| When framed in proper literary context, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves may appear to have little unique to offer the world: the world had already become at least passingly acquainted with such literary features as typesetting experiments and "concrete" prose (that is, in the style of concrete poetry), and tropes such as unreliable narrators and spooky houses had been seen for at least four centuries. However, House of Leaves is more than a simple amalgam of postmodern experimentation and gothic themes; it synthesizes these two, yes, but it also updates them for the digital age. Moreover, because of the extreme visibility of the novel as such (and the large cult following that it has spawned), it is one of the most important recent examples of Gothic, postmodern, or computer-age literature.;Written during the early rise of the Internet, released largely via the help of a website, and published in the same year as the founding of Wikipedia (2000), House is inextricably tied to the first steps that the general public took onto the Worldwide Web. Danielewski, recognizing that the world was teetering on the edge of a total revolution of communication and information, reached into the past to help articulate his opinion of the incipient digital frontier. Like many Gothic writers before him, Danielewski witnessed the sheer scope of what man had built and pointed out to his readers the shadows lurking in the potentially infinite corners - of course, where the former reacted to the science and architecture of their own age, Danielewski explored the conceptual ins and outs of the omnipresent, potentially boundless realm of the computer. Like any good postmodernist, he saw the inherent self-contradictions present in a global (or extra-global) construct, and defied the conventions of his medium to highlight the sheer arbitrariness of 21st-century American expectations of what precisely a novel was allowed to do. The result is a novel that undermines the nature and generic forms of the Internet even as it uses them to cast Gothicism and postmodernism in a new, 21st -century light. |
