This is not for you
House of leaves: A Popomo
House of Leaves is an ergodic literature. As in, you need to physically put effort into reading it. Which can range from turning pages back and forth to holding the book in front of the mirror to read what’s written.
While House of Leaves is post-modernistic. There are several aspects of it that don’t seem Post-modernistic but Popomo.
Popomo means Post-Post-Modernism, basically, Post-Modernism with extra steps. While postmodernism is about deconstructing everything Popomo takes it further by a search or longing for meaning and purpose which is often absent in purely post-modernistic viewpoints, which like to be ambiguous and indefinite.
The story starts when a young man named Johnny Truant is woken up from his sleep by a call from his friend, who feels there’s something wrong with the apartment of his recently dead neighbour, Zampano.
When Johnny reaches Zampano’s apartment, he and his friend find a black trunk with lots of notes, printed papers, and handwritten notes.
Johnny takes that trunk home.
Later, he recalls, that the first time he saw it, he was appalled by looking at it, he felt he was staring at an old man’s corpse. He thought that he would get rid of it at the end of the week, but when he started reading it, he just stopped thinking of ever disposing it off. It became his obsession.
That’s where the actual story starts. The trunk contains a collection of pages which revolve around a film called The Navidson Record.
The Navidson Record is a film about a strange house and the family of Will Navidson and his partner Karen, and their two kids, who moved to the house to save their crumbling relationship.
On a side note, The character of Will Navidson is inspired by the Pulitzer-winning photographer Kevin Carter who captured the photo “The Vulture and the Little Girl”. There are several commentaries in the book regarding this subject which bring depth to The Navidson Record and also on the character of Will Navidson.
At first, the Navidson family loved the new house with its lush greenery and non-chaotic neighbourhood. This all changed when they left for a week to attend a wedding, when they came back to the house, they saw a mysterious closet, between the room of their children and their own room, thus creating a distance between them and the children.
This clearly confused Will and Karen.
They checked their cameras to see what happened during the previous days but didn’t notice any motion detection. Then, they checked the blueprint of the house, but nothing. They also called the police but to no avail.
“With all obvious options exhausted, Navidson returns to the building plans. At first this seems pretty innocent until he gets out a measuring tape. Idly at first, he starts comparing the dimensions indicated in the plans with those he personally takes. Very soon he realizes not everything adds up. Something, in fact, is very wrong. Navidson repeatedly tacks back and forth from his 25' Stanley Power Lock to the cold blue pages spread out on his bed, until he finally mutters aloud: "This better be a case of bad math."
An incongruous cut presents us with the title card: 1/4......The width of the house inside would appear to exceed the width of the house as measured from the outside by 1/4.”
What Johnny discovers from the very first chapter is that the Navidson record has no actual evidence of it ever existing. The Navidson record seems like a figment of Zampano’s imagination, and so do most of the footnotes/references written by him. There is nothing like the Navidson record and all the criticism and study about this film described in references and footnotes is false.
This book has a LOT of layers. There are several things happening at once; whole chapters dedicated to echoes, films, photography, and commentaries which are often falsified.
There isn’t really any definite answer to a lot of things. One of the biggest ones being, who wrote the book? Sure, the book’s real author is Mark Z. Danielewski, but in the House of Leaves universe, who actually wrote the book? There are several clues in the book, but they contradict each other. Forcing you to question if Johnny is the writer, or Zampano, or someone else.
I couldn’t fully immerse myself in all the puzzles and ambiguous language of the book. Mostly because even though the author tried to make the House of Leaves seem like reality, I felt something was off about it. Or maybe, that’s not the point.
Even though I didn’t particularly like the indirect style of writing, I found the post-post-modernistic elements deeply meaningful, hence the sub-title of this article.
The search for purpose, or the longing to find meaning in their life is reflected upon every character that the author has in House of Leaves, whom I can’t talk in detail about so as to not give any spoilers.
Except through the example of Zampano, the dead old man who had written The Navidson Record.
Zampano had a life full of regrets or so it seems.
"Just the way it goes, 80 some years, and the inevitable kerplunk, the system goes down, lights blink out, and there you have it, another body on the floor, surrounded by things that don’t mean much to anyone except to the one who can’t take any of them along."
Zampano was an old man with no family or friends and was blind as a bat.
“Well that, of course, was Zampanó’s greatest ironic gesture; love of love written by the broken hearted; love of life written by the dead: all this language of light, film, and photography, and he hadn’t seen a thing since the mid-fifties.”
So, writing The Navidson Record was his last attempt to pour his knowledge, his regrets, his memories somewhere. A last attempt to give his legacy to this world. To say "I was here!".
Despite the author’s attempt to deconstruct everything, so that we don’t have any clue about what’s real and what’s not, we can still see that the actions of the characters are often based on their search for purpose, recovery, mental health and their fight with past traumas. Thus giving House of Leaves not only the title of a post modernistic book but also A Popomo.
This book will either be loved by you or hated but whatever it will be, it will be memorable. If not for the ergodic style of writing, the horror, or the plot, Popomo is enough to make House of Leaves worth a read!
I had taken a long break from here due to academics but I’m back and will be writing more articles soon.
Till then, I look forward to reconnecting with familiar faces and connecting with new ones!
Send me an email at:- writes.divya@gmail.com
