“The Stuntman”
by Rachel Cusk
from the April 24 & May 1, 2023 issue of The New Yorker
This week we get a new story by Rachel Cusk, whose Outline Trilogy (Outline (2014), Transit (2017), and Kudos (2018)) has been very well received. That’s not quite right: it has been a literary sensation.
This story, “The Stuntman,” has an interesting origin. It was a lecture Cusk delivered in Italy in December. It might not have been exactly what the organizers expected, from the sounds of it! But that’s why we love what Cusk is doing.
Here is how the story begins:
At a certain point in his career, the artist D, perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down. This is how I imagine it. At first sight the paintings looked as though they had been hung the wrong way round by mistake, but then the signature emblazoned in the bottom right-hand corner clearly heralded the advent of a new reality. His wife believed that with this development he had inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition, and wondered if it might have repercussions in terms of his success, but the critical response to the upside-down paintings was enthusiastic, and D was showered with a fresh round of the awards and honors that people seemed disposed to offer him, almost no matter what he did.
I hope you’re all starting what will be a great week! Please feel free to leave your thoughts below.
Rachel Cusk’s The Stuntman (New Yorker): I was enchanted by the language and the conceptions in this, amazing if long, short story. I have to wonder if she thought of ending it a few paragraphs earlier, where “she” is watching a man and his children in the garden below, and mentally inverts the scene. The paragraph that ends so wonderfully, with “…the burden of their humanity extinguished.”
Hank, I thought similarly. I thought it ended three times before it did.
What the holy hell is this, people? Hard to even know where to start with this train wreck.
“So he had come upon this marginal perspective sidlingly, as it were, from a sideways direction, participating in its disenfranchisements, in its mute and broken identity, with the difference that he had succeeded in giving it a voice.”
Starting a sentence with “So…” needs a reason, as does over-explaining one’s little neologism (kinda borrowed from Seinfeld too). Disenfranchisements? A mute and broken identity? A bestowed voice? Is the author trying to make the audience hate the narrator?
By the time (not far into the piece) that we get to the innocence and the ignorance and “it basked in a wordless moral plenitude” I was hoping it was going to be a sendup of pretentiousness and “the art world” and the worst expects of Frieze or BOMB or Artforum or whathaveyou, something that might be an all-in immersive attempt to foist upon the reader the sorts of things Helen DeWitt or Mark de Silva or Cesar Aira regularly lampoon. Maybe even an embroidery of nonfiction and fiction, like in John Haskell, or something like Emily Segal’s and Elvia Wilk’s engagement with the pomposity of certain sectors of the trendster sphere. But no, it’s just ludicrousness on top of ludicrousness. And I’ve got to admit to a pet peeve here – characters who have just a one-letter name (unless it’s from behind-the-curtain Eastern Europe or totalitarian South America and written significantly long ago)? Come fucking on already. And then D said to S who was having an affair with Y, who was D’s wife’s twin sister… Seriously? Really? You’re subjecting my eyeballs to D and D’s wife and D’s father and whoever the hell else for 10,000 words?
Oh, and the mirror is ornate and gilded, hoh hoh!
I must say, it’s rare for an author to create a character whose narrating prose is so loathsome that when said character is victimized by an act of violence and an uncaring neighbor ends the call short when victim/survivor person confides said victimization/assault, that I empathized far more with both the assailant and the phone call ender than with the victim.
I was then about to at least give Cusk credit for semi-originality or provocation when I came across sentences like: “D and his wife went to visit D’s father, who lived in a stuffy little room in a retirement home out in the flat countryside. It was difficult to find reasons to visit him, since the home was not near or on the way to anywhere that D and his wife ever wanted to go. Yet at one time his domination of D had been such that it was indistinguishable from fate.” At that point I wanted to both assail and shriek at whoever it was at the ol’ NY’er who greenlit this fucking thing. Maybe with something like: And then S called up the magazine and asked politely to speak to T and was put on hold by a receptionist named H, who was standing red-faced at their window, while S tried to figure out whether to storm into the inner offices of said magazine with a wrench, a lead pipe, or a revolver for being forced to carry the burden of this story and its chemical odor while that ol’ hard winter light filled a room, a room already full of a lot of hot air.
A sickness had taken possession of me, indeed. The nausea of reading tripe trussed up as literature.
Sifting for anything not offensively pretentious (in the worst possible way) and ridiculous: the cloth dolls weren’t terrible, and the premise of the story (woman randomly assaulted on the street — by woman who randomly assaults women on the street — decides to randomly assault other women on the street) if it had been executed with even a modicum of self-awareness isn’t bad.
And apparently a small abstract expressionist painting about a cathedral is about marginalization. Huh, the things you learn on the interwebs (eye roll) in between the cartoons.
And speaking of eye rolls, I gotta say, since Cusk is known for autofiction, that it’s worth noting the level of narcissism and self-absorption required to imply that a painting that is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars at minimum (and is displayed in London at The Tate!!) is somehow a sign of lack of representation or failure or obscurity (in a story published in The New Yorker!! by a very famous author who has been garlanded with awards and was noted in Forbes when she sold a house for almost 3 million dollars) is quite astounding.
Agreed, Sean.
Ditto
Sean, thanks for the reality check. Kudos to you.
Listening to the story, I thought I was stoned, but I wasn’t. Well said , Sean
I am very relieved because I thought maybe I was too tired when I read it, but it seems to be almost a self-parody of obtuseness. I really like Cusk’s trilogy so I was quite looking forward to this, but it took me two sitting to get through this unrewarding, turgid slog.
And yet…I do admire her trilogy and so I might try this again in a few weeks–crazy? masochistic?
Unintelligible, and believe me, I know from intelligible.
So…I did read it again and found it much more coherent. I only did this because of liking Cusk’s trilogy (which is crystal clear interestingly enough). I wrote down some stray thoughts and present them somewhat diaristically:
OK. Read it again. Ideas: 1. Representation and “truth”—can representation be overcome to find truth or can representation reveal truth? 2. Representation and the inchoate wordless violence of the attack on one of the two female protagonists—the attack as art work of a homeless woman relegated to objecthood. It leads to 3. Her considering the representations of women artists of femininity of the body—Louise Bourgeois and Paula Modersohn-Becker—and how a woman is also creating with her body (i.e. children) and woman’s body as spider also producing some external materiality. But 4. The attack is like a rip in her system of representing things, imagining an identity, the return of the “stuntman”—the story’s title—who bears the violence and physicality of womanhood after the moment of birth—and who returns here.
Back to #1—the other story of the artist who is definitely going for “truth” by inverting his painting but his story is refracted through his wife who has allowed him to be a “man”—have a family and kids and a maintained home—while being free to paint and yet herself has become something of an appendage to him, wondering about her own identity and also puzzling over his seeming lack of desire for her until at the end she has a visual epiphany while in Italy as the rain finally ends and a family emerges gleefully into the sun and she sees this a much like a memory of hers but better. She seems to transcend time to some degree. The other woman, observing a marginalized, Black artist’s (Norman Lewis) painting of a cathedral (seat of much worldly, ideological power) recognizes that the artist can only paint their own obscurity and marginalization without anger. How then to represent? Can representation ever be true? Can it reflect woman’s worth/identity/body? Representation vs. the wordless horror of violence?
I hope I’ve not manifested the same incoherence attributed above (by me as well) to Cusk’s story