Aspects of Postmodernism: Metafiction Versus Hyper Reality

An analysis of the Postmodern focuses of metafiction and hyper reality using Rushdie's "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" and Danielewski's "House of Leaves"

Postmodernism is a set of tools and challenges that covers a vast amount of cultural artifacts and practices in both literature and art. Literature, of the two, is both exemplar and a paradigm of the theory in the way of masking a reality we know to be true and even going so far as creating its own. For instance, both Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski exist in genres�"magical realism and horror fiction respectively�"that are able to be critiqued using postmodernism. These novels take the challenge of this analytical approach seriously and return us to the world of literary fiction. Not to avoid, but rather to engage with new ways of thinking and challenging representation, reality, and truth. By utilizing the post modernistic values of metafiction and hyper reality, one can begin to understand the representations, realities, and truths present behind the fictional narratives in Haroun and the Sea of Stories and House of Leaves respectively. In addition, one can observe the differences in the two techniques by comparing the use of darkness in both novels after their individual analysis.

Before we can attempt to critique Haroun and the Sea of Stories, we must first understand what “metafiction” is and how it’s typically applied to literature. Margret Mackey, in “Metafiction for Beginners,” defines the term as “a fiction about making fiction” (Mackey 181); that is to say, a fictional work that is related to or centered around the creation of fictional works. With this in consideration, from the very beginning, it’s obvious that Rushdie’s piece is a work of metafiction. From the description of the town Haroun and his father inhabit to the food the glum people in this “saddest of cities” (Rushdie 1) eat, the characters are suspended in a state that depends on storytelling, not only for the continuation of the nameless townspeople’s plot, but for the continuation of their occasional happiness, which is exactly what propels the main plot in the first place. Everything about this novel is focused on fictional narratives, from the stories that Rashid tells all the way to the army�"aptly referred to as the “Library”�"that is made up of “Pages [soldiers]…organized into Chapters and Volumes” (Rushdie 88). In fact, each aspect of the second moon and the Great Story Sea that covers it revolves around the aspect of creating more new and original stories. Another recurring theme through the novel is the question “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” (20), which obviously questions the entire point of novel and makes the reader consider the usefulness of such tales in real life. Rosalía Baena argues Rushdie’s creation of fiction “illustrates and comments on such contemporary cultural issues as double identity, life as a story, [and] the boundaries of fiction” (70) to name a few. This argument advances the reader into understanding the value of metafiction on another level: its use in analyzing their own reality in regards to the analysis of the fictional reality they have grown accustomed to.

Pushing further past the internal fictional devices being used throughout the novel, Rushdie provides an analysis on our culture that pull the reader out of the magical reality that is Haroun’s journey to Kahani. The reader is enveloped in this world of fantastical literary devices and well placed allusions to fiction as a whole when Rushdie inserts political statements that leave the reader blindsided by the truth of the reality they live in. For example, when Haroun discovers Blabbermouth, one of the Pages in the book’s equivalent of the royal guard, is actually a girl who has posed as a boy in order to join the Pages in the first place, Blabbermouth defends her choice by asking the boy if he knew “girls have to fool people every day of their lives if they want to get anywhere” (Rushdie 107) and insisting that girls would always have it harder than boys because boys would always just be handed anything they wanted. While one could interpret this simply as making a flat out political statement, the characters’ banter back and forth about Blabbermouth’s inability to find rooms or navigate the castle by herself creates the situational irony that is characteristic of postmodernism throughout the rest of the novel. Furthermore, the novel also goes into the freedom of speech when Haroun is surrounded by Pages who are openly discussing their disdain for the princess they’re attempting to rescue, the general even joining in the conversation. When Haroun brings up the disrespect they are showing toward their princess, he’s met with a simple statement: “what is the point of giving persons freedom of speech…if you then say they must not utilize same? And if not the Power of Speech not the Power of all?” (Rushdie 119). Applying this logic in what seems to be a genial scene brings a significant cultural necessity into view. If people are so willing to defend the freedom of speech, why are they so upset when others utilize this inherent freedom? Rushdie’s use of metafiction to emphasize important social components proves postmodernism’s necessity in critiquing fiction.

A vastly different approach than metafiction, hyper realism is best defined by Jean Baudrillard’s “Precession of Simulacra.” For those unfamiliar with Baudrillard’s work concerning postmodernism, it’s most easily summarized by four characteristics; “it is the reflection of a basic reality/ it masks and perverts a basic reality/ it masks the absence of a basic reality/ it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own simulacrum” (Baudrillard 4). To apply this to fiction is difficult when tasked with a novel that takes place in a reality the general public typically accepts, such as modern times with no fantastical element added that would obscure the reality the public accepts as the norm. Of course, House of Leaves deals with a reality far off from the “norm” when the entire concept of the novel is considered. One major example evident would be the normality of a typical suburban home, opposed to Will Navidson’s home, which creates hallways that exist beyond our dimension, maybe even beyond time. Where this novel also focuses on analyzing a work of fiction, the creation of a strikingly realistic dimension within the reality the public accepts pushes this novel from metafiction into hyper reality. In regards to Baudrillard’s precession, House of Leaves exists on the fourth tier; “it is its own simulacrum” (4).

The novel is told from the perspective of a narrator�"Johnny Truant�"who is compiling the unfinished works of what appears to be a dissertation by the deceased Zampanó of “The Navidson Record,” a documentary centering around Will Navidson’s (a renowned photojournalist) house with ever shifting corridors to nowhere which never existed in the first place, from the moment the reader opens the front cover. The dedication�"“This is not for you.”�"is written from Truant’s perspective, warning the reader against continuing their pursuit into the novel itself. By keeping the dedication to the book in the narrator’s perspective, Danielewski inserts the reader straight into the grim reality, or “the nature of nothingness” (Slocombe 88), present in the novel without a chance to consider the author as a separate being. As Josh Toth argues, the novel contains a running theme of “returns without return, of closures without closure” (182) in reference to House of Leaves trying to reignite the postmodern movement, which was wavering before the release of this novel and others like it, in addition to both main characters�"Truant and Navidson�"frequently leaving and returning to places that have caused them pain in hopes to succeed in finding a clarity that’s never really found. This argument, however, leaves the discussion open for the psychological effects that the characters in House of Leaves face throughout their respective journeys.

With the realistic descriptions of traumatic events comes the psychological changes of the narrator. The reader follows as Truant’s life falls apart, going from a young man living his life to the fullest in California with his best friend to a recluse, starving and forced from his apartment in a matter of months as he sets out to complete the deceased author’s work. Even though the reader is separated from the events in “The Navidson Record” by a dissertation and a narration, there’s still a “failure to maintain a sense of closure” (Toth 182) due to the way the novel ends. The reader finds Navidson badly handicapped, both physically and mentally, from his last exploration into the darkest depths of his house alone and Truant evicted, unemployed, his best friend dead, and revisiting his last memory of his mother before ending his narration entirely. Both endings are melancholic, to say the least.

The reader is left to dwell on the after effects of the house in question and how it thereby affected and flipped both of their lives, and the lives of the people close to them, upside down. I argue that the lasting psychological effects in nearly all of the characters and even potentially as the reader are the key points to what makes this novel hyper realistic opposed to metafictional. Consider the people that interacted with the house first hand: Navidson loses part of an ear, one of his hands, an eye, obliterates a hip to the point he’s bound to a crutch, and continues to work and finish “The Navidson Record” due to passion for his work (although “passion has little to do with euphoria….it means to suffer” (527)); his wife, Karen, has increased anxiety for months after they initially leave the house, loses touch with her children, separates from Will until after his solo exploration, and creates her own short films in response to the man she thought the house took from her; the children, Daisy and Chad, withdrew in their own ways, Chad having the tendency to wander off and Daisy has cuts from when her uncle threw her out of the home through a broken window and hears voices; two men, Jed and Wax who were explorers hired to do that very thing alongside Holloway, were shot; Jed died, leaving a fiancé alone; Holloway, who shot both Jed and Wax after having a mental break within the labyrinth of corridors, got lost within the infinite house and the camera he was equipped with caught footage of his body being taken away by some otherworldly being; Billy Reston, the physicist, has an “enduring sensation of cold” (396) for months following the exploration; and Tom Navidson, Will’s twin brother, in lost in the effort to save Daisy when the house collapsed in on itself. Outside of the documentary, Truant slowly goes insane just from reading Zampanó’s dissertation. He insists, by the end of his narrative, “there always will be darkness but I realize now something inhabits it” (518), in reference to the same creature or being that removed Holloway’s body from Navidson’s labyrinth of a home. Even though Truant didn’t experience the house or the explorations first hand, simply reading of the events that supposedly occurred in this documentary that never existed was enough to illicit a disastrously negative psychological reaction from the narrator, leading to several thoughts of suicide or violence inflicted upon other people (see pages 495-497).

The lingering psychological nature of the novel within the novel suggests to the reader how influential a piece of literature can be without the reader realizing the effect the novel as a whole has on them at the same time. As Nick Lord stated, “the book itself becomes a textual version of the continuously shifting labyrinth” (465). The structure of House of Leaves is set up to confuse, to blindside, and to distract the reader, keeping them open to what’s both figuratively and metaphorically lurking around the corner when it comes to the happenings in the Navidson household. This structure Danielewski adopts allows the reader more intense reactions and understanding when it comes to the characters’ emotions throughout the novel and even leaves them feeling the same level of panic, which in turn makes the setting in the novel a reality of its own. Utilizing different fonts, colors, text variations, foot notes, and formats for the pages in the novel allowed the author complete control of the reality that the reader sees. I would even go so far to argue that, as difficult of a read House of Leaves proves to be, it’s formatted in such a way that the reader has to become involved in the book, because the experience and effects of the reality present within the binding only work for those deeply enveloped in this alternate reality.

Lastly, both Haroun and the Sea of Stories and House of Leaves put a great amount of emphasis on darkness. In Rushdie’s novel, the darkness is something mechanical, created to be of use to the Chubwalas as their eyesight is much better in the dark than in the light. Rushdie’s darkness is reinforced through the will of Khattam-Shud and his army of shadow-men; it also creates the weapons and machinery used by the Chubwalas. Everything about the darkness in Rushdie’s novel is controlled until, of course Haroun makes a wish to shine a light so bright upon the shadowed half of Kahani and the shadow-men are reverted back to simple, lifeless shadows. Being a novel based in magical realism, it’s understandable where the trope of shadow-men and shadow-machinery would originate from, and it’s yet another example of the metafiction aspect of postmodernism. Baena points out the similarities between Haroun and the Sea of Stories and other well-known magical realism pieces with the simple statement “we observe the same pattern of a hero’s quest in a fantastic world” (71) to support this claim. The Water Genie and the Hooboe both mention several times an idea along the lines of story melding, where pieces of one story intertwine with pieces of another to become a new story (helped along by the Plentimaw Fishes). The instance of the boy defeating the shadow-men, then, is simply just a piece of a story that got added to Haroun’s tale; metafiction to a slightly less obvious degree in the novel.

On the other hand, the darkness described in House of Leaves is much more sinister. Instead of something that can be controlled, it’s a rampant force, acting on its own. Danielewski’s approach isn’t one of childish fantasy but one of realistic nightmares and a force that only seeks to consume what enters it. Approaching darkness with hyper realism is what gives the novel its edge, making it teeter on the line of unsettling and ingenious. No one can conquer the darkness within the Navidson household, proven when the hallway doesn’t appear extended from the house where it should’ve stood, when the darkness causes Holloway to go mad, when the creature tears his body from the reality within the labyrinth, when the house collapses and swallows Tom with it, and when Navidson finds himself trapped, freezing, and without a hope to survive. But Danielewski goes one step further to incorporate the idea of darkness and unease into the reader’s mind; he fills pages with footnotes too small to read, with x’s signifying passages that were beyond the ability to read, prints straight across margins, and breaks aesthetic boundaries through the entirety of House of Leaves. His intention, both with the darkness and with the obscurity of the pages, is to throw the reader into this reality they’re not familiar with, in the same way Truant entered this reality and allowed the darkness to alter him.

While there are obviously key differences between metafiction and hyper reality, both analytical perspectives fall under the umbrella of postmodernism due to the fact that they both incorporate the idea of using an alternate reality to force the reader to understand the truth behind the narrative. But not only do these novels exemplify the theory, the theory in turn exemplifies the novels through its tendency to represent something larger than itself and ability to differentiate between what’s on the surface of a narrative and what’s hidden beneath. The theory allows critics to question what reality is limited to and what is it that creates those boundaries. The use of metafiction and hyper reality approaches illuminate the themes of the novel. Postmodernism as a whole allows us to see what the different levels of the novels are doing, and tries to teach the reader a lesson about the reality they perceive to be true.

Works Cited

Baena, Rosalía. "Telling a Bath-Time Story: Haroun and the Sea of Stories as a Modern Literary Fairy Tale | DeepDyve." DeepDyve. SAGE, n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2016.

Baudrillard, Jean. "The Precession of Simulacra." Semiotext(e), Inc. (2004): 1-6. 16 Oct. 2011. Web. 20 Nov. 2016.

Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. New York: Pantheon, 2000. Print.

Lord, Nick. "The Labyrinth and the Lacuna: Metafiction, the Symbolic, and the Real in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves." The Labyrinth and the Lacuna: Metafiction, the Symbolic, and the Real in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves: Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol 55, No 4. Routledge, n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2016.

Mackey, Margaret. "Metafiction for Beginners: Allan Ahlberg's "Ten in a Bed.", Children's Literature in Education, 1990." Springer Link. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Nov. 2016.

Rushdie, Salman. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. New York: Granta in Association with Viking, 1990. Print.

Toth, Josh. "Healing Postmodern America: Plasticity and Renewal in Danielewski's House of Leaves." Healing Postmodern America: Plasticity and Renewal in Danielewski's House of Leaves: Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol 54, No 2. Routledge, n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2016.

Slocombe, W. ""This Is Not For you": Nihilism and the House that Jacques Built." MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 51 no. 1, 2005, pp. 88-109. Project MUSE. Web. Spring 2005. 19 Nov. 2016.