The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Mark Z. Danielewski · a novel in four nested layers, with exhibits, appendices and an index · Pantheon Books, 2000 · scored on the book as Pantheon published it in the full-colour form the author designed, Danielewski’s English and his layout judged as one making, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Horror novel built as a scholarly edition; haunted-house tale, family novel, parody of criticism and confession in one book
Mythos
The labyrinth and the beast never seen in it; Echo, the self that can only repeat; the house that becomes the abyss, the home turned underworld; a descent into the dark and a return
Phase
The Navidsons’ time in the house, from the first measurement to Navidson’s last exploration and return, seen through a study written about the film and the notes added after its author’s death, with a mother’s letters beneath
Presentation
Fiction; Zampanò’s study in numbered chapters with footnotes, Johnny Truant’s footnotes beneath it, sparse notes by the Editors, exhibits, appendices and an index; the word house set in blue, struck passages in red, footnotes boxed, mirrored, upside down and run across facing pages, and pages holding a few words each
Register
From Zampanò’s measured, citational criticism, blind to its own horror, through Johnny’s run-on confession and the terror of the explorations, to Pelafina’s letters, formal, tender and then fractured
Scale
One family and a few friends and explorers in one house, a young man’s rooms and bars in Los Angeles, and a mother in an institution, held by one figure
Governing Proposition
A photojournalist moves his family into a house on Ash Tree Lane in Virginia and finds that it measures a quarter of an inch larger inside than outside; then a hallway opens where there was no door, and beyond it a dark without wall or floor. His film of the house is the subject of a blind old man’s scholarly study; the study is found after its author’s death by a young man in Los Angeles who assembles and annotates it while he comes apart; and the young man’s mother writes to him from an institution. The wager of the novel is that a book can be built like the house it describes, larger inside than out, so that the void inside a family and a self, and the commentary poured into that void, are entered by the reader rather than only reported.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“This is not for you.” The line stands before the book begins, a dedication that turns the reader away, and the book that follows will make the reader its last explorer. It is Mark Z. Danielewski’s first novel, published by Pantheon in New York in 2000: a book of a little over seven hundred pages, printed in colour, with footnotes that run in boxes, mirrored, upside down and across facing pages, pages that hold a handful of words, passages struck through in red, and the word house set in blue. The design is not dress on the text. It is the author’s, and the book is scored in the form he made, its exhibits, appendices and index part of it.
Four layers nest inside one another. At the centre is The Navidson Record, a documentary film by the photojournalist Will Navidson about his family’s house on Ash Tree Lane in Virginia, a film that, as far as the frame can tell, does not exist in the book’s own world. Around it is Zampanò’s study of the film, a scholarly commentary in numbered chapters, with footnotes and citations of critics real and invented, and long digressions on echo, on the labyrinth, on the history of building. Around that are the footnotes of Johnny Truant, a young man who works in a tattoo shop in Los Angeles, finds the manuscript in the apartment of the dead, blind Zampanò, assembles it and records beneath it his own disintegration. Outermost, sparse, stand the notes of the Editors.
Then come the appendices: Zampanò’s fragments; Johnny’s material, among it the letters of his mother, Pelafina, written from the Three Attic Whalestoe Institute; contrasting views; an index. Pelafina’s letters were also issued separately the same year, as The Whalestoe Letters; that book is context, and the letters that stand in the novel’s appendix are part of it. Later printings, the remastered and those in black and white or two colours, are versions of the same work. Each layer claims to contain the one inside it, and none of them quite does.
Movement II
The first crack is a measurement. Navidson measures the house, inside and out, and the inside is a quarter of an inch larger than the outside. Nothing the tape can do will account for the difference. It is a small and exact terror, the kind a man trained to record what he sees cannot stop recording, and the book begins its horror there, with a figure and a tape and no explanation.
Then a door that was not there. In the wall of the house a hallway opens, and Navidson films it: the five and a half minute hallway, the first film made of the impossible interior. Behind it is a dark that answers to no plan and has no end, and out of the dark comes a growl with no body behind it. Navidson, a man whose fame rests on a photograph of a dying child, the picture that won him his prize, goes in with his camera rather than face what is empty in his marriage and his house.
There are four explorations. The worst is Holloway’s, an expedition into the dark, which ends with its leader gone mad, firing on his own men, and recording his own end on tape. Navidson and his twin brother, long estranged, are reconciled, and the reconciliation costs a life. The couple fail and are repaired, though the repair, between Navidson and Karen, is thinner on the page than the terror before it. Zampanò reports all of this as a critic reports a film, calmly, with citations, and his calm is part of the horror.
Movement III
Zampanò’s study keeps the house at a scholar’s distance. It argues with critics, some real and some invented, cites authorities with a straight face, and digresses at length: on the history of architecture, on the acoustics of echo, on the labyrinth. The voice is measured and exact, a pastiche of the critic who explains everything and sees nothing, and the fake citations are a comedy of their own. The commentary is also an act of pouring: a blind man writing at length about a film, filling an emptiness with words.
The labyrinth is the book’s figure, and it is built twice. The house is one, a maze with something in it that is heard and never seen. The text is another. In the labyrinth chapter the footnotes are boxed, mirrored and run across facing pages, so that the reader turns the book, hunts from page to page and reads backward in a mirror while the explorers move through the dark. Zampanò’s passages on the Minotaur stand struck through in red, crossed out and restored, and the beast in the maze becomes the thing the father, the author and the reader shut away.
The chapter on echo builds the second myth: the self that can only repeat. And the old haunted house, from Poe’s House of Usher to Jackson’s Hill House, is taken down to its root, the dwelling that becomes the abyss, the home that becomes the underworld. Every descent into the dark is a katabasis, and every return a return from the dead. The blue word house runs through all of it, a word set apart on every line as if it too were a space one could enter.
Movement IV
Beneath the scholarship Johnny Truant comes apart. He is a young man in Los Angeles who works in a tattoo shop, drinks in bars and goes home to his rooms, and the manuscript he has taken from a dead man’s apartment takes hold of him. His footnotes begin as an editor’s and turn into a diary: of fear, of dread, of the women he sleeps with, told at length and told again. His voice runs on, self-regarding and overwritten, and the footnote, the scholar’s instrument of control, becomes the channel by which his breakdown seeps up into Zampanò’s calm.
The reader moves down the page as the explorers move down into the house: from Zampanò’s text to Johnny’s note, from note to note within note, from a critic’s certainty to a young man’s panic. Johnny’s life has a void in it too. At its root is his mother, and her madness, and the institution where she was kept. The house on Ash Tree Lane is a figure for what is empty in a family, and Johnny’s layer is the same figure lived by the man who is annotating it.
At the bottom of the book are Pelafina’s letters, written to her son from the Three Attic Whalestoe Institute. They are in a voice unlike anything above them: formal, loving, lucid, and then breaking as her mind breaks. They are the most moving pages in the book and its best prose, and they are its floor. The letters hide acrostics, and readers have worked at them for a quarter of a century, with the larger questions the book leaves open: whether Zampanò existed, whether Johnny invented him, whether Pelafina made both.
Movement V
Navidson goes into the dark a last time, alone. His supplies fail. The space around him loses its walls and then its floor, and the pages that tell it hold a few words each, so that the reader falls through the book at the speed of the fall. It is the book’s height, and among the strangest in the fiction of its decade: a man suspended in a dark without dimension, the last of the four explorations.
In the dark he reads. The book he has with him is called House of Leaves, and he reads it by the light of its own pages, burning them one by one as he goes. The act of reading becomes the last fire. The novel that opened by turning its reader away ends its central story with a reader alone with a book, using it up to see by, and the reader holding the novel is put inside the same act.
He comes back. The family is repaired, more thinly than it was broken. Around the return the layers keep their silence about one another: the film that may not exist, the critic who could not see it, the young man who may have invented the critic, the mother who may have invented them both. Every container in the book is larger inside than out, and what is inside each of them is absence: a void in a house, a film, a life, a love that an institution could not contain. The book was built to be that kind of house, and its last room is a mother writing to her son.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and it bites hard. The core is required: the house, the four explorations, Navidson alone in the dark, Zampanò’s commentary keeping the horror at a scholar’s distance, Johnny’s descent beneath it, Pelafina’s letters at the bottom. Each layer needs the others; take one away and the structure of nested containers, which is what the book is about, collapses. The defence that excess is the subject, a text overfull and larger inside than out, is real and is credited. It does not cover all the excess, and that holds the axis lowest of the twelve: Johnny’s sexual episodes, told at length and repeated, add little after the first two; the long lists of names and buildings are partly the point and partly permitted; several appendix pieces are additive; the invented critical apparatus overruns its parody. Well over a tenth of the book is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 7.7 / 10
What is uncovered can be stated. The house is a figure for a void inside a family and a self: grief, depression, the absence at the centre of a marriage that Navidson enters the dark rather than face, the mother’s madness at the root of Johnny’s life. The harder disclosure is about interpretation: Zampanò, Johnny, the Editors and then the reader pour commentary into an emptiness that will not hold it, and the commentary becomes the haunting. A third strand, the photograph of a dying child that won Navidson his prize, puts the ethics of looking at suffering into the frame. These hold. What keeps the axis below the bar is that much of what the book gives is dread and vertigo, a mood rendered with great force, and mood ranks below meaning; the family’s truth is often reached through the apparatus rather than shown in the action, and the reconciliation of Navidson and Karen is thinner than the terror before it.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Elevation of the dreadful kind, and often. The first measurement, a quarter of an inch the tape cannot account for, is a small and exact terror. Holloway’s expedition, its leader going mad in the dark, firing on his own men and recording his end on tape, is a set piece of horror. Navidson’s last exploration, alone, his supplies failing, reading a book by the light of its own burning pages as the space around him loses floor and wall, is the book’s height and among the strangest in the fiction of its decade: the act of reading made into the last fire. The pages that hold a few words each enact the fall. The other height is pathos: Pelafina’s letters, loving, lucid and then breaking, are the most moving pages in the book. Held below the top because the heights are spaced through long stretches of commentary and diary, many flat by design and some flat by default.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myths are built, not only evoked. The labyrinth bears weight: the house is one, the text is one, and Zampanò’s passages on the Minotaur, struck through and restored in red, make the beast in the dark a figure for what the father, the author and the reader shut away; the growl in the dark has no body, as the monster in the maze is never seen. Echo is built too, in the long chapter on echoes, as the form of a self that can only repeat. The haunted house, from Poe’s House of Usher to Jackson’s Hill House, is taken to its root: the dwelling that becomes the abyss, the home turned underworld, with a descent and a return that is a katabasis in the old sense. The family plot carries all of it. What holds the axis short of the bar is that the myths are many and sometimes listed rather than fused, the Minotaur partly signalled through apparatus, and the mother and son’s myth less built than the house’s.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is wide and plain: Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a text eaten by its commentary; Borges’s invented scholarship and labyrinths; Sterne’s typographic play; the concrete poets; Pynchon and the encyclopedic American novel; the haunted-house tale; the found-footage frame then current. The turn joins them into something none of them was: a horror novel that frightens through its own apparatus, in which the page becomes architecture, so that the reader turns the book, hunts across facing pages and reads backward in a mirror as the explorers move through the house. Typography is made narrative space at the scale of a whole novel. The stake was real: a first novel by an unknown writer, some seven hundred pages, colour printing, a layout no commercial house would choose, under constant risk of the charge of gimmick, which it has drawn. It clears the bar, and is held near it because much of the instrument, commentary, footnote and fake scholarship, was built by Nabokov and Borges, and the swerve lies in the joining and the scale.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The book’s strongest axis. Change the form and the knowledge goes almost entirely. A story about a house larger inside than outside is told in a book larger inside than outside: layers of commentary nest inside each other, each claiming to contain the last and each leaking into it. The footnote, the instrument of scholarly control, becomes the passage by which Johnny’s breakdown seeps into Zampanò’s calm, and the reader’s eye, moving down the page from text to note to note within note, performs the descent the explorers make. In the labyrinth chapter the boxed and mirrored notes are a maze the reader is inside; in the late explorations the near-empty page is the void, read at the speed of falling. The blue word house marks the word as a space in every line it stands in. Held just off the top because some effects are decorative rather than instrumental, a few typographic games repeat their discovery, and the appendices extend the form more than they deepen it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over twenty-six years. The book has sustained a scholarly literature and is a standard case in the study of print in the digital age and of what Espen Aarseth called ergodic literature. Outside the academy it has held a community of readers for a quarter of a century, working its codes: the acrostics in Pelafina’s letters, the hidden messages, the question of who wrote what, whether Zampanò existed, whether Johnny invented him, whether Pelafina made both. Those questions remain open. Held below the higher reaches because a share of what return yields is puzzle rather than depth: decoding is difficulty before it is meaning, and some of the open questions are open by the design of a game. The semantic yield, the family’s grief and the ethics of interpretation, is real, and it is the larger part.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is American fiction around 2000 and, beyond it, the book as an object in the first digital years. The intrinsic force is high: the book showed that the printed page could be made spatial and navigable, as hypertext had promised to make the screen, and that the most theory-laden form of postmodern metafiction could carry genre terror to a large popular readership. What holds it below the bar is that the literary novel did not reorganise around it: its method was followed by few, often as manner, and much of its reach is a cult’s rather than a redirection of the field it entered. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands at the head of a line of designed, multi-layered print novels, in which Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007) and Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams’s S. (2013) are commonly placed; and its reach runs outside the literary field, into the horror of the found document and the impossible interior written and passed around on the internet, wide but lateral.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over twenty-six years. Form: the text survives whole as the author made it, and has stayed in print in its designed form, which the publisher has kept despite its cost. Fabric: no charge. Presence is wide and continuous for a book of its age: a cult readership renewed in each generation of young readers, lately through social media; translations into many languages, in spite of a layout that resists translation; a place in university courses on contemporary fiction and on media. Charged lightly: its surface is partly fixed to its moment, the video and tape of a late-1990s documentary and the parody of 1990s critical theory, and its presence is more a devoted readership than a culture-wide one. Twenty-six years demonstrate far less than centuries, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Judged on Danielewski’s English and his design, which are one making. The command of layout is controlled and bears weight: the facing-page mazes, the mirrored notes, the pages of few words, the colour coding all keep the reader oriented enough to be lost on purpose. Zampanò’s voice, a pastiche of the scholarly critic, measured, citational and blind to its own horror, is exact, and its fake citations are a comic craft of their own. Pelafina’s letters are written in a voice entirely distinct, formal, tender and then fractured, and are the best prose in the book. Three charges hold the axis down. Johnny’s voice, which carries a large share of the pages, is overwritten: run-on, self-regarding, repetitive in its sexual bravado and its metaphors of dread, an excess only partly justified by his collapse. Some typographic effects are games. And the narrative prose of the explorations is, sentence by sentence, serviceable more than distinguished.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Zampanò’s dry chapter on the acoustics of echo, and Pelafina’s last letters from the institute. They obey one law: every container in the book is larger inside than outside, and what is inside is absence. The house holds a void; the commentary holds a film that may not exist; Johnny’s notes hold a life emptied by his mother’s madness; the mother’s letters hold a love the institution cannot contain. The horror, the scholarship and the confession run on the same physics, and the range is very wide, from academic parody to terror to grief. Charged: Johnny’s layer often runs on a looser law of excess and episode than the house’s exact menace; some of the apparatus, the contrasting views and parts of the appendices, obeys the joke more than the law; and the seams between the comic parody of criticism and the terror are sometimes visible rather than made to bear.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Several orders, held by one figure. Consciousness: three minds coming apart, Navidson’s, Johnny’s and Pelafina’s. The family: a couple failing and repaired, twin brothers estranged and reconciled at the cost of one life, children, and a mother and son at the root of the book. Art and media: documentary, photojournalism and its ethics, film criticism and the institution of interpretation. The academy and its discourse. Institutions of care and confinement, in Whalestoe. The natural and the sacred, as an abyss that answers to no physics and no god. They are integrated, not listed: each is a house with a void in it. Held below the higher bands because history, labour, class and the state are thin or absent; the social world is a backdrop to the private one; and the cast is small, a family and a few friends and explorers, with Los Angeles reached mainly as Johnny’s bars and rooms.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 8.9, then The Swerve at 8.6, then The Imperishable at 8.5. A book built like the house it describes, larger inside than out, in which the footnote carries one mind’s breakdown into another’s calm and the reader’s eye performs the descent; a turn that joins Nabokov’s consuming commentary, Borges’s labyrinth and Sterne’s page into a horror novel whose page is architecture, staked on a first novel no commercial house would have designed; and twenty-six years of a designed edition kept in print, translated against its layout, and found again by each generation of young readers.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.7, held by what is permitted rather than compelled: Johnny’s sexual episodes told at length and repeated, lists that are partly the point and partly excess, additive appendix pieces and a critical apparatus that overruns its parody, well over a tenth of the book. Next above it, The Unconcealment and The Encompassed at 8.0: a disclosure that holds, a void in a family and interpretation as a haunting, but one carried largely as dread, with the family’s truth often reached through the apparatus; and orders held by one figure, with history, labour, class and the state thin or absent. Then The Made at 8.1, held by Johnny’s overwritten voice.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.7 against a threshold of 7.5, by two tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.2, The Made at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Swerve at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Imperishable meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 fall two tenths short, and The Unconcealment at 8.0 falls five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 7.7, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.3, stands well below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, his first novel, published by Pantheon Books, New York, in 2000. It is scored as the novel in the full-colour form the author designed, with the word house in blue and the struck Minotaur passages in red, and with its exhibits, appendices and index as part of the book; the letters of Pelafina that stand in the appendix are part of it, and The Whalestoe Letters, issued separately the same year, are context, not the work scored. Later printings, the remastered and those in black and white or two colours, are versions of the same work, and nothing here turns on the differences between them. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Danielewski’s English and his design, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the line set before the book. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact page count, the circulation of parts of the manuscript before publication, whether the word house is set in blue in every language in which it appears, the source of Navidson’s prize photograph, the dates and places of the book’s first scholarship, and its standing as a precursor of the horror of liminal spaces, are not given.