Memory Criticism

 I don't know why I experience such a shock of recognition every time I read a Nicholson Baker novel. It may be that, in his microscopic observations of human mental processes, he has managed to tell the truth about all-but universal facts of human consciousness that had hitherto escaped notice and gone unrecorded (which is clearly his goal). Or, it may be that he and I are obsessive freaks in exactly the same way, and I just happened to find the books of the one other human being in history who thinks the way I do...

I specifically have in mind his 1991 book about John Updike—U and I, which I was reading last night. And perhaps this is not really a "novel"—it is ostensibly an essay or a piece of literary criticism; but I would class it really as a sequel to Baker's first two books: The Mezzanine and Room Temperature. Like these two volumes, it is really an attempt to chronicle as closely, minutely, and accurately as possible the thought processes of the narrator. Those thought processes just happen in this case to be the ones that occur in his brain as he thinks about and tries to write an essay about John Updike. 

This book is therefore not really about John Updike, except to the extent that he provides an occasion for the further exploration of Baker's technique. Indeed, Baker confesses up front—with his usual thoroughgoing obsessive candor about his mental processes— his insistence on penning "my heart laid bare"—his usual intent, with Robert Lowell, to "say what happened" for real—that he has not even read many of Updike's most famous works. Indeed, my own favorite Updike novel, Roger's Version, appears on Baker's list of the Updike volumes he has barely touched. (Though he is familiar enough with its contents to proffer an entertaining theory at one point that he may have been the model for the socially-insufferable evangelical computer whiz Dale.)

Why presume to write a study of Updike if you haven't even read that much of him? Why do it in 1991 when—as we now know—Updike still had years of productive life ahead of him? Baker obsessively analyzes precisely both these questions; and you may accept his answers if you choose. 

As to the first question, Baker replies: his goal is precisely to freeze and record the impressions at a specific moment in time of a person who cares a lot about Updike's work but hasn't read all of it. Such a goal may not be the most conventional one of the literary essayist—but it is perfectly consistent with Baker's larger project of trying to record facts and states of human mental life that would otherwise never be chronicled. 

Consistent with this project, Baker decides not only that he will dare to put pen to paper before reading the rest of Updike's oeuvre—but indeed, that he will actively avoid reading so much as a single line of Updike while working on the essay. He takes this principle to such extremes that he doesn't even check his half-remembered quotes from Updike's works against the original text (at least not until after he has first written the essay—he then appends corrections in brackets, as I will do here in imitation). 

Baker calls this method "memory criticism" (though he also includes a long digression explaining why he hopes no one will lift this phrase out of his book and turn it into a literary term of art—a hope I am now betraying, with this post). 

And it is merely one of several places in the book where—as I say—I recognize my own obsessions reflected back to me. After all, I too practice a kind of "memory criticism" on this blog; though I did not coin the term for it. 

Indeed, I'm practicing it right now. I'm telling myself I'm not allowed to refer back to Baker's volume until I've finished writing this reflection on it; because 1) the very challenge and game of the thing is to see how accurately and thoroughly I can remember Baker's argument without opening the book again; and 2) I'm deeply afraid that, if I did open the book again, I would be overwhelmed with other data points that I would feel the need to incorporate into this blog, but which would derail my fundamental purpose. 

The memory, after all, acts as a great strainer. Baker uses a line from Updike about the "vast dying sea" of half-forgotten books and poetry as his image for the fact that we irrevocably lose any recollection of most of what we've read in the past. And while this great literary amnesia is indeed tragic, it helps to prevent us from being overwhelmed by a mass of detail. We can boil down the things we've read to the handful of lines and observations that we find personally useful. 

If memory did not winnow down, after all, and I still wanted to write this reflection and appreciation of Baker's book, then I would end up having to pull a Pierre Menard and write the whole thing over again here. I wouldn't be able to select what had and had not stayed with me from it.  

My general experience, from more than a decade now of blogging, is that I always have too many things to say, rather than too few. As a result, I have learned that, as soon as I have an idea for a post, I need to scrupulously avoid seeing any further data points that could complicate the already-bloated thing I have to say. Therefore, like Baker, I can scarcely imagine wanting to research a post. To the contrary, I must be meticulous in conducting a kind of anti-research. I must avoid all further knowledge of my subject, in order to write about it. 

Suppose I have just seen a news article about something appalling that Trump did. Suppose it suddenly connects through my neural circuitry with a literary quote or two, plus a personal anecdote. I then have the three legs of the stool of a Six Foot Turkey post right there. I need to hasten to write it down. If I don't do this soon, I run the risk of seeing some other news story or commentary on the same thing that forces me to revise what I've written, or (as Baker describes) that dampens my enthusiasm for the observation, because it suddenly seems less original. 

So Baker, in order to write about Updike, must avoid reading any more Updike than he has already. And I, in order to write this reminiscence of Baker's book, must avoid opening its pages again (at least until I've already drafted the piece, at which point I am allowed to check my work). 

I wasn't always this way. When I first started writing this blog, I would scrupulously look up the text of a passage before referring to it in print. Indeed, I often still have to do this with prose—my memory is not good enough to hold whole paragraphs of Erich Fromm or Gustave Le Bon or Elias Canetti or whoever in my head. 

But at a certain point, I became paranoid that people would assume I had merely googled the quotes in advance, with the occasion in mind, and that I was using them to create a spurious impression of erudition to which I was not really entitled. 

Now, this is such a bizarre obsessive compulsive paranoia to suffer from that I would probably never have copped to it, if Baker had not gone there first. But he admits, in this book, to his own kindred paranoia: the fear, in his case, that—every time he drops an impressive piece of vocabulary—some cruel and invidious reader may think to themselves: "he probably just got that out of a Thesaurus." 

Baker therefore notes that, in order to prove this hypothetical carping critic wrong, in his own mind, he must avoid all Thesauri while writing—unless it is for the limited purpose of reassuring himself that the impressive vocab word he just came up with is not in fact readily accessible in one, so that the carping critic must be cheated of his quarry. 

And so, I developed similar methods to avoid the hypothetical accusation of simply fishing my oh-so-apropos literary quotations from some online "Bartlett's" or kindred repository (to this day, I have never opened a Bartlett's and never will, for precisely these reasons). I started to provide some context from the surrounding work, to ensure people knew that I had read the quote as part of the body of the entire piece, and that I had not retrieved it from an excerpt somewhere. I also started adding in little autobiographical flourishes—like "which I was reading last night," which I added above to explain why I know the contents of Baker's U and I first-hand—so that people would know exactly how it came about that I have ready access to such an incredibly on-point piece of literature. 

But eventually, I realized that there was no way to silence the paranoia on this score fully. After all, the hypothetical cruel and invidious reader could simply assume that I was lying about all this. They could assume that whatever online Bartlett's I had been using must have provided "context" in order to enable phony would-be eggheads to pull off exactly this sort of ruse. 

And now, of course—with the dawning of generative AI—there is simply no way to prove anything to anyone ever again. No one will know for certain that I wrote this myself, instead of asking a chatbot to write a blog post in the style of Joshua Leach reflecting on Nicholson Baker. 

And so, I eventually decided to do what every sane and non-compulsive person would have done from the start: to not worry about it. I realized that the true victory is that I know that I found these literary quotes through my own autodidactic erudition, and not through any online cheating—just as Baker can rest content with the knowledge that he actually did think of esoteric vocabulary words like "florilegia" on his own, without the aid of a Thesaurus. 

But of course, the inward carping critic is never done. And worse still: the inner carping critic is sometimes externalized. I recently sent a post on this blog to a friend. I was very proud of the fact that, in watching the 2024 Vice Presidential debate, I had remembered a line from Joseph de Maistre that perfectly encapsulated a particular cynical rhetorical move that J.D. Vance attempted. I wrote a blog making the comparison and sent it over, certain that I would be applauded for my powers of recall. 

Thankfully, my friend did not doubt that I had actually read Maistre (which I have). But he found a new way to foster my paranoia. You see, I had made the mistake of previously describing to him another blog post earlier in the year, in which I had also discussed Maistre's Considerations on France. And so, my friend accused me of simply getting mileage out of the same book over and over again. And so, what appeared to the uninitiated as proof of my supreme erudition had now become—in my friend's eyes—a mere "hack." The trick had been revealed, so far as he was concerned. 

Baker nurses this same fear with respect to his vocabulary, he tells us. It may be the case, he acknowledges, that people will not be so crass as to accuse him of simply cheating with a Thesaurus. But even if they grant him that he knew the word from his prior reading, and is simply that smart and well-educated—he then has to fear the risk of using the same word more than once. Because if he does so, people will assume that words like "florilegia" may be part of a set of "favored freaks," in Baker's words (a phrase I remembered without looking it up; see, I'm following the rules!), rather than evidence of a well-stocked cornucopia of inner vocabulary resources. 

My friend, after all, was basically saying that Maistre had been revealed—not as a sign of my wide reading and knowledge—but as simply one of my "favored freaks." I therefore realized all over again that I must work relentlessly not only to quote from things in the most apropos circumstances—but that I also have to be ever-vigilant in constantly varying my quotations. Baker, reasoning along similar lines, devotes a portion of his book to explaining his attempts to avoid repetition. 

To a large extent, I have simply had to give up on this goal. There have been long stretches this past year in which I've averaged roughly a blog post a day, after all. I simply do not have enough literary quotes to supply that many pieces without some repeats creeping in. Plus, if I truly forbade myself the privilege of repetition, then I would face the dilemma of having squandered too early a quotation from D.H. Lawrence or Edna St. Vincent Millay, say, long before an even more perfectly apropos moment asserted itself. 

So now, I just give in to the temptation. I've probably quoted that "Latter-Day Sinners" poem from D.H. Lawrence fifty times, by this point. Is it my fault that the world keeps furnishing seemingly ever-more apt occasions for its use? 

But if I accept that I will simply never please the carping critics—whether inner or external—then who is this blog for? Who am I trying to impress or please? Well, the obvious answer is: myself. All I'm really trying to do, with my retrievals of literary quotes, is to prove to my own satisfaction that my powers are undiminished. That's the joy I seek on this blog, every time I pull out a line from Hugh MacDiarmid or A.E. Housman and realize how well it fits. I'm looking for that thrill of self-complacency: that feeling of: "I've still got it!"

But if that is my purpose in writing, then you can see that here is yet another reason to practice "memory criticism." If I go back and look up the quotation every time, after all, rather than pulling it from memory—then I am in some sense cheating. And I therefore fail to persuade the one audience that counts—myself—that I truly still possess the encyclopedic literary knowledge that I am trying to reassure myself I still have. 

And so I play certain games with my own memory. I set it little challenges: like, see if you can write a whole blog post about that Byron poem without going back to look any of it up. I am therefore forced, by the terms of the game, to rely exclusively on scraps I can bring up by recall, or paraphrase from the poem's general ideas, when the specific words elude me. 

And then, after I've written the posts, I am allowed to go back and check my recollection against the original—though I'm often more attached to the way I remember the line going than to how it actually reads (Baker similarly notes, at one point, that he finds his misquotations to be worth preserving, as revealing in their own right). [Baker's actual quote: "In most cases I regretfully corrected my misquotations—regretfully because my errors of memory where themselves of mild scientific interest to me."]

Now, as noted above, I often simply can't remember prose well enough to play this game. If I want to retrieve something more than a phrase, I have to go back and look up the passage. When this is forced on me by necessity, I will permit it; and I will simply have to reassure myself that at least I remembered the thrust of the passage well enough to see how it would fit into what I was writing. 

But suppose, in going back to look up the passage, my eye should happen to alight on some surrounding text that makes my point even better than the passage I had dimly remembered. Am I allowed to use the text then? 

Baker addresses precisely this difficulty. What is one to do if, while ostensibly practicing "memory criticism," one happens to accidentally see a passage from the author that proves one's point and substantiates one's argument? May one sneak it in—even though one was not really entitled to cite it, because one did not really remember it on one's own, according to the rules of memory criticism? [What Baker actually says on this subject: "I had to stave off the intense desire to bolster the argument with other quotations I encountered along the way."]

Baker roughly concludes: yes, one may use it; but only if you explain exactly what happened, and record in detail one's own violation of the rules. [Baker says that it is to be allowed so long as "there [i]s a way to include a confession of this very lapse."]

And so, in that spirit, I offer two instances in which I have faced precisely this dilemma. Here, as accurately as possible, is how I recall it playing out. 

Example 1: Doris Lessing. 

I was writing a post a while back about how Trump's fellow Republicans practice a kind of "if only the little father knew" self-deception with respect to the czar of their party. After all, many of Trump's actions are indefensible and/or completely incompatible with Republican orthodoxy. Yet, according to the doctrines of the MAGA cult that the GOP has become, Trump can do no wrong. How to resolve the paradox? The only way out of the ideological impasse is to say: Trump is still right, but his wicked advisors are all wrong. This is how people have reconciled the infallibility of the absolute monarch with the patent mistakes and injustices of his government through the ages. The king must be right; but the advisors led him astray. 

One of the examples I had just seen in the news at the time: after Trump had publicly encouraged Vladimir Putin to "do whatever he wants" to U.S. treaty allies, Senate Republicans scrambled to figure out how to somehow criticize the statement without criticizing the Dear Leader who made it. Senator Tillis came up with the best one, I thought: "Shame on his briefers!" Tillis said. 

Now, I knew that there was a quote from Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook that I wanted to cite to describe this phenomenon. I remembered that the narrator at one point says something—in describing her disillusionment with the Communist Party after Khrushchev's  "secret speech"—about how strange it is that "everyone has this need for the Great Man," and how they keep believing such a man exists, no matter how obvious his crimes and follies become. 

I found the passage in The Golden Notebook. But I saw, in hastily re-reading it, that it also included something that was even more on point to the argument I was making. Because not only does the protagonist make this observation about the need for the "Great Man"; another character in the same scene also says something along the lines of "if only the little father knew." That is, she says something like: "Maybe Stalin never knew about all the terrible things that were happening." Maybe, that is to say, it was just his wicked advisors all along. "Shame on Stalin's briefers," as Tillis might say. 

Now, having found this even more apropos quote, while trying to look up a slightly less apropos quote—was I then entitled to use it? Or would that violate the rules of memory criticism? 

I decided I could use the passage—it was too good to pass up. But I didn't feel good about it. It felt slightly like I was practicing a fraud on myself. 

The only thing I could say in partial exculpation was that perhaps I had been drawn back to that "Great Man" passage because I remembered subconsciously that it contained the other even more apropos quote. 

Example 2: this one occurred even more recently. On that dark night of the soul when the 2024 election results came in, I was awake at 3 in the morning and felt the need to write down some of my thoughts. I was trying to talk about how I would not succumb to despair, because that would be to hand Trump a spiritual victory, in addition to the electoral one he had just achieved at all our expense. 

I remembered a phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins that captured my mood: "now done darkness." I dropped it into the piece, just as I recalled it (following the rules of memory criticism). But, after finishing the piece, I allowed myself to check my work—again, as the rules permit.

I went over to Hopkins's poem, "No worst there is none," since that's where I thought the line came from. But, to my perplexity, I did not find it there. Instead, it turned out it came from a different Hopkins poem (but that is also about his struggles with clinical depression), "Carrion Comfort." 

And in re-reading "Carrion Comfort," I discovered that it made precisely the point I had just been trying to make in the blog—the point about not succumbing to despair. I mean, the piece literally starts with something like: "Not, I will not, carrion comfort—Despair—not feast on thee" or something like that (I'm quoting from memory now, see). 

So the old dilemma immediately arose: was I allowed to use this oh-so-apropos line, even though I had not remembered it on my own? But wouldn't it be cheating to quote it, as if I had just recalled it? Wouldn't that be committing exactly the kind of hack that I had foresworn, in my inner struggles to prove all the carping invidious critics wrong? 

I decided to quote it anyway. 

Because that's the beautiful thing about writing this blog that is really just for me. I can set the rules. But I can also break them whenever they cease to be a worthy challenge and become a mere inconvenience.