Mauro sprang to his feet as we approached and congratulated us on finding the restaurant. I’m afraid the others might not solve the riddle so quickly, he said. It’s typical of this city’s attitude to fashion, he said, that the most desirable meeting place should also be impossible to find. Not so impossible, Julia observed, since they found it. It’s the parade that has confused everything.
Obviously, Rachel Cusk is smarter and more sophisticated than I am, and despite the fact that I am always struck by how wonderfully constructed her sentences are, I’ve only ever given one of her novels (Second Place) more than three stars: the wonderful sentences stack up and up into something that whooshes right over my head. Because Parade is primarily about art and artists, I’ll use the analogy that I much prefer Impressionism to Realism (in both painting and literature), and while I might appreciate elements of Abstract art on an intellectual level, it doesn’t speak to my soul; and what Cusk is doing in her work to “disturb and define the novel” strikes me as closest to the Abstract. This novel that reads like a series of essays or vignettes — a shifting parade of artists, all named “G” — repeats themes of doubling and mirroring, death and violence, having children and losing parents, and it all seems to add up to a commentary on gender and artmaking — and I say “seems” because coming right out with a point seems to be beside the point (which is not a fatal flaw, just hard for me to connect with). As an intellectual exercise, I am enlarged for having picked this up, but when it comes down to taste, this isn’t exactly my thing. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
It occurred to me in the time that followed that I had been murdered and yet had nonetheless remained alive, and I found that I could associate this death-in-life with other events and experiences, most of which were consequences in one way or another of my biological femininity. Those female experiences, I now saw, 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. Like a kind of stuntman, this alternate self took the actual risks in the manufacture of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity. Despite having no name or identity of her own, the stuntman was what created both the possibilities and the artificiality of character. But the violence and the unexpectedness of the incident in the street had caught my stuntman unawares.
Cusk has written before about having been “brained” by a strange woman in Paris, and Parade would seem to be an expansion (in themes and format) of the short story she had based on that event, “The Stuntman”. Rotating between third person accounts of various artists (G the painter whose style evolved into painting upside-down landscapes, prompting a female novelist to lament, “G was not the first man to have described women better than women seemed able to describe themselves.” — or G the sculptor who made amorphous figures out of fabric, “It seemed to lie within the power of this G’s femininity, to unsex the human form.” — or the Black artist G, “By painting a small picture of a cathedral, G appeared to be making a comment about marginality. In the eye of this beholder, the grandiosity of man was thwarted: his products could be no bigger than he was himself .”) and various first person accounts (of everyday life and travel and family demands), this is more about the artists’ common humanity than what they created. (Many of the artists who appear, despite all be named “G” in the novel, are identifiable as real people by their work, but masking their identities seems to be in keeping with Cusk’s attempts to write herself, as the author, out of her novels). There is no overall plot, but the episodes recounted reinforce themes of gender disparity, artistic vision, and family dynamics. Again: Cusk has much to say and her sentences are masterful —
• Perhaps men had always painted nudes in the same way as they committed violence – to prove that their courage had not been damaged by morality and need.
• 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. Art is the pact of individuals denying society the last word.
• Something had changed: somehow she had become identifiably female. This was not a sexual but a social femininity, offered to her as a form of weakness.
• Psychologists tell us that little children are proud of their own shit, and enjoy showing it to other people, until they are informed that their shit is disgusting and should be hidden, and I suddenly wondered whether artists somehow never got this message and kept on being proud of their shit and wanting to show it to people.
• A woman artist marries a male artist because she sees her ambitions mirrored in him. She thinks that because he’s an artist he’ll let her be an artist – she thinks he’s the one guy who will understand her. But a male artist wants a slave, and when he marries a woman artist he gets the bonus of a slave who thinks he’s a genius.
Two of the artists that Cusk writes about seem to be achieving in their preferred media the “effaced narrator” that Cusk strives for in her writing. There is the painter, G: “She painted a number of big oils that showed a seamless, almost featureless surface, quietly undulating like the surface of the sea. They seemed to hang mutely and pacifically between death and life. They proposed something non-human, a spiritual quest.” And the film-maker, G:
His style, so uninterfering, drew attention to itself without meaning to. He rarely, for instance, showed his characters in close-up, believing that this was not how human beings saw one another. His films had no particular aesthetic. They often took place in public spaces, and his characters seemed barely to notice that they were being watched. They wore ordinary clothes and rarely looked at the camera. They were absorbed in their own lives. For those accustomed to the camera’s penetration of social and physical boundaries and the strange authority of its prying eye, this absence of what might be called leadership was noticeable. People were often baffled or even angered by his films. They expected a storyteller to demonstrate his mastery and control by resolving the confusion and ambiguity of reality, not deepening it.
These two creations (an “almost featureless” painting and a film without a narrative that deepens the ambiguity of reality) are fairly analogous to how I perceived the construction of the “almost featureless” Parade — and that may very well be genius and genre-defining, but personally, I need more there there; whoosh, right over my head.
