What Would Virginia Woolf Think of "The Mezzanine"?
As I was reading the Virginia Woolf essays, I noticed a lot of similarities in the way Virginia Woolf and Nicholson Baker approached writing a novel. Both focus on the seemingly insignificant parts of a person’s life, and delving deeper into character than plot. However, on the surface, I don’t think Woolf would really like The Mezzanine, or see it as a good description of character and human emotions and thoughts.
When you first read The Mezzanine, the beginning doesn’t seem to give you much insight into who Howie really is as a person. The things the book describes sound insignificant and random, and have nothing to do with the character of Howie. I think the first couple of pages could be compared to Hilda Lessways, the book that Woolf dismissed for being too focused on setting and not enough on the character of Hilda. It’s not until further in the book that the character of Howie becomes the main focus of the book. The footnotes tell stories about Howie’s family, his childhood, his relationships with his coworkers, and what’s important to him in life. I think Woolf would really appreciate the details of Howie’s character that come later in the novel.
Another reason I think Virginia Woolf would like The Mezzanine is because of a quote in her essay about Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, where she says, “the writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him something which he recognizes, which therefore stimulates his imagination, and makes him willing to cooperate in the far more difficult business of intimacy” (Woolf). This is exactly what Nicholson Baker does in The Mezzanine. He starts with something basic like ties, and then uses it to tell a personal story about his relationship with his father where you learn more about his character.
Overall, even though I’ve only read a little bit of her writing, I think Woolf would really like The Mezzanine, and might consider Nicholson Baker to be one of the new age writers who pushed the boundaries of novel conventions.
I really liked your post! I thought that the way you connected the Woolf essays to the Mezzanine was really interesting! Even though Baker does focus a lot on the setting, I think that Howie's character is "real" in the way Woolf describes. Like you said, Howie is someone we can relate to and imagine as a real person. He captures the essence of humanity and the way that we think.
ReplyDeleteI agree! It's also interesting how, thinking back to in-class discussions, Howie does not mention anything other than trivial settings around him. Baker doesn't really write about any contemporary issues and how Howie reacts to them, which contrasts with Woolf's literature.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you! I feel like both authors and similar writing styles at some points. I noticed a similarity in Woolf's writing and Baker's during the scene where Peter Walsh is walking along the streets of London. Woolf seems to focus on details that tell us more about Peter's mindset and personality. I wonder if Baker read a lot of Woolf!
ReplyDeleteI agree as well! After now reading Mrs. Dalloway in class, some of the points of similarities that you made make a lot of sense. I do think that both authors use the seemingly insignificant to turn it into something significant and worthwhile to read about.
ReplyDeleteBaker and Woolf both seem interested in depicting the often overlooked aspects of daily life as a human being in a society as a worthy focus for literature, and they both eschew what is usually thought "large" for what is usually thought "small." I've suggested in class that Clarissa Dalloway herself would usually be seen as too "small" to be the center of a novel, and Woolf makes a point of going deeper and deeper with her character with just about every page--"proving" that Clarissa can absolutely carry a novel, with all the other characters revolving around her.
ReplyDeleteBut I can say with some certainty that there are aspects of Baker's work that she would utterly recoil from--Howie gives way *too much information* for Woolf's more refined tastes. In "Modern Fiction," Woolf praises the early chapters of James Joyce's massive experimental narrative _Ulysses_, which had been appearing at the time she wrote the essay (the whole book would be published in 1922). She generally praises Joyce's efforts to depict the mysteries of consciousness, and she sees him as a good example of a Georgian novelist who is moving the form forward into the twentieth century. But elsewhere she compares Joyce with distaste to "an adolescent picking at his pimples," and she particularly objects to a scene in _Ulysses_ where we follow the protagonist into the outhouse, where we get a detailed description of the business he conducts there. Howie's scene in the corporate rest room is chaste by comparison, but if she hated this scene in Joyce, I suspect she'd have felt the same about Howie trying to pee.