Sometimes it is December again. 

My father calls me up to ask what I would like for Christmas. In his voice, a sincere fondness—a recognition mourning celebration of our collective past Decembers. Of that living room in our house back in Maryland, fir pines embedded in carpet (pedial hazard), the distant hiss and drip of brewing coffee, awaiting the announcement of school closures on television. Snow days, that plastic orange sled, wet gloves, salted asphalt. We don’t speak of these things overtly, but we reminisce through intonation. It’s earnest. I restrain myself from launching into a critique of Christmas consumerism and manufactured demand. 

My answer is the same every year. Barnes & Noble gift card. This is how I have come to own a copy of House of Leaves.

House of Leaves is Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel, published by Pantheon in 2000. It’s a monstrous artifact, a coffee table centerpiece, weighing over two pounds in paperback form, full-color, 709 pages, approximate L x W x H dimensions of a Star Alliance-approved personal carry-on item. Three appendices and a complete index. I’m reluctant to go so far as to adopt the hyperbolic language of its most ardent online supporters, as I’ve found Infinite Jest (hard-cover edition; three point two pounds) marginally superior for behemothic tasks such as tofu-pressing or door-stopping. Nonetheless, House of Leaves is a big ass book.

Beyond the physical dimensions, a formidable mythology precedes and surrounds the text. The alcoves of Reddit and Goodreads are swarmed with endless theorizing and discourse about the narrative layers of House of Leaves. Like most discussions on the internet, it appears (to me) that people seem to either really love it or really hate it. On Reddit, in particular, I have discovered formal academic theses written on the book, philosophical and literary analysis, incessant contrarianism (a core tenant of the platform), petty scrutiny, awe, exasperation, willful misinterpretations, and many many pleas for answers clarity interpretations or, really, some form of assurance. 

Among the most popular forum posts are anecdotal claims about how House of Leaves will scare the pants off you, hence perpetuating the novel’s misleading categorization as “horror” (Stephen King once described it as “the Moby-Dick of horror” [1]; the book’s Goodreads genre classification is, first and foremost, horror). A nearly ubiquitous symptom of the scared-pantsless is induced insomnia, which, curiously enough, precisely parallels the sleepless experiences of Johnny Truant, the novel’s primary narrator. (So impressionable is the human mind.) Another commonly reported phenomenon is that readers, without explicitly alleging supernatural possession or otherwise occultish interference, find themselves truly afraid to keep this book in their house. Again, in House of Leaves, it is not a book but a different inanimate structure, i.e., the house on Ash Tree Lane (which, presumably, inspires the title) that is accursed with a malignant and unexplained form of sentience.

While I personally was not frightened by House of Leaves (though I was certainly thrilled, astonished, creeped out, etc., and continue to be existentially troubled by its resistance to cohesive interpretation), I see no real harm in Redditors indulging in the mysterious and sinister mythos of the book as entity. Danielewski himself certainly leans into it. House of Leaves, with its labyrinthine structure and inscrutable (to the naked eye) self-references, has been described as intentionally antagonistic to the reader. The novel opens with the foreboding epigraph: 

This is not for you.

Certain readers of House of Leaves have been driven to hysteria by the unending implications of this sentence towards their interpretation of the novel as antagonistic. While the idea of simulating a novel’s own consciousness is creatively intriguing (and a key feature of metafiction), I feel that the public’s reaction to this opening line is indicative of a broader, more pervasive fallacy across online media discourse at large. That is, the inability to distinguish between what a work of art is doing / what a work of art is. I must remind such readers that, at the end of the day, House of Leaves is a work of fiction. It is, specifically, a pastiche—i.e., a book pretending to be a different kind of book. 

The author, Danielewski, pioneers shockingly original and avant-garde techniques through both form and content to convince the reader that the book they are holding is not, in fact, a copy of House of Leaves written by (real-life flesh & bald) Mark Z. Danielewski, but an academic manuscript titled “The Navidson Record.” From there, it gets real meta real fast. “The Navidson Record” is supposedly an analysis (and, conveniently for the reader, also a retelling) of a fictional documentary of the same title. This manuscript was drafted by a blind man named Zampanò and posthumously assembled and annotated by one Johnny Truant. These are both characters. Their narratives are delineated through typeface: Zampanò writes in Times New Roman / Johnny writes in Courier New.

While Danielewski employs literary devices (e.g., the typeface shenanigans, nested and intertwined narratives, engaging with pastiche and metafiction tropes, etc.) that may invoke the reader to perceive hostility (a book which resists reading), I reject the notion that the book is antagonistic to the reader. The story, while complex and structurally experimental, is remarkably compelling and the novel as a whole follows a stringent internal logic. Contrary to proponents of the antagonism claim, I did not find House of Leaves to be abstruse or overly difficult to read—I found it riveting and, unexpectedly, heart-wrenching. Throughout the month of January, I awoke before dawn nearly every morning to read this book, ever drawn towards it, never away. It is very, very good.

On one such morning, whilst perusing appendix guides and chapter-by-chapter analyses on the House of Leaves subreddit, I stumbled across a comment that elicited, well, precisely the kind of reaction that engagement-driven, advertisement-supported platforms like Reddit profit from: rage. I was rage-baited. 

Original post heading:
 r/houseofleaves – 4y ago
Thoughts on book? (or something generic like that)

Rage-bait comment:
u/[redacted] – 3y ago
Gimmicky and derivative. 

I’m beside myself with disbelief. Rushing to re-establish my ethos, I hastily investigate their profile. Outside my bedroom window, the sun ascends into the sky. Bands of light rise and fall across my street. Leaves scatter, yawn, tumble, etc. The oak trees nod and bow deeply like the great slow pendulous heads of oxen. (Theatrical recreation—I’m not actually looking.) I’m absorbed by my screen, reading through dozens upon dozens of u/[redacted]’s comments on innocuous forums such as r/Yarn, r/knitting, and r/tea. (Mission for complete obliteration of u/[redacted]’s credibility ultimately proves unfruitful, although I do eventually find one comment potentially sympathetic to the gluten-intolerance-truthers movement (?)). The question begs, whose great aunt is chronically on Reddit, and why is she dunking on a relatively obscure work of metafiction from a pre-9/11 millennia? And why do I care so much? 

Claim 1: Gimmicky

There are two aspects to the definition of a device as a gimmick: audience perception and artist intention. The pejorative “gimmicky” is often hurled at low-grade media that uses sensationalist tactics which do not contribute to the artistic value of the piece, for the purpose of general marketing. In other words, a gimmick must be both 1) intended for marketing and 2) perceived as having no inherent value beyond this intention.

In the context of House of Leaves, or even just in art broadly speaking, we can debate an artist’s intentions until the cows come home shaking their pendulous oxen heads. I’ll say this: it is reported that Danielewski spent ten years writing House of Leaves [no citation—in fact, there’s very few direct citations of Danielewski at all, outside of his two Reddit AMAs and officially published works]. Given the author’s maintained obscurity, and the declining (bleeding!) state of the contemporary literary industry, I think it’s no great leap to conclude that Mark Z. Danielewski’s primary intentions for the decade-long endeavor of writing a 700+ page experimental (and, might I remind, debut) novel were not marketability and/or profitability. To qualify my argument, I’ll also reaffirm my belief that this whole line of “intentions” investigation is still trite and inconsequential and okay sure, maybe Danielewski is just a really bad, like terrible on biblical proportions, entrepreneur. 

The real determining factor of whether or not the novel is gimmicky is how it is read, not how it was written. Returning to my discussion of the prodigious mythos of House of Leaves and its imposed horror genre classification, I feel that many readers of the novel (perhaps even u/[redacted] herself) are clouded by the preconceived expectation that they’re about to read a really scary book. Because, if you are searching for the literary equivalent of the Saw franchise, Danielewski is not your man.  

Why is House of Leaves so often touted as horror? In short, because it is an immensely strange and intertextual piece, which, in everyday discourse, is difficult to succinctly describe. (My poor mother rarely receives a straight answer to the question “What are you reading honey?”). I once, regrettably, described the novel to my writing professor as something along the lines of “if Pale Fire were a horror book” (I’m guilty too!).

However, when afforded more than a few seconds to gather my thoughts, I can say definitively that House of Leaves is not horror. Nor is it even genre fiction at all. While the novel certainly engages with traditional horror tropes—namely, young family (the Navidson-Greens of “The Navidson Record”) move into new house only to discover it’s haunted (!?!)—the author himself agrees that the book can, in many ways, be read as a love story [2], and an encyclopedic novel [3], and a satirical commentary on academia. It’s all of those things. One label I might alternatively attribute to House of Leaves would be postmodern (which is way more vague and pretentious than saying horror). 

I am not bothered by a reader’s potential disappointment with House of Leaves as not-that-scary. What bothers me is the type of bad faith argument that places the individual reader at the center of literary critique, i.e., “I thought this was a horror book, but it didn’t scare me, therefore it was bad.” This is antithetical to the intentions of a postmodern novel. The nature of postmodernist fiction is to deconstruct and subvert its reader’s expectations. House of Leaves engages heavily with deconstruction (re: Derrida, Lacan, annoying French guys you don’t want to talk to at a party et al.), which, essentially, challenges preconceived notions of truth and emphasizes that meaning is subjective rather than objective (in other words, it’s constructed). Therefore it is troublesome that u/[redacted] resisted deconstructing her own reading of House of Leaves. 

In House of Leaves, Danielewski uses a multitude of inventive techniques to explore deconstruction and to compel the reader to deconstruct as well. I feel that he understands, more than any other contemporary living writer, the concept of book as experience. For example, the language employed in Johnny Truant’s narrative sections, which exist almost solely as footnote-style annotations added to Zampanò’s “The Navidson Record,” is strikingly inconsistent throughout the chronology of the novel. This is intentional and meticulously calculated—nothing is in here by accident. Johnny introduces himself to the reader as a disengaged, drug-addicted tattoo apprentice who’s essentially stolen Zampanò’s “The Navidson Record” manuscript from the deceased man’s apartment and (at first) is more or less going through it for shits and giggles. Beyond the typographical switches, Johnny’s distinct voice (e.g., Johnny on Heidegger, “Certainly this geezer must have gotten hung up on a pretty wicked rock habit to start spouting such nonsense.” [4]) serves as a sharp departure between his narrative and Zampanò’s intricate academic monograph (which reads more like, e.g., Zampanò on John Hollander, “His slim volume abounds with examples of textual transfiguration.” [5]). 

It’s a banal observation of human psychology to state that we adopt the speech and attitudes that surround us. It’s less banal to see it in action, dissected; exposed bone, twitching capillaries, stench of surgery. As we delve deeper into House of Leaves, our immersion into Zampanò’s world of abstraction, formal diction, and academic references begins to alter the language we use to observe the world. Language bleeds in. The other day, I used the word preadamite in casual conversation. Language bleeds out. The effect that House of Leaves has on the reader is replicated in Johnny as his prose gradually converges with Zampanò’s (see Johnny again, 300 pages after the initial quotation, “As I strain now to see past The Navidson Record, beyond this strange filigree of imperfection, the murmur of Zampanò’s thoughts…” [6]). Johnny Truant’s annotations of “The Navidson Record” serve as metaphysical stand-ins for our own experience reading House of Leaves—as we discover this novel page by page, so does Johnny. He enters Zampanò’s labyrinth blind, just as we do, with an air of cynicism and levity, and yet he leaves as a—

He does not leave. 

Abandon all hope, ye who enter. [7]

Johnny Truant never makes it out of the labyrinth.

I wanted to make another reference to The Divine Comedy here by comparing Johnny to reader as Virgil to Dante, but, perhaps a more apt comparison, one which reinforces the historical establishment of Danielewski’s devices as literary (and not gimmicky), is that Johnny is to reader what Dante is to reader. The characters are both outsiders, serving as a proxy for the readers through their expedition into the Inferno, into the house on Ash Tree Lane, into the unknown world of fiction. They are not guides, but more like companions—they cannot explain to you what is occurring, or why, but they can sort of cock their heads at you as if to say, this is weird, right?

Because it gets real weird. House of Leaves discussion forums are littered with photographs of the book’s most visually appealing pages: upside down and sideways text, redacted sections in blood-red script, annotations trickling up and down pages like grease stains, footnotes that fold in on themselves, which reference appendices and even other footnotes, some of which span across multiple non-consecutive pages, seemingly leading to nowhere. Some pages are nearly blank. Some host a singular line of text, marching off the page like a trail of ants. Some are so busy that the reader must physically orient the book in four directions to read all the text. 

If you’re expecting House of Leaves to be a Horror novel, then these structural antics might seem childish to you, something out of a Goosebumps graphic novel beta-test. They may even seem gimmicky. In defense of Danielewski, the novel is structurally manipulated to mimic and amplify the content of the book. You see, the living room of the house on Ash Tree Lane has an ominous empty hallway. Enter it, as Will Nadvidson, the protagonist and documentarian of “The Navidson Record” (the fictional film) does, and you will be led down a capricious labyrinth. There, in pitch darkness, the walls and stairwells shift, contort, and occasionally growl as though the house were an entity of its own. 

Danielewski controls our reading of his novel by emulating the pacing of narrative arcs, emotional entanglements of characters, and even the physical dimensions of the house by mirroring them through the visual structure of the pages themselves. E.g., when the narrative pace picks up amidst a moment of crescendoing tension during hallway Exploration #4, the number of words on each page starkly decrease, and the footnotes disappear, commanding the reader to turn the pages in rapid, heart-quickening succession. In Exploration #5, as the hallway upheaves itself diagonally, as does the text, appearing to literally slide off the page. When a certain character (no spoilers) is confined to an ever-shrinking room in the house, trapped claustrophobic dying, the white margins grow, gradually smushing the words down to tiny 3 x 3 squares of text, and then nothing at all. These are not cheap gimmicks. Danielewski reawakens the concept of a captive audience, of book as visceral experience, ensnaring us within the splintered rules of his labyrinth by boldly re-inventing the boundaries between text, page, narrative, and reader. 

Claim 2: Derivative

To be derivative is to derive concepts (structural, thematic, stylistic, etc.) from existing works. But isn’t that the context of nearly all contemporary art? Would we dare call Amanda Bynes’ 2006 magnum opus, She’s the Man, derivative simply because it draws inspiration from the Bard’s Twelfth Night? The way I understand it, the disparaging subtext of the term is contained within this nuance: the derivative work does not, as writers say, make it new—it recycles pre-packaged styles (e.g., Shakespearean cross-dressing) without revitalizing them with original substance (e.g., the epic highs and lows of high school soccer). 

But I feel that u/[redacted] is implying something different in her critique of House of Leaves, which, narratively, stylistically, and visually, simply does not resemble anything else on shelves today. My trouble in unpacking u/[redacted]’s meaning of “derivative” may be, in part, due to the fact that the word is often used imprecisely or just straight-up incorrectly. E.g., I’ve seen it used to describe parodies, or spoofs, in the sense that audience enjoyment of such media is contingent on their understanding of the reference media(s). Another e.; while leaving a blockbuster, let’s say, for instance, that god-awful Bob Dylan movie, any reasonable audience member might exclaim “how derivative!” which is to mean that they found the film formulaic, befuddled by cliché, and grotesquely commercial. 

However, neither of these interpretations of “derivative” apply to Danielewski’s novel. Perhaps closer to what u/[redacted] and other critics of House of Leaves are implying with their accusations of the book as derivative is that they perceive it as relying too heavily on formal academic convention or references to (real or imagined) literature; or, maybe, that it too closely parallels another postmodernist leviathan of the same era (we’ll get to David). 

Across the board, House of Leaves readers seem to struggle with Zampanò’s “academic” chapters the most. Despite the fact that Johnny Truant writes his narrative through what essentially appears to be an escalating psychotic episode—complete w/ audio-visual hallucinations, memory lapses, delusions of grandeur, etc. (all conveyed through his feverish, stream-of-consciousness annotations)—I see fewer complaints about the incoherence of Johnny’s sections than Zampanò’s. 

I feel as though the reasoning here is somewhat obvious—academic language and form is widely and automatically received as “dull,” “dry,” and “difficult” [complaints compiled from various Goodreads reviews because, yeah, I diversify my sources], even though Danielewski’s engagement with academia in House of Leaves is entirely subverted and re-imbued with emotion. Recall the boundary I defined earlier: what a work of art is doing / what a work of art is. Zampanò’s analysis of “The Navidson Record,” while mirroring the vocabulary and form of academic texts (e.g., footnotes and citations; clear organization by theme and chronology), is not an actual academic text. Beyond the fact that the documentary titled “The Navidson Record” (along with the majority of Zampanò’s convincingly formatted citations) simply does not exist, it is baldly evident that Zampanò’s monograph primarily serves as a creative structural vessel for the story of the Navidson-Greens and the house on Ash Tree Lane. Danielewski’s most obvious subversion of the academic form is that no actual analysis would recount its source media in its totality, whereas he dedicates the majority of House of Leaves to such a re-telling—his choice to do so is clearly narrative, not analytical. 

Drawing upon observations of readers’ instinctual resistance to academic language and form (I’m not even going to attempt to entangle myself with class/cultural/taste conflicts by trying to explain the basis of this resistance), I would further describe the (un)critical online reception of House of Leaves as a flat-out rejection of what David Letzler defines, in his 2012 essay on Infinite Jest, as literary “cruft” [8]. Letzler derives the term “cruft” from its use in computer programming circles, originally meaning redundant and/or unnecessary code [9], and extrapolates it to the context of the encyclopedic novel. Literary cruft refers to the seemingly superfluous or non-essential (to narrative and/or authorial intention) components of a novel—in other words, untrimmed fat. 

I personally cannot allow the word “cruft” to exist anywhere near David (Foster Wallace)—while it’s true that his prose is renowned for its sprawling and maximalist quality (which has supposedly warranted Infinite Jest its status as “encyclopedic novel,” whatever the hell that means), the nature of his work, at a sentence-level, is pure condensation. Density. Every last DFW detail works triple-duty unpaid overtime to develop character-driven narratives, reinforce overarching themes, and reveal cosmic dimensions of the human experience through granularity (total aside: he (David) liked to describe this as “getting at your nerve endings” [10, 11, 12]). 

If you replicated the above paragraph and replaced DFW’s name with Danielewski’s, I’d still pretty much agree (though with maybe 10% less fawning).

However, in the context of our modern media ecosystem, which I hope we can almost universally agree is simultaneously oversaturated (in number) and underdeveloped (in nuance), I admit that there’s some legitimacy in the concept of “cruft.” A good example here might be film, wherein we might use the alternative term “fluff.” While it is, in my opinion, the jobs of the filmmaker and editor(s) to whittle projects down to appropriate and traditionally accepted runtimes, film critics abound—from NYT essayists to that weird liver-spotted guy who starts talking to/at you outside the AMC bathrooms—have long debated the need for long movies to “cut the fluff.” Understandable. (I mean, absolutely no one wants to sit through the nearly four-hour runtime of The Brutalist, if not for anything other than preservation of the bladder.) 

Returning to my point, this is all to say that it seems Letzler (the cruft guy) has identified the core argument of critics of House of Leaves, i.e., they believe that Danielewski’s adoption of academic (hyper)stylization, metanarratives, and even his visual-structural experimentation, is nothing but decorative cruft. Marketing gimmicks. Hollow derivations. However, if one were to remove these supposedly superfluous components from House of Leaves, as one may axe scenes or narrative threads from any particular film, a tighter, more engaging novel would not emerge. Instead. What. We wou[] be left with[ Is. 

Nothing. 

The absence of a novel. If critics, imposing themselves as surrogate editors, were to adopt the cut-the-cruft approach, they would transfigure this novel into nothing but

a house of leaves

moments before the wind. [13]

The rejection of literary cruft in novels like House of Leaves, or Infinite Jest, is to reject the basis of the postmodernist novel itself. That which touts (Letzler’s interpretation, not mine) the inverted Kantian philosophy of “purposelessness with purpose” [8]. In other words, the intentional supply of technically useless information. Why on Earth do this? one might ask (although, I must say, this idea of having “technically useless” explorations in literature seems to follow essentially the same argumentative vein of “why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?” [14], or, as Goodreads user/[censored] so astutely puts it: “Instead of taking a straightforward approach, Danielewski chooses to tell the story in a dry, academic style…” Profile set to private). 

Letzler has plenty of intelligent, intertextual things to say about the usefulness of useless information. Me, I don’t know. Why read at all? Why aimlessly browse Reddit, Wikipedia, [bad bad social media site], etc.? Why do we collect tchotchkes, or preserve ticket stubs, or remember the birthdays of our ex-girlfriends? Why do you wear your late grandmother’s earrings? Why does your mom call you to tell you that your old neighbor, do you remember, no yeah she had that cane that kinda scared you. Oh you know with the, the purse and. Anyways. She’s dead.

A utilitarian viewpoint of information is inherently incompatible with artistic, and human, experience. At the end of the day, no amount of analysis can really describe the real psychic pleasure that fiction can inspire in you. In me. And this is where I diverge from Letzler, who considers an example of Infinite Jest cruft: the lines which read “Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED.” [15] in endnote 24 (a list titled JAMES O. INCANDENZA: A FILMOGRAPHY). Despite Letzler’s identification of their nonexistence and nonspecificity of these lines, and thus their inclusion in the filmographic list deemed utterly “pointless” [8], Letzler justifies their presence in the novel not by arguing for their inherent worth, but by emphasizing the role they play in the book’s overarching philosophy. Namely, that these lines serve as nothing but background noise, intended to be confronted and promptly filtered out by the reader in order for the novel to be experientially representative of the day-to-day information overload we receive in this (budding; Infinite Jest was written in the early 90s) digital age.

Sure. I don’t disagree with Letzler’s postmodernist interpretations of the way Infinite Jest functions and engages with the reader’s focus, as well as with the concept of an attention economy at large. DFW, with those bicep-strengthening endnote references littered throughout the main text of Infinite Jest, certainly understands the book as experience; so does Danielewski, as I’ve previously argued, as well as (Letzler argues) Joyce, re: the pacing of Ulysses, or Melville re: 101 fun whale facts. But I also feel that this route of literary analysis ignores/overlooks our ability to read via nerve-endings. 

“What renders a truth meaningful, worthwhile, & c. is its relevance, which in turn requires extraordinary discernment and sensitivity to context, questions of value, and overall point—otherwise we might as well all just be computers downloading raw data to one another.” [16; David; pro-cruft].

James O. Incandenza (character in Infinite Jest) was not just an erratic and troubled filmmaker, but also a father. What is the overall point of including his various unfinished, untitled, and unreleased projects within his filmography? Firstly, I would argue that they contribute to the reader’s understanding of his characterization—you see, J.O.I. is deceased in the present narrative of the novel, therefore it’s pretty much only through mundane and miniscule posthumous glimpses of his characterization (e.g., the various unfinished films scattered across his tumultuous career) that we gain the ability to detect his (J.O.I.’s) lasting psychological impressions on the surviving Incandenza family. Maybe that’s a stretch. From the standpoint of book as not just experience, but cathartic and moving experience, the inclusion of James O. Incandenza’s unfinished projects make him seem human. Flawed. They make the story seem textured, teeming with life. When unobserved and/or unacknowledged aspects of your own life are replicated in fiction, by a complete stranger, it can make you feel seen in a way that you have never felt before. Or that you felt once, long ago, surely at least once, but only in a sinewy childhood memory. In a sense, DFW is saying, I see you. I see you for everything that you are, the things that you think no one else sees, or does, or remembers, much less acknowledges. I do. I do it too. 

Sometimes it is October again. 

This is what Will Navidson tells us in the final pages of “The Navidson Record” (the body text of House of Leaves) as he watches over his costume-clad children “wending their way from porch to porch across great lakes of shadow” [17] on Halloween night. He loves them more than anything else, although, of course, this we need not be told. Instead, Danielewski concludes with images of an early Vermont winter. “Tongues of grey ice cover the roads” [18]. Dried leaves scatter, yawn, tumble, etc. Any semblance of structural manipulation has vanished from these pages. For a moment, you realize that Danielewski has lost sight of you, the reader, his focus never flinching away from those scenes of “simmering milk, roasted walnuts and against a backdrop of black ash and pine, Karen’s graceful fingers braiding her daughter’s long auburn hair.” [18]. With him you are invited, but by no means forced, to reminisce through little more than observation and intonation. It does not matter. Because, remember: 

This is not for you.

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References

[1] Dominus, S. (2013). “Stephen King’s Family Business.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/magazine/stephen-kings-family-business.html

[2] Wittmershaus, E. (2000). “Profile: Mark Z. Danielewski.” Flak Magazine. https://web.archive.org/web/20110629020408/http://www.themodernword.com/borges/Flak%20Magazine-Danielewski.html

[3] Polley, J. S. (2018). “Documenting the (Un)Official Kevin Carter Narrative: Encyclopedism, Irrealism, and Intimization in House of Leaves.” IAFOR Journal of Media, Communication & Film, 5(1), 5–22. https://doi.org/10.22492/ijmcf.5.1.01

[4] Danielewski, M. Z. (2000). “House of Leaves.” 2nd ed., Pantheon Books. [Pg. 25]

[5] Danielewski, M. Z. (2000). “House of Leaves.” 2nd ed., Pantheon Books. [Pg. 43]

[6] Danielewski, M. Z. (2000). “House of Leaves.” 2nd ed., Pantheon Books. [Pg. 337]

[7] Alighieri, D. (1321). “The Divine Comedy: Inferno.” as translated by and quoted in Danielewski, M. Z. (2000). “House of Leaves.” 2nd ed., Pantheon Books. [Pg. 4]

[8] Letzler, D. (2012). “Encyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction: Infinite Jest’s Endnotes.” Studies in the Novel, 44(3), 304–324. doi:10.1353/sdn.2012.0036

[9] Raymond, E. S. (1996). “The New Hacker’s Dictionary.” 3rd ed. Cambridge: MIT Press.

[10] “One of the things about being a writer is you’re able to give the impression—both in lines and between the lines—that you know an enormous amount. That you know and have lived intimately all this stuff. Because you want it to have that kind of effect on the nerve endings.” from Lipsky, D. “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace.” Broadway Books.

[11] “What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves. They’re entirely themselves, they’ve got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.” from “David Foster Wallace interview on Charlie Rose [Video].” (1997). Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GopJ1x7vK2Q&t=1625s&ab_channel=ManufacturingIntellect

[12] “The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral.” from Miller, L. (1996). “Something Real American [Interview].” Salon.

[13] Danielewski, M. Z. (2000). “House of Leaves.” 2nd ed., Pantheon Books. [Pg. 563]

[14] That one meme of Kevin from “The Office.”

[15] Wallace, D.F. (1996). “Infinite Jest.” 1st ed., Little, Brown. [Pg. 990, 992]

[16] Wallace, D.F. (2011). “The Pale King.” Little, Brown. [Pg. 188]

[17] Danielewski, M. Z. (2000). “House of Leaves.” 2nd ed., Pantheon Books. [Pg. 528]

[18] Danielewski, M. Z. (2000). “House of Leaves.” 2nd ed., Pantheon Books. [Pg. 527]

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