Abstract

Reading the fiction of Nicholson Baker and Walker Percy through the prisms of Kierkegaard and Henri Lefebvre, this paper explores the ways these writers seek to find pleasure, poetry, and insight in the most mundane circumstances. Assuming that the everyday is a legitimate object of philosophical inquiry and reflection, I argue that these writers’ works inhabit a contradiction between the desire to transform the way we perceive everyday life and the desire to transform the character of everyday life itself. With their ability to find poetry in this most unremarkable of moments (moments most writers skip over in order to get to something more epically or emotionally significant), the protagonists in these works oscillate between wanting to escape and embrace everydayness. This is precisely the problem that Kierkegaard and Lefebvre (amongst others) grapple with—to live a life of infinite resignation and to pursue the fundamental mystery and absurdity that is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, or to leverage what Lefebvre calls “moments of presence,” which are “those instants that we would each, according to our own personal criteria, categorize as ‘authentic’ moments that break through the dulling monotony of the ‘taken for granted’” as a way of opening up and changing everydayness into something more liberating. If our being is profoundly tied to the types of practice that generate the space and time we inhabit, these writers and theorists suggest that politics also hinges on the ways we create cultural time and space—the world we walk through everyday without much thinking about it