House of Leaves

"Yes, this book is the nucleic text in this field. It might be the most meta book that there is. It is an iconic Gen-X novel, written throughout the last half of the 1990s and published in 2000. Johnny Truant, a young man in Los Angeles, is typing pages in the style of diary entries, in the first person. That is the first layer of story that you’re seeing as a reader. Johnny discovers that his neighbor is dead, and when he ventures into his neighbor’s apartment, he finds a trunk filled with pages and pages of a thesis, with faux footnotes, very much like in Pale Fire . The footnotes are basically innumerable, and the very text itself, at a layout level, starts to get peculiar. Words appear to fall off the page as you read them. Whole sections invert themselves and flip around on respective sides of the physical page, that kind of thing. The neighbor’s thesis is about a documentary film called The Navidson Record , about a man and his family who moved into a house that was a quarter-inch bigger on the inside than on the outside. A door appears one day where there wasn’t a door before and it turns to a very spooky, distinctly horror genre. The movement between story layers—this metaleptic thing that I mentioned—is bananas. It is really profound. You have Johnny in the first layer, who’s living in LA and losing his mind because he doesn’t know if his neighbor who wrote this thesis—the second story layer—was writing about something real or if it was imaginary. Inside the third story layer—the film—the father of this family is getting sucked into this psychonautical labyrinth within the walls of his home. The text rearrangement that I mentioned in the neighbor’s thesis gradually amps up through the book and becomes less predictable. If you Google ‘House of Leaves pages,’ you’ll see how the text rearranges itself. There are deletions in the middle of pages; things are upside down; there are codes and riddles. For anyone who likes the idea of gamified reading or puzzles and doesn’t find that there’s a lot of puzzle stuff for grownups in the field of literature..this is the one! I forget how I came across it, but when I did, I immediately said to myself, ‘I need to do a PhD about this.’ It is the transgression of a reader or narrator through diegetic levels. House of Leaves is a perfect example. You have a story within a story within a story—at least three layers of that. But it’s not just about this layer-cake structure; it’s about what happens when those layers communicate with each other. In House of Leaves , when you see the word ‘house’ appear, even in that first layer (where Johnny in Los Angeles is typing), the word is presented differently: in some editions of the book it’s in red, in other editions it’s slipping downward off the page. You come to realize this is because in the third layer of this story, there’s really spooky house stuff going on! Metalepsis is a way that an author can design a mode of communication between layered stories. The father of this field is a 1960s French theorist called Gérard Genette. He described it as the paradoxical transgression of the boundaries between narrative levels."

"I think it’s a print novel that presents a multimedia sensibility in a high literary art form. I think it appeals to people who read for entertainment but also to literary critics and teachers, readers of Derrida and deconstruction – people who have read the works that are alluded to in its pages. It’s a highly intellectual and literary text. So it spans readerships in a way that few novels, and certainly few contemporary novels, do. And it is also, of course, really fascinating in terms of its form, its print body. It re-mediates cinema and the internet, and it beautifully exploits the possibilities of the print page. So there’s a lot there for a lot of people. Well it doesn’t. It’s a big paperbound book! But I see this novel as residing in a network of other media forms. So there’s an accompanying website published at the same time as the novel (the House of Leaves bulletin board is a massive website that continues to receive thousands of hits and discussions in their forum, which is amazing for a literary print book published nine years ago); and then there’s another print book that was also published simultaneously that contains and expands upon the epistolary section between the protagonist and his mother. And the most interesting aspect to me is the musical album by the author’s sister, the recording artist Poe. She produced an album that accompanied the novel, called Haunted . If you listen to the music and lyrics in conjunction with the novel you hear that there’s a kind of cross-traffic of narrative and clues going on. So I’ve argued (in an article) that some explanations for the enigmas within the novel are contained or illuminated in the music. So it’s not that this is a digital novel, but it does in some way live within this multimedia universe, a network connected via the internet. I think it can be read both ways and I think that’s why it’s such a successful novel. There are some people who read it and get absolutely absorbed in the layers of storytelling and mediation that are happening in it. But there are other people, who, as you rightly point out, are absolutely aware of the meta-level questions it raises. This is a work that, like some of the digital works I selected, are interested in being self-reflexive, in looking at the space they inhabit, not only in terms of their print and digital media, but in terms of the larger cultural spaces and value systems that literature inhabits in the contemporary world. This isn’t just about plot or characters but also about reading and about how reading has always been dependent on various technologies. House of Leaves is really fun to read. It’s an addictive text. Some people don’t get interested, but if you’re game, this is a book that can rule your universe for a good few weeks – and terrify you. Even though it’s highly mediated, as we’ve discussed, it starts to seep into your own personal world. It directly addresses the reader on the first page, stating ‘This is not for you’; so you end up not knowing what’s real and what’s not. Indeed, my husband started reading it when I was out of town and he had to put it in a drawer and hide it because he got so frightened of it. It’s really fun."