Re: The Mezzanine
James Mulholland (jsm5q@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU)
Tue, 25 Feb 1997 19:04:48 -0500
Just about what everyone has been saying in class, generally, I still found
the most interesting thing about the book to be the way familiar objects
were made so strange by the obsessive amount of detail and attention paid to
them, and the way we use/think about them. These things are all
predominantly commodities, but Howie has certainly personalized some sort of
relationship to them all. Learning to tie his shoelaces has extraordinary
signifigance for him, and though I'm still not sure how Howie has positioned
himself in terms of commodity culture (there is a reference on p. 54 to him
thinking he wasn't the "man" he wanted to be) it still seems like the
signification of all these objects are profound and personal, and that it is
precisely Howie, rather than say jingles or advertising, that has imbued
these objects with memory and signifigance, which seems somewhat hopeful to
me. At the same time, there is clearly a certain amount of naivete or even
stupidity that is difficult to ignore in Howie. He seems pathetic, and I
think there is something to be said about evoking such a reaction (such as
"well who the fuck do you think you are anyway?"), but still he doesn't pay
any attention to what these commodities may mean, or how he feels about
their production, which is the typical Marxist trope for ignorance about
what really happens in the world of commodities, meaning those shoelaces he
loves so much has made some corporation rich (this seems to be something
that Carter was saying when he talked about there being no movement in the
book). Howie feels a personal relationship to something that everybody else
owns as well, and it seems to me that the problem with Mezzanine is how, and
why, we can or do feel this way about things that everyone else can and may
own as well, and how these things still have personal signifigance to us,
and whether we like this condition or not anyway. It does seem to be a
problem that Howie has a less than critical relationship to these things, or
maybe he does have a problem, or maybe it doesn't matter at all.
James