Category Archives: Books

As Nicholson Baker nears the end of his novel The Mezzanine, his narrator begins talking about Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. We learn he has begun to read this book because of “a glowing mention in William Edward Hartpole Lecky’s History of European Morals (which I had been attracted to, browsing in the library one Saturday, by the ambitious title and the luxurious incidentalism of the footnotes).” And here Baker inserts a footnote. This footnote starts off with anecdotes from Lecky’s book and modulates into a discussion of footnotes themselves. This is the sentence with which the footnote ends:

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

I’m not entirely sure if that’s a brilliant sentence or a terrible one. Maybe it’s brilliant in its awfulness. But I love the idea that footnotes connect the book to the rest of the library, to a wider reality.

But back to the beginning — Baker’s narrator repeats a couple of the anecdotes from Lecky’s book, one of which tells us that Spinoza “liked to entertain himself by dropping flies into spiders’ webs, enjoying the resultant battle so much that he occasionally burst out laughing.” The narrator considers why such side notes, such digressions are so much fun, and in doing so, he quotes Boswell on Samuel Johnson:

Upon this tour, when journeying, he [Johnson] wore boots, and a very wide brown cloth great coat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio dictionary; and he carried in his hand a large English oak stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particulars. Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing.

The narrator goes on, and here we get to the heart of his footnote on footnotes:

Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a tough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of “ibid.s’s” and “compare’s” and “see’s” that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one’s mind. They knew the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, a gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom.

At the risk of boring you, here’s a bit more:

Digression — a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument — is sometimes the only way to be thorough, and footnotes are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters. And yet the MLA Style Sheet I owned in college warned against lengthy, “essay-like” footnotes. Were they nuts? Where is scholarship going? (They have removed this blemish in later editions.)

This whole book is an illustration of what Baker means by “luxurious incidentalism”; we find this in his footnotes, but we also find it in the text itself, which wanders from topic to topic as the narrator’s mind wanders on his lunch break. I begin to wonder, not how Baker could write 135 pages about one morning, but how he could capture the whole morning in a mere 135 pages.

Footnotes on one’s own thinking interest me. How does one decide what belongs in the main text and what belongs in a footnote, especially when the main text is itself already very digressive? To footnote someone else’s text I understand, and to footnote one’s own scholarly work with further details and explanations and documentations I understand, but to footnote a record of one’s own thoughts, a record that is by no means smooth and sequential to begin with and is already full of footnote-like digressions — that shows just how complicated it is to try to capture what goes on in a mind. If the “outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph,” then neither is the “outer surface” of the mind.

I’m curious about this because the book ends with two endings, two climaxes, one in the main text and one in a footnote. The ending in the main text is quite simple: the narrator makes it to the top of the escalator. The footnote ending is about the resolution of the shoelace dilemma (what, exactly, wears them down and causes them to snap?) After researching the question exhaustively, the narrator finds a 1984 volume of World Textile Abstracts, with the following entry by the Polish researcher Z. Czaplicki:

Two mechanical devices for testing the abrasion resistance and knot slippage performance of shoe laces are described and investigated. Polish standards are discussed.

Here is the narrator’s response:

I let out a small cry and slapped by hand down on the page. The joy I felt maybe difficult for some to understand. Here was a man, Z. Czaplicki, who had to know! He was not going to abandon the problem with some sigh about complexity and human limitation after a minute’s thought, as I had, and go to lunch — he was going to make the problem his life’s work … A great man! I left the library relieved. Progress was being made. Someone was looking into the problem. Mr. Czaplicki, in Poland, would take it from there.

He doesn’t discover what makes shoelaces wear out, but there is somebody out there just as fascinated by the question as he is. The footnote ending shadows the main text ending, but in a way it is more important than the main text ending. The footnote ending points the reader out of the novel, out of the narrator’s mind, out to the world; it is an example of those “finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.”

I finished The Mezzanine last night and loved it. If you’ve ever been tempted to read Nicholson Baker but haven’t yet, or even if you’ve never been tempted, I’d say give him a try. This is one sort of book I love very much — a non-traditional narrative that’s more about thoughts and ideas than about plot. It’s the kind of book where the narrator’s personality makes or breaks it; it’s all about voice. If the voice is good, it doesn’t matter what the subject is. It’s a novel that’s closer to the essay than it is to more traditional novels.

The subject of this book, that I say doesn’t matter so much? Let’s see. The main events include riding an escalator, contemplating why the two shoelaces on a pair of shoes snapped within a short time of each other, shopping at CVS, eating a cookie and milk, talking to work colleagues, and visiting the bathroom. The book describes the escalator ride from the vantage point of a few years afterward, and it moves backward from the escalator ride to describe the morning at work which precedes it and the lunch break which the ride brings to an end.

But these things aren’t really the subjects of the book. The real subjects are the way the narrator’s mind works and his enthusiasm for the little details of modern life. This enthusiasm is boundless. When the second shoelace snaps shortly after the first one did, the narrator sets off on a quest to discover how shoelaces wear out. Is it because of the stress caused by pulling the laces tight when he ties them? Or is it the wear on the laces caused by the slight friction of lace against shoe every time he takes a step?

Now that I think about it, I realize that there are a number of more traditional narratives and genres that the book plays with, one being the quest narrative. While a quest to discover why shoelaces wear and break might seem small, what this narrator is really after is knowledge of those details that shape our day-to-day lives that most of us don’t even notice, much less understand. He’s showing that those details matter — they are our lives, after all. We are surrounded by things we don’t understand, things we use without knowing where they came from or how they got to us, or how they function and why they break. He wants to dig those details out and examine them and understand them.

He also wants to understand the way the mind works. In one passage, he considers the “periodicity of regularly returning thoughts,” the number of times he thinks of a particular thing a year. If he can study and chart this, he can understand his mental life much better; without this study, he has only a vague impression of what thoughts he actually devotes his energy to. He realizes how complicated such an endeavor would be, but he makes a chart with his best estimates, a chart that occupies a couple pages of text, and tells us that he thought about how “people are very dissimilar” about 16 times a year, and about how “people are very similar” about 12 times a year. And he thinks about staplers 7 times a year and escalator invention 12 times.

This sounds rather Proustian, doesn’t it?

Some of these thoughts are inspired by Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, a book the narrator carries with him on his lunch break. Here is another traditional form Baker draws on, for his own book could be called meditations — meditations on the world the narrator has found himself in. He never reads very much of Aurelius’s Meditations, but he has it with him because he fell in love with one line he came across by chance while looking at the book in the bookstore. Here’s the line:

Manifestly, no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!

The narrator’s response to the line is this:

Wo! I loved the slight awkwardness and archaism of the sentence, full of phrases that never come naturally to people’s lips now but once had: “condition of life,” “so well adapted for,” “chance finds you,” as well as the unexpected but apt rush to an exclamation point at the end. But mainly I thought that the statement was extraordinarily true and that if I bought that book and learned how to act upon that single sentence I would be led into elaborate realms of understanding, even as I continued to do, outwardly, exactly as I had done, going to work, going to lunch, going home, talking to L. on the phone or having her over for the night.

And that, you could say, is the book in a nutshell, from the enthusiasm in that opening “Wo!” to the list of things that make up an ordinary day at the passage’s end, to the idea in the passage’s middle that one can live an ordinary life profoundly.

And lest you think this book is all seriousness, let me say it’s hilariously funny, and I often laughed out loud as I read. The bathroom scene — generally I’m not big on bathroom humor, but that bathroom scene — ah, just read it.

I haven’t even gotten to the footnotes yet, but perhaps I’ll come back to them tomorrow. I must talk about the footnote on footnotes and the footnotes on the resolution of the shoelace conundrum. It’s a very moving passage, something I never thought I’d say about a passage on shoelaces.

I have recently come across a beautiful passage from Proust on the relationship of art and life. It is a passage on Vinteuil’s sonata, the famous sonata from which comes the “little phrase” that was so important to Swann as he fell in love with Odette. Now it’s the narrator who is thinking about its significance.

This is what he thinks: upon encountering a new work of art — “new” meaning something recent that departs from established methods and schools — we can’t understand it immediately. We don’t have the background to make sense of it; it seems foreign and chaotic, and maybe ugly. We can’t analyze it — break it into parts — because we can’t get a grasp of the entire thing in order to understand its structure. When we do begin to appreciate the new work of art, we don’t appreciate the right things:

Not only does one not immediately discern a work of rare quality; but even within such a work, as happened to me with the Vinteuil sonata, it is always the least precious parts that one notices first.

When we finally understand the work more fully, those things we valued at the beginning of the process, we have now forgotten. And here is his conclusion:

Because it was only in successive stages that I could love what the sonata brought to me, I was never able to possess it in its entirely — it was an image of life.

If we were to possess life entirely, it would have to be from the perspective of death, wouldn’t it? Otherwise, we are always changing and so can’t possess a thing in flux. But because we are changing constantly, our understanding of art is constantly changing, so we can’t possess the work of art either. Art isn’t so much a way of getting life to stand still as it is a way of charting its movement.

Proust elaborates:

But the great works of art are also less of a disappointment than life, in that their best parts do not come first. In the Vinteuil sonata, the beauties one discovers soonest are also those which pall soonest, a double effect with a single cause: they are the parts that most resemble other works, with which one is already familiar. But when those parts have receded, we can still be captivated by another phrase, which, because its shape was too novel to let our mind see anything there but confusion, had been made undetectable and kept intact; and the phrase we passed by every day unawares, the phrase which had withheld itself, which by the sheet power of its own beauty had become invisible and remained unknown to us, is the one that comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave. We shall love it longer than the others, because we took longer to love it.

I like what this says about art; I’m not sure I like what it says about life. About art, this tells me that some of the greatest pleasures to be had are those I have to wait and work for. It tells me, as I think about my post from a couple days ago, that pleasure and effort and patience are not opposed. If I stick with a difficult and bewildering work of art, it will begin to reveal beauties to me.

About life, Proust implies that the best parts come first, that we have the greatest access to beauty when we are young. I’m not sure I like this because I find it depressing, and also because I’m not sure it’s true. Perhaps we have more intense experiences of life when we are young — perhaps — but surely the nature of one’s experiences become deeper and more complex. Surely there is beauty in life that witholds itself until we have been patient long enough to see it revealed.

I reached my goal for the weekend: I finished Dracula, and what fun it was! The ending is very tense and exciting. And so now my rather lame RIP challenge is finished, only one book, and it’s not even October yet. I have time to read more RIP books if I like. We’ll see.

I thought the book was good in a number of ways, most of all, perhaps, because it was a great story. It’s a relatively long novel, but Stoker kept the tension high throughout. He’s fabulous at creating the frightening, eerie mood that this novel absolutely must have. The parts that take place in Transylvania — at the beginning and the end — are the most exciting and atmospheric, but the middle parts in England maintain the momentum.

The book is also good in ways Stoker might or might not have intended: it strikes me as the perfect late 19C novel (1897), reflecting so precisely so many of the period’s preoccupations. It’s about the too-thin veneer of order and rationality that we sometimes think is all of life, and how easily this gets ripped away to reveal the chaos and irrationality beneath. The book is full of train time tables and business accounts, signs of an orderly society at work, but order and rationality are at war with the supernatural. Nice, neat categories such as “alive” and “dead” are disturbed and forced to make room for the “undead” vampire. Up until the very end, the time tables are there, symbols of “civilization,” weapons the characters must wield against Count Dracula, whose powers and actions defy the rules that generally govern humanity.

The book is also about very weird and disturbing gender dynamics, and it’s obsessed with sexuality. You have the typical Victorian bifurcated view of women: Lucy, for example, the innocent, beautiful, sexually-attractive-but-pure, soon-to-be wife and angel of the house at first, who then transforms into a lustful, aggressive, evil vampire who must be killed. The issue is complicated, however, because while the men in the novel insist that Mina, the other main female character, remain out of their planning to destroy Dracula, they soon learn that Mina is precisely the one they need to track him down. It’s her good memory for those train tables and her forceful logical thought that save them in the end. The women in this novel are either perfectly pure or perfectly corrupt, but it is a woman who employs the stereotypically male power of logic to deduce Dracula’s whereabouts at a crucial moment in the story.

And Stoker has way too much fun playing around with images of sucking people’s blood and blood transfusions and exchanges of blood as thinly veiled sex acts. Sexuality is equated with vampirism, showing how a fear of and obsession with sex underlie Victorian staidness. Sex haunts the book, just as do a fear of the supernatural and of death.

I think Dracula belongs to the class of book which is at least as interesting for the ways it reveals something about the culture it came out of as it is for its story and characters. Any book will reveal something about its time and place of origin, but some books sum up what’s characteristic of its time and place so well that that becomes one of the chief pleasures of reading it. This novel is quite like The Monk and The Castle of Otranto in the way they all are often a bit sloppy and sometimes unintentially hilarious (well, maybe this is intentional?) but very good and interesting nonetheless, because of the energy and pleasure that obviously went into the writing and also because of the way they so perfectly speak to their times.

This book certainly has its flaws: I wished Stoker hadn’t bothered with the accents, especially Van Helsing’s, which is horribly distracting, and, like the accent of a bad actor, comes and goes. And not only are the gender stereotypes pervasive, but the national stereotypes are as well. The American character, Quincy Morris, made me laugh; he was from Texas, of course! and was rather cowboy-like. And the farther east the characters traveled across Europe, the more “primitive” and superstitious and irrational the natives became. But the book was just too much fun to let its flaws get to me.

If you’ve read Dracula before and are looking to read it again at some point, I highly recommend this edition. It’s not good for a first-time read (as mine was) because the footnotes are very intrusive and give away parts of the story early on, but it’s excellent for a re-reading. The footnotes are thorough and very funny in places; you can see my delighted posts on them here and here. They are the footnotes of a book-lover as well as a scholar, and they make good reading in and of themselves.

One of the things I’m enjoying in my Proust reading is the way he captures the waywardness of the mind and emotions, the manner in which a person can feel one thing in one moment and then the opposite in the next. He describes the contrariness of emotion and desire so excruciatingly well; I recognize my own shifts and variations and inconsistencies in Proust’s characters.

Towards the beginning of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, the narrator talks a lot about his desire to be a writer and his confidence, or lack of confidence, in his ability to write. And his feelings change constantly. When the narrator’s father says about the narrator’s desire to write that “The main thing is to enjoy what one does in life. He’s not a child anymore, he knows what he likes, he’s probably not going to change, he’s old enough to know what’ll make him happy in life,” he has a strange response. He knows he should be happy because his father had wanted him to be a diplomat, and now, instead, he’s getting permission from his father to do what he’s dreamed of — be a writer. But instead:

On this occasion, much as an author, to whom his own conceptions seem to have little value because he cannot think of them as separate from himself, may be alarmed at seeing his publishers putting themselves to the trouble of selecting an appropriate paper for them and setting them in a typeface that he may think too fine, I began to doubt whether my desire to write was a thing of sufficient importance for my father to lavish such kindness upon it.

Now that his father is taking his desire to be a writer seriously, he’s not so sure that he’s worthy of it. And this proclamation from his father makes him nervous for other reasons; his father’s statement that he’s old enough to know what he likes and that he won’t change has made him realize that his life has truly begun. He is no longer on the threshold of life, full of possibility, but instead is already living, and, what’s worse, his life may not change all that much. Isn’t it often true that when we finally get the thing we’ve been longing for, we realize it’s a disappointment, or that we didn’t really want it, or that getting what we want just creates a whole new set of problems?

Near the above passage, Proust offers another example of the inconsistency of our minds and emotions:

Think of the travelers who are uplifted by the general beauty of a journey they have just completed, although during it their main impression, day after day, was that it was a chore.

He talks about the “promiscuity of the ideas that lurk within us.” Isn’t that a great way to describe what living in one’s mind is like? It’s true for me, certainly. That example of the traveler works particularly well for me, because I’m reminded of my backpacking trips, which I have fond memories of, many great memories, and yet when I try hard to remember what each moment actually felt like when I was backpacking, I have to admit that it was a lot of pain, misery, boredom, and unhappiness.

So which is it? Are my backpacking trips wonderful or terrible? Does the narrator want to be a writer or not? The answer depends on the moment you are asking the question.  postCountTB(’11