I've been binging on Janet Malcolm lately, as I'm in the thick of writing and thinking about all the ethical conundrums that go along with my profession (Malcolm, if you don't know her work, is literally obsessed with such questions). In any case, I read The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes last week. It's basically Malcolm's exploration of all the biographers of Plath's short life, the sticky situations they get themselves into with Plath's widower Ted Hughes and his sister, a domineering woman who serves as Ted's manager of sorts, and the public's tendency to get seriously voyeuristic when it comes to suicides (especially of beautiful, talented women).
The whole things is super meta. While Malcolm travels around England and the U.S. tracking down these various characters and analyzing the ways in which they projected themselves onto Plath's life, she herself is projecting her own obsessions and insecurities on them. The genius of Malcolm is that she actually makes such convoluted, hashed and rehashed material interesting. She explores the way in which writers are forced to create succinct narratives out of the messiness of life. I found this passage particularly amazing:
At the end of Borges's story, "The Aleph" the narrator goes to the cellar of a house, where he has all the experience of encountering everything in the world. He all at once sees all places from all angles: "I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; saw the circulation of my own dark blood." Writer's block derives from the mad ambition to enter that cellar; the fluent writer is content to stay in the close attic of partial expression, to say what is running through his mind, and to accept that it may not, cannot be wholly true, to risk that it will be misunderstood. I, too, have spent days fruitlessly hanging around the door to that forbidden cellar. I have looked at my revisionist narrative and found it wanting. I have found every other narrative wanting. How can one see all the ants on the planet when one is wearing the blinders of narrative?
If you're not a writer, or someone working in storytelling or documentary arts of some kind, I'm not sure that you'd dig this super meta book. But if you're like me--fascinated by the way stories get told, how history is shaped, and the drama behind the curtain, then you just might like it.
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I'm a writer and I find it wanky. In my opinion, that sort of thinking is the work that that should be done before one publishes. It's self-indulgent for an artist to say "look how hard I work! Look how hard this is! Look at my pain and confusion!" As artists, we take on the burden, we carry the pain, so the audience doesn't have to. We give the audience that gift. Imagine if singers cried all the way through their songs.
I don't know...to me that presumes the audience is never other artists. Or even people who are interested in both output and process. There is a benefit and a pleasure (self-indulgent though it may be) to be had from seeing another person's process, to seeing not only the paint job and pretty trim of the house but also the rough frame. I don't think it's something that should be done constantly, in every piece of art, but there is a time for it in writing, just as there is a time to break through the 4th wall in theater, or, yes, for a singer to cry all the way through their songs.