Today’s xkcd was one of those moments where you are completely lost, and then suddenly, it comes to you like a bolt of lightning. I thought the comic was good and funny, and then I started reading the comments on it and was reminded of why I hated that book so much.
Sure, there were the people who have no idea going on because they’d never read House of Leaves (and piss off if you think I should the word house in blue), but there were just pages on pages of verbal fellating comments over the book. Fortunately, the forums at xkcd were a lot less blind praise, and even the people who loved the book were polite.
So, what is House of Leaves? It’s a bunch of postmodern wankery is what it is. It has the potential to be an absolutely terrifying haunted house story about a house whose dimensions are larger on the inside than on the outside; instead the book has almost as many footnotes as it does pages, many of them having no bearing to the story whatsoever, forcing you to flip several dozen pages forward or backward as you read it. And then you get to the part where you have to read the book backwards, upside-down, and in a mirror.
It’s like the worst choose-your-own adventure story ever.
But the thing I hate the most is the people who assume that just because you don’t like it, you’re obviously too stupid to understand it. I call that the Arrested Development argument, after getting flamed in a FARK comment thread for saying I just didn’t understand all the praise for a sit-com (Don’t worry, I’ve seen the same argument crop up in real life).
Is it wrong to dislike being called an unsophisticated, boorish, clod for not liking something? It’s not that I just don’t get it, bless my heart. I have what I think to be pretty legitimate gripes with the book. It’s because I want to be immersed in a world when I read a book. Every time the book starts to get really scary and I’m getting more and more immersed into it, Danielewski YANKS me right back out with pages of inane lists about architectural styles or whatever that I absolutely must read (in my opinion, if I have to skip parts of a book, then I haven’t read the book) or he distracts me with footnote after footnote that I have to read right then, only to find they have absolutely nothing at all to do with the story. You never get more than a dozen pages before getting reminded with a gigantic clue-by-four that you’re reading a book.
I get the point that he’s trying to make the book seem like a labyrinth with all its twists and turns and dead ends. But to me, that’s not scary. It’s more like taking a good horror novel and then re-inventing it as imagined by the person who wrote the tax code. Yeah, I can follow it, but in doing so, it completely sanitizes me of any emotion I may have once had for it. Well, other than rage for having wasted my time, of course.
1 response so far ↓
1 Sarah // Sep 18, 2008 at 3:38 am
I think you are an unsophisticated, boorish, clod for not liking it.
Well, not really.
It’s just that the author created the “other world” you say you want to inhabit through all of the methods you’ve just listed as detracting from your enjoyment. It’s not traditional literature, to be sure. It’s newer than that. The book itself is only a metaphor for your thoughts. The words on the page are your mirror. You have to read everything with that in mind. The material is all a metaphor for the world inside the researchers’/ the house explorer’s/ your [the reader's] mind.
The studies that appear in footnotes, whose very authenticity is debated, are meant to be doubts, the mirror-reading is the mental acrobatics, or looking at a different perspective, that one must sometimes indulge in to understand an entire subject, and the lists are mental non-starters with seemingly chaotic echoes of sense sprinkled in by mere mathematical chance inside of which our mind strains to see a pattern. It breaks one’s -concentration- to look at a mirror, for sure. But one’s train of thought should remain intact long enough to find a mirror and start reading again. You must read the entire book on a metaphorical level, and not be distracted by form.
I would think a degreed philosopher would recognize these metaphors better than anyone. And yet, you say that these things actually prevented you from becoming immersed in a landscape meant to simulate the mind. Is it because you failed to get into the metaphor? Do you consider reading that way too much work? Or were you just looking for a traditional novel and not prepared for what you picked up?
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