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Janet Malcolm; An Amateur Newspaper

Long time readers might remember that I was on an episode of Better Read Than Dead last spring to talk about Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and The Murderer. Since then (and since Malcolm’s death this summer), I put together some of the wider reading I’d done for a long essay in Majuscule. Check that out here.

If you only want a sample right now, below is part of a tweet thread I did outlining the essay’s argument. You can click through for the whole thing. If you check out the essay itself (please!), I’d love to hear what you think!

Sebastian Stockman @substockman

I've been reading Janet Malcolm's books and thinking hard about her work for the better part of a year, so I'm really glad to have worked out some portion of that thinking @MajusculeLit.

majusculelit.comFreud, Facts, and Folly - MajusculeJanet Malcolm on the Uncertainty Beat Turtle Bay, Midtown Manhattan. A Sunday in June, the early 1980s. Robert Gottlieb comes home from the flea market and wanders into his backyard garden. The publishing icon finds his family where he expects them, at lunch in the adjoining backyard garden of Janet…

Sebastian Stockman @substockman

she lets her main character have his say — about 20,000-words worth in a pretty slim volume, and he sues her over five lines that she doesn't have substantial-enough documentation for (including one in which he calls himself "an intellectual gigolo").

Sebastian Stockman @substockman

That leads to a 10-year lawsuit (eventually resolved in Malcolm's favor), that definitely besmirched her reputation and did not particularly endear her to her colleagues, and that was before her most-famous line:

Sebastian Stockman @substockman

"Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to know what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."

Sebastian Stockman @substockman

OK, so Malcolm writing a book about a subject suing a journalist while she herself is a journalist being sued by a subject seems... Freudian, right? Incredibly, she told Katie Roiphe in the @parisreview that psychoanalysis had had little influence on her work.

Sebastian Stockman @substockman

Psychoanalysis — a full course of which she'd undergone (which we learn from Robert Gottlieb's memoir), and a subject about which she'd written two books and a dozen or so other pieces — had had no influence on her work.

Sebastian Stockman @substockman

But forget it at as a subject. My thesis (such as it is) is that psychoanalysis — especially after The Journalist and the Murderer and her own decade-long ordeal at trial — undergirded her own unique approach to journalism.

Sebastian Stockman @substockman

Malcolm is like the analysts in FREUD ARCHIVES who shrug at Masson's "Don't you care what happened?" What matters is not what happened but what subjects make of what happened. How their story of what happened informs what they're doing now and what they're going to do next.

Sebastian Stockman @substockman

This is, in part, what kept her going back to trials. Another area which she correctly identified as an operation not in truth-seeking but as a forum for competing narratives.

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A Saturday Letter has been on hiatus while the semester ended and I worked on the Malcolm essay. But that doesn’t mean the Stockman Publishing Conglomerate has been dormant:

Sebastian Stockman @substockman

The 8-yo has produced a newspaper this morning. The front page is something called “punk zone” and something else called “Ike’s most wanted.” Both features appear to consist of “mug shots” of his friends and their siblings.

The back page, as I note in that tweet thread, is taken up by a comic strip based on a video game popular in our house. The comic is called “The Murderer of Among Us.” You can click through to the thread if you’d like to see it, but it’s too violent to include in a family newsletter.

But, in case you thought this rag was just another purveyor of fake news:

Slogan really gives “Fair and Balanced” a run for its money.

And, like all newspapers, it’s desperate to maintain its circulation:

A bargain