Nostalgia? | Exploring Shared Experience in Nicholson Baker's _The Mezzanine_
"Haven't I been here before?"
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Although it's far from beating Mumbo Jumbo on the wackiness scale, Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine is definitely still one of the oddest novels I've come across. After closing the book (or rather, my laptop), as it often tends to be the case when finishing a particularly unconventional piece of literature, I was left mulling over what I had just read. What exactly was I supposed to have gained from this experience?
Most well-written stories will make you feel something after you've finished reading them. It could be relief and fulfillment after an intense adventure. Maybe it's something more solemn, like at the end of a series of books where you finally part ways with the characters you've come to know. Or maybe the book will leave you hanging, with more questions than when you started. To me, this so-called "aftertaste" can be one of the most interesting aspects of a novel, although for some books, it can be hard to tell what exactly the "aftertaste" tastes of. The Mezzanine is certainly one of these books.
If I had to describe the aftertaste of The Mezzanine in one word, it would be “nostalgia”. Maybe it seems like a weird choice, but hear me out. Nostalgia is a big theme in The Mezzanine as we often see Howie reflecting on his past, thumbing through the random assortment of thoughts and observations he’s made throughout his life. He goes on these long, rambling tangents about seemingly boring things like plastic drinking straws or the World Dryer Corporation, giving us these moments of “hey, I’ve thought about that too!” in the process. Arguably, the The Mezzanine's lack of plot and characters makes this exact sense of recognition and shared experience the center of attention, which ends up fostering an unlikely sense of interrelatedness between us and a 1980s office worker in his twenties. By crossing out names, dates, and other identifying information which would make Howie’s thoughts unique to him, Baker preserves the link between us and Howie, allowing his mundane yet relatable experiences to mix with our own.
Not long ago, while I was in the Senior Lounge, a friend of mine randomly went: "did you know that the tiles on the ceiling have holes in them that are arranged in a 20x20 grid?" and left the room soon after. This goes to show that fleeting inconsequential thoughts, like the ones Howie seems to love so much, are a timeless and integral part of human experience. In The Mezzanine, Baker manages to tap into the innate curiosity that exists within us all; because we've all been on an escalator, tied our shoelaces, and made irrelevant observations about meaningless things, it creates a sort of familiarity between us and the "characters" in the book when they have these same experiences.
So when Howie looks back at his life and recalls these moments, his memories flashing upon his inward eye in a warm rush of nostalgia, it elicits a similar response from us. For me at least, as the novel progressed, I began to see more and more of myself reflected in Howie and his lived experiences, the line separating his thoughts and mine continuing to be blurred further and further until eventually, at the very end of the novel, when Howie ceases to exist and all that's left over is the weird amalgam of our consciousnesses, I get a distinct feeling of anemoia: nostalgia for something I've never known.
9/2
Very insightful exploration of nostalgia Josh, particularly in how you connect Howie's simple observations with our own experiences. His internal world and ours are blurred. Baker takes often overlooked moments and transforms these into shared experiences, that as readers, creates a sense of collectiveness. Howie's reflections are essentially another version of ours too.
ReplyDeleteJosh, I find your analysis of the "after taste" left my The Mezzanine as being nostalgic absolutely correct. The way The Mezzanine dives into a world of small details triggers the nostalgia. Many times we remember particular objects by the small details they have that although we may not realize in the moment we subconsciously remember them. Baker revisiting these small details triggers the nostalgia from my experience.
ReplyDeleteThis is an excellent and insightful effort to pin down the unique "aftertaste" that this novel leaves readers with, and I agree that some version of nostalgia--or maybe anemoia is more apt--is a big part of that experience. I am especially interested in this idea because this class is entirely comprised of readers for whom the period of human history being narrated by Baker precedes their birth--you all feel no specific nostalgia for the setting of a corporate office in an American city circa 1985. I have some quite distinct memories of the 1980s, having been a child and teenager in that decade, but I have little experience with the "adult world" of suits and ties and subway commutes and lunch hours that Howie narrates. Readers who are closer to Baker's age--who harbor such memories and associations themselves--will have a quite different reading experience.
ReplyDeleteSo for all of us, this narrative is freezing a moment in time that we don't have specific memories of--and yet I still think there's a kind of nostalgic feeling evoked simply through the ways such a "snapshot" makes visible the inexorable passage of time. We read Howie exploring the vague feelings of nostalgia he has for home delivery of milk--but for me, the idea of a "milkman" coming by the family home and leaving glass bottles of locally produced milk in the foyer is total fiction. And yet there's something about preserving all of these little details about a particular moment in time that evokes the human experience of being all too aware of time's passage. We see how fleeting the seeming "permanence" of the world really is--these people working in what seems to them to be a fully MODERN office space have no idea what's coming in the next decade or so, with the internet, smart phones, AI, etc. We see them as "innocents," occupying their place in the historical timeline just as the characters in Woolf's novel occupy 1923. Clarissa Dalloway is so often alive to "the moment" that she occupies in history--"this day in June, London" etc. And we too can't imagine a time from which our own period will look quaint and old-fashioned.
This was an eye-opening post, Josh. You truly captured the “aftertaste” of the novel. It’s clear how much this book has resonated with you, and you’ve picked up all on so many nuances, even during class discussions. I believe after spending so much time with Howie, it feels as though our thoughts and his start to intertwine, and he becomes a part of us. Even in daily life, we’ll forever have this “Howie voice” that observes and comments on the “little” things. As you mentioned, the line between our minds and his becomes blurred, and his experiences, time period, and town feel very familiar, giving us with a deep sense of nostalgia.
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