Being hit in the head, I now saw, had been both real and unknowable, was the inversion of representation while being ultimately representative…
-Rachel Cusk, Parade
Reality, for most people, is easy to recognise. It is a kind of disappointment. Think of the slogans, “a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality”, or “facts don’t care about your feelings”. These identifications of reality with pain are not special or unique to conservative movements. They are, I believe, everywhere, in our ordinary usage of the word, in real talk, and especially in our understanding of what literature in its fictional form does.
I’ve written about realism before here (I think has to do with death), and I ‘ve also written about Rachel Cusk before, but, as she has a new book out—an interesting if not finally successful work, Parade—in which the word “reality” appears about 500 times, I wanted to try to get at the question again. It also seemed worth doing because Rachel Cusk is, for many, the best exemplar of a turn towards “reality” effects of a certain kind in the Anglophone fiction of our century, away from more conventional “realism” towards the exploration of writerly consciousness that we call (I think we shouldn’t) autofiction. Results in the mode have been variable. But it seems to me that for Cusk, as for any good realist, you recognise reality because when you touch it, it hurts.
This is certainly the case in Parade, which mainly comprises biographical essays on fictionalised artists, all called G. Some of them are male, some are female, but in each case, the freedom of the artist to create is presented as ultimately masculine. And what makes it masculine is precisely its falseness, its attempt to subvert, imitate, surpass, and reorder reality, reality which is, according to the novel, painful, unrepresentable, and (consequently?) female.
Parade begins with a character based, it seems, on the German painter George Baselitz, who, as well as getting ‘called out’ in 2013 for saying that women couldn’t paint, spent the 70s painting the world upside down. G’s wife finds the paintings unsettlingly relatable:
When G’s wife first saw the upside-down paintings she felt as though she had been hit. The feeling of everything seeming right yet being fundamentally wrong was one she powerfully recognised: it was her condition, the condition of her sex. The paintings made her unhappy, or rather they led her to acknowledge the existence of an unhappiness that seemed always to have been inside her.
Representation is wrong, a violence to reality, we come to see, and women, especially violated by representation, can see this more clearly than any male avant-garde artist. The novel is, as the title might suggest, a parade of different artists, all of whom struggle to be free in art and somehow gesture, mostly in the negative, to the ‘condition’ of the female sex. One of the Gs, we are told, thinks about it this way:
G’s point might have been that if one were to answer truthfully the question of what a female art might look like, it would have to be composed chiefly of a sort of non-existence. In the absence of an inviolable self, the making of art becomes something bound to the self in a more violent way, a kind of self-immolation or suicide mission…
The point of Cusk’s form is not to find models of female art. It is to contrast art with reality, which women, for better or worse, belong to. That’s probably why Parade has no real plot, character, or anything like that. These orderly structures are to be dispensed with because they do violence to reality, a word that obsesses the various artists and their spouses.
Taken together, the Gs form a compound portrait of the artist as something like a man in drag, or, more tragically, a woman in drag as a man in drag. The counterpoint to artistry, the true one, that Cusk offers in the book is motherhood. We might say that art is parasitical on motherhood, both because no one would exist otherwise, and because it’s where we get the idea to make something from. Mothers, by contrast to artists, create with reality, a disappointing and painful substance that they never really control. People can disappoint you so much more than works of art can. Reading the novel, you sometimes get the sense that Cusk thinks the artist wants the rights and privileges of motherhood without being willing to accept or endure the pain. This is, if not quite forgivable, at least pitiable.
The most sincere and uplifting sounding statement of artistic principle in the book is probably contained in the description of G (The Midwife), an artist whose biography and relationship resembles aspects of Cusk’s own, who learns not to associate ‘motherhood with mediocrity’. Instead, she begins to allow her daughter into her studio: ‘She left the door open, as the door of a house stands open at a death.’
If there is an emotional centre of the book, however, it is not the creative power of motherhood, but the limits of its power, the real constraints on it. The novel climaxes in a moving description of a lost mother, who sounds like a difficult woman, at the end of her life. That mother herself longs for the freedom of fiction, but is denied it once the potentiality of pregnancy turns into the reality of children. ‘Perhaps her discovery that she disliked reality and its logic was made there,’ Cusk writes. And while reality is, in a sense, gendered in Cusk’s world, that doesn’t mean that women like it. The struggle that G (midwife) resolves in letting the studio open is not, I think an answer, in any kind of programmatic sense. Or rather, it doesn’t really help. It has none of the pull of ‘art’. As we see when the plural narrator describes the dying mother:
Pregnancy was a reverse kind of authorship, where the work started after publication and the suspension of disbelief came before the story had begun. She was creating, sure enough, but what a troublesome creation it turned out to be, leaving her no peace, disobeying her intentions and, most of all, proving impossible to put an end to. Pregnancy concluded with the drama of birth. Love ended with the spectacle of marriage. But we didn’t end, not even with our own marriages, our own births.”
That gesture of reversal is everywhere, not just in this book, but in all Cusk’s post Aftermath work. You can see it above with the ‘suicide mission’, for example. To confront reality you have to go to war with representation.
Here then, we see represented a mother refusing to confront reality, and instead seeking to fly into fantasy. You could read this as a way of fictionalising the failure of fiction to come to grips with the real pain that most women who do become mothers encounter, the pain of suddenly encountering fate, and indeed, a much more obvious gulf between the sexes.
At the beginning of A Life’s Work, her memoir about early motherhood, Cusk offers a fascinating description of gender/sex, and its relation to facts. Motherhood especially, the most longstanding fact of female existence, is a way to get in contact with reality, because of its shattering of your identity, and its pain:
The modern privileged woman is a creature for whom the fact of her sex can remain, indefinitely if she chooses, a superficial characteristic. What do I understand by the term ‘female’? a false thing; a repository of the cosmetic, a world of scented boutiques and tissue wrapped purchases, of fake eyelashes, French unguents, powder and paint, a world in which words such as suffering, self control and endurance occur but usually in reference to weight loss; a world steeped in its own mild. voluntary oppression, a world at whose fringes one may find intersections to the real: to particular kinds of unhappiness, or discrimination, or fear, or to a whole realm of existence both past and present that grows more individuated and indeterminate and inarticulable as time goes by. What it once meant to be a woman, if such a meaning can ever be fixed, it no longer means; and yet in one, great sense, the sense of procreation, it means it still.
Before I try to explain what I think is actually a redemptive hostility to reality that Cusk’s work is powered by, I want to first acknowledge the understandable, indeed plausible objections to the Cuskian world articulated by Andrea Long Chu. I pretty much always agree with her reviews, at least about what I would call the cultural-political-personal-pathological stance of a book, the weird worldview it encodes. While most of the early newspaper reviews of Parade seemed bored and puzzled, Chu saw its Manichean vision, and its fealty to an idea of reality that she has no interest in accepting as true. Her criticisms of Parade, as a somewhat tedious exposition of a theory of biology as destiny, ring almost true for me. Cusk, she says:
has taken some fine observations about bourgeois motherhood under late capitalism and annealed them, through sheer intensity of talent, into empty aphorisms about the second sex. In so doing, she has wasted an enormous amount of energy on making the idea of female freedom unthinkable — an ironic choice for a writer who has achieved something like canonicity within her own lifetime. If Parade is women’s writing, let us hope it is the last of it. Another kind of novel is possible. When Angeliki [In Kudos] tells Faye that she regrets not putting more about her characters’ “material circumstances” in her novel, I think we are meant to find this vaguely funny. But it’s a good idea! At least it would be better than banging on about female destiny while ignoring the lives of actual women. One must never mistake a defect of the imagination for a hole in reality.
One thing that Chu notices that hasn’t really been commented on by other reviewers is that the parade that appears in the novel, which disrupts a nice dinner in a restaurant, appears to be a gay pride parade. And there’s something of a parallel between the artists who are paraded through the book and the gays, whose ‘freedom’—as the characters discussing it weirdly keep calling it—is pointedly messy. It’s not, I think, that Cusk dislikes gay pride. It would be uncharitable, certainly from me, to say that she doesn’t understand the possibilities of queerness. For Cusk, it does seem, however, that any play with gender is like the artists’ play with gender, somehow aesthetic rather than real. But Chu writes as if Cusk thinks such experimentation unappealing, or undignified. And I’m not quite sure.
If we take Cusk to be saying that life is really like she says, wherein art is modelled on a male freedom that is a kicking against motherhood, it’s fair enough to say that this is not how things have to be. Though, then again, many heterosexual women clearly do experience coupledom as kind of tragic fate, wherein childrearing demonstrates the limits of certain kinds of freedom and equality. Such an experience might be historically contingent, but it is surely longstanding enough to make it reasonable to see it sedimented in the forms of contemporary art. The novel is a younger form than the bourgeois family. Chu is right to say that you can’t turn this into a metaphysical, Manichean vision, that this isn’t reality. But I wonder if we need to treat Cusk’s implicit metaphysics as describing any kind of reality at all?
I don’t think it matters, really, whether what Cusk seems to be saying about women’s writing is true. I think what matters is not a writer’s sense of what reality is, but how they go on to do battle with it all the same.
Certainly, I think Parade probably falls short of achieving what Cusk set out to do. And this failure probably does have to do with her sexual metaphysics, but it doesn’t just have to do with them. Second Place, her weird battle with DH Lawrence, seemed to me to rise to the occasion, I think it’s her best book, and it contained literally the same metaphysical vision. L, the painter—who by the way, ‘objected to reality and was always trying to free himself from its strictures’, sees M and her daughter bathing and is driven to paint them—his art is a feeble echo of the original beauty of real women, and of a mother, (M?) especially.
Cusk’s vision, and the form that she chooses to use for it, is largely unchanged, even if her approach is becoming even looser. In Outline, Anne, one of the many writers that Faye encounters, feels that her listening to a man try to “describe what she was not”. The contrast with this speaking man, experiencing that being talked at, has become a kind of project of getting closer to the truth about herself:
This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank.
The form of undoing, the claim that the form of undoing is female, motherly, and in contact with reality is everywhere in all of these books, and many of them are good. I agree with Chu that the vision in Parade seems to make more of itself, to become less interesting perhaps as it becomes more confident in its obvious truth, but the vision and the method, if not the form, remain consistent.
There is a neat little scene in her memoir Aftermath, the book that kickstarted all of this, where Cusk discusses her divorce with a therapist in a manner that prefigures the form of the trilogy: monologue in front of a supposedly silent auditor, in which the domestic, the interior pain is paralleled, callously, you might say, with the larger global distribution of pain:
“It is strange to discuss my marriage in this room; its neutrality is almost chastising, makes the story both more lurid and more sombre, like the orderly courtrooms in which suited committees analyse war. “crimes, carefully dissect individual acts of thoughtless brutality and havoc over matching coffee cups. It is aftermath, the thing that happens once reality has occurred. Will I ever find reality again, bloodied and pulsing, find my way out of this room and back down the road along which I came? Y listens, stroking his large knuckles. I talk and talk, as though I am on the stand. I talk in expectation of a judgement, for or against me I do not know. Finally he opens his mouth to speak.
We have to stop now, he says.”
In Cusk’s work, the recognition across a gap, a large, yawning chasm, between fiction and reality, between war crime and divorce, is perhaps the key formal structure, the key attempt to offer a vision of the world. Rather than use the conventional mimetic powers of realist fiction, to show the grinding consequences of poverty as a result of spending too much on one’s mistress, for example, there is instead, an attempt to make representation fail to contain women’s reality, which gets at wider aspects of reality too. War crimes and divorce might not be similar, but they resemble each other in not fitting into language, Cusk thinks. Representation has to leave so much out. Chu suggests that women for Cusk are ‘a hole in reality’ because they are sort of definitionally opposed to the constructed world, what a philosopher might call second nature or the space of reasons. But Cusk seems mostly to entertain a fantasy of tearing down that social world, of destroying fictive representations which we can find compelling without needing to believe (or disbelieve) in a distinct female ontology.
Cusk’s vision can become powerful and terrifying, can be taken seriously, sometimes, not necessarily because all reality is messy and female, but because of something that in Parade she calls the ‘pathos of identity’. By that, I think she means the felt contradiction between what matters to you about yourself and what you think is real. It doesn’t matter whether it’s real or not, however, if the pathos is there. The pathos of Cusk’s pursuit of annihilation is there in her represented person. She is the one making the hole.
I think something similar to this pathos is exemplified in, for example, the moment in Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence’s first novel, after Paul and Clara have sex, where Lawrence is staging, for the first time, his sort-of-unbearable sex-metaphysics stuff. Paul is moved by the encounter, but he realises that sex is not personal:
But it was not Clara. It was something that happened because of her, but it was not her. They were scarcely any nearer each other. It was as if they had been blind agents of a great force.
It doesn’t matter if you believe in the Schopenhauerian /Nietzschean will-to-live bollocks that Lawrence claimed to. Because what makes it affecting, where the pathos comes from is in the ways the impersonal that Lawrence wants to celebrate is in tension with the personal, with Clara’s person, with Paul’s with their relationship. She cannot fully be dissolved into the ideal, like the bubble he later compares her too. She can’t be reduced to the great force. To be condemned to a personal existence among impersonal forces, this is worth pitying. And if ultimately, for the most part, the person Cusk wants us to pity is herself, that is as it should be. We do.
And at times, Cusk seems to suggest we don’t need to believe in her forces, or not in the way she does, because she is the one being sacrificed to her own vision. We can admire it without believing. Do we need to believe that the narrator of Second Place has really met the devil?
The time I met the devil on a train leaving Paris, and about how after that meeting the evil that usually lies undisturbed beneath the surface of things rose up and disgorged itself over every part of life.
This perfectly describes, in a way her vision of the relationships between the sexes. These are her demons, her possessions. Once you see the devil you can’t unsee him. But we cannot take the moment in the novel literally, and it is surely too fantastic to be allegorical. Instead, we see the predicament of an individual artist, her idiosyncratic vision is the battle to make the untrue and the true equal to one another. Second Place ends with a beautifully ambivalent statement—True art means seeking to capture the unreal.
The pathos of fiction in its classic realist sense, Frederic Jameson once said, comes from the entertainment of fantasy, and the failure of wish fulfilment. This moment, in the Political Unconscious, is to me the most important thing he has written, or the core, most defensible version of his aesthetic theory—it comes in the form of an explanation of the power of 19th century realism—embodied in the realest of them all, Balzac. Balzac knew (subconsciously) what he wanted, and he fantasised about these things, but in order to enjoy his fantasies, he had to make them believable. And in order to make them believable, he had to represent the real systematic obstacles to his fantasies. So he ends up constructing a form, the realist novel, that basically keeps placing its characters in touch with what hurts, which is capitalism:
It then sometimes happens that the objections are irrefutable, and that the wish-fulfilling imagination does its preparatory work so well that the wish, and desire itself, are confounded by the unanswerable resistance of the Real. […] not Balzac’s deeper sense of political and historical realities, but rather his incorrigible fantasy demands ultimately raise History itself over against him, as absent cause, as that on which desire must come to grief. The Real is thus—virtually by definition in the fallen world of capitalism—that which resists desire, that bedrock against which the desiring subject knows the breakup of hope and can finally measure everything that refuses its fulfillment. Yet it also follows that this Real—this absent cause, which is fundamentally unrepresentable and non-narrative, and detectable only in its effects—can be disclosed only by Desire itself, whose wish-fulfilling mechanisms are the instruments through which this resistant surface must be scanned.
Cusk, I think, has created some of the most interesting channels for desire to get in touch with what hurts. And indeed, in so doing, she proves a different point about reality, perhaps than the one that she wants to make. We don’t go to writers for an accurate map of the world, partly because we can’t anymore. But we still want to see our desires encounter objections. The systems of global capitalism, among other things, are now, I think, too complex to apprehend through the shape of an individual life. If Balzac tells us something about capitalism’s totality via its relationship to desire, this is to his credit. We can’t pull it off. But we still know there is a world that frustrates our desires, an unmappable chaotic reality, perhaps, and we still want to see our desire crumple against it, to feel the pathos and dignity of our individual desires being almost a match for reality.
As I said, at the heart of Parade is the death of a mother, and this seems to be the actual pain of the book. It’s not simply that reality is messy, it’s that it makes us and then it consumes us. This is a huge, terrifying subject, which dwarfs the questions of freedom she establishes. I’m not sure if Cusk’s form finds the right balance for this in her depersonalised parade of artists. They do not quite acquire enough pathos individually at any one time. They stand in for their theme too much. Unlike Clara, in Lawrence’s novel, their bubbles seem to burst too quickly. Each failed artistic freedom prepares us for the final failed freedom of the mother, but they disappear too soon. The writing is often much vaguer than when she is at her best, partly because of this general lack of individuation (“Not to be understood is effectively to be silenced, but not understanding can in its turn legitimise that silence, can illuminate one’s own unknowability.” Sentences like this, with unclear switches between agents crop up a lot).
In a way, the gap between the artistic biographies and this great grieving theme of the lost mother is like all of those other gaps, holes and outlines in her work. At the level of form it almost works. Cusk sets up a huge rhyme between womb and tomb. But in Parades I think the hole she digs for all of the individual artists, and herself, is too deep to see into.
*
One of the greatest poets to ever do battle with reality, Wallace Stevens, created a terrifying version of the identification between motherhood and death. It is a late poem, ‘Madame La Fleurie’, that sees reality winning, as Cusk does here. I thought of it, while reading Parade, as a work almost as unconsoled. It’s a poem whose stance I think Cusk would oppose, but in its overthrowing of Stevens’ usual charms, I think it comes close to her own way of self-immolation:
Weight him down, O side-stars, with the great weightings of the end.
Seal him there. He looked in a glass of the earth and thought he lived in it.
Now, he brings all that he saw into the earth, to the waiting parent.
His crisp knowledge is devoured by her, beneath a dew.Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the moon.
It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he could be told.
It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.
It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.The black fugatos are strumming the blackness of black...
The thick strings stutter the finial gutturals.
He does not lie there remembering the blue-jay, say the jay.
His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw,
In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light.
This essay is also part off attempt to concretise some thoughts in response to Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, which I hope to write about soon.