omissions and typos.

A significant aspect of House of Leaves is its dependency on frames and the way that these frames collide and intermingle. At the core of the narrative is the so-called the Navidson Record, a documentary film about the Navidsons and their life in the house on Ash Tree Lane. The film is then the first fictional frame, yet we never have direct access to the film as it has only survived in fragments, primarily a fragment known as the “Five and a Half Minute Hallway” but also “Exploration #4.” Our access to this film fragment comes only from a manuscript written by one Zampanò. This manuscript contains one of the main narratives of House of Leaves and is also the one which contains most of the horror genre conventions. There is a subframe, so to speak, to Zampanò’s narrative in his use of footnotes and references, all adding authority and authenticity to his narrative voice – these are not simply his observations but verifiable through the books he references.

Adding to Zampanò’s manuscript is the frame of Johnny Truant, a tattoo parlor worker who came across the manuscript and took it upon himself to collect it into a coherent whole and annotate as much of it as possible. He contacts many of the people referenced in Zampanò’s manuscript to validate their comments and translates as much of the non-English text as possible, but throughout the book Johnny ends up adding another narrative of his own life and experiences with the manuscript. Johhny’s frame then has the unidentified “Editors” comment on some of Johnny’s work, correcting or adding to his translations, but also adding the passages that Johnny was unable to translate. This frame is no story discourse, only indicating what was added for the second edition.

The outermost frame consists of Mark Z. Danielewski as the actual author of the book, along with the actual paratext added by the publishers (either Pantheon or Doubleday). Between this factual frame and that of the fictionalized “Editors,” we have three frames where the narrative level remains in doubt. These three floating narrative levels establish what is a constitutive part of the book’s aesthetics – the disruption of borders and boundaries. There is nothing to suggest that these three levels are in any way connected – different typefaces would in fact seem to indicate the opposite – and so we cannot assign them to any one narrative voice. Instead, we may connect them thematically to the rest of the book, since they seem to generate an ambiguous response.

The first floating narrative level we encounter is the (anti-)dedication of the book “This is not for you.” which could conceivably be by Danielewski directed at the actual reader, yet for me it seems to be more a part of the playful nature of the book. Also, the dedication is written in Courier typeface, which generally indicates a different narrative frame – most typically Johnny Truant’s. What this dedication also does, is to immediately destabilize our reception of the book and question who exactly the intended audience might be. The most immediate and most playful reading of the dedication is to attribute it to Danielewski, teasingly letting the reader know that this book was not written with him or her in mind, but instead someone else – one could easily imagine the trite cliché of the author only writing to please himself, here. Another, slightly more unsettling reading, is that it is not a dedication but a warning; that we are reading something we were not meant to read – as if we had come upon the manuscript much like Johnny Truant, maybe even that the book contains something dangerous or frightening. Certainly this reading leans more towards the Gothic connection of the found manuscript tradition which House of Leaves explicitly draws on. In either case, we are confronted with uncertainty and ambiguity right from the start, leaving us with a degree of hesitation as we move further into the book.

The second floating narrative level is the epigraph “Muss es sein?” between Johnny’s introduction and The Navidson Record. Again, the narrative voice is unknown – the typeface is italicized Times New Roman, which would indicate that it belongs to Zampanò, yet it is placed outside his frame and it is unclear to what extent he spoke German. So, the epigraph remains ambiguous as to the narrative voice and also in terms of its meaning. A literal reading of the epigraph seems to indicate the same slightly ominous tone as when we read the dedication as a warning – must this thing (the book, the story, the house – again, the meaning of ‘it’ remains unclear) be, or would it not be better if it never existed? However, ‘muss es sein’ may also be seen as referring to Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16, where Beethoven noted “Muß es sein?” under the opening chords of the last movement, while responding “Es muß sein!” later in the movement. This entire movement is named “Der schwer gefaßte Entschluß,” which once again generates ambiguity – what is this resolution and why is it difficult. The intertextual reference thus folds this uncertainty back into the epigraph of the book, indicating that the book might in itself be a difficult resolution. Finally, it seems peculiar that in a book obsessed with typography, the German ‘ß’ is not used. Again, uncertainty proliferates as we find it impossible to attribute this mistake or deliberate use to either Danielewski, the publisher or a narrative voice. We have, in other words, no stable ground from which we may proceed into the main body of the book; everything is cast into doubt and left open for the reader.

The final floating narrative level comes at the book’s very end, after the index and credits. There is a large black dot and the text:

Yggdrasil / What miracle is this? This giant tree. / It stands ten thousand feet high / But doesn’t reach the ground. Still it stands. / Its roots must hold the sky. (Danielewski 2000, 709)

which is followed by a large, bold ‘O’ the interior of which does not entirely match the black dot above. The typography of this page is far more unusual than the two first floating narrative levels; in this case the word ‘Yggdrasil’ is bold and divided: ‘Ygg’ is written horizontally with ‘drasil’ written vertically, centered on the page. The prose poem is also centered on the page with the line breaks noted in the quotation above. The final ‘O’ has a larger, bold typeface than the rest of the words and can be seen as the final end of the book, which indicates a form of looping back or infinity, taking the mythological implications of Yggdrasil into account. In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is the World Ash from which extends the Nine Worlds and at the roots of Yggdrasil lies the dragon Nidhug, eating away at the roots.

This playful engagement with the world of publishing is then our first immediate clue that the book engages in a poetics of materiality. House of Leaves plays around with the concept of its physical origin – the edition(s) available claim to be the second edition, with a Foreword by “The Editors” stating that the first edition was privately distributed and did not include Chapter 21, Appendices II and III or the index, and that there may be errors of translations and the accreditation of the sources (Danielewski 2000, vii).

Of course, there is no self-published first edition and the second edition is the actual first edition and the Foreword from the editors is simply a playful element along with the inclusion of fake sources alongside real sources, an index, the title page stating that the book is written by Zampanò, with an introduction (and notes) by Johnny Truant. This fictional paratext is meant (playfully) to add to the authenticity of the novel as a found object and so it inscribes itself into the Gothic tradition of fictions posing as long-lost manuscripts recently discovered. And yet there are reasons why one might not immediately realize that there is no lost first edition; the novel was actually published in three different versions (called editions): a full color, a 2-color and black & white edition. Which edition the reader has is mentioned at the bottom of the copyright page, where four editions are in fact mentioned – an incomplete edition is also noted, which could conceivably be the lost first edition, since it misses appendices and index. However, in the full color version published by Pantheon Books, the words ‘First Edition’ are printed with a line going through them, thus undermining the authenticity of this as being the first edition.

In other words, the stability of the editions is placed under erasure and so become ambiguous and uncertain; how much can we trust this paratext and if that paratext is unreliable, then how much may we trust of the fiction inside the paratext? We might even go so far as to propose the concept of the unreliable publisher, since we are clearly being deceived (although obviously not maliciously) by the publisher, even if it is at the behest of the author. Yet due to the unusual nature of this unreliability, it is likely that many readers will never notice these small signs of instability, even as they proliferate throughout the book, with references to non-existing books, false references and many other smaller ontological slips. There is even more slippage between the different versions, an invisible touch which has faded away unnoticed. In the Doubleday Black & White version and in the Pantheon Books 2-Color version, the Full Color version is referenced as having braille (“Braille and color plates”), while all the other versions are listed by the laconic “No Braille”. However, the Pantheon Books Full Color version is listed as having “Xxxxxxx and color plates.” Something has slipped away from the Full Color version, an alteration has taken place without making itself felt. It is of course unclear why the braille script has been removed from the Full Color version, yet it does play into the whole concept of the materiality of the book, since this flickering stability of the editions and the different versions of the book is an aesthetic effect, what we may term a material metaphor after Hayles, “a term that foregrounds the traffic between words and physical artifacts” (Hayles 2002, 22).

What does this metaphor of the slipping and fading editions and versions implicate for House of Leaves, then? First of all, maybe paradoxically, it foregrounds the materiality of the book at the same time as actual editions and braille script fade away. Yet for those who pay attention, it becomes evident that the construction of the book is extremely deliberate and significant; the absences (of the first edition and of the braille) reveal an interest in what can be done with the book as a physical object. Our flickering hesitation as to whether or not there might be an actual first edition or if perhaps another version exists with the braille script precedes much of the hesitation we will encounter throughout the book, and this paratext will haunt us and inform our reading, as much as any other structures we bring with us. In this way, the technology of the book informs House of Leaves; it is clear that Danielewski (whether deliberately or not) proceeds from Walter Ong’s observation that writing restructures consciousness and that print culture encapsulates the word in very specific ways (Ong 1995), ways that are challenged and investigated in Danielewski’s book.

This should not surprise us, since fiction – especially supernatural fiction – has often narrativized the impact of various technologies and machines and mechanisms take on uncanny meanings, as Fred Botting has shown (Botting 2005). What House of Leaves does, then (among other things), is to investigate how technological and media-specific strategies inform and change our experience of the book. Much of the aesthetic appeal of the book comes precisely from its engagement with its own materiality and as much as the narrative of the book is contingent on this materiality, it is already in the paratext that we are alerted to the book’s unusual nature. Of course, as has been noted, the entire book could be considered one large paratext to a text which does not exist (Sørensen 2007). Still, what remains fascinating about the book is the way that it engages and structures our understanding of the book as a medium, which is certainly also why Hayles has used it as much as she has, to discuss issues of media-specific analysis.

As a haunted house story, we might proceed from Maurice Blanchot’s argument that all literature carves its own space in which it (dis)places its aesthetic concerns and that this space is of one constant deferral, because it is a void introduced “in place of the place it takes” (Blanchot 11); indicating that our experience of the literary work is always located somewhere else than in the physical object we hold in our hands. Such a view is consistent with what Walter Ong has discussed about the book being considered at first as an enunciation rather than a material object and is also consistent with Mark Rose’s intricate history of literary copyright, where he shows how the author is granted the rights to the ideas and concepts in the book, but not to the physical layout of the book, which became the property of the publisher (Rose 1995).

House of Leaves, along with a number of other literary texts, wishes to give the lie to the immateriality of the book and instead revels in a broad variety of typographical play, iconic prose arrangement and insertions of visual materials (primarily in the appendices). While certainly playful, all of these material devices are significant parts of the aesthetics of the book and often mirror, represent visually or engage with the narrative(s). We know that Danielewski himself took part in typesetting and designing the book, which is unusual for the publishing industry but also indicates that the visual layout is not simply an afterthought or left to an in-house designer. We need to pay attention to the design, then, in order to see how the book’s materiality impacts our reading of the novel.

The cover of the Pantheon edition has a fold-over flap containing on the inside of the flap a mock blurb meant to indicate that the book is in fact a collection of a lost manuscript by Zampanó with added material by Johnny Truant. The inside cover is a color plate collage consisting of a confused design of notes, a compass, tape measures, a shell, pills, thread, stamps, comic book pages, drawings and most disturbingly what appears to be smears of blood. While not immediately decipherable, this color plate does indicate a lot of what is part of the book’s narratives, yet without revealing anything for the first-time reader. What is, however, immediately clear is the obsession with measurements and hence space. This spatial obsession is further visible in the way that the fold-over flap is a ½ inch gap between the cover and the pages of the book. This missing ½ inch is mirrored in the narrative of the Navidson Record, where the Navidson’s house is discovered to be larger on the inside than on the outside. The exact dimensions of this extra space changes constantly from practically nothing to what appears to be almost infinite. It is uncanny space which The Navidson Record focuses on – how can this house defy the laws of physics and what happens when hallways and spaces suddenly open up?

The book has the same anxious preoccupation with space in its layout, not simply mirroring it in the missing ½ inch flap, but constantly throughout the entire book typographic space takes on visual meaning, reproducing or commenting in its own way on the narrative levels. Most notably is the use of different typeface fonts: The Navidson Record by Zampanò is in Times New Roman whereas Johnny Truant’s notes are in Courier. This change may seem innocent and irrelevant, yet inevitably it tells us something of the character of Zampanò and Truant. The materiality of these typefaces is significant and triggers meaning in us as readers; I believe that Zampanò’s soft, curved Times New Roman reproduce a sense of quiet elegance and authority, both because it is very often the typeface of academic works and thus reproduce that sense of knowledge and respect, but also because there is a calmness to the serif typefaces which slowly leads us on to the next word, the next sentence, the next paragraph.

Zampanò and his writing thus exude calmness and continuity. With epigraphs for every chapter and obsessive referencing and footnotes, Zampanò reassures us of his competence, knowledge and authority. By contrast, Truant’s Courier typeface is jarring and confusing – in an age of computers, Truant’s writing seems an oddly archaic throwback to the typewriter. Along with his ranting style, bad grammar and spelling and constant use of expletives, Truant appears extremely intrusive, further enhanced by his writing sometimes spatially overtaking Zampanò’s prose – Truant’s prose is located as footnotes but as Truant becomes more verbose, his words take up more and more space on the page until it completely blocks out Zampanò and fills up the entire page. This happens first on pages 12 and 13, where Truant feels compelled to tell us about the lack of hot water for his morning shower and continues to provide more details about his day. Seemingly completely irrelevant for the story about the house and Zampanò’s narrative, it is difficult not to feel frustrated with the ugly smear of the Courier typeface across the page, blocking our access to what we at this point believe is the main story.

So much more is the shock when in Chapter IX, Zampanò suddenly introduces not simply struck-through text but also red text, footnotes placed in boxes rather than the bottom of the page and these boxes appear on both recto and verso of the pageleaf, mirrored on the verso side as if one can see through the page. Upside-down, italicized text appears on the right side of recto pages, while the verso pages has a regular typeface footnote along its left side. Footnote 148 is located along the inside margin; left on a recto page, almost obscured (121). Footnotes 166, 167 and 168 spread over two pages, turning first sideways and then upside-down. A black box appears along with a white box and peculiar uses of indents or whitespace. Suddenly, all of Zampanò’s hard-earned authority is questioned and starts falling apart, just as the typographical unity falls apart. Chapter X continues this use of spatialized typography with little text per page, ordered according to what is happening in the narrative of the film fragment “Exploration #4.”

Significantly, this explosion of typographic space comes as part of the description and discussion of “Exploration #4,” which is concerned with the shifting space of the Navidson house and the labyrinthine nature of this unstable space. Chapter IX contains a discussion of the nature and etymology of labyrinths and certainly the shifting between epigraph, footnote, Truant’s comments and the main text becomes extremely labyrinthine in this chapter, to the point where it is all but impossible to navigate the book. One needs to physically turn the book to read the upside-down text and the sideways text, and find a mirror to see the reversed text. Also, it becomes necessary for the reader to decide whether s/he wants to read the main narrative or the footnotes first; everything becomes so intermingled that one cannot easily locate a direction for reading, and the spatial disorder inevitably afflicts the reading which becomes confusing and multi-directional, again much like a labyrinth. The fragmented typography thus informs the narrative just as the narrative informs the typography, yet we cannot decide where the labyrinth originated first – the poetics of content and form haunt each other.

The book itself suggests that a labyrinth “is a required effort to keep from slipping or falling; in other words stopping. We cannot relax within those walls, we have to struggle pat them” (Danielewski 2000, 114), yet this seems to suggest that the walls we are struggling against are in fact the ‘walls’ of text swirling on the page. We – as readers – have to work to keep from slipping or falling in our reading; slip into the footnotes or fall out of the frame of reference. Of course, the book makes sure that this is impossible by destroying the calm typographic space as well as the order of reading. The footnotes become all jumbled and no longer simply lead us to look down the page or to pages further ahead. We have to flip back, for instance, to find note K, which is referenced on page 114 but located on page 109. By breaking up our direction of reading, the typographic space begins to take on uncanny features as the book becomes a strange thing, suddenly alive in our hands instead of the inert object it usually is. Of course, in this way the book simply, yet again, mirrors the house which similarly does not remain inert and stable. Zampanò’s authority recedes as we no longer fully trust the book we hold before us. The specter of typography suddenly peaks forth and becomes visible, thus alienating our reading. Even the footnotes, usually markers of stability and authority in any text, become unstable and lose their anchoring effect through their displacement on the page.

The significant point here is that the textual instability occurs at the introduction of the film fragment and the visual breakdown of the page visualizes the spatial breakdown which Holloway and his team experience. This visual representation of the literary content is of course in itself unusual; although there are a number of precedents, most books do not visually resemble their narratives. Instead, this is one place where Danielewski’s book turns uncanny as an object, as a thing. House of Leaves is no longer a literary experience where the materiality of the pages, covers, etc recede until we no longer notice them because they are ‘transparent’. The pages glare back at us in all their visual glory and disturbing ‘aliveness’ because the book must now move for us to make sense of it (to read it we would normally say, yet that seems too easy for House of Leaves). As Ong has pointed out, visual surface is

charged with imposed meaning and because print controlled not only what words were put down to form a text but also the exact situation of the words on the page and their spatial relationship to one another, the space itself on a printed sheet – ‘white space’ as it is called – took on high significance (Ong 1995, 128)

which House of Leaves is certainly an example of, but only because such experiments are not typical. In fact, most books attempt at making their pages transparent in order for the reader to become immersed in the narrative. Although Bolter and Grusin only discuss visual media in their Remediation: Understanding New Media, it seems evident to me that the history of printing and the history of the novel have created a form of immediacy for its readers: we accept the trivial effort of turning over a page and regard verbal representation as close to visual representation, in order for the immersion to work. In other words, for the reader a book is a transparent medium in most cases. What House of Leaves achieves is precisely to hypermediate its language and its material construction. The spatial construction of the typographic page generates an interest in the medium and materiality of the book and suddenly the book emerges as a visual medium. No longer do we simply ‘see through’ the pages, words and sentences but see the page in its entirety – with whitespace, typeface and color.

In this way, House of Leaves is a product of a visual media-age since the book’s visual layout attempts to remediate cinema. House of Leaves is as much a visual object as a literary. The visual impact is immense, especially because we are not used to it, yet it adapts much from cinematic storytelling in the way that the words become almost animated and move around on the ‘frame’ of the page. The spatial constriction or expansion of the words influences our reading. Sometimes we read faster because there are only a few words on each page and we leaf through the pages much faster than normal. At other times, the page frame is so dense that our reading slows to a crawl, as we check footnotes, twist the book, decide which order to read the sections in, skip back or forth to find the proper references and so forth. Constantly, we are made aware of the material nature of the book as a piece of technology as we come across different typefaces and different colors, or even iconic images – all this without going into the photos, comic book pages and prints which appear in the appendices.

All of these spacings turn the book into a monster and a monstrous object, simultaneously inert as any book but also uncannily alive in our hands as we turn it and flip it around. The book transforms itself into a visual object instead of a verbal object readily containable in a conventional book; House of Leaves thus oscillates between being a work of verbal and visual representation and so transgresses our easy conception of the book as a stable (verbal) unit. Let us remember that the etymology of monster is derived from the Latin monstrare, which means to show or display (Huet 1993, 6), and in this sense House of Leaves is monstrous. And as Huet goes on to show, monster is also derived from monere, which means to warn, especially associated with prophetic visions of impending disaster (Huet 1993, 6). Certainly also in this way, House of Leaves is monstrous, as it constantly filled with danger and uncertainty. The monstrosity of the book goes even further in its transgressions, as the narrative frames which we establish in order to have at least some sense of control over the book, constantly collapse.

The narrative frames collapse for different reasons, some for diegetic reasons others for non-diegetic ones. The two most significant diegetic ones are revealed early on, before we ever arrive at that narrative frame. In the introduction, Johnny Truant relates to us how he found Zampanò’s manuscript when Johnny moved into Zampanò’s apartment after Zampanò died. Johnny reads the manuscript and annotates it, which is what we get after the introduction. However, before this Johnny reveals two things – the manuscript is about a film which does not exist and Zampanò was blind (Danielewski 2000, xix, xxi). These two revelations effectively render the entire book void, since it is all fabrication, even on a diegetic level. One must even wonder why the publishers would even release a book which is so evidently fake. It seems that we must take this framing as an ironic and playful engagement with the Gothic tradition of found manuscripts, but also a certain satire of the academic world – Zampanò’s blindness did not, after all, prevent him from writing an academic treatise on a fictitious film; one might argue that this is a satire of academia in general on how film critics (and presumably literary critics) do not properly ‘see’ the work in question, being too preoccupied with theories and academic argument. Such a reading would anchor this framing with reference to Danielewski himself, as a satirist of academia, a field he himself has occupied.

Yet these frames also explode outwards. Consider how the word ‘house’ in any language is always colored blue in Pantheon’s Two-Color and Full Color versions. At first, we might assume that this coloring is done by Zampanò but the coloring is also present in Truant’s commentary, even when it is not in English. We know that Truant only speaks English and would have had problems coloring the non-English words for house, so perhaps we must locate the action of coloring the words with the Editors, since they at times correct Truant’s mistranslations or provide translations Truant never made. However, ‘house’ is colored blue even in the copyright section, the review blurbs and even on the front and back cover of the book (Patheon editions). So, again we are forced to anchor this decision with the publishers and Danielewski. It is unusual to have the need for so much recourse to the author as the anchoring frame, since authors are generally absent from their own works or at least only playfully present. In the case of House of Leaves, however, we are constantly confronted with the need to consider Danielewski as part of his work, thus establishing an implied author. This implied author continually haunts our reading of the book, since we must consistently turn to this construct in order to explain certain features of the book. However, the implied author wavers between being a fictional construction made by the reader and the factual author we know exists. This flickering becomes simply another device of instability for House of Leaves as we are never fully aware of where to locate authority and stability.

A further example is that of Appendix III: Contrary Evidence, which is a collection of images referred to in Zampanò’s and Truant’s frames. This appendix is added by the Editors, yet why would the Editors feel the need to present contrary evidence? And why are we never told the identity of these editors? Again, uncertainty proliferates and once more we are forced to locate the final decision with Danielewski or accept that there is no final authority which can anchor the meaning of the book. As such, we as readers are drawn into the oscillating narrative frames and confronted with a series of shifting and transforming relationships between these frames and this in itself leads to a proliferation of meanings. More than simply this tendency towards indeterminacy, however, the book also breaches the usually established boundaries between diegetic levels, in the case of the unknown entity which begins to come after Truant.

Truant, of course, has never been near the Navidson house (if that house even exists, since the film does not) and so has only been confronted with the so-called monster of the house via Zampanò’s writings. However, he does encounter a monster one night in the tattoo parlor where he is building needles:

Worse, I’m no longer alone. Impossible. Not impossible. This time it’s human. Maybe not. Extremely long fingers. A sucking sound too. Sucking on teeth, teeth already torn from the gums. […] And then behind me, the door closes. The rest is in pieces. A scream, a howl, a roar. All’s warping, or splintering. That makes no sense. […] Everything falls apart. (Danielewski 2000, 70-71)

Even in this compressed quote, we see how everything is confused for Truant and while the encounter clearly terrifies him, it is difficult to determine whether or not it is actually caused by the presence of something monstrous. Truant himself claims that he was no longer under the influence of alcohol or marijuana, yet it seems to me that we are here confronted with a case of Todorov’s fantastic – we may chose to believe Truant’s encounter as supernatural (thereby making it marvelous) or to read it as the confused after-effects of drugs and alcohol (in which case the encounter would be uncanny). Much of Danielewski’s book wavers between these two poles, allowing for plenty of hesitation for the reader but what is interesting for me is how Truant describes the encounter, which is terrifying but not exactly bodily or visible. Instead, his description is much more literary:

Stories heard but not recalled. Letters too. Words filling my head. Fragmenting like artillery shells. Shrapnel, like syllables, flying everywhere. Terrible syllables. Sharp. Cracked. Traveling at murderous speed. Tearing through it all in a very, very bad perhaps even irreparable way. Known. Some. Call. Is. Air. Am? Incoherent – yes. Without meaning – I’m afraid not. (Danielewski 2000, 71)

This hardly sounds like a typical description of an encounter with a monster and certainly not coming from Truant. The emphasis on words and the power of words and syllables is, however, interesting considering the nature of the book itself. One could argue that what Truant encounters and fears so much that he has constant nightmares about it (Danielewski 2000, xi) is simply the book – in this case, Zampanò’s manuscript with its fragmented and monstrous layout. Truant has simply succumbed to the Haven-Slocum’s Theory of post-exposure to the house. In this case, however, the house is not the Navidson house or any other physical house – it is the house referenced in the title; the book itself as a house. This argument is not unusual for as Mark Wigley has argued, a house is a system of representation just as a system of representation can be considered a structure akin to a house. So, let us change our emphasis to that of the haunted house of House of Leaves.