My Thoughts on The Mezzanine: Stream-of-consciousness
I'm Sloane and I have quite a lot of thoughts on The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker: specifically, the character's unique writing style, as displayed through an intricate interweaving of seemingly mundane occurrences (that appear slightly disconnected at first glance) into overarching themes at the end of each chapter. What do I mean by this? To understand how his writing style weaves different components of the narrative together, we must explore his parallels to stream-of-conciousness writing.
While The Mezzanine is definitely not a true depiction of stream-of-conciouness by any means, it draws from certain elements, such as the inner-monologue nature of Howie's mind, and also the long paragraphs and sentences diverging into different thoughts as they develop. I like to imagine it as a tree of ideas, each branching into more and more sections until they accumulate at their own individual points. Traditional stream-of-conciousness will not include punctuation, and tends to cut off trains of thought at abrupt moments, or start new topics in the same manner. In this way, The Mezzanine does this differently by having a real goal to eventually tie subjects together, instead of having them disjointed. Bringing the footnotes into the equation serves an additional purpose: expanding on thoughts that previously were left untouched on, which brings me back to my analogy of the tree branches. This element of footnotes gives The Mezzanine a unique spin on stream-of-conciousness by structuring the thoughts in a less chaotic order, almost as if he's backtracking on thoughts which his mind naturally came back to, after he ran out of content in the main paragraph. Another key part of Howie's narration is his tone. This emotional regulation fluctuates throughout the entire book: in some parts, he expresses grievances and, consequently, his tone escalates. In other parts, he takes on a more contemplative mood and examines the world with a critical attention to detail. This change in tone can often appear to us slowly building as Howie delves into a specific topic.
All in all, I love the way that this book is written. The most interesting climaxes in Howie's internal monologues come from the unexpected, and perhaps even unexpected from Baker as he wrote the book and came up with new details on the spot. I think that the way Howie goes through the process of his thoughts is one of the most important parts of how The Mezzanine works. If it were simply a narration of actions or dialogue, it would not achieve the same goal at all (of tying seemingly unrelated topics into a final analysis of what goes unnoticed in daily life), let alone be the same book. The Mezzanine is what it is because of its disorienting changes in subject, and its tangents that bring us comfort because we know what it's like to have an unending stream of thoughts on something we're passionate about.
This is a really nice account of what I tried to briefly describe in class--how this novel FEELS like stream of consciousness, and MOVES like stream of consciousness, but in fact it is explicitly a *written reconstruction* that only mimics or follows the movements of consciousness. It's true that, if we wanted to, we could map out the structure pretty clearly--the main line of forward-progressing post-lunch escalator ride; the digressions from that escalator ride itself, the flashback to the pre-lunch activities (which have their own digressions), etc. And it's crucial to note what a carefully constructed text this is--the sentences are not only not disjointed and fragmented, the way Joyce's stream of consciousness is. They are long, intricately structured, and always 100% tight in terms of grammar and editing. the footnotes FEEL like spontaneous mind-wanderings, but by definition a footnote is a structurally sound and coherent aspect of a standard essay format. They are "notes" that are *written* by the author and added to the main text. Somehow, this structure makes the digressions seem more logical, more relevant, less "random." Howie is addressing US directly as readers--he invites us to follow his train of thought, whereas the subject of a stream-of-consciousness narrative doesn't know we're there! While this book can at times be uncomfortably candid and private in its self-revelations, we're always aware that Howie is choosing to share this stuff with his readers. Stream of consciousness sometimes feels like "eavesdropping" on a character's mind.
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