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Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things (a Moscow-trained Marxist believing in horoscopes), make us laugh. In origin, laughter is thus of the devil's domain. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extent also a beneficent relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness).

The first time an angel heard the devil's laughter, he was dumbfounded. That happened at a feast in a crowded room, where the devil's laughter, which is terribly contagious, spread from one person to another. The angel clearly understood that such laughter was directed against God and against the dignity of his works. He knew that he must react swiftly somehow, but felt weak and defenseless. Unable to come up with anything of his own, he aped his adversary. Opening his mouth, he emitted broken, spasmodic sounds in the higher reaches of his vocal range (a bit like the sound made on the street of a seaside town by Michelle and Gabrielle), but giving them an opposite meaning: whereas the devil's laughter denoted the absurdity of things, the angel on the contrary meant to rejoice over how well ordered, wisely conceived, good, and meaningful everything here below was.

—Milan Kundera "The Book of Laugher and Forgetting"

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I found myself one day reading portions of Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine out loud to whoever passed by my chair—my wife, my son, our new Bichon¹. Here, you have to listen to this. This guy's talking about earplugs:

I used a box or more of them a week, and over the years I had grown found of their recherché placement, implying, which was often true, that hearing was an affliction, a symptom to be cured. The aisle, moreover, was never crowded with pill-studiers, as "headache" was, and all of those nearby boxes of Band-Aids, still trustingly unsealed, with specialized shapes for unusual wounds and the bonus row of miniature strips that adults used even for quite bad finger-cuts, such as you get slicing through a presliced bagel, because they are less ostentatious and self-pitying than the standard size, seemed to be the heart of the whole pharmacy. (108)

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No one laughed at any of my read-alouds. Well, that didn't phase me, that I'm used to. The whole thing is just stupid seemed to be the overriding response. A whole book like that? Such responses led me to wonder where the absurdity originated—in that pharmacy?—in the character's analysis of it?—in Baker's focus upon such seemingly insignificant details?—and/or in my own laughter (and mine alone)?

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The absurdity of the pharmacy. Everything in the world had to be created or designed by someone: shoelaces, staplers, bags, escalators, post-it notes, Polaroids, milk cartons, and pharmacy aisles, labels, and products. So many ideas, minds, energies go in to such a set-up; so much thought. Every set-up—every design—has both an order/rationale behind it and a ridiculousness, the inanity of all that effort for what? Surely there must be something better we can be doing with our world, isn't there?

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The accumulation of details about this very small world contained within the novel makes one realize the enormity of the situation. It's not just in pharmacies, but everywhere. It makes one take notice. In fact, I began to look at the set-up of my classroom² in the same way, looking for those small, telling details which create the world of CLASSROOM. (This attempt sucks, of course, compared to Baker, but you get the picture).

Over the summer, I replaced the blackboard and white chalk with a whiteboard and black marker. I miss the residue of chalk on my fingers, clothes, in the air, on the board itself. White boards leave only a chemical smell, the black against white more like text, giving it a sense of importance lacking with the marker. And the chalk, more like a crayon, a remnant of childhood and its drawings and dust. The whiteboard had no such connotation; its whiteness an echo of the sterility of hospitals and waiting rooms and high school hallways.

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The absurdity of the character's analysis. Anyone's habits and world—given such a close scrutiny—might appear odd. All those things writer are told not to include—you don't want to be talking about a character's brushing his teeth (or tongue) even though he does this every morning and night—come to the forefront. Why? Because the character concerns himself with these aspects of the world. It's easy to forget the world comes filtered to us through this character, each reverie on an aspect our lives feeling disconnected from any specific person.

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I learned this: character's actions make sense within the context of their world. In a world full of this ordered absurdity, does it not make sense to make sense of it?—to imbue it with a meaning that transcends its ordinariness at the same that it exults it? Engage a character in both the Olympian task—ordering the world—and its opposite, reducing the oppressive seriousness of its order. The world is built up and torn down at the same time. That, to me, sounds a profoundly interesting struggle to engage a character in.

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The absurdity of Baker's focus upon seemingly insignificant details. But a whole book about the world's details—as if he were a scientist examining the design within a teaspoon of pond water? It begins like a stand-up act, "Did you ever wonder what the order of a pharmacy meant?" An entire world of meanings and designs have been created by God-knows-who and you willing submit to their meanings, without ever wondering what those are? Yes, you might have thought about the existence of God, but did you ever wonder why you choose those miniature band-aids for the worst of cuts—or why that bagel came pre-sliced³?

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Well, it made me stop whining about my inability to find enough details to include within a scene. A famous analysis of Gulliver's Travels said simply, "The first part is about little people; the second part, big ones." We often overlook the obvious, even though these are the details that might reveal the most about us. As a writer, I often look for the grand gesture, the eccentric detail. Instead, might I find the eccentric within the ordinary. Might my vision penetrate the surface of this world for its strange, embedded meanings and connections?

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I think it could. Maybe something like this:

She winked at me. She was often winking. It closed off on half of the world, the world without me in it (I hoped she wasn't making me disappear). The one eye closed and then opened, always quickly, a metaphor for being in on something: a joke, a secret, a private signal. Except he never felt like an insider; he felt excluded by her winks, surely, though, not her intention.

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The absurdity of my own laughter. Baker's novel made me laugh like none other in recent memory. I particularly loved his list of major advancements in life, three of which involve shoe tying. It's an understated type of humor, one that arises from the way things turn out differently when they enter Baker's consciousness. The world is rendered familiar—we've all been down pharmacy aisles—but also magnified so that we cannot be sure that such a place—full of pill studiers and labels and imbued meanings—truly exists in the world. The humor arises from the intersection of the absurd everyday world and the awareness of its intricacies being brought to light. I attempted to create such laughter, but well, I'm no Nicholson Baker⁴:

Each morning, school announced, "Have a nice day. Or not. It's your choice." As if the pressure to have a nice day was too great. As if everything—grades, scores, getting called freak, thrown against lockers—resided in us. Our choice. Like being born and memorizing the capitol of Portugal..

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Endnotes

¹ I often do this—list three things and make the third one not belong. Sesame Street and Highlights Magazine inculcated mastery of this skill into me. Why was it so important for children to pick out the different one? It's the different one that creates humor, with the similar items as a set-up. It's the third one we laugh at.

² Of course, I didn't really, or at least I didn't until I realized I needed something more here for the post. Writer (I) wonders what said essay might be like if Reader (You) wasn’t there or was someone else (say, my high school English teacher). Is it possible for Writer to write without the need to satisfy the imagined desire of the Reader? Take these footnotes. Did Writer think, "Reader might dig these?" or did he think, "I'd like to add footnotes just as Nicholson Baker did." Is Writer bound to the desires of Reader forever and ever?

³ That the presliced bagel still needs to be separated makes me wonder why they don't just make bagel halves. Well, of course no one wants half a bagel. People have begun selling only muffin tops, but that's because the top's much better than the bottom. One half of a bagel is no better than the other. And the halves must fit together. How will consumers know which half to match? They will forever be left thinking one of these doesn't belong.

⁴ It's important to appear humble, to undercut one's abilities whenever possible. It leads people to say, of such writers, he has self-deprecating charm.