Quisling

[malakite]

you know, the only reason i clicked on this thread is that quisling is a funny word. but ill say somethin unrelated so i look helpful,

speaking of cat names, navys cat and dog were named hillary and mallory. the real hillary and mallory died trying to be the first people up everest. the animals are rejected from the house by being moved to the yard, the humans are rejected from the mountain by being killed to death. mentionsa are even made in the book about ice crevasses, common on everest, that are cold(like the house), and shift constantly(also like the house.

make no mistake, this is a novel of exploration, not horror. caving is also remarkably prominent.

[starblight]

it is without fortune that most of the readers here do not understand the meaning of the letter that you reference.

the people who do claim to understand it state that it is less code and more reference. by reference they refer to Dates. to my knowledge, no one has been very helpful.

maybe you have found something, but it doesn't give me the "peace of mind" solution that i would like to feel from that letter. there must be more.

but good job in your insight.as the "knowing"
have stated, it's all about correlation.

it doesn't hurt to know as much as possible about this letter.

[AtLarge]

I was working on the September 19, 1988 letter, and looked up Quisling in the dictionary, "A traitor who serves as the puppet of the enemy occupying his or her country.", and in another dictionary "someone who collaborates with an enemy occupying force"; and for its origin, "After Vidkun Quisling (1887-1945), head of Norway's government during the Nazi occupation(1940-1945)"

The Pelican poem July 26, 1988 mentions Quisling several times, and says "Quisling is history's name." In the Bits it says that "The house is history" on May 7, 1994.

Does this mean something? I find Quisling to be too unusual a word to be thrown in by chance.

The only thing I could find in the Search was that Quisling might be the name of a cat.

[magnus_jor]

... and I entered this thread because im norwegian. quite obviously, almost everyone in norway knows about quisling's nazi-friendly role during the second world war; so much that, as atlarge indicates, the name quisling has become synonomous with "traitor".

perhaps the explanation for the two (probably linked) sentences "Quisling is history's name", and "the house is history", is that the history of mankind can be analyzed as betrayal; and the house in ash tree lane certainly betrayed the navidsons. what i mean by history being betrayal is that in order for new things to happen (the milestones and major events of history), something else has to be betrayed. for our (relatively recently) industrialized (and commercialized!) society/ies to exist we have to a great extent had to betray the environment and the ideals of older cultures (e.g. the native american one). this as one example, there are certainly many others.

the house deludes the navidsons. they sought a home- bought a house- and that was all they got: a house. the navidsons are homeless despite having a house; just as yggdrasil is not a place to live- it is only the bridge between the supernatural and the natural, the house is really no more than a hallway (!) between the "real" world and the dark underworld (analogical of the human psyche?), an "unheimlich" place, in other words. the delusion is a betrayal to the hopes and intentions of the navidsons.

well, this link might be farfetched, and it's really only what comes to my mind upon the observation of these two sentences. anyways, even though my post possibly (probably even probably) doesn't interpret the letter's meaning precisely, i hope it made a good point relevant for house of leaves in a general context- unavoidable, i guess, because my points were rather a matter of stating the obvious, linkable to the letter or not.

loooong time since i last posted!!!! if any of you remember the "plans for the fall" discussion (dunno if thats what it was called) we had this summer: i'm reallly really really enjoying myself at college, and two of my 6 subjects are literature classes (english and norwegian); these two and 'history' (coincidentally) are my three "higher" subjects...

[espenhoel]

as with magnus, i checked this thread due to nationality. just wanted to point out that quisling never was head of the norwegian government, though, as he was never accepted by our king. but quisling is not such an unusual word, and though i don't have my hol-copy at hand right now, i'm quite sure that word is used several times (at least in several pelican poems).
magnus ; where are you studying?

[malakite]

quisling is an unusual word in the u.s. at least the part that i live in. maybe thats because our education system works hard to purge us of all knowledge, except the absolute most basic, regarding foreign nations. ex: i am a junior in high school and i only had the vaguest inkling that the nazis were even in norway.

[verismo]

Quisling is also a character in the Pelican Poems. Pg. 575.

[malakite]

my geuss as to why it is prominant in the pelican poems: johnny (or whoever wrote them) was in europe at the time, so he probably encountered the story there and was influenced by it while writing the poems.

[magnus_jor]

espen: i'm studying at red cross nordic united world college, doing my first year of the ib (international baccalaureate). its an international college with 200 students from 83 different countries, 10% being from norway. the location is very rural (flekke, sogn og fjordane, about as far from urban civilization as you can get; or, well, all is relative i guess), but im really enjoying it (as mentioned before) despite being used to oslo...

[delirium]

Yeah, the pre-eminence of the term Quisling, to my mind, certainly points to the thematic importance of betrayal, and particularly betrayal from the interior. Betrayal usually, to be most effective, emanates from an unexpected source.

To me, this links into my own thesis that the Navidson Record is a dialogue of sorts between Pelafina and Zampano, the substance of the dialogue being an exploration of their shared past and Pelafina's mental health. Thus the House, for me, is a metaphor for madness. And madness can be described as betrayal of a sort - the betrayal of the subconscious against the conscious.

I also think the relationship between Pelafina and Zampano, not to mention that between Pelafina and Johnny can be characterised as one of betrayal - the betrayal of maternal responsibility Pelafina displays when she attempts to kill her own son (not without good cause, I wouldn't mind killing the deceitful little bastard myself).

[AtLarge]

I think the traitor within your own house is the important part of Quisling.

I was talking to someone the other day about the codes and curiosities in the book, and I mentioned this weird word that my spell check didn't balk at, Quisling. And he knew immediately who it was, what it meant. Right away he said "Traitor, but no, more specific than that, a traitor in your own home." He's in his late 70's, served in WWII (American, served in the Pacific), and he told me that Anyone who grew up in WWII era would know that word and what it meant. Personally, I don't ever remember hearing that word in my life; but like I said, he immediately recognized it when I said it, and knew exactly what it meant.

that's my opinion.

[dhv25]

Karen, too, has issues regarding betrayal. "Karen's attacks, which I suspect stem from early adolescent betrayal, increase proportionally with the level of intimacy..." p.59

[girl2]

wow. i also am from the u.s., and i had no idea that quisling was anything more than a made up word! seriously! (then again, i did fail my a.p. american history test... =[)

what if we take it really, really literally? war buffs, there are so many war ties here that they have to be telling us something... does quisling tie into one of the other war references? (yes, i am an idiot and i really don't know any of the countries involved in or dates for ANY wars... do any match up in any way with the book?)

*starts reading encyclopedias online*