Jonas Vansteenkiste

 My sense is that the problem lay not with the house, but with the man’s memory of how to read one. After all, for the girl who lived there it was her home, full of echoes, just as for the other people in the other houses he visited. As the narration continues, Mr. House switches his attention from the man to himself, remarking in a latter passage of inward contemplation: “If I think it true, maybe I left my mother too soon. Or it could have been too late, I’m not sure anymore. You must understand that I live in doubt lately, and I feel defenceless.” These words bring to mind Sigmund Freud’s description of the Mother’s womb: “the former Heim [home] of all human beings… the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.” As such, the former Heim is the origin of home; the primary site of safety and protection to which – like all ‘once upon a time’ places – we can never return, though we may unconsciously harbour feelings of longing, or homesickness, for.

The Mother is also what defines our initial existence within the world; it’s only later, as we enter Lacan’s mirror stage (and with the help of D.W. Winnicott’s Transitional Objects), that the mother-child bond is broken and we acquire a sense of individual self-hood. Mr. House connects his recent sense of uncertainty and disorientation with an early separation from his mother, finally concluding: “Maybe I did leave to soon.” It is only then we learn that it was from his mother that he first heard the story of the man. “I am trying to remember that story,” he adds. Could a house be a Transitional Object? Could a story? Or later (as our mind matures) a concept or idea? Does the man feel displaced, like Mr. House? Perhaps that’s why he goes from home to home; driven by a sense of longing – longing for his own lost home. The origin of Home. The blueprint. The place to which we can never return. Perhaps that’s why he needs his mother’s story. Why he’s trying to remember.

But why the amnesia? In his later work, Martin Heidegger described the state of modern nihilism or anxiety (unheimlichkeit: not-being-at-home) as a form of ‘existential homelessness’ – a contemporary, rather than essential, human condition, brought about by the decline of factors like religion, tradition and community that help give life meaning. Does the character’s inability to read this house mirror a weakening or destabilisation of the home within society? Unlike in previous centuries, we no longer reside in one town or village for most of our lives, let alone under just one roof. Today’s global population is a far less rooted one; forever in transit, whether chosen or imposed.