Both sides now: why is being confused so great?

“I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down and still somehow

It’s clouds’ illusions I recall

I really don’t “know clouds at all” – Joni Mitchell

As I finalize my final project for this course on the creepy, complicated, massive House of Leaves, I find myself feeling what I don’t get to feel enough: pure excitement at turning the next page. Even though I’m familiar with the text, I want to know when one of my favorite parts will come up and wait in anticipation. I’ve been daydreaming about poring over its endless footnotes and dizzying layout as I finish up work for my other courses. If I haven’t made the point clear, it is not an easy read, especially the first time around – those searching for “something light,” well, all hope abandon. But that density and difficulty is so much of why I really, really cannot get it out of my head.

In large part, the difficulty in the book comes from wondering who to trust and when to trust them: the Navidson Record, the documentary film that comprises most of the novel’s narrative, appears to be made up by an old man named Zampano, who is dead, and who we are only reading from by way of the self-professed unreliable narrator Johnny Truant. Readers also have to contend with the spectre of Johnny’s mother as a potential “author,” alongside the real author himself, Mark Z. Danielewski, who also inserts himself in the narrative strategically (and secretly) just to make sure you can’t be sure of anything. Reading the novel is akin to playing a guessing game and attempting to reconcile contradictory pieces of evidence, with the only conclusion (as far as I can see, anyways) that there is no real, satisfying conclusion; there’s no tidy Formalist answer.

Confusion, or rather the feeling of being confused, is a feeling that I value when it comes to literature. It’s part of why I’m so drawn to Kurt Vonnegut, who thrived so much on paradox and introspection that you’re never really sure how to make sense of his lessons. It’s why I love studying philosophy and in particular metaphysics, because part of arriving at a conclusion is learning the fatal flaws against it, those that threaten to utterly destroy it.

I used to think I liked having the answers, but I’ve realized more through being an English major that that’s not the case at all. The best reading I do is when I think to myself, “I have no fucking clue what’s going on.” Beloved appealed to me, in part, because of the central mystery surrounding the identity of the titular guest at 124. There’s evidence that could point in several different directions, and we as readers cannot settle decisively on one lone possibility without taking a leap of faith or two.

I think that, in the pursuit of high GPAs and well-sourced essays and unpacked metaphors, we forget that we’re all here studying literature not because of the money, but because it’s just so much fun. (I like to joke that I became an English major for book recommendations, but the jury’s out on how much of a joke that really is.) To that end, I hope that I am still finding work to admire and appreciate, work that excites me to write about, work that confuses the hell out of me – and I hope everyone else gets to do the same.