HOLIDAY READING = House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
OK so to patch up his collapsing marriage, a World-Famous Photographer buys a house in the Virginia boonies – except when the family move in, they discover a secret room which CAN’T PHYSICALLY BE THERE. WFP decides to explore, and to make a video documentary of the exploration. The tale of all this (plus its academic aftermath) is discovered as a chaotic manuscript in the foul apartment of the dead neighbour of a friend, by one Johnny Truant, tattoo artist. Zampano, the dead man, old and blind, left a trunkful of papers: these are painstakingly reconstructed and annotated by Truant. The book WE get consists of Zampano’s original text *PLUS* Truant’s lowlifestory, as spilled in the endless obsessive rambling footnotes he supplied…
One of Raymond Carver’s collections is called Elephant, short for ‘Elephant in the Room’, the giant massive looming issue everyone in a story is aware of but no one dare mention. You could shorthand HoL as Carver with a Borgesian Elephant. Or else as a Pale Fire knock-off with a Blair Witch (indoor) Project for the poem and the demented reader-critic-footnoter drawn from the Bukowskian LA scuzzworld. Or a B. S Johnson novelisation of Tomb Raider 3. Oulipo-does-Solaris. A disquisition on the role of Non-Euclidean Geometry in Poltergeist. In fact there’s a dozen neat’n’cheeky ways to locate the deliberately complicated lineage of this book, and every time Mr M. Z. DrollAnagramski is our Arne Saknussem, tempting us farther in and down into the path of this or that Bigwig Literary/PopCult Dinosaur…
Generally the problem with ahem ‘ludic’ writing is that, because anything can happen – ie ALL the rules and conventions are up to be playfulled at – not enough seems at stake. Has anyone ever cared about a Nabakov character? They’re always just SO enslimed in the author’s look-at-me cleverness. And games with hommage are mostly crossword-puzzle evasions, wriggling the reader away from the book at hand, its depths and its failures, into the safely contained glamorzone of borrowed thoughts about Great Predecessors, ‘PoMo’ this, experimental that. If a narrative announces itself as Lovecraftian, it’s all too often the author’s admission that he would love to do to you what Lovecraft did to him (but doesn’t know how). When dead Zampano mentions Pierre Menard, you sort of feel Anagramski holding you by yr lapels and shaking you and yelling YES ZAMPANO IS BORGES DO YOU SEE!!!!! But Truant is annoyed also: cz he doesn’t get the reference, and just thinks Zampano is being cute. [INSERT SHUDDER and/or CHUCKLE HERE: the bumpkin bystander just knocked into the ghoul’s tomb-opening machinery]
Borges used lineage as a resource, not a shortcut: it was his primary Elephant supply. In a Borges story, a myth or ideal construct from mathematics or pre-modern philosophy, is dropped into a genre-realistic setting, where it immediately becomes an object of terror: the minotaur, the zohar, the Book of Sand… But his genres were dated, and he wasn’t that great a mimic anyway. Despite his much-stated fascination with Buenos Aires lowlife – all those stupid streetfighters with razors – he only really made vivid the lonely and beleaguered fright of the librarian: everyone else – everyone ordinary – walks by unconcerned, untouched. Actually readers (good or bad or mad) aren’t so safely cut off from us. They distort and disturb the lives of non-readers every day: you’re sat beside someone on the bus and you DON?T KNOW WHAT THEY’RE THINKING – is there a frightful boiling world in there, or softly buzzing nothing? What I love love LOVE about this book is how far the author (real name unknown) trusts the power of his own imagination AND YOURS to unsettle you. Except not you as you identify with the High and Exalted Caste of the Reader, but you as you identify with the passerby who cannons into said reader in the street, by mistake. The uncanny and explosively protean space in House of Leaves, which opens up and shifts around – and lures and traps and kills – is no more and no less than the space inside someone else’s head. Even the footnotes go all Cthulhu in one bit. Just because it’s made up doesn’t mean it can’t harm you.