When the saturation of meaning leaves no choice but to flee, we can only seek, in complexity and mystery, a truth that cannot be expressed with conceptual clarity, but is nevertheless profoundly real. On Rachel Cusk’s new novel.
ParadeRachel Cusk’s latest novel (it is not yet translated: I wonder if the one who has the task of doing it will have a better idea than “Parade”, a word with a very difficult sound for a title; there is also “Procession”, but it has a religious echo that has nothing to do with the book) is another of his attempts to stop writing novels without stopping doing so. If in the previous ones, however, the narrative continued to take precedence over the most avant-garde elements, in this one it is very clear that the anti-novel beats the novel. The critics, from what I see, have almost unanimously hated it. For me, however, it reminds me of those chaotic albums by Joni Mitchell, less perfect than Blue either For the rosesless rounded, who make far fewer shots, but have such deep ambition, research and concern that they can leave a more solid impression on you; I am thinking of Hegiraan album that almost no one names, but which I heard Björk say was her favorite. It’s Parade: the book in which Cusk takes to an absurd paroxysm the obsessions he had under control in the trilogy Backlitthe book in which he seems to almost forget the readers to explore paths that lead to dead ends, the book in which he loses the fear of all his faults and, on the contrary, immerses himself in them, disguises himself as them, drowns himself in them.
Parade It is divided into sections independent of each other: no character is repeated, although they all take place in the world of visual arts, but in each section there is an artist, sometimes a woman and sometimes a man, whom the novel designates with the letter G. I like it because it is a very stupid trap, and which speaks of the folds between reality and fiction, of the things we invent for fiction to make it more plausible than reality. In fiction, it is absurd to have two characters called G, or Gabriela, or Matías or John. People would be confused, they would have to be called by their last name, anyway, it is boring. Either we play with the confusion and give it meaning in the text, or there is no point in including such an incentive to get lost. In real life, however, there is nothing more common than sharing a name or an initial; and indeed, these coincidences make no sense. People in real life don’t have the same name “for a reason.”
At first glance, then, the artist called G (who in one case is a deceased painter who painted herself pregnant; in another, a sculptor with an unbearable husband; in another, an artist who, at some point in his career, begins, for some reason, to paint landscapes upside down, to the amazement of his wife, etc.) is the only thing the sections share. But as you read on, you realize that there is another common element, in addition to G and art: in almost every section, a slightly absurd and slightly violent fact erupts, with different impacts. In some cases, it happens to G; in another to another character; in some sections, it is a very important issue, around which all the conversations that Cusk writes with his characteristic mastery revolve; in another section, it is a detail. A man enters G’s living room and jumps out of the window, ruining the opening; a woman who talks to her husband about a sample of G is attacked in the street by a stranger; G the sculptor has a strange encounter with her husband, who returns from a trip and notices the fraternity that has formed between G, the nanny and her daughter, who excludes her.
In the conversations that the characters have in these sections, many themes emerge: the leitmotif of motherhood in its relationship to creation emerges above all, the question of being a woman and an artist, a mother and an artist, whether one can be a woman and an artist or a mother and an artist, and in what sense they are two things that are identical and in what sense they are the most opposed identities. But these are not the themes of the novel, and that is what is wonderful: the themes of the novel are those that it draws with its form; anonymity, the universal and the singular, the general and the particular, the question of whether the same things happen to all of us, of whether there is something like an essence of life that resides in living in a normality, whatever it may be, and seeing it constantly haunted by ghosts until one day insignificance and death take us by storm; the question of whether a life can be told like this, with letters and general descriptions, with a repeated pattern. It’s funny because I see that critics of the novel accuse it of being elitist, of talking about the lives of European artists, and it seems to me that if you read the novel beyond the explicit reflections of the characters, it’s a book that is It’s about exactly the opposite, about the question of whether artists really have as special a life as they think they do, or whether they’re so innocuous and interchangeable that we could count them all with the same initial.
There are people who appreciate the deepening of the discourse on Internet forums; young people, especially. I see its decline, its return as a farce, and I feel that, even if it is enigmatic, even if I have given up talking to many people, I prefer to move on.
I thought a lot that it was no longer possible to discuss, that it was already difficult to talk about subjects. Everything has been spent; one position, the opposite position, the first but ironic, the second but more innocent. I understand more and more the second Heidegger, the second Wittgenstein, those who betrayed their years of conceptual clarity to move on to a kind of mysticism where everything was truer, but also more confused. I think we have to do what they did, move on to a kind of second era of the Internet, to our esoteric years. In this context, I understand Cusk’s metaphysical turn, her poetic turn: she also knows that it is no longer funny to talk explicitly about things because the ways of reading like this, in a world saturated with so-called discussions of ideas, are no longer useful. We have to look for other ways of saying, even if they will have less of an audience, if they will be less appreciated, will sell less, will work less. It’s either that or join a chorus of sound and fury that means nothing, and that can be done on Twitter, but not in a book that you’re going to put so much time and effort into, not in the work that you want to give to the world. I guess from my humble and insignificant position, I’ve tried to do that too. I’ve been interested in Jewish mysticism in recent years, something I’ve never been interested in before. I was interested in language that was the furthest thing from recommendations, advice, and opinions.
In this sense: the return of fiction and poetry is important, it is avant-garde, it is not an escape, quite the opposite. There are people who appreciate the deepening of the discourse on Internet forums; young people, especially. I see its decline, its return as a farce, and I feel that, even if it is enigmatic, even if I have given up talking to many people, I prefer to move on. I think that the only thing that still interests me on social networks is the mens clothing guys (@dieworkwear), the guy who talks about clothes and always insists that he is not interested in classes, or bodies, or advice, or teaching how to look decent or look skinny, only pure form and personal communication (not normative, not vindictive) with a tradition; with one, with anyone, in fact. The saturation of meaning leaves no other option than escape.
