This and Thats: Toward an Ethics of Digression
There is a book I can’t escape from, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine. I cite it with such frequency that I’ve almost become disgusted with myself: like Tylenol, I apply it to every aching quandary, despite only reading it once, years ago. The attention it pays to minutia, a reminder of something important, something in danger of being smoothed out. But so, it seems, does everyone else: I hear about this book constantly. Its name is often reported with a slight smile, a wry knowing, a little irony. Digressive books, of which The Mezzanine is one, can come across this way—as much project, or experiment, as novel—in other words, they are often more essay, in all of that form’s traditionally meandering slowness, its inquiry, its showing of the hand, or mind, behind the page. Many people beyond me also love Baker’s mind, and how it can move from investigating whether the US dropped biological weapons on Korea in the fifties to palming his dachshund’s paw on a winter’s day.
(Digression, by my definition, is the movement away from narrative into something else, an essayistic pocket. Formally, digressions might be embedded within paragraphs, or constitute chapters, or lounge in parentheticals, or, as in The Mezzanine, they might live in footnotes, which, as Baker writes, “are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters.” Done digressing, the writer returns to the narrative, continues on. A digression is a detour, with all of that word’s suggestion of delay and scenery. It adds something to the trip, if you are of a mind to appreciate it. Digressions are, “incontestably,” writes Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy, so relentlessly quoted on this, “the sunshine—they are the life, the soul of reading.” Think of Melville, digressing from the whale chase for all of Moby-Dick’s sixtieth chapter, and instead turning to “the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line,” the difference between a hempen rope and something called Manilla rope, the way a length of this rope can spell either sudden doom or whale for an entire cast of men, and then, how “All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever present perils of life.” The whale chase elicits these meditations, which in turn allow for a more meaningful whale chase.)
(I will not be footnoting this essay.)
The Mezzanine came out in 1988, the year of my birth. It’s a slim novel in which a man rides an escalator at work and thinks mostly about shoelace grommets and carpets. The idea is that he progresses almost not at all physically; his mind is the active thing, his thoughts moving from this to that. I think it’s strange to have been hearing about a little project-novel for so long, and I’ve started to suspect that many digressive projects hold this strange, lasting power over readers. Indeed, they’ve inspired a steady drip of essays (this latest in Lit Hub from Mark Haber), each of which, for years now, seems to make the claim that this is revolutionary stuff. The delaying of narrative, the refusal of efficiency! Mark Haber, for one, emphasizes that this flavor of writing is all about love of language—but the appeal, for the digressive writer (and their readers) resides also in the ability to be a smartass. You can riff with only a gentle nod to the plot left behind. And as a reader, it’s flattering to be let in: to understand that the writer is playing with expectations, starving you a bit of plot, feeding you a ton of side dishes instead of a meat and potatoes dinner. Perhaps you find this excruciating and even manipulative. Perhaps you find it charming, and flatter yourself that you’re in on the joke, for these are your sensibilities, too, as someone fed up with centuries of protein and starch.
(I could put something in these parentheticals, to indicate a meta moment, a digression that you can feel in on. But it seems arrogant, this kind of move. Dated, too—like the footnotes might bring to mind the maximalism of a different era: the Mountain Goats, the slightly too-snug t-shirts, the beginning of exposed brick and Edison bulbs.)
Digressors spawn digressors, and Baker, who seems to be a kind, self-effacing, mild man, is especially procreative in this manner. Yes, the danger of Baker—as with Lerner, Dyer, Bernhard—is that they tend to hatch desperate, thankful imitations borne from a sensation of never having encountered anything like this before. “I loved it, and I read it in two sittings,” writes Jordan Castro of The Mezzanine in an essay for The Point, which “would, I intuited, with increasing conviction as it settled into my subconscious, serve as a perfect model for my own writing.” In the same vein, and far predating Castro’s essay on Baker’s influence, J.C. Hallman wrote B & Me (about Baker), influenced by Baker’s U & I (about Updike), in which Hallman writes that he is practicing, partially thanks to Baker’s influence, something he terms “creative criticism,” in which “writers [depict] their minds, their consciousness, as they think about literature”—both tackling a subject and diverting from it. But a review of Hallman’s effort, from Calum Marsh, in the New Republic, gestures at the other place, that such rhapsodic, digressive essayism can land: annoyance. The creative criticism Hallman, is, “as far as I can tell,” writes Marsh, “when a critic discloses what he had for lunch that afternoon or what the cat is up to while he’s hammering away on the keyboard. Of less interest to the creative critic, it seems, are niceties like research and intellectual rigor.” The charge is implicit, and familiar to any writer of essays: navel-gazery.
What is it about Baker, and maybe even The Mezzanine in particular, that seems to inspire, at first glance, the affectation of navel-gazery? See Joel Golby’s essay in Granta on The Mezzanine, which begins with an unending description of the writer’s feelings towards Turkish versus Greek yogurt, employs footnotes, includes many parenthetical stray thoughts, employs a Bakerite or Wallacite acronym (C.O.A.N. for “coming of age novel”) inside one of said footnotes, and culminates with the insight that “reading The Mezzanine (or re-reading: this was my third trip through) quietly convinces you: that every thought you have is deeply profound.” Perhaps The Mezzanine, even though it really isn’t that inward-looking, grants freedom to the inwardly-inclined to trot across the pastures of the personal. The book is lavish with its digressive observations in a way that might give license to certain writers to experiment with their own breathless examinations of the minute, although many of these arguably boil down to a fundamental interest in how they see the world, and less an interest in what the world offers them to consider.
Of course, the charge of navel-gazing is a well-worn label to anyone writing any kind of work inflected with a non-fiction framing. A fear of it poisons digressive attempts—deep-diving into observation feels indulgent, even if we work diligently to diminish the personal dimensions of these observations. Like a rich dessert, digressions are excessive, whim-driven, and unearned, we might worry, just as we might worry about writing personal essays in the first place. The charge feels ever around the corner: who are we to expound, who are we to say our lives are of any interest? But sometimes the navel gazer is actually gazing through their navel and then out through the window. I think of Baker writing the first footnote of The Mezzanine: “I love the constancy of shine on the edges of moving objects.” How simple and plain and unforced, that early digression. How believable for its specificity and its vulnerability (“I love”). It is possible to both use an “I” and not to navel-gaze. It is possible to digress without being self-indulgent. And, in fact, the I is how someone can more easily digress, by seeing something and saying, “I’m reminded of,” “I think about,” “I considered,” “I love,” etc. These personal tags are less self-interested, more… something else. They dare to connect the self, even tangentially, to the world and its many shining pieces.
I suspect that when we charge digressors with navel-gazing, what we are really doing, at least sometimes, is expressing a discomfort with symptoms of a writer’s self-interest, of course, which compels a knee-jerk response to diminish any sense of “specialness” that might underly it—who are they to believe their perspective on yogurt might be different, noteworthy, or educational? Weirdly, Baker enjoys outsider status, despite Monica Lewinsky famously giving a copy of his novel Vox to Bill Clinton, despite being a more than occasional contributor to The New Yorker and Harper’s. Or, consider that Granta reissued The Mezzanine as “part of Granta Editions, a collection of outsider classics.” How outsider can it be, this novel which laid the foundation for Baker’s career, earned him a rave review in the New York Times, and continues to be referenced, again and again and again, in the decades to follow?
Yes, there’s a strange overlap between so-called outsider status and a certain set of digressive writers. The choice to step away from plot, and write instead about rope (Melville), IKEA (Dyer), grommets (Baker), leg hair (Wallace), sexual encounters (Vollman) etc., etc.—there are so many examples, and each one, still, is considered some kind of maverick. We are entranced, sometimes put off, by their choice to fixate. Are these digressive fixations a form of resistance to mainstream expectations, a setting oneself apart from dominant culture? Or are they actually somewhat dominating? Are they expressions of attentive love for the world, or are they in fact screams of retreat?
It depends, I think, on the tone. This reminds me of Knausgaard’s black-and-white portrait gracing the cover of My Struggle, cigarette blooming from the fingers of that outsider king. I carried that book, many years ago, on the subway, acutely aware of the message it sent to read it in public: cool, and intense, and dangerous, the mark of an insider-to-outsider who gripped the literary world, and something like a fifth of Norway, with his unedited essayism, long digressions into the doldrums of childcare and house cleaning. The irony is clear that this self-proclaimed retreat into memory, of course turned him into one of the biggest insiders of literary scene. I remember going to an event he did at the Javits Center, and a young man in the audience standing up and asking, timidly, and with awe, something like Why is it that looking at a tree can suddenly make you feel so much? And I remember Knausgaard not really having an answer, but a sense of quiet understanding came over the audience. (I also remember seeing him perform at Sunny’s, in Red Hook, with his college band, and how they sang a bad cover of “Nightswimming” in Norwegian, and then Knausgaard stalked outside to smoke in a private area still a spectacle through the venue’s windows.)
But we all knew what the starstruck tree guy was talking about: that we are hit, at certain moments on certain days, particularly if we (along with a fifth of Norway, and everyone else) already feel like outsiders, or whatever, by the power of small and mundane things, and that there is an alternately torturous and transcendent feeling, sometimes, in perceiving them. Perhaps it is that there is already a feeling of the rest of the world streaking by these things, and us being able, somehow, to catch them. In Knausgaard’s hands, the personal details are shot through with pain, shame, guilt. In Baker’s, they tend more towards eroticism, joy, wonder (and, more than occasionally, a Quaker-y interest in justice). It is a matter, in other words, of disposition.
When I first read Knausgaard, it was because my grandmother, an avid reader of book reviews and a lifelong reference librarian, knew it was about to be a sensation. It was also from her house that I got the first book I read by Baker—not The Mezzanine, but Double Fold, the one about libraries and microfilm, which sat on my grandmother’s shelf, stuffed with her notes and torn-off pieces of newspaper articles on related subjects, even a bibliography of related titles she had typed up to go with the book. At the time, I remember, I slid her ephemera out from the pages and became immersed in that book, the directness of Baker’s inquiry into something so specific, small and large at once. That book, more than Knausgaard’s, I think, is pure essay, with all of that word’s associated spiralings, breadth, movements, returns-to-professionalism, then detours again. It is Montaigne, de Quincy, Robert Burton, Agnes Varda. It is also an argument, and not a particularly fashionable one, for the preservation of physical text, so full, Baker explains, with discoveries that digitization might obscure or delete.
She would digress endlessly in conversation, my grandmother would, spinning out and out and out in a way I found difficult, painful even, regardless of her inarguable brilliance. I had not yet learned, then, about my own tendency toward this, nor had I begun to wonder if others in the family maybe had it too. Now I see that we all focus all the time on little things and detours. The right word might be “fixations.” Generations of us have gone to the airport at least five hours early, leaving the bulk of our days behind. Our minds have been often commandeered by what ifs, and we’ve followed them into anxiety, away from reality. I remember the texture of the fixations on bedbugs, helmets, sunscreen, movie theaters, airports, so many small pieces of existence that obsessiveness makes large.
As I have grown older, I have felt increasingly ambivalent about this tendency to fixate—unsure if it is, in my case, a retreat from or an embrace of the world. Our minds, generations of them, have not been able to turn off: a total delight and a total, nearly physical, pain. But I have returned to a few lines from an interview with Baker, contemplating the reception to The Mezzanine, and why his narrator Howie is so prone to meditating on small things: “I thought of myself as writing a book that was in some ways light. It was making a point that truth was light. I was puzzled when people would say, This guy’s obsessed. I don’t think of it that way. The book is Howie’s personal anthology of idle thinking.”
If there is an ethics of digression, then I suspect it relates to the style’s tendency to stop, to pause, to delay, to idle —less obsessive-compulsive, and more intentionally resistant to the smoothing-out of the world and the streamlining of the ways by which we notice it. Someone who cannot turn their brain off, who cannot relax, who suffers under the mantle of constant productivity: we must find somewhere (somewhere!) to idle. This impulse is a different animal than Knausgaard’s memory-project. It resists more intentionally the subtle tightening of life as it marches on and becomes further hemmed into a sense of plot. For this is how we stay safe, if we are lucky—we build a clean and clear plot that involves going to college and getting a job and saving money and buying a house and getting married and starting a family and not moving and staying there until we die.
This plot is, of course, antiquated and obviously false and problematic, but it still manages to shape common attitudes toward productivity versus idleness, staying on track versus digressing. But digression, idling, pausing, stuttering, is how our minds, and often our lives, want to work, which is not something that my high school, in East Central Illinois, ever wanted to tell us. It wanted to tell us instead how to run on our tiny horrible PE track, over and over, until we vomited, and it wanted to tell us how to secure an excellent high-paying job, likely in tech. We ran that track, we ran it over and over again. I remember realizing, then, two things: how torturously boring it is for your brain to be stuck in your body while your legs move forward until some asshole with a whistle finally allows you to stop, and how to escape while you wait. You escape, it turns out, by thinking about whatever, but in a focused-idling way, lest you recall the grind of your feet plodding (plotting) along underneath you. You dream in specificity of ice cream sundaes and think to yourself, at length, about how some are served in tall, ribbed glasses, and others in cold metal bowls. Some of them have a slight sense of spoilage to their whipped cream; others have something clearer and cleaner to their dairy. Idle on the maraschino cherry on top of a sundae, and how it might be soft like a bad grape, or it might be taut like a bowling ball. Then there is the spelling of the word, which with just a tweak of a single letter feels so, so different from the day of the week, and the way that that ae is both redolent of a medieval age and of chopped peanuts.
Of course, pondering ice cream sundaes while running around a track is a different form of digression than the written kind, which other people get to evaluate, so it better be somewhat coherent. This is where the gimmick comes in.The writer Matthew J.C. Clark described a phenomenon he termed FCCF: Festival/Conference/Convention/Fair-journalism, in which the writer takes on the carapace of a journalist, enters an FCCF event, lets the carapace fall away. This is prime territory for the digressive writer: David Foster Wallace at the Fair or on the Cruise or at the Convention, Geoff Dyer at the Conference or on the Ship, John Jeremiah Sullivan at the Music Festival, Lauren Oyler on the Cruise or in the Baths, etcetera, etcetera. FCCFs bring together large groups of people to observe, giving the writer (finally) a pointed purpose which they can use to digress away from and back towards. These essays are fundamentally about the self: they look outwards to look inwards. They are (often) not as interested in Baker’s “idle thinking” on grommets and straws as they are in describing a parade of freaks, against which the outsider-writer makes themselves look both very pained, very wry, possibly changed by the experience (“the real spectacle that draws us here is us” – David Foster Wallace, “Ticket to the Fair”).
But there are other, weirder, more interesting ways of digressing, for instance: Clark’s own book, for instance, titled Bjarki, Not Bjarki, which moves forwards and backwards and sideways and into nesting parentheticals, and about which I began our email correspondence after reading it, expressing gratitude that this thing could exist. That he had been steadfast enough to write it so calmly-wildly. Clark’s book, which is loosely about carpentry, both the craft and the niche set of people who work with it, the dissolution of his marriage, and Maine, sparkles with digression, so ubiquitous it quickly takes over the book. Its aim, unlike an FCCF essay, is to teach us to read differently, so that we might learn to catch the fireflies in our minds also. Everywhere are facts and feelings, almost nowhere is exposition, and as a result we get to learn about something called “denim pine”—a fashionable bluish stain caused by an attacking mountain pine beetle—alongside a flash of memory from years ago, a moon beheld in love. It is unclear what is actually a digression and what is not, just as it is indiscernible to the fish of Wallace’s famous speech the wateriness of the water in which it swims. Everything, for this writer, matters.
Is it possible to be this way and not be pained? Just for our own sakes? To be able to hold so much without bowing? I know how my own brain works, and it is no longer dreaming of milkshakes on the track, but it has at times become overwhelmed by how the small things capture its attention, sometimes to the point that I leave the track altogether despite needing a PE credit. It is not always a kaleidoscope of beauty as much as it is submersion into self and self’s worries. I have spent years of my life dreaming, for example, in emails I have sent or need to send. The “this and thats,” as my grandmother used to call her own little and medium and large medical conditions, which she would lump under the “this and thats” category in conversation so as to not digress towards them, to spare you that unending category of (upsetting) experience—the “this and thats” of life can take over, as they did for her. She and I were/are not Knausgaards or Bakers or Clarks, we were/are Schillers, as one family idiom goes, and because we are Schillers, we show up to things five hours early, wait in the car until dinner hosts are ready to have us, make things difficult on ourselves (I am remembering a review of Clark’s book: “I can’t diagnose whether Clark has a proclivity for pain, but he certainly seems to delight in difficulty”). “I wanted my first novel to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers,” Baker once wrote about The Mezzanine, and I recognize in it, yes, a certain tendency to place things in your own way, to make things complicated rather than straightforward. Some of us, I guess, do not choose to be this way, and want to find beauty and joy in it, but don’t always.
I have searched for that ephemera I mentioned earlier—my grandmother’s clippings once sandwiched in that copy of Double Fold, and I have found two pieces of it in the tornado zone that is my office. One is a review in the San Diego Union Tribune from April 15, 2001 (she dated it). The other is a clipped letter to the editor from another, unspecified newspaper, by a man named G. Thomas Tanselle—a foremost Melville scholar—who wrote in to echo Baker’s points around the preservation of physical materials, specifically in the British Library. A friend clearly saved it and left it in her mailbox. Am in a big rush now, my grandmother’s friend wrote on a Post-It note affixed to the top of Tanselle’s letter. Here’s the BL letter. Take care, keep well, + lift up your feet.
Lift up your feet! Gone is the context from which my grandmother’s friend advised her, but I know it anyway, to some extent. Schillers, I hear an aunt, who married in, saying with a trademark disdain. We are a family with foot problems who could talk about those foot problems for, like, hours. Running around a track doesn’t help, not in any sense. An activity like that has never been able to erase our fixations, our pains, our tangential obsessions and detours, nor, especially in the case of my grandmother, a certain magnetic attraction to everything happening in the world. I miss that about her, the frenzy of her interests. Life forces you to do these track-running type of things, and so it’s necessary to find detours—painful and otherwise. Flights of fixation or fancy, hopped onto. It is not always self-indulgent. It can cause great difficulty. But it is generally made of some kind of hopeful effort. Lift up your feet! her friend had written literal decades before I saw it for the first time, although she slid it to my grandmother the same year I was running around that tiny, awful track in East Central Illinois.