#houseofleaves

[johnqqtruant]

ey gang ive made an arg website: https://notesypersonalmortis.neocities.org/

[mothmanicc]

"Oh you're reading House of Leaves? How far are you?"

Me, with my fingers holding three separate places open, surrounded by colored sticky notes, and color-coded highlighters, looks up with tired, bloodshot eyes: ..... "who's to say"

[shaped-easter-island]

tom

[limecaine]

House of Leaves: The Perception Theory

People apparently liked my last post, so this is another House of Leaves Theory I posted on reddit

Do you know when you first enter a new place, like maybe a new video game or a town you’ve never been to before, and you are in awe of the sheer massiveness of the place. And then over time, as you become more familiar with it, it shrinks down to a manageable size? All of that happened just within your head.

Hi everyone. Some in my last post suggested I write about some of the explanations I have for the “docility problem,” or “why does the house start out dormant and become more aggressive over time?” This is something that I’ve been brewing in my head for a while: The Perception Theory.

The Perception Theory states that the house is a sort of distorted mirror. Anything the inhabitants believe about the house is reflected and becomes true. This is not only about conscious perception but memory as well. Like I pointed out in the opening, new places feel larger. To the Navidsons, the house was a place to be conquered and controlled even before the supernatural events begin. They believed the house was larger, so it became larger - the first hallway. When first moving into a new house, it’s normal to discover new areas and rooms that you didn’t find or forgot about until after a while of living there. The family wasn’t consciously aware of every facet of the house - and were away during this time - and this created a “hole” that the house filled with a pitch black hallway.

It is to be noted that this “perception” element only affects humans. Hillary and Malory (if you forgot, I don’t blame you, but they were the family cat and dog) were completely unaffected by the house, and the motion activated cameras were not triggered by the first Hallway appearing. It’s something innate within us that causes this effect. Curiosity, imagination, higher order thinking, possibly.

This becomes the basis for a snowball effect. Now that the Navidsons’ perceptions of the house were skewed by this new discovery, the whole house grew by 5/16”, then there was the bookcase event, and then the echo chapters. As humans, we can use echo as a way to gauge how large a space is. When the Navidsons first hear an echo within their house, again, the perception is altered. Larger and larger the home grows… that’s until the second Hallway manifests. Again, it is a freezing cold area with absolutely no discernible features. An uncanny mix of a familiar hallway with something extremely alien and empty.

It reminds me of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Some have pointed out that the rooms at the end of the film that Dave resides in are as if an alien with a superficial knowledge of humans tried to build a “zoo” for them. It’s familiar, it’s human, but everything is in the wrong place. The lights are on the floor and all the furniture placement seems off. Rooms are mirrored and even time is warped. In House of Leaves, the labyrinth is like an entity tried to extrude a house without knowing what makes a house… a house. The inhabitants’ perceptions made it larger, but because they didn’t know what they would find so it manifests as nothing, void, the bare minimum.

It should be noted that there are two kinds of “furniture” within the house, doors and banisters. That significance is unknown to me.

The Perception Theory also explains why the exploration team’s supply cashes are destroyed. Halloway brings a gun, anticipating a monster or some kind of enemy within the halls. This causes scratch marks to appear on the neon signs and caches. They were destroyed because the team expected to find them destroyed. The buttons on their shirts disappear not because they were arbitrarily consumed, but because they were not being kept track of. u/kingshaux pointed out something else that was interesting:

Notice how the House only really starts acting like Holloway’s enemy as soon as he starts seeing/treating it like one, almost as if it’s offended/defensive, like a person.

The house reflected Holloway’s hostility onto himself, becoming aggressive towards him but also (attempting to) protect Wax and Jed in the door shutting scene. Holloway expected to be attacked and killed by a monster, but the real monster was him, being reflected back by the house. The teamed exploration occurred at the same time the place outside the hallways started to be referred to with terms aligning with a war. Bases, fronts, attacks, SOS, outposts… the inhabitants’ intentions went from exploration to war. After they find Holloway’s suicide tape, the house tries to consume everyone like it did Holloway. It’s now an enemy in their minds.

The spiral staircase scenes are a major point of the Perception Theory. First of all, it appears that they go down forever, so they go down for a very very long distance. It takes the team days to reach the bottom. But now they they’ve confirmed that there is, in fact, a bottom to it, it takes Navidson 5 minutes to walk down it. Because the perception that it was bottomless changed, the distance changed as well.

So why does the distance stretch so far when Navy tries to leave? Not only does it stretch to an absurdly large size, it’s also a metaphorical distance, as he becomes more and more distant from Karen and his family. Because his connection to the outside is waning. He is mentally consumed by the house at this point, ignoring his wife’s wishes to enter inside (even though it was to save the team, Navidson wanted to go back anyway) the Hallways. But Navidson’s determination wins, as he climbs to bridge that distance even if it might be in vain. He makes it back to Tom. He makes it back to Karen.

This leaves some questions. If Karen’s perception of the house was so fearful, how does she save Navidson in the end? If we assume the colonials weren’t expecting to find anything in the area, why did they find stairs? How did it consume Karen’s Feng Shui and/or did she forget about it? Where does the cat go? Why can the house only manifest doors and hallways?

I get that that’s kind of a lot of loose ends but I didn’t want to make this post too long. Thanks for reading and tell me your ideas.

[notanicewitch]

[ive7]

Ironically, hollowness only increases the eerie quality of otherness inherent in any echo. Delay and fragmented repetition create a sense of another inhabiting a necessarily deserted place. Strange then how something so uncanny and outside of the self, even ghostly as some have suggested, can at the same time also contain a resilient comfort: the assurance that even if it is imaginary and at best the product of a wall, there is still something else out there, something to stake out in the face of nothingness.

House of leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski

[3sr4]

Guys i bought House Of Leaves, how do i read it????? I’ve seen multiple strategies online which one do i choose????

[cassiesbookishcorner]

January 5, 2022

🌟

Picked this up because of the hype I've seen across multiple platflorms.

I don't know if I will read it. I mainly wanted to see how it looked inside. I may pass it on to my mom then she can tell me how it is. Spoilers and all.

🌟

Do you think my pregnant heart could stand this book?

That's my main worry. I've seen so many say they were left with an uneasiness after reading it.

This will definitely stay on my radar and I may pick it up to read later on.

🌟

I put in two holds at the library, this and Spoiler Alert. Hopefully Spoiler Alert will be in soon so I cam get started on it for book club.