MZD Interview 03.2024
Bit of a different post, but here you will find some words from MZD himself about things like a House of Leaves audiobook, the impact of HoL on modern horror, the TV Series Teleplays, Inspirations and more.
This is a translation made back to english from an official interview published earlier this year in march in brazilian portuguese in regards to the newly published brazilian translation of the book.
The interview with proper formatting in google docs can be accessed here, but is also pasted down here in the See More for ease of access.
MZD Interview [2024-03-13] - Every book is an universe of inspirations
This was translated from the source https://darkside.blog.br/entrevista-mark-z-danielewski/, dated March 13th, 2024. I am in no way affiliated with Darkside Books, or MZD for that matter, and am just a mere instrument in translating this translated interview (of which no original record is available) back into english. This was translated on October 4th, 2024.
DarkSide (DS) interviews Mark Z. Danielewski (MZD)
[Intro]
It’s expected that an author that has written such work that has taken over a decade like House of Leaves has a lot to say. More than that, Mark Z. Danielewski is a person who doesn’t only like to talk, but to listen too.
Like a good novelist that knows how to draw inspiration from everything around them, he shows a genuine interest for people he just met and with whom you could easily spend an entire afternoon talking ideas without seeing time pass.
This is the way that this conversation with the author from House of Leaves happened with DarkSide/DarkBlog [the blog from the Brazilian publisher of the translation]. With the humility of someone that considers himself a mere instrument of the universe through his books, Danielewski went a few decades back to tell us about his book first steps, its repercussion and the theories around the work and even his relation to Brazil – at the end of the 1980s he visited the country, getting to know Rio de Janeiro and Saquarema, and doesn’t hide his will to come back and get to know other regions.
This will be a conversation that is wide and with many layers, the way House of Leaves deserves. Check it out:
DS: When did you start to write House of Leaves at the end of the 80s, did you imagine the impact your work would have in modern horror?
MZD: What does a young man dream when they are 22, have close to no money, and no idea of his place in the world, or even if there is a place in the world? With these initial creations, that are so hard at the start of any young person’s career, you can’t go beyond the obvious despair that you’ll never finish. And that when it’s done, if anyone will ever read it. And if someone does, that it will never be published. Oh, to think “well, maybe it is a success”.
But how can we categorize this success in terms of impact on horror, impact on literature? There is something that happens in a book when you are in the middle of its creation, especially on a so intricate book like House of Leaves, that takes so long that you start to orbit it. At the start, it’s the book that kind of lives in your orbit. You are the central mass. And that mass includes everything that is frenetic or calm in your life, be it doing laundry or going out to get some coffee. But step by step, as you start to craft and create and imagine it, the story becomes the bigger mass. And that mass grows, then suddenly it’s you that are orbiting it. And the more you orbit it, the more you are governed by its necessities and requirements.
So you don’t really think much beyond that. You don’t think what will happen to it, because to you that became a planet now. A sun or a black hole. You are just a tiny particle that is becoming increasingly smaller, as the story becomes increasingly bigger. Not to talk much about me, but I’m writing a western which I've been working on for the past five or six years, and I’m exactly in this situation. And I have many questions about how it will be received. Where will it fit in the bellic culture of today? But those are just some sparks, because the main thing that is drawing me to its orbit is its immensity and complexity.
This is a way to both answer and not answer the question, but is at least an introduction about how this process worked and how I see it many, many years later. Even now, as I work on this new novel, I’m fascinated by how a book almost takes a life on its own. And that feeling is scary and great at the same time.
DS: It’s almost like you are being taken by your story, and not the other way…
MZD: Exactly. And I believe this applies to any creator, from any medium. It’s when you start to understand that your piece gained a bigger mass, a bigger gravity, than you. It’s at that time that you know you are starting to reach the end. There are all types of metaphors for that, be it talking about stars or about someone being born. It’s that sensation of “oh, we have a conclusion here”. There is an immensity, a component that changes your life with it.
DS: One of the more famous aspects of the book is its experimental formatting on some chapters. Was there any visual experimentation that did not go into the book?
MZD: The final version represents a beautiful evolution of it all, so there is nothing that I was attached to that is not there. I believe that, as you get older, and if you are lucky like how I was to have a successful career – unless you were swollen by your ego instead of by your books -, you realize how lucky you are. Of having met the right people along the way, of having the editor that I had at the time – and I still have almost 30 years later. Someone that instead of saying “no, don’t do that”, says “well, how will it be visually? How are people gonna see it?”. And part of the mythology of the book is that it was presented with all these typographic explorations everyone now knows so well.
But in my ingenuity, I believed the publisher would help in this process, that there would be a room dedicated to this type of work with layouting for every writer that would show up. Soon it became clear that I would be responsible for it. My editor/agent/publisher basically said “If you can come to NY, we can give you access to our computers and everything you need at Pantheon”. And that is what I did. I arrived there at Pantheon in NY every morning at 6am, bought the best coffee that I could find so, when everyone would arrive (they had that thing), we would have the best aroma/scent of this gourmet coffee, that at the time was something new. A gourmet coffee that I had no way to provide by myself, but that was important to me, to have some coffee, and one or two more for others, to understand that that was not a creative process. I used the word “creative” a lot, but it was not about destroying things – although the house destroys things in different ways -, but it was the evolution that was in the process.
Things being that way, I started the formatting, and my editor/publisher was always with me and I started to talk with preparers and advertisers, and the people that printed books, and everyone was getting increasingly curious. Slowly I was finishing chapters like 9, with its labyrinth with all its convolutions and stamps. And then I saw how people got fascinated by that, and, as that happened, people would get increasingly excited.
I’m very cautious to say that, but while the book looks impactful and original, It comes from a tradition of old poets that worked with concrete poetry, be it Pauliner, Mallarmé, there were a lot of folks that explored that before. We can go very far into antiquity, where we can see ways that were already present.
I believe the novelty there was the use of film rhetoric, that I learned with my dad, of basically understanding how movies/films were edited. It’s not just getting an image and then putting another image right after. It’s the way angles are divided, be it from up or down, the position of focus on the screen, the movement, the way how you can slow down the audience response to a scene by doing some specially long cuts/shots, and then speeding up the experience by using quick cuts/shots and moving the focal/focus point of the scene.
All this was incorporated in House of Leaves appropriately, because it is about a movie. This, in that sense, starts to intensify the experience. There were a lot of first readers, long before the book’s publication, but even at that time, and, once more, how lucky I was to have some of the best readers. They were professional readers, and just for getting a single moment from them to see some few pages, made me see about what was and was not working with the book, what maybe would not work and how to better refine it.
DS: You mentioned your father, who was a filmmaker. What was his influence, and of movies and general audiovisual works, in the construction of the narrative and format of House of Leaves?
MZD: Oh, very big. We still get mentions from cinema academics that identify some various references from movies that are there, be it Nouvelle Vague, or even the origins of cinema, and all those little gestures and moments that readers see some reference. And that is fascinating, because in some ways, there is a story, albeit a dark one, of cinema that is hidden between the scribbles of that house.
DS: On the internet there are numerous reading groups and discussion forums dedicated to unravel all the book’s references and riddles. Are there secrets in the book that are impossible to be solved?
MZD: There have been very intense readings of it and certainly many findings. But there still are tiny moments, like when a person contacted me about a specific movie, that no one, as far as I know, had mentioned yet. And this person was able to say with certainty that there was in fact a reference there and its own variety of mysteries. It's the influences, whether literary or cinematographic, but there's still other ways that the house works.
But yes, the book is extremely dense and there's still layers that were not completely deciphered to the present moment. But it still is the source of some smiles, for example, in my daughter's school, the mother of a student reached me and asked "I finally started reading your book. It's really good". She looked relieved and gave me the impression that she had this big idea that it would be very hard, that, according to what people said, it would be a very hard read for a reader that just wanted to dive into the story. And then she discovered that it was exactly the opposite, that there is a genuine pleasure and a real horror there, and that surprised her.
It's one thing to have all these intense groups, where people read the book many times before. They are not on a different level. They are advanced readers, sure, but there still exists the wonderful experience of being able to read the book for the first time and discover how it really is.
Recently I had this experience: only two people read my new book completely, and here there is a note because my wife is still not finished, but she is almost at the end, and keeps telling me to get out of the same house space as her because she wants to finish it, and I realized that I envy her for that experience. I envy the feeling of getting to have the first experience through everything that is about to happen. Now that I think about it, I can think of some people that read House of Leaves for the first time and how special that was.
Every author is tormented by the anxieties of "will they like it or not". But if you can get past that, and that is something hard to say to someone that is just starting this path, because you are very vulnerable. You still don't have any type of skill, scars or calluses that will keep you ahead of it. If you can focus only on the story, the unraveling that I had the opportunity to observe in some of the first readers entering the house for the first time it's pretty incredible. A great feeling.
DS: There is a theory that some of the blank spaces in the book's formatting are an invitation for the readers to make their own annotations and footnotes. Was this intention there? Do you like to see House of Leaves scribbled out in various ways?
MZD: I love it! I love any book that is annotated. Even when I buy a second-hand book, I get fascinated when it has the margins scribbled. It's like I've received a gift from two minds. What has this person discovered? I'm infinitely fascinated by that.
And yes, there was an intention there, there are many intentions there, so I rarely get surprised. I say "rarely", but honestly I think I never was surprised. The book was so planned out. I don't say that I don't get surprised by the connections people made, that are very personal, but for the book as an artifact. Even the way the margins were created, the spaces, everything you mentioned, that the spaces are there for people to add their own annotations, their own perceptions, of becoming other editors of that process, even more narrators.
There even is some recent discussion in transforming House of Leaves into an audiobook or not, for example. How would that experience be? Would it be completely different? Should we look at it more like a movie that is being made and is something completely separate, and kinda an experiment too? Or is there a way to create some kind of space in which the listener can participate? These are some of the questions that come up.
The same with an e-book. In some way, you are a company to House of Leaves when you have the book, and the e-book doesn't allow that. But when you have the digital version, you are facing a glass screen, in a way. You are robbed of the unquestionable interactivity that the page allows. Yes, you can write in an e-book, in some you can create annotations, but it's a bit complicated. It's less personal. And also a bit risky. Yes, the technology got better, but I remember creating annotations in a digital version and lost all of them, and that was not cool. I still have annotations on my books, in my bookshelves, that are 40 years old.
This is an important question, and one that made me think a lot, literally in the last two days: how do we feel about an audiobook and e-book? That said, I give the question back to you and all readers of this work: what do you think? Would you like to hear an audiobook version? Would this bring something new or would it lessen the experience?
DS: It's a valid question. Talking adaptations, much has been said about a possible House of Leaves film or TV series. In your website there are Teleplays for the work. We know the challenge it is to adapt a complex work like this one. How do you see an audio-visual adaptation of the book? Is there something in the works or that you would specifically like to see?
MZD: No, I'm not attached to any one vision of what I would like to see produced and made. I'm a novelist and there will come the day, when the right constellation of people align, there will be a meaningful representation of the book. But it's a dance, and unfortunately we don't have all the celestial time to make this dance, but there are, yes, many brilliant and creative professionals in Los Angeles and the whole world, but here specifically, those involved in making things happen
Many times that just doesn't work. But the question is: Could it be done? At this point I am still on the dance. There is nothing to announce, but there is allways excitement. We always have requests coming. People want meetings. If I answered them all, and got into all those meetings, I would never be able to write another book. And that is what I love to do. So the process gets slowed down. But still, there are people asking "what about Hulu? You could make something on FX". Maybe, who knows?
DS: Yes, A24, maybe?
MZD: Yes, A24, maybe. Talking about A24, I think someone sent it to me, something going around, maybe on TikTok, a false advertisement that A24 finally made the movie. And it was created with generic images. I don't know if any kind of AI was used, but it was like a trailer and everyone was saying "Oh my God, it's happening", just because they put on A24's logo. It was fun and I like to see that kind of stuff. There is a joke tone to it and I allways receive that well.
DS: Even though there is no adaptation, there are many known movies and games inspired by your book. Do you consider any oen of them particularly good or faithful to your work?
MZD: I don't follow that too closely. Like, these works are not House of Leaves, they don't answer the ideas and the energy that are part of the book. And who am I to say if anything is better or worse? There are inspired things that are really fun. There's this magnificent map of a Doom mod that was made on YouTube. It's extremely well done and you can see in the comments how people lived that. You can see that it's honest work, from the person or group of people that made it. If you look now, there's over 10 million views [12 million by the time I'm translating this]. Like the term I used before, it's something meaningful. It was not an errant attempt of just looking if the house was bigger or not on the inside just by looking at this. It's something that looks at all the complexities of how we understand space.
[Here, they linked the video. So I am too. https://youtu.be/5wAo54DHDY0]
A simple example is like when you're in a relationship and you feel much closer to that person. And suddenly there's a rupture in the way you communicate, or the way you present yourself to each other. And that person seems miles away, even if you are sitting close to one another. It's there that the complexity shows up. There's where the emotional journey starts in House of Leaves. I believe that's why readers come back to it.
So, when I see a project like that that was executed with so much emotion and integrity, it's not exciting only because it's related to House of Leaves. It's exciting because it's a continuous conversation, because this shows that there are big creative hearts out there. And that shines a more brilliant light into the future.
DS: House of Leaves is a work that surprises many people from their first encounter. Has there been an event or personal happening that caused you a great impact, that marked your life as a storyteller? Which?
MZD: I think you already know the answer to your question. The interesting part about this type of questioning is that there is some type of safety in the idea that there is this singular moment that offers inspiration for a big book like this one. I think we all feel comfortable with that idea. But, in many ways, I can point out the moment that I understood that the house was bigger on the inside.
I remember it happened shortly after my father died and I understood that there was a footnote that would become a poem or a short story. Only later I realized that that was actually the structured answer to everything I was writing in the previous years. There I was able to give form to a voice that is as similar to Johnny as it is to Zampanò, it was something resonant with this big idea I was exploring. Dissertations that I wrote to myself about how the language of films could be used in text
But each book is filled with a universe of inspirations. Frequently I am questioned where my inspiration comes from. For artists, inspiration is everywhere. The big problem is that, as you open the shutter [the camera thing] to this extraordinary world, where we're able to live, it can be oppressive. It's too much. So, in many ways, we're hiding all the time. I can write about a tree, about this little moment outside myself. Or this interesting conversation I heard on the bus between two people. It 's everywhere.
If there's anything wonderful about being a novelist it's that constantly there are moments that you can enjoy and remodel in your book [I don't get what he's saying here. Did my best]. One piece of advice that I give to new artists is to not block yourself too much from your tiny idea. You had just a little spark in the face of this vast and celestial wonder where we live. So it's more "be the way through which the universe can speak, so it can speak through you". Writers have the right to rearrange things. The voice that sounds in a bus by a powerful man can become through you a character that is exactly the opposite.
I believe that this is a more valid answer, that when the journey begins, there will be constant inspirations, coming from tiny moments. I'm in debt to all of them, I don't consider myself an author to any of them. I'm just lucky to have had these moments and for them to have given me the energy that I needed to write phrases that became meaningful to other people.
DS: This is the first time that Brazilian readers will have the possibility of reading House of Leaves in portuguese. What note/warning would you like to share with them?
MZD: First things first, I'd like to apologize for it taking almost 25 years for the book to have a version in Portuguese that would arrive in Brazil. I have a great affection for Brazil. Who am I to warn someone? I can only share a story for the people who read the whole book to have their own personal journey. The people that only get to the middle are the ones I worry about the most, because they are still in the darkness. They are still trapped in the house. I sometimes worry about those people that are still stuck in the darkness and are not able to leave.
I remember a beautiful and humble moment, when I was in an art gallery, and an old man came to me and asked me if I was "Mark Danielewski" and if I had written "House of Leaves". I confirmed, and he told me that he did not read the book, but that he wanted to thank me because his daughter tried to take her own life and, when he was beside her as she woke up, the man asked if he could do anything for her. And the daughter said "could you get House of Leaves for me?". And that is one of the things I've heard that makes me feel each time more a mere instrument of this book. Because to them it allowed a journey in trying times. I believe this should be available to any reader, no matter the language you speak.
[End]
