The way 99% of people who’ve read House of Leaves talk about House of Leaves make me sad because they’re always like “oh it’s about a house that gets bigger on the inside etc etc” but like. Within the canon of House of Leaves itself the Navidson Record, the part of the book that the house comes from, is a work of fiction. The book teases at the possibility that maybe it does in fact exist in a sort of urban legend type way but it asserts over and over again that Zampanò appears to just be making shit up and there’s no evidence of the Navidson Record or the house ever existing. The book goes out of its way to “disrupt” the Navidson Record narrative to remind us of this.
The story is, textually, about Johnny Truant, and Johnny’s trauma and repression and eventual descent into madness. Now to be clear I don’t think it’s wrong to say that the house is your favorite or the most memorable part of the book to you. Obviously it’s a major key to the story and plays a huge huge huge role in it and it’s very cool and very fun. But like. It makes me sad that people basically treat Johnny’s role in the story as, like, a side note. “House of Leaves is about the house…… and also sometimes this guy talks about his weird sexcapades and says a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make sense.” No!! That is the story!! Johnny’s story serves just as much narrative purpose as the house!! If not more!! Danielewski didn’t put it there for no reason!! I’ve literally seen people on Reddit say to “skip” Johnny’s sections and that’s CRAZY. The story of House of Leaves is not “the Navidson Record with skippable cutscenes about some guy.” It’s a work of fiction written by an author who intentionally devoted like half the narrative to the protagonist lol.
People do the same with Poe’s Haunted, treating it as, like, an interesting side note or trivia fact that it exists rather than acknowledging it as a complete sister piece to House of Leaves that constantly gives new dimension (hah) to the content of House of Leaves itself. She and Danielewski ARE Chad and Daisy. Ba dah ba-ba. All the time I see people ask for more media similar to House of Leaves and they’ve never even heard of Haunted until it’s mentioned!! It clarifies that the book is best interpreted as a story about grief, literal and figurative hauntings (especially by deceased family members), generational trauma. The concept of a house that’s impossibly bigger on the inside, that exists beyond the confines of human imagination, haunted by something that may or may not exist, is such an apt artistic interpretation of the complex grief that comes with the death of a family member.
The fact that “Wild,” the longest song on the album that functions in some ways as a sort of thesis statement for it, ends with this sample of an audio recording of their deceased father, whose death spurred the creation of both the book and the album:
“Communication is not just words. Communication is architecture. Because of course it is quite obvious that a house which would be built without the sense, without that desire, for communication would not look the way your house looks today.”
Like! That IS the key to House of Leaves! That’s the answer to the puzzle!
And I mean that’s to say nothing of the fact that, like, at least half of House of Leaves is meant to be satire on literary criticism and academic texts. Danielewski received an English Literature degree from Yale. I truly believe House of Leaves is intended to be just as funny and absurd as it is scary. The whole bit about how some theorist supposedly wrote a 900 page book about how Will and Tom Navidson function as contemporary versions of the Biblical Esau and Jacob that’s become the “academic standard” and “is not one page too long” genuinely had me laughing out loud. It’s clearly meant to be a meta joke about the field. This kind of further separates the reader from the narrative of the house — we are constantly reminded that, really, Zampanò is not a particularly good writer; his writing sort of comes to represent a particular type of goofiness found in academia. On a more serious note, how this method of engaging with text and by extension the world around you can come to be dehumanizing and harmful also plays a significant role, emphasized strongly in the constant allusion to Kevin Carter’s The Vulture and the Little Girl.
Anyway. When I’ve had people ask me what House of Leaves is about I always start by talking about Johnny. I usually say something about how it’s about this lonely messed up guy who’s given access to his friend’s dead neighbor’s apartment and finds a bunch of fragments of a story about a house that’s bigger on the inside and he starts losing his mind trying to put it back together. The role of the house itself is a side note to Johnny’s story. I do this, of course, because I’m a pretentious piece of shit.
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