House of Leaves: Unholy discourse

I have never read a novel with so many levels of discourse, nor such explicit narration. At its heart, we have the story of Navidson and his family, though our experience of those events is shaped by Navidson's film editing. Furthermore, we don't actually see this film, but are fed only excerpts from critical literature, which describe the scenes only as evidence for a certain reading of the text. All of this is assembled by Zampano--so much commentary on a film compiled by a blind man! But it has been organized from fragments by Truant, who also reveals up front that the entire Navidson video is a fabrication. Truant presents Zampano's work as nearly unchanged (except perhaps for the addition of the word "water" before "heater"). Yet, from his footnotes we see that Truant is practically a compulsive storyteller (aka, bullshit artist; ie, unreliable narrator). As frosting on the cake, we have the nagging question of how much change was affected by the anonymous "Editors".

Hayles does a nice job pointing out how each of these levels of narration have also affected a change in medium, from film, to scholarly article, to a box of notes, to a novel.

Also, we are constantly aware of the narration. (This book reminds me of The French Lieutenant's Woman, which is my only other major experience with this sort of thing.) Footnotes inherently break our reading of the text for the purpose of commenting on that text. (Though in House of Leaves, it's so easy to slide from the text into a footnote!) Each level of added narration comments on how the previous narrators were unreliable or biased, adding levels of their own experience to the mix. And the text wanders away from the story for pages at a time to make an abstract argument for a certain reading--such as the discussion of the mythological and symbolic nature of echo.

Certainly a very dense and somewhat unsettling read!