Los Angeles Alternative

Mark Z. Danielewski only writes in revolutions.
by Lesley Bargar

As I watch cult obsession/modern literary groundbreaker Mark Z. Danielewski frantically foot the Grove parking structure’s maze of cement pillars, escalators and bichon frise in a fruitless quest for his black Prius—no doubt one of 10,000 in attendance—I can’t help but smile. Not simply because it’s a comically awkward situation in which to find oneself with a complete stranger, but because for once, it’s Mark Z. Danielewski who’s lost and confused—not me.

I first encountered the work of this masochistic genius in college, where Danielewski’s debut masterpiece House of Leaves cast an enormous shadow over the remainder of my Modern American Literature syllabus. On the surface, House of Leaves appeared a rather standard novel, with one story to be told and one author to tell it. But then… what’s that thing they say about judging books? Inside, it’s a spiraling collage of fonts, text and colors, warping paragraphs in upside-down chunks and colored blue boxes, sometimes isolating one word per page, sometimes cramming three into a corner, and most times stuffing one footnote with an entire chapter’s worth of narrative.

See, House of Leaves is simultaneously the story of—and one narrated by—at least three individuals: 1.) Will Navidson, a documentarian who finds his house contains a frighteningly infinite and ever-changing abyss of a hallway; 2.) a deceased elderly man named Zampano who spent a lifetime researching and analyzing Navidson’s findings; and 3.) the young rebel Johnny Truant who stumbles upon Zampano’s millions of paper scrap notes and attempts to piece the story together while he narrates the process (and his life) in an extensive series of footnotes.

Danielewski took these stories and with them smashed the traditional format of a “book” into a million pieces, both destroying and liberating it at the same time.

“I think it’s incumbent on every artist to be open to what is happening in the present day—not to repeat what Homer was doing or Shakespeare was doing, Eliot or Warren were doing,” he says. “There is this opportunity to now explore how fonts affect the way we read. How does color affect us? Obviously, the way we read is changing with the way we navigate information online.”

To a dyslexic—or a first year English major—House of Leaves’ layout is either a fantasy fulfilled or a repeated kick to the crotch, but to millions of readers around the world it has become an object of obsession. There are forums, classes, websites, conventions and even tattoos dedicated to the novel’s mysterious and revelatory alterworld. And now its creator, on the very day his highly anticipated follow-up novel hits bookstores, is painfully reliving a favorite episode of Seinfeld before my eyes.

Danielewski has lost his car in the process of checking out how the Grove’s Barnes and Noble (and earlier, Borders) chose to display his new work, another challenging yet worthy word scrambler entitled Only Revolutions.

Its pages are populated by two central characters, Sam and Hailey: a pair of 16-year-old punks on a momentous roadtrip across America—and throughout history, in margin lists of historical dates and events—to form a complex epic poem that literally turns the novel upside-down. Only Revolutions has two nearly identical covers—one green for Sam, the other yellow for Hailey—and each character’s “narrative” begins on an opposite side of the book. The reader is advised by the publisher to read eight pages of one narrative, flip the book over, and read eight pages from the other…lather, rinse, repeat.

“I want to at least be able to provide a book to someone that gives them an experience they can’t get anywhere else,” says Danielewski of his approach. “You can’t see this anywhere else. In a painting, movie, music. This is a particular experience that’s going to affect you in a particular way. It will open it up in a way that’s like, ‘Wow, I can’t get this on my iPod. I can’t get it anywhere.’ And that’s what literature is really about. We need to create books which can’t exist anywhere else.”

In fact, the only other place it could exist for Danielewski during the writing process was spread out in an infinite sea of yellow and green sheets of paper on the floor of a friend’s ballroom. “I could finally see the whole act, and then I could go to page, you know, 375 and then 151, go right down the line and see where everything was lining up.”

And that’s the thing about Danielewski—it’s undeniably clear that nearly every miniscule detail in his work, every possible theme, each tiny link and angle was put there deliberately. He claims to work with meanings in triplicate, and House of Leaves, he attests, “anticipates all the critical and theoretical tools that could be used to analyze it.” In other words, every funky word placement or colored letter isn’t just random or post-modernly weird—it all serves some purpose. Which is why, as someone who strives for this level of control, Danielewski may be more frustrated than most having lost his car in a mall parking garage.

But then in a way, it’s fitting. After all, despite the concentrated thought put into the placement and implication of every single ink spot, in the end his advice is this: “Don’t ever deprive yourself of the meaning in that wonderful experience of not ‘getting’ everything.” LAA

Mark Z. Danielewski will be reading from Only Revolutions Saturday Sept. 16 at Skylight Books.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 10:42 am and is filed under Arts + Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.