by Derek Neal
An excerpt of Rachel Cusk’s forthcoming novel, Parade, appeared in the Financial Times last week. The story features two narratives, one about a female painter simply referred to as “G,” told in third person, and another about a group of people visiting a farm in the countryside, told in first person plural. It is unclear how these two stories intersect in terms of plot—is G the narrator of the second story? Is she the woman living on the farm?—but these are not questions worth asking. Thematically, the two stories fit together as they both tell of women constrained and controlled by male figures of authority: in this case, their husbands.
Nestled within this narrative is a fascinating articulation of a theory of art, which is what I will focus on in this essay. Cusk does not pause the story to explain this theory, as some purveyors of “autofiction” might do, but embeds it within the story by explaining G’s different artistic periods and the way her art relates to her personal life. The story is stronger because of this.
In the beginning of G’s career, she is seemingly self-taught, lacking formal and technical skill but compensating for it with inspiration and honesty. Her painting is described as existing “autonomously, living in her like some organism that had happened to make its home there.” In this characterization, G is simply the vessel giving shape to an artistic drive she scarcely understands, rather than the source of its creation.
Later, G gets her big break. Much like Paul Schrader’s understanding of “art as therapy,” in which he purges himself of his demons by confronting them and making films about them, G decides to acknowledge her demons—in this case, shame—rather than avoid them, and attempts to understand herself via her painting. Here is Cusk’s description of G’s creative process:
She began a series of paintings in which her sense of shame was permitted to guide the evolution of the image. G thought of these vaguely as autobiographical paintings. There was a running impulse somewhere in her work, as though she were constantly fleeing or pursuing or proving something, as though she was always climbing mountains, and it was this feeling of exertion, or compulsion, that she suddenly wanted no more of. The word she found for it was shame. This word made her stop and look around herself.
Cusk then describes G’s exploration of shame through her painting. This is fascinating because, again like Schrader, Cusk knows that one’s demons cannot be represented directly via art, or else the resulting piece will feel didactic and false. Instead, as Schrader describes in his lecture on screenwriting, you create a metaphor that represents your problem; the issue is then approached from the side rather than head-on. For example, Schrader wanted to confront his loneliness when writing the script for Taxi Driver and conceived of a man in a taxi as a picture of isolation. In American Gigolo, Schrader wanted to show a man incapable of love and found an illustration of this in a male prostitute—a person whose job it is to give love but never receive it. In First Reformed, the problem is social isolation and suffering, exemplified by a priest whose very job is to form a community around a church and ease the suffering of his parishioners. Schrader’s metaphors often work by inverting conventional stereotypes of occupations.
Returning to Cusk, G must attempt to vanquish her shame by somehow facing it in her painting. What follows is a truly extraordinary description of the nebulous creative process, in which Cusk shows rather than tells how art is made. It is also, I think, an indictment of the idea that one can teach what is often called the “craft” of artistic creation, or rather, it is a statement that art is much more than formal, stylistic conventions, and that these must be combined with the interiority of the artist in order for something moving and beautiful to be created that may resonate with an audience.
G begins by making “childhood paintings” because she senses that her shame is related to her childhood, although she does not understand how. The resulting paintings are “horrible,” but G feels that she is moving in the correct direction. Next she paints a portrait of a woman that is based upon models in magazines from the time period when she was a child. Again, she is unsure why she is doing this, but she remembers being afraid of these photographs and would now like to confront her fear. In painting the women from the magazines, G no longer feels afraid; instead, she develops a feeling of affection for these women, and in a way, herself. The next step in G’s process is to take a model and “carefully break her down and return her to colour and light and non-being.” As readers, we can imagine that G’s painting has become highly abstract.
But G is not finished. In some vague, alchemical way, she uses this “diffuse mode of perception” that she has created to “describe the history of her sexual encounters” and subsequently finds that she is “free of shame.” Let’s recap the steps in G’s creative process to see its progression: she wishes to confront an indefinable feeling of shame, so she begins by making some sort of painting related to her childhood, because she senses that this is where the feeling originates. These are unsuccessful, so she explores this feeling further by creating paintings based off magazine photo shoots from her childhood. These are better, but for whatever reason she feels the need to pursue a new direction based simply on light and colour. This then allows her to face and extinguish the shame of her sexual encounters through her painting.
It would be nearly impossible to create an accurate, real painting based simply on Cusk’s description of G’s imaginary paintings. We don’t really have any idea what they look like. In the same way, we can imagine that viewers of G’s paintings would have no idea that they somehow relate to her sexual history. G herself imagines that her gallerist will stop working with her when he sees the paintings, as “the idea of it making sense to anyone other than herself had been unimaginable.” Indeed, G’s process in neither rational nor logical; instead, it is inextricable from her own being. These paintings catapult G to fame, and we as readers believe this account of events because we intuit that G’s paintings have a deep truth to them that resonates with their viewers.
The explanation for the success of the paintings is described by Cusk in this way:
Her technical competence, rather than exhausting itself with feats of representation or satire, put itself at the service of internal self-description, and the accuracy she was able to achieve through the discipline of candour was remarkable.
Here we have a theory of art, what it is and what it does. Cusk rejects the idea that art should be representational, noting that it should be “at the service of internal self-description.” According to this description, we make art to understand ourselves, and if we are honest, what we produce will speak to others. Again I have to think of Schrader and his description of his filmmaking as a personal problem expressed via a metaphor. For both Schrader and Cusk (at least in G’s story), art is deeply personal, yet it is not documentarian. Somehow, the personal must be aestheticized. In a recent interview, Schrader said, “The closer I get to my own personal story, the weaker it is. Symbolism holds more truth.” Referring to films where he has sought to directly represent his personal life, Schrader says, “They’re not very good films, so I learned to stick with metaphors. For example, I continue to write these stories about me and my brother and then they morph into something more different, thankfully.” As with G’s paintings, Schrader’s films arise out of personal struggle, or to use Cusk’s term, “internal self-description,” then become something else on the surface while still revealing some deep, subjective truth.
Later in the story, after G has married and the quality of her painting has suffered, she visits the house of a fellow painter who seems to be working in the way that G once did:
She often painted random, unframed sections of this interior [her house], as though she were an object blamelessly looking at other objects. These paintings reminded G of how her life used to feel and no longer did. They were curiously shocking, if only because they did not engage in the moral barter of representation. They made her own work seem exploitative and wilful.
In this description and in the previous one, Cusk criticizes the idea of art as representation. This thread also runs through the story in the discussion of G’s husband’s photographs—a more representative medium than painting—and its comparison to G’s paintings. Her husband’s photographs are of their daughter and seem to be done more or less as portraits. They are hung all around the house. The photos are said to “confirm” their daughter’s beauty and “record” her innocence. In other words, in their seemingly accurate depiction of their daughter, they capture something true about her. Yet the photographs, in G’s view, also contain “obscenity” and, in capturing their daughter’s innocence, somehow seem to “taint” it as well. At one point, Cusk writes that G “hates” photographers and considers them “cowardly voyeurs.”
G’s issue with the photographs seems to be that they indicate no introspection on the part of her husband; instead, they reveal his own confusion as to who and what he is. Whereas G’s painting succeeds when she engages in “internal self-description,” her husband’s photographs only look outward and are an “act of violation [that] was his pride,” something he “mistook for genius.” In the same way, when G avoids herself when painting, her work is “exploitative and wilful” as well as “cynical…mendacious.”
The comparison between photography and painting comes to a head when G removes the photographs from the walls and begins to paint her daughter. Here’s Cusk’s description:
G began to draw her daughter, childlike drawings that the girl herself could easily have bettered. She didn’t look at her daughter while she drew: the drawings came from her hand. The hand was full of clumsiness and simplicity but it seemed to awaken to the sense of its task. Because G didn’t look at her, the girl didn’t know she was being observed. It was an interior act of pure attention. The observation was not an enquiry but a confirmation, like the chiming of a bell.
G is not seeking to accurately represent her daughter; instead, she is somehow expressing a deeper truth about herself and her daughter through her painting. Indeed, G doesn’t even regard her daughter as she’s painting but looks within herself. This can be compared to her husband’s photographs, which in attempting to portray their daughter realistically, transform her into something else and corrupt her. It is difficult to express this conundrum in words, but it is a feeling that everyone knows when viewing an artwork: a realistic or naturalistic depiction of something can seem false, whereas an abstract work can seem true. Cusk suggests that an artwork’s success or failure lies with the artist’s ability to look inward and honestly bring their own vision into their art. This is reminiscent of something Emmanuel Carrère, a French writer known for inserting himself into his stories, once said in an interview. In describing the process of making a documentary about an isolated, impoverished town in northern Russia, he tells of a promise he made to one of the town’s residents to present the town in a “delicate and decent” way. When this person, named Sasha, finally views the film, Carrère is nervous because he’s not sure if he’s kept his promise. According to Carrère:
Sasha watched the film attentively, and when we got to the part I just described, he put his hand on my arm and he said, “You kept your promise.” I was hugely relieved. Then he added something that killed me. “You know what I like about it? You didn’t just come to take our unhappiness. You brought your own.”
You have to bring your own pain, as Carrère knows, as G knows, as Schrader knows, but as G’s husband does not know. In this understanding of art, if an artist simply attempts to portray reality through naturalistic representation, the creation will seem false to its audience, because the artist has not wagered anything of their own in creating the artwork. This does not mean the writer must write in the first person, the filmmaker must turn the camera around on themself, or the photographer or painter must create a self-portrait. It simply means that the artist must present their vision of reality and truth and be aware that this is what they are doing anytime they set out to begin an artistic creation.