About a week ago I finished the novel House of Leaves, by Mark Daniellewski. A dark provocative, skillfully written and structurally intriguing work of literary fiction, simulated literary and film criticism, poetry, and myth. Most people seem to acquire a limiting sense of what can be real and draw sharp lines of defense around that sense. But darkness eats at every limit, as nothingness is the negative ground that allows every substance. Mr Danielewski follows the dark side of nothingness and disintegration palpably and in layers of experience and of interpretations of those experiences and interpretations of the photographic and filmed records of the experience. To read House of Leaves was for me to reconsider a long abandoned interest in horror as an artful cauldron. Sadness and danger, terror, fear, violence, loss and death seem the most real commonality of our time. Again and again the airwaves bend toward anger or war though for seemingly opposite reasons, but mistrust and fear abounds, death multiplies. It cannot help but touch us all. Ordinary pleasures are tainted by distant but constant violence and disaster and every system of thought is implicated. Danielewski invokes these and more personal existential fears as a house which inhabits and invades a seemingly normal house; doors open, hallways lengthen, closets lead to endless stone passageways of cavernous darkness and bone chilling cold.. The photo journalist who has bought the house as a refuge from a marriage-fraying career sets about with all his acumen to document these experiences. The filmed documentary ( the Navidson Records) is interpreted by critics and writers from many disciplines, some real contemporary writers. But not only is the movie fiction to us the readers, it is fiction to the fictional narrator and discoverer of a messy disconnected manuscript that summarizes the reviews and offers its own POV. Johnnie Truant, who recovers the manuscript from a blind writer who dies, then adds his own biographic and autobiographic notes as he assembles the bits and pieces of the House of Leaves. This despite his discovery that there is no Navidson Records and no reviews. Truants creation by Danielewski is a work of sublime intensity, his voice note-perfect from the smart streets of urban America. This is a book where the more fictional it is, the more real it seems. What I come back to as the theme that captures my own interest is the question of what is journalism or scientific research and what establishes the credibility of a valid record. It is harder than we admit. Does film prove that what a camera records is real? Couching the quest for reliable stories or even reliable data as science can be as problematic as submitting the difficulties to religious or political or scholastic authority. Again and again, pre-existing prejudices, and imbibed mythic models built over a life or career, along with personal baggage serve both to enlighten and prejudice ones understanding of an event. Social pressures are potent enough that you can easily end up confirming something you dont seriously believe rather than live with your questions and perhaps lose security. People line up as skeptics concerning anything suggesting a spiritual mystery and mount their outraged scientific arguments, but often their seeming confidence in scientism is eroded by the ambiguities of actual science, by uncooperative data, and the unanticipated consequences of logical scientific solutions. Inquisitors want to test but not be tested. But In fact horrors approach as much from modern physics and chemistry as from religion or from political invocations of evil or heroism. This is not to say that there is not a large appetite for alternate explanations of just about everything, from wall street scandals to extra terrestrials or the shroud of Turin. Where this appetite comes from is its own worthwhile question. There are certainly gullibles and con men galore. But is it so very unthinkable to suggest that many people and scientists and researchers have experiences that defy psychological interpretation, that make them curious and open minded? Who can explain death, love, the relation of light to dark? There is something about multidimensional fiction that overlaps with real people, events and ideas that few writers beside Thomas Pynchon do really well. This is one.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 07:17:14 +0000
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