Proust and Danielewski
Throughout In Search of Lost Time, I’ve noticed Proust takes an experimental approach to the construction of characters and their subversive inner natures, and to the narrative, which is full of discursive asides (with language pushed to its limit) and isn’t quite temporally fixed, as perspective shifts through the narrator’s past experience, his reflections in the present, his omniscient insight into the minds of others, and the voice of Proust himself. In thinking about la recherche, I find myself making connections to House of Leaves, by Mark Z Danielewski, published in 2000–a good contemporary example of experimental narrative fiction (and one of my favorite novels). House of Leaves is full of confounding typography–ballooning margins, rotated and reversed text, color-coded words (‘house’ shows up invariably in dark blue–analogous to a blue-screen chromakey, according to the author)–and narrative glitches, with excessive footnotes and chapters misplaced, interrupted, or missing. The story goes like this: a blind man–Zampanò–dies, and a young guy named Johnny Truant moves into his LA apartment where he finds a manuscript of a detailed recount and criticism of a movie called The Navidson Record. But there is no movie. It’s a work of imagination. As with Proust, we read through several perspectives (in different fonts): through Johnny’s footnotes in the first person, as he pieces together Zampanò’s manuscript (some of these shed light on the old man, but they often run off course into Johnny’s hedonistic life, unsteady past and destabilizing mental state) and through the manuscript itself, which gives a third-person account of The Navidson Record and an analysis of its characters, themes, production and critical reception. Additionally, there’s the occasional presence of mysterious Editors (which makes me wonder how much the voices of the less cryptic Moncrieff, Kilmartin and Enright–not to mention Pléiade editors of the French–influence our interpretation of Proust’s manuscript). Zampanò’s movie never made is bizarre. It’s a documentary of impossible events–a photojournalist settles down in Virginia and rigs up cameras to shoot high-production value home movies and ends up capturing the siege against his family and loved ones waged by his house, which gets a little bit bigger on the inside than it is on the outside–and then a lot bigger, when an infinitely massive pitch-black labyrinth pops up connected to his living room. Unlike Proust’s narrator, who constantly struggles to retrieve his lost memories of childhood joy, Danielewski’s characters are haunted by the events they can never forget. Will Navidson, the photojournalist, won a Pulitzer for capturing a child near death, stalked by a vulture (based on a real photo taken by Kevin Carter who committed suicide weeks after receiving the prize), and carries immense guilt for being unable to save the child’s life. Karen Green, his partner and the mother of his children, was abused by her stepfather, who trapped her in a well while targetting her sister, and became intensely claustrophobic. Their house is a backdrop–or a blue-screen–for their fears. It transforms into a dark, malevolent maw, both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, which Karen will not set foot into and Navidson must explore, even as it claims the lives of his colleagues and family. House of Leaves deals with painful memories, family connections, shifting perspective, unreliable recollection, sexual love, and imagination as a way of plumbing a character’s subconscious, and while going through In Search of Lost Time, I see similar themes. I’m just glad I never have to hold Proust’s books upside down.