A Place With No Words: PARADE and Rachel Cusk's Quest for a Philosophy of/in Literature

Bloomsbury Club Show Notes

This post contains the show notes for the most recent edition of the Cordelivres Criticism Club podcast, on Rachel Cusk’s most recent novel, Parade. Check out the audio if you haven't yet—it’s free!

Let’s get into it!

Bloomsbury Club Deep Dive

We start with a bit of a general intro to our deep dive episodes of the Cordelivres Criticism Club, for the Bloomsbury Club (we played around with the name a bit). Whatever we call them, these episodes will focus on in-depth analyses of specific texts or aspects of texts that warrant closer examination. These episodes sometimes might be looking at specific elements of novels we also cover in more general conversations, and sometimes a focus on novels that, as we say, seem like they require a deep dive—Parade is one of them, for sure.

We’re also be continually evolving all aspects of the show, so on verra !

Boundary-Pushing Novels in Literature

We started off the substantive conversation with my concept of novels that define or demarcate the boundaries of the novel form, using the (tortured? warped? unstable?) analogy of a cricket oval. As far as anyone can possibly know, the sport of cricket involves an oval. There’s also, we’re pretty sure, a rule that allows the ball to be hit in any direction. This is not a cricket podcast.

Nonetheless, we try and make sense of our cricket oval analogy to describe the boundaries of the novel form. We might uses this image to explain how certain books, like Parade, define or push the limits of what constitutes a novel. In this analogy:

• The cricket field represents the entire scope of the novel form

• The central area represents conventional novels

• The boundary line represents innovative works that test the limits of the form

• Different directions on the oval represent different aspects of innovation (e.g. narrative style, structure, philosophical content)

Among others, Parade redraws this boundary, particularly in its use of the novel as a philosophical text while still maintaining compelling narrative elements. The idea, as we get into with some detail, is that certain novels—we mention Finnegans Wake and Ducks, Newburyport, alongside Parade—push the boundaries of the novel form in different directions, redrawing the demarcation line of the oval: that is to say, what is in bounds. We could look at this idea for any art form, I think; how do these “cricket novels” push the boundary of the form for us, here, novels? More importantly, perhaps, there’s also a question of how good (or “good”) these novels are; I’m not convinced there’s always a 1-to-1 overlap, there. But it’s a fruitful way to think about form, and something that we’ll certainly come back to on the show in the future. Parade, though, is examples of a book that’s an intriguing formal novel and a successful novel-novel, so to speak.

Parade On The Cricket Pitch

About twenty minutes in, I get ot my thesis on Parade, which I think (and say), is one of the most important and interesting novels of the century. On the show, we get into the novel’s formal innovations and narrational techniques, positioning it as a super significant work that sits right at the boundary of the form. We talk a little about Cusk's exceptional skill in managing different narrative modes; putting her in conversation with Joyce and Woolf in that area might be a good idea for a future episode.

We got into a bit of context by looking at the arc of her career, particularly her evolution from (somewhat) conventional early works to more experimental later novels, with Arlington Park as something of an apotheosis (there’s a fun word). We covered the Outline trilogy and Cusk’s more recent, subject-oriented work, and how her career lines up with Woolf’s; a compelling parallel, I think.

The Last Philosopher

I mentioned my coverage of the book; which you can check out in full as well. My review-essay for 3:AM was tilted “The Last Philosopher: Rachel Cusk and the Transgressions of Art.” Parade is, by far, her most avant-garde novel, however we want to define that term—it’s also her most pointedly feminist work. I think this book is super, just, cool (there’s some high-end analysis) as a philosophical exploration of art, language, meaning, and truth. It really is a remarkable book, managing to grapple with some seriously heavy-hitting philosophical concepts while maintaining its novelistic shape, momentum, and engagement.

These concepts range across the board, too: there’s a critique of gendered spaces and what it means for a woman to create; the intersection of the domestic and the creative; the price and meaning of art; and other, classical Cuskian thematics such as marriage, motherhood, family, selfhood, and, of course, language. Ultimately Parade seems invested in interrogating the philosophical potential of art, and answering that inquiry via its own artistic method and aesthetic truth.

Cusk is so good at wrangling a complex, abstract idea into a (sharp, often lyric, figurative) sentence—that’s really her superpower. We’ve talked about this on other episodes covering her work, and we get into it some again today; it’s the technique that gives her work that particular quality of sentence-level readability mixed with conceptual density, something that people often miss and are often thrown by, not least my students.

I’ve said this before, but Cusk’s novels seem like they should be really easy to read—her senesces don't look like Woolf, or Joyce, or Faulkner, or even contemporary writers like Shelia Heti (a favorite of Cusk’s) or Eimear McBride in Strange Hotel—but the are very much not, because of that depth and density of ideas they achieve. On the show I call this quality in Parade “frustratingly propulsive” and I like this formulation; you can read Cusk for days, but thinking your way through her books is a lot harder.

Art, (In)Sanity, and the Self

The central core here, I think, is the balance between art and madness. We get some of those great Cuskian linguistic moments in exploring these ideas.

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. G made a painting she particularly loved, of slender birch trees in sunlight, and the demented calmness and innocence of these upside-down trees seemed to suggest the possibility of madness as a kind of shelter. How had he understood this nameless female unhappiness inside her that made madness such a temptation? Unlike other artists they knew, G could not have been accused of exploitation: he didn’t suffer from blind male self-im-portance, and nor had he ever taken any kind of liberty that the public value of his gaze might have seemed to legitimise. [emphasis added]

The two questions I wrote down in my notebook, preparing for the show, were: What does it mean to create art? What are the costs? In the discussion we looked at the book’s narrational structure, particularly how it explores art's relationship to human experience through shifting narrational modes. We see all sorts of methods—first-person plural, singular, and third-person viewpoints—and spent a bit of time on how Cusk moves between these modes, which are so abrupt that it seems the entire narrational coherence is bound up in this all being created by one first-person narrator. Cosmopoiesis, indeed.

Here’s that first break, which we read on the show:

So she thought that what he was really saying was that women could not be artists if men were going to be artists. Once, she was in his studio for the visit of a female novelist, who was struck as though by lightning by the upside-down paintings, much as G’s wife had been herself. I want to write upside down, the woman exclaimed, with considerable emotion. No doubt G found this a preposterous thing to say, but G’s wife was quietly satisfied, because she herself felt that this reality 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. There had been a plaintive note - of injustice, perhaps - in the novelist’s tone, as though she had just realised something had been appropriated from her. was not the first man to have described women better than women seemed able to describe themselves.

A great Cusk line at the end of that first, third-person, section too.

Her idea of the “stuntman” is another great concept, one that was excerpted as a standalone New Yorker story last year. This idea—that the first-person, woman narrator (who I take as the creator of the entire fictive world) has a double, the stuntman, who absorbs her female experiences so that, essentially, she herself might live. This is a super compelling idea, I think, and does a lot of work in allowing the book to accelerate its philosophical claims through its own composition, which gives it a lot of depth.

Basically, it seems to be saying that art is madness, or that madness is a waypoint along the way to art:

It was as though a violence underlying female identity had risen up and stuck. This was the domain of the stuntman, this attack on me that had originated within myself, but now the stuntman seemed to have taken an actual human form and been externalised. In the exhibition I found different reflections of this notion, there in the vague and exalted light of those lofty silent rooms, which opened one upon another, so that one felt drawn deeper and deeper into G’s secret being, where the making of art bore a relationship at once childlike and savage to the living of life. Here, sanity and insanity were not opposites but rather were the two faces of animate matter, the point at which the existence of consciousness can get no further in breaking down the existence of substance, of the body. Art, rooted in insanity, transforms itself through process into sanity: it is matter, the body, that is insane. [emphasis added]

Or, as it the narrator puts in in an earlier quote that we read, “the possibility of madness as a kind of shelter.”

So then all of it—Parade’s challenging linear narrative coherence, the disparate narrational modes, the fractured approach to characterization—are ways in which its formal qualities reflecting its themes, or, more potently, how the book's structure itself serves as an artistic statement about the human condition.

Through its very formal properties, the novel demonstrates that art can transform from madness to sanity through its creative process, serving as both a narrative (rather, narrational) and a philosophical statement about the nature of selfhood and art. This structure is a tightly constructed work that embodies those thematics, illustrating its exploration of art's connection to madness, loneliness, and the transition towards self-being.

On the cricket oval, the book marks the place where a novel can be an art-object and a work of philosophy. Parade wants to—and, I’d say, is—be, not give, an account of art’s status as an ongoing human activity. This statement is accelerated through its own artistic method, which makes it such a tight, coherent, and compelling work both of art and philosophy. And, for my money, one of the most fascinating novels of the last several decades.

Thanks so much for listening and hope everyone enjoyed the talk.

À bientôt. In the meantime, au revoir—and stay critical.