What it Means to be Human - The Mezzanine
The goal of many literary works has often been to capture what it means exactly to be a living, breathing human. While most fall short, bound to the unspoken laws of convention and plot, The Mezzanine differs from these works by narrowing the majority of its focus to the pure, unfiltered human experience. The first way Baker does this, and the most crucial, is by having the entirety of his book cover a tiny, seemingly insignificant, interval in a perfectly normal day. By focusing the time frame of the book on such a small instance, the thoughts of Howie are magnified a hundredfold, just as thoughts of actual humans sometimes seem to be. Every thought is immediately given more significance; more time to breathe and expand to its full capacity. An example of this is Howie’s thoughts about shoelaces, in which he expresses his pleasure at having both shoelaces break within two days of each other: “Apparently my shoe-tying routine was so unvarying and robotic that over those hundreds of mornings I had inflicted identical levels of wear on both laces. The near simultaneity was very exciting-it made the variables of private life seem suddenly graspable and law-abiding,” (Baker 15). While many other books wouldn’t bother going into depth about such mundane thoughts, Baker leans into these thoughts, just as we do subconsciously in our own lives, intentionally representing what it means to think like a human.
Baker’s purposeful use of a small time interval and magnification of seemingly unimportant thoughts is a good first step to the process of capturing the human experience, but it is only a part of a whole. It is important not only for these random and mundane thoughts to exist, but also for there to be a sense of sentimentality to them. In one of the footnotes, Howie reflects on his tie being on his father’s doorknob: “Later still, when I went home to visit, I swapped a tie with him, and when I visited the following Thanksgiving, I spotted what had been my tie hanging over a doorknob in the midst of all the ties he had bought himself, and it fit right in, it fit right in!” (Baker 28). Howie’s pride around his tie being on display represents why exactly each thought Howie seems so natural and familiar. Howie always leans into the sentimentality of the thought, and its meaning to him in the context of his experiences. Thoughts are never spoken plainly or without emotion or experience. Subjectivity is the essence of every sentence Howie shares with us, with undertones of nostalgia, memory, and relationships underlying each written word. In this regard, Baker humanizes what would be plain matter-of-fact statements that the observant Howie constantly notes to the reader.
Lastly, Baker fully represents what it means to be human through his characterization of Howie. Howie is delicately developed, so much so that the reader barely realizes he is supposed to be a character. While his characterization mainly comes from his thoughts and the underlying subjectivity of those thoughts, his memories, too, complete his character. “Out of habit or a reverence for tradition, we continued to take home delivery, even though the delivered milk often went bad more quickly, after a day in the foyer, unrefrigerated, while my parents worked and my sister and I were at school” (Baker 44). While Baker works to show Howie’s memories, there is no forcefulness in this. It never seems as though Howie’s singular goal is to attempt to describe his memories to another person, but instead it is to mainly summarize them to himself. His personality, his stance as a character is never directly stated, but instead assumed and discovered by the reader, as it is not Howie nor Baker’s intention to present Howie as a character, but instead as a person.
From these three facets, of thought, sentimentality, and humanization, Howie has become complete as a human, as the reader is indeed, not an omniscient presence hovering over every aspect of Howie’s mind, but instead a guest invited for a short time into the unfiltered thoughts and occasional memories that Howie presents to himself. By making Howie a human, and not a character, Baker represents to the reader in a complex and beautiful manner what exactly it means to be human. Even after the story is over, and the book is closed, we continue with our lives as Howie goes on with his own.
Works Cited
Baker, Nicholson. The Mezzanine. Grove Press, 1988.
The potential metaphor of Howie being a human is a tricky concept to grasp because while Baker developed his character he envisioned a human, but the personification of Howie is what truly brings his nature to life. Inviting us into the mind of Howie was a bold move, a prospect for issues even with the consequence of drag, but Baker managed to pull of an engaging text that may even imprint itself on our daily lives.
ReplyDeleteI like this description of the uniquely "human" kind of literary character Howie represents--he feels "real" and authentic as we read, in large part because so much about him and his perceptions reminds us of ourselves, and in particular this aspect of ourselves (fleeting, private, even embarrassing thoughts and anxieties and second-guesses) that we feel like we're seeing reflected in print for the first time. (I can't count how many readers have told me some version of how they had no idea anyone else did that little pantomime of suddenly remembering something you need to do when confronted with the threat of an awkward pass in the hallway until they read Baker's account of Howie chickening out on the escalator!)
ReplyDeleteI would add that, while the novel does offer an extended portrait of what it is to "be human," it specifically documents what it is to be human *in this particular time and place*. The experience of being alive, in other words, will be vastly different depending on your social, historical, and even commercial context. Howie thinks of himself as a very "modern" character, just as people living the corporate life in the 1980s would have thought of themselves as very modern and contemporary. But for readers in 2024, we can't help but reflect how *different* these daily issues and routines are (not necessarily *better* just *different*!) in the age of social media and smartphone and AI. And I'm not at all sure that giving this man access to an iPhone and the internet would be a good idea, at least in terms of his productivity at work!
Your exploration of the notion of "being human" and "living the human experience" made me think of a unique concept that I recently learned about called sonder. While I'm not sure if it's even a real word, it supposedly refers to the realization that everyone is living a life as complex and nuanced as one's own. I think that by effectively mapping out the inner workings of Howie's complex character, Baker is able to induce moments of sonder. The three elements that you highlighted -- thought, sentimentality, and humanization -- bring Howie down to an intimately human level, thus evoking larger considerations about the incomprehensibly convoluted web of interrelated thoughts and experiences of earth's billions of inhabitants.
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