Rachel Cusks gender fundamentalism fully surfaces in her latest novel,Parade.
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She has been away from him, she says, as a consequence of her international book tour.
The scene unfolds like nearly every other scene inOutline: Someone talks, Faye listens.
The same themes animate Cusks nonfiction from this period.
We belong more to the world, in all its risky disorder, its fragmentation, its freedom.
The results are extraordinary.
But the claim to objectivity bears the bruise of exaggeration.
The parallels with the authors own life were both intentional and carefully repressed.
In effect, Cusk wished to have it both ways.
She wanted Fayes emotional distance and biographical vagueness to place her in a more authentic relationship to truth.
Now Cusks gender politics have taken center stage.
With this G, Cusk poses a question that has obsessed her for years: Can women make art?
It is a false question.
Yet Cusk treats it with fatal solemnity.
One should call this what it is crude misogyny and crush it underfoot.
The female artist, we are told, must reckon with the mystery and tragedy of her own sex.
What Cusk really means is that women must make art about being mothers.
One cannot, I think, have a high opinion of women if one is to believe this.
It is like defining the air as male and bravely refusing to breathe.
The wild young painter G marries a lawyer she meets at a gallery opening.
He disapproves of her: In this, she recognizes a form of heterosexual authority that she craves.
G adapts to his life, lets him rule over her, and becomes pregnant with his daughter.
One day, Gs daughter looks up and casually asks why men need to exist at all.
Men are great, she answers, though she cannot say why.
The story of G has the quality of a parable or a fairy tale.
It contains the broad strokes ofCusks theory of the woman artist.
Cusk regards this as a dead end for the female artist.
Writing may become womens writing when it could not have been written by a man.
But what such a female sentence would look like is deeply unclear.
In short, she must let her child into the studio.
(She is 57.)
The assertion is brittle and accusatory.
One senses that Cusk is berating herself.
I am not a feminist, she concludes.
I am a self-hating transvestite.
What to do with all these troubled hermaphrodites?
Menmustbe men; womenmustbe women.
But Cusk can scarcely imagine a world beyond the heterosexual family.
Divorce did not cure her of that weakness.
She regards her few gay characters with slow bewilderment.
Lesbians, meanwhile, are nearly unthinkable.
I myself would not know this hadCusk not volunteered it at a launch eventrecently.
What they mean by this, Cusk does not say.
What is clear is that the queers, in their fantastical costumes, are now crowding up the restaurant.
Its the parade, says one woman apologetically, that has confused everything.
It is interesting to note that Cusk has looked to Beauvoir and Woolf for inspiration.
But there was an important difference between the two.
Between these two arguments there lies an almost infinite gulf.
By contrast, Shakespeares sister, as Woolf called her, is simply the victim of a shut door.
To confuse them is disastrous.
Women have, I think, enough problems already; there is no reason to invent more.
One cannot say for sure: It has never been tried.
(I am surely fonder of them than she.)
Wouldnt it be a bit boring if everyone was the same?
Now it is true that Woolf called for women to write as women write, not as men write.
Literature is open to everybody, Woolf writes.
I know Cusk knows this.
The paintings crush her; they are acts of unbearable authenticity and theft.
But why should the theft go only one way?
Even their annihilating force reflects the power of her mind.
She steals the paintings every time she looks at them: They are hers.
To question the possibility of female art is, ultimately, to question the possibility of female thought.
In both cases, one wonders how hard Cusk is really looking.
She endsParadeby considering severaloil paintings by the 17th-century Dutch painter Jacobus Vrel.
It just means she hasnt told us.
IfParadeis womens writing, let us hope it is the last of it.
Another kind of novel is possible.
But its a good idea!
At least it would be better than banging on about female destiny while ignoring the lives of actual women.
One must never mistake a defect of the imagination for a hole in reality.
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