‘House of Leaves’ is about the internet

Or actually the Information Age generally. Which is why it keeps making an impact 20 years later.

House of Leaves is about information.

I keep seeing references to House of Leaves in the strangest places. Most recently I read a long description of House of Leaves in a transcription of a podcast interview between a sports talk host and a Bay Area sports editor. Something about this book sticks, across lines of culture and interest and across the decades since its publication.

House of Leaves is sticky because it is the perfect book for the Information Age. People don’t talk much about the Information Age anymore, but we’re in it. We are deluged with information constantly, thanks to the internet mostly. Much of the information is fake, enraging, unhelpful, or distressing, but there it is nonetheless.

In fact there is so much information that it is impossible to know what is true or relevant. Life becomes like finding your way through a dark place where everything keeps changing. You grope within an expanding universe where your markers keep disappearing.

I’m assuming that if you’ve made it here, to Paragraph 5, you’ve read House of Leaves. You know that it is a story within a story within a story, all related by a series of unreliable narrators. I’m going to ignore all that for now and focus on the central (fake) story at the center.

The story is about a group of people who encounter a strange internal space that is endless, dark, and constantly changing. This space has different effects on each person but the effects are usually negative.

The people (Will Navidson, Tom Navidson, Billy Reston, Holloway Roberts, Jed Leeder, Wax Hook, eventually Karen Green) spend a great deal of time exploring this space. Somewhere within this space is a monster, unless the monster is only a myth generated by their own psychological projections. At one point the experience of the space causes one of the characters to kill several of the others for no reason. And all of the characters find they become lost and disoriented very quickly.

Zooming back out a bit: This story is conveyed to the reader in a book that supposedly is an academic treatment of a documentary. It is packed full of long quotations, copious footnotes, and massive lists — at one point a pages-long list within a footnote of random photographers. It provides overwhelming amounts of unnecessary information.

In fact it is impossible to keep up with all of the information you are presented with. Keeping the footnotes straight quickly becomes impossible; tracing the translations to the originals is a chore; matching the footnotes with the footnotes that reference other footnotes is hopeless. Oh I know people have in fact spent hours or days decoding it all, but I would argue this activity does not help one understand the book any better.

Making matters worse is that you can’t look up the original sources, because almost none of them actually exist. Much of the information has been created out of thin air. This is possible, and in fact easy, for the author — whether that author is Zampano, Johnny Truant, Mark Z. Danielewski, or Thumper. It’s just text after all.

The footnotes are as useless as the characters’ fishing lines and marks on the walls as they explore the hallways.

But your experience of the characters exploring the hallways — and this is semiotics (or postmodernism, or something) 101 so feel free to skip this sentence — is actually an experience of information conveyed via text, because it is written in a book you are reading. The house is a house of leaves — of pages — of text. For all intents and purposes the hallways are information, and the marks on them are footnotes, and the fishing line is your attempt to trace the connections across everything.

And the information is endlessly expanding, and you get disoriented and hopelessly lost.

Pure information is disorienting because it is infinite. Anyone who has studied any subject for any length of time knows that the more you know, the more you realize you do not know. The rules of the universe go as deep as the staircase when Navidson has to wait 50 minutes for the quarter to land (and in fact those sections of the house are nearly as old as the universe…).

This was not a problem in olden times. You could put a cap on the amount of information you were exposed to. You could read the newspaper, or talk over local happenings with your neighbor over the fence separating your farms, and call it a day.

But that is no longer an option. Today you are exposed to copious amounts of information whether you need it or not, whether you can process it or not. In 2020 this mostly occurs over the internet, but in the late 20th century it was the internet combined with TV, radio, and newspapers.

Experiencing the absurdity and senselessness of the universe is no longer the province of philosophers and lead-poisoned artists. Now all of society is exposed to the endless void. The void where nothing is true and there is nothing to hold onto.

This is too much for most people to handle and it drives them crazy, like Johnny Truant.

Or instead of going crazy, they search for meaning and finally turn to myths — conspiracy theories — and they become violent like Holloway Roberts. Roberts thought he saw the minotaur. The Pizzagate morons thought they saw…whatever it was, I tuned out that news story.

And no wonder people go crazy and see things. In the void, you are left with nothing but yourself and your own psychological projections. “I have no sense of anything but myself,” said Navidson near the end.

What will save us from the endless void of infinite information? Existentialism provides us with one answer: our own will to act. This is what we always have, despite the universe’s absurdity and meaningless. We can achieve authenticity and meaning by acting in accordance with our true selves.

And for a while, as I was rereading House of Leaves for the first time in a couple years, I thought I remembered the characters willing themselves out of the house at certain points by sheer action.

But I was remembering wrong—this isn’t what happens. House of Leaves has a different solution: personal relationships between human beings. Relationships will save us — meaning friends, family, colleagues, lovers.

House of Leaves continually draws our attention to the relationships between the Navidson family members and between Will and Karen. Relationships between people remain true even in the void.

In the end Karen’s love for Will is what enables her to find him in the midst of what he was experiencing as an endless cold void, without even any ground by that point. And earlier, when Will was trapped at the bottom of a stairwell that went deeper than the diameter of the Earth, he found his way out by focusing on and remembering his relationships with family members.

I read House of Leaves as a manual to surviving in the midst of a deluge of useless or distressing information. Commit to relationships; choose to value human connection. If only Johnny Truant hadn’t been alone.

Follow me on Facebook.