Excerpt from The Business of Memory

From the Introduction by Charles Baxter:

In a review of a recently published book of memoirs, Frank Conroy somewhat irritably notes: "Memoirs to the left of us. Memoirs to the right of us. A blizzard of memoirs good, bad and indifferent." The first implicit metaphor, of memoirs as cannons aimed at the Light Brigade of readers, and the second one, of memoirs as stinging snowflakes in a blinding storm, leave little doubt about Conroy's worries concerning the genre. But it's still a puzzling triad of sentences. What good precipitation could Mr. Conroy possibly have in mind when he uses that adjective and attaches it to the blizzard? Still, he himself has written a grand memoir, Stop-Time, and has therefore contributed to the blizzard in question. Like the rest of us, he too has trafficked in the business of memory.

Cannons, blizzards. Mud slides of memoirs. Readers and critics these days have had strong opinions about the writing of memoirs, and they have not been slow to express them. Feelings run high on this subject, and there has been considerable name-calling in the critical literature. In fact, the metaphors that Frank Conroy has chosen are mild compared to some that have been deployed. Thanks to the work of Christopher Lasch, the word narcissism, for example, appears ubiquitously in discussions of contemporary memoirs. Memoirs by Kathryn Harrison, Frank McCourt, Tobias Wolff, and some of the contributors to the volume you hold in your hand, have created a considerable stir; they have managed to get people excited and upset.

All these attacks upon the memoir boom probably screen a larger issue having to do with the role of memory, both personal and impersonal, in an information age. Memory and subjectivity are inevitably joined here. They have to be. And subjectivity, in many of its forms, is now being contested. You may possess subjectivity, you may even be a subject yourself, but it is sometimes considered to be in bad and somewhat narcissistic taste to say so. Subjectivity leads to self-indulgence and finally to narcissism. Communities are sacrificed for the sake of the self. The public realm dies as everyone turns inward.

Still, not every expression of subjectivity (which has to be understood by means of memory) can be a side effect of narcissism. Furthermore, the business of memory is not just the business of memoir writers. It is also Bill Gate's business. Anyone involved with artificial intelligence and electronic data processing has been touched by it. Memory, to put it another way, has become a profitable if somewhat controversial growth industry. You can now buy more memory at your corner computer store, but only your computer can have it.

You can buy memory enhancers at the vitamin store for yourself-today in a stack of junk mail I received an advertisement that warns, "SENILITY EPIDEMIC— 1 in 5 over 60 Affected!"—but the remedies are expensive and unproven scientifically. The remedy is not as significant, I'm certain, as the fear-of-forgetting that this brochure addresses.

The storage and retrieval of impersonal data and the remembering and forgetting of personal experiences have become linked somehow. And they are both causing excitement and anxiety in the culture at large. The real questions might be phrased in the following way: What is remembered? And why? And how? And why, in the professional-managerial class, has memory become such an obsession?

Copyright © 1999 by Charles Baxter. All rights reserved.