The Many Forms of Rachel Cusk
To judge by the critical response, Rachel Cusk’s new novel has left readers feeling betrayed. The nature of the betrayal depended upon what aspect of her work the critic once esteemed. For Dwight Garner of the New York Times, reviewing Parade meant retracting a claim about Cusk’s ability to hold the reader spellbound. This “anti-novel,” he wrote, “fails the Hardwick Test”: that it “must be consistently (‘each page, each paragraph’) interesting.” For New York Magazine’s Andrea Long Chu—writing as the tribune of those who had soured on the “aura of unimpeachability” (as Janique Vigier once put it) that Cusk had acquired thanks to the Outline trilogy—Parade revealed its author as the “paranoid custodian of an idiosyncratic gender fundamentalism.”
Two points were salient in the second kind of response. The first was a degree of bad faith. As Valerie Stivers has noted in an incisive essay for Compact, Cusk’s “atavism,” her flirtation with the role of tradwife avant la lettre, has been evident in her work from the beginning. Only willful blindness—or, perhaps, a delayed encounter via the Outline trilogy rather than the memoirs that preceded it—could have allowed readers to miss this persistent aspect of her vision. (What Cusk might say about this is easy to guess: if readers feign ignorance of her essentialism it is because they know it, love it, want it, but refuse to countenance it, thus making her the teller of universal, tacitly known truths.)
The second was that an aesthetic failure was being judged in moral terms. Cusk’s previous books, if not invariably triumphs, had a dazzlement that held the promise of something more. With the aesthetically inert Parade, readers who now convinced themselves they once praised her under duress could sense blood in the water. Yet if their moralistic response suggested something philistine in the earlier acclaim, it was also one that Cusk seemed to invite. For in Cusk, particularly in her non-literary pronouncements, and those asides in the novels that resemble them, we see an artist of real stature growing less confident with time. To gain the true measure of her work thus means rescuing it from both her disappointed admirers and the novelist who, increasingly, seems to hearken to them.
By now, the general contours of the new novel are well known. Each of Parade’s four chapters features two kinds of writing: passages in the third person recount the career of an artist named “G,” who is sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes a painter, sometimes a sculptor or filmmaker. These alternate with passages voiced by a “we” that is sometimes a couple, but which becomes more ambiguous as the book unfolds. (By the end, it becomes a group of adult siblings, then all living people, or at least all women.) There are some recurring episodes—a man’s suicide at an art exhibition—and certain typical scenes. (The slow death of an aged parent appears in all four chapters, crisscrossing the “we” and “G” sections.) Most of all, though, it is the narrator’s voice, with its talismanic words—words like “truth,” “legitimised,” “representation,” “illusion,” and “violence”—that are the novel’s binding force, and also, more problematically, what most invites comparison with Cusk’s earlier work.
None of this is inherently uninteresting. Two of Parade’s chapters, “The Stuntman” and “The Midwife,” could stand on their own as short stories: acidic distillates of Cusk’s endless themes. In the latter, the “we” narrator visits a small village in Greece—a familiar Cusk setting—whose inhabitants she renders with trademark grotesquerie. The chapter works its way around to the emblematic image: it is revealed that in this village, there used to be a woman whose task it was, when it came time for people to die, to creep into their bedrooms at night and bash them on the head with a mallet (and who is thus a kind of “midwife,” evoking women’s traditional role of custodianship over life’s entrances and exits). These grimly comic folkways stand in contrast to the clinical deaths in the book’s English settings, which are rendered with the frigidity of a Houellebecq.
“The Stuntman” begins with a famous painter who starts painting the world—and later his wife and himself—upside down. It ends with the Cusk-like narrator being struck down on a Paris street by a nameless woman, an episode that leaves her feeling as though she “had been murdered and yet had nonetheless remained alive.” The narrator likens this to her experiences of “biological femininity” and thus links herself to the wife of the painter “G,” who had described being “hit” by his upside-down paintings in much the same terms. “Those female experiences,” the Cusk-narrator now realizes, “had usually been attributed to an alternate or double self whose role it was to absorb and confine them so that they played no part in the ongoing story of life.” This alternate self is the “stuntman” of the title: someone who “took the actual risks in the manufacture of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity.” It is another of Cusk’s unforgettable metaphors—another of those means by which she suggests some hidden dimension within ordinary reality, repressed but omnipresent. (Reading her often feels like watching a movie with the sound turned off, leaving only the bare gestures: as if these revealed conversation’s essential truth, hiding in plain sight.) As such, it marks a high point in what is always Cusk’s central struggle, for “form.” Unfortunately, it comes in Parade’s first chapter.
“Form” is an inevitable topic in discussions of Cusk’s work, though she doesn’t mean what most writers mean by it. Primarily, Cusk’s “form” refers to the metaphorical “shape” taken by a self through its relations with others, relations that can be vitalizing, deadening, or negating. (The “outline” of the trilogy famously leaves its bearer reduced to a cipher, the negative of her male interlocutor, leaving her essence undefined.) The forms of Cusk’s works in the literary sense can be thought of as extensions of this underlying idea. What they vary is a set of relationships—between teller, reader, and world.
Even more than in Outline, “form” in Parade marks a withdrawal from contact. As you work through one account of disrupted or non-relation between artist and world after another—one paints the world upside down (he has no other way to “make sense of his place in time and history”), another paints massive cathedrals in miniature, thus reflecting his experience of “marginality” as black artist, another sculpts spiders spinning webs, like women, their bodies always working—the sense you get is less of the presence-absence of Outline, than of an obsession yielding the prospect neither of release nor of definitive transfiguration.
The central conflict in Parade remains that of sex, or gender. For Cusk, the artist’s task requires—or consists in the embodiment of—the most thoroughgoing freedom, a freedom she portrays as essentially “male.” Unlike Stivers, who lays stress on the element of ressentiment in this portrayal, I do not find it to be particularly “misandrist.” (Indeed, as Chu implies, Cusk’s view of male freedom could just as well be seen as stridently masculinist.) Rather, I would characterize the G storylines as dramatizing a conflict between art and family—what Cusk here, as elsewhere, sees as a zero-sum conflict between total commitments. (While it hardly refutes the point about misandry that Cusk’s artists are in some cases male, in some female, it surely does matter that the first and final male G share characteristics with Cusk herself—specifically, a formative early experience of being “criticised” and attendant revenge-fantasy, and a wish for invisibility, a shrinking from self-disclosure.) For there remains a universality to the problems Cusk explores. Men and women experience them differently, with differing intensity, but it isn’t as though we have nothing to say to each other.
More than with most writers, to discuss one of Cusk’s books seems to require discussing all of them. This not simply because her themes and motifs repeat, but because her manner of handling is so clearly dialectical: the concrete expression of any given work is so clearly the working out of problems that were themselves the solutions to prior problems. Cusk’s works demand to be read, like her narratives of the various G’s in Parade, as stages in a quest-narrative of artistic self-formation.
What becomes more apparent with time, however, is that two problems are conjoined in her work—each of which has an artistic and a social side, or rather an existential one. The first is the problem of representation: how to tell the universal story in concrete terms. The second is that of resolution: what answer will her character (which often means Cusk herself) find to her predicament.
The representation problem itself finds two solutions in Cusk’s earlier work. One is autobiography, as in A Life’s Work and Aftermath. The other is that of the much-discussed Outline trilogy—which partly inverts the memoirs, though is itself a kind of dispersed autobiography. (Its characters tell the blank narrator their “life stories.”) Readers who faulted Cusk for taking her own experience as normative failed to consider that it is just the universal aspect of experience—the disorienting encounter with that which hitherto was excluded from one’s self-image—that is the memoirs’ theme. The universal aspect of the individual is also something Cusk once asserted, and justified via quotation from D. H. Lawrence: “One is not only a little individual, living a little individual life. One is in oneself the whole of mankind, and one’s fate is the fate of the whole of mankind.” Yet the Outline trilogy showed that she had taken her critics to heart.
The answer to the second problem is easier: there is none. Neither of the memoirs comes to a summative resolution. (As I have written elsewhere, each has the structure of a “convalescence.” The crisis wanes; the underlying problem endures.) The same is true of the Outline trilogy, which opts at best for local “poetic justice.” Echoing Dante’s Divine Comedy (a fact strangely unremarked upon in critical discussions of the trilogy), with the hint of “purgatory” in the temporary condition of Transit and the bitterly ironic Paradiso of Kudos, its Faye takes her midlife passage through a landscape studded with personages who tell her their stories. Each has their appropriate fate—the fate that reflects their deepest flaws and desires. The harshness of vision in each author consists in the belief that, ultimately, we get what we want. This stems from Cusk’s belief in freedom: we each do retain the shaping power over our lives, even if only the power to interpret them.
In this way, the narrative problem reverts to that of representation. Yet this is also where Cusk runs into difficulties. For, in fact, the problem of how to live ends up being answered in terms of how to represent. The turn to memoir was itself the answer to the problem of how to live as a woman and artist (at least, no other is on offer). The task of “form,” you could say, turns out to be “formulation”: that of finding a way to articulate, or give shape, to the underlying predicament.
This is, of course, what any artist does—any artist, that is, who does not cease to be one by becoming a propagandist or terrorist; say, by striking random strangers in the street. (Though Cusk acknowledges that this act is itself merely symbolic; the streets of Paris are the nameless madwoman’s studio, the assaulted narrator her canvas.) It is certainly what the painters and sculptor and filmmaker in Parade do. But note that Cusk’s metaphors are of something static (“outline,” “form,” “shape”). Emerging through interpersonal dynamics, they freeze conflict into its result. Here lies the hidden trap in Cusk’s increasing interest in visual art—the ostensible subject matter of Second Place and the real one of Parade.
An artist’s life is largely the story of movement from work to work. (The story of the works themselves is something else, it is criticism.) The “form” in Cusk’s sense, like a new artistic style, is arrived at prior to the new work; you encounter it from the first page. Yet the form having been arrived at, and no social resolution being in the offing, what remains for the novel to do? This is a problem with large implications for Cusk’s writing—and one that raises, among other things, the difficult question of what (beyond the subliminal echo of Dante) really necessitates that the Outline trilogy be a trilogy. (You get the sense, in fact, of a painter, producing variations on a new style.) In Second Place, the plot is given: it is adopted from Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos. In the minimalist Parade, however, there is nowhere to hide.
Parade’s much-discussed form feels like an effort at defying gravity, at avoiding being sucked back into the concerns and preoccupations of Cusk’s previous works. This effort fails. Unable to disguise the fact that its conversations and anecdotes are just the kind we have encountered thrice over in the Outline trilogy, it amounts to old wine in old bottles.
The book is not without redeeming qualities. For one thing, Cusk can be funny. Think of that story about the woman who is phobic of pigeons (funny already) who, when one of the birds invades her home, seeks help from her neighbor—who turns out to have the same phobia. Even the first reaction of G’s wife to his painting upside down (“The feeling of everything seeming right yet being fundamentally wrong was one she powerfully recognized: it was her condition, the condition of her sex”) is surely meant to be funny, in some grim way (as if this were all anyone could think about). True, it anticipates the assault on the street (“she felt as though she had been hit”), but that scene of is not without its own darkly comic elements, albeit at the expense, not of the assaulted narrator, but of the gawping spectators, frozen in a rictus of pointing inaction until she gives them their cue how to act.
As the book goes on, however, you get less and less sure she’s joking—or rather, more certain she isn’t. “Suddenly we could not tolerate capitalism,” the narrator intones in the final section—as if in wry allusion to the emergence of millennial socialism, whose capture of the literary terrain put pressure on writers of Cusk’s generation and temperament to demonstrate political bona fides. A few lines later, however, earnest koans about “Capitalism, whose only interest in love lay in its commodification within the system of possession,” convey the depressing sense she’s serious.
Parade’s final chapter is where it really hits the doldrums. For elided in its pivot to abstraction on the largest scale—culminating in the drably messianic concluding sentence (“This grey reality, this meeting of darkness and light across shards of broken glass, was our beginning,” as if the negative condition of the “outline” had been transposed into our future)—is that Cusk’s has been, on the whole, a tragic reading of sex and gender. Sex is what remains, after the “end of history,” as a source of perpetual conflict. Her best writing, rather than promising some future condition, explores the conflicts, only ever to be resolved within the confines of an individual life, that stem from actually existing freedom.
This theme is, appropriately enough, introduced in Parade’s opening chapter. Telling of the latest turn in G’s artistic peregrinations—how, after painting the world upside down, he turns to painting himself and his wife upside down and nude—Cusk’s narrator comments: “In this way he marks the end of history and the advent of a new reality. The ageing bourgeois couple trapped unto death in their godless and voluntary bondage is the pedestrian offspring of history.”
Unlike the pseudo-prophecy of the ending, this ironically marked “advent” feels authentic—a distillation of a major current of our time. If the “end of history” is a kind of civilizational menopause (with which, however, this male artist affiliates himself in “voluntary bondage”) or late middle age, this has its own corollary: that youthfulness, early married life, child-bearing and the conflicts that stem from it—the very stuff of Cusk’s previous books, A Life’s Work and Aftermath, with their thrilling language of battles and conquests and ransackings—just is history, at least here, at least now. Though history in what sense?
In a related allusion in the first chapter, to Hegel’s dialectic of Master and Slave, we catch a note of what makes Cusk a more compelling figure than her detractors and admirers tend to allow:
She was only a few feet away. He could neither use her nor dispense with her, could not, because of her, be entirely free himself. It was her undeveloped equality with him that was crippling. She was not the pure object of his desire, nor was she his rival and equal in power. Instead she was his companion; she situated herself there only a few feet away, in the terrain of weaknesses, of need, of plain daily requirement.
Again, whatever this portrayal of waning desire is, it is not misandrist. Nor, in any serious sense, is the passage that follows it, where the narrator presents the woman’s aged father-in-law “beadily watching her body move through the caressing bands of dark and light” (to which the proper response, I would think, is: “Whatever”). Rather, this and the merely companionate mode of non-desire she receives from her husband name one unsatisfactory and one unsustainable response to the problem of combining eros and freedom.
In a footnote in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, the premier theorist of the “end of history,” observes that Hegel once considered “love” as a site for the mutual “recognition” that is the ultimate goal of political struggle. Yet though Kojève goes on to present reasons why Hegel implicitly “reproaches” love in favor of political “recognition”—love is private (insufficiently universal), attached to mere existence (“i.e., precisely that which is not truly human in Man”), and entails no mortal risk (though tell that to the great lovers of legend)—we may nonetheless ask whether Hegel’s demotion of “Love” in the Phenomenology represents its transcendence or the sweeping aside of an untidy problem.
Cusk’s transfusion of the Hegelian notion that the maximum freedom of each requires the freedom of all into the realm of the erotic—an effort in which she is preceded by Beauvoir—raises without resolving the question of their relationship. (Desire is for the other’s desire as freely given, though, paradoxically, also not.) Yet surely for her, as for Hegel himself, this calls into question the possibility of any ultimately “political” resolution of the problem of recognition. (This is another reason why Cusk’s concluding prophecy lacks substance.)
Like Beauvoir before her, Cusk looks wistfully at times at violent forms of revolution, forms that in the sex-and-gender war are foreclosed. (The real problem with the wish that the father would simply die would thus lie not in the old Oedipal conflict, but in the inability, or unwillingness, to inhabit the role of slayer.) Cusk’s recurring metaphors of warfare, her image of her post-motherhood self as a “veteran” or “aged general recalling past battles,” show her yearning to have the battle of the sexes be a real one. (Among the bitterest lines in the Outline trilogy envision the likely outcome of a literal contest of physical strength between a woman and her manipulative ex-husband.) Then again, perhaps these yearnings after the literal should not be taken too literally.
Either way, I remain unconvinced that Cusk is truly interested in collective, as opposed to individual “solutions” to the artist’s conflict within the home. Critics who fault her for this merely reveal their naiveté. Andrea Long Chu, in interpreting Cusk’s conclusion as being that the female artist “must let her child into the studio” is correct in the sense that, for Cusk, the child needs to be “admitted” as an existential predicament. Yet though the female G of Parade’s third chapter does literally do this—prompting another character to say that she “used her experience of motherhood in a way that seemed to explain the subject to me much more clearly”—another responds, somewhat later on: “G was selfish and cruel and egotistical—she was as bad as any man.” Clearly the case isn’t so simple. There is no single prescription.
It is likewise correct—though pedestrian—to observe that economic disparity, too, limits women’s lives. (In a weirdly defensive gesture, Cusk herself, in an essay on Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf, imputes to the former a basically economic reading of female disempowerment.) Cusk’s true subject is not political, but existential. To carp about the social status of her protagonists is irrelevant. The great tragedies have always been tales of kings and queens—for it is with them that family drama, under the guise of dynastic politics, assumes cosmic proportions. To be reduced to the struggles of bourgeois professionals is quite prosaic enough. Cusk cannot be well-served by being made anodyne, either by herself or others.
Parade’s failure is in this sense tonic. This malformed double of her best work will enable the latter to be seen in its true stature. With her loftiness and extremity, Cusk is more interesting than the figure cherished by her admirers. She is also more interesting than the figure, increasingly, cherished by herself.
Paul Franz has contributed to Bookforum, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, among others.
