Postmodernism is something of mystery until a person understands the main concerns of the postmodernists. Although I finally understood postmodernism in relation to Andy Warhol and his art, a topic that I find even more interesting is postmodernism in literature. Unbeknownst to me, I had been reading postmodern literature for years without ever realizing it. Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, is a novel that contains many of the elements of postmodernism, and that illustrates the new and exciting direction in which postmodernist literature is taking us. Authors like Danielewski force us to re-examine our pre-conceived ideas about what good literature should be; his subversion of literature is parallel to the subversion found in other postmodern works of art, especially in Warhol’s art.

Even from the onset of the novel, the way in which authorship is handled is vastly different from other, more traditional novels. Danielewski’s name isn’t even on the title page: instead, underneath the title, it says “by Zampano”, and then directly underneath it says “with introduction and notes by Johnny Truant”. That wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary, if it wasn’t for the fa

the events in their house on Ash Tree Lane. Even more disturbing, the footnotes are oftentimes fake, such as Dr. Isaiah Rosen’s article “Flawed Performances: A Consideration of the Actors in the Navidson Opus.” Even the fake articles are footnoted with precision and are made to appear in established publications like New York Times or New Republic. Yet, some of footnotes and names of people in academia that you would expect to be fake (like the list of one-hundred photographer that Zampano suggest a reader should look at to get a good example of a certain type of technique) are all real. In addition to the names, there are appendices that include Polaroids and original sketches of Zampano’s manuscript, as well as contrary evidence by the novel’s supposed editors that refutes Johnny Truant’s claim that he could never find anything to prove that The Navidson Record ever existed

The sense of unreality increases even more when the hallway is introduced. The Navidson children are playing inside the house, when the parents hear their shouts. “The terrifying implications of their children’s shouts is now impossible to miss. No room in the house exceeds a length of twenty-five feet, let alone fifty feet, let alone fifty-six and a half feet, and yet Chad and Daisy’s voices are echoing, each call responding with an entirely separate answer. In the living room, Navidson discovers the echoes emanating from a dark doorless hallway which has appeared out of nowhere in the west all.” That hallway, which is dubbed the “Five and a Half Minute Hallway” disrupts our concept of reality the more we read about it. Navidson’s video recordings reveal that the ceilings are at least two hundred feet away, and although there is an opposing wall fifteen hundred feet away, it only opens up to an even larger dark void.

Perhaps one of the reasons that the novel is not easily forgettable is because it requires active participation from the reader. When Johnny Truant is telling his story, there’s a footnote to his footnotes, provided by the book’s editors. It reads: “Though Mr. Truant’s asides may often seem impenetrable, they are not without rhyme or reason. The reader who wishes to interpret Mr. Truant on his or her own may disregard this note. Those, however, who feel they would profit from a better understanding of his past may wish to proceed ahead and read his father’s obituary in Appendix II-D as well as those letter written by his institutionalized mother in Appendix II-E” (72). It isn’t very often that readers are explicitly given a choice as to what parts of the text they will read. Along this vein, there are also sections of the book that require that the reader break a code in order to discover another meaning. In Chapter VIII, which begins with the definition of what SOS means in Morse code, there is undoubtedly a code to break: all the paragraphs are of varying lengths (either short or long) and separated into groups of three or four. Although it sounds simple, I haven’t been able to break the code yet. This also appears in letters written in code from Johnny’s mother, who instructs him to read only the first letter of every word so they can write to each other in secrecy. As the stories in the novel progress—and as Johnny Truants descents into madness and unreality more and more—the book’s structure begins to crumble down. There are lists that run on for pages, but

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