‘The Creature We All Are’: Deleuze and Guattari's Geophilosophy in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves

Abstract

Mark Z. Danielewski's 2000 debut novel House of Leaves has rapidly become a gothic cult classic, detested by some and acclaimed by others with identical passion. This article explores the new approaches that contemporary ecocriticism appears to be taking, embracing the geophilosophical theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to uncover the presence of the ‘monstrous vegetal’ throughout the novel. It argues that the vegetal images of the rhizome and the tree, illustrated within Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus reveal the way in which the titular house becomes horrifying through its similarities to a growing, organic creature. Indeed, it is its horrifying sense of uncontrollable and incomprehensible growth that overwhelms the characters’ bodies and minds before eventually infringing upon the reading experience as we are forced to acknowledge the house's, and by extension the vegetal's, complete alterity to human existence.