Rachel Cusk: The novelist on the “feminine non-state of non-being”

Rachel CuskThe novelist on the "feminine non-state of non-being" Merve Emre (bio) Rachel cusk is the most unsettling and philosophically astute British novelist at work today. The author of fifteen books, she is best known for her memoirs, A Life's Work (2001) and Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012), and the novels that comprise the Outline trilogy (2014–18). The narrator of the trilogy is a divorced writer named Faye who participates in writers' workshops and literary festivals in Europe. She is self-effacing, passive, and unusually receptive to other people's stories, which she listens to without any explicit commentary. Yet Faye's narration of these stories is rigorous, controlled, and judgmental—at moments, shockingly so—shifting from tenderness to cruelty in its descriptions of her interlocutors' faces, bodies, and confessions. End Page 27 The result is a tense, dramatic experiment in novelistic ethics, a struggle between self and other that led Cusk to declare, in a 2018 interview with Alexandra Schwartz, "I don't think character exists anymore." Cusk's 2021 novel, Second Place, returns to many of her preoccupations, among them fate and freedom, the burdens of femininity, the ethics of parenthood, and the moral status of art. The narrator is a woman, "M," who is thrown into an inchoate state of longing and self-doubt by "L," the painter whom she invites to stay in her guest house, a cottage for artists that M refers to as the "second place." Although Second Place is set at a time much like the pandemic, in a place much like Norfolk, England, where Cusk used to live, the novel is more mythic than realist in tone and structure. The marsh where M lives teems with symbols of nature's innocence and its corruptions. M and L are both references to historic individuals—the novel is inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan's Lorenzo in Taos (1932), about D. H. Lawrence—and to archetypes of male and female creators. What is at stake in their relationship feels like nothing less than a battle between cosmic elements: desire and dread, good and evil, life and death, or, as Lawrence put it, "being and non-being." Cusk and I discussed Second Place at the Southbank Centre, in London, on December 8, 2022. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. —merve emre merve emre Second Place is narrated by a writer, M, who invites a famous painter, L, to live and work in the guest house in the marsh where M and her husband, Tony, live, along with Justine, M's daughter, who has relocated there with her boyfriend Kurt during the pandemic. But before the novel takes us to the marsh, it shows us M leaving Paris on a train, where she is pursued by the devil, "horrible in appearance, yellow and bloated with bloodshot bile-coloured eyes, and when he laughed, he showed dirty teeth End Page 28 with one entirely black tooth right in the middle." It is a memorable opening, because the devil is, on the one hand, disgusting, lascivious, and abject, and, on the other hand, tempting. What does the devil portend in Second Place? rachel cusk I was thinking a little bit of Death in Venice (1912) and the feeling of fate—of reality taking fateful shapes in a psycho-drama of the self. I think I thought: "Okay, you can just say it. You can have the devil in your book." I wanted to introduce the concept of evil in a very melodramatic way that would make it a presence in the book but didn't have to be too philosophically thought out. It could be a feeling of great vulnerability on the part of the person who's speaking, something that could replace a moral or a religious sense of vulnerability. That kind of drama or melodrama was very much how I wanted the book to be. me The presence of evil and the possibility that art may offer us a moral vision to either channel or counter that evil is an important idea in many of your books. But evil is not usually presented as dramatically as it...