As mentioned by Emily in class, The Mezzanine appears to be a book filled with what people are not supposed to write about, subject matter deemed “inappropriate” and “uninteresting.” The book dedicates an entire chapter to a trip to the bathroom and the social encounters there, and contains page-long footnotes focusing on mundane topics such as ice cube trays.
But despite all this, I found The Mezzanine to be, as Howie might say, a very “interesting” book. I believe that part of its success is due to the blending of the two literary conventions discussed in Virginia Woolf’s essays “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and “Modern Fiction.” The Mezzanine is a very materialistic novel, and at first glance appears to be following what Woolf called the “Edwardian” style of the 19th century. But contrary to “Edwardian” convention, the objects discussed are not emblematic of the character.
The literary conventions of the 19th century were materialistic insofar as they described in detail information that was related to a person in some way, such as the style of their house. As mentioned in “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” this was done to “ hypnotize us into the belief that because he has made a house, there must be a person living there.” However in The Mezzanine, the items discussed seem completely unrelated to Howie; they tell us nothing about him.
The explanation for this conundrum is found in the new literary conventions discussed by Virginia Woolf, and summed up in this quote from Mr. Bennett: “The foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else.” The doorknobs and garbage trucks of The Mezzanine tell us nothing about Howie’s life, but his musings about them reveal to us his character, the exploration of which is the purpose of fiction, according to Virginia Woolf.
I agree and believe that Woolfe would have approved of The Mezzanine because of the way Baker was able to give us a fairly complete image of Howie with only a minute of his life. By giving us an small gilmpse into one of Howie's mundane days, one can already be convinced that Howie could live among us in this 21st century. Because of this, I also found The Mezzanine quite, and you and Howie say, "interesting".
ReplyDeleteI'm interested by your statement that the items in The Mezzanine have nothing to do with him. In a sense, the whole point of The Mezzanine is to show that any object you interact with has everything to do with you, as it shapes the "daily fabric" of your life. The most mundane experiences -- say, going to the bathroom -- have more pertinence and bearing on my life than the most exciting, fleeting moments.
ReplyDeleteIt is true that many of the objects that Howie interacts with aren't unique to the plot of his life which is perhaps why The Mezzanine is so successful. The novel contemplates the sentimentality that every person has for mundane objects. Although the every day person does not consciously appreciate as much in life as Howie, everyone can ponder a good looking stop sign, or hairbrush. Your argument that "his musings about [mundane objects] reveal to us his character" is a lot like how we muse over objects ourselves with our inner monologues.
ReplyDeleteThis definitely brings up an interesting question about whether or not Woolf would approve of the Mezzanine. Looking at both of her essays, we can see certain sentences that might lead us to believe that she would hate the book while other sentences indicate the opposite. For example in Modern Fiction, when she is talking about materialists and how they are bad, she writes "materialists, we mean by it that they write of unimportant things; that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring." Here we see how Woolf might call Baker a materialist writer, but then we also see throughout the essays that Woolf loves to have characters be developed and there is no better way to learn about Howie than to be in his head. All in all it would be interesting to find out what Woolf's reaction would be to Baker's Mezzanine.
ReplyDeleteI really really like ur comparison here. It's "interesting" (haha) because in The Mezannine most of Howie's musings ended up defying a lot of literary conventions, yet Baker still managed to conform (unwittingly or not) to the 19th century ideas Woolf critiques in her essays. I also thought your insight about how objects tell us nothing about Howie was good -- I think, though, that the most solid information we got about his "life," as would be considered by the novelists that were the subject of Woolf's essay, came from the things he described. We learned that he worked in an office building, lived in a little apartment, took the subway, etc. all because he had to say those things first in order to focus on little details he picked up within them. Does that make sense? It's like, Baker's writing parallels the 19th century novelists who focused more on the material -- houses, appearance, clothing, but rather than making those things the main plot or focus, Baker uses them as a way to show us Howie's thought process, his brain. It's a really cool concept I hadn't thought of before!! Very nice :-)
ReplyDeleteI agree - although The Mezzanine appears at face value to be a book full of meaningless materialist things, they're all described through the lens of a character. The book is full of the same kind of subjectivity that Virginia Woolf uses in Mrs. Dalloway. It still uses material objects to reveal Howie's character, but it works from the inside out, instead of showing us these things and expecting us to draw our own conclusions about Howie without actually getting into his head.
ReplyDeleteHowie's relationships with material objects might not "tell us about him" in the way that Victorian and Edwardian novelists had in mind when they cataloged a character's "place in life," but I'd argue that every time he's talking about an object (whether one that's highly personal to him, as with the riff on his father's neckties, or one that's fully "public property," as when he's contemplating the escalator) he reveals a lot about himself, not in the narrow Edwardian sense of placing him in terms of economic or social class or education, but in the broader sense of revealing how his mind works, what it's like to be him, and how he relates to the world. He's never *just* talking about the objects themselves; he's talking about how he sees them, what he "loves" about them, how they fit into the rhythms and habits of daily life. (I think I'm saying something very close to what Emily proposes in the previous comment.)
ReplyDelete