The Anthropology of Howie's Mind
Some things I recognized, but others were completely unfamiliar to me. I had no idea about the etiquette of men's bathrooms, for example- apparently there's no trash cans and people stand a set distance away from each other? I've never had any kind of corporate job, so it was interesting to see the rules of mindless office small talk as Nicholson Baker presented it. "...etiquette required me to wait until her phone duty was done in order to exchange one last sentence with her, unless the message she was taking was clearly going to go on for more than three minutes, in which case Tina, who knew the conventions well, would release me"(Baker 32). Flirting mechanically or waiting a prescribed amount of time while a secretary is on the phone are both social rules completely irrelevant to my daily life, but it was fun to see how office workers navigate their daily interactions. However, I did relate to trying to sign a card inobtrusively without signing next to the wrong person or making my signature too big. And everyone has done the awkward shuffle of being handed a pen you already have, and going back and forth until someone finally takes the pen. It was also entertaining how Howie scrupulously avoided his coworker Bob Leary on the escalator rather than admit he'd never talked to him before.
Every possible office scenario seemed to have a rigid social script. I can just imagine an anthropologist taking notes from The Mezzanine like "Subject walks close to parking meters before raising his arms at the last second. He pretends to walk like a wind-up toy when alone in an elevator." Because of Howie's obsession with minutiae, you get a great outsider's view of completely ordinary things. Are people supposed to stand or walk on escalators? Why do girls make such a specific face in the mirror when putting on makeup? And why would you put on deodorant fully clothed? This book brings out everyone's inner social scientist.
The specific rules and social contexts that Howie/Baker explicates might be outside of your experience (office politics, men's restrooms), but surely there are many parallel contexts where you constantly follow and reinforce unspoken rules of behavior. I really like this description of Howie as a kind of anthropologist of the late-capitalist urban office setting (something that has become increasingly rare all of a sudden, in the last year, as many offices are working remotely at the moment and some companies are saying they won't go back to in-person office work). And he treats himself, his own habits of mind and behavior, as his prime subject. So this is a neat way to describe his odd kind of detachment when writing about his own experiences.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting observation! Reading the Mezzanine as a sort of ethnography makes a lot of sense; in class, we talked a bit about how The Mezzanine can serve as a time capsule of Howie's life and times, which is all very well, except that Howie himself seems to think of his book as a "memoir." The "memoir" idea is odd in itself because it begs the question of "who cares?" Who cares what some generic office-worker guy thinks about during his lunch hour? You're making the point that The Mezzanine is a bit of both--a literary work that encapsulates the habits and behaviors of the American office worker, as well as detailing the thoughts that are unique to Howie.
ReplyDeleteYeah I agree with what you said. I found a lot of the experiences Howie has in The Mezzanine were really eye-opening and a new perspective to look at everyday actions from. There are a lot of things people normally don't talk about that Howie, or rather Baker, brings light to, which kind of frames the observations differently for the reader.
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