Anyone else read House of Leaves , Danielewski?

[Joseph Tracy]

I'm just finishing House of Leaves. A dark provocative and structurally intriguing work of literary fiction, simulated literary and film criticism, poetry, and myth. 

 What I come back to as the theme that captures my own interest is the question of what is journalism or scientific research and what establishes the credibility of a valid record. It is harder than we admit. Couching the quest for reliable stories or even reliable data as science can be as problematic as submitting the difficulties to religious or political or scholastic authority. Again and again, pre-existing prejudices, and imbibed mythic models built over a life or career serve both to enlighten and prejudice our understanding of an event. We can easily end up confirming something we don't seriously believe rather than live with our questions and perhaps lose security. People line up as skeptics concerning anything suggesting and mount their outraged scientific arguments, but their seeming confidence in scientism is eroded by the ambiguities of actual science, by uncooperative data, and the unanticipated consequences of logical scientific solutions.  In fact horrors approach as much from modern physics and chemistry as religious and political invocations of evil or heroism. 

 Most people seem to acquire a limiting sense of what can be real  and draw sharp lines of defense. But darkness eats at every limit,  as nothingness is the negative ground that allows every substance . Mr Danielewski follows the nothingness and disintegration palpably and  in layers of experience and of interpretations of those experiences and interpretations of the photographic records of the experience. To read House of Leaves was for me to  continue to renew a long abandoned interest in horror as an artful cauldron.  Sadness and danger, terror, fear, violence, loss and death seem the most real commonality of our time. Again and again the airwaves bend toward anger or war though for seemingly opposite reasons, but mistrust and fear abounds, death multiplies. It cannot help but touch us all.  Ordinary pleasures are tainted by distant but constant violence and disaster. 

Danielewski invokes these and more personal existential  fears as a house which inhabits and invades a seemingly normal house, doors open, hallways lengthen, closets lead to endless passageways.  The photo journalist who has bought the house as a refuge from a marriage-fraying career tries to document these experiences. The filmed documentary ( the Navidson Records)is interpreted by critics and writers from many disciplines, some real contemporary writers. But not only is the movie fiction to us the readers, it is fiction to the discoverer of a disconnected manuscript that summarizes the reviews and offers its own POV. Johnnie Truant, who recovers the manuscript from a blind writer when he dies,  then adds his own biographic and autobiographic notes as he assembles the bits and pieces of the House of Leaves. 

There is something about multidimensional fiction that overlaps with real people, events and ideas that few writers beside Pynchon do really well. This is one.




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