The house - House of Leaves

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Das Haus - House of Leaves (original title: House of Leaves ) is the first novel by the American writer Mark Z. Danielewski . The book first appeared on March 7, 2000 after previously being published on the Internet ; the German translation by Christa Schuenke was published in August 2007 by Klett-Cotta . At first sight, the novel is a horror story with an endless labyrinth in its heart, but actually a multi-layered, non-linear postmodern novel in which several levels of meaning are shifted into one another and come into relationship with one another.

shape

The house stands out at first glance because of its typographical characteristics. Different fonts are used for the different narrative parts and the entire layout is broken up in parts of the novel : On individual pages there are only a few words that depict the content , as in concrete poetry - on other pages the text tilts; it is mirrored, is upside down, crosses, simulates tempo, space or acoustics, or it stretches across the pages as if through a corridor, etc. The typeface thus also simulates the film's stylistic devices.

The word “house” is always printed in blue , even if it appears in other languages. In the English-language four-color edition, all the crossed-out passages that deal primarily with the Minotaur appear in red; there are also two text passages in purple. This peculiarity was not taken up in the German version.

Numerous footnotes create a reference to real and fictional sources and link the novel in a context of meaning that goes far beyond what happens in the book: Anyone who follows each of these footnotes gets lost in the labyrinth of references. The form of the book is a structural reflection of the plot.

action

Will Navidson, documentary photographer and Pulitzer Prize winner, retreats with his family to a quiet house with his family in order to counteract the alienation from his life partner and intends to capture this new beginning in a documentary . The peace is soon disturbed, because a chamber appears in the house that has not been there before. The inside of the house is larger than the outside - even if only by millimeters - and a corridor soon opens up on the outside wall that does not exist from the garden, but from inside into a lightless, ice-cold labyrinth of immeasurable extent and with rooms that are constantly shifting leads. The relationship between Navidson and his companion as well as the dangerous explorations of the halls and corridors with the help of four other, expedition- experienced adventurers is the subject of the Navidson Record - the core story of the novel. At the same time, one of Navidson's long-ago guilt that goes back to his days as a war photographer is unraveled.

The second voice is that of Zampanò ( Times font ), an old blind man with an obscure past. Zampanò has examined and analyzed the Navidson Record and left a well-read treatise on it, partly on slips of paper and tattered fragments in a chest, written in a factual language based on a scientific style. He himself died in a mysterious way, haunted by something sinister. From his notes the reader learns something about the meaning of the phenomenon of the labyrinth, he undertakes an excursion with him into the deepest layers of architectural history, even geological contemporary history, with hundreds of examples that can be found in literature, fine arts, photography, philosophy and psychology wise.

The chest falls into the hands of the young Johnny Truant ( Courier font ), a "drifter" who makes his living in a tattoo studio and spends time on sex and drug use. The old man's legacy, which he puts in order for publication, has a destructive effect on him and increasingly draws him into neglect, isolation and disorientation. He sees himself exposed to violent and claustrophobic visions that lead him to search for his own roots and at the same time for the beginnings of the strange house. In the process, the story of multiple abuse in Johnny's childhood and adolescence is revealed. Johnny's language is the slang , but despite his lack of education he feels his way into the elaborate idioms of the old and in his darkest moments he elevates his own words into the language of poetry . Formally, Danielewski solves the juxtaposition of the voices by allowing Johnny to run his own story in the footnotes.

On a further level there is the editor's voice - again marked with its own font. It is his job to comment on ambiguities and to complete information.

Supplementary material follows in the appendix of the book, with the so-called Pelican poems and other poetry, as well as collages , text fragments, drawings, photos, "evidence" etc. The letters from Johnny's mother Pelafina (Dante font), which they give him, occupy a special place wrote from the madhouse . They form a further, external narrative level in the novel complex. In the bundle of letters there is an obituary for Johnny's father, a passionate aviator who died in a truck accident.

Meanings of the labyrinth

The labyrinth tears an irrational abyss into the living space of the protagonists, which becomes a threat to everyone. Everything that constitutes incomprehensibility, horror and the loss of existence has taken shape in him. On the other hand, there is the attempt to wrest a meaning from this phenomenon. The treatise Zampanòs with its more than 400 footnotes offers numerous possibilities of interpretation which anticipate the work of literary analysis on the book Das Haus - House of Leaves .

The labyrinth is initially only an end in itself, namely an eerie and very effective setting for an intelligent horror story. It quickly becomes clear, however, that the labyrinth, with its excessive complexity and danger, has a direct relationship with its visitors (especially Will Navidson) and that it affects the character of Johnny and even his mother Pelafina through the various layers of text.

Navidson has an influence on the dimensions of the labyrinth: If it initially appears to be bottomless, on another exploration he reaches the bottom after just a few meters, because he has learned that there actually is a bottom. Thus the labyrinth can be read as a mirror of one's psyche , albeit an empty mirror, because there is nothing in the labyrinth and everything that is left in it - including buttons, fishing line and body - also dissolves into nothing. In this sense, the labyrinth also represents Pelafina's madness, just as her letters are typographically similar to the Navidson Record : the writing tilts, falls, overlaps, is full of repetitions (echoes).

Another meaning lies in the mythological . Zampanò goes into a (deleted) text passage on the myth of the Minotaur , which he interprets as a son who has been cast out because he is deformed and then hidden in the labyrinth; for him it stands as “ trope for oppression and / or repression”. The minotaur of the book plays a special role in Johnny's visions. In addition, there are countless allusions to other mythical-religious motifs: Daedalus and Icarus, Oedipus, Orpheus in the underworld, Christian and Old Testament symbolism, etc.

The last page of the book refers to Yggdrasil ("Steed of the Terrible"), the world ash tree of Nordic tradition, which in this short text is like a reflection of the labyrinth which is not defined above. Here the fatefulness of the labyrinth with its roots in time and space becomes clear. According to legend, Odin ("The Terrible") hung for nine days in the world ash to gain wisdom and gave his eye as a pledge. Likewise, Navidson faces the labyrinth and loses an eye. Sheets ( leaves ) can easily be understood as the pages of a book, so that a direct connection between tree maze and book consists.

The progressive ramification of the labyrinth and the hypertext structure of the work suggest the possibility that Das Haus - House of Leaves is designed as an open concept, a work in progress , a steadily growing box of notes with no actual closure.

Unreliable narrators

The book's footnotes help in interpreting the maze, but they also often mislead the reader. Much of the evidence serves as a clever commentary on the narrative and enables a rich scooping of writers such as Dante , Milton , Rilke , Proust , Ovid , Jorge Luis Borges and theorists such as Freud , Heidegger , Derrida , Bloom and Douglas R. Hofstadter as well as numerous other authors; but most of the sources are actually made up. The narrators themselves are particularly unreliable .

The blind man succeeds in writing a detailed treatise that not only requires precise knowledge of the text, but also the careful viewing of extensive visual material, and he interprets the facial expressions of family members and researchers, which can only be seen in the videos. In fact, Johnny reports that he was never able to find a copy of the film and that those who are said to have commented on the film do not know it, Navidson or Zampanò. The Pulitzer Prize winner Navidson does not exist, but the photo for which Navidson is said to have received the award: it is - apparently - a picture of the photographer Kevin Carter , who actually received the Pulitzer Prize, which exists in our reality .

The character of Johnny is also implicitly blurred. He is explicitly a storyteller who now and then explicitly points out (but possibly only claims) to have lied. His ability to properly organize and document the Zampanò material is incomprehensible because of his apparent lack of need, his drug use and his increased paranoia . Nevertheless, there is evidence that he has a rudimentary knowledge of Latin, and his descriptions are of strong poetic density. The nature of his visions and the breaks in his biography cannot always be categorized in terms of time: what has happened to himself or to others remains vague. It seems as if the structure of the book is a struggle for its existence. On his travels in search of the house through places that are significant for American history, he even comes across the book, The House , which he has not yet completed, in a strange loop , to be given to the editors give.

Pelafina's figure remains almost completely in the dark. Her letters are addressed to the beloved and absorbed son and gradually hint at something of a family tragedy in Johnny's childhood. Her nature is changeable - equally loving and violent. The style of her letters is old-fashioned and elaborate, but also delusional and contains numerous mythological allusions. Motifs and expressions shimmer in her letters that can be found literally in Zampanó's story as well as in Johnny's report or are formulated in slightly different ways. This creates an insoluble chain of causes and effects, of influence and repetition, and the question arises as to the actual authorship of the various text levels.

Decryption

Hidden meanings, codes and signals form one of the important themes in Das Haus . Johnny's visions are accompanied by the feeling that there is a subliminal message within them. And in some of her letters, Pelafina herself provides the keys for deciphering other passages in the text. In this way, the book prompts you to look for more signs.

In fact, it is interspersed with codes that either have an informative, structural or, last but not least, playful function. In Pelafina's letter of April 5, 1986, the phrase "my dear zampano whom have you lost" can be found in an acrostic , so that it becomes clear that there is a connection between the two figures that cannot be explicitly read anywhere else. This gives rise to the question of the identity and the relationship between these figures. In Chapter VIII the SOS signal is tapped, which is taken up by the film editing of the Navidson Record (slow and fast sequences), and at the same time Johnny's subtext is divided by Morse caesuras. Footnote 75 of Chapter V lists photographers over several pages, and the first letters of the surnames first result in meaningless rows of letters, then in the following then meaningful words and parts of sentences, whose meaning leads to further ambiguity.

This is the problem you face if you want to understand parts of the book. There are different degrees of darkness on the narrative levels. The Navidson Record is a largely linear story that is easy to follow if one accepts that laws of nature are overridden inside the home. But there are already distortions at this level. Johnny's reports, on the other hand, are not only contradictory, but largely confused and imprecise without interpretation. The characters Pelafina and especially Zampanò can only be understood from the context of the text, not as a linear narrative. Largely puzzling and only really comprehensible in fragments are the poems that have been left behind in the appendices.

Accordingly, different keys for education of importance are laid out in the novel. One approach for the interpretation is to make analogies by comparing motifs and formulations (for example with the help of the extensive index), another is to follow up on the footnotes and other references. These appear in different forms: 1. They are explicitly discussed in the book, 2. They are mentioned in the footnotes, 3. They appear as unrecognized quotations or paraphrases. In this form of research, however, one comes up against the limits of binding statements, since the meaning is attached from the outside and is only fixed at individual concise points in the novel, so it cannot be hermetically deciphered from the inside; they are references that are only recognizable in the folds of an external context. So one can assume that Zampanò served in the Foreign Legion and had the most cruel experience when one knows that the lovers of Zampanòs bear the name of the outposts of the fortified position Điện Biên Phủ , for the French and Vietnamese fought the decisive battle in 1954, which with the withdrawal the French from Indochina ended.

A clear frame of reference is the postmodern discourse . Many motifs dealt with in this branch of literary studies (the question of literary precursors, father-son conflict, space-time continuum, the dissolution of the ego, the end of the author , authenticity, limits of knowledge, recursive structures) are discussed in The house transformed into a story - and in this sense Das Haus is a classic meta-novel .

Other media

The WDR sent on 10 December 2009, a radio play -Adaption (Editing: Thomas Boehm ), takes up the different themes of the book and in an experiment, the complexity of the book is trying to replicate. The broadcasters Eins Live , WDR 3 and WDR 5 broadcast different versions of the radio play at the same time, which you could switch between in order to get more information and connections within the story. Three teams with different directors and composers, Martin Zylka and Andreas Bick , Jörg Schlüter and Thom Kubli , as well as Claudia Johanna Leist and Rainer Quade , gave each of the three levels their own staging signature. The broadcaster called it "the first 3D radio play".

In Audio Verlag the WDR production in 2010 appeared as a DVD that allows the listener to hear the three narrative levels by changing the channels in an infinite number of combinations. Radio play with Roberto Ciulli , Anna Thalbach , Wolfram Koch , Christian Redl a . v. a. The radio play won the German Audio Book Prize 2011 in the category The Special Audio Book / Best Editing.

literature

  • Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons (Eds.): Mark Z. Danielewski (=  Contemporary American and Canadian Writers ). Manchester University Press, Manchester, New York 2011, ISBN 978-0-7190-8262-7 .
  • Sebastian Detering, Achim Hölter: Paper simulates visual media. On Mark Z. Danielewski's novel 'House of Leaves' (2000) . In: Aesthetic Transgressions. Series of literature studies . No. 69 (2006) . Trier 2006, p. 213-233 .
  • Rune Graulund: Text and paratext in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves . In: Word & image . No. 22 (4/2006) , 2006, ISSN  0266-6286 , p. 379 .
  • Mark BN Hansen: The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves . In: Contemporary Literature . No. 45 (4/2004) , 2004, ISSN  0029-4047 , p. 597 .
  • Nancy Katherine Hayles: Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves . In: American Literature . No. 74 (4/2002) . Duke University Press, December 2002, ISSN  0002-9831 , pp. 779-806 .
  • Nancy Katherine Hayles: Chapter 8: Inhabiting House of Leaves . In: Writing Machines . MIT Press, Cambridge (Massachusetts) 2002, ISBN 0-262-58215-5 .
  • William G. Little: Nothing to Write Home About: Impossible Reception in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves . In: Neil Brooks, Josh Toth (Eds.): The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism . Editions Rodopi BV, Amsterdam, New York 2007, ISBN 90-420-2162-4 , pp. 169 .
  • Amanda Piesse: Don't turn around: the embodiment of disorientation in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves . In: Kate Hebblethwaite, Elizabeth McCarthy (Eds.): Fear: essays on the meaning and experience of fear . Four Courts Press, Dublin 2007, ISBN 1-84682-070-7 .
  • Sascha Pöhlmann (Ed.): Revolutionary Leaves: The Fiction of Mark Z. Danielewski . Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge 2012, ISBN 1-4438-4146-3 , pp. 235 .
  • Jessica Pressman: House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel . In: Northeastern University (Ed.): Studies in American fiction . No. 34 (1/2006) , 2006, ISSN  0091-8083 , p. 107 .
  • Will Slocombe: “This is Not for You”: Nihilism and the House That Jacques Built . In: The Johns Hopkins University (Ed.): MFS Modern Fiction Studies . No. 51 (1/2005) . The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, ISSN  0026-7724 , pp. 88-109 .

Web links

  • Nele Bemong: Exploration # 6: The Uncanny in Mark Z. Danielewski's “House of Leaves” . In: Instituut voor Culturele Studies (Ed.): Image & Narrative . No. January 5 , 2003, ISSN  1780-678X ( online [accessed March 25, 2017]).
  • Martin Brick: Blueprint (s): Rubric for a Deconstructed Age in House of Leaves . In: University of Sydney (ed.): Philament . No. January 2 , 2004, ISSN  1449-0471 ( Internet Archive ( Memento of April 23, 2016 on the Internet Archive ) [accessed March 25, 2017]).
  • Alison Gibbons: A Visual & Textual Labyrinth: The Eyes' Dilemma - Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves . In: University of Sheffield (ed.): Route 57 . No. 1 , 2006 ( online [accessed March 25, 2017]).
  • Larry McCaffery, Sinda Gregory: Haunted House - An Interview with Mark Z. Daniewelski . In: Critique - Studies in Contemporary Fiction 44.2 . Heldref Publications, 2003, ISSN  0011-1619 , pp. 99–135 ( Online [PDF; 148 kB ; accessed on March 25, 2017]).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ page 146, footnote 123
  2. ↑ See especially footnote 196
  3. ^ For example, page 723, letter dated April 27, 1987, in which she announced that she would write in Akrosticha.

See also