A few years ago, at the Hayward’s retrospective of the work of Louise Bourgeois, a scene occurred that, had it been a fraction less psychoanalytic, I would have sworn had been staged by some experimental curatorial team. A girl, around three, the youngest member of a young French family, crawled with wide-eyed, slack-jawed wonder towards one of Bourgeois’ cavernous arachnoid frames. At the threshold she stopped, stood and span around. ‘Cache-moi, maman, cache-moi!’ she cried, and raced back to bury herself in her mother’s arms.
From whose sight did the little girl flee? It’s well known that the spider motif in Bourgeois’ work is a referent for the artist’s mother, a seamstress. Did the little girl realise she was running from one maman to another? Was it this replication, a doubling with its attendant indication of her own mother’s capacity for both secrecy and solidity, that spooked the daughter? Or was it – ‘simply’ – the discovery of a giant spider that made the girl want to disappear? Her panic is a conundrum: how to hide in a building designed to make one see? Only by becoming part of the art was she safe from its threat; only by making herself the spectacle and performing the imperative of Bourgeois’ sculpture (returning to, but not into, her mother) could she escape its grasp.
Rachel Cusk, the British novelist and winner of this year’s Goldsmiths’ Prize, contributed an essay to the catalogue for the exhibition, on the artwork ‘The Woven Child’. In it she writes that the ‘artist treats the body as alternately a public interface and a site of intimate memory’. Turn this statement on its head, in the manner of a painting by Georg Baselitz, and you have a plausible synopsis of her latest novel, Parade, in which the artist becomes the site and interface of memory and public observation. A short book, patched together like the cloth-work sculptures of Bourgeois’ late style, it hangs together by a letter. ‘G’ is the common name for a group of artists, though in the version of the book’s first section published in the New Yorker, the letter is ‘D’ and Bourgeois is named (Baselitz, the first anonymised artist of the series, is not).
Interspersed with episodes from these artists’ lives is a first-person narrative in the more familiar Cusk register; it begins with an account of an attack on the narrator by a mad woman on the streets of Paris. This sudden act of violence precipitates a resurgence of the narrator’s memories of her children’s births, but it’s the cries of other women’s children in the city, distracting her from her work, that prompt the thought that is the book’s animus: ‘To be a mother is to live piercingly and inescapably in the moment. The artist who is also a mother must leave the moment in order to access a moment of a very different nature, and each time she does it a cost is exacted, the cost of experience.’ We find the narrator financially independent and writing in a room of her own, on the other side of the restrictions of a period in which her time was not her own because ‘at any moment, the husband or children can come ask her for an explanation, a helping hand, or a favour that she is obligated to satisfy’; we find her still – always – a mother, dissected across two temporalities, reckoning two costs, an experience that is ‘like being a soldier, and I am a veteran of it.’
The book is stitched together with a barely concealed joke: when is a door not a door? When it is left ajar, as a portal between life and death, between motherhood and art, the entrance to and the exit from a farmhouse, from which one woman makes her escape just as the narrator arrives on retreat. The first tells the second of a local tradition, or perhaps it’s a myth, of a woman – often the village’s midwife – who delivers death with a single hammer blow to the heads of those ready for her ministrations. The signal for action is ‘when a person discreetly left their door ajar at night.’ The possibilities for error are huge, but this woman ‘is subtle enough to know when the message is for her.’
A contemporary female artist, G, achieves fame and renown for her work, and marries a man who neutralises all her impulses by cultivating her public artistic persona as an accessory to his self-image. She leaves for the country, with her daughter and the nanny, and keeps her studio door open. The child begins to come in and out as she paints. This shift provokes the child, one day, to ask: ‘Why can’t there just be mothers and children?’ G is horrified, ‘The idea of a world filled with mothers and children repelled her. . . If men were dispensable, then so was her desire for superiority. Men are great, she answered. . . But the question pierced her repeatedly in the days that followed.’ This greatness manifests a few pages later, in the husband’s authority when he arrives, interrupts ‘the atmosphere of female laxity’, scoops the child up from the studio couch and takes her outside, ‘shutting the door behind him.’ G, we are left to imagine, resumes work.
‘The moment the look dominates, the body loses its materiality’, Luce Irigaray once told interviewers. After Cusk’s narrator leaves the Bourgeois exhibition, a body is wheeled out. A man has thrown himself from the gallery balcony. Cusk notes he has been covered in a blue tarpaulin – become an object. Cusk’s male artists, throughout Parade, reckon with the necessity of feminising themselves in order to create. But, the narrator, decides, ‘. . . if one were to answer truthfully the question of what a female art might look like, it would have to be composed chiefly of a sort of non-existence.’
Parade, while sharing formal qualities with Cusk’s previous work (a first-person narrator whose presence binds writerly conversations, usually in haut-bourgeois European settings), as well as thematic concerns (motherhood, art, the problem of arriving at a description of the creative act relevant to both), nevertheless makes a break with her usual subject position. Its approach is essayistic, rather than novelistic – the Cuskian central voice a hungry observer, gleaning what she can from the lives of others in order to try and parse ungraspable acts and experiences in her own, rather than a deft choreographer of scenes in which speakers often are given just enough rope. Its four sections feel collected rather than composed (two have been serialized) and its nearest resemblances are to works of feminist art history and criticism, rather than contemporary fiction. Most obviously, it shares an interest in the set of representational juxtapositions highlighted by Grizelda Pollock: vision and difference, yes, but also the capacity of painting to create a form of public intimacy, the bifurcation of interior and exterior space and thought that Pollock identifies in the sharp diagonal compositions of Mary Cassat and Berthe Morisot. The personal-political and the autofictional: Parade attempts to show both faces of the coin at once – an impossibility, but one that draws our attention to the coin itself.
Were Baselitz’s paintings spun round, Cusk’s narrator wonders at one point. At the recent exhibition of his work at the Bermondsey White Cube the male figures seemed to have emerged fully formed into an inverted world, their heads swollen as if gravity had decided that the skull was the base of the body. The female ones, however, seemed to have been flipped horizontally: their breasts remained pointed towards the top of the canvas, in the direction of their feet. I asked a friend what she thought. To me, she replied, they look like they are being born, emerging from the birth canal. Then it’s the gallery – the city – the world – that’s breech.
Read On: Caitlín Doherty, ‘Between Ego and Libido’, NLR 138.