The House as a Horror Story

Mary Flanagan’s The House is a horror story, a physical and psychological haunted house in the vein of Danielewski’s House of Leaves. The horror of the piece is derived from its alogical spatiality, its non-directionality floating architecture, which forces a sort of agoraphobia onto the reader. The shrinking and enlarging of the boxes provides the semblance of movement and therefore control of one’s surroundings, while simultaneously remaining elusive, tangential, to the reader’s control, and mocking of the logic of human movement. The mocking of the human perception of space is a very Dadaist trait in terms of self-negation. The stripped down architectural elements both reflect the essence of structure (the literal building blocks of architecture) but are simultaneously subverted by their own ungroundedness and maneuverability. The reader’s body is denied placement and control, although given the illusion of both.

This is similar to House of Leaves, which gives the illusion of walls, doors, and staircases but stretches their representations to the point of the infinite, thereby negating their meaning altogether. The point of a door is to lead to somewhere else, but in infinite space, one point is the same as the last. The boxes of Flannigan’s piece are obvious constructions, which sets them apart from the surrounding grey space. However, because the grey space is infinite (at least from my perception) the structure is negated, as its placement in space can never be found.

In this way Flanigan’s piece reflects Kandisky’s description of clowns:

“‘Clowns in particular, build their composition on a very definite alogicality. Their action has no definite development, their movements are incongruous, their efforts lead nowhere and indeed, they’re not meant to.’ Lack of motivation and of clear direction: these elements contributed to a ‘depthlessness’ and play which disputed the absent authority of the ‘paternal’ text” (Nichols 236).

Flanagan’s piece the grammar of the text is removed, once again giving the semblance of language but without its supporting structures. The text can be read backward and forward, upside-down and from behind, negating the spatial structure on which we depend to derive meaning from the language.

The negation of that spatial language structure is once again reflecting the Dada negation of itself, leaving “absolute irony as the only valid mode of self-consciousness” (Nichols 232). The House is aware of its own horror, its own arbitrariness, and its spatial existence is an anathema to human spatial existence. That is the point. The text is ostensibly about human relationships, as described by the author, and human relationships, are, indeed, horror stories.