an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 10, July-December 2013, ISSN
1552-5112
Habent Sua Fata
Libelli: An Explanatory Note on Literary Singularity
Johnny Truant opens Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves by stating that “This is
not for you.” Yet my experience with the novel suggests that it is particularly for me. Like Johnny
noticing his past etched in the margins of Zampanò’s fragmented manuscript, I
began noticing my own memories crowding the white spaces between pages,
paragraphs and words. In particular I found myself over and over again
considering my relationship with the novels of my past—Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, the
Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel Who
Killed Harlow Thrombey?, and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy—two of which I strongly recollected reading,
and one of which I didn’t until my father, not realizing the exploration he was
about to inspire, reminded me. While reading Danielewski’s novel I also
recalled sharply a reoccurring dream that had been plaguing and delighting me
since early childhood: that I am lost in a labyrinth constructed of the most
familiar of raw materials—my home. As I read
deeper into the novel I was able to read more deeply into myself. What does it
mean, I asked myself, that I follow every hyperlink, read every footnote, every
appendix, run to the mirror to watch myself read the backwards-printed words,
decrypt Pelafina’s code, Google or card catalogue every intertextual reference,
place my own checkmarks at the bottom of the pages? What does it mean that the
type of novel that coerces me into this participatory behavior makes me
unabashedly giddy? I had, at the time of my first reading of House of Leaves, also been reading
through the catalogue of hermeneutic theorists. The hermeneutic circle was
constantly on my mind, but the circular cycle of reciprocity that, as Gadamer
puts it, “brings before me something that otherwise happens behind my back” only began to explain how and why each
decision to turn my attention from Zampanò’s narrative to Johnny’s turned my
attention, as well, to myself. The hermeneutic circle, in its simplest form, depicts
how interpretation cycles between self-knowledge and textual knowledge, but to
me the geometry of the circle didn’t explain how I was learning about myself at
the same time that I was learning about the book, how each turn of the page
(sequential or non-linear) made me more attuned, somehow, to the ways of the
novel and of myself. Rather than a circle, I began to see the cycle of
hermeneutic reciprocity as a spiral not unlike the spiral staircase in
Danielewski’s novel: it stretches, it shrinks, it isolates, it unites, it
resembles both chaos and phenomenological precision, it shows the Navidsons the
limits of their own interpretative behaviors. And, while to traverse its stairs
one’s movements might resemble a circle, it necessarily forces one to climb or
descend, to move vertically, as well as cyclically. Through the staircase that
grows impossibly dark and long for photo-journalist Will Navidson, yet is
compact and pleasingly narrow for wheelchair-bound Billy Reston, I began to see
how the geometry of the spiral explains growth, reflection, the ability to
learn, and the building of interpretation. When one passes through a circle,
the same ground is retread over and over again, whereas a spiral cycling
between the hemispheres of textual- and self-knowledge would also allow for the
growth and revision of ideas that are necessary for interpretation. “Habent Sua” is an attempt to visually
represent this spiral. When the pages are laid out in a vertical line, my
reoccurring dream about labyrinths and defamiliarlized space winds through the
textual, critical, theoretical, and autobiographical discourse as the spiral
staircase winds through my interpretation of the novel. Danielewski’s novel incorporates many voices—each
character is as well a narrator, contributing his or her own voice to the
palimpsest. I attempted, in the textboxes that interrupt or enhance the central
discourse, to represent my own palimpsestic narrative voice. And, like
Danielewski’s novel, I did not want to impose directions for encountering these
voices. I have known readers of House of
Leaves who, like me, read every word, follow every hyperlink. I have met
just as many, however, who do not. I have known readers who have never read,
nor intend to read, a Pelican Poem; who have no idea who Pelafina Lièvre is;
who don’t realize or care that there is an index at the end of the novel. My
own brother, who did not follow a single hyperlink, knows no character by the
name of Johnny Truant. For my brother and me, the novel is, quite literally, a
different shape. In my reading of House
of Leaves, this very flexibility of the novel is indicative of the spiral
staircase, which also changes its physical form to accommodate its individual
interlocutors. The title of the piece comes from Walter Benjamin
who, in Illuminations, unpacks his
bookshelf before his readers’ eyes. The relationship that he describes between
the books and their collector is among the “most intimate,” for it is not only
the books that come alive in him, Benjamin says, but “it is he who lives in
them.” “So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building
stones, before you,” Benjamin states, “and now he [himself, the collector] is
going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.” “Habent Sua,” in a lot of ways, is my own rendition of a bookshelf,
my own attempt to recreate before the eyes of my readers the life that I have
found inside my books, inside of House of
Leaves in particular. an international and
interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image Volume 10, July-December 2013, ISSN
1552-5112
