B & Me by J.C. Hallman

Author:J.C. Hallman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

33

NOW SEEMS LIKE A GOOD TIME TO ASK AN IMPERTINENT QUESTION: What do I know about Nicholson Baker’s penis? A good bit, actually:

The Mezzanine: “Howie” reveals that he had once stolen his mother’s sanitary napkins, punctured them, and then “push[ed] [his] crayon-sized penis through the hole, and urinate[d] into the toilet.” (An earlier footnote makes passing reference to “Howie” ’s “miniature dick.”)

Room Temperature: Mike excitedly tells a dorm-roomful of college girls, Patty among them, that his “genitalia were constructed on a humble scale.”

U and I: Baker revels in the discovery that he has psoriasis, which links him to Updike, but he worries because his affliction is less serious: “Phase 1 involved only the scalp and penis.”

It was opening Vox for the first time that got me thinking about all this. There was no dedication page this time around (“For M. W. B.” appears in very small type in the front matter), and there was no author photo and there wouldn’t be for The Fermata, either. What got me thinking about his penis was that for a couple books now Baker had stopped mentioning Eastman and music in his author’s notes. The author’s note of the first edition of U and I is extremely spare (year of birth, previous books, general location of residence), and Vox’s is about the same though it lists the magazines he’d been writing for and—here was the clue—it specifies that in addition to two novels he had produced “a work of autobiographical criticism entitled U and I.”

Why not “memory criticism” here? It’s odd because even though U and I toys with other names for its technique (“phrase filtration,” “closed book examination”) it’s “memory criticism” that sticks and reappears throughout the book. “Autobiographical criticism” is a phrase never associated with Nicholson Baker before the author’s note of Vox.

What does this have to do with his penis? Well, when I said that U and I was the first book of writerly criticism to have been published in some time, that wasn’t strictly true. Or at least it’s debatable, as the broad range of work that fits into what is, at best, a loosely defined category makes it a difficult history to track. I’d borrowed “creative criticism” from critic J. E. Spingarn, who coined the term in a 1910 essay inspired by a remark from Goethe: “There is a destructive and a creative or constructive criticism.” When Spingarn published the idea in book form—Creative Criticism appeared in 1917, and again in 1931—it caused enough of a stir that H. L. Mencken and T. S. Eliot weighed in, but that was about the end of it. That’s why, in the 1980s, when a number of critics, mostly feminist, grown weary of sublimating their identities to masculine pronoun–rich academic prose, set out for something new, something that would let them emphasize the self rather than stifle it, they called the technique not “creative criticism” but “autobiographical criticism.” (“Confessional criticism,” “personal criticism,” “impressionistic criticism,” “sequestered criticism,” “autocritography,” and “plebeian autobiography” also got bandied about, but “autobiographical criticism” won the day.

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