This essay examines the depiction, subversion, and reconfigurations of white masculinity in Mark Z. Danielewski’s postmodern horror novel House of Leaves, with a particular focus on varying thematizations, and performances, of failure. I venture that Will Navidson, photojournalist and protagonist of the novel’s innermost narrative, is construed in reference to a conception of masculine art coded as heroism. In this conception, failure is something to be struggled against even at the peril of mental, physical, and communal wellbeing. However, by juxtaposing Navidson to the foil character Robert Holloway with a hyperbolic display of heroic, individualist masculinity, the novel emphasizes his gradual moving away from such a conception and towards a less masculinist, more comforting, and communal acceptance of failure. In a second step, however, I argue that House of Leaves, through its nested doll structure and repeated references to artistic dramatization, in fact replaces one notion of exploitative masculinity with another, staging the acceptance of failure as the greater heroic feat than the futile confrontation of it. Therefore, it remodels rather than disassembles a white masculinist notion of the creative process which is as contingent on failure to define itself ex negativo as the form it superficially writes against.

Keywords: Danielewski; masculinity; failure; performativity; postmodernism