Frequent commenter rozele wrote to me about the afterword to Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, calling it “a pretty amazing example of the godawful things done to people’s words in the name (quite explicitly) of turning what we actually speak into True Language”:
in the course of a psychoanalytically-informed account of journalists’ writing processes, and what she describes as a defense of “the necessity for [journalistic] mediation” (by “showing how the literally true may actually be a kind of falsification of reality”), malcolm gives us a transcription of a section of a tape-recorded interview, and then what she asserts is the rendering that appeared in the main text of the book. the latter, she has already told us, is “English”; the former something she calls “tape-recorderese”, which she very clearly considers not to be language at all. “translating” the one into the other is, apparently, absolutely necessary for “trustworthy quotation”.
it’s fascinating on several levels. to my ear the rewrite (without altering its abstract factual content) quite thoroughly transforms the tone, emphasis, and impact of what malcolm’s interviewee says, rather than simply shortening the passage or cutting false starts or abandoned shifts of direction. on top of that, what she claims is the published rendering in fact omits the entire last sentence of what is actually printed in the book as a quotation – no trace of which appears in any form in the transcription excerpt she provides. and what comes through most strongly is her absolute contempt for what she denies is “English”: the language people actually speak and the ways we speak it.
it makes me wonder whether people whose conception of language is constrained to literary writing are even aware of the layers of meaning that they’re refusing to acknowledge. i get the impression that malcolm is not – that she thinks what she’s doing is adding, not destroying, meaning and complexity – though perhaps this is because i can’t picture taking pride in that endeavor, much less calling attention to it at length while discussing my working methods.
I haven’t read the book, but I certainly agree with rozele’s point. (We discussed Janet Malcolm and a different trial back in 2010.)
Actual field linguists can get quite sniffy about anything that isn’t “tape-recorderese.”
Once again, this sad tale demonstrates that even basic linguistics forms no part at all of a typical broad liberal education. (C P Snow would doubtless nod smugly.)
This reminds me a bit of the stranglehold that the educational elite who had learnt Literary Welsh (a form of language about four hundred years removed from any actual speech, insofar as it isn’t altogether artificial) used to have over what was regarded as really being proper Welsh at all. (The preface to Stephen Williams’ 1980 English translation of his Welsh grammar talks of “debased colloquial usages.” There is, oddly enough, nothing like that in the original Welsh version. Maybe the reader of that was assumed to have already drunk the Kool-Aid.)
To be a bit fairer to Janet Malcolm, the study of the grammar of spoken English is distinctly harder than that of written English, and the necessary terms have really not made it out of the linguistic ghetto. Spoken English has a precise and elaborate system of focus marking, for example, which is normally completely unrepresented in writing*, and which few L1 speakers could even describe, despite using it all the time whenever they open their mouths.
* Good writers know how to work round this fundamental failure of the writing system with conventional paraphrases and suchlike. But it’s unnatural to do that, and produces sentences nobody normally actually comes out with spontaneously.
This is relevant to my interests. Where can I find a description of this focus system? I’m worried you’ll say CGEL…
Here is the page with the tape-recorderese and Malcolm’s English translation
@Lars:
Your fears are, alas, amply warranted …
(Chapter 16; pp1370ff …)
In general, focus is a difficult subject, to say the least. I seem to recall that Martin Haspelmath denies that it is a cross-linguistically coherent concept at all. But then, he says that about everything …
Lavukaleve gets my personal award for most focus-obsessed language EVAH. If you can get a look at Angela Terrill’s grammar, it comes up passim. She has lots of handy literature citations too.
Focus interacts with tense/aspect in an interesting way in Kusaal. I eventually discovered that similar things have been noted in a good many Bantu languages: Larry Hyman, one of the Bantuist gurus, published on it way back in 1984, but nobody much seems to have run with it until Tom Güldemann twenty years later.
Thanks, mollymooly!
How about this dissertation (Cohan, The Realization and Function of
Focus in Spoken English)?
@mollymooly:
Apparently the actual original words spoken “lack the atmosphere of truthfulness.” This misses the point so cosmically that I thought I must have misinterpreted Malcolm initially. But no, she really means it. The journalist’s impression of what the speaker meant is more valid than what they actually said.
Yes, my jaw dropped when I read that.
What purpose would there have been to quote the entire taperecorderese passage verbatim? You could have picked out the substantive part close to verbatim (as Malcolm sort of did) and do the relevant part of the rest that sets it up in paraphrase w/o needing to present it as a direct quote. Say “He explained that the defense counsel Kornstein never ended up having a chance to put him back on the witness stand for additional testimony (w/ or w/o parenthetical about a plane to catch and time being wasted by dumb questions), but that after his initial day of testimony he had realized” and then into the verbatim with punctuation marking the transition. How hard is that?
In presenting her (quite reasonable) paraphrase as oratio recta, Malcolm is in fact deceiving the reader. Her motive is no doubt pure, but that is no excuse.
She might plead that a sophisticated reader will actually know that what journalists present as ipsissima verba is in fact normally no such thing, but that really doesn’t help one bit. She ought to know better, and we should be able to expect better from honourable reporters.
“Truthfulness” must be autocorrupt for truthiness.
@JWB:
personally, i might argue for the speaker’s actual words as transcribed, complete with false starts etc. that’s an approach i’ve found powerful in anna deavere smith’s early work, including journalistic pieces like her 1996 “Broken Sentences” as well as her transcript-based plays. but even those are of necessity built on selection and excerpting. and i’d expect that people more committed to a psychoanalytic view of language would also find that approach compelling, since it would allow for the presence of the moments of static and rupture that freud placed at the heart of the discipline.
but for journalistic purposes, i expect exactly the kind of middle-ground approach that you describe: an absolute minimum of intervention on what’s between quotation marks, and indirect quotation where that’s not stylistically feasible. malcolm absolutely disagrees. her objection isn’t difficulty; quite the opposite. she finds all kinds of ways of saying that the journalist can and should actively rewrite what their subjects actually say, but they all basically come down to an explicit declaration that journallists’ literary inventions are the only possible way to access the truth of what someone says, and should be considered more accurate than a mere transcript.
“As everyone who has studied transcripts of tape-recorded speech knows, we all seem to be extremely reluctant to come right out and say what we mean—thus the bizarre syntax, the hesitations, the circumlocutions, the repetitions, the contradictions, the lacunae in almost every non-sentence we speak. […] Texts containing dialogue and monologue derived from a tape—however well edited the transcript may be—tend to retain some trace of their origin (almost a kind of metallic flavor) and lack the atmosphere of truthfulness present in work where it is the writer’s own ear that has caught the drift of the subject’s thought.”[p155; p157]
she’s absolutely right that we don’t talk in sentences (or in prose at all – she even manages to cite m. jourdain!), but in every other way what she has to say is, to me, pretty appalling. and also amounts to such a clear confession of guilt in jeffrey masson’s lawsuit against her for fabricating quotations that i’m surprised it wasn’t brought in as evidence.
o, and – to DE’s point – if you go to p79 in the text mollymooly linked to (thank you!), you’ll find that what malcolm presented as her rewrite in the afterword is itself not what she printed!
the final sentence of what she actually included in the main text makes a huge leap in both analytic and poetic terms – and its absence from the later citation leaves no real alternative to believing that she left it out because it was a complete invention, in hopes that nobody would remember the passage well enough to notice. which i gotta say is both foolish (it’s easily the most memorable element of the quotation) and a classically freudian error-that-reveals-truth, of the kind that her erasure of “hesitations…contradictions…lacunae” aims to eliminate.
Yes, there are such people. To start from the assumption that everybody is like that is breathtaking. And that’s apart from the fact that getting people to say what they mean is the job of the interviewer, not the transcriber!
If I am reluctant to come out and say what I mean, it’s usually for a very good reason. I am not likely to appreciate a reporter telling everyone what I really meant (even if the reporter is actually right, and not projecting their own opinions onto me.)
Moreover, the fact that I prevaricated rather than answered directly is itself an important piece of information. What right has the reporter to censor this fact?
And if I am in fact incoherent, is the reporter doing their job if they present my actual words as having been perfectly clear and logical?
Seems to me that this dysfluency thing is being worked as an excuse for a systematic bad journalistic practice. (I imagine that this is no way a thing unique to Janet Malcolm: she’s just rather startlingly upfront about it.)
cf. sanewashing
I was going to say.
Don’t there exist actual guidelines for this (for the use of media that remain more than extremist propaganda outlets, obviously.)
Silent excision of ums and ers is normal, I think. I suppose you could even claim that this is an inevitable part of reducing speech to the inadequate medium of English orthography.
I suppose that you could do a Truss (Lynne not Liz) and say that this whole issue is one of punctuation. The Appalling Misuse of the Inverted Comma. Eats, Shoots and “Leaves.”
Re David E.’s theorizing about “honourable reporters”: Perhaps the most famous sentence the late Janet Malcolm ever wrote was the rather striking “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” Which is indeed the opening sentence of the book under discussion. NB that she is using an old-timey “generic he,” the scope of which would not exclude her (unless she self-identified as a writer but not a “journalist,” which for all I know may have been the case).
While there are surely no totally honourable reporters, the implication that “they’re all the same” is no more true for reporters than for politicians. (In both cases, the lie is assiduously promoted by enemies of democracy. It should be stamped on with vigour wherever it raises its malignant head.)
Compare, oh, let’s say, Walter Duranty’s reporting of Ukraine with this man’s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Jones_(journalist)
Also, there is Tintin.
Mind you, he never really seems to do any actual, like, reporting.
And he was a bit collabo.
OK, maybe not Tintin.
I have not read Malcolm. I wonder whether her later work conformed to the extreme manifesto of this afterword. Plausibly it was a rehearsal for the defence offered in the ongoing libel trial, and her later work reflected a less presumptuous attitude?
Tintin was inserting himself into the story decades before New Journalism
“Tintin in the Land of the Hippies.”
“Tintin in Las Vegas.”
The notion of Tintin as gonzo journalist does have a certain appeal. (Milou would fit right in. That’s one mean sonofabitch.)
Perhaps Tintin was too hono[u]rable to make it as an actual reporter? But maybe there is actually a difference here that I too hastily elided between reporters (an old-timey artisanal trade that has fallen on hard times) and journalists (a fancy social-climber “profession” for the degreed and credentialed), and fundamental moral defects are more a problem with the latter group?
WP tells us that the term “gonzo journalism” antedates the first appearance of The Muppet of That Name, but only just. Eheu fugaces …
A 300 lb. “Samoan” Capt. Haddock has a certain appeal as well.
JWB, I don’t think Malcolm thinks that what she (and every other journalist) is doing is “morally indefensible” because of inexact quotations. I personally, like the clear information from a journalist about their treatment of the material. If a journalist tells me that their work is in a sense a work of fiction, a fiction closely aligned with facts, but nonetheless not a direct report, but some sort of reconstruction, I can live with that. I actually do not expect anything else. Most journalism that I read is quite obviously a journalist making up a “story” out of complicated web of circumstances with what goes in and out of the story heavily dependent on journalist’s personal opinion. (This is assuming that the writer is not simply lying) The idea that a lighter editing of direct quotations is going to be a significant improvement seems to me rather optimistic.
I must confess that I do not recall having ever viewed the Muppet-heavy 1970 Christmas tv special in which the Muppet of That Name supposedly first appeared, despite having been (at age 5) a good target audience member. Perhaps David E. has seen it? But I don’t read the wikipedia accounts to be claiming (at least not unambiguously claiming) that the actual name “Gonzo” was attached to the Muppet-in-question in that 1970 one-off rather than that the physical muppet-object first created for that occasion was brought out of the warehouse and dubbed “Gonzo” when repurposed as a recurring character in the Muppet Show proper that debuted in 1976.
And now it’s going to be hard to get clarification on these Muppet-naming-timeline issues because as bad luck would have it the Muppet-History subset of the internet has just been embroiled in controversy and scandal. https://brobible.com/culture/article/muppet-history-instagram-twitter-controversy-explainer/
Note FWIW that this social-media-controversy-explainer post comes with a little author’s bio note letting you know that the author has a bachelor’s degree in “Print Journalism” (from a perfectly good university) and is thus appropriately credentialed.
on the muppets tip, i have to plug my old friend max’s recent book of muppet history: Funny Boy: The Richard Hunt Biography – it’s a tour de force.
and @DO/JWB: from malcolm’s perspective, the moral indefensibility that is the subject of The Journalist and the Murderer is about the relationship between journalist and subject – the question of the journalist’s intent when approaching and conversing with an interviewee, what the journalist says to them, and whether that can be (or can avoid being) misleading or deliberately false. the question of what the journalist does with/to their subjects’ words is related, but distinct: it’s the subject of Masson v. Malcolm, which she addresses (somewhat prematurely) in the afterword, but not of MacDonald v. McGinniss, which the book itself is about. and, for her, “journalism” explicitly includes the versions marked as fictionalized – capote’s In Cold Blood, above all, which repeatedly appears as a foil to McGinniss’ Fatal Vision – as well as the ostensibly purely factual stuff of daily papers.
Yes, to amplify rozele’s point, Malcolm’s critique re “morally indefensible” was definitely not in context intentionally directed to the practice she fessed up to herself in the same book. One has to do a little dot-connecting to appreciate the irony. Let me just note that in my own perhaps morally-dubious profession as a lawyer, I am actually subject to enforceable rules that in certain circumstances (certainly not all circumstances!) require me to affirmatively warn someone I might be talking to that despite the positive rapport and aura of trust and confidence I am hopefully inspiring they should know that I remain free to betray their trust and confidence in pursuit of someone else’s agenda. AFAIK, essentially no journalists give such warnings, nor is the notion that perhaps they should within the Overton window of their profession’s self-reflection on how it conducts itself. And that undisclosed risk of betrayal is more precisely what Malcolm was focused on when she was banging on about “morally indefensible.”