Rachel Cusk’s Parade (Faber and Faber, 2024) tells a series of stories about a painter called ‘G.’,1 and a range of women who experience the vagaries and violences of life in similar and parallel ways.
Parade is an eccentric novel with no stable centre—G. changes gender chapter-by-chapter, and even changes her/his mode of art, as well as the century in which s/he lives—but there is one narrative moment early in the novel that struck me as important. The second chapter is told from the perspective of a woman in contemporary Paris. She is attacked in the street and her reaction is significant:
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. […] But the violence and the unexpectedness of the incident in the street had caught my stuntman unawares. (Parade, p. 13)
This isn’t a straightforward paragraph. There is the idea that the narrator’s femininity has been parcelled off as a kind of avatar by this thing called the ‘stuntman’. Contained in this is the idea that this thing called ‘femininity’ should not be affecting the rest of life—as if life exists outside gender.
But the part of the paragraph that caught my attention was the idea of living a ‘death-in-life’. It reminded me of a 1994 essay by French intellectual and novelist, Maurice Blanchot, called The Instant of My Death.2 It is a short prose piece written in the third person, but with telltale signs of being autobiographical.
The Instant of My Death
The Instant of My Death tells the story of a French aristocrat who, in 1944, has been summoned outside his château by who he assumes are the Nazi invaders. A firing squad is lined up in preparation for his summary execution. However, the lieutenant calling the shots (literally) has to go elsewhere just before the aristocrat is killed. The aristocrat survives and flees to write the story some fifty years later.
However, there is a series of important descriptions of the aftermath of this experience, anticipating Cusk in 2024:
There remained, however, at the moment when the shooting was no longer but to come, the feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate: freed from life? the infinite opening up? Neither happiness, nor unhappiness. Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already the step beyond. I know, I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him. ‘I am alive. No, you are dead.’ (The Instant of My Death, pp. 7, 9)
And:
All that remains is the feeling of lightness that is death itself or, to put it more precisely, the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance. (The Instant of My Death, p. 11)
The same experience of ‘death-in-life’ for Cusk’s unnamed narrator and Blanchot’s similarly anonymous protagonist takes the characters in opposite directions. For Blanchot, a lightness, a feeling of ecstasy emerges from the near-death experience; for Cusk’s woman, it leads to a recognition of her divisibility. The fissure appears along the false border between her ‘self’ and her ‘femininity’, as if they could be cut apart.
Ecstatic flow
Blanchot’s death-in-life is tied to the Second World War, part of which led to an assault on intellectuals like himself. Blanchot also, in using the word instant, set up a paradox in which the instant is permanently replayed, with ‘death […] always in abeyance’: death is present but never takes places. Ecstasy arises from this.
James O. Pawelski and D.J. Moores, in writing about the ‘good life’ (or ‘eudaimonia’ in philosophical speak), have summarised psychologists’ descriptions of ‘flow’, an ‘ecstasy, a peak experience’ that often arises from the encounter with beauty. But Pawelski and Moores also explain that the same ecstatic flow can be produced after engaging with the ‘negativity’ of ‘tragedy’.3 This is what has happened for Blanchot’s protagonist.
Autobiography
Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘Demeure’ that accompanies The Instant of My Death, highlights the autobiographical aspects of Blanchot’s testimony. I won’t dwell on that here, but think it’s worth pointing out that Cusk is herself renowned for revolutionising the autobiographical form. She did so in The Outline Trilogy (2014–18), which followed A Life’s Work (2001) and Aftermath (2012)—the latter two were written more conventionally. There’s a chance that Parade and The Instant of My Death are closer in terms of their form—the kind of book they are—than it first appears.
To that end, Pawelski and Moores’s ethical reading, which highlights the ‘good life’ in the reading experience, provides the idea of ‘self-knowledge’ emerging from this ecstatic ‘flow’. Perhaps this rudimentary term—’self-knowledge’—can also help us read Cusk’s character with her stuntman avatar, who learns at the moment of rapture that her femininity has been separated from her ‘self’.
Perhaps this means that, like Blanchot’s fiction, we can learn how to live with ever-present death by reading Parade. (It is a novel that, on at least two occasions, includes a death-midwife character.) Perhaps, in addition, we need to pay greater attention to that readerly feeling of ‘flow’, whatever prompts it.
And, finally, perhaps we need to think about the afterlife in contemporary literature, and what is sundered to give birth to full knowledge of the (in)coherent self.
- John Berger won the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel G, and Cusk is surely alluding to Berger’s novel. ↩︎
- In its original French, L’instant de ma mort. In English, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2000). ↩︎
- James O. Pawelski and D.J. Moores, The Eudaimonic Turn (Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2013), p. 46. ↩︎