"Awww Crap. I still have summer reading to do. There are only a few weeks of summer left. Well, I better get it over with." I open to page 1 of The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. "... undulating outer edge of LP. 1 " "Hmm a footnote, what stupid vocab or explanation do I get to learn about today?" I jump down to the bottom on the page and read "I love the constancy of shine of the edges or moving objects". "What?? This isn't a footnote, there most be something wrong." Weird.
That about sums up exactly what was going on in my head the day I started reading The Mezzanine. It probably sums up the internal conversation everyone had when they first opened this Baker novel. As I continued reading the novel I was shocked at the way the footnotes were used. It was something that Ii had never seen before. It wasn't an editor explain complex concepts or abnormal vocabulary. It was the actual author of the book using them as an opportunity to digress from the actual substance of the book. Baker goes off on these wild tangents ranging from paper vs plastic straws to people's eyebrows (p 97). It was quite entertaining most of the time.
It was nice to have a change of pace for once. Most books just roll right along never pausing to allow time for thought. They just impose a strict plot that follows a linear path of events until the climax. This novel was fun to read because it encouraged digressions and time to think. When I was reading I could space out for 5 minutes just to think about what I read and how I had never thought about/noticed it in my own life. While this change was nice it was also very annoying at times. In addition to the fact that it took forever to read -- because I would space out randomly -- sometimes Howie would rant about stuff that I didn't care about what so ever.
When I started writing my pastiche to demonstrate this same technique in the footnotes I found it really difficult. I made an outline to direct my thoughts and sort of planned out digressions and ideas. However, when I actually started writing I found opportunities for much better digressions that I hadn't intended. This is the sort of tangents that Baker is after. The kind that one can just write about -the kind that just keep going and going- and then have a problem coming to a stop.
I can definitely admit that I had similar experiences with the footnotes in The Mezzanine. After I got over the shock of the first one, I started to notice how much the footnotes were able to capture Baker's train of thought, and I was always interested to see his point of view on the often overlooked quirks of human nature. Most of the time, his insights were quite profound and relatable, but once in a while, as you mentioned, I didn't understand or care about some of the stuff he talked about, especially regarding things that were specific to the 1970s and 80s. While I still very much enjoyed reading it, it is possible that I would have enjoyed it even more if I had read it back when it was published.
ReplyDeleteI felt the same way you and Anshul did about the footnotes in The Mezzanine at first glance. Upon completing the book though, they were some of my favorite passages.Seeing the way Howie views the world made me think a bit deeper about the more mundane things in my life. I had a lot of fun practicing his style of going off on a tangent in my pastiche.
ReplyDeleteIt didn't really work for me to plan out footnotes for the pastiche either; I just sort of threw them in if I either had some interesting little thing to add, or if I felt like doing some more research into a topic. Generally, when writing papers, I often find myself looking things that I'm writing about up or just thinking about them more and going off on tangents, and I thought that footnotes were a really good way to channel this. I felt like that was sort of what Baker did in The Mezzanine as well, as the footnotes with all their information felt less like what Howie would actually have time to think about at the time and more what he would add in as a supplement when he was writing about it later.
ReplyDeleteI too had an interesting experience with footnotes! After a long search to find the Mezzanine in physical form, I concluded that I could not and thus read it electronically. I first read without footnotes--the electronic form hid them, and you had to select the footnote to read it-- but went back and read through the whole thing once I was done (footnotes and all). I agree with you, I was pleasantly surprised by Baker's use of footnotes, they added character, humor, and really added depth to the story.
ReplyDeleteI think the digressions made the book much more interesting to read. In many works of fiction, you just see characters behaving the way they are supposed to, and thinking in such a way that their thoughts aren't taboo. But Howie deviates from that. I think in real life, we could have many verbal footnotes/tangents, but it's hard to try to fictionalize them/put them into writing. You could go on and on and on about something in real life, and not be able to do that in writing because it just doesn't feel natural.
ReplyDeleteWhen first reading The Mezzanine I was definitely in the same boat as you with Baker's footnotes. Prior to my encounter with this novel I was used to the more standard style of footnote where they briefly "explained" something, usually resulting in making the thing being explained even more confusing. However I ended up loving Baker's footnotes and they were definitely my favorite parts of the book.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to compare the experience of reading these Baker footnotes to your experience trying to write in that style: in both cases, there's a feeling of wandering attention, of losing track of where you were. It definitely makes sense not to plot out the footnotes too strictly--there is a "luxuriant" quality in being able to hit "pause" on the main track and just launch into a big "by the way" whenever you want. This is certainly how thought works. I experience it all the time while speaking off the top of my head in class--I try to hit pause on my main sentence and launch into a quick aside, and then when I return to the surface, I can't remember where I was or what I was talking about. Sometimes I don't remember until later in the day! The beauty of writing (and reading?), of course, is that it's a lot easier to keep track of the thread.
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