Intelligence Squared: The 12 Books of Christmas
Rachel Cusk on Art, Womanhood and Redefining Fiction
Original Air Date: December 27, 2024
Host: Adam Biles (with introduction by Conor Boyle)
Guest: Rachel Cusk
Overview
In this episode, celebrated novelist Rachel Cusk joins Adam Biles, Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company, to discuss her latest work, Parade, and its exploration of themes such as art, feminism, motherhood, violence, and the evolution of creative form. Framed as part of Intelligence Squared’s “12 Books of Christmas” series, this conversation offers a deep dive into Cusk’s literary journey, the boundaries of autobiographical writing, and the shifting structural landscape of fiction in relation to gender and experience.
Key Discussion Points & Insights
1. Refusing Repetition and Literary Innovation
[02:42-05:08]
- Biles opens by noting how Parade both culminates and departs from Cusk’s previous two decades’ work.
- “With Parade, Rachel Cusk has once again refused to get stuck in any kind of literary furrow… once again shattered the assumptions of the contemporary novel.” — Adam Biles [02:51]
- Cusk reflects on her creative process, acknowledging a tendency to abandon previous techniques (“tools”) after each book, resulting in a sense of unfamiliarity and ongoing self-reinvention.
- “Each book feels more unknown to me as I sort of try and find it… that also involves forgetting who I am and having to come up with some new definition every time.” — Rachel Cusk [05:25]
2. The Challenges and Mysticism of Language and Perception
[06:06-08:17]
- For Parade, Cusk describes a heightened doubt in language and its structures, intensified by her move to France and immersion in a new linguistic and cultural context.
- “The difficulty with this book was enhanced by the fact that I really felt a doubt about language… and also the kind of preoccupation… about the image versus language.” — Rachel Cusk [06:51]
- She talks about wanting to approach something closer to the image through language—a kind of mystical or perceptual challenge, not just a technical one.
3. Freedom, Fear, and Artistic Tools
[08:17-09:36]
- Cusk emphasizes the impulse for freedom in abandoning familiar structures.
- “The impulse is to be free, and that could almost be reduced to an instinct to free yourself from anything…” — Rachel Cusk [08:56]
- She admits that this willingness to be frightened by the new is a defining trait of her approach as an artist.
4. Violence in Life and Literature: The Search for Moral Authority
[09:36-12:56]
- Reflecting on her career, Cusk identifies an increasing awareness of the “violence” inherent in the structures of nation, gender, parenthood, and marriage.
- “Living is violent, nationality is violent, gender is violent, parenthood is violent, marriage is violent… structures we live in do violence to us.” — Rachel Cusk [10:49]
- She positions herself as asserting, not moral authority, but the idea that morality plays an authoritative role in living, and that literature can serve as a means of moral expression.
- Writing about the violence in universal experiences—like childbirth—has both provoked audiences and helped her raise questions about morality in language.
5. Gender, Canon, and the Compartmentalization of Experience
[12:56-18:04]
- Cusk talks about the crossroads women writers face, often forced to compartmentalize biological experience from “serious” art.
- She reflects on her early novels as a process of learning, a need to “go the long way like everybody else” before finding her unique voice.
- “If I’d started writing later, I would have started further on.” — Rachel Cusk [13:30]
- Motherhood served as a rupture—her experiences couldn’t be stuffed into existing narrative forms, leading to the discomfort and innovation of her memoirs (before “autofiction” was a known term).
- “These experiences did not belong in the books I was writing… as far as I could see, the books most people were writing. This kind of uncomfortable producing of memoirs… was a kind of schism.” — Rachel Cusk [15:41]
6. Rejecting Traditional Narrative and Embracing Formlessness
[18:04-20:51]
- Cusk explains her growing aversion to “narrative escape”—especially when deep in states of identity such as motherhood or dying.
- “In that condition, the idea of a narrative escape… you can’t desert the sight of your body. The falsity of that idea really hit me with writing A Life’s Work.” — Rachel Cusk [18:54]
- The male artist's privilege to set aside life for art often leads to entrenched authority, but also inauthenticity — as seen by diminishing returns in their work when they don’t engage with the ruptures of life (like parenting).
7. Art, Anonymity, and Biographical Detachment
[22:24-27:37]
- Parade is structured as a series of anonymized artist biographies, each “G” representing archetypal figures—sometimes easily linked to real historical male artists, sometimes intentionally ambiguous.
- Cusk discusses her fascination with how visual artists detach their work from their personal stories—seeking a similarly “non-narrative” shape for living within her own writing.
- “Lives that had resulted in an image had some biographical form that could be like a shape for living, because they were essentially non-narrative.” — Rachel Cusk [26:20]
8. Outline Trilogy and Experiments with Self and Knowledge
[27:37-32:18]
- The Outline trilogy helped Cusk move away from the personal voice, distributing the weight of self among others’ stories and dialogue.
- “I wanted the book to know much, much less and the surface to say much, much more.” — Rachel Cusk [30:29]
- By the end, she says she had access to “real anger… and violence” not previously found in her work.
- The trilogy acted as a “peacemaking enterprise” after the public conflict over A Life’s Work and Aftermath:
- “All I can do in this space… is to love others. That’s the only... the idea of engaging in some kind of argument or some response to unpleasantness... the trilogy was an attempt to find a peaceful solution.” — Rachel Cusk [32:51]
9. Literary Fragmentation as a Model for Life
[33:41-36:51]
- Biles observes how Cusk’s vocabulary—shattering, fragments, shards—evolves, becoming more internalized in Parade.
- Some sections shift to a “we” voice, an experiment in narrative humility and communal perspective.
- “It was an interesting moment of feeling that something… brought me to the end of ‘I’ and of ever being able to use ‘I’ again. And of ‘we’ being… a humble solution.” — Rachel Cusk [34:57]
- She credits aging and a collective breakdown of belief and narrative structures as impetus for this shift.
10. Childhood, Death, and the Problem of Form at Life’s Margins
[38:57-45:12]
- Parade explores life stages, particularly how adults, when grappling with death and aging, return to a kind of childlike state.
- “My age-old belief about artists as people who never left childhood really found its opportunity here.” — Rachel Cusk [40:24]
- The book probes undefined phases, especially post-biological life for women—a space “beyond description” that pushes against literary form.
- “Why we look at created objects, paintings, things that have no words… might be this feeling of almost not wanting things to be described, or that they’re beyond description.” — Rachel Cusk [43:39]
11. Death, Violence, and the Body as Meaning
[45:12-56:24]
- The conversation turns to the motif of violence and bodily experience, especially a pivotal autobiographical incident Cusk narrates in Parade.
- Reading: [46:45]—A passage in which Cusk is struck in the street by a stranger:
“One morning… I was attacked by a stranger who hit me forcibly in the head… It occurred to me... that I had been murdered and yet had nonetheless remained alive.” — Rachel Cusk [47:07]
- Reading: [46:45]—A passage in which Cusk is struck in the street by a stranger:
- Cusk discusses how this event unlocked her ability to write about bodily violence and its universality in female experience.
- “That really, in the end, was the clue to its meaning… it unlocked a resolutely closed door that led to the body and the question of the body’s meaning and its memory.” — Rachel Cusk [51:24]
- She underscores that suffering is not inherently generative, but can force a reappraisal of the structures of self and belief.
- “Suffering is bad and should be avoided. But there is a loss of belief that is a consequence of it, and therefore a possibility to question structures of self and identity.” — Rachel Cusk [54:17]
- The conversation expands to consider the violence of larger societal structures, like capitalism, and draws connections between personal and impersonal, bodily and systemic forms of violence.
12. The We-Voice, Death, and Catharsis
[57:24-62:04]
- Cusk reads a poignant section on the death of a mother, exploring post-mortem “lightness,” inheritance of unease, societal expectations for emotion, and the ambiguous authority of the body.
- “[On her mother’s death:] For a while afterwards there was a feeling of lightness, almost of freedom. The violence of death had the appearance of a strange generosity… A capital sum had been returned to the living.” — Rachel Cusk [58:57]
- Biles prompts Cusk on the notion of catharsis; she unequivocally rejects it:
- “No, that’s my response to you. The opposite… It feels like total discipline is required. I can’t think of anything less releasing and unburdening.” — Rachel Cusk [61:31]
Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments
- “If it isn’t like the most difficult thing you could possibly do, then that’s probably a sign that you’re kind of repeating yourself.” — Rachel Cusk [06:41]
- “These structures that we live in do violence to us… Morality is authoritative in living.” — Rachel Cusk [10:44]
- “Not only could I not [write about motherhood], or anyone, when in states of extreme personal identity… the idea of a narrative escape… the falsity of that idea really, really hit me…” — Rachel Cusk [18:44]
- Parade’s biographical artist sections—“The first G is the classic male G… What he was really saying was that women could not be artists if men were going to be artists.” — (Excerpt read by Cusk) [23:22]
- “It was an interesting moment of feeling that the process of writing this book brought me to the end of I and of ever being able to use I again.” — Rachel Cusk [34:57]
- “The violence of death had the appearance of a strange generosity. A capital sum had been returned to the living.” — Rachel Cusk [58:56]
- “No, that’s my response… The opposite [of catharsis].” — Rachel Cusk [61:31]
Timeline of Important Segments
| Timestamp | Segment / Topic | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:42 | Introduction, Biles on Cusk’s refusal to repeat herself & literary innovation | | 05:08 | Cusk on “throwing away the tools” and reinventing with each book | | 06:39 | Language doubt, mysticism, and the impact of moving to France | | 09:36 | Violence in life’s structures; morality in literature | | 12:56 | Career turning point: motherhood, memoir, and the constraints of gender on literary form | | 18:04 | Narrative as “actively repellent” in experiences of extreme identity (motherhood, dying) | | 22:24 | On anonymizing artist biographies in Parade | | 27:37 | Outline trilogy: detachment, peacemaking, and shifting away from autobiographical voice | | 33:41 | Fragmentation, “we” voice, and narrative humility | | 39:53 | The artist’s childlike authority and return to “primal” forms | | 42:03 | Grappling with form and formlessness in post-gender/post-biological life | | 46:45 | Reading: Street attack & introduction of the “stuntman” concept | | 51:24 | Bodily violence as a universal experience, unlocking meaning | | 54:17 | Suffering, loss of belief, and the potential to question identity | | 57:24 | Reading: The death of the mother—narrative techniques, freedom, and societal expectation | | 61:31 | On catharsis (or its absence) in her writing |
Conclusion
This conversation with Rachel Cusk maps a remarkable journey across the forms and themes of contemporary fiction. With Parade, Cusk interrogates the boundaries of narrative, autobiography, and the female experience with characteristic fearlessness, continually questioning how—if at all—art can both express and transcend the violence and structures inherent to life. Rejecting catharsis and familiar forms in favor of risk and creative humility, Cusk’s work, as discussed here, models the literary possibilities borne from persistence in the face of discomfort, rupture, and uncertainty.