False Documents Pt II

"Just because something isn't a lie does not mean that it isn't deceptive." - Criss Jami

I. The Four Main Food Groups of Falsity

There are four main categories or types of fictional documents.

1. Implied Texts (never shown, but carry narrative or emotional authority)

2. Self-Presenting Texts (presented as the entire story itself, without framing)

3. Framed Texts (text fully included, but mediated by framing devices or narrators)

4. Partial Texts (quoted or paraphrased, revealing just enough to shape the reading experience)

None of these categories are inviolate. They can overlap. A self-presenting text can also be framed, depending on how it’s presented. Check out this table:

I’ll go into greater detail on some of the texts listed above next week. Stuff like The Blair Witch Project, De Vermis Mysteriis, and Rivers of the Dead but this week I want to focus on one target: academia.

Both Donna Tartt and Mark Z. Danielewski use false documents to satirize academia. The former invents an outdated reference book to simultaneously criticize the lax standards at her fictional liberal arts college while ridiculing her novel’s most obnoxious character. Danielewski mimics the tone and structure of academic writing to emphasize its wilful obscurantism and deliberate opacity.

II. Men of Thought of Deed

I’m a rabid fan of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which follows a coterie of Classics students at an exclusive New England liberal arts college whose obsessions and elitism drive them to murder. The least academic of the students, Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, is described thusly:

He seldom read the required texts or supplemental books for any course. Instead, his knowledge of any given subject tended to be a hodgepodge of confused facts, often strikingly irrelevant or out of context, that he happened to remember from classroom discussions or believed himself to have read somewhere. When it was time to write a paper he would supplement these dubious fragments by cross-examination of Henry (who he was in the habit of consulting, like an atlas) or with information from either The World Book Encylopedia or a reference work entitled Men of Thought and Deed, a six-volume work by E. Tipton Chatsford , Rev., dating from the 1890s, consisting of thumbnail sketches of great men through the ages, written for children, full of dramatic engravings. Anything Bunny wrote was bound to be alarmingly original because he began with such odd working materials and managed to alter them further by his befuddled scrutiny.

Bunny is trying to piece together a twenty-five page essay on John Donne and takes to wandering around campus, muttering to himself and visiting friends in their dorm rooms, as if by placing himself in close proximity to other students he might somehow absorb the information he needs by osmosis. Anything but consult a book. Bunny has the attention span of a mosquito. He tries to cajole the smartest member of the group, Henry Winter, into writing the essay for him but Henry is too smart to fall for it.

Somewhere, Bunny had heard that John Donne had been acquainted with Izaak Walton, and in some dim corridor of his mind this friendship grew larger and larger, until in his mind the two men were practically interchangeable. We never understood how this fatal connection had established itself: Henry blamed it on Men of Thought and Deed, but no one knew for sure. A week or two before the paper was due, he had started showing up in my room about two or three in the morning, looking as if he had just narrowly escaped some natural disaster, his tie askew and his eyes wild and rolling. “Hello, hello,” he would say, stepping in, running both hands through his disordered hair. “Hope I didn’t wake you, don’t mind if I cut on the lights, do you, ah, here we go, yes, yes…” He would turn on the lights and then pace back and forth for a while without taking off his coat, hands clasped behind his back, shaking his head. Finally he would stop dead in his tracks and say, with a desperate look in his eye: “Metahemeralism. Tell me about it. Everything you know. I gotta know something about metahemeralism.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what that is.”

“I don’t either,” Bunny would say brokenly. “Got to do with art or pastoralism or something. That’s how I gotta tie it together with John Donne and Izaak Walton, see.” He would resume pacing. “Donne. Walton. Metahemeralism. That’s the problem as I see it.”

“Bunny, I don’t think metahemeralism is a word.”

“Sure it is. Comes from the Latin. Has to do with irony and the pastoral. Yeah. That’s it. Painting or sculpture or something, maybe.”

“Is it in the dictionary?”

“Dunno. Don’t know how to spell it. I mean-” he made a picture frame with his hands. “The poet and the fisherman. Parfait. Boon companions. Out in the open spaces. Living the good life. Metahemeralism’s gotta be the glue, see?”

And so it would go, sometimes for half an hour or more, with Bunny raving about fishing, sonnets, and Heaven knew what, until in the middle of his monologue he would be struck by a brilliant thought and bluster off as suddenly as he had descended.

He finished the paper four days before the deadline and ran around showing it to everyone before he turned it in.

“This is a nice paper, Bun,” Charles said cautiously.

“Thanks, thanks.”

“But don’t you think you oughta mention John Donne more often? Wasn’t that your assignment?”

“Oh, Donne,” Bunny had said scoffingly. “I don’t want to drag him into this.”

Henry refused to read it. “I’m sure it’s over my head, Bunny, really,” he said, glancing over the first page. “Say, what’s wrong with this type?”

“Triple spaced it,” Bunny said proudly.

“These lines are about an inch apart.”

“Looks kind of like free verse, doesn’t it?”

Henry made a funny little snorting sound through his nose. “Looks kind of like a menu,” he said.

All I remember about the paper is that it ended with the sentence “and as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.” We wondered if he would fail.

I can’t help but wonder what the Rev. E Tipton Chatsford was like. His author photo (or possibly even a daguerreotype) has him in profile, stroking his considerable beard. The embodiment of Victorian constancy. Not unlike a more severe Jebediah Springfield.

A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man. - Jebediah Springfield

Tartt is clearly having fun with the contrast between Bunny’s self-serious attitude and the woeful condition of his essay. But she is also satirizing academia itself. Julian, the Classics professor, might be charming and mysterious, but the other faculty members are almost exclusively depicted as bumbling morons. The novel’s narrator Richard works for an absent-minded professor named Dr. Roland, who is almost the cause of Richard not being admitted to graduate school by writing him a recommendation which - though glowing - refers to him repeatedly as “Jerry.”

It was sometimes difficult to believe that Dr. Roland was a tenured professor in the Social Science Department of this, a distinguished college. He was more like some gabby old codger who would sit next to you on a bus and try to show you bits of paper he kept folded in his wallet.

Dr. Roland is friends with Dr. Blind (pronounced “Blend”) who is

if possible, an even bigger windbag than Dr. Roland. Together, they were like one of those superhero alliances in the comic books, invincible, an unconquerable confederation of boredom and confusion.

Dr. Blend was about ninety years old and had taught, for the past fifty years, a course called “Invariant Subspaces,” which was noted for its monotony and virtually absolute unintelligibility, as well as for the fact that the final exam, as long as anyone could remember, had consisted of the same single yes-or-no question. The question was three pages long but the answer was always “yes.” That was all you needed to know to pass “Invariant Subspaces.”

I never had an exam that consisted of a single yes-or-no question but I’ve had my share of absent-minded professors, one of whom was about a hundred years old and blew his nose on a handerchief and carried a pocketwatch and had been hired before the “publish or perish” trend because he hadn’t published a single thing in his half-century teaching courses on Elizabethan-era English literature.

His bio on the website, a place where a professor customarily lists his/her achievements and/or scholarly interests, a place where other professors listed their published works dating all the way back to graduate school simply said Area of Interest: bogus letters. He was a cross between Dr. Roland and Dr. Blend. A lovable but doddering old man. He’s probably still teaching to this day.

III. Labyrinth of Letters: House of Leaves

Academics are easy and natural targets for writers because so many writers are recovering academics, having either gone to and graduated from college (Donna Tartt, John Irving, Chad Harbach) or even taught college courses (Nic Pizzolatto, Stephen King).

Academic articles are written in dry, stilted language seemingly designed to bore the shit out of the reader. Scholarly writing is a monotonous filter that paints all of literature and even life the same drab uniform Soviet grey. In House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski expertly parodies this kind of writing, from its smug know-it-all tone to its arcane references and mountainous footnotes.

House of Leaves is a novel about a documentary that may or may not exist, a haunted house that defies physical laws, and a man unraveling as he tries to make sense of it all. The documentary is called The Navidson Record. It’s a found-footage-style film compiled by Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson, who moves into a Virginia house with his partner Karen and their two kids. Will installs cameras throughout the house, hoping to edit together montages of suburban bliss. But almost immediately, strange events begin to occur.

Will’s measurements of the interior come out longer than the exterior. A dark, featureless hallway materializes in the living room wall and leads to an expansive void Will dubs “the Great Hall.” A low rumbling can be heard coming from somewhere deep within the maze. No one knows what it is but they agree it doesn’t sound promising.

Against the express wishes of his family members, who want to move immediately, Will hires a team of explorers to document and map the space, only to learn that its constantly shifting dimensions render mapping futile. Some explorers return with rock samples predating Earth. Others vanish entirely. As the house grows darker and more unstable, so does Will and Karen’s relationship, captured in fragmented footage that pinballs between expedition and domestic collapse.

The Navidson Record is the subject of a sprawling academic treatise written by a blind man named Zampanò, who obsessively catalogues and analyzes the footage despite having never seen it. After Zampanò’s death, his copious notes are discovered by Johnny Truant, a tattoo shop apprentice with a haunted past and transgressive habits (the Johnny Truant sections are the weakest of the novel. They read like bad Chuck Palahniuk. Then again, given the many layers of parody evident in the novel, maybe Danielweski is mimicking the Fight Club author).

As Johnny edits and footnotes Zampanò’s manuscript, he becomes increasingly consumed by the material, descending into paranoia, hallucinations, and memory distortions. His sections read like a fever dream, full of erratic margins, blackout poetry, and self-loathing digressions from nights spent in seedy bars, violent sex, and blackout binges. Not only does he inherit Zampanò’s obsession with The Navidson Record, Johnny Truant inherits the blind man’s hypergraphia. His notes become rambling and incoherent close to the end.

In House of Leaves, what begins as a documentary becomes a manuscript about a documentary, then a footnoted commentary on the manuscript, then a metafictional trap. Editorial notes from a publishing house appear near the end, suggesting Johnny has disappeared entirely, his last pages delivered posthumously. Meanwhile, the physical book itself participates in the descent: footnotes spiral into the margins, typography collapses into visual puzzles, and pages must be rotated or flipped to be read. The book becomes a literal labyrinth, mirroring the house, the documentary, and the mind of anyone who tries to make sense of them.

Danielewski doesn’t just employ the false document as a narrative trick. He uses it to expose the machinery of belief. Zampanò cites interviews, scholarly essays, critical responses, and even quotes from Stephen King, Camille Paglia, and a pre-disgrace Harvey Weinstein, as though the film has an established cultural footprint. Johnny Truant engages with Zampanò’s analysis as if it’s fact, but he can find no evidence that the film exists outside Zampanò’s manuscript. This recursive layering becomes a meta-commentary on the nature of false documents themselves.

We, as readers, are trained to believe what is given authority, citations, footnotes, and academic tone lend credibility. But in House of Leaves, that authority is deliberately undermined. There is no Navidson Record. There is no scholarly debate. These are fictions stacked atop other fictions. Danielewski weaponizes the format to explore how easily fiction becomes reality when presented in the right form and how desperately we cling to structure, even as it disintegrates.

Okay! That’s it! Tune in next week for Part III where I’ll (probably) talk about The Blair Witch Project, Pale Fire, The Art of Fielding, Rivers of the Dead, and Hell House LLC.