House of Leaves, House of Leaves, house of leaves: Sameness, Differences, and Old Paradigms

Published in its printed form in the year 2000 by Pantheon Books after it had made its appearance on the Internet twice, first as a pdf file and secondly in serialized installments, House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, was greeted by Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory as “arguably the most impressive debut since Thomas Pynchon’s V. nearly forty years ago.” Its unusual, to say the least, page layout, the different typefaces for the different narratives it comprises, the use of colors and struck- out sentences, its often puzzling system of notation, the fact that it forces the readers to turn the book upside down or sideways or to go back and forth in order to be read, not to mention its more than two hundred (out of seven-hundred-nine) pages of “Appendices” with collages, drawings, photographs, poems, letters, various citations, and even an extensive “Index” of the entire novel were the features that attracted the attention of the first readers and commentators of House of Leaves, and that after more than a decade from its publication still make it so innovative and unique. House of Leaves belongs to a long line of antimimetic literary works that begins with Tristram Shandy, that is, together with the rise of the novel as a new literary genre. Since the outset, the novel has always been metamorphosing, adapting, mutating in its attempt to grasp and shape reality, even when that reality sealed off experience, as Walter Benjamin prophetized about modernity, modernism and the twentieth century, or when that reality exists in “an increasingly visually oriented, digitalized Internet era” (McCaffery and Gregory 98), as is the case for the early twenty-first century.