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Intelligence Squared
The 12 Books of Christmas | Rachel Cusk on Art, Womanhood and Redefining Fiction
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- [00:00]
Conor Boyle
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TJ Watt
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- [02:06]
Rachel Cusk
And in the app.
- [02:07]
TJ Watt
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Conor Boyle
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm Head of Programming Conor Boyle. We're looking back at some of our favorite books of the year in our 12 books of Christmas. Today's episode is with writer and novelist Rachel Cusk. Cusk joined us alongside writer Adam Biles to discuss feminism, art and the themes of her new book, Parade. Let's go to the episode now.
- [02:43]
Adam Biles
Thank you Connor. Good evening everybody. Welcome to this Intelligence Squared and Faber event. As Connor just said, I'm Adam Biles, literary Director at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, and I am delighted to be here with Rachel Cusk tonight to mark the publication of her latest novel, Parade. Because yes, dear readers, she has done it again. If by doing it again, we all understand that to mean that with Parade. Rachel Cusk has once again refused to repeat herself, once again refused to get stuck in any kind of literary furrow, once again refused to write what might be expected of her, and rather has once again shattered the assumptions of the contemporary novel and reconstructed something breathtakingly new and radically beautiful from the rubble. Divided into four parts, Parade is the novel as kaleidoscope. As the reader turns the drum moving from one section to the next, the concerns remain consistent. The artist's life, the female condition, violence, the death of a parent, marriage, the struggle over children. But the colored charts shift into startlingly different arrangements, allowing new insight, new revelation, and creating new art. This is an approach that not only allows the author to interrogate the fragmentary life of the human mind, but which makes her readers feel the sharp edges and pointed ends of those fragments in their minds, but also in their bodies and in all their wonder and terror. In this way, Parade feels both like a rupture from and an extension of what came before, particularly the memoirs A Life's Work, the Last Supper and Aftermath, the trilogy of novels Outline, Transit and Kudos, and most recently, Second Place. So tonight, Rachel has offered to also talk with me about Parade in the context of these books, what caused them, how they were written, and how their reception would go on to shape what she would write next. Let's get to it. Please welcome Rachel Cusk to the Union Chapel. So, to begin with, that thought I just referenced in the introduction, that idea of Parade, at least to the reader, feeling like both a culmination of the last two decades, but also some sort of new departure, some sort of rupture from what you have been doing in those two decades. Did it feel that way in the writing of it?
- [05:09]
Rachel Cusk
I had an interesting conversation with our mutual friend Sheila Hetty when she was in Paris just now. And she said, oh, the thing about you is that I get the feeling that every time you write something, when you finish, you throw away all the tools you used to write that book, and so you have to go and find a whole new set of tools. So I think. And I thought about that and thought that that's true. And so I guess each book feels more unknown to me as I sort of try and find it sort of discerning what it is, because that also involves, I guess, forgetting who I am and having to come up with some new definition of that every time.
- [06:06]
Adam Biles
It's interesting you mentioned tools, because I remember the first conversation we had on stage was about kudos and the outline trilogy generally. And I'd asked you A question about the writing process, and you said it was like breaking rocks, which I could kind of understand in the context of those particular books. Was that the feeling as well with Parade? Was it breaking rocks, each sentence, or was there a different flow to it?
- [06:40]
Rachel Cusk
I mean, I think 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. And I guess the difficulty with this book was enhanced by the fact that I really felt a doubt about language, I guess, and language structures. And that partly being the result of moving to France, moving into a different language culture, reading a lot in French, beginning to think much more about what made. Made it possible to read in another language. So what is this system that, you know, I can sort of do this in a different language? And also the kind of preoccupation, I guess, that has grown and grown in me about the image versus language and a desire to move closer to that and how to do that in language. So in that sense, the difficulty was kind of mystical in some way because I couldn't find language solutions. It had to be about perception in some very, very different way.
- [08:17]
Adam Biles
Let's stick with that idea because I think it's very useful. From Sheila Hetty about the tools with which you write and that idea of throwing them away. Because I guess when you throw away the tools to write a new book, there's two possible reasons you might throw them away. One is you just might make the choice to throw them away because you want to write something different. You want to write something new. And the other option, which I suspect is your option, is you look at the tools that you've got and they're no good for you anymore. Makes sense.
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Rachel Cusk
Yeah. I mean, I suppose the impulse is to be free, and that impulse could almost be reduced to an. An instinct to free yourself from anything. It is that you have. Because. And I mean, I think this is something that people easily experience in their lives, not necessarily because they want to, I mean, very often against their own will. But when one loses familiar structures, you're left with a very, very, very different kind of conundrum and an opportunity to change. And it's extremely frightening. So I guess I am willing to be frightened in that way.
- [09:36]
Adam Biles
And that brings me on nicely to what I wanted to talk about, because that sort of loss of familiar structures does seem to have defined your career, or there's been sort of, at least punctuated your career at different moments. So there's a moment in Parade, in the stuntman section where you write. For the first time in years, I thought about the violence of childbirth when I had passed as if through a mirror into an inchoate animal region, a place with no words. And if we're looking back at your oeuvre, it does seem that with a life's work, that moment of sort of passing through the mirror, that there was something, I don't know, some sort of rupture in your association with literature, with the idea of the novel as you had been previously writing.
- [10:31]
Rachel Cusk
I mean, I guess I think with hindsight that I've tried to assert some idea of moral authority. Not that I have moral authority, but a belief that morality is authoritative in living. And alongside that, an increasing realization that living is violent and nationality is violent, gender is violent, parenthood is violent, marriage is violent. You know, these structures that we live in do violence to us. And I think, you know, this has been my experience of getting older and maybe not wiser, but more experienced, is not seeing the violence of outside, you know, that we have so much information about as an attack, so much, but as being part of a sort of shared or. Or I suppose the culmination of a shared landscape in which violence is inherent. And I suppose by sticking very closely to those elements of personal experience that seem to me to be shared or sort of relatively universal and I guess expressing something about their violent nature, I've annoyed a lot of people and provoked a lot of strong reactions, but also, I guess asserted this question about morality. You know, can at the same moment that you experience the violence of having a child, can you also use language to morally serve that experience? And I don't think that's something that people necessarily have the time or ability to do in the lived moment. But it has seemed to me that if I could live the moment and do that thing too, that would be valuable.
- [12:56]
Adam Biles
I pick up from what you're saying that perhaps there was something in the. Let's say the pre. A life's work novels, the novels you wrote before you made that sort of. The transition into memoir writing. I don't know if memoir is quite the right word, but autobiography or maybe we'll come on to that. Do you now look back at those novels as existing in some sort of. Almost got a prelaps area or sort of unconsidered part of your writing career?
- [13:27]
Rachel Cusk
It's really difficult learning how to write. I mean, I really remember learning how to write and knowing that that's what I was doing. And I had a feeling of. I mean, certainly a voice I was a voice. I had a voice. But then there was this citadel or more than that, you know, this culture, this canon, this history. And I think I felt that. I mean, I was really young. I was like, 24 or something when I wrote my first book. So I think I felt I had to go the long way like everybody else. Maybe if I'd started writing later, I would have started further on. I probably would have done.
- [14:19]
Adam Biles
Yeah, yeah. And in that idea of kind of doing it like everybody else, there's a lot of moments in Parade where we're kind of confronted with this idea that the concepts we have of artistic creation, whether that be the visual arts or the novel, are sort of shaped by the sort of. The male, I guess, in a way. So there's a moment when you write about a sculpture. How could the female sex be commemorated in stone? Its basis lies in repetition without permanence. Its elements are unlasting, yet eternal in their recurrence as violence itself is. And that does almost make me think that perhaps with that sort of transition from novel writing to memoir and then finding your way back to the novels when you started writing the outline trilogy, that you were in some way trying to find your feet in a concept of art or a concept of the novel that was outside of the mail to find if that was possible in some way.
- [15:27]
Rachel Cusk
It definitely started as another example of the compartmentalization that really, really seemed to characterize, you know, motherhood, for instance, or the sort of early experience of motherhood. And I definitely. And, you know, maybe this sort of early idea that I started with. And, you know, presumably I'm not the only writer who started like that, of a kind of formality or a canonical rigidity to the novel. And suddenly I was having experiences as a woman that I could find no way to put in the novels that I was writing. And I look back on that as very much a crossroads for want of. I can't think of a better word than that, where I think a lot of women, not just writers, women, women who work for companies, go one way and then some other people go the other way. But the right hand turn, which is to say, okay, this stuff is happening to me because I am female and my biological life is like this, and I have to take care of that and then pretend that it doesn't exist so that I can go and. And do this other thing. And, you know, that's very often the way the world requires women to be. But it interests me that I think women writers do that, too. There's A moment at which they think, am I obliged because of my identity to serve this material? Just because I've had a baby, does that mean I have to talk about it and write about it? Or can I just do what men do and write about the things that I'm interested in? And for whatever reason, for me, the answer was no. I had to. I felt, I don't know, a duty, I suppose. And those experiences did not belong in the books I was writing or as far as I could see, the books most people were writing. And so. So this kind of uncomfortable producing of memoirs, I mean, I guess that was the word because no one said auto fiction in those days was a kind of schism.
- [18:04]
Adam Biles
Because I guess there's also the possibility of what you could do because there's the content. So whether you're going to write about motherhood, but you could also, I suppose you could try and fit that to the structures of the novel, or you could take the route which you took, which is sort of to say, okay, it's not just the fact that I'm writing about motherhood, but, like, I have to interrogate how we write about them.
- [18:35]
Rachel Cusk
Well, because this is where narrative becomes actively repellent. I suppose. This was the first stirring of my feeling about that. That, you know, not only could I not. Or a human, not when in states of extreme personal identity where the difference between being you and. And being that person over there is everything. And there's a handful of experiences in life that are like that, including dying, but having a child is one of them, you know, in that condition, you can't, you know, the idea of a narrative escape. You can't read a book, you can't watch a film. You can't escape. You can't. You can't desert the sight of your body. And I couldn't, as a consumer of narrative. And I certainly couldn't imagine it seemed, I suppose, yeah, the falsity of that idea really, really hit me with writing a life's work.
- [19:53]
Adam Biles
One thing we find quite a bit in Parade, these portraits of male artists who seem almost to be permitted to set their lives aside and continue with their art, or at least to sort of to transfer a lot of the responsibilities of, for example, being a parent onto their wife, onto their partner, and to sort of continue in their artistic practice. But there's also a sense of a certain inauthenticity to that too. Like it's something which they seem to be encouraged to do by the system they find themselves in. But we get a sense that there's in some ways sort of diminishing returns from their art if they don't, I guess, embrace the rupture of becoming parents, for example.
- [20:51]
Rachel Cusk
I mean, I think one of the interesting things about living in our time, and I mean this presumably is true of living in time generally is. And it's something that I increasingly, in my work, really, really try to respond to, is the changing conditions. And for the longest time, and I mean, this is why I really, really was interested in the idea of artists biographies, which is basically the form that Parade takes for the longest time. You know, the male creator and what he needed to serve him in order for him to serve whatever vision that was. Authority was absolute. And then suddenly it changed. It is changing. That authority has been called into question. Those men are being questioned. And that seems such an amazing moment to interrogate, I guess. And part of what happens in the book is a sort of progression towards the idea of the female creator and the terms of that, as opposed to. Yeah, the standard egotistical man who is at the beginning of the book.
- [22:25]
Adam Biles
Could we hear a little extract from the book? The scene in the museum? I think.
- [22:30]
Rachel Cusk
Yes. I was actually just wondering if I could find the bit in. But we haven't prepared that, so maybe I can't. Yeah. So there's just this little bit that I actually will read because it's kind of what we've just been talking about. So the early part of the book, all of the artists are called G in the book, but G changes in embodies lots of different artists. But the first G is the classic male G. And the section is really sort of spoken by his wife, in a sense. So I'll just read a little bit of that. Ji believed that women could not be artists.
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Reader/Assistant
As far as Ji's wife was concerned, this was what most people believed. But it was unfortunate that he should be the one to say it out loud. She wondered whether it was her own indefatigable loyalty to him, her continual presence by his side, that had brought him to this view. Without her, he might still be an artist, but he would not really be a man. He would lack a home and children, would lack the conditions for the obliviousness of creating, or rather would quickly be destroyed by that obliviousness. 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 Ji found this a preposterous thing to say. But Ji's wife was quietly satisfied because she herself felt that this reality Ji 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.
- [24:44]
Adam Biles
Thank you. That idea of artist biographies. So reading the book, I mean, I think there will be some artists which a reader feels they recognize. Others may be less familiar. Could you talk a little bit about that urge to, in one sense present the biography, but then also to anonymize?
- [25:12]
Rachel Cusk
So I've often felt that.
- [25:17]
Reader/Assistant
The lives.
- [25:18]
Rachel Cusk
Of visual artists had a kind of immunity, partly because there was a. Was and possibly still is a kind of snobbery in. In the culture of visual arts about trying to interpret the image by means of, like, a person, a character, or the sort of circumstances of their lives. And so there seemed to be a very sort of startling and complete. Not just even a sort of disconnection, but an actual obstruction of. And okay, in a few cases, like Lucian Freud, for instance, that then becomes a form of celebrity once the visual artist actually is using that self or that autobiography. And it seemed to me that.
- [26:20]
Reader/Assistant
These.
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Rachel Cusk
Lives that had resulted in an image had some, I don't know, biographical form to them that could be like a shape for living, could be interesting shapes for living because they were non. They were essentially non narrative. So that was kind of where I started and how those. I mean, yeah, Most of the GS in the book, in fact all of them are really, are roughly based on possibly recognizable artists, which is a kind of fun game, I think a few people are already trying to play by guessing who these people are.
- [27:11]
Adam Biles
But.
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Rachel Cusk
I suppose there is a progression of sorts in terms of artists who, in the end, I guess, succeeded in detaching their work from the story of themselves, which is very much where the book ends.
- [27:37]
Adam Biles
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's such an interesting point, that detaching of the. Their work from the story of themselves. Because I think if we move on to the Outline trilogy, that felt very much part of the project in that respect. I mean, you said earlier that the reception of particularly A Life's Work and Aftermath was sort of received as well and was an act of violence almost for you. I mean, I always have the sense of sort of, if the British establishment come for you, come for someone in the way that they came for you, that you probably must be doing something right.
- [28:26]
Rachel Cusk
It's the kind of thing. It's really easy for other people to say.
- [28:28]
Adam Biles
Right. But there is a moment in. In Parade where you write a novel was a voice, and a voice had to belong to someone. And that seems, I guess, perhaps in some way to underlie the attraction to you of the visual arts. Is that because it's a way to express yourself without a voice?
- [28:52]
Rachel Cusk
Yeah, I guess. I guess the trilogy was phase. A developmental phase towards that and definitely towards. I mean, it's not really about depersonalizing exactly or sort of deadening the self. It's, I suppose, re. Proportioning the self in the context of other things and in terms of other things and especially in terms of, I guess, what seemed to me a sort of grotesque loss of kind of balance in the information content of the average novel and how that average novel was coming more and more to represent almost a space of personal fantasy of kind of making things up and the person reading it sort of installing or making things up in their own head in a kind of private transaction that has something slightly sordid about it, you know, for me, and feeling that the difference between pornography and fiction was getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So I think I started the trilogy wanting just to change that information structure and knowledge structure. I wanted the book to know much, much less and the surface to say much, much more. And for that to give some kind of integrity back to the idea of, you know, a human being. Which, I mean, I guess by the end of Kudos, I felt if I keep doing this, because I literally could have written 20 books like that because once I'd understood how to do it, it was very, very tempting to keep on doing it. And if I do do it a bit in this book, yeah, it could have become a kind of parody of itself. But I guess I felt by the end that I felt much closer to interestingly real anger, such as I had not found a way of, you know, in all the provocative things I'd written that made other people so incredibly angry. I don't think I ever expressed any anger in my work. And suddenly at the end of the trilogy, kind of there it was. So that felt like a. And violence. I mean, those two things. So I think since then I've gone towards, I don't know, a different way of symbolizing these things and a different way of expressing them.
- [32:18]
Adam Biles
That's very interesting because I have heard in the past people talk about the trilogy as if it was a means for you to escape. Although I've heard that expressed in the sense of. Kind of. To escape the sort of. The critical eye that was sort of so overbearing for your previous books. But from the way you're talking, I get the sense it was more of a sort of. In some way an escape of the structures in a way of novel writing or writing generally.
- [32:51]
Rachel Cusk
And it was also a. You know, there was so much conflict around. By the time I wrote Aftermath, so much horrible conflict around that work. And it was. I suppose the trilogy was a kind of peacemaking enterprise. It was just. I'm just going to love. You know, all I can do in this space that I've been put is to love others. That's the only. Because the idea of engaging in some kind of argument or some response to unpleasantness. So, yeah, I think it was an attempt to find a peaceful solution.
- [33:42]
Adam Biles
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is. I mentioned in the introduction this idea of sort of. Of fragments and shards. And that's definitely when I was rereading Aftermath in recent weeks in preparation for tonight. It's fascinating to find the. That is the vocabulary of aftermath. It is of the things. Shattering of fragments, of shards. And we do find that in Parade as well, but in a. I don't know. It's different in nature. It almost feels like the shattering is not of the external life, but of the. Of the internal, in a way. And so there were a couple of moments when the narrative voice is the we. And on my first reading of the book, I projected the we to be either a couple or a group of siblings. And on my most recent reading, I lost confidence in that reading and almost felt the we as potentially could be the sort of. The single. The single person expressing themselves in the plural. Am I barking up the wrong tree there?
- [34:58]
Rachel Cusk
No. It was an interesting moment of feeling that something in the process of writing this book brought me to the end of I and of ever being able to use I ever again. And of we being. I mean, it's something that Annie Arnault does in the years which I promise I only thought of after I'd done it. I was not copying or not consciously anyway. It felt like a humble solution and I guess something connected with age and a feeling of, again, belief structures and narrative structures kind of breaking down for everyone. And one of.
- [36:06]
Reader/Assistant
The kind of beautiful.
- [36:08]
Rachel Cusk
Possibilities of writing is to try to detect change and respond to change and to hear things changing. And I guess it felt to me that, again, this may be something about a life stage, that that surrendering of belief, and particularly narrative belief could be expressed as I becoming we yeah.
- [36:51]
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- [38:33]
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- [38:57]
Adam Biles
It'S interesting this idea of life stage or sort of changes with age because that's definitely a Shift that we notice in Parade is oddly from, I guess, in previous works, from the narrative voice being one of the parent. So there is a moment where you write my own history of motherhood feels like something far upriver. And because of the stage in life that a lot of the characters are characters I use loosely. But in the book, it's almost like they become children again because they're reckoning with their parents who are at the end of their lives. And that did feel something that was crucial to this book in a way that perhaps because of when you wrote them in your life, it was less significant to something like the Outline trilogy.
- [39:54]
Rachel Cusk
I mean, I think that my kind of pretty age old belief about artists as being people who never left childhood, who've somehow managed to remain in the childhood state really found its kind of opportunity here.
- [40:20]
Reader/Assistant
Because.
- [40:24]
Rachel Cusk
The sort of terror of people in their lives trying to enact authority, themselves trying to be adults, having to deal with their own parents dying or their children becoming adults, it felt to me like that terror of enacting the self in the various available structures to. To put that in a context of almost like the childlike authority of the artist was a very useful thing to do at this point.
- [41:14]
Adam Biles
Is that sort of the child, the artist remaining the child in the sort of. In the state of, you know, I guess the sort of the natural creativity and sort of expression. Expressiveness that a child has, which is kind of crushed out of them by the various. The various structures of society. But is it also. Is there something almost kind of pre. Civil, pre civilization to that? Like one of the things that kept coming up in my notes when I was reading Parade was that it feels like. I don't want to use the word kind of primal or primordial, but it definitely feels like a. Of all of your books, this taps into. Yeah. So sort of something pre civil in a way that perhaps your previous books didn't.
- [42:04]
Rachel Cusk
Yeah, I think. I mean, one of the questions I had writing Second Place was about form and formlessness and trying to find a form that could possibly express this idea that I had about kind of post biological female life. So, yeah, post everything, essentially that part of life for women and for men that seemed to me that people sort of came out of. Emerged from gender in some way, but that also this was a very, very undefined phase of experience for a lot of people. And yeah, I found a strange form for that. And in Parade, I guess that I was kind of back with that problem again. And yet it seemed that the problem had got even more Sort of extreme because. And particularly around violence, death, it felt like. It felt like a crisis of. That felt like a crisis of form that actually was part of people's lived experience, that there were no particular answers to, that you could only be very sorry about whatever it is that is happening to. To people as their lives kind of go on. And so I guess that, you know, I don't know if it's an answer to. Because I think it is an answer in people's lives. I mean, the question why we read books. There's been lots and lots of more or less trite explanations of that, but actually why we look at things. Why we look at created objects, paintings, things that have no words. And I think it might be this feeling of almost not wanting things to be described, not wanting them, or that they're beyond description or. So that was kind of. That's kind of where I'm trying to get in the book. And it's a kind of difficult thing to describe, in fact.
- [45:13]
Adam Biles
And it also, I think, unearths certain ideas and certain reflections which feel quite taboo today. And I think it's quite rare in, like, the early 21st century to find things. And one of them was this idea of the kind of regenerative power of death, which, of course, was something that existed in sort of ancient civilizations to the point where people would sort of eat the bodies of those that had died and sort of take the strength from them. But it felt like something we don't encounter much in literature, this kind of reckoning of sort of, you know, death is held as this tragedy which we're all supposed to kind of sort of accept almost unquestioningly. And you don't accept that unquestioningly in this book?
- [45:58]
Rachel Cusk
No, no. The unnaturalness, the idea that unnaturalness could persist, that artificiality could persist right into the loss of existence, seems absolutely extraordinary to me. So that's. Yeah.
- [46:19]
Adam Biles
You've referenced violence in different forms throughout this conversation so far. And there is. I mean, there are several moments of violence, different types of violence within Parade, but there's one in many ways which feels quite foundational. It comes near the beginning of the book in the stuntman section, and I was hoping you might read you will that little bit for us.
- [46:45]
Rachel Cusk
So this is a.
- [46:50]
Reader/Assistant
This might be the last bit of.
- [46:57]
Rachel Cusk
Supposed autobiographical writing that I will ever write. And they had to go through a lot of processes to. To get written.
- [47:07]
Reader/Assistant
One morning, walking along a quiet, sunny street where people sat at pavement tables drinking coffee, I was attacked by a stranger who hit me Forcibly in the head. My assailant was a woman deranged by madness or addiction, and this fact of her gender caused difficulties both in the recounting of the event afterward and in my own response to it. I had not noticed her approach or prepared myself for the blow which left me bleeding on my hands and knees in the road with no understanding of what had happened. A crowd instantly gathered. People rose from their tables, shouting and gesticulating in the pandemonium. The woman walked away. The onlookers were pointing at her. She had stopped on the street corner and turned around like an artist stepping back to admire her creation. Then she shook her fist in the air and she vanished. It occurred to me in the time that followed that I had been murdered and yet had nonetheless remained alive. And I found that I could associate this death in life with other events and experiences, most of which were consequences in one way or another of my biological femininity. Those female experiences I now saw had usually been attributed to an alternate or double self whose role it was to absorb and confine them so that they played no part in the ongoing story of life. Like a kind of stuntman, this alternate self took the actual risks in the manufacture of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity. Despite having no name or identity of her own, the stuntman was what created both the possibilities and the artificiality of character. But the violence and the unexpectedness of the incident in the street had caught my stuntman unawares.
- [49:09]
Adam Biles
Thank you. You said just before you read that that that may be the last piece of directly autobiographical writing. Would there have been parade in anything like that form without this incident?
- [49:30]
Rachel Cusk
Well, it's funny, I was reading just now the most recent Edouard Louis book, Monique Cevade, about his mother getting away from the most recent of the dreadful men that she has sort of surrendered her freedom to and been kind of imprisoned by, essentially over and over again. And.
- [49:56]
Reader/Assistant
He.
- [49:58]
Rachel Cusk
At a certain point, has to give her money, and this money that he gives her enables her to survive, because she has no capacity to survive on her own. And so it's very beautifully. It's a beautiful book. It's very beautifully described this because he says, I wrote. Because Edward Louis wrote this book, the End of Eddy, which was about the absolutely appalling, sordid violence and horror of his childhood. And his family, including this mother and his family, were very, very angry and upset that he did this and sort of severed relations with him for a long time. And so as he pays out this money, he says, and his mother is extremely grateful, and their relationship improves. But he says, if those things hadn't happened to me. So if I hadn't written that book that my family so disapproved of, I would not now be able to help my mother. So if I hadn't written about how terrible my mother is, I would not now be able to save my mother. And, in fact, if my mother hadn't.
- [51:21]
Reader/Assistant
Been terrible, I would never have written.
- [51:24]
Rachel Cusk
The book that has saved my mother. So, Suffering. No suffering. No book. No suffering book. So it was kind of interesting, and I wasn't sure it sounded nice. I sort of thought, okay, I'll need to kind of do the maths on this one a little bit more. But in terms of this incident of the stuntman, the idea of the stuntman came from, you know, I guess I thought that, you know, one would have to see it as meaningless, the event itself as meaningless. And I think that that really, in the end, was the clue to its meaning. Because I could not see how something like that could ever give rise to a meaningful element of a book. But in the end, I thought actually it unlocked a resolutely closed door that led to the body and the question of the body's meaning and the body's life and its memory and its experiences. And I thought. I mean, I'm very nervous about using experiences that are exceptional, that are not things that happen to most people. But I felt that if you look at it as something in a chain, then actually it does happen to most people in one way or another.
- [53:23]
Adam Biles
It's interesting that use of the word unlocked as well, because that was something that I. Exactly. That word I wrote in my notes was this idea that it felt that there's all these different structures of types of violence considered in the book.
- [53:41]
Rachel Cusk
And.
- [53:43]
Adam Biles
Yet it seemed that it took this kind of, in a sense, this act of bodily violence from one person to another to clarify, in one sense that all of these other.
- [53:56]
Rachel Cusk
Yeah, and in a sense, I guess.
- [53:58]
Reader/Assistant
I thought in the end that it.
- [53:59]
Rachel Cusk
Was a version of throwing all the tools away. It was kind of the same thing being kind of broken down back to something in the end seemed. And again, you know, it seems to me that that's a model that arises a lot in living in the way that people live. And that's not to say that suffering is good for you or that suffering, I don't quite agree with that suffering creates art or makes people artists. 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, you know, so often end up obstructing change and obstructing one's access to truth. And so in the end, the kind of violence of that breaking down, I guess as long as I could see it in the context of other kinds, more natural or more acceptable kinds of violence, it came in the end to feel sort of instructive.
- [55:24]
Adam Biles
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That idea of acceptable is interesting because it's sort of. Yeah. Acceptable means not exactly that we validate it, but we accept it. We sort of. We know it's there. We see it and we don't do anything about it. And yet perhaps these sort of awful acts of suffering. Yeah. They in some way sort of of provoke us to engage with it. So there is a moment in the final section of the book, you write about the violence of capitalism. And it's fascinating to see, to have that juxtaposition, that sort of, at the beginning of the book, an act of individual violence from one person to another. And in one sense, at the end of the book, the lines being traced right out to the very structure of.
- [56:19]
Reader/Assistant
Our civilization, which I think only because if you think about how.
- [56:24]
Rachel Cusk
If you wrote a story about, I don't know, domestic violence, say, if the violence that I was describing here was something kind of known in my life or in a person's life.
- [56:42]
Adam Biles
It would.
- [56:42]
Rachel Cusk
Be much harder to connect it to anything outside itself. And I guess that's the other thing that I kind of discovered about that incident, that its impersonality was a connection to other kinds of impersonality that we have so much of in our lives without even really ever admitting it.
- [57:09]
Adam Biles
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are coming towards the end of our hour together. Before we turn over to the audience, if there's a few minutes time, if you do have questions for Rachel, do get them ready and we'll get microphones to you.
- [57:23]
Reader/Assistant
Maybe I should read a little bit.
- [57:24]
Rachel Cusk
Of the last bit.
- [57:25]
Adam Biles
Oh, yes, please do.
- [57:26]
Rachel Cusk
Just to.
- [57:32]
Adam Biles
And then I do have one more thing I want to ask you before.
- [57:37]
Rachel Cusk
I'll just read this short couple of pages from the last section, which is the beginning, really, of the we voice. So this section is called the Spy.
- [57:52]
Reader/Assistant
Not long ago, our mother died, or at least her body did. The rest of her remained obstinately alive. She took a considerable time to die and outlasted the nurse's predictions by many days, so that those of us who had been summoned to her bedside had to depart again and return to our lives. No One cried at her death, though among the congregation at the funeral there were some outbursts of shocked weeping, as though at the sight of death being surprised in the act of stealing from life. It was the entrance of the coffin, rather than the death itself, that constituted the violence of this act. The coffin was shocking, and this must always be the case, whether or not one disliked being confined to the facts as much as our mother had. The body inside the coffin was entirely factual. She had never seemed to take much notice of her body. It had been her vehicle, that was all. But its authority, it turned out, had been absolute.
- [58:55]
Rachel Cusk
For a while afterwards there was a.
- [58:57]
Reader/Assistant
Feeling of lightness, a feeling almost of freedom. The violence of death had the appearance of a strange generosity. A capital sum had been returned to the living. We, on the side of life had been in some way increased. But in fact an unease remained, which grew and which was our mother's impenetrable bequest to us. There ought to have been a feeling not of freedom, but of loss. If there was loss, then it was of something we had never had. We were free simply from the conundrum of this double loss. It was noted that at the funeral we had remained unmoved. It was a day of extreme, almost frightening heat, like the day of Meursault's mother's funeral at the beginning of Camus l'. Etranger. Meursault's own seeming indifference that day was also noted. It later became a central piece of evidence in his trial and conviction as a heartless killer. Was our indifference likewise a philosophical refutation of the social contract? Had we too run the risk of being arrested and convicted for the failure to adhere to cultural and moral norms? Months later, at dawn, on the ninth floor of a hotel in a northern city, standing before a view of astonishing ugliness, it became evident that our mother was accompanying us in a way she had not when she was alive. Far below, people scurried across the concrete spaces. In the cold, gray morning, a violent wind was blowing. It shook the power lines and the leafless trees. It rattled the hoardings outside the shop fronts. It upended the litter bins and sent their contents whirling madly into the air.
- [60:41]
Adam Biles
Thank you. Actually, it's very appropriate, that section for the final question I did want to ask you, because it mentions. You mentioned Meursault and Letranger, and.
- [60:54]
Rachel Cusk
He.
- [60:54]
Adam Biles
Seems to be a character. I was going to ask you about Catharsis and Camus seems to be a writer in Mercenaries, seems to be a character that refuses Catharsis in a sense actively refuses it. But I'm curious to know, I suppose, if there is that catharsis as a concept is meaningful to you when you do have these moments of kind of rupture and trauma. I remember. I know the risk of asking this question because I remember asking it to Carlo Veg Knausgrd after he'd written his kind of 3,000 pages of memoir, and his response was no. No catharsis whatsoever.
- [61:32]
Rachel Cusk
No, that's my response to you. The opposite. The opposite of that.
- [61:35]
Adam Biles
The opposite. Would you expand on that?
- [61:39]
Reader/Assistant
No.
- [61:39]
Rachel Cusk
It feels like total discipline is required. Yeah, that's. I can't think of anything less sort of releasing and kind of unburdening. It's very, very much the opposite of that.
- [62:00]
Adam Biles
Yeah, I suspected as much. Thank you.
- [62:04]
Conor Boyle
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Conor Hoyle, with production and editing by Mark Roberts and Lee Duncan.
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TJ Watt
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Conor Boyle
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Adam Biles
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