In the
book, House of Leaves by Mark Z.
Danielewski, there is a part where he uses strategic text layout and
positioning to exemplify what is happening in the book. The part I am referring to takes place on
page 289, and it is the first instance when Danielewski makes you turn the book
upside down to read it, which makes the reader feel uncomfortable and awkward
while reading the book. Furthermore, the
words are written in a certain way to actually show what the words mean. I believe Danielewski wrote the way he did on
page 289 to help the reader completely grasp the enormity of the situation that
Navidson was in and how his life turned completely upside down at that instant.
On page
289, there are only eight words, but the meaning behind those words are
extremely significant for Navidson at that time. There are three words in
particular that are written in a way that help the reader understand what is
going on. For instance, the first word
is sinking, which is written at an approximately 45° angle downward towards
the center binding of the book. This
makes the reader look over the words going down into a dark cavity of the bookbinding
and helps you visualize what Navidson is seeing and feeling at that
moment. He is sinking away from a
possible escape from the darkness, and heading down into more darkness, alone
and scared.
The second
word is stretching, which is literally stretching over three quarters of the
page, and is using the same ‘s’ used in ‘is’.
Danielewski used almost the whole page to show this because it was
needed to help the reader understand how massive a stretch was happening. We
find out later, with a quarter in free fall analysis, that the stairs have
stretched an impossible distance that is greater than the earth’s circumference
at the equator. This immense stretching
of the stairs needed to be written in such a way that it would not be merely
glanced over by the reader.
Along with
the word stretching, expanding was written across the bottom of the page that
took up about three quarters of the page’s width. The letters start out closer together, as
they did with the word stretching, and are written farther apart by the
end. These words are synonyms and are
simply used in the same manner to further illustrate the changes taking place
in the house.
I like to
relate the house changing in such a drastic way, at the exact moment Navidson
is the last man down in the bottom, to a passage earlier in the book on page
167 that reads, “Navidson, however, knows the stairs are finite and therefore
has far less anxiety about the descent”.
This passage refers to when Navidson is going in for the rescue mission
and is able to reach the bottom of the stairs in a matter of minutes, but then
on page 289 the stairs are now separating Navidson from his family and his own
survival. All his anxiety is translated
into the radical evolution of the stairs, and how they are now a seemingly
insurmountable obstacle keeping him from escaping alive.
Along with his anxiety of escaping,
he has also felt cut off and different from the outside world ever since he
came back from Vietnam and started protesting the war. That is why he has felt more comfortable with
dangerous situations than with living a normal life. I believe the house was able to sense Navidson’s
true self, and even though he does not want to die down there, he knows if he
makes it to the top of the stairs a part of him does die down there. He will never be able to keep his family and
go on another adventure like this again. Which again relates to how Navidson’s
life is life is flipped upside down at the same time the words on the page are
flipped upside down. Furthermore, the words being written upside down show how
this is such a drastic shift in the tone of the book for Navidson and how his
plans went from a smooth escape to an impossible survival mission all in an
instant.
In the end, Danielewski is able to
use the placement of words, and letters to better exemplify what is going on in
the novel. It helps the reader imagine
the dramatic shifts in the book, with a certain amount of magnitude given to
particular words positioning.
Even in your introduction, I’d like to see a little more here: “I believe Danielewski wrote the way he did on page 289 to help the reader completely grasp the enormity of the situation that Navidson was in and how his life turned completely upside down at that instant.” -- It’s a good start, but how does that influence our reading of the text as a whole, or of this chapter, for instance? Why does this upheaval matter in particular?
ReplyDeleteThe next several paragraphs are a perfectly solid unpacking of how we should read some of the visual details. So far, so good - I have no objections, but there is a danger of spending excessive time and effort explaining something which is at least bordering on the obvious here. This could have been more compact, and you could have then moved more quickly into how this page matters in some larger sense.
“I believe the house was able to sense Navidson’s true self, and even though he does not want to die down there, he knows if he makes it to the top of the stairs a part of him does die down there. “ -- this is good, but it also highlights the issue here. You have a good grasp of the immediate text itself and of its larger importance. But you labor over the easy part and skim over the hard part (how it relates to the whole). Here you’re showing that you have good ideas re: how the part relates to the whole - you just aren’t really *doing* it yet.
Overall: the balance was a little off between the parts and the whole, as I was saying, but really this was good anyway - it just had some room to be better than it was.