Postmodernist Anxiety in House of Leaves.
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 fact that Zampano and Johnny Truant are both characters in the novel. They are given authorial credit because the bulk of the novel is a critical explication on the subject of The Navidson Record, a documentary film about Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson's bizarre encounters with (and within) his house. The only problem is that Zampano's House of Leaves was written only on scattered scraps of paper. Upon Zampano's death, the character of Johnny Truant finds and gathers all the scraps of paper and assembled them into a book form. Johnny then adds his lengthy footnotes to the text; some !.
of Johnny's footnotes tell his own story about growing up "a story that parallel's Zampano's eventual madness and alienation from society due to his preoccupation with The Navidson Record, especially because Johnny can never find any proof that The Navidson Record ever existed.