In a moving scene from the aboriginal chapter ‘The Stuntman’ in Rachel Cusk’s recent book, Parade, the female narrator is “hit forcibly in the head” by a strange woman (a semi-autobiographical element), which the narrator later interprets as an artistic gesture. She realises after the incident that she felt as though she had been killed but remained alive. This death-in-life was linked to her experiences as a woman, which she had assigned to an alternate self, a stuntman, who absorbed the risks. She goes on to add: “but the violence and the unexpectedness of the incident in the street had caught my stuntman unawares”.
Parade, divided into four parts — ‘The Stuntman’, ‘The Midwife’, ‘The Diver’ and and ‘The Spy’ — intertwines the lives of four distinct artists, all of them named G, with the life of the woman narrator and her husband. The predicament faced by the female artist calls to mind Margaret Atwood, who, in one of her poems, writes: A child is not a poem,/ A poem is not a child.
Women often find themselves constrained by their femininity, juggling roles as mother, wife, woman, artist — in that exact sequence, never reversed. Cusk proposes three potent (if not radical) ideas in the book: the transient nature of femininity, comparing it to the eternal recurrence of violence, motherhood, not just its thematic concerns but also scrutinising how we write about it, and questioning how women can be immortalised in stone when their existence is defined by repetition without permanence.
Defying convention
The renowned author’s recent literary journey, transitioning from novel-writing to memoir (Aftermath and A Life’s Work), and back to novels with the Outline trilogy, is particularly interesting as she tries to find her artistic language. Cusk faced the challenge of integrating her female experiences into her work and felt compelled to address them despite the limitations of traditional novel forms.
Parade furthers her interrogation by depicting the struggles female artists face in balancing personal responsibilities and creative pursuits, in stark contrast to men who often prioritise art over family. The book achieves this through an examination of artistic biographies, traditionally dominated by male creators as the ultimate authorities. Paradeobliquely introduces and emphasises the concept of the female creator who pushes against established norms.
In a review of Parade in the New York Magazine, journalist Andrea Long Chu accuses Cusk of being a gender fundamentalist and claims her works have “characters who secretly want to be men”. She reduces Cusk’s work to a case of penis envy. However, there is something more complex at play here.
Cusk, in a recent discussion of her book, shared how the process of writing Parade was particularly challenging, involving doubts about language and narrative structures. She became interested in the non-narrative aspects of artistic creation. Is Parade, then, a giving in to convention or working your way from the inside? It’s a question that needs more deliberation.
I understand Cusk’s case through two third-wave feminists — Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Cixous, in her essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, writes, “Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.” Irigaray, warning against gender fundamentalism, writes in ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’: “By speaking out the non-place of sexual difference, woman escapes from the prison-house where language, always in the singular, tries to enclose her.” Cusk seems to be caught between these two aphorisms and is painstakingly stuck in the man-woman binary.
The male perspective
The narrative voice continually shifts in the novel, with Cusk gradually losing belief in the ‘I’ and resorting to ‘we’, as if responding to an obligation to encompass all of human experience, which again, is counterproductive and aligns with Long Chu’s criticism.
The novel, therefore, ultimately possesses a mythic quality, manifested in Cusk denying proper names to the artists. Similar to how in mythology or a biblical story, a figure like Job stands for all of mankind, Cusk’s characters too are archetypal male and female.
Readers are confronted with the idea of how artistic creation — whether in visual arts or literature — is often shaped by male perspectives. At one point in the novel, a woman gazes at the male artist G’s painting and declares, “I want to write upside down.”
“…because she felt that this reality that G had so brilliantly elucidated, identical to its companion reality in every particular but for the complete inversion of its moral force, was the closest thing she knew to the mystery and tragedy of her own sex… G was not the first male artist to have described women better than women seemed able to describe themselves.”
The reviewer is an independent journalist based in Delhi.
