Janet Malcolm's Chekhovian Ambiguity

I’m pleased to see that my favorite New York Times critic, Dwight Garner, has chosen Janet Malcolm’s Iphigenia in Forest Hills as one of his “top ten” books of the year (see “Dwight Garner’s Picks for 2011,” The New York Times Sunday Book Review, December 11, 2011). A substantial portion of the book appeared in The New Yorker (May 3, 2010). In his piece, Garner says:

Ms. Malcolm’s book, set in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, casts a prickly moral and intellectual spell. It’s about a young woman, accused of murdering her husband, who seems to be plainly guilty. Yet she wins the author’s, and our, sympathies. Ms. Malcolm puts her book’s animating enigma this way: “She couldn’t have done it, and she must have done it.” This book has the eerie elegance of a Chekhov short story.

That “eerie elegance of a Chekhov short story” is brilliant! Geoffrey O’Brien, in his illuminating review of Iphigenia in Forest Hills (“The Trial,” The New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011), also notes Malcolm’s Chekhovian approach to her subject. He quotes a statement made by Judge Robert Hanophy during Mazoltuv Borukhova’s trial (“Somebody’s life was taken, somebody’s arrested, they’re indicted, they’re tried and they’re convicted. That’s all this is”), which Malcolm uses as an epigraph to introduce the book, and says:

In opposition to this cut-and-dried dismissal of any residual impulse to probe deeper, she juxtaposes the words of a prospective, ultimately unselected juror: “Everything is ambiguous in life except in court” – an observation of a sort in which Malcolm’s books abound, posted like warning signs to the reader to beware of the astringent clarity of each separate element as it come sinto view. We want the elements to add up to a satisfying and coherent story. But as Anton Chekhov wrote – in a letter quoted by Malcolm in Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (2001) – responding to a reader who had complained of the writer’s having evaded a proper explanation of his protagonist’s motives: “We shall not play the charlatan, and we will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything.”

In support of O’Brien’s point, I would also refer to Malcolm’s description of the psychologist Igor Davidson, one of the few compassionate figures in the book:

Davidson introduced an element into the hearing that had been entirely absent from it: ambiguity. Alone among the participants, Davidson spoke as if he were in touch with life as it exists outside the courtroom, where everything isn’t always this or that, but can be both.

V. S. Pritchett, in his review of The Letters of Anton Chekhov (“A Doctor,” included in Pritchett’s 1979 essay collection The Myth Makers), quotes from a letter that Chekhov wrote to his friend and editor, Alexei Suvorin, attacking him for the anti-Semitic articles Suvorin published at the time of the Dreyfus affair and the trial of Zola. The quotation, which could serve as another epigraph for Iphigenia in Forest Hills, is as follows: “Zola is right, because the writer’s job is not to accuse or persecute but to stand up even for the guilty once they have been condemned and are undergoing punishment.”

The Deconstructionist's Vacation

I want to briefly explore a possible connection between Malcolm’s “J’appelle un Chat un Chat” (The New Yorker, April 20 1987; included in Malcolm’s great 1992 essay collection The Purloined Clinic under the title “Dora”) and her “Iphigenia In Forest Hills” (The New Yorker, May 3, 2010; published this year in slightly expanded book form using the same title). The texts that I’ll refer to in this discussion are “Dora” and Iphigenia in Forest Hills. They’re linked in my mind by their mention of “vacation.” “Dora” is about the literary qualities of three of Freud’s case histories, of Dora, the Rat Man, and the Wolf Man. In its memorable opening line, Malcolm says:

Today, everyone knows – except possibly a few literary theorists – that the chief subject of the psychoanalytic dialogue is not the patient’s repressed memories but the analyst’s vacation.

Iphigenia in Forest Hills is, as its subtitle indicates, an “Anatomy of a Murder Trial.” Chapter 15 begins as follows:

It is time to introduce a subject known as The Judge’s Vacation.

I remember finding both these statements intensely interesting when I first read them. They bring into the open a heretofore hidden element of two supposedly sophisticated, complex processes - psychoanalysis and criminal trials – that is shockingly simplistic and unsophisticated, namely, the vacations of analysts and judges. When I think of psychoanalysis, I think of many things – free association, dream interpretation, transference, etc. One thing I certainly don’t think about is the analyst’s vacation; it just seems too extraneous and mundane to merit consideration. The same goes for the trial process, which I associate with cross-examination, jury selection, final summation, etc. – but certainly not with the judge’s vacation.

But the analyst’s or the judge’s vacation is just the sort of marginal detail that Malcolm delights in seizing on to show, in the case of the analytic encounter, its “absurdity” [“Out of this absurdist collaboration – the tireless joint scrutiny of the patient’s reactions and overreactions to the analyst’s limited repertoire of activity in the sphere of fees, hours, waiting-room etiquette, and, above all, absences – come small, stray self-recognitions that no other human relationship yields, brought forward under conditions of frustration (and gratification) that no other human relationship could survive”], and, in the case of trial work, its “artificiality” and “inhuman character” (“Ezra’s refusal to play – his continued protests against being questioned in a way that people aren’t questioned in life outside the courtroom – brought into sharp relief the artificial and, you might even say, inhuman character of courtroom discourse”).

Using the entirely familiar and understandable notion of vacations as a way of comprehending what transpires in the often bizarre proceedings of courtrooms and analyst’s offices may strike some as gross oversimplification.

But vacations are just one vulnerable node among many that Malcolm prods in her anatomizations. And, in the case of Mazoltuv Borukhova, the matter of the judge’s vacation may actually turn out to be legally significant. Geoffrey O’Brien, in his excellent review of Iphigenia in Forest Hills (“The Trial,” The New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011), says:

The simmering hostility evoked by the judge’s first entrance in these pages persists as part of the book’s permanent atmosphere, flaring up from time to time, and taking on fresh importance when Hanophy, in the closing days of the trial, forces the defense to deliver its summation with very little preparation time in order not to delay his vacation: “This trial is going to be over on March 17th because I’m going to be sipping piña coladas on the beach in St. Martin.” (This and other such remarks have helped form the basis of an appeal to overturn the verdict currently being brought by the lawyer Alan Dershowitz.)

I hope Dershowitz succeeds. Regardless of whether Borukhova is guilty, justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done.