Other books that I enjoy which have extenisive footnotes similar to The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
In my experience, I have read three fictional works with highly extensive footnotes. One of those, of course, is The Mezzanine itself but the other two are books that I find very, very enjoyable (unlike The Mezzanine). In general, I actually appreciate the footnotes as being able to foray into the realm of more obscure tangents without completely detaching from the pacing of the story if you find yourself engaged with the plot at the current moment and let you return to where you were whenever you found it convenient. I, unfortunately, felt like The Mezzanine represented this idea in its embryonic state, not fully developed to the point where it became genuinely useful, but rather as a continuation of the plot which forces you to look down if you want to feel that you are truly reading the book, offering very little in ways of a true break between sections that would allow you to double back and read the footnotes later. While I find this inconvenient, this was one of the earlier works to use this form of extensive, almost encyclopedic footnotes. The usage is also quite different from the other books that I want to talk about, using them as a vehicle to delve into the minute and introspective.
The first book I would like to mention is House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. House of Leaves, unlike The Mezzanine does follow a coherent plot, although many of the footnotes are not much better than the annoyances of The Mezzanine. However, they serve an additional purpose in House of Leaves, which is to switch perspectives between the main narrative and the editors. While many of the footnotes do seem to randomly interrupt the flow of the story, it is necessary to preserve the coherent flow of the story, even as the editor's life crumbles around him, giving a narrative shift without excessive and flow-breaking chapter transitions. When the footnotes do interrupt, it serves as a means to increase the horror of the story as you feel your mind rending itself to try and follow a narrative being split apart and reglued back together at its most jagged seams. The footnotes serve as an eraser that smudges the line between fact and fiction, the completeness and confidence in the footnotes making you question if this is truly a work with no basis in reality/ The work, while vastly different to The Mezzanine in terms of flow, writing style, and subject matter, the influence of boundary-pushing books like Baker's Mezzanine begs the question of what a novel truly is.
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| A visual description of Eschaton from Infinite Jest. |
To conclude, I am a big fan of footnotes. Even though Baker's application was not one I was fond of, I appreciated it as an extension of the narrative style of the story, lending itself well to a stream-of-consciousness work. Footnotes, especially in experimental or unconventional literature can benefit the esoteric types who enjoy reading them, even if they aren't well suited for a standard novel. They make a fantastic literary tool that applies itself in its best form to books that defy the standard.
David, 8/31
This is an interesting extrapolation stemming from one of the key aspects of The Mezzanine that makes it so distinct and memorable, namely, its footnotes, and branching off into other, unrelated articles of literature where the author of this post has seen similar footnotes before. I disagree with your negative assessment of The Mezzanine's footnotes as ultimately "inconvenient" and underdeveloped, as I found that the footnotes added and gave life to the specific mental images and ideas that the Mezzanine conveys, and did not find myself feeling forced to read the footnotes in order to remain properly positioned within the plot and space of the narrative; however, I suspect this may be a matter of personal taste. I personally dislike having footnotes moved to the end of a piece of writing, even if they are unusually long, as footnotes help to sharpen and dilate the main content of the piece, and I believe they may not serve their intended purpose or have as much of an impact upon the writing's delivery if they are moved to the end of a piece where a reader may forget to look at them; however, I do understand and recognize your perspective that the footnotes interfered with the delivery of The Mezzanine.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if you intended this effect or not, but your discussion of the effects of footnotes on the reading experience strongly echoes Baker's way of writing about these experiences, talking about how you feel like you are "truly reading the book" and the ways these interrupting intervals disrupt that experience in an unsatisfying way. (It would be fun to compare your take in this first paragraph to Baker's own very self-referential riff on why HE as a reader LOVES footnotes.)
ReplyDeleteYou're right that DFW in _Infinite Jest_ uses footnotes (actually endnotes in Wallace) quite differently from Baker--and I have been known to flip out when people tell me they're reading _IJ_ but "skipping the notes." I particularly love the three-page note detailing the "Mad Stork's" extensive experimental filmography--and the letter from the insurance company about the workplace accident that reads like a transcription of a slapstick scene from a Buster Keaton movie. But I'd say Baker's more discursive, "I have a bit more to say on this topic, actually" approach to notes is more typical of DFW's nonfiction--like "A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again" or the essay about the Illinois State Fair (often the magazines he was writing for would force him to cut all the notes, but they'd be restored in their full glory for the book-length collections of essays).
And you acknowledge this when you refer to Baker's version as "embryonic," but I do like to point out that he started this stuff, at least in the context of postmodernist fiction, and Wallace and Danielewski followed suit.