" Exploration #6: the Narrative Architecture of Mark Z. Danielewski1s

The House of Leaves "

To parody and combine altogether Henry James and the Bible, we could say that in the house of (American) literature there are many mansions, from Edgar Allan Poe’s " The Fall of the House of Usher " and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables to John Barth1s story " Lost in the Funhouse,” Stanley Elkin’s novella The Condominium and William Gaddis’s novel Carpenter’s Gothic or Curtis White’s The Idea of Home, via Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, William Goyen’s The House of Breath, N.

Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, to name but a few. Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000) is the latest avatar in what could be a long list of texts in which the house is - diversely – a central place, object, subject or metaphor in and for the narrative. Danielewski’s 709-page novel has received enormous critical attention and praise, its scope and ambition compared with the works of such literary fathers as Herman Melville, John Barth, Jose Luis Borges or Thomas Pynchon. This paper’s goal is to focus on what might be the book’s most impressive and original achievement: its complex narrative layering and structure that relies at the start on an architectural pretext and metaphor, that of the house. The novel is thematically fraught with references to architecture (with quotations, from real and fictional architects, drawings of floor plans, a page with snapshots of houses, lists of architects’ names and famous buildings) and more generally has an encyclopedic reach so that if it is a building, it aims at being another " library of Babel ". As the house turns out to be larger inside than it is outside and constantly changes shape and size, the main character is prompted to launch five explorations into the labyrinthine chasm that yawns inside, on which occasions the text offers visual analogues on the page (in the typography and physical disposition of the paragraphs, along with other devices) of the transformations of the house and of the progress of the explorer. In his essay " Tropes of the Text " (Habitations of the Word, 153), William H. Gass writes: " The printed text exists as a whole, all at once, as the rooms, stairways, and floors of a building do [S]. Novels are books and books are buildings, and therefore they exist like other built objects - they are a space in space". Architecture indeed offers a metalanguage to describe literary constructions, and in that sense we can read House of Leaves as a metafiction - it uses the architectural metaphor to describe its own processes. This paper would like to examine how the narrative explores the space of its own architectural metaphor, to see " how metaphor can give meaning to form " (the phrase comes from Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By) and conversely how the form of the novel gives meaning to the architectural metaphor. But is the house " just " a metaphor? What is the link between house and narrative? What is the significance of the book’s yearning " to become a " volume ", the text1s striving for a three-dimensional existence, i.e., in a used-up pun (though not in Genette’s sense here), an " architexture " (to be defined) to make up for an impossible literal “architecture”, figuratively represented by a wealth of narrative and visual devices? Here are some of the questions we will try to address in an attempt to assess the novel in the light of the conference theme, " Text and Architecture ".