I know this is kind of late to be posting about the Mezzanine, but the thought just occurred to me as I was thinking about what to post on this newfangled blog of mine. Anyways, when I first picked up the Mezzanine and began to read it, I was always puzzled by the question of how could Nicholson Baker get so in depth about things that seem so meaningless. By coincidence, my tutor had also mentioned the experiences that he had from his (one-time) usage of drugs, LSD (unless if you count marijuana brownies as drugs, in which case it would be two). One point that I remember he mentioned was why drug users continue to say phrases like "wow" or "oh my god" or just open and close their mouth like a fish. Apparently, everything becomes equally interesting. Our minds desensitizes some irrelevant information like the details in the trees and the shape of the flowers because if we focus on all of the little details, then it would prove to be very detrimental for humans in nature. My tutor said that when he took LSD, it made everything seem equally important and he wasn't able to describe in words what he was seeing.
His description of LSD made me think back to the Mezzanine, and the intricate detail that Nicholson Baker put into the book. Apparently the 80's were a time of drug use panic. In the years before, drug use was popular and relatively more tolerated than today, though not necessarily encouraged. People took LSD and cocaine to get "high" or a sense of euphoria and some even reported to be able to see things that they normally wouldn't be able to and how taking drugs had changed their perspective on the world completely. In the 80's, drug usage had grown to a very large scale, mostly the usage of cocaine which is cheap and extremely addictive, and people were beginning to crack down on the rampant usage of drugs. Public awareness of the harmful side effects of drugs were gradually increasing and politicians were declaring a "war on drugs." I thought it was very interesting that Nicholson Baker published his Mezzanine during this time period when drug usage was so frowned upon. I'm not saying that Nicholson Baker wrote the book with the intention of supporting drugs, but I can't help but wonder why there seems to be a connection between the theme of the book and the effects of drug usage. In both cases, the "main character," Howie or the drug user, finds great interest in mundane stuff that normally people wouldn't pay attention to. This however might be too much of a stretch as it is true that Nicholson Baker wrote the Mezzanine with the intention of letting the readers see into the stream of consciousness within a human mind. I'd like to know what everyone else thinks; am I reading too much into it or perhaps Nicholson Baker did write the Mezzanine fully understanding the environment around him.
In the sense that our experience of time is extremely flexible, and subjective (it flies when we're having fun, drags when we're bored, etc.), and certain psychotropic drugs affect the user's perception of time (as is well documented), it makes sense to compare the novel to a kind of drug experience (safe and legal, at that!). As we discussed in class, Baker doesn't try to reproduce the actual experience of riding the escalator (and everything else), in "real time"--he slows down the pace to an impossibly detailed level, and narrative allows an author to control a reader's experience of time in this way. We get an impossibly packed set of minutes here, and we see reality in a way that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time (again, analogies to how certain drug experiences have been described).
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, I think most people would probably categorize pot brownies as "drugs."
I would say that Nicholson Baker did in fact write the Mezzanine knowing what he was writing about. I say that as Nicholson Baker, in his future writing;his eulogy on Steve Jobs in that one magazine was written in that exact Baker style we saw in the Mezzanine. And i'm pretty sure he wasn't on drugs (lol that just makes me laugh evertime I think about it. I mean not in a negative way, its just funny, cause nobody has ever thought of it that way) when he wrote the eulogy. Its just an idea, but I feel that Nicholson Baker wasn't on drugs although the thought is really possible and also quite amusing!!!
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