Consciousness in The Mezannine
Consciousness in The Mezzanine
I’m going to start by likening human consciousness to a tangled mess of yarn. There are strands to grasp at, thousands of colors, and once you follow one line for any amount of time you can no longer be sure you have the same one. As in the image above, this tangle of fleeting impressions, long-forgotten experiences, and passing observations nonetheless informs your view of the world. It takes up the area you use to comprehend the space around you, resulting in muddled confusion. Baker does an excellent job in his novel of not only navigating but imitating these twists and turns in Howie’s brain through his unpredictable footnotes and topical shifts.
The portrayal of Howie’s consciousness in The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker seems very similar to that of actual human beings, based on my experience with my own human consciousness. Baker provides a net, a sort of filter, that allows you to be enveloped in the folds of Howie’s brain and view the world through the tangled nuance he himself sees. Further, in articulating Howie’s thoughts in tremendous detail, Baker demonstrates the importance of stepping back from this fray of consciousness to better observe its inner workings.
What I especially love about Baker’s map of consciousness is his determination to articulate every fleeting glimmer that crosses Howie’s mind in the lunch hour. He then categorizes those notions and pursues them, arranging them into as much order as possible. And in doing so, he creates for us a much deeper understanding of Howie. We are elevated from the level of flares in his head to a birds-eye view of his train of thought. The thoughts are by no means flawlessly organized into distinct piles: that would be impossible with all the nuance and complexity. However, by spooling the notions into footnotes, into paragraphs, Baker gives us a wider, more comprehensive view of Howie’s existence than we would get through a stream-of-consciousness approach of fleeting ideas.
Finally, I think Baker illustrates in his vivid articulation of the fleeting impressions the importance of carefully considering the implications of your own sloppy tangle of conscious yarn. He demonstrates the power of articulating the tangles in writing to explore them. Without periodically placing these yarns in footnotes and expanding what they are, why they exist, what other yarns they interact with, the stream of consciousness might become overwhelming to even you inhabiting it. You may only be able to see a small section at the time, and miss out on all the wonderful connections shivering around every decision you make.
I really liked your post! I think that the analogy of yarn is a really good way to explain all the complicated features of human thought and I thought your point about the tangles was really interesting. There are so many places our minds can wander to after any particular thought and The Mezzanine does a really good job of exploring how thoughts flow through our mind and lead to one another.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I really liked your comparison of consciousness and yarn- that's a great way of explaining it! I also appreciated how Baker would go into more detail in the footnotes. First, it helped to show his character, which seemed almost obsessive in the way that he documented events. However, it also helped to develop him into someone by giving him a past and memories that we could read about. By using such a realistic consciousness, Baker effectively created a true person, instead of just a fleeting character that we would quickly forget.
ReplyDeleteI really like the yarn analogy, it makes a lot of sense in terms of the mezzanine and how Howie thinks. I liked what you said about the footnotes, as they almost seem necessary to continue searching through the yarn without getting lost.
ReplyDeleteI really liked the yarn comparison and thought it added so much detail and reality to what happened in the book and what happens in real life. I think your completely right about the way Baker navigates it. The book seems very well written but there are a lot of different thoughts woven together in the book. In the beginning of reading it did seem like random thoughts but by the end it seemed to fit together and become a larger story. The tangling of the yarn analogy does happen in real life to with our thoughts so I totally agree with the use in the book. Great job!
ReplyDeleteI've never thought about his stream of consciousness this way! Comparing it to a net makes sense, and the yarn analogy made me think of a flow chart. While some of Howie's thoughts seem random and out of the ordinary when first reading them, they make sense if you trace down the flow of the initial thought to the final one. This idea will make me more conscious about thoughts I have in the future and what experience they originate from!
ReplyDeleteI agree, I think Baker does an excellent and unique job of illustrating the human consciousness. I like that you brought up the occasional "zooming out" that Baker includes in the story. We can also see the same thing happen in Mrs Dalloway in the case of Septimus. And like you said it is needed to get a better birds eye view of the character outside of their tangled minds.
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