KATG Book Club: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

[DWarrior]

Thanks. Yeah, schizophrenia is an umbrella-term for a bunch of different ones, but I guess people usually suffer from several symptoms (maybe someone who's studied abnormal psych can chime in, psych 101 didn't go very deep).

On page 629 she writes his father stopped her and took her to the institute when he was 7, don't really see a reason to not believe that. Though maybe she's been there before. I assumed at first she was there because of her husband's death.

I tried to construct a timeline to hopefully aid with the understanding. I wasn't really taking notes while reading, so when I went back I was only able to find one mention of Johnny's age, his mom says he's 11 years old on Feb 14, 1983, then a letter on June 21, 1983 wishing him happy birthday, so I based the calculations off that.

sometime before June 21, 1979 - mom tries to strangle him, committed to Whalestoe
July 1981 - father dies, Johnny is 10 years old
May 4, 1989 - mother dies, Johnny is 18
January 6, 1997 - Zampano dies, Johnny is 26
October 31, 1998 - date of Intro, Johnny is 28

And yeah, I guess we can't really trust his mother regarding his writing abilities/intelligence.

[36D]

Here are some of the questions I came up with:

1. Why is it that Johnny Truant's footnotes matter in the novel? What do they add/take away from Zampano's story?

2.What possible explanation can you give as to why the house is changing itself?

3.We're told early on that The Navidson Record doesn't exist. On page 16, Truant tells us that he added the word "water" to a sentence of Zampano's text. We are given letters from Truant's mother who is in a mental institution. Are any of our narrators trustworthy? Is there anyone we can rely on to tell the truth?

4. Chapter V begins with Zampano discussing echoes. How is what is happening inside the physical house an echo of what is occuring inside the house?

5. Who is your favorite character and why?

[paul_r]

Originally Posted by arcatacat

wtf is a nutty bat?

i goggled it and this thread came up #1 & #2

[DWarrior]

Originally Posted by paul_r

i goggled it and this thread came up #1 & #2

I'm going to guess that it's an eccentric nocturnal creature?

[StuartPants]

OK I know I was one of the people who wanted to start this whole book club thing, and I haven't been very participatory, but so you know, I have been done with chapter V, and have to read the appendix entries detailing his mothers letters.

[StuartPants]

Originally Posted by paul_r

i goggled it and this thread came up #1 & #2

haha that's awesome.. i own the interweb market on "nutty bat." Anyone doing any research on a nutty bat will be directed to KATG.. HUZZAH!

[36D]

Interesting of note.


truant (Plural: truants)
Noun

1. One who is absent without permission, especially from school.

[william]

Libri Andante: From the beginning

We start off with a hook, giving us a taste up front – raw and straightforward, written with a contemporary tone, storytelling style reminiscent of cyber-punk attitudes and yet without technology. In fact, the rawness of the work - courier font, unjustified edges, old-school typewriter style – is meant to give us the feeling that this is an unedited piece channeled from the author’s mind to yours.

And then on the second page (xii) you immediately get a glimpse of whom you’re dealing with:

“Look at yourself, working at a tattoo shop, falling for some stripper named Thumper.” And he was sure right about one thing: Zapanó…

Right about one thing? It sounds like he pretty much summed up the narrator in one breath.

The first four chapters really reeled me in, and then came chapter five, where I believe for most the story kicked into high gear. Not for me.

There are some truly beautiful sentences, showing that Danielewski is not only producing a tale, but a work of literature:

…. they are brothers, because like Tom, Navidson’s eyes share the same water. (Page 32)
… she kept returning to the old man, a trace of her own obsession mingling with the drift of her thoughts. (36)

… I give these moments shape here… (37)

But come chapter five and although we’re presented with a beautiful essay on Echo, nada afterwards.

(Though withing within the essay, we find:

Look to the sky, look to yourself and remember: we are only god’ echoes and god is Narcissus (45)

I was so taken by it that I had to look up the reference – attribute this quote to Danielewski, for the reference is fake.)

---

Early on, Danielewski evokes a memory in me when he writes about the smell of Zapano’s room:

“It wasn’t a bad smell just incredibly strong. And it wasn’t one thing either. It was extremely layered, a patina upon progressive patina of order…All the windows were nailed shut and sealed with calking…” (xv-xvi)

I knew this guy, N., who had a room like that. In order to keep drafts out, his father sealed up his bedroom. After a few months, the place had a spent smell of unwashed laundry, a smell that over time Norberto probably came to associate with comfort. I donno. To me it just smelled musty, sweaty, and layered. Homage.

But I liked that. Liked that three pages into the book, Danielweski’s words made a connection with me. That’s great writing – when even though it may not have been your intent, you write about things so true that people connect.

- - -

Going back a page to xii, and we find an anachronism,

…and Flaze will lunge at them like a pitbill raised in a crackhouse.

and the later he mentions The Simpson’s and other anachronism, dating the work both in time and style. Stuff like this jars me because it makes me think of Shakespeare and how sometimes you miss out ‘cause the references are no longer relevant. “Get the to a nunnery’ and you’re like – wha???

Fortunately, they cease a few pages in.

- - -

On xvii we have:

What did I know then? What do I know now? At least some of the horror I took away at four in the morning you have before you, waiting for you a little like it waited for me that night, only with these few covering pages.

Nice. And so I read on, thinking that he was referring to the events to come – “what you have before you” - but then I turned back, re-read it, and then placed it within the context of “these few covering pages.”

It was the words - the book itself - that he was referring to. That’s what’s waiting for me: the words I was about to read and the tale I would soon discover.

I like that! Brings the book to life. I don’t think I would have caught that in an audiobook rendition.

And then on page xix – Bam!

Whoever finds and publishes this work…

Now read this:

Zapanó was one of those people hardly anyone notices, who, seemingly, move through life as shadows. Born in 1892, possibly in Brazil or in Germany, young Zapanó lived with his father- "a tailor and a kind and easygoing man" in Chicago until 1900. Zapanó Sr. died in 1905 and his son was institutionalized as feeble-mind Zapanó found menial employment in a hospital and in this fashion continued to support himself for the following 50 years. His life took on a pattern that seems to have varied little: he collected and saved a bewildering array of trash from the streets. His dress was shabby; he was a solitary. In 1930 he settled into a second-floor room on Chicago's north side. It was in this room, more than 40 years later, after his death that Zapanó 's extraordinary secret life was discovered.

Amid a thick accumulation of debris- including hundreds of Pepto-Bismol bottles, nearly a thousand balls of string, old newspapers, magazines and comic books, religious kitsch and much more- Johnny Truant found a creative life's work: an enormous literary production. The key element was a movie, “The Navidson Record.”. It took more than eleven years to write it in longhand; in 1912 Zapanó began the task of typing the still incomplete manuscript

Only this isn’t Zapanó they’re talking about. It’s Henry Darger. I changed the names in the passage above, leaving everything else in tack - you can see how it’s like a rough cut peg fitting ever so neatly into a slot.

Could Darger have been an inspiration for Zapanó?

So the mystery begins. The sight of darkness itself (xxi).

----

I was immediately struck by another insinuation in Chapter One: Phaedrus.

Is “House of Leaves” a Chautauqua?

A core concept in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig is Quality. What do we mean by it? How do you know when you have it? Where does it arise from?

In House:

While enthusiasts and detractors will continue to empty entire dictionaries attempting to describe or deride it, “authenticity” still remains the word most likely to stir a debate

From Motorcycle:

Quality is neither mind nor matter, but a third entity independent of the two…even through Quality cannot be defined, you know what it is.

Chapter 1 spends a great deal of time dwelling on the authenticity and mastery of Navidson’s work. Is it authentic? Could any else have done what Navidson has?

Also Navy’s won the “Pulitzer for his great picture of a dying girl in Sudan.”

Nice! I like the way Danielewski evokes the zeitgeist of our collective culture with an allusion to an actual person, Kevin Carter:

In March 1993 Carter made a trip to southern Sudan with intentions of documenting the local rebel movement. However, upon arriving and witnessing the horror of the famine, Carter began to take photographs of starving victims. The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to a young emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, wherein a seemingly well-fed vulture had landed nearby… Carter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography on May 23, 1994 at Columbia University's Low Memorial Library.

Carter, by the way, committed suicide.

---

Further on we see more of Danielewski’s language, some truly beautiful sentences, showing that Danielewski is not only producing a tale, but a work of literature:

….they are brothers, because like Tom, Navidson’s eyes share the same water. (32)

…she kept returning to the old man, a trace of her own obsession mingling with the drift of her thoughts. (36)

… I give these moments shape here… (37)

He only wore through one newspaper after another which was when the officials responsible for the custody of parentless children decided something was gravely wrong with him and sent him away, making sure he had no more clippings and all the ink, all that remained of his father, was washed from his hands (37)

- Johnny the Tattoo aspiring tattoo artist, who wishes through ink to leave his mark permanently in others.
- Johnny, a man whose transubstantiation of his father’s death was washed away by others.
- Johnny, in love with a girl who he named after her inking.
- Johnny, a man who discovers works – marks of ink – and pulls us into Navidson’s tale.

And thus as one storm begins to ravage the Virginias, another one just as easily dissipates and vanishes in a flood of bad jokes and old stories (39)

By chapter five, the Johnny who wore so coherently earlier is losing it, in both his life and his literary style. We go from well constructed passages to several run-on sentences, thoughts of which could be edited down to their essence without losing substance:

And darkness enfolded all of us and we gave away our childhood for nothing and we died [the little death – William] and condoms littered the floor and Chistina threw up in the sink and Amber kissed me a little more, but in a way that told me it was time to leave (36)

Beautiful.

Nothing like that in Chapter Five.

Is it a turning point in the novel?

[36D]

Originally Posted by william

Also Navy’s won the “Pulitzer for his great picture of a dying girl in Sudan.”

Nice! I like the way Danielewski evokes the zeitgeist of our collective culture with an allusion to an actual person, Kevin Carter:

In March 1993 Carter made a trip to southern Sudan with intentions of documenting the local rebel movement. However, upon arriving and witnessing the horror of the famine, Carter began to take photographs of starving victims. The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to a young emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, wherein a seemingly well-fed vulture had landed nearby… Carter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography on May 23, 1994 at Columbia University's Low Memorial Library.

Carter, by the way, committed suicide.

I thought of this photo too when I read that part. However I had never seen the actual Carter photograph. I remember learning about it in school but never seeing it - but still, just the descripton of the photo was powerful to me. I'm glad you included it




Chapter III starts out with the question, "Why me?"? Moses, Dante, Navidson, and Truant. Dorthea Lange says in the chapter opener quote

"It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer."

Which is a wonderful thought, but doesn't answer Truant's question - why him? Are we to take it as fate that Truant found Zampano's work, or is it merely chance? Did Truant need to find it for something to happen in his life?



A couple of my favorite quotes thus far:

"But I've come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul." (31)

Mistakes and flaws are what make us who we are - they are the loose string in the rug that gives it character and makes it stand apart from the rest.

"Perhaps one reason Navidson became so enamored with photography was the way it gave permanence to moments that were so fleeting." (22)

Fleeting but powerful - so often people focus on taking pictures of the overall. The birthday party with a plethora of pictures of child with cake, child unwrapping gifts, child holding gift up and smiling. But focusing in on the child trying to lick frosting off his nose, or the discarded wrapping paper on the ground is taking a closer look at a moment that otherwise would have gone unnoticed and forgotten.

[william]

Originally Posted by 36D

I thought of this photo too when I read that part. However I had never seen the actual Carter photograph. I remember learning about it in school but never seeing it - but still, just the descripton of the photo was powerful to me. I'm glad you included it

Ha! Reading on in the Carter Wiki I note the following:

Will Navidson, a character from the Mark Z. Danielewski novel House of Leaves was partially based on Kevin Carter.

Wonder if the Darger was right as well.

So where are we with this joint reading?

Anyone else have thoughts / responses to the questions posted?

And what should be the next target chapter?