Exploration #1: This is not for you
Obsessions and Beethoven and reacquaintances foretold - week one of our House of Leaves book club!
Alexa, play Haunted by Poe.
Hello, dear reader, and welcome to the first expedition of The White Whale Book Club. Be sure to leave the light on, or bring a flashlight, and keep a measuring tape handy, just in case.
Lets get introductions out of the way before we depart, yes? So begins our journey into Mark Z. Danielewskiโs twisty-turny-noodley behemoth, ๐ท๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐ป๐๐๐๐๐. The novel began its life underground in the late 90s, โnothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper;โ originally handwritten, and intended to be serialised for the internet, before it was secured and published by Pantheon in 2000.
The story of its creation and distribution is so fitting to the book itself, another layer of myth and meta-narrative inextricable from the text. It is not difficult to imagine an early iteration of ๐ท๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐ป๐๐๐๐๐ changing hands amidst the fast-and-loose world of Johnny Truantโs Los Angeles, as it passed between โmusicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies.โ Itโs punk, grimy, postmodern, urban, quintessentially Y2K with its roots in zine culture. A work of multi media, it finds a companion in the album Haunted, by Poe, Danielewskiโs sister. If you havenโt already, please listen! The two converse in dialogue with each other, with Poeโs album capturing the haunting, unsettling atmosphere of the novel and its characters.
Exploration #1
As we embark on this exploration, we would do well to heed the warnings of our guides, as Zampanรฒ implores the finder of his text:
โThey say truth stands the test of time. I can think of no greater comfort than knowing this document failed such a test.โ
๐ท๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐ป๐๐๐๐๐ is a story within a story within a story. We are introduced firstly to our psychopomp, Johnny Truant, as he guides us through the text. He discovers the work of Zampanรฒ, a blind film critic, whose lifeโs work (obsession) was a critique of The Navidson Record - a documentary created by Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, Will Navidson, about a ๐๐๐๐๐ that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and a mysterious doorway that opens into the great maw of the ๐๐๐๐๐ within. These narratives interweave, interlocute, in a swirl of footnotes and endnotes and appendices, that, like the labyrinthine house, have you reading forwards and backwards and upside down. (To mark your waypoints on this journey, I recommend a bookmark, or two, or three.) The book is simultaneously a work of horror, a family drama, a love story, a critique of academia, and a literary analysis. Polyvocal, multilayered, and genre bending, I first fell in love with this book because of the ways in which it transgresses both the physical shape and convention of the novel, transmuting it into a strange, new beast.
Still, there are additional layers of meta-narratives: Mark Z. Danielewskiโs own mythos about the creation of the text, removing himself as author and attributing the book to Zampanรฒ and Johnny. And then, an additional fifth layer, where you, as the reader, become an unwitting participant in the construction of the narrative.
A return to the ๐ท๐๐๐๐
I return to ๐ท๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐ป๐๐๐๐๐ so many years after my first voyage, and Johnny teases that this reacquaintance was fated from the beginning:
โThis much Iโm certain of: it wonโt happen immediately. Youโll finish and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year,ย maybe even several years. Youโll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It wonโt matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, youโll suddenly realise things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. Youโll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, youโll realise itโs always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you wonโt understand why or how. Youโll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place.โ
Johnny Truant/ Mark Z. Danielewski, ๐ท๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐ป๐๐๐๐๐
This book has a way of working its way into your psyche. It holds its cards close to its chest, makes you work for them, each reading illuminating a new, previously unseen pathway. And so, the inevitable prodigal, I find myself once again in these pages. You, yourself, dear reader, may be a returning pilgrim, or perhaps you are a first time traveller in the shadowy hallways of the ๐๐๐๐๐ on Ash Tree Lane. There are breadcrumbs here, a trail laid early that, though we may stray from at times, we will find our way back to in pages to come. The novel is self-aware of its own fabrication. Johnny tells us in the introduction that he quickly discovered Zampanรฒโs project was about โa film that doesnโt even exist.โ The quotes cited are made up. The works referenced in the footnotes are fictitious. Zampanรฒ himself is aware of the difficulties in establishing his own credibility, as skeptics of the film cast the ๐๐๐๐๐ in the same light as UFOs, Elvis sightings, and the Cottingley Fairies. Johnny and Zampanรฒ both question the truth of the text, as should we. Whose voice can we trust? As you read, tread cautiously. Keep your eyes open. Things may not be as they seem.
Muss es sein?
Must it be? Zampanรฒ asks us this question at the beginning of The Navidson Record (and now I look at it again, I see, perhaps, a parallel with Johnnyโs own admonition preceeding his introduction: This is not for you.) This is a novel with signposts: a turning back point. Should we proceed, we cannot say we have not been warned. But, as we fail to heed Johnnyโs warning, Zampanรฒ again gives us a moment of pause before the point of no return.
Muss es sein? he implores. Must it be?
The questions takes its cues from the final movement of Beethovenโs Opus 135, titled โThe Difficult Resolution.โ Melancholy, dissonant, minor, the phrase underscores the grave at the start of the movement. When read in the context of Beethovenโs life at the time of composition, it is imbued with a weight of existentialism. Opus 135 was his last composition, and, nearing the end of his life, Beethoven battled his failing body: his loss of hearing, abdominal pain, difficulty walking, alcoholism, and deep depression. (It is interesting to note that where Beethoven was a deaf musician, Zampanรฒ was a blind film critic. Johnny recalls the irony of a man who โwrites constantly abut seeingโฆ of light, space, shape, line, colour, focus, tone, contrast, movement, rhythm, perspective, and composition,โ and yet โwas blind as a bat,โ [pg. xxi].) And so, muss es sein? questions destiny, determinism, the artistโs struggle to continue in the face of an inescapable fate. Must it be this way? Beethoven offers an echo, a response: Es muss sein. Yes, it must.
Muss es sein is imbued with this sense of resignation, where Zampanรฒ leads us with trepid compulsion into the text. As Johnny exhumes Zampanรฒโs apartment after his death, we are made aware of how much the critic has suffered for his work. Isolated and gripped by mania in a โpissholeโ, Zampanรฒ felt a need to keep his acrid patina of human history sealed inside - windows nailed shut, air vents covered with duct tape. An โendless snarl of wordsโ fills the loose pages that litter his abode. Deep, inexplicable grooves tear the floorboards like a scar, as though mauled by a wild and savage beast. Beneath the weight of torment, Zampanรฒ raises a question to his search for truth within a world that appears senseless and disorienting. โMust it be this way?โ Zampanรฒโs question hangs unanswered in the anacrusis. There is a sense of fatalism implicit in the work he must complete, metonymic of Beethovenโs response. As we, the reader, enter the abyss, it is up to us to answer with our own refrain.
The White Whale is a monthly book club in which we tackle those behemoth tomes that have, at some point, eluded our grasp. Each week Iโll guide our journey with an essay exploring the themes and resonances of the work, and weโll catch up in the chat! To those of you joining me on this Exploration, thank you! If you havenโt already, say hi in the chat - tell me about your own White Whales, or tell me about your journey so far through House of Leaves - what are your first impressions?
In the coming days, weโll be reading the Introduction and Chapters 1-9, and then rest, regroup, reflect next Sunday. Follow @whitewhalebookclub for the reading schedules, and subscribe if youโd like to get these lil love letters straight to your inbox!
๐๐ซถ
Felicity