I can’t remember where I first heard about it, but somewhere I read that Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves was one of the main inspirations for the MarbleHornets YouTube videos, which has become one of my absolute favourite horror narratives. You may remember me writing about them a while ago, and if you haven’t been keeping tabs on them, they’re back for a ‘second season’ after several months’ hiatus, as creepy and enigmatic as ever.

Anyway, being a fan of terrifying myself with videos of the Slender Man, or ‘The Operator’ as he is known in MarbleHornets, I cajoled my mother into buying me Danielewski’s cult novel for Christmas. After reading the first few pages I remember thinking something along the lines of “this might be one of the most important novels since Ulysses”, which put me in mind of a quote from the experimental novelist Bryan Stanley Johnson where he asked “Why do so many novelists still write as though the revolution that was Ulysses had never happened?” True House of Leaves is very much more towards the post-modern than the modern, but it has very strong elements of modernism in the Joycean stream-of-consciousness side-notes of its main protagonist, and in its relentless T. S. Eliot-style theft of famous literary and mythological phrases.

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This is an essay that I wrote as part of my university course, a little heavy-going perhaps, but it was something I enjoyed writing and I suppose some people may enjoy reading, so here it is:

Only one reason is shared by all of us [novelists]: We wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is¹ – John Fowles

‘Real’ is subjective, changing from person to person and with the passing of time. Because of this indefinite nature, the representation of what is ‘real’ both in literature and in other art, has always been difficult. While all novelists may “wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is,” absolute ‘realism’ has not been the primary goal of every novel ever written: Many seek only to create enough of an internal realism to sustain suspension of disbelief. For example, no one would mistake a fantasy novel such as The Fellowship of the Ring² or even a Magical-Realist novel such as One Hundred Years of Solitude³ as reality because of the implausible and fantastic aspects of them. But there have been various movements and individual novels over the last century-and-a-half that have sought to represent the most ‘realistic’ real possible, to get as close to life as art can.

Three movements for which this has been the goal are Realism, Modernism and Post-Modernism, and three novels that typify the objectives of these movements are George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979). Each of these movements and novels has sought to be ‘realistic’ in a different way.

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