of Leaves

[shever]

I'm making my second journey through the book, so this may sound a bit naive (if so, forgive me):

what are the leaves in "house of leaves"? leaves as in autumn leaves or leaves as in departures? or something else?

[Cruciphage]

The title is intentionally vague and could mean any number of things.

The tree imagery--Yggrdasil and Ash Tree Lane, for example--is just one index to the title. There is also a brief untitled poem near the back of the book in which "house of leaves" is part of a line. The poem compares our lives to houses of leaves, forever subject to sudden and irreversible change (sort of the like the labyrinth, no?). Again, just one more interpretation of the title.

My favorite is this one:

leaf (leef) n. 5. One of the sheets of paper bound in a volume, each side of which constitutes a page.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Sixth Printing (1970)

Another nod to Borges and "The Garden of Forking Paths," most likely. If you have not read this story yet (or anything by Jorge Luis Borges), favor yourself with seeking it.

[alphan]

Leaves = Change

House of Changes.
[img]images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]

quote:

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"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."
-Edgar Allan Poe

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[Nowt]

Excuse me, TrueNorth... how do you get to 'leaves = change'? I don't quite follow you there... [img]images/smiles/icon_confused.gif[/img]

[ManiKatt]

Leaves change with the seasons and if I'm not wrong there is something having to do with season's here. Perhaps it is something we should go into. I think I extent of my notice is that the avidson record goes on over a summer period.

[Zar23]

Let us not forget the Papyrus of the Egyptians... the first books were made of leaves. Today, we have books made of tree pulp. In a sense, all books are houses of leaves.

-Zar

[alphan]

Very good ZaR and ManiKAtt, but the seasons part is only the begining of my observation, i talk about it in more detail in the "about the title" section so i didnt here. the main idea that created the connection for me, was that just as the house changes with the "seasons" of the mind (the state of mind of the inhabitants) so do leaves change with the seasons of the earth; furthermore, i just realized while typing this that the earth is like a house to the trees/leaves (makes a nice circle of connections between the ideas).

[broler_qx]

this is my own interpretation why "house of leaves" and it got alot to do with the chapter of the echos and the beginnig of the book in wich and the whole paper u can read

"THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR U"

now,if u yell out loud the title u'll got

-HOUSE OF LEAVES!!!!
-OF LEAVES!!
-LEAVES!
-LEAVES!
-LEAVE!
-LEAVE!

the tittle itself (and the book) is warning us not to read it so LEAVE!!!,that book is not for us


hopefully u get what im saying


[img]images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[Sharky]

Rather than "change", I think it more specifically refers to the "fragility" or "impermanence" of things. Just like it does in the little snippet of poetry on 563. "...and this great blue world of ours seems a house of leaves moments before the wind."

It'll all be swept away in short order. Like the house sweeps away anything left behind by the explorers; and the marshes of Virginia swept away any traces of the original Jamestown colony (as was said in some footnote about a Virginia state park ranger); and many other examples in the book of the fleeting nature of the things we leave behind.

Thus, I don't think the title refers to the house at all. I think it's a metaphor for the fragility of the characters involved.

[floorshw]

hi everyone , i 'm new here

my interpretation may be a little different from yours because i read the french edition.
so i shouldn't be posting in this section, but i actually see it as some kind of invasion from the book. i mean, you now how it acts, it always tries to get out of what it is to produce its works in the outside(s) (world(s)). i see it as a root ( or as a seed ) we can maybe better identifiy from its products than from itself.

well then, the word "leave" is translated in the french edition and while the translation is good the meaning changes but the intended meaning is maybe not changing that much. and the ideas it implies still seam valuable for the original edition.

if you think of leaves as a sheets of paper bound into a volume constituve of a book (or something like this). what can you then say of the "House of Leaves"?

- it's a "house of pages", then it's a book. (wow big news [img]images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] )
- but being a book (what we already knew) it is also a house (well we already knew it was a labyrinth anyway)
- but then if "the book" and "the house" maybe referring to each other, eventually being the same "thing". can't Navidson's house be a book. i mean he thinks he's exploring a house but he is actualy exploring a book, and he can't help going on, just as we are.
- but still, the house of leaves, clearly refers to a tree, and here is were it starts to be really thrilling. because until then everything was alright: we new we were reading a book, we knew there was a story about labyrinth(s) , we knew we entered the book as one enters a labyrinth. but then what trees are doing that books and houses don't is ... growing, changing, LIVING. ... the thing you're holding in your hands is actually (even if slowly) moving !
- plus. it doesn't matter what shape the tree is taking, how many leaves it has, how many pages it has, how many rooms it has... the tree was born from a seed and it will produce fruits that will reproduce that same seed, that will grow somehere else, in other grounds,in somebody else's mind.

so i read a BOOK whose name is "the HOUSE of leaves" (being a poetic metaphor for a TREE). the all thing is both a labyrinth, and a game; which we love to play (even afterwards), like we (i) played children games in the TREES, building (dreaming) wooden HOUSEs , where we (i) could hide to read mysterious (forbiden) BOOKs.

is the french version helpful, or at least "messingful" ?

[le_theope]

Je suggère que tu ailles faire un tour du côté du forum français avec une petite recherche complémentaire sur Deleuze et le rhizome.

[ThE_sLeEpLeSs_OnE]

I don't know, maybe it's because I really like that little snippet of verse in the appendix, but the whole use of the word Leaves suggests a lot more of fragility, just as Sharky said. Leaves are very impermanent things, objects that can be affected by all aspects of the physical side of the enviroment. In fact the poem also suggests this in it's last phrase
"moments before the wind"
this wind could be a metaphor for conflict or gradual change, which the leaves would be permantly changed by.

It's almost as if leaves is a metaphor for mind, that we will be changed simply by reading the book.

[floorshw]

oh please forgive me for not using the blue colour, i just did not know how to use them.

quote:

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Originally posted by le_theope:
Je suggère que tu ailles faire un tour du côté du forum français avec une petite recherche complémentaire sur Deleuze et le rhizome.

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genial
merci

[le_theope]

You're welcome.

[fatwoul]

quote:

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Originally posted by le_theope:
Je suggère que tu ailles faire un tour du côté du forum français avec une petite recherche complémentaire sur Deleuze et le rhizome.

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And now the subtitles:

"Haha we are so clever. We let other countries defend us from invasion. Our armed forces wear pastel blue because they don't need camouflage."

[ August 18, 2003: Message edited by: fatwoul ]

[Nash]

quote:

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Originally posted by le_theope:
Je suggère que tu ailles faire un tour du côté du forum français avec une petite recherche complémentaire sur Deleuze et le rhizome.

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Subtitle :

(I think you should have a look on the French forum and) also search on Deleuze and the rhizome.

[floorshw]

quote:

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Originally posted by fatwoul:


And now the subtitles:

"Haha we are so clever. We let other countries defend us from invasion. Our armed forces wear pastel blue because they don't need camouflage."

[ August 18, 2003: Message edited by: fatwoul ]

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are some of you involved in a kind of Wee Argument Reaction ?
[img]images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[Ima]

The point about fragility is particularly apt given the fragility of the leaves of the book itself, as has been discussed in other threads. My copy is decomposing as I read it, the leaves falling away from the front of the book. It reminds me of trying to read the book while the leaves are burning away just behind me.

[ThE_sLeEpLeSs_OnE]

Or like how Navidson was despratly trying to read the book with the last amounts of his light, burning figers, growing more and more desprate...

[Stencil]

I don't think this has been said before, but if you talk of a family tree, then I suppose the leaves would be the individals who are part of the inter-connected family. In all these 'who=who?' debates, I'm pretty sure we've established that connections can be made between all the narrators.

[JuggaloStatix]

quote:

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Originally posted by broler_qx:
this is my own interpretation why "house of leaves" and it got alot to do with the chapter of the echos and the beginnig of the book in wich and the whole paper u can read

"THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR U"

now,if u yell out loud the title u'll got

-HOUSE OF LEAVES!!!!
-OF LEAVES!!
-LEAVES!
-LEAVES!
-LEAVE!
-LEAVE!

the tittle itself (and the book) is warning us not to read it so LEAVE!!!,that book is not for us


hopefully u get what im saying


[img]images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

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not trying to be a dick...but it's

"This is not for you"

House of leaves
of leaves
leaves
leave

[unstoppableV]

well when i first saw the book i automatically assumed leaves meant pages (e.g. walt whitman's leaves of grass) and decided to take it at face value: Zumpano's house full of paper = House of Leave. altho i think its pretty obvious that the House in the title is also THE house
this new theory of leaves = change makes sense tho

[fatwoul]

quote:

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Originally posted by unstoppableV:
well when i first saw the book i automatically assumed leaves meant pages (e.g. walt whitman's leaves of grass) and decided to take it at face value: Zumpano's house full of paper = House of Leave. altho i think its pretty obvious that the House in the title is also THE house
this new theory of leaves = change makes sense tho

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What?

[silver474]

quote:

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Originally posted by DeliriumXV:
I went to our backyard and yelled "House of Leaves" and the echo said "Eaves." That probably means something. Discuss.

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I think it means your neighbors now all think you're insane. [img]images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

[dara.downey]

Three things - first of all, we all know that MZD has read Bachelard's Poetics of Space, becuse he quotes him all over the gaff. There is a bit in there about how if we fill a house with our daydreams then it will never be tied down to the exact dimensions by whihc it was built, and furthermore he says - I think HoL quotes this - that every house should have a certain amound of darkness floating around tis rafters to prevent it from becoming too real, too concrete, not able to expand with our dreams - or nightmares. The eventual result of all this is that Bachelard quotes some guy - I can't find it right now - who imagines that in his house he can always hear the rustle of leaves, and this is a result of his having daydreamed in it, of it being mroe than simply bricks and mortar.

Secondly, you should all read the story called 'The Ash Tree' by MR James - Victorian horror at its best, and a possible inspiration, but definitely not a direct source.

Thirdly, When MZD links it all to hte process of colonisation with the story of the Jamestown Colony (is that it?), don't you think it makes on think that the house is a kind of metaphor for America, nad how the forest was never really conquered, the frontier and the wilderness has never really been pushed back the way you would all like to imagine it is, and so the house, to paraphrase Angela Carter, is 'leafy on hte inside'?

[DanSRose]

quote:

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Originally posted by Cinderella:
Thirdly, When MZD links it all to hte process of colonisation with the story of the Jamestown Colony (is that it?), don't you think it makes on think that the house is a kind of metaphor for America, nad how the forest was never really conquered, the frontier and the wilderness has never really been pushed back the way you would all like to imagine it is, and so the house, to paraphrase Angela Carter, is 'leafy on hte inside'?

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No. Family, family, family. The most complex thing of all- family. What wilderness are you talking about? The pre-Jamestown forest? The three explorers found the staircase, presumably in a house of some sort, the three explorers who left their family in search of food, but were in the New World by the Word of God. I forget the actual percentage, but the survival rate of Jamestown settlers was very small. Not something people in touch with their family would do.
Either way, the inside of the house and the staircase was void, blank, empty (for the most part). Wilderness implies wild, something there.
It's about leaving what really matters behind (like family) to chase windmills.

[goof7]

quote:

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Originally posted by broler_qx:
this is my own interpretation why "house of leaves" and it got alot to do with the chapter of the echos and the beginnig of the book in wich and the whole paper u can read

"THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR U"

now,if u yell out loud the title u'll got

-HOUSE OF LEAVES!!!!
-OF LEAVES!!
-LEAVES!
-LEAVES!
-LEAVE!
-LEAVE!

the tittle itself (and the book) is warning us not to read it so LEAVE!!!,that book is not for us


hopefully u get what im saying


[img]images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

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I get what YOU are saying. See? It's not that hard to type "you," now, is it?

[Stencil]

quote:

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Originally posted by Cinderella:
When MZD links it all to hte process of colonisation with the story of the Jamestown Colony (is that it?), don't you think it makes on think that the house is a kind of metaphor for America, nad how the forest was never really conquered, the frontier and the wilderness has never really been pushed back the way you would all like to imagine it is, and so the house, to paraphrase Angela Carter, is 'leafy on hte inside'?

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One of the theories about the collapse of Jamestown was that it was posioned in a Spainish(?) plot against the English. The Traitor is a theme in HoL as well.

Could the various hints at an exploration theme be a comment on where America can go? What I mean is, what is left to explore? Where is all the energy of a previous century being spent now there are no new and virgin territories?

[dara.downey]

OK, first, the wilderness thing - considering the manner in which the diary from the Jamestown colony is written, would you not agree that the very symptom of the wilderness IS emptiness, it's being off the map, somewhere unexplored where there be dragons, because we have to fill emptiness with something, and it scares us so much that we fill it with devils and witches because at least they have names and shapes, and are thereby, at least to an extent, under the power of man? And isn't this what all the stuff with Tom's hand shadows and the discussions of people in the wilderness with imaginations and all that is all about?

Sorry, that was long. Stencil, I gotta go read your bit again now.

[dara.downey]

Ok, Stencil, yes, thank you, that's mainly what my thesis is all about. The house is the image of the anti-wilderness - of the feminine 'safe' world have tamed the unknown and the empty - but safety and domesticity isn't always what men want, because a house is also a kind of prison, it's the antithesis of the sense of freedom that the land beyond the frontier always gave those who wantd to escape something crushing and hidebound and overly conventional and over-plotted in the east. Navidson's house, however, is kind of both of these things at once, and points up the radical paradox in the view of the American landscape - that all the free space must be conquered because people need space to be free from stuff in - from religious persecution in Europe, or just from your parents' values or whatever - but that the very process of such conquering consumes that freedom. Hence, free space is both something to be feared - what's in it? am I going to die here in the middle of no-where? etc. - and desired, and it's the lack of freedom that is to be feared (which is why so mnay haunted houses end up being female). Nav's house is both indoors nad otdoors all at once, it's a confined space and endless space. See?