The Perspiring Writer Magazine

An Educated View:

Mark Z. Danielewski and The House of Leaves

By Martin Kich

Born in 1966, Mark Z. Danielewski is the son of Tad Danielewski, a professor, acting teacher, and documentary filmmaker. Danielewski has had a very close relationship with his sister Annie—called “Poe” since she attended a Halloween party dressed as one of the character’s in his short story “The Masque of the Red Death.” She is now a professional musician, performing and recording under the stage name Poe.

When he was ten years old, Danielewski completed the 400-page manuscript of a novel that he titled The Hell Hole. It treated the coming-of-age experiences of a young man in New York City who becomes addicted to cocaine and is eventually imprisoned for crimes that he has committed to support his habit.  Especially given that a ten-year-old was the author, the narrative was quite shocking, freely incorporating profanities and explicit descriptions of troubling behavior and gritty realities. Its depictions of police corrupted beyond redemption and of prisons defined at every turn by predatory behaviors were extraordinarily hardboiled for a pre-adolescent writer. When Danielewski shared the novel with his parents and with his English teacher, they all found it very unsettling, and their open dismay and even disapproval made him very reluctant to share his writing with anyone for many years afterwards. 

Danielewski completed high school in Utah and then attended both Yale University and the University of California at Berkeley. He subsequently worked as a tutor, a plumber, a waiter, and a woodchopper. He worked on The House of Leaves for about a decade. Thirty publishers reportedly rejected The House of Leaves before Pantheon took it, offering a $15,000 advance that Danielewski essentially lived on for almost three years. Since the publication of the novel, he has established a sort of home base in Los Angeles. He has become somewhat notorious for his eccentric appearance and behavior—including dyeing his hair cobalt blue and arranging to meet with interviewers at odd times and in odd places. 

As Danielewski worked on The House of Leaves, he shared sections of the manuscript with his sister, who incorporated elements of it into her music, which she then shared with her brother, influencing his further work on the manuscript. Moreover, both his novel and her CD were very much concerned with their often troubled relationship with their father and their attempts to come to some sort of terms with his recent death. Interestingly, Poe had also found some tape recordings of her father delivering academic lectures and casual conversing on a broad range of issues and topics, and she spliced pieces of those recordings into the background of some of the songs that most pointedly treat her attempts to transcend his influence on her by understanding it. 

Tad Danielewski was a Polish refugee who came to the United States after the Second World War. His parents were executed by the Nazis for attempting to shelter some Jewish friends, and he himself endured a term in a Nazi labor camp. Beyond the obvious traumas in his personal background, his children’s strained relationships with him can be traced to two sources. First, he seemed to them to have become increasingly emotionally distant and demanding. 

So they became very used to his all-too-predictable criticism of their efforts and yet they sought his approval with what amounted to a deep-seated desperation for it. Second, his work as a filmmaker forced him to travel a great deal, including some overseas travel to places such as Switzerland, Africa, and India. Although his children did travel with him, even after he and their mother divorced, his emotional distance made them yearn for a sense of place, a sense of rootedness, that he was incapable of providing and that he could not help but resent them for wanting. 

The House of Leaves originated in a short story that Danielewski wrote while traveling from New York to California to visit with his father after he learned that his father was terminally ill with cancer. Intending the story as a gesture of reconciliation, he read it aloud to his father, whose response was to rail against the ultimate uselessness of artistic creation and imagination. This tirade caused Danielewski to tear the story to pieces and toss it into the trash. As he was leaving his father’s home, Poe handed him the manuscript that he had destroyed. She had rescued the pages from the trash, had reassembled them, and had scotch-taped them back together. 

Given the shared experience that has infused their work, it seemed natural for Danielewski and Poe to continue their creative synergy—for Danielewski to promote The House of Leaves at the same time as Poe went on tour to promote Haunted. Danielewski and his sister completed a very successful national tour of Borders book stores, but it was not until Poe incorporated her brother’s reading of passages from his novel into a reworked recording of the single “Hey Pretty” that it generated a great deal of attention on radio stations devoted to alternative rock. Poe’s recording company asked her to make a video for “Hey Pretty” which featured Danielewski, and she was subsequently invited to be the opening act for a national tour of Depeche Mode. Danielewski traveled with her and joined her onstage for the performances of “Hey Pretty.” 

For The House of Leaves, Danielewski has received the initial Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library.  The award includes a $10,000 stipend and has been funded through the efforts of the actor and author Ethan Hawke and the writer Rick Moody, among others. The novel was also short-listed for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and it was selected as a Book of the Year by The Independent in London. 

Danielewski initially published sections of the novel on the Internet, and the published novel shows the influence of its original publication in hypertext. Danielewski incorporates many typographical experiments, which visually free the reader from conventional expectations about the narrative.  Indeed, the type varies in font, size, style, and color, and some blocks of text appear sideways, upside down, in spirals, and only partially on the page. Furthermore, the novel includes nonlinear elements that somewhat approximate the experience of reading hypertext—sudden shifts in focus, startling juxtapositions of narrative elements, unpredictable points of linkage between sections, tangents and dead ends, and ultimately a sort of self-referential circularity. It includes all sorts of footnotes—including footnotes to footnotes and, in some instances, chains of footnotes to footnotes—as well as some 200 pages of appendices. 

Reportedly, it took Danielewski’s publisher three years to prepare the manuscript for printing. Some of the time was, however, taken up by his publisher’s attempt to negotiate some reduction in number and range of the textual experiments. Danielewski has asserted that the narrative demands that the reader become a co-author, an active contributor to the shaping of the story in his or her imagination. Certainly, a similar role can be attributed to his publisher, who had to redefine the nature of the “book” and recognize the possibilities opened by the experiments with narrative. 

At the other end of the spectrum, however, are critics such as Will Slocmbe, who has argued that Danielewski’s novel represents a sort of literary nihilism. For it forces the reader to confront the impossibility of the novel’s—that is, any novel’s--providing a meaningful form of creative expression and perhaps the impossibility of communicating meaningfully through any sort creative work. 

Of course, at its center, The House of Leaves is a ghost story. In several interviews, Danielewski has explained that he used the idea of a building blueprint as a model for the novel’s structure.  If that is true, then the building he had in mind must have been something out of a gothic classic like The Monk--a castle with secret rooms and passageways and with spaces that may sometimes be less real than perceived by dream or imagination and then believed. In other instances, in a seeming acknowledgement of his musician sister’s influence of the novel, Danielewski has described the novel’s structure as musical. 

Certainly, there are recurring tones and themes, though much of the narrative’s effect would have to be described as eccentrically atonal. Indeed, although The House of Leaves depends a great deal on the gothic tradition and the conventions of the more recent sub-genre of horror fiction, Danielewski draws extensively on other literary influences as well. He owes an obvious debt to the Dadists, Futurists, and Surrealists, to Modernist “anti-novels,” such as Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake and Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and to their postmodern offspring—the compulsively amassing and convulsively massive books of William Gaddis, Joseph McElroy, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon. 

The protagonist of The House of Leaves is a young man named Johnny Truant. Employed as an apprentice at a Los Angeles tattoo shop, he comes across a critique of a documentary film on paranormal phenomena. The critique has been written someone named Zampano, who reveals little about himself other than the fact that he is blind, and Truant is unable to find a copy of the documentary, called The Navidson Record, or even to verify that it exists, that it has ever been made. Still, Zampano’s critique provides Truant with an entryway into a deepening obsession with the preternatural and the occult. 

His obsession begins to verge on insanity when he is drawn to the paranormal events that have occurred at a farmhouse in Virginia where Navidson, the documentary filmmaker, now lives with his family. In a novel characterized by its over-the-top experiments with style and form, it is wonderfully ironic that the most concrete evidence of the farmhouse’s paranormal state is the diminutive but incontrovertible fact that it is five-sixteenths of an inch larger when it is measured on the inside than when it is measured on the outside. At the other extreme, with an almost Kafkaesque spatial elasticity, an interior passageway in the house opens into an Arctic landscape across which dark dreams shadow the strange quests that those entering the landscape are compelled to undertake. 

Danielewski’s novel has been frequently compared to the film The Blair Witch Project, which was released shortly after his novel was published. Both works rely on idiosyncratic improvisation that violates many of the commercial practices, as well as the creative conventions, of their forms, and both reinvest the gothic with an inspired but deliberately “amateur” enthusiasm for the genre. But Danielewski feels that the similarities between his novel and the film are superficial—that his novel seeks to reinvest the genre with density whereas the film surprises simply because of its disarming transparency. The comparisons between the novel and film have, however, been encouraged by the use of Poe’s music on Haunted in the soundtrack for the sequel to The Blair Witch Project.