Rachel Cusk’s latest novel Parade reads like essays and reflections on art and is divided into four parts — The Stuntman, The Midwife, The Diver, and The Spy — with no prelude and epilogue, for it doesn’t merit any as it’s an exercise in lateral thinking in the art of constructing a novel.
Parade begins with the life of an artist, who at a certain juncture in his life decides to “paint upside down”. German artist Georg Baselitz may have inspired Cusk to shape this character. However, what she seems to be more interested in is not offering his art as a form of expression that readers via her gaze may be able to analyse, but a world that he inhabits in which the labour of women is exploited to help G become an artist.
What Cusk is trying to do is to explore the myriad ways of seeing things, which compels one to think of John Berger. In his quintessential book, Ways of Seeing, he wrote: “Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent.
Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked — and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people.”
Can such an act of observation inspire purchase in making decisions that can appear baffling to understand? One such thing happens in the third part of the novel when a young man jumps off the upper gallery of a museum after looking at the artworks on display.
When he jumped, the director of the museum was looking at this act of killing oneself in public — as if it were a form of an exhibition of some sort of art itself — while she was being yelled at by her ex-husband over the phone.
The way Cusk employs autobiographical elements in this novel is also mesmerising. In the first part, a woman is hit by a stranger. When the onlookers start “pointing at her: she had stopped on the street corner and turned around, like an artist stepping back to admire her creation.”
It’s this gaze, the shifting of viewpoints that Cusk champions by writing a novel with the detachment of a reporter, who seems to possess a very sharp pair of eyes, with which she transforms the notions of understanding gender, work-life balance, parenthood, the dynamics between the creation and its creator, the performance of grief, and much more.
It can attract all sorts of labels: anticapitalistic, antinovel, and what not, but it is a work of art against the notions of artmaking. Finally, a meek submission: Cusk is highly likely to laugh reading this review, for it’s hard to offer interpretation of an artwork to a creator who is immensely perceptive about her creations. It is almost sacrilege, but offering a review is like participating in a ‘parade’ itself. Cusk would definitely know.
Parade
By: Rachel Cusk
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Pages: 198
Price: Rs 650