“It’s the parade that has confused everything.”

Rachel Cusk’s recent novels have challenged the conventions of the novelistic form (and seemingly the patience of some readers). Her Outline trilogy (Outline, Transit and Kudos) introduced the startling technique of ‘annihilated perspective’. And Second Place was a bravura, almost Oulipan, take on Lorenzo in Taos.

And in both cases, constrained as any reader is, by the expectations of genre, even if the genre is literary fiction, the intent of her books only became clear over time, from discussions amongst readers and interviews with the author (indeed the conceit behind Second Place, which explains much of the novel, still seems to escape most critics).

Which makes me suspect that, four months before publication, Parade has still to reveal its true architecture.

Cusk is known, outside of her novelistic output, for her essays on art, female artists in particular.

The first section of Parade, The Architect, began life as a lecture Cusk gave in Italy (one apparently rather different the expectations of her host) and was then published as a stand-alone piece in the New Yorker, accompanied by an interview with the author.

And it is fascinating to see the small changes that Cusk has made for the novel Parade (my annotations with underlining representing insertions):

“At a certain point in his career the artist <s>D</s><u>G</U>, perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down. <S>This is how I imagine it</s>. At first sight the paintings looked as though they had been hung the wrong way round by mistake, but then the signature emblazoned in the bottom right-hand corner clearly heralded the advent of a new reality. His wife believed that with this development he had inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition, and wondered if it might have repercussions in terms of his success, but the critical response to the upside-down paintings was <u>more</u> enthusiastic <U>than ever</u>, and <s>D</s><u>G</U> was showered with a fresh round of the awards and honours that people seemed disposed to offer him almost no matter what he did.”

The deletion of “this is how I imagine it” removes the explicit acknowledgement of the fictional nature of some of what follows, but thereby also separating the author Cusk from the fictional narrator.

And the switch in the cipher for the artist concerned from D to G might be a clue to the reader that this artist is in fact an imagined/novelistic take on Georg Bazelitz.

Except one key feature in the novel is to have more than one artist named G.

Whereas in the New Yorker we had:
“We went for a weekend to Berlin, where there was an exhibition of the artist Louise Bourgeois’s late fabric works.”

Referring to the 2022 exhibition The Woven Child at the Gropius Bau, where Cusk provided a contribution to the catalogue. The novel now has it:
“We went away for a weekend to another city, to see an exhibition of works by the female sculptor G.”

This continues, describing the work:

“The exhibition occupied the entire top floor of a grand museum, accessed by a broad walkway that circled a vast central atrium. Light cascaded from the glass ceiling down to the marble floor far below. Beyond the open doors of the entrance, where the attendant sat checking tickets, one of G’s characteristic giant cloth forms could be seen hanging in space, suspended from the ceiling – a human form without identity, without face or features. It was genderless, this floating being, returned to a primary innocence that was also tragic, as though in this dream-state of suspension we might find ourselves washed clean of the violence of gender, absolved of its misdemeanours and injustices, its diabolical driving of the story of life. It seemed to lie within the power of this G’s femininity, to unsex the human form.”

Gs that follow include:

“Sometimes the screams reached the window of my room in the new apartment, where I was reading about G, a late-nineteenth-century woman painter dead of childbirth at the age of thirty-one. Her nude self-portraits show her heavily pregnant, her head inclined to meet her own eyes in the image. Can the element of the eternal in the experience of femininity ever be represented as more than an internalised state? G is trying to show herself from the outside, while she experiences the dawning knowledge of her situation and its consequences. She doesn’t entirely know quite what it is she has chosen: she is being led by instinct. To be led by instinct is the pre-eminent freedom attributed to male artists, and to the making of art itself. There is a self-destructive element to that instinct, and to the creative act, but in this case the cards have been dealt out in advance: G is stepping out of a relative safety and into the world of her own illegitimacy.”

Referring to Paula Modersohn-Becker

And

“One day in an exhibition I saw a painting by the Black artist G of a cathedral
[…]
It had struck me as small, for the reason perhaps that its subject was big. 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. What was absent from the painting was any belief in what the cathedral was. I remembered it as resembling a glowing pile of blackened embers, charged with internal heat: it seemed to belong more to nature than to man. I wondered how this same artist might have painted a mountain. The justice he brought to the cathedral was of a rare kind, was something akin to love, or pity. He would not, perhaps, have pitied a mountain in the same way.”

Norman Wilfred Lewis

But then other Gs in the novel, outside of the first section of the book, I have so far been unable to identify and may perhaps be fictional:

In The Midwife:

“It was well known that G’s early years in the city had been wild. As time went by her circumstances had become more conventional, which everyone except her seemed to regard as a natural progression. Great success had come to her, and with it a husband and child, and money that needed to be converted into material things.”

In The Spy (again the G was initially E when an extract was published in Harpers):

“The mother of the film-maker G did not know who her son was: his name, which had become widely known, was not in fact his real name. He had assumed it so that she should not discover what he did. While she lived she knew nothing of his illustrious career, and even after she died he maintained this alias and the habits of secrecy and disguise that came with it.”

Three sections follow The Stuntman: The Midwife; The Diver; and The Spy. Three of these alternate between the story of one of the Gs, and a present day account of the narrator(s) (not necessarily the same people in each section; and who may or may not be based on Cusk, The Stuntman built around a real incident which befell Cusk in Paris).

The Diver offers a variation on this theme, set after the same exhibition seen in the narrator on The Stuntman, but here a death by suicide from a visitor has interrupted a planned day of events and lectures, and various of those involved meet to discuss what happened and also, intertwined with this, the life of the artist G (the Bourgeois stand in) who several of them knew personally.

The G of The Spy, a film-maker, film-reviewer and novelist also neatly links back to one of Cusk’s own dilemmas:

“His reviews began to attract notice for their striking avoidance of the word ‘I’. The memory of his novel now embarrassed him: his idea of writing had begun to falter. Of all the arts, it was the most resistant to dissociation from the self. A novel was a voice, and a voice had to belong to someone. In the shared economy of language, everything had to be explained; every statement, even the most simple, was a function of personality. He remembered how exposed he had felt as a child, as his mother steadily built a panorama of cause and effect around him. He was publicly identified with everything he did and said, as well as with what he did not do or say. Writing seemed a drastic enlargement of this predicament.”

The novel contains much lyrical and profound writing on art, and in particular the condition of the female artist, echoing Cusk’s non-fictional writing, and indeed strays at times into the essayistic. And I suspect some of its novelistic foundations await excavation.

“We had obligations and responsibilities of our own. We travelled for work. In a northern city, in our free time, we went to a museum. It was late in the day, half an hour before closing, and we decided to see the temporary exhibition that was on display. We were surprised that we knew nothing about the artist but in fact there was nothing to know: he was virtually anonymous. For centuries his work had been mistaken for that of a far more famous artist of the same school, and once the misappropriation had been acknowledged his activities lay too far back in time to be reconstructed. There were only the paintings themselves in which to look for clues. The paintings were interiors and streetscapes. They possessed a great eeriness that was partly the result of their manufacture by an unknown hand and partly that of the strangeness of what they saw. They were often scenes in which apparently nothing was happening and where the basic formality of the captured moment was absent. In one, for instance, a middle-aged woman was sitting alone in an empty room reading a book. The room was full of a bare light but the windows behind her were dark: it was night-time. She was fleshy, well dressed, self-absorbed. This woman was alone in a way that was nearly impossible to represent – it might have been captured, for instance, on a security camera. Immersed in being herself, she was indifferent to how she was seen. This indifference was oddly familiar to us. How had someone observed her in that way, alone?

It was only after several moments that we noticed a face in one of the windows behind her. It was the face of a small child standing outside in the darkness. He was looking in at her but she didn’t know he was there. She didn’t care enough to know: he didn’t matter to her. Yet he wanted something, was waiting out there in the dark for something. He wanted her to turn around and see him. In another painting of the same room, again at night, there was now a different woman sitting in the chair. She was leaning toward the dark window so that we could only see her back. On the other side of the window there was again the face of the little child alone in the darkness. The woman was waving at the child through the glass, her hand and face almost pressed to it, the chair nearly toppling with her enthusiasm. The child was smiling. We were told that this was the only example in this school of painting of a woman tipped forward in her chair to look through a window. But we had already recognised the rarity of love.”

Pending the verdict of time this didn’t quite live up to Second Place for me, but not did Second Place itself on a first reading, but still another excellent novel from a truly creative author.

The latest novel from the ever provocative, ever boundary pushing Rachel Cusk (each one of whose Outline/Transit/Kudos trilogy was Goldsmith shortlisted – the first of those Women’s Prize shortlisted also) and I would say a return to form after the slightly odd and reader-divisive “Second Place” which was Booker longlisted).

I said of that book in my review “As one would expect with Cusk - this is a deep and quotable book, one which teeters somewhere - like much of her writing - on just the right side of the boundary of genius and pretentiousness, but one which occasionally trespasses the boundary as well as making the occasional excursion to the territory of farce.” and I think much of that applies here but without the farce elements.

Like so much of her writing the themes of being a woman and motherhood are fundamental to the novel – and as with Second Place there is a developing theme in her writing of exploring the visual arts where the confrontation between art and the male/female experience (and the underlying current of violence in much of the artistic representation by both male and female authors) is in Cusk’s view more immediate and urgent than in literature.

And like much of her writing the themes and ideas often require a re-read and engagement with other Cuskian-readers to really appreciate what is going on with the book (for example quite how much “Second Place” was effectively a rewrite of “Lorenzo in Taos” and how what explained much of what seemed slightly jarring in the text only became clear to me when my brother engaged with the book in depth, and I think passed many reviewers completely by even then).

So for now consider these as working notes as I try to understand the structure of the novel and its meaning – notes I will revisit much nearer publication.

The book is split into four distinct sections – three of which have two interwoven strands to them.

The Stuntman

The first strand tells the third party story of an artist named G (of which there are many many more to come) famous for his upside down paintings. These are clearly based on those of the artist George Baselitz although the story is otherwise imagined. Through the thoughts of G’s wife we see both how G‘s artistic career is only possible due to her support, but also how she genuinely believes in his work which is “the closest things she knew to the mystery and tragedy of her own sex.” in its inversion of the world.

The second is told in first person and part autobiographical story based on when Cusk was “brained in the street in Paris, completely randomly” by a deranged female attacker. Cusk has said

the difficulty for me as a writer lay in the use of a personal experience that was so anomalous. Generally, I would use myself—as a location—only if the experience seems universal. It took me a long time to figure out the universal in this very singular and personal act. And, in the end, it had to do with the gender of the attacker—I don’t believe I would have found anything to say about being attacked by a man. But I think the sense—indeed, the reality—of being attacked by life, and by the self, is in fact quite general. Once I had confidence in this idea, it seemed legitimate to use what had happened to me, not because it particularly mattered in a personal sense but because it could function as a kind of reference for the things that happen to other people.

The narrator travels to large exhibition by another female sculptor G (the inspiration here is clearly Louise Bourgeois and her spider installation pieces) – the exhibition is abandoned when a spectator commits suicide by deliberately falling to his death from the atrium. Later the narrator sees work by other artist called G – one (based on some quick Googling) Paula Modersohn-Becker and her mother with child photos, the other Normal Lewis and his 1950 painting Cathedral.



The concept of Stuntman is explained as follows:

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.

The Midwife

The third party strand is about a initially notorious and wild female artist G (I was unable to work out in this case if there was a real life inspiration) who lives with her photographer husband whose specialty is mildly-disturbingly-close ups of their young daughter’s face. Much of the roots of G’s work lies in the “combined authority with neglect” influence of her parents and her reaction to it. Even though she is now successful she still keeps her run-down studio in a dodgy area of the nearby City – but is also conscious that much of her artistic freedom as a woman relies on a Nanny (“her drudge, her alter ego, her shame”)

The first party plural section tells the story of a visit to a remote farm on what seems to be a Greek island. The Midwife is a person on the Island (always a woman) “a community figure” whose job is to “assist with death, rather as a midwife assists with birth” – but using the rather shocking method of a hammer blow (picking up of course on the violence-to-both themes than run through the novel). Further death, particularly of the elderly and mothers, and those that assist at that time becomes a recurring theme in the last section.

The Diver

This is the only single strand section – a group of people involved with the art-exhibition-ending-in-suicide (“The Diver” – other than in the title not otherwise mentioned in the text as such) meet to discuss the impressions the event has made on them and some of their philosophies of life.

The lengthy eloquent and somewhat artificial monologues in which many of them engage in lieu of conversation reminded me of Cusk’s style in her trilogy.

There is also some discussion of G – both her art and some biographical details which in this case did match what I have come to know of Louise Bourgeois’s career (through novels such as ”Now, Now Louison”).

The Spy

The first party plural section features a family coming to terms with the death of their domineering mother.

The third party section has of course another artist G (again one I could not relate to a real artist) who makes naturalistic films. His work too is largely in reaction to his upbringing. Earlier he wrote a novel under an alias (partly due to the notoriety of his brother), and reviews which “attract notice for their striking avoidance of the word “I” (I wondered if this was a nod to Cusk’s ideas of “annihilated perspective”) – largely due to his increasing discomfort with his novel and writing in general, which of “all the arts is the most resistant to disassociation from the self”. His mother too dies in this section linking the two stories.

Earlier in his career he is inspired by the idea of a spy who “sees more clearly and objectively than the others, because he has freed himself from need: the needs of the self in its construction by and participation in experience”.

Overall this is a novel which I think needs a re-read for me, but one I will leave until others have engaged with it (as proved very productive with “Second Place”).

Cusk is astonishing! This is a book that is so thoughtful, so intentioned, so capacious and uncontainable that it's almost impossible to write a coherent review. But that's not a negative thing, I think it's a comment on how dense and intense this is, how it takes its big topics - art and representation, the nature and experience of reality and subjectivity, life and death, motherhood and identity, the 'doom' of gender, split selves and constructed narratives, liberation and confinement - and treats them with a pliable fluidity.

Other reviews have described the form and structure, something that gives order and purpose - if not any easy 'meaning' - to the investigations here. There are images and motifs that echo and which are iterative: mirrors and reflections, visual splittings that proliferate, just as there are various artists of different genders who operate as G. The 'I' of the opening narrative becomes the 'we' of the later ones, representing, I think, the divisions of self, mind and body, possibly gender, with which the writing is concerned, but which also unify as a combined 'we' by the end.

Throughout, this challenges the conventions of the 'novel': it interrogates the concept of the narrator, of form and narrative (the third section, The Diver, is a witty replay of the annihilated narrator of the [book:The Outline Trilogy|40942732]) but also pushes past what Cusk has done before. The integration of essay-like elements, some drawn from Cusk's own legitimate essays on art and female modernism, are re-purposed as part of this fiction, collapsing boundaries that are more usually upheld. This is also critically-engaged, not just in terms of art and literary theory but also their intersections with issues of capitalism and emotional commoditization.

The network of intertexts and references is wide and individual readers will bring their own prior knowledge to make these of lesser or greater significance to their interpretation and engagement with this text. I was especially struck by the centralisation of shame, something which [author:Annie Ernaux|56176] has already demonstrated to be one of the key drivers of her own literary project, alongside desire.

This is not, I'd suggest, a book to be picked up lightly: it demands attention (and I ended up with 29 pages of Kindle annotations!) - but, for me, it's the best thing Cusk has written to date, building on her previous work but feeling purer and more directional. How exciting to see where she will go next!

I love Rachel Cusk, and am excited by this new direction she's taken in her writing. Though the themes in her novels remain consistent--artmaking and motherhood, at the top of my head--she's doing something no one else is doing. In this way, PARADE has more in common with SECOND PLACE than any of her other novels. But it's even more formally inventive. I thought at times about Catherine Lacey's BIOGRAPHY OF X, with so much of PARADE unfolding through the life of the enigmatic artist G,. But I was just as entranced by the "I" that dips in and out, the woman "killed" on the street. This is a beautiful, puzzle box of a novel, one I plan to revisit again, and soon. Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley.