Jed Perl's "Impassioned Ferocity" (Part II)

Jed Perl, in his "Impassioned Ferocity" (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2025), says,

Much if not most of what is today thought of as criticism is just nonfiction writing with a distinctive personal voice, attitudes and opinions without any underlying idea. My impression is that among younger nonfiction writers the central focus is on developing that distinctive voice, with less focus on what’s actually said. Janet Malcolm and Dave Hickey, whose work apprentice writers in BA and MFA programs are likely to encounter, are striking essayists who leave you in no doubt as to who they are and what interests them, but neither of them has what I would call an aesthetic position. Malcolm produced a kind of personal reportage, with readers invited and expected to be alert to the sharp edges of her personality. 

No “underlying idea,” no “aesthetic position” – does this describe Janet Malcolm? I’m not concerned with Hickey. I’m not sufficiently familiar with his work to be able to comment on it. But Malcolm is one of my heroes. Her work is one of this blog’s touchstones. Click on her name in the “Labels” section and you will find eighty-four posts that discuss her writing. This post will be the eighty-fifth. 

Malcolm described herself as a deconstructionist. In the Preface to her great 1992 essay collection The Purloined Clinic, she says,

I have chosen the title of one of the pieces, a review of Michael Fried’s Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane, as the title of the collection, because in Fried I recognized another sort of double: a critic whose imagination I found uncannily familiar and congenial, and who caused me to see that I had been thinking like a deconstructionist for a long time without knowing it, like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who discovered that he had been speaking in prose all his life.

Writers aren’t necessarily their own best critics, but, in this case, I think Malcolm was right. She was a deconstructionist. In her brilliant “J’appelle un Chat un Chat” (The New Yorker, April 20, 1987), she reviews an anthology called Dora’s Case: Freud – Hysteria – Feminism (1985), edited by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane. She says,

These new writings—feminist, deconstructive, and Lacanian, for the most part—have a wild playfulness and a sort of sexual sparkle that flicker through their academic patois and give them an extraordinary verve.

Right there, I think, is a glimpse of Malcolm’s governing aesthetic – her delight in analysis that is performed with “extraordinary verve.” It’s a description of her own work. 

Deconstruction is one way into Malcolm’s underlying aesthetic. Another is psychoanalysis. She wrote extensively about it: see, for example, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981) and In the Freud Archives (1984). Like a good psychoanalyst, Malcolm took nothing at face value. “Was the incident like a screen memory that hides a more painful recollection?” she asks in her superb “The Window Washer” (The New Yorker, November 19, 1990). “My arrival in Yalta was marked by an incident that rather dramatically brought into view something that had lain just below my consciousness”: “Travels with Chekhov” (The New Yorker, February 21, 2000). 

She had a psychoanalyst's distrust of narrative:  

We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative. [“Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” The New Yorker, May 3, 2010]

Even her photography writing has a psychoanalytical aspect. In her excellent “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.” (The New Yorker, August 6, 1979), she wrote,

Hare takes the camera’s capacity for aimless vision as his starting point and works with it somewhat the way a psychoanalyst works with free association. He enters the universe of the undesired detail and adopts an expectant attitude, waiting for the cluttered surface to crack and yield an interpretation.

To deconstruction and psychoanalysis, I would add another bedrock aesthetic idea that Malcolm believed in – decontextualization. She not only praised it, she practiced it in her own photography: see Burdock, 2008, in which she says,

What I have done with the burdock leaves is, of course, part of the enterprise of decontextualization that received its awkward name in the late twentieth century and was a fixture of that century’s visual culture. Patchwork quilts hung on the walls of museums, African tribal masks used to decorate orthodontists’ waiting rooms, ship propellers displayed on coffee tables—these are some familiar forms of the practice of taking something from where it belongs and that has a function, and putting it where it doesn’t belong and merely looks beautiful. It looks beautiful in a particular way, to be sure, the way of modernist art and architecture and design. When I remove a burdock leaf from its dusty roadside habitat, I anticipate the stylized aspect it will assume when it is set upright against the clean white walls of my attic studio, its lineaments refined by sunlight coming from above.

I think I’ve said enough to at least cast doubt on Perl’s assertion that Malcolm lacked an “aesthetic position.” Her delight in analysis – deconstruction, psychoanalysis, decontextualization – runs all through her splendid oeuvre.

Credit: The above photo is Janet Malcolm's Burdock No. 1 (2005-07).