Jamie Hood in Bookforum:
MARRIAGE IS A GRIM BUSINESS—worse still if you’re a woman in a Rachel Cusk book. The blame lies with Christian iconography, she writes in her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, and pictures of the “holy family, that pious unit that sucked the world’s attention dry.” There, we found Mary and the manger, the Christ child, cuckolded Joseph: images gathered in a “cult of sentimentality and surfaces” to obscure the innate beastliness of human existence and so tidy death. They were fraudulent images, coercively “bent on veiling reality.” And who within the family is conscripted to perpetuate, if not precisely to manufacture, such images? Women. In becoming wives, we’re made stewards of our husbands, sainted sucklers of children, menders of life’s ripped seams. After the dissolution of a decade-long marriage, Cusk turned from Christianity to the myths of antiquity and the unconscious, that “tempestuous Greek world of feeling.” We are beings born of chaos, after all, disciplined by institutions but governed by affects and actions that stretch past the limits of our knowing and detonate the illusion of social order.
Cusk’s “fictions,” in turn, have a fabular quality, muddling fate and circumstance, conditioning and immanence. She’s not particularly interested in identity-qua-identity or the psychological and novelistic conventions of character. Instead, she’s after human “experience in a more lateral sense,” an “oceanic” and provisional representation of subjectivity.
More here.
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