Interesting effect in House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski (spoilers)
In a passage in the novel House of Leaves, Will and Reston enter the labyrinth to rescue Jed and Wax while Holloway pursues them with a gun. At the moment Will and Reston find Jed and Wax, Holloway enters thtough a different door and shoots Jed in the head.
After this happens, the novel changes the text to a layout that has a handful of words, from 1 to 10, per page for a couple of sentences (and many pages). The words are laid out inorder to resemble the trajectory of a bullet, a bullet itself, and a bullet hole etc. This is interesting, but I think the main reason is to space out the incredible amount of thought that would have gone through their heads, and make the visual weight of the passage correspond to the mental weight of a gunshot.
However, after I finished the passage, I am struck with another effect that I believe is more interesting.
Up to this point, the novel follows Will and Reston who don't speak much to each other and the labyrinth is eerily quiet, so the gunshot would have been a large change in volume. I read this book in silence in my bedroom, so I was in a similar situation to the characters. However, one huge effect of a gunshot is the thought of having heard the deafening sound in the aftermath. So how can an author accomplish this from a novel? You cannot make the reader hear anything literally, and if you want to do something more than say that the characters are still hearing the noise ringinging in their ears, you are at a loss.
I think that Danielewski made the passage take up so many pages so that the reader has the "ear-ringing" effect of having heard themselves turn all the pages in such a short amount of time. In order to comprehend the sentences (which are not short), you have to flip through the pages as fast as possible to keep up a normal rate of reading. After the shots are fired, you are left remembering the sound of all these pages, and at least to me it left me more engrossed in the story as I was in the same mental state as the characters. A similar effect is the way that you are left thinking you mind is going at so many pages per second, as usually the words are much more dense on the page.
This makes me respect the author, and I am left thinking novels themselves are much more than words that happen to be laid out on a page. Perhaps all authours are limiting themselves by not taking advantage of micromanaging fonts, text layout, page turning, and everything else done in this book.
Real neat book.
also, does anyone know of books like this? I sometimes feel as if Danilelewski's books are a reaction to ebooks or cinematic adaptations of novels, as House of Leaves could never be an ebook for the reasons I described above and obviously never a novel.
Could even this book be published before cinematic adaptations of novels became popular, apparently exposing the limits of novels?
Man, I could write a lot about this book.
Any other thoughts?
