The Name Game

Howie fixates on a lot of little details.  That's what makes Howie Howie.  From the modernist design of staplers to the inefficiencies of air dryers in bathrooms, no object or task is too small for lengthy discourse. Yet there is something seemingly large and important that is almost completely ignored by our observant protagonist of The Mezzanine: the names of people.  It would seem appropriate to discuss names in The Mezzanine, after all, a few letters are often all that represent us on the written page, people judge us for what our name is and how we spell it.  Names have deep roots in culture, reflecting a family history as well as contemporary culture.  It's no coincidence that generations will often have a lot of...Johns or Alices or Stephens...names are shown to go in trends, the more people hear about a name becoming popular the more they use it or a variant.  So why is it that Howie doesn't discuss names, and goes so far as to almost completely ignore them?

Let's take the case of his own name.  Howie, the diminutive form of Howard, is a pretty average name, at least in my own head it doesn't evoke any strong images, if anything the only thing that stands out is how unremarkable it is, neither common nor rare, not specifically from any given culture or time period.  Perhaps Howie doesn't mention his name because it is just that--his name, since it's his story he doesn't need to remind himself of his main character.  I normally don't think of myself in the third person, and if this were a stream of consciousness style book I would have no quibble with only seeing his name once (in the bathroom of all places).  Looking at a different example of a book with a similarly styled first person narration from a somewhat removed version of the narrator who is authoring the story, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield manages to slip his name into the narrative often.  Granted, Holden is more specifically writing to the reader, though Howie clearly talks to us through his footnotes (something Salinger chose never to deploy). Think about how many times in conversation (either in real time or revisiting in your memory) someone says your name.  Maybe not as much as "you" but my bet is that it comes up every now and then, enough that if you were to write to the detail that Howie did, it would probably be included many times.  This would lend to the idea that Howie is intentionally editing out his name in his depiction of his lunch hour.

The other person's name that stands out to me would be L.  In class people brought up that we never really get a description of L., what she looks like, who she is, what she does, we see only fleeting glimpses of her in relation to one of Howie's observatory stories.  Forgive me for going to a different novel for comparison, but I immediately saw the connection to E.C. of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  In that, she is the romantic interest of the protagonist Stephen Dedalus.  E.C. who the reader later finds out is named Emma, has minimal contact with Stephen, with little more actually taking place between the two of them than glances during different scenes.  Emma is one of the key pieces that Stephen fails at during his maturation that ultimately drives him from his native shores of Ireland to seek a new country to achieve his potential.  We don't quite see the same thing from Howie and L., they seem to be in a long term relationship.  Though she is a seemingly large part of his life, perhaps Howie's reluctance to name L. derives from her importance in his mind that ultimately does not fully fit with her place in reality.

So now I will finally attempt an answer to my question initially posed above.  I suggest that it is in response to Aurelius that Howie chooses to ignore names.  "Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spices and ashes."  If we do not live meaningful lives as Aurelius argues, then what in death are we remembered by if not our actions and mannerisms?  Our names.  For millenia humans have carved the names of the dead onto rocks so that if nothing else, that singular description will survive.  Is there any way Howie could have refuted Aurelius more, then by focusing on all the trivialness of mortal life, while ignoring the one thing of relative permanence?    

Here Lies

Here lies the end of my coming of age, and the beginning of my journey in the 20th century.