HoL Book Club | Part 1 – My Musings, Just in time for World Book Day…

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book challenge, book club, ergodic literature, HoL, house of leaves, hypertext, japan, Jorge Luis Borges, mark z danielewski, readalong

It is March 1st – which means I get to mark World Book Day from a busy cafe in a shopping mall, after having travelled 40 minutes (there and back) to work only to find out it is a ‘snow day’ and therefore the site is shut.

I am currently drowning the last embers of my rage in my chai latte and top it off with a blueberry muffin, which quite frankly, I think I bloody well deserve after battling with Storm Emma’s offering on my car this morning. But hey-ho, can’t complain. I get to sit across the way from a Scouse handyman who is commiserating about his personal life to his mate and just eavesdrop (because that is what reader/writers do – we are very Parisian in that fashion).

This is the perfect time and place to write another blog post. Go me.

So, WBD is celebrated all day by reading books, talking about books, writing about books, and that is exactly what this is. MZD, the prodigal author of House of Leaves, began his online book club which looks at one section of this massive genre-defying tome at a time, and we all get to basically go nuts over inferring the shit out of it.

My observations so far of the group talk on the House of Leaves FB Book Club Page  is as follows:

• Every person has a different edition (full colour, black and white mostly) which means people are now sharing pictures of the inner sleeve that others do not have. There is a lot of camaraderie going on! And I have unearthed some pretty neat connections I never had the chance of learning about 10 years ago, because of the limitations on internet chat rooms and forums (remember those? Yeah, still miss ’em).
• It is all one MASSIVE GEEK PARTY! I mean, there is one lady who literally got paranoid over a splodge of blue ink on the title page (if you know the book, blue is a significant colour. All references to the HOUSE are in blue.) It was reading into stuff, gone mad. I have come to the conclusion that there is such a thing as too much interpretation, and that can ruin a beautiful thing like HoL. Turns out, MZD even gets exasperated at how deeply and seriously some people may lose themselves in HoL.
• The conversations are attracting not only the academically minded, but also complete newbies who are entering the horrific alchemy of the novel and realising that YES, this book CAN give you nightmares. A word of warning to those beginning it: make sure you read it during the day, not in your house, and you have someone around to have a light-hearted conversation afterwards. DO NOT READ AT NIGHT. You have been warned. I have personally experienced the horrors of that.
• It can be a bit confusing, but that is the nature of the novel and the way ideas unspool from it. When you have a piece of work that has been constructed like a daisy-chain from other pieces of literature and literature that doesn’t even exist, but is given the illusion it is a credible piece of evidence, then people begin to echo that in their own surmisings. It is completely a meta-experience. We are the book, the book is us. Simple as.

What ‘Genre’ is House of Leaves?

This is my second read through of HoL, which means I’ll be approaching it from a completely different perspective. When I first read it, I didn’t really get what I was experiencing. Yes, it was a very unique experience as the book is laid out differently from other texts. It is a story about a labyrinth, that grows in a house in Ash Tree Lane, and the text is labyrinthine to mimic that.

A labyrinth, as everyone knows, is designed to throw you off, make you lose your bearings, your sense of ‘self’, induce a sense of panic etc until you ‘work’ to find out the exit. This is what I mean by the ‘structure’ of the book mimicking the content of the book:

The text will not obey the laws of literature as we know it. Text will flow backwards, go sideways, be cut off, slide down the page, even be ‘caged’ in a box, which here is symbolising how one of the characters feels as he crawls through one of the ever shifting spaces in the labyrinth.

As for what ergodic means:

“The ergodic work of art is one that in a material sense includes the rules for its own use, a work that has certain requirements built in that automatically distinguishes between successful and unsuccessful users.”

It also needs to be something that requires the reader to interact with the text, (which the book club members are doing, they are digging up meanings, joining up the dots, making new connections and using the ‘interface’ that MZD created.) This book does not come with a manual on how to read it – you need to figure out what is needed to crack it:

“In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. If ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traverse the text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages.”

So basically moving your eyes from right to left is not going to get you anywhere with HoL.

Apart from this, HoL is grossly intertextual – to the point where we can say that it doesn’t stay anchored to any one ideology, theme or genre. It passes fluently and fluidly from one to the next at will. In fact, you have control over what those connections are. The suggestions are there, only you have to make the links (if you wish).

So, let’s introduce ourselves to the notion of HYPERTEXT:

Hypertext fiction is characterized by networked nodes of text making up a fictional story. There are often several options in each node that directs where the reader can go next. Unlike traditional fiction, the reader is not constrained by reading the fiction from start to end, depending on the choices they make. In this sense, it is similar to an encyclopaedia, with the reader reading a node and then choosing a link to follow.

HoL, despite proclaiming itself to be a ‘novel’ is actually more of a manual of sorts, an academic paper, that gets lost in the throes of its own urban mythology. It desperately tries to anchor itself in reality. We have at least 3 narrators for starters: Zampano (a blind man who to me resembles Jorges Luis Borges more than anything (more on this for next week!), Johnny Truant (a young drug-addled failing tattoo artist who picks up the mantle of Zampano after he dies, whose voice is a footnote in the margins of the book) and Navidson (a man who may or may not have existed, who moved into a haunted house, that grew a labyrinth one day that was physically impossible according to some shaky home videos). In fact, here is one person’s very useful diagram of how many ‘narrative layers’ one experiences when reading this book:

 

Can you say ‘unreliable narrator’? Um, yep. So paranoia when reading this novel is inevitable. The hypertext aspect of the book comes into play as you go deeper into the story. You will find yourself breaking off, going away and delving into the story of the Minotaur for a few days, coming back, then realising that the page you are reading has a secret code embedded in it. Off you go again, figuring out what it means, you will go back several pages, pontificate on a word, a letter, a line. Repeat ad nauseam.

This aspect of hypertext is experienced more literally with MZD’s Only Revolutions, where you literally flip from the front to the back to the front of the book constantly to experience that same moment in time, from two different perspectives. It is a physical process and creates a feeling of symbiosis between the two lovers who are, interestingly, alive at two different points in history, and are travelling towards each other from opposite ends of the USA. It is the great American road novel, turned ergodic and hypertextualised (apt, since MZD’s fans had a hand in creating the novel itself).

But I digress… (as is natural for a novel like this). Let’s look at those all important words “This is not for you”.

Why does this greet the reader before the story begins? Some say it is a warning from Johnny Truant, who let’s face it, wishes he never went to Zampano’s apartment that day with his friend Lude. It is reminiscent of Milton’s “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” which greets those at the entrance to hell. I would like to agree that it is this an nothing more, as the house is a hell to anyone who enters it and especially goes down the 5 1/2 minute hallway to the great unknown.

However others have stated that the work itself consists of personal notes, scribblings, Zampano’s obsessive writings which are reminiscent of diary entries. The man was a graphomanic and died in a place much like this:

So maybe we are NOT meant to read his things, because they are a diary of his mad thoughts. The reader is solely himself (ironic, as the man was blind – another link to Borges!)

Others have suggested that since ‘echo’ plays a big part in the core theme of the book, then maybe we should apply to myth directly, in that if this is Echo’s voice, only the last two words would chime back to us ‘for you, for you’. An interesting theory (and one of my favourites!)

Lastly, one member of the book club made a very valuable contribution about how he had once met Danielewski at a signing, and he said the following ‘I wrote this for you so you could swim in it, not for you to drown in it’. Very revealing, as yes, it is for us and for the reader. Nice to know MZD worries about us and our obsession with his creation.

So remember guys – have fun, don’t drown. From one Pisces to another, just swim with the current*.

*Just an observation but it is WBD, 1st March. That means 4 days to go for MZD’s birthday, and 6 days for mine. Check out the publisher of my edition of the book:

*sly grin* Okay, I’ll stop now… I’ll stop. Those of you who got it, have got it. Thank you. I’ll just ‘swim’ and try not to drown. 

 

Midnight’s Children Readalong | Part 3 Discussions

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1001 book list, midnights children, readalong, salman rushdie

Reading ‘Midnight’s Children’ has been quite an experience, and I’m both glad and sad that it’s over. This is the final set of questions that wraps up this modern literary classic and I would like to thank JoV at Bibliojunkie for hosting this readalong, the insightful questions she posed and for all the people who joined in.

I can say that best part of this has been answering the questions. It’s forced me to take a really good look at what I’m actually reading. Interpretation is what gives a book its flavour. Discovering that you have your own spin on something also sheds light on what kind of reader you are (and subsequently, what kind of WRITER you might be if you put your mind to it). So I took the opportunity to look at some of Rushdie’s more elaborate motifs/ use of language as a way to develop myself as a writer. This was why it probably took me so long to finish the thing! 

Below are some of the discussion questions (pages 350 – 500) and my responses to them. Click here for part 1 and here for part 2 of the discussions.

Question 1: What is the role of the 1001 children?

At first glance this question had me a bit stumped. I think the number 1001′ comes with its own special meaning; the most obvious being the ‘1001 Nights’, the legendary Arabic story-within-a-story that winds and rewinds around itself to create a continuous narrative. Therefore the children could be just this; people who signify stories, and who come to culminate and echo inside Saleem’s mind, or the ‘Midnight Conference’ as it’s known. At first, Saleem converses with his fellow brethren within the fictional realm of the psyche. The children are really nothing more than voices who are telling their own stories. It is only later, when that secret agora is permanently destroyed that Saleem actually meets some of the midnight children in reality.

Each child has his/ her dark gift bestowed by the powers of midnight and each is like a prophet in their own right, a little living god/ goddess. Rushdie uses a lot of religious symbolism, often juxtaposing Islam (Monotheism) and Hinduism (Polytheism). At the beginning we are introduced to Aadam Sinai, whose faith in Islam is suddenly tarnished when he accidentally hits his nose on the ground during prayers. This foreshadows the breaking of the country into two pieces (Pakistan and India). People of different faith who have managed to live together for centuries suddenly feel an urge to separate. This nationwide feeling or obligation to choose sides grows like a cancer in the population. The most affected by this are probably the mothers, whose as of yet unborn babies are suffused with this unbearable sense of divide and the ‘yoke of destiny’, as Saleem puts it.

In a sense, the country undergoes a caesarean section of sorts. There is a cutting and a taking out. A certain set of people are forced to leave their homes and make a life elsewhere. While birth is the creation of life, it can also be an expulsion of it. What was in the womb, or ‘mother India’ is expelled, and the moment of expulsion when ‘both hands meet’ is the creation and expulsion of the children. It is in effect the cancer made manifest. The ‘1001 children’ also personify the common hatred of the two communities. In effect they are quite literally born out of the synchronised birth/ death of a nation. These magical imps are each a vessel of foreboding and prophecy. Saleem’s often inadvertant hand in political scheme of things (pepperpots) indicates this. The rounding up and systematic castration of the midnight’s children also shows that anyone who understands the real reason of the breaking up of India, knows that the children are a gross representation of the many-headed gods/ beliefs/ ideologies that made the break possible in the first place.

Question 2: Why did the author give so many characters two names?

At the heart of the story we have a country who is hacked in two and given a different identity. The hopes and misgivings that such a divide causes is questioned by the thought that midnight might bring the two nations a fresh/ different set of values. When this is so, Rushdie probably went one step further and mirrored this in his characters. The notion of midnight is one of change or magical transformation. The idea that things morph during this particular moment into something else is also thwarted, as many people expected the land to undergo some sort of magical transformation and become better, more fertile and lucky for its inhabitants. The only transformation that midnight had was on the people themselves. This also goes for what became Pakistan, or ‘land of the clean’ as it was so hopefully named.

There is also the fact that a person is born with a given name. That name may have set values or expectations that come with it. Saleem is constantly called ‘little-piece-of-the-moon’ by his mother and is faced with the  tremendous expectations of his family. But as a person grows and begins to ‘become’ the person they are, they may change names to suit their evolving identity.

Midnight’s Children Read-Along | Part Two Discussions…

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Indian literature, midnights children, readalong, salman rushdie

I have finally arrived at Part 2 of the read-along discussions and can’t wait to write up my views on what I have experienced so far. As you may be aware, the read along has actually ended, but I will continue to post the next two discussion points as and when I come to them. If you are interested in this read-along and other people’s views about the book, then you can find this hosted over at Bibliojunkie by JoV.

Without much ado, I will go onto the questions.

Question 1: What did Methwold represent? Why did he specify that nothing be changed in his houses?

Methwold and his estate didn’t strike me as important at first, but it was only when he finally left the Sinai family and the country altogether, that I realised how crucial he was as a character. In the story, Rushdie makes a big to-do about how Methwold’s great-great grandfather was the pioneer of modern Bombay, and how he had a hand in making it the bustling city that it is now. This puts a lot of emphasis on the notion of ‘hereditary origins’ at a time when India is slowly changing hands and returning back to its’ native people. This also goes nicely with highlighting Saleem’s extensive back story. When Saleem recalls the rapidly changing geography of the region and the colonial influences that suffused throughout Bombay; it made me think about how history sometimes leaves marks in places that are often impossible to get rid of. And sure enough Rushdie went further with this notion by downsizing it to Methwold and his estate.

The estate is an almost chess-sized version of the ‘real’ battle between the Indian population and it’s invaders. The natives are represented by the Sinai’s and the other families who come to live on the estate. The British colonists are embodied by a single man; Methwold (apt because he quite literally inherits the role!), and the estate comes to symbolise an India that has been split up, isolated into ‘pockets’ of foreignness and given an identity and history alien to itself (major parallel here with Saleem, as he was switched at birth and therefore lead a life that was theoretically not his own.) The game of conqueror and conquered is played out through 
psychological methods. Methwold’s odd request that nothing be changed in the houses is his way of getting his new tenants to get used to the British way of life. The cocktail hour remains as one of the lasting effects of this psychological warfare of a colonist determined to inoculate the ways of Britannia, even when he is in the last steps of the so-called ‘handover’ of power.

In Saleem’s case, Methwold has two separate meanings. Firstly, he is undeniably his biological father. Secondly, he is also a mirror that refracts and reflects what Methwold is doing to the Sinai’s back onto Methwold himself. As Methwold (colonist and conqueror) leaves behind the last bitter seeds of his revenge as he attempts to bastardise the cultural beliefs and traditions of the native population; Methwold leaves behind a son who is quite literally a bastard (unbeknownst to him) which grows up in the intense atmosphere of Indian customs. Rushdie adds a touch of poetic justice to the whole situation, as he ironically depicts Methwold’s line continuing in the form of Saleem, but without a trace of the English heritage that runs through his veins. For me, this reminds me of the symbol of the Ouroboros; the snake that bites its own tail. Methwold is snake-like as he feeds his unassuming venom into the future inhabitants of the estate. But it is his own son who destroys what is most dear to him; a sense of Britishness. Saleem, with all his knowledge of the past and his ability to see into other people’s minds embraces his ‘cuckoo-child’ existence. Taken from his real parents and planted into the arms of another, Saleem accepts his adoptive Kashmiri relatives with complete ease and in turn bites the tail of Methwold as an act of divine revenge.

Therefore, the estate is almost certainly a battle ground for ethnic identity,  a scaled-down version of the games played on India and her people.  

Question 2: At the very heart of Midnight’s Children is an act of deception: Mary Pereira switches the birth-tags of the infants Saleem and Shiva. The ancestors of whom Saleem tells us at length are not his biological relations; and yet he continues to speak of them as his forebears. What effect does this have on you, the reader? How easy is it to absorb such a paradox?

The paradox for me came as a bit of a shock. Switching babies at birth is quite an old literary device and regardless of how many times I’ve heard it being used in stories; this time it did give me quite a jolt! In fact I went back and read the page two times to make sure I understood what was going on but it’s quite a powerful twist to the tale. I suppose what Rushdie is telling us through the character of Saleem is that it is not our blood that dictates our future or indeed our ethnicity. The ‘nurture’ part of our upbringing, whether it be with our biological parents or not, plays a big part in how we identify ourselves. Saleem being a ‘midnight’s child’ has powers that enable him to look into the past through other people’s memories. He talks of how events outside him, even before his conception, heralded his coming. He seems to believe that he is the ‘fated’ child of the Sinai’s, which promotes a much stronger sense of belonging.

End of questions! Wow, it has been a real roller-coaster ride for me reading this book. I have learned so much and it just keeps getting better and weirder. Can’t wait for part three discussions. I wonder what’ll happen next!

Midnight’s Children Read-Along | Part One Discussions…

Tags

Indian literature, magical realism, midnights children, readalong, salman rushdie

I know I’m a bit late jumping on the bandwagon, but I heard about this read-along and couldn’t help joining in. If you are interested, you can find this hosted over at Bibliojunkie by JoV. I’ve been dying to read one of Rushdie’s books for the longest time, but his reputation as a brainy, intelligent type did kind of put me off. I was afraid I might not completely understand his writing! But surprise, surprise, I have been really enjoying this one. It’s been a while since I’ve read any magical realism and I find I haven’t gotten lost in it yet. But a little less about me and more about the read-along, and an overview of the book itself.

How The Readalong Works: The read-along is split into three parts or ‘weeks’. Part one covers ‘Book 1’ of the novel, which is roughly from pages 1-150. Each week we get a set of questions about the section we’ve read. Each member posts their thoughts on their blogs to share with other reader. That’s it! Very simple. But because I was late getting the book I will be posting my responses as and when I finish the sections in my own time.

Synopsis of ‘Midnight’s Children’: Saleem Sinai, the protagonist and narrator of this extraordinary story, is not an ordinary person. His birth (the exact moment of India’s liberation, as it happens) caused something of a warp in time, making him one of the 1001 children to be linked inextricably to world history. Imagine if the ‘Book of Life’ had been expelled from heaven and landed on earth in 1001 fragments, each fragment to have suffused itself in a child being born at that exact moment. That’s what it would be like: an elite collective of ‘midnight’s children’ who are connected to each other and to the fate of the world. 

This is Saleem’s destiny; to carry within him the burden of India’s painful re-birth. However these children of fate do not live long, and at thirty-something Saleem is already seeing signs that history, is literally, pulling him apart. Therefore exhausted and spent, Saleem’s only desire now is to write down the endless lives and worlds that have come and gone inside him any way he can. What ensues is a convoluted narrative of multiple stories that break off and resume their course elsewhere, and memories that capture the essence and nuance of people, places and events in India’s history.

1. Saleem describes himself as ‘handcuffed to history’. What do you think that this means, and do you think that this is true of him?

In the story Saleem has a very distinct reason to call himself ‘handcuffed’ to history. As the synopsis says, he is one of the many children who are magically connected. But I think Rushdie has created Saleem’s unique destiny as a way of saying that all people are handcuffed to their own personal histories, whether they be familial, cultural, religious or otherwise. I am reminded of Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.”  When we are born, we enter part of an ongoing story or ‘play’ that other actors or people are taking part in. I’m not a fan of the notion that we live a preordained life, but I can’t help thinking some things might be set. For instance our family history is something we can’t change. This is evident when Saleem chooses to write about his life. In order to do it properly, he decides to go back as far as his great-grandfather to begin his own personal history, as if to say that he already existed in some form or other in his ancestors.

The notion of being linked to the history of a country is far more potent. We don’t think about it very much, but all our lives pretty much depend on the decisions made by the countries we live in, or those more powerful ones surrounding us. The India under British rule that is portrayed in Book 1 draws many parallels with today’s Afghanistan and Iraq. I do not know for certain yet, but I anticipate Rushdie might link the other 1001 children to countries that have been split in two through the ‘divide and conquer’ strategy of Imperialist forces like China – Hong Kong, North – South Korea, Northern Ireland – The Republic of Ireland and Inner -Outer Mongolia. Even if this isn’t the case, it certainly makes it a very interesting concept.   

2. Unlike many novels, Midnight’s Children is not written using a linear narrative. Why do you think that Rushdie uses this technique, and do you think that it is successful?

The concept of ‘Midnight’s Children’ is quite unique and complex. There are many characters and historical events that collide together to form a colourful confusion. And it is only natural that this confusion be represented by a non-linear narrative. Rushdie notes that it took him many years to write the story, and I think the broken storyline is an effective way for Rushdie to evoke the nature of time, the way it passes outside us and within us and how we capture time in memories that are, in effect, incomplete and flawed in themselves. We may make memories through sight, sound or even scent (noses are very important in Saleem’s story… he has amazing olfactory senses that warn him when he is in trouble!), so the fabric and cadence of these memories may change.

I think it’s also Rushdie’s way of saying stories do not have to be told in a linear way. We don’t think in a linear way, so why should stories go in a straight line? When we encounter Saleem, he is writing an autobiography after all, and our lives are full of alleyways and multiple roads that we may have travelled at any one time. Our life history may even contain dead-ends and booby-traps. Instead of going the way of ‘stream of consciousness’ which would have rendered this novel completely unreadable, I think Rushdie chose a more ‘friendly’ version, and made his story fragments bigger and therefore more coherent for his readers. Instead of having three separate memories flowing into one another in a single sentence a la Woolf or Joyce, memories are divided distinctly into paragraphs so we at least know the next one will be a jump to somewhere else. Part of the alienation of SoC is the fact that the story switches without indication. Rushdie has taken great care to make sure this doesn’t happen too often with his readers.

These are some of the questions put to us for the readalong. If you’ve read the book, what would be your response to them?