This is the second in a series of five posts. (Part 1).

This is the second of five articles by Bernadette Dahan-Delelis, translated and posted with her permission. The original French versions of the articles can be found at http://zarathousetra.net.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.
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ZaratHOUSEtra

As The Philosopher Nietzsche Once Said

by Bernadette Dahan-Delelis

bdahandelelis@hotmail.fr

translation by Heather Osborne

heather.k.osborne@gmail.com

http://heatherosborne.speculative-fiction.ca

Solitary Spaces: House’s Office, Greg’s Apartment

     Thou lonesome one, thou goest the way to thyself!
     Thus Spake Zarathustra, First Part: The Way Of The Creating One.

     Like I always say, there’s no “I” in “team.”
     There is a “me”, though, if you jumble it up.
     House, “DNR”, Season 1, Episode 9

Whether we consider the character of House as a doctor or as an individual, what most often strikes the spectator is his resolutely solitary nature. Before addressing how such a character functions, an analysis of the spaces in which he evolved can clarify the manner in which he has “become what he is,”¹ at once in his work and in his home.

House works in the heart of a hive, which doesn’t stop him from being alone at its center, isolated in his office, which he shares with no one. As Zarathustra, from time to time, takes refuge on his mountain, to meditate and “[enjoy] his spirit and solitude,”² so House often retreats to his office, a private space where he thinks, not with an eagle and a serpent as his only companions, but with a rubber ball that he bounces interminably in order to concentrate better, and with the whiteboard on which he systematically writes all the symptoms of the disease he is treating. When House gathers his team together, they most often meet in the adjacent outer office, which doesn’t earn its name by chance. House’s space is set apart and personal. His name and title feature prominently on the glass door, and even the least amount of cleaning requires his approval. When the Dean of Medicine, Dr. Cuddy, has House’s blood-soaked carpet replaced after a family member of one of his patients shoots him, House demands that she return his old carpet immediately, on the pretext that it is his office, his carpet, and his blood. “That carpet is part of me,” he says.³ House’s office is an extension of himself, a privileged space dedicated to solitude and reflection. “My office! Where I work, where I think, where I save lives!”⁴ House could not be more clear: in insisting on the ‘I’, repeated three times after the initial ‘my’, he gives proof that he considers his office as the essence of himself and of his function as a doctor. Not just any doctor: a doctor who saves lives, who solves difficult cases, mysteries that no one else is capable of solving, not one of those doctors that House constantly denigrates, all of them barely capable of diagnosing the common cold.

3.04 “Lines in the Sand”

Therefore, what happens when House has the impression that he is being evicted from his own office? Once the old carpet has been pulled up and replaced by a new one, House decrees that he has no space of his own. He sees himself as obligated to squat in others’ places, until such time that he is given back his office and his carpet. This triggers a process of appropriating every new space he visits.

House starts by installing himself in the entrance hall of the hospital. In seconds he has transformed it into his private space. He talks about his patient’s case with his team and makes a point of speaking loudly. Even though what he says only concerns the doctors on his team, it is easily overheard by everyone in the hall. Cuddy finds the situation unacceptable, and she intervenes, asking House if his plan consists of disrupting the entire hospital in order to get his carpet back. House retorts that it’s a devious plan but that he saw it in a James Bond movie, which is his manner of telling Cuddy that yes, that is precisely the idea. And it is one he continues to put it into practice throughout the episode.

In this manner, House invades his friend Wilson’s office. The process of usurpation is put back into action. House finds a horribly tacky knickknack on his friend’s desk and demands what it is. Wilson explains that it was a present that a young patient gave him as a joke; they laughed because they both knew it was hideous. After learning that the patient has since died, House knocks the knickknack into the garbage without a word. This gesture isn’t simply characteristic of a man who despises pity and dismisses it entirely by trashing the gift. He also shows, in this case, his intention to empty Wilson’s office all the items that don’t reflect his own personality. An ugly piece of kitsch with a sentimental story attached has no place in a space that House has decided to invest with his essence. The gift symbolizes Wilson’s primary weakness, according to House: his concern for others. Understandably, the figure of the Nietzschean Solitary would not know how to tolerate the signs of that weakness around him. The scene may appear shocking to the audience who, for the most part, share Wilson’s natural tendency towards sentimentalism. But it reveals the implacable logic in House’s plan: that knickknack had nowhere to go but the trash.

3.04 “Lines In The Sand”

Later, during a second scene in Wilson’s office, it is the Zen garden that gets the same treatment as the young patient’s knickknack. This sand garden was also a present from a former patient and House knows it, since Wilson told him during his first ‘visit’. After pushing the Zen garden, along with everything else on that corner of Wilson’s desk, into the garbage, House sits on his friend’s desk and symbolically invites Cameron to sit next to him. This time, the appropriation is total: House has replaced Wilson’s knickknacks with the work of art represented by Cameron! In the pilot episode, House explained to Cameron why he recruited Foreman (because he had a juvenile record) and Chase (his father made a phone call) and he added that he’d chosen Cameron for her beauty: “I hired you because you look good; it’s like having a nice piece of art in the lobby.”⁵ The appropriation of space was done in two steps: first, the elimination of any trace of the office’s original owner, and second, the introduction of new rules. The audience is only shocked that House didn’t start throwing darts at the posters on Wilson’s walls.

3.04 “Lines In The Sand”

Because House’s power play pits him against Cuddy, he invades her office next. This time, he sits in Cuddy’s desk chair and examines the papers he finds on her desk. Foreman, with whom House is discussing their patient’s problem, is nervous. Twice, Foreman demands if they can leave, but it is clear that House wants a confrontation with Cuddy. He is waiting for her in the position of power in her own office. The confrontation is not long in coming. Cuddy enters her office, or what she believes to be her office, and orders House to drop her files and get out immediately. The countdown she starts doesn’t faze House in the slightest; he continues to talk with Foreman about their patient, as if Cuddy isn’t there. This time, it’s not a matter of throwing out physical items, but the psychological elimination of Cuddy as a person. With Cuddy, House adopts a much more radical method than with Wilson: he goes so far as to ignore her very existence as his superior in order to better take her place. When the telephone rings, House answers it. Cuddy grabs the receiver from him, determined to take back the upper hand in their power struggle, but House tells her, “Take a message.” Completely disconcerted, Cuddy is forced to take the message because the phone call was, indeed, for House. His appropriation of Cuddy’s office was a premeditated act: his team members knew they could reach him in that room! And as House himself remarks, the one thing that might get him out of Cuddy’s office would be his patient’s worsening health. The one thing, because no person could have budged him.

3.04 “Lines In The Sand”

In a less spectacular manner, House appropriates each of the following rooms in turn: the room of the child he is treating, by playing with his patient’s blocks and his video game; the chapel, where he plays the role of an evangelical preacher at the pulpit; and a conference room where he uses the same type of whiteboard that he has in his own office. The principle is the same in each case. The occupied space becomes the exclusive property of the Solitary who cannot tolerate the idea that the values of others might apply to him, on the pretext that he no longer has his own space. Therefore, his home extends to all the places that he decides to inhabit. As Sertorius says in the eponymous play by Pierre Corneille: “Rome is no longer in Rome; she is everywhere that I am.”⁶ The Solitary necessarily becomes the master of the places he occupies. He does as he wishes with the objects and the beings that he finds there. House takes over the spaces the rooms’ usual occupants leave vacant, whether by inclination or by force. In this episode, he demonstrates to Cuddy that he can make the entire hospital into his office if he must, by “Housifying” all the spaces that he wants: he remains a doctor in his doctor friend’s office but changes the decor, he becomes an administrator in Cuddy’s office, a child in his patient’s room, and a preacher in the chapel. Cuddy is forced to concede that she has lost the battle. She folds under his demands and has House’s old carpet retrieved so that House will finally reinstate himself in his real office and stop expanding his sphere of influence. In the end, the Solitary might well have been capable of transforming Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital into House M.D. Hospital!

This theme of usurpation, particularly evident in this episode, reoccurs throughout the series. When House finds himself tracked down by a documentary television crew who want to film his tiniest actions and gestures, he gathers his team in the most improbable locations in the hospital: the MRI room where no metal object, and thus no camera, is permitted to enter; an operating theatre where an operation is in progress; Cuddy’s office, where she complains about his movements and finds herself once again expelled from her own workplace; and the entrance hall. In another episode, “Games,”⁷ House arranges to meet his fellows in the hospital laundry to avoid Foreman, though in vain. Quite a long list could be drawn up of unusual locations where differentials have taken place.

The conclusion that arises is that, even if House attests that his office is a part of him, it is actually the entire hospital that is part of him. He can declare that the laundry or an operating theatre has become his office the moment he can’t use his real office to his satisfaction. The true space of the Solitary, while he is thinking, is his own mental arena. The physical reality is abolished.

Since Nietzsche—much like House—adores metaphors, why not consider that the mountain where Zarathustra took refuge in order to meditate and “feed on [...] knowledge”⁸, is, in the end, this mental space? What characterizes this mountain in Nietzsche’s text? It is contrasted with “marshes,” those places teeming with insignificant beings: “One should not stir up the marsh. One should live on mountains. With blessed nostrils do I again breathe mountain-freedom. Freed at last is my nose from the smell of all human hubbub!”⁹ The mountain is the place, wherever it might be, where one can think quietly because one has complete freedom. House is, in fact, capable of thinking in an operating theatre if he must. The operating surgeons don’t bother him; the cameras hounding him do. There is confirmation of this idea in the second season. Foreman is near death and House wants to do an autopsy on the cadaver of the police officer who transmitted the fatal disease to him. Since Cuddy refused to transport a body that might be contagious, House lays siege to the morgue for hours, hoping that the guard might fall asleep, so that House can get to the corpse. Because he is there, Wilson reproaches him for not being in his office and for wasting his time while Foreman hangs between life and death. House responds: “Only thing I can do is think. I can pretty much do that anywhere.” And he adds: “As long as no one is bugging me.”¹⁰ Wilson takes the hint and leaves without a word. House can even think in a hallway outside the morgue. The physical space that surrounds him has no bearing on his ability to think. The only influences that disturb him are those who might interrupt his train of thought. The small difference from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that might be argued is that, sometimes, House feels the need to think in the company of his ‘disciples’, whom he has chosen and who are not there only to listen to him: they must also push his thought processes forward.

The location where Dr. House works is thus essentially a mental space. But what can be said about the home space that is Gregory House’s apartment?

***

5.10 “Let Them Eat Cake”

Though there are several odd objects on House’s desk, such as an eagle with spread wings¹¹—likely a present from the ephemeral Dr. Samira Terzi who had it on her desk and who piqued” House’s interest from the moment they met¹²—there is not a single photograph. It would be easy to assume that House hopes not to mix his public and his private life. But the explanation is even more simple than that: as he likes to say of himself, House “cleverly has no personal life.”¹³ His apartment is somber and very classical. There are no more photographs there than there are in his office. The baby grand piano and the two magnificent guitars hanging on the wall betray House’s passion for music, but it is a passion that he shares with no one. He always plays alone, never in a group. His apartment represents a place of refuge. He locks himself in when his leg hurts badly. He also locks himself in when Cuddy offers him a plane ticket so that he can take a vacation: he sprawls on his couch, takes Vicodin, and watches television. It’s easy to imagine that he spends all his vacations there, since he threw the airline ticket in the garbage as he entered the apartment.

2.19 “House vs. God”

Who has the right to enter this private space? Not many: Wilson, who has a key, the neighbours whose names House doesn’t even know for poker nights, and the call girls on nights when House is depressed. Wilson, obviously, is thus the only one with true permission to occupy this space. But what happens when, by chance, House doesn’t invite him but is obliged to put him up because Wilson has left his wife and has come asking for House’s hospitality?¹⁴

In truth, House pursues a path not unlike the one he takes when he is “evicted” from his office. He immediately tries to impose his own rules and doesn’t accept any norms from the “outside world,” which is barely tolerated. The Solitary can’t stand the noise of the shower or the sound of the hair-dryer in the morning when he is trying to sleep. He won’t allow the television to be turned to any program but the one he picks, and he imposes that choice without warning:

Wilson: I was watching something!
House: No, you’re about to watch something. I’m watching something. See the difference?

And he chooses a sports program—even though he could have chosen, from the list of his recorded programs, Blackadder, a British television series from the eighties which starred a certain Hugh Laurie…

In the end, after thinking about evicting Wilson after he has lived with him for only a day, House would do anything to keep Wilson as long as possible, since he realizes that Wilson is a wonderful cook and that House can amuse himself at Wilson’s expense. Thus the process of appropriation starts all over again… When Wilson labels a Tupperware container with a post-it that reads “Property of James Wilson, Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted!” containing a meal Wilson has prepared for himself, House doesn’t hesitate to wolf down the contents. And when Wilson’s rental agent calls him at House’s number to offer him an apartment, House erases the message because he has decided to appropriate Wilson himself! A cook in his home who also serves as the butt of his practical jokes: who could ask for more? House dips Wilson’s hand in a bowl of warm water while he is sleeping: Wilson has become his toy. Once again, the audience might feel uneasy watching House’s juvenile behaviour; he is like an disobedient rascal who believes he can get away with anything because no one can control him. House doesn’t hesitate to leap across boundaries, both at work and at home: it is the principle trait of the Solitary who recognizes no law but his own. But the viewer does not feel embarrassed for long, since Wilson starts to fight back. If Cuddy is incapable of putting House in his place, Wilson manages it. In the following episode, he starts by sawing halfway through House’s cane during the night. The next day, the cane breaks and House finds himself on the ground. Wilson gives a “hypothetical” explanation for his fall and the viewer is treated to a rare phenomenon: a true, genuine smile from House. He is quite simply happy to see his friend reacting, refusing to let House get the better of him, and, in short, becoming like him.

2.17 “Safe”

That night, in front of the television, Wilson holds the remote control firmly and says in a calm voice to House that, if he were him, he wouldn’t sit where House is on the couch. House says nothing, takes Wilson’s pillow and places it underneath him, and conscientiously watches the program that Wilson has chosen. Certainly, Wilson has been absorbed by House. He has become like him, has adopted his methods, has accepted the game of pranks, but in exchange, he has earned the right to exist on his own terms as well: he can watch Blackadder if he wants!

At another moment, Wilson’s dog plays the part of the intruder. Wilson is in the middle of a divorce. His ex-wife lives in a tiny apartment, and he himself is living in a hotel, so he asks House to keep his dog. The dog’s name is interesting and prophetic: Wilson’s ex-wife Bonnie named him Hector, or more precisely Hector Does Go Rug, because it is an anagram for Doctor Gregory House, the one who doesn’t know how to contain himself.

What does House make of this intruder? At first, much like he did with his master, House tries to get rid of him. He leaves his bottle of Vicodin open on the floor. The dog gulps half the pills, but he doesn’t die, he just gets high! There’s a reason he shares Gregory House’s name…But at the same time, he’s not Wilson’s dog for nothing, and House takes a second fall because of a faulty cane, this time chewed in half by the dog! So House tries once again to rid himself of Hector by deliberately leaving his apartment door open. When he arrives home, he shouts, in a tone that pretends to be despairing but that poorly hides his hope:

Oh, goodness! I’ve left my door open! My poor dog must’ve run away and been hit by a car or…truck. Or train. Or an anvil.¹⁵

But Hector is still there; only House’s stereo system has disappeared! The next incident is one that House didn’t plot himself. Perhaps without intending to, House slams the door behind him on the dog’s paw, and Hector whimpers. House smiles; he’s gotten his revenge, and from then on, the dog limps, just like House. When Wilson comes to take him back, Hector is gnawing on his stethoscope, which House has given him as a chew toy. House tosses him a pill that Hector catches mid-air. House seems almost disappointed to see the dog leave. Hector is disappointed, too: he turns back to House one last time and then limps away. House then tosses a pill and catches it in his mouth, treating himself just like the “good boy”!

In other words, the dog undergoes the same treatment as his master. He has been transformed into a canine House…he has his name, though an anagram; he gets high on Vicodin; and he limps.

3.21 “Family”

Up until now (the end of season five), there haven’t been any other intruders into House’s apartment, which shows itself to be the catalyst of a most disturbing metamorphosis. House’s apartment is, like his office, an extension of himself. Whoever remains there overlong is Houseified, and every space taken by House as an office is equally transformed. Therefore, we must rethink what House says to Bonnie, who named Hector:

“Hector does go rug” is a lame anagram. You want a better one for “Gregory House”? “Huge ego, sorry.”¹⁶

House is well and truly what Nietzsche called “the lonesomest one”:¹⁷ wherever he finds himself, there is no room for anyone else. His excessive ego that he boasts of, and that permits him to exclude or absorb the people around him—this ego must be alone. Solitude, according to Nietzsche, is a virtue, a quasi-necessity for he who wants to surpass himself. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche develops the idea that “all society makes one somehow, somewhere, or sometime—’commonplace’.”¹⁸ House cannot run that risk. The individual would then endanger the extraordinary doctor. His solitude is thus obligatory, both in his private life (which he claims not to have) and in his profession.

Interestingly, the series which was originally titled House, MD has become, simply, House. It isn’t the doctor as such who interests the public: it is the individual himself and his manner of living who makes him a fascinating character because he “liveth in order to know.”¹⁹

2.15 “Clueless”

Acknowledgements:

Thank you to Heather Osborne for her splendid translation, to Jean-François Vaillant for his ability to always be able to tell me who said what in which episode when I was stuck, and to Gérard Dahan for his pitiless hunt for double spaces and other typographical errors.

Footnotes