Meta-novelist Mark Danielewski: ‘My books are my tattoos’

American novelist Mark Z. Danielewski is a voracious consumer of text, but finds himself baffled by Philippine newspapers. Reading the STAR recently (while staying at Raffles Makati for this weekend’s Philippine Readers and Writers Festival), he came across the term “shabu.” “I only know shabu-shabu, so I thought, ‘They’re confiscating soup now? Things are getting out of control!’”

Author meets Manila. A tale as old as time.

You experience Danielewski’s books as objects even before you scan a single paragraph: they’re laid out in challenging blocks of text, sometimes crisscrossing into blurs of ink, sometimes reversed or boxed within other chunks of text, sometimes spread out so that pages contain… one… word… at… a… time.

In town for the literary fest sponsored by National Book Store and Raffles Makati, the New York-born Danielewski comes from a filmmaking father and visually oriented mother, so it’s understandable that his books go beyond the usual confines of storytelling. They borrow from movies — David Lynch comes to mind, but also the time compression play of Christopher Nolan — as much as from graphic novels. Of his most recent novel series, The Familiar, one reader commented that it’s “pretty much a graphic novel where the percentage of text to image is reversed.” Danielewski liked that comment.

LA-based since 1990, Danielewski finds normalcy in a rural homestead with his wife and pair of cats (Archimedes and Meifumado, the latter named after a manga comic). Cats turn up a lot in his books, especially the new series, The Familiar (up to Vol. 6 now), which concerns a little girl and a kitten that’s actually a window into the span of universal time. But saying that’s the concept is like saying James Joyce’s Ulysses is about a single day in Dublin.

Danielewski uses every literary tool available — varying font sizes, colors, footnotes, epistolary, movie scripts, aged documents, math equations, plus a few graphics here and there — to fill his books. His breakthrough novel House of Leaves began as an online experiment of drawings and text, adopted by a limited audience before finding a publisher in 2001. In print, it weighs in at 709 pages (“It’s a big statement for the trees”), and from there he didn’t stop: Only Revolutions (2007) is a Möbius strip of a book spanning from 1845 to 2045, told as a road trip story through the eyes of 16-year-olds Hailey and Sam, lovers who crisscross in their journey. With its Beat lingo and Whitmanesque yawps, it’s steeped in American Romanticism.

During our interview at Raffles Writers Bar, the author pulls out his trusty red notebook, shows us a few sketches. He carries around a clutch of marker pens (in different colors, secreted somewhere on his person) to sign books for those who ask. An avid doodler as a child, Mark cherished the little messages and drawings that kids wrote in the marginalia of notebooks. “I was one of those kids who said, well, I’m gonna keep the doodles.” They grew and grew, then became books.

It’s hard to categorize Danielewski’s work; even “meta-novelist” doesn’t come close. He sees text as blocks to be freely moved around on pages, laid out to stretch or compress time as necessary. (We talk about Dunkirk for a bit, a movie he says needs to be viewed side by side with Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, both genre-breaking takes on war.) But his books are not haphazard, despite whole pages devoted to white space. They’re highly structured, even intimidating; not everyone necessarily gets them, or finishes them, and he says that’s okay. I ask him if he’s easily bored as a reader. “Not necessarily bored, but I no longer feel the need to finish a book. At a certain point I understand what voice is being set up and it’s not necessary to finish it. Not to disrespect the author, but I’ve seen it before.”

He shares an anecdote about moving apartments, and how he bequeathed “thousands of feet of books” to an elderly black woman who’d been his neighbor. She sold them online, and occasionally he’d get a message about his books on the Confederate army ending up with a family in Florida, or one of his copies of Moby-Dick now residing in Colorado. By hanging onto these unread books, he realized, “I was culpable of holding these things, and not letting them open up.” Maybe that’s why he prefers to go so big in his own books.

He doesn’t espouse any grand theories about the future of print, maintaining that his “work with how text and image correlate, how they dance together” is enough to sustain his interest. Having said that, he has contributed spoken word bits to his sister’s musical project, Poe, and toured with her as an opener for Depeche Mode; and he’s overseen a stage version of his The Fifty Year Sword at Roy and Edna Disney Calarts Theater (REDCAT). He has no problem moving outside the box, media-wise, yet so far, Hollywood hasn’t snapped up his tales of houses that have infinite interiors (House of Leaves) or cats that are windows to universal time. “I have author friends who tell me I’m a total fool,” he says. “They may be right. They say ‘Just sell it, relax, get some money and go write something else. Who cares?’” He acknowledges “you don’t make a lot as a literary novelist,” though book touring Asia — including Singapore, where a chunk of The Familiar is set — has to be one of the perks. For now, Hollywood can wait. “At this point, it’d have to be a sit-down with someone talented — if P.T. Anderson wanted to sit and talk about doing House of Leaves, I’d be interested.”

Since he’s so interested in text, I ask Mark if he personally has any tattoos or any thoughts on the subject. “My books are my tattoos,” he answers with a sly smile. There for anyone to gawk at or study.

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Mark Z. Danielewski and author Pierce Brown (Red Rising series) join The Philippine Readers and Writers Festival sponsored by National Book Store and Raffles Makati from Aug. 25-27. Registration for author discussions and book signings starts at 8:30 a.m. at Raffles Makati lobby. Visit www.readersandwritersfestival.com for details.

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