This panel reconsiders Mark Z. Danielewski’s epochal novel House of Leaves (2000) twenty-two years after its publication. The odd anniversary marker is appropriate, given that Danielewski’s text showcases, at its core, a meditation on mismeasurements, inaccuracies, and the futility of master designs. House of Leaves itself is a case in point. Weighing in at 709 pages, suffused with several layers and loops of footnotes, and alternating different fonts and ink colors let alone the wildest typographical arrangements, it defies straightforward description. A book in the loosest sense of the word, it has been branded a multimedia assemblage (Gibbons 2010), an experiment in ergodic literature (Corrigan and Ogden 2013), and the first networked novel (Pressman 2006). Danielewski himself partakes in this critical reception, sprinkling his text with apocryphal quotations in which the likes of Jacques Derrida, Camille Paglia, and Martin Heidegger expound on its embedded storylines and metacommentaries. Given Danielewski’s attention to multimodal narrative and self-reflexivity, the most influential critical responses to House of Leaves unsurprisingly belong in New Media Studies (Hansen 2004) and Cybernetics (Hayles 2002).
Our panel refuses to leave House of Leaves there. Without underestimating these contributions, we argue that the novel has much more to teach those willing to tackle it from other perspectives. What happens, for example, if we read it as a haunted-house narrative commenting on the Gothic precedents that the novel itself lists down? What do scholars in disability studies and the medical humanities have to say about Danielewski’s panoply of disabled characters and pathologies? What is to be gained by bringing this text to the classroom and engaging students in its experimental media nesting and solipsistic apparatuses? To what extent does it mark, in the United States, a transition toward the postpostmodern ethos theorized by Jeffrey Nealon among others? Does Danielewski’s parody of academic writing and scholarship still hold, given that humanistic inquiry as we know it seems on the verge of disappearance? And what anti-capitalist critiques drip from the ways in which Danielewski prophesies the rise of cultural immediacy (Netflix), entrepreneurial unfreedom (gig economy), and a media landscape shot through with alternative facts?
Out of this realm of possibilities, our panel advances three specific lines of inquiry. Titled “‘This Thing in a Binding Tomb’: House of Leaves and the History of the Book,” Catherine Winters’s presentation meets Danielewski’s novel at the intersection of book history and narratology—not so much a non-digital turn as a historicization of the novel’s digital entanglements. In “The Forever House: Unpacking Digital-Age Narrative Strategies in House of Leaves and The Haunting of Hill House (2018),” Christie Honore situates the novel in a tradition of audiovisual adaptations of Gothic classics, a tradition that augments the genre’s arsenal of commercialist formulas with contemporary practices such as binge-watching and Easter-eggs catching. Our third paper, Genevieve Marie Bettendorf’s “Material Volumes: Print Architextures after House of Leaves,” returns to the novel’s digital contexts via new, urgent questions about, in Bettendorf’s own words, “the durability of print-distributed literary fictions in the resource-scarce Anthropocene.”
Although our panel revolves around a single literary text, it should be of interest to scholars in a wide range of critical fields, for the reasons already stated. Honoring the commitment to make the follow-up discussion as generative and cross-disciplinary as possible, our three presenters have agreed to keep their presentations below 20 minutes. As panel organizer and moderator, I will limit my introductory remarks to 5 minutes. This will leave roughly 25 minutes for discussion.
Works Cited
Corrigan, Marianne, and Ash Ogden, “Explorations in the Ergodic.” Alluvium, 26 Mar. 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.2.01. Accessed 26 March 2021.
Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. Pantheon, 2000.
Gibbons, Alison. “Altermodernist Fiction.” The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, edited by Joe Bray et al, Routledge, 2012, pp. 238-52.
Hansen, Mark B. N. “The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 45, no. 4, Winter 2004, pp. 597-636.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves.” American Literature, vol. 74, no. 4, Dec. 2002, 779-806.
Nealon, Jeffrey T. Post-Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Just-In-Time Capitalism. Stanford UP, 2012.
Pressman, Jessica. “House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel.” Studies in American Fiction, vol. 34, no. 1, 2006, pp. 107-28.