2024-07-15 14:34:52
Aon the cover of Rachel Cusks The new novel “Parade” features a strange-looking cactus. In one of the episodes, an anonymous “we” spends many holidays on the large, desert property of a legendary artist and his family, among rusted machines, eaten animals, unfinished works and things phallic plant. “Next to it grow gigantic cacti with thick arms. Some rise up, others fall down and slither on the ground like snakes. Day by day, their strange forms coalesce into mythical creatures.”
Cactus is the essence of patriarchy, the journey of female horror, solitary, intense, self-evident man who also appears as creative, changeable, irrational, irresponsible. In the novel, the protagonist – not sure if it’s a couple, a clique or a group of thinkers – witnesses a tragic marriage drama.
The forgotten eccentric who, in view of the summer, advised the guests to act “like animals” and stay in the shade, he turned out to be a false egomaniac who sold the land behind his wife’s back and acted as a killer as a god: hippie World leaders.
Against the novel form
Parade is a disturbing, radical book. There are no clearly identifiable main characters, no overarching plot. An English review in the sense of disgust it is called just “the novel of thought from which the novels have been taken out”.
Such criticism rests on the popular understanding of the novel, which Cusk once called “an old, archaic form” in a WELT interview: “In the visual arts, people are constantly reinventing themselves, they and is truly a believer, but many writers are serious. Still wrote Victorian novels with a worldview to match.” She, on the other hand, seeks “new forms for describing new situations” – a system that seems avant-garde in view of the modern relevance of global aesthetics.
Visual imagery is also a symbol of modernity in “Parade”. In four parts of the short but highly novel, the biographies of historical and contemporary artists are ignited and the individual is erased in favor of representation, almost abstract.
Many only have the letter G as their name, even if Paula Modersohn-Becker or Louise Bourgeois are recognizable from the works described. A historical example of historical texts that seem to appear in them and differ from central themes such as the relationship between motherhood and authority, the possibility of autonomous female practice, the relationship between the body and (self-) image.
Gender sensitivity
At the beginning of “Parade” we talk about the artist G, who is celebrated for his idea of painting on the mountain – one immediately thinks of Georg Baselitz. “When G’s wife first saw the pictures above she felt as if someone had hit her. She immediately recognized the feeling that everything seemed right and yet was fundamentally wrong. This is her state of mind, the state of the gender soak.
But Cusk is particularly interested in the contradiction between this aesthetic reality and the reality of relationships: the quality of images is inseparable from the power imbalance between women. How can a woman be an artist without remaining – even negatively – related to a male-dominated culture is the poetic question of the novel.
A “stuntwoman” is sometimes called a double, that of another person who is supposed to “take” and “have” the experiences of the female world “and not play any role in the ongoing life story.” However, a physical attack causes this defense mechanism to fail and leads to a serious mental crisis.
The sovereignty of the life-writing soundtrack has also become questionable. Cusk once became famous – and infamous – with his seminal essays “On Becoming a Mother” and “On Marriage and Divorce”. Freedom of expression can become a public trap. Today she has turned herself into a pure example of intelligence – this is also a defense to the writing of an angry woman: self-revelation takes place in the middle of external attention. The novel preserves the wealth of personal experiences in its fascinating aphoristic sense.
A common thread is the death of parents. In the last part she is the mother of a “we”. The story is told in parallel by the director G, who once decided to write a work under a pseudonym in order to escape the paralytic gaze of his parents, who are now close to death. In his films, G sees himself as a “spy”, and this is how to read “Parade”: “Seeing without seeing – in G’s eyes there is no better meaning for artistic creation.”
Rachel Cusk: “Parade”. Translated from English by Eva Bonné. Suhkamp, 172 pages, 25 euros.
#Parade #Rachel #Cusk #author #womanizer #spy