In a non-fiction special, The Paris Review talks to the New Yorker’s Janet Malcolm about malice, anger and the importance of noticing small things.
‘Malcolm: Although psychoanalysis has influenced me personally, it has had curiously little influence on my writing. This may be because writers learn from other writers, not from theories. But there are parallels between journalism and clinical psychoanalysis. Both the journalist and the psychoanalyst are connoisseurs of the small, unregarded motions of life. Both pan the surface—yes, surface—for the gold of insight. The metaphor of depth—as in depth psychology—is wrong, as the psychoanalyst Roy Schafer helpfully pointed out. The unconscious is right there on the surface, as in “The Purloined Letter.” Journalism, with its mandate to notice small things, was always congenial to me. I might also have liked being an analyst. But I never would have gotten into medical school, because I couldn’t do math, so it wasn’t an option. I never went to journalism school, either. When I started doing journalism, a degree from a journalism school wasn’t considered necessary. In fact, it was considered a little tacky.
Interviewer: Interesting. I do wonder, though, if psychoanalysis might be somehow involved in your unearthing of the hidden aggressions involved in the writing process. One of the most striking elements of your work is the preoccupation with the relationship between the writer and her subject. In a recent New Yorker piece, you say of journalism that “malice remains its animating impulse.” This type of motive searching seems to me to be somehow connected to the habits of mind we associate with psychoanalysis.
Malcolm: I think you are asking me, in the most tactful way possible, about my own aggression and malice. What can I do but plead guilty? I don’t know whether journalists are more aggressive and malicious than people in other professions. We are certainly not a “helping profession.” If we help anyone, it is ourselves, to what our subjects don’t realize they are letting us take. I am hardly the first writer to have noticed the not-niceness of journalists. Tocqueville wrote about the despicableness of American journalists in Democracy in America. In Henry James’s satiric novel The Reverberator, a wonderful rascally journalist named George M. Flack appears. I am only one of many contributors to this critique. I am also not the only journalist contributor. Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion, for instance, have written on the subject. Of course, being aware of your rascality doesn’t excuse it.’
“Malcolm,” Craig Seligman once said, “found her vocation in not-niceness.” A faintly derogatory, almost excoriating sneer pervades the interview. Read it for yourself if you don’t believe me. Another interview, this time in the Guardian, possesses an equally sour tone. Maurice Sendak might be described as “not nice”. Here’s the standfirst:
‘At 83, children’s author Maurice Sendak is as productive – and angry – as ever. Roald Dahl? Glad he’s dead. The US right? Schnooks. Life? Awful. Emma Brockes gets an earful.”’
And then there’s the nastiest of them all: the ageing enfant terrible of French literature, Michel Houellebecq. The translation into English of his Prix Goncourt winning novel, The Map and the Territory, occasioned Tim Martin to appraise Houellebecq’s reputation:
‘Critics of le phénomène Houellebecq have long sought to draw parallels between the sad-sack males in his novels – exploitative and incapable of love or connection – and the author himself. The figure of Houellebecq in The Map and the Territory provides a golden opportunity to send up this grim prejudice. The figure that greets Jed in southwest Ireland, pronouncing miserably on his “feeble sense of solidarity with the human race” amid a litter of unopened cardboard boxes, scraps of half-eaten charcuterie and red wine spills, resembles “an old, sick tortoise” who “smells bad, but not as bad as a corpse”.
The reality is rather different, though the vigorously private Houellebecq has shown little interest in correcting the record.’
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