House of Leaves (34 page)

Bibliography

Architecture:

Brand, Stewart.
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built.
New York: Viking, 1994.

Jordan, R. Furneaux.
A Concise History of Western Architecture.
London:

Thames and Hudson Limited, 1969.

Kostof, Spiro.
A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals.
Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1995.

Pothorn, Herbert.
Architectural Styles: An Historical Guide to World Design.
New York: Facts On File Publications, 1982.

Prevsner, Nikolaus.
A History of Building Types.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976.

Prost, Antoine and Gerard Vincent, eds.
A History of Private Lfè: Riddles of Identity in Modern Times.
Trans. Arthur Goidhaminer. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991.

Prussin, Labelle.
African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place, and Gender.
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.

Travis, Jack, ed.
African American Architecture In Current Practice.
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, Inc. 1991.

Watkin, David.
A History of Western Architecture.
2nd ed. London:

Laurence King Publishing, 1996.

Whiffen, Marcus.
American Architecture Since 1780.
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992.

Wu, Nelson Ikon.
Chinese and Indian Architecture: The City of Man, the Mountain of God, and the Realm of the Immortals.
New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1963.

Film:

Too numerous to list here.

X

Every
house
is an architecturally structured “path”: the specific possibilities of movement and the drives toward movement as one proceeds from the entrance through the sequence of spatial entities have been pre-determined by the architectural structuring of that space and one experiences the space accordingly. But at the same time, in its relation to the surrounding space, it is a “goal”, and we either advance toward this goal or depart from it.

—
Dagobert Frey

Grundlegung zu einer vergleichenden

Kunstwissenschaft

Karen may lose herself in resentment and fear, but the Navidson we see seems joyful, even euphoric, as he sets out with Reston and his brother to rescue Holloway and his team. It is almost as if entrance let alone a purpose—any purpose—in the face of those endless and lightless regions is reason enough to rejoice.

Using 16mm motion picture (colour and B/W) and 35mm stills, Navidson for the first time begins to capture the size and sense of that place. Author Denise Lowery writes the following evocative impression of how Navidson photographs the Anteroom:

The hot red flame spits out light, catching on

Tom, entwining in the spokes of Reston’s

wheelchair, casting Shape Changers and

Dragons on a nearby wall. But even this watery

dance succeeds in only illuminating a

tiny portion of a corner. Navidson, Tom and

Reston continue forward beneath those gables

of gloom and walls buttressed with

shadow, lighting more flares, penetrating this

world with their halogen lamps, until finally

what seemed undefinable comes forth out of

the shimmering blank, implacable and now

nothing less than obvious and undeniable

—
as if there never could have been a

question about the shape, there never could

have been a moment when only the imagination

succeeded in prodding those inky folds,

coming up with its own sense, something far

more perverse and contorted and heavy with

things much stranger and colder than even

this brief shadow play performed in the irregular

burn of sulfur—mythic and inhuman,

flickering, shifting, and finally dying around

the men’s continuous progress.

[199—See chapter ten of Denise Lowery’s
Sketches: The Process of Entry
(Fayetteville, Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 1996).]

Of course, the Great Hall dwarfs even this chamber. As Holloway reported in
Exploration #2
, its span approaches one mile, making it practically impossible to illuminate. Instead the trio slips straight through the black, carefully marking their way with ample fishing line, until the way ahead suddenly reveals an even greater darkness, pitted in the centre of that immense, incomprehensible space.

In one photograph of the Great Hall, we find Reston in the foreground holding a flare, the light barely licking an ashen wall rising above him into inky oblivion, while in the background Tom stands surrounded by flares which just as ineffectually confront the impenetrable wall of nothingness looming around the Spiral Staircase.

As Chris Thayil remarks: “The Great Hall feels like the inside of some preternatural hull designed to travel vast seas never before observed in this world.” [200—Chris Thayil’s “Travel’s Legacy” in
National Geographic,
v. 189, May 1996, p.
36-53.]

Since rescuing Holloway’s team is the prime objective, Navidson takes
veiy few photographs. Luckily for us, however, the beginning
of this sequence relies almost entirely on these
scarce
but
breathtaking
stills instead of the
far
more abundant but vastly inferior video
tapes,
which
are used
here mainly to provide sound.

Eventually when they realize Holloway and his team are nowhere near the Great Hall, the plan becomes for Reston to set up camp at the top of the stairway while Navidson and Tom continue on below.

Switching to Hi 8, we follow Navidson and Reston as they react to Tom’s announcement.

“Bullshit,” Navidson barks at his brother.

“Navy, I can’t go down there,” Tom stammers.

“What’s that supposed to mean? You’re just giving up on them?”

Fortunately, by barely touching his friend’s arm, Billy Reston forces Navidson to take a good hard look at his brother. As we can see for ourselves, he is pale, out of breath, and in spite of the cold, sweating profusely. Clearly in no condition to go any further let alone tackle the profound depths of that staircase.

Navidson takes a deep breath. “Sorry Tom, I didn’t mean to snap at you like that.”

Tom says nothing.

“Do you think you can stay here with Billy or do you want to head home? You’ll have to make it back on your own.”

“I’ll stay here.”

“With Billy?” Reston responds. “What’s that supposed to mean? The hell if you think I’m letting you go on alone.”

But Navidson has already started down the Spiral Staircase.

“I should sue the bastards who designed this house,” Reston shouts after him. “Haven’t they heard of handicap ramps?”

The dark minutes start to slide by. Based on Holloway’s descent. Navidson had estimated the stairway was an incredible thirteen miles down. Less than five minutes later, however, Tom and Reston hear a shout. Peering over the banister, they discover Navidson with a lightstick in his hand standing at the bottom—no more than 100ft down. Tom immediately assumes they have stumbled upon the wrong set of stairs.

Further investigation by Navidson, though, reveals the remnants of neon trail markers left by Holloway’s team.

Without another word, Reston swings out of
his
chair
and starts
down the
stairs. Less than twenty minutes
later he reaches the last
step.

Navidson knows he has no choice but to accept Reston’s participation,
and
heads back up to retrieve the wheelchair
and
the rest of their
gear.

Amazingly enough, Tom seems fine camping near the staircase.

Both Navidson and Reston hope his presence will enable them to maintain radio contact for a much longer time than Holloway could. Even if they both know the house will still eventually devour their signal.

As Navidson and Reston head out into the labyrinth, they occasionally come upon pieces of neon marker and shreds of various types of fishing line. Not even multi-strand steel line seems immune to the diminishing effects of that place.

“It looks like its impossible to leave a lasting trace here,” Navidson observes.

“The woman you never want to meet,” quips Reston, always managing to keep his wheelchair a little ahead of Navidson.

Soon, however, Reston begins to suffer from nausea, and even vomits. Navidson asks him if he is sick. Reston shakes his head.

“No, it’s more.
. .
shit, I haven’t felt this way since I went fishing for marlin.”

Navidson speculates Reston’s sea sickness or his
“mat de mer,”
as he calls it, may have something to do with the changing nature of the house:

“Everything here is constantly shifting. It took Holloway, Jed, and Wax almost four days to reach the bottom of the staircase, and yet we made it down in five minutes. The thing collapsed like an accordion.” Then looking over at his friend: “You realize if it expands again, you’re in deep shit.”

“Considering our supplies,” Reston shoots back. “I’d say we’d both be in deep shit.”

As was already mentioned in Chapter III, some critics believe the house’s mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it. Dr. Haugeland asserts that the extraordinary absence of sensory information forces the individual to manufacture his or her own data. [201—Missing.
—
Ed.] Ruby Dahi, in her stupendous study of space, calls the house on Ash Tree Lane “a solipsistic heightener,” arguing that “the house, the halls, and the rooms all become the self—collapsing, expanding, tilting, closing, but always in perfect relation to the mental state of the individual.” [202—Ibid. Curiously DahI fails to consider why the house never opens into what is necessarily outside of itself.

If one accepts Dahi’s reading, then it follows that Holloway’s creature comes from Holloway’s mind not the house; the tiny room Wax finds

himself trapped within reflects his own state of exhaustion and despair; and Navidson’s rapid descent reflects his own knowledge that the Spiral

Staircase is
not
bottomless. As Dr. Haugeland observes:

The epistemology of the house remains en-

tirely commensurate with its size. After all,

one always approaches the unknown with

greater caution the first time around. Thus it

appears far more expansive than it literally is.

Knowledge of the terrain on a second visit

dramatically contracts this sense of distance.

Who has never gone for a walk through

some unfamiliar park and felt that it was

huge, only to return a second time to discover

that the park is in fact much smaller than ini-

tially perceived?