The Clean-Background Trick

One of my favorite passages in The Mezzanine is when Howie describes seeing a memorable green garbage truck on his daily commute. We get a neat formulation of Baker’s aesthetic throughout this novel:

The whole thing looked crisply beautiful as I changed lanes to pass it. Right when I suddenly had more blue sky in front of me than green truck, I remembered that when I was little I used to be very interested in the fact that anything, no matter how rough, rusted, dirty, or otherwise discredited it was, looked good if you set it down on a stretch of white cloth, or any kind of clean background. . . . This clean-background trick, which I had come upon when I was eight or so, applied not only to things I owned, such as a group of fossil brachiopods I set against a white shirt cardboard, but also to things in museums: curators arranged geodes, early American eyeglasses, and boot scrapers against black or gray velvet backgrounds because anytime you set some detail of the world off that way, it was able to take on its true stature as an object of attention. (38)

This novel constantly tries to get its readers to see our familiar surroundings in a new light, and this involves a kind of “mental” clean-background trick: Baker “set[s] the escalator to the mezzanine against a clean mental background as something fine and worth my adult time to think about” (39). His narrative is constantly hitting the “pause button” (or extreme slo-mo, or zoom-in), eschewing forward (or upward?) progress in favor of lingering on some idiosyncratic detail. I love the fact that it’s a garbage truck he’s describing as “crisply beautiful” here—the epitome of something we’d ordinarily not look at twice, and something we’d typically not view as “beautiful.” Baker’s language snatches familiar objects and habits from the flow of daily life and “reframes” them, compelling us to consider them anew. We see a framed object differently. This is one good reason why this novel functions as art and not merely as a catalog of trivial data; it doesn’t merely remind us of ice-cube trays, or document their function, it makes us see how they resemble harmonicas. Metaphor alters perception, animating and refreshing familiar reality.

            Again, the important distinction between Baker’s narrative and stream of consciousness needs to be emphasized: in a number of fundamental ways, reading this novel is nothing like the actual experience of riding an escalator, which passes fleetingly, in real time. It’s not exactly that Howie notices more than the average person (although he does have an extraordinary capacity to pursue tenaciously what for many would be a flicker of a thought, quickly abandoned); his narrative style compels and allows us to slow down and notice more as we too become less interested in the “destination” of the story. As always, the author controls the pace of our progress, and Baker is in no hurry to get to the end of this escalator ride. Most people ride escalators to get to the next floor, a means to an end, just as we often read a novel to get to the end of the story, to see how the plot ties together. Baker compels us to treat the escalator and the ride itself as worthy objects of our attention.

            This is essentially what you all will be trying to achieve in your pastiche: whatever you end up choosing to write about, you will submit it to the “clean-background trick”—setting the elements of everyday life apart from their usual purposeful context, against a “clean mental background” that allows you to see them in a new way, to reanimate or defamiliarize them through metaphor, as Baker does throughout The Mezzanine.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with.