#hus351

The layers of images on the cover parallel the book's layers of narratives.

The symbol || appears on the inside of both the front and back cover of House of Leaves.  Collage #1 in Appendix II C shows that this is the Ground-Air Emergency Code signal symbolizing a request for medical supplies.  A few more of these symbols appear throughout the book (perhaps as directional cues for the reader, or in reference to Johnny’s father’s career as a pilot), but it’s interesting that the book should begin and end with a request for supplies: a call for help.  Other portions of the book (primarily Zampanò’s bits about The Navidson Record) reference and duplicate the Morse Code distress signal, ••• ‒ ‒ ‒ •••, hinting that members of the explorations are in trouble.  Perhaps the || symbol appears at the beginning of the book as a warning that its characters, its authors, maybe even its readers are in distress, and again at the end of the book as reminder that reading the book did not help: someone still needs to be rescued, the riddle still needs to be solved. 

To decipher the letter from Johnny's mother on pages 620-623, you could take the time to write down the first letter of each word, and then go through what you've written, finding words and making sense of them.  But by deciphering the letter in your head as you read, you'd be doing exactly what you're doing as you read the rest of the book: reading every word, following each story line, while at the same time trying to make sense of the book as a whole.

"Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and Reason are concerned both claims are accurate.

               "And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love. There is only silence." (Danielewski 50).

These words finish about a 5 page discussion of the physical and mythological Echo, and sums up the topic nicely. This is one of my favorite moments in the text, and succinctly goes a long way toward providing some sort of "meaning" for house of leaves.

Think of it this way: the sound/echo is language/thought and  the walls which this sounding bounce back from are knowledge and the known. We use language/thought to place ourselves in this world, and we do so by bouncing our ideas/words/thought off of our knowledge base--things we know to be true. HOL builds a world where the usual knowledge base is shifting and unreliable, language is transforming, and the truths we use to place ourselves become irrelevant.

This is for page 204 of “House of Leaves” where the men are exploring the inner workings of Navidson’s house in Virginia. The page simply states:

"Something that was never there"

and I thought of the monster figure again that is haunting both them and Johnny Truant (this is sort of the image that I pictured for the creature).

Johnny is obsessing over if this monster is real or not, and maybe it’s just a figment of his (and the other mens’) imagination…?

"When revisiting places we once frequented as children, it is not unusual to observe how much smaller everything seems. This experience has too often been attributed to the physical differences between a child and an adult. In fact it has more to do with epistemological dimensions than with bodily dimensions: knowledge is hot water on wool. It shrinks time and space." (p 167).