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Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm Biography

Writer

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“Fortunately for readers and writers alike, human nature guarantees that willing subjects will never be in short supply. Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day when their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses-- the days of the interviews-- are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.”

JournalismJournalistsThe Journalist And The MurdererJanet Malcom
Book:The Journalist And The Murderer
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“Critics established the right to say whatever they pleased about the dead. It is an absolute power, and the corruption that comes with it, very often, is an atrophy of the moral imagination. They move onto the living because they can no longer feel the difference between the living and the dead. They extend over the living that license to say whatever they please, to ransack their psyche and reinvent them however they please. They stand in front of classes and present this performance as exemplary civilized activity—this utter insensitivity towards other living human beings. Students see the easy power and are enthralled, and begin to outdo their teachers. For a person to be corrupted in that way is to be genuinely corrupted.”

CriticsPosthumousTed Hughes
Book:The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
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“The old are still accorded human rights. The dead, however, lose all rights from the very first second of death. No law protects them any longer from slander, their privacy has ceased to be private; not even the letters written to them by their loved ones, not even the family album left to them by their mothers, nothing, nothing belongs to them any longer.”

PrivacyPosthumous
Book:The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
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“Unlike other relationships that have a purpose beyond themselves and are clearly delineated as such (dentist-patient, lawyer-client, teacher-student), the writer-subject relationship seems to depend for its life on a kind of fuzziness and murkiness, if not utter covertness, of purpose. If everybody put his cards on the table, the game would be over. The journalist must do his work in a kind of deliberately induced state of moral anarchy.”

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Book:The Journalist And The Murderer
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“Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day where their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses — the days of interviews — are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.”

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Author:Janet Malcolm
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“The therapy of psychoanalysis attempts to restore to the neurotic patient the freedom to be uninteresting that he lost somewhere along the way. It proposes to undermine the novelistic structures on which he has constructed his existence, and to destroy the web of elaborate, artful patterns in which he is caught.”

PsychoanalysisPsychoanalystThe Journalist And The MurdererJanet Malcolm
Book:The Journalist And The Murderer
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“But, of course, as everyone knows who has ever heard a piece of gossip, we do not “own” the facts of our lives at all. This ownership passes out of our hands at birth, at the moment we are first observed. The organs of publicity that have proliferated in our time are only an extension and a magnification of society’s fundamental and incorrigible nosiness. Our business is everybody’s business, should anybody wish to make it so. The concept of privacy is a sort of screen to hide the fact that almost none is possible in a social universe. In any struggle between the public’s inviolable right to be diverted and an individual’s wish to be left alone, the public almost always prevails. After we are dead, the pretense that we may somehow be protected against the world’s careless malice is abandoned. The branch of the law that putatively protects our good name against libel and slander withdraws from us indifferently. The dead cannot be libelled or slandered. They are without legal recourse..”

CriticismCriticsPrivacyGossipTed Hughes
Book:The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
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“I have read a little of the material he has sent-- trial transcripts, motions, declarations, affidavits, reports... I know I cannot learn anything about MacDonald's guilt or innocence from this material. It is like looking for proof or disproof of the existence of God in a flower- it all depends on how you read the evidence.”

JournalismThe Journalist And The MurdererJanet MalcomJeffrey Macdonald
Book:The Journalist And The Murderer
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“Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure.”

WayNeedsHumansHandsOrderGivenPleasureMoralityExtremesHypocrisyAgreementAllowingStrictUnspokenHuman NeedsGreaseFallibility
Author:Janet Malcolm
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“Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.”

ThinkingWorldReasonCertainHouseViewsSecretTakenMediumsBiographiesJewelryDrawersDumpedBiographersBurglars
Book:Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath And Ted Hughes
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“The heavy odds against finding the desired... work of art in the mess and flux of life, as opposed to the serene orderliness of imagined reality, give a special tense dazzle and an atmosphere of tour de force to any photographs that succeed in the search.”

GivingArtRealityForceSpecialSucceedFindingsPhotographHeavyMessAtmosphereWorks Of ArtOddsTenseSereneFluxDazzleOrderliness
Book:Diana & Nikon: Essays on Photography
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“[Richard Avedon's] camera dwells on the horrible things that age can do to people's faces - on the flabby flesh, the slack skin, the ugly growths, the puffy eyes, the knotted necks, the aimless wrinkles, the fearful and anxious set of the mouth, the marks left by sickness, madness, alcoholism, and irreversible disappointment.”

PeopleEyeAgeFacesLeftGrowthCan DoMouthsSkinsMadnessMarkCamerasDisappointmentUglyFleshHorribleNecksSicknessAnxiousFearfulAlcoholismWrinklesHorrible ThingsIrreversible
Author:Janet Malcolm
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“The ‘I’ character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the ‘I’ of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the ‘I’ of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic ‘I’ is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.”

WayHas BeensIdeasCharacterFiguresCreationPureArgumentTasksTragedyConnectedInventionJournalismGreekToneMeant To BeCrucialAdsRepresentationAutobiographyObserversChorusEmbodimentNarratorsJournalisticGreek TragedyNarrationKentDispassionate
Author:Janet Malcolm
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“The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.”

SelfWaterShameCleanJournalismBeachJournalistNovelistsGrievingShoreTraitsDominantExposureTremblingPlungeRobesExposingGentlemanly
Author:Janet Malcolm
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