What is House of Leaves? Part III: Johnny Truant & Pelafina
“We all create stories to protect ourselves.” — Johnny
Inside a Dead Man’s Trunk
Welcome back to my series looking at Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. If you missed them or want a refresher, here’s Part I: The Navidson Record and Part II: Zampanò. For a highly simplified recap: a blind man named Zampanò wrote a chaotic academic manuscript summarizing and analyzing The Navidson Record, a documentary/found-footage film about the Navidson-Green family and their eldritch new home.
You may be a little confused as to why I’ve made such a big deal about The Navidson Record not existing; this is fiction, of course it doesn’t exist in our world! But remember, we’re looking at layers upon layers of subjective reality here. What’s important is that The Navidson Record doesn’t exist in Zampanò’s world, which he happens to share with a young man named Johnny Truant — our third narrator for this tale.
I should mention here that House of Leaves uses different fonts for its narrators, so that the reader can distinguish text written by Zampanò (Times New Roman), Johnny (Courier), Pelafina (Dante or Kennerley), The Editors (Bookman), and for very brief sections by Will, Tom and Karen. This mainly functions to separate Zampanò’s academic writing from Johnny’s rambling and editing visually, but also serves as yet another source of mystery when it comes to which fonts the various extra content is written in.
Johnny and his friend Lude find Zampanò’s manuscript in his boarded up apartment, not long after the elderly man’s death. While Lude dismisses the trunk filled with manic scribblings, Johnny feels the need to take a closer look. Like his predecessors, he seems to have a hole in his life that he believes might be repaired if he can only solve this puzzle. That, and he genuinely doesn’t want to see Zampanò’s apparent life’s work go to waste. It’s Johnny (and later The Editors he sends the House of Leaves manuscript to) who must discover and deal with the fact that The Navidson Record and many of its associated articles don’t exist.
“This is Not For You”
These are the first words of Johnny’s you read in the book, and brilliantly take the place of a dedication for House of Leaves. The meaning has been debated for twenty-five years, but on the most basic level it demonstrates that neither the book or Johnny are going to be particularly friendly to the reader.
Johnny takes it upon himself to turn the manuscript into a book, and so is responsible for a great deal of House of Leaves’ structure (including the very strange parts, such as in chapter IX). He also follows Zampanò’s example of using footnotes, offering clarity and commentary on the text and his editing choices. Yet his mind also seems to wander in the midst of writing, leading to footnotes spanning multiple pages where Johnny digresses about his life.
We learn that Johnny works in a tattoo parlour, parties with Lude, has a crush on a dancer named Thumper, is a habitual liar and had a troubled childhood in foster care after his mother was institutionalized. He writes about his progress with the text itself; research he is conducting and contacts he has found.
We also watch Johnny’s life degrade around him as he spends more and more time and energy on House of Leaves. His hygiene, sleep and diet are replaced by substance abuse, lost time and hallucinations of the Minotaur coming to kill him. At certain points his narration rivals The Navidson Record for which is the more alien tale; at others events in his life seem to perfectly echo events in the film (quite possibly he’s finding prompts for his unreliable narration).
That’s Johnny! Some readers say they fully skip his rambling, others say it’s essential in tying the whole book together. I lean towards the latter, partly for the text’s own merits and partly because of the greater context of The Whalestoe Letters.
Pelafina
Included in House of Leaves and also published separately with added material are The Whalestoe Letters, written to Johnny by his mother Pelafina during her time at the Three Attic Whalestoe Institute. The letters themselves are a heartbreaking chronicle of a woman who can’t trust her own mind, reaching out over the course of years to a son suffering in foster care. Her journey of ups and downs — sending Johnny her love, begging his forgiveness, accusing him of ignoring her — is just the first layer.
The second layer of the letters are all the hidden messages Pelafina has included in efforts to bypass the eyes of the Institute’s Director. These also range in their tone and content, from trying to signal Johnny to use the codes as well to accusing the Institute staff of sexually assaulting her. Perhaps the strangest one readers have found is the message below:
And that’s a hint at the third layer. How does Pelafina know Zampanò, given this letter predates Johnny discovering the trunk by years? One theory (with evidence for and against) holds that Pelafina wrote the entire book after losing Johnny in infancy. Another posits that Zampanò is Johnny’s father — after all, he wrote nine months before Johnny’s birth that he would create a son to live in the margins of his work (as Johnny does with his footnotes).
And many more besides. I doubt every secret in The Whalestoe Letters has been found, and every hint has the potential to alter our understanding of the various narrative layers in the book.
The Ending
I left the first Part of this series without addressing the ending of The Navidson Record, so here it is. Navidson has traveled further into the darkness of the House than the size of the Earth should allow; is now stuck, faced with absolute darkness. He pulls out his only remaining source of light, a matchbook, and his only remaining source of fuel: a copy of House of Leaves. He burns it, savoring the last moments of light and life he will ever get — simultaneously burning the dark obsession of all four narrators in a moment of catharsis.
At the same moment, having resolved their family and bond is worth fighting for, his partner Karen enters the House for the first time. She finds him immediately. After all, what else is there? He’s let go of the darkness, and she’s forgiven him for it.
How does the book itself show up in the innermost, most fictional narrative layer? Great question! It’s technically possible Zampanò could have guessed the title his successor would give the manuscript, but he also gets the book’s exact page count correct. What the hell is real and what isn’t?
What is House of Leaves?
And… do you see the terrifying beauty of this book? Like a fractal it is effectively infinitely complex; you could spend your life studying it and continually feel like you were making progress toward some greater understanding. House of Leaves implants within the reader a trace of the very same obsession they have just witnessed in Navidson, Zampanò, Johnny and Pelafina alike. The reader gets to decide for themself how long and how passionately to follow that interest.
And when they’re done, I believe their experience with House of Leaves will improve them as a person. It’s a concrete example of a danger they’ve experienced through the text and personally walked away from. It’s a practice run at quitting an addiction, at avoiding spiralling thought patterns, at getting out of a bad situation.
That’s my answer, for now, to what House of Leaves is. Yet I still feel the pull to look deeper — much stronger since finding out yesterday that Mark Z. Danielewski has released screenplays for a House of Leaves TV show, which (of course) raise exponentially more confusion about what and who is real in this story. (For instance, the script establishes that Danielewski himself is a fraud, while The Navidson Record is absolute fact.)
With all we’ve been through in the past month, don’t we deserve the cultural insanity that would stem from House of Leaves becoming mainstream? Let’s get this TV show made folks.
Fin
I’m someone who has a tough time fully closing doors on things, so I won’t promise that this is all I’ll ever write about House of Leaves. Maybe I’ll lose myself in theories about the Minotaur, the letters or Zampanò’s poetry, or in interpreting the screenplays, and come back with a Part IV. More likely I’ll reread the book and choose a motif or two to focus in on because there are many fascinating themes to discuss here — as well proven by Zampanò’s own lengthy writing.
This book is labyrinthine and abyssal, hilarious and heartfelt. I hope I’ve managed to impart some small sense of that to you. For one last time I’ll encourage you to try it for yourself on a rainy day. If you do, I’d love to hear about your experience with it!
Thanks for reading and until next time ❤