Anthony Hopkins as Titus Andronicus
What fool hath added water to the sea? – Titus Andronicus
NYT critic Neil Genzlinger shares Titus’ frustration. Genzlinger complains of an overabundance of memoirs, negatively reviewing three memoirs and praising a fourth in his piece the Problem With Memoirs. Genzlinger yearns for a time when, “Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.” He presents three categories of appropriate memoir authorship,
accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment.
Towering works of genius only please.
Now, I haven’t recently read nearly 1,000 pages of memoirs like Genzlinger, but I find his perspective thoroughly wrongheaded. By all means, dislike the memoirs of Heather Havrilesky, Sean Manning, and Allen Shawn, Genzlinger’s a perfect right to do so. But his broader critique on memoir authorship shows an impoverished view on the lives of his fellow (wo)man.
The Gabriel Orozco exhibit at the Tate Modern includes his “Obit Series”, a piece composed of the headlines of New York Times obituaries with names and ages removed. Lives in headlines read as: Psychologist who wrote about self-esteem, Sociologist who studied the supernatural, Nicknamed Dr Strangelove, An Advocate of Mammograms, Wrote Patriotic Chinese Music. These simple four or five word lines are the summations of all those “accomplished” lives. Why exclude the experiences Genzlinger puts down as unworthy? Childhood spent in North Carolina (Havrilesky), son cared for ailing mother (Manning), family grappled with autism (Shawn).
We should be deeply skeptical of a perspective that puts life in a giant ledger totting up experiences and excluding retelling of those who fall below a minimum level of “greatness”. For one thing, our measures of greatness have (rightly) radically shifted, once upon a time only the great and the good deserved to be documented. Their severe portraits adorn the walls of many English stately homes. The (nearly) undocumented lifetimes of their peasant farmers must be painstakingly reconstructed using archaeology. The lives of (noble)men deserve attention, but studying them exclusively leaves a pretty partial account of history.
Genzlinger complains of documenting the usual, Havrilesky writes of “cheerleader tryouts, crummy teenage jobs and, that favorite of oversharers everywhere, the loss of virginity”. To me the word “usual” here is like “normal” or “natural”, its content ephemeral and subject to quite a bit of disagreement. Not everyone will find these topics usual. Havrilesky must present a specific place, a specific time, a specific set of circumstances, all in some senses unrepeatable. Will her usual experiences be the usual experience of those living a decade hence, two decades, three? Think back over decades past, a decade ago was pre-9/11, a decade before that, the USSR still loomed, a decade prior and the computing revolution was in its infancy. The usual from any of these periods may become startlingly unusual in another period; consider the card catalogue, duck and cover to survive nuclear explosions, American unipolarity.
Roman mosaic
(Alexandria National Museum, Richard Beck)
The (pseudo)historian in me clamors for more memoirs – would that everyone were a diarist or memoirist, providing firsthand accounts of the extraordinary and the everyday. Any single life is a weird, windy, fascinating thing with endless layers of causes and effects, chance encounters, startling reversals, “new” discoveries (like sex). As cultural artifacts, memoirs offer a glimpse into this cavernous expanse we call our civilization (even if they’re poorly written).
