Hello all! In this blog post I want to talk a bit about how puzzles shape the reader in House of Leaves . More specifically I want to speculate on how our compulsive desire for an author allows its own subversion when we try to read it into the puzzle element of the text, and this subversion reconfigures the role of the reader in interesting ways.

It is important to note before I proceed, that my use of author is intentional and distinguished from the narrator (or narrators). I want to present the author as, not something that we can gain definitively from the text, but rather as a concrete force that we often construct into the text. In fact this construction is almost impulsive, as we consistently want to defer a text to a particular authority or author for validation, but the text has no point of origin and always refers to itself and the process of textualizing.

In class today we commented quite a bit about the multiple registers in the novel and how these complicate our trust of any of the three given editors for this text. What also was raised is how, if one reads the first letter of a number of footnotes starting on page 41, Danielewski’s name is spelled acrostically. This peculiar construction is significant because it not only introduces the author as part of the narrative (Danielewski becomes inundated into the mystery) but signals to the reader that a multi-lateral type of reading is required for this novel. The story, as in many other instances, is heavily invested in this puzzle function and it seems to integrate itself into the larger story arch.

It is, however, precisely because of these puzzles that our sensibilities as readers become complicated. We no longer except the template given to us, for example the “author” (or “authors”) providing us with words on the page, but rather initiate that template into the narrative of the novel. These intentional puzzles seem to suggest this bizarre configuration where the producer of text somehow stands apart from the thing he/she produces. This contradiction cannot stand though, Danielewski cannot simultaneously write the puzzle (that utilizes the narrative) over the narrative he is writing- or a complete reversal, the narrative over the puzzles he has created-, and the reader is forced to accept a sense of temporal hierarchy. One came first, the puzzles or the narrative, as one comments on the other. And the reader finds this search for origin frustrated, like so many other searches in the novel, by an inability to situate the novel in any permanent context. The puzzles do not seem to provide a sense of closure, but rather to complicate this issue even further.

These lacks of closure I think introduce a certain degree of textuality to the material production of the book. By encouraging the reader to think about the format of the novel as open-ended, the reader begins to view things like the edition number, the width of the page etc, with the eye of a conspirator anxious to find the hidden message. These puzzles incorporate the physical boundaries of the book within the discussion of the book itself, where does it stand in relation to other editions entirely. In developing this multi-book consciousness within one novel, House of Leaves plays with the notion of hyperlink I think at the structural level, not just thematically (with all the cool stuff going on in the story).