David Shepard

Projecting History:
Race and Mediation in Mark Z. Danielewksi’s House of Leaves

Chapter 20of  Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel House of Leaves contains fictional interviews with leading lights of poststructuralism, media studies, and feminism as an invitation to critics; consequently, the novel has attracted much attention in its short life. Many scholars have followed N. Katherine Hayles in reading the book as a reflection on the obfuscations of digital mediation, but most critics have not noticed the chapter’s absence of ethnic studies approaches or the novel’s interest in race and colonialism. This novel, which thematizes buried trauma, uses multiple remediated narratives to conceal unsettling histories. For example, the protagonist, Will Navidson, suffers guilt over his prize-winning photograph of a dying Somali child. The book-within-book structure hides the fact that the author of Navidson’s story is a French veteran of the Indochina war. Finally, the titular mysterious house is located near the first English settlement in Virginia.

House of Leaves explores connections between projections of historical narratives onto a nebulous past, the literal projection of film, and the metaphorical projection onto the colonized by the colonizer. I read the novel, therefore, as an exploration of identity politics in a hypermediated age. House of Leaves argues that although cheap, easily-accessible digital technology might seem to assuage concerns about representing race in the media by empowering individual consumers to develop their own, more accurate work, the nation’s history still stands in the way of some groups’ access to this technology. Consequently, questions about race remain relevant in considering the influence of technology in literature.

David Shepard is a PhD Candidate in the UCLA English Department. He is currently at work on his dissertation “Programmerhood: Composing Code as Writing Literature,” which explores how ideas about programing influenced the conception of literary authorship in the mid-to-late twentieth century. His interests include technology, media, and literature, and the intersection of programming and literature.