Philosophy as Rebellion: The Ontology of Narration in "Parade"

By D. W. White on July 1, 2024

On the black walls of Goya's Madrid home was found Saturn, devouring his son. The original usurper, Time himself, takes his children—that which he has created—and devours them, an act which therein creates him, as the anthropophagic monster of Spanish dining rooms and the relentless Titan of Olympic myth. From this encounter between creator and creation, an eternal conflict over truth and vision, comes eventually the human race. If such primordial questions have lost their potency in the modern age, it is because we have lost the tools for their asking: philosophy, and its emanation in art. It is amidst this Pandemonium that Rachel Cusk stands in her latest novel, Parade.

This image can also lead towards a definition of Modernist literature, that elusive creature: the mind of a perspective character so potent as to devour the narrative in which they exist. A benefit of this framework is to ground a book in its composition, focusing on the text and radiating outward. A bit more broadly, Modernism is a project concerned with defying convention from within, that is to say we see novels that challenge the traditional way of seeing the world—and literature—as an essential component of their coherence. In this sense, Cusk is a quintessential Modernist writer, and Parade, which succeeds by eliding the very idea of a novel at all, her most fully realized work.

The novel opens with the serpentine story of a painter named G who, upon discovering a technique whereby he inverts the subject of his art, ignites "the advent of a new reality" which "seemed to suggest the possibility of madness as a kind of shelter" and achieves enormous success. From these opening pages, then, Parade is both the end result and the metafictional enactment of Cusk's career up to this point, an astute work of philosophical rigor and artistic skill, as we do not stay with G in the neat third-person the book's first ten pages employ. Instead there is a fabricator, a method to this madness, an unnamed protagonist who suddenly appears after a section break to begin her own story, through which she will interweave those of G, his wife, and other artists while engaging in a creative act befitting Cusk herself—a writer proving herself to be as equally Daedalus as Icarus, genius as recusant, Goya as Saturn.

What makes Parade, an ontological inquiry bearing the shape of a novel, successful is the scope and depth of its philosophical vision, an understanding grounded in our narrator (from, of course, Cusk herself), and reified via an innovative narration into the plot of the book. We come to learn that G is in fact several artists, or perhaps the same artist, existing in protean mutability à la Woolf's Orlando. That it is our narrator who creates these narratives, interweaving them with her own, unifies the book's narrative and narration—its existence as a story and as a piece of art—into a philosophical work of proportions not often found in contemporary fiction.

This type of movement between sites in narration—and the larger insouciance towards the rules of novelistic composition in which it exists—can't be taught, it can only be earned, excavated by the exact type of artistic toil explored in Parade's opening fugue. After the blooming luminance of the opening section, the book settles into a groove, reading a bit like an EP, with long tracks broken into alternating sections as the narrator moves between her own story and that of the artists she envisions, slowly consuming their storylines into her own vision of reality.

Cusk's Modernist approach to cosmophagic narration (as this reviewer has argued) has long sought to destabilize the linear narrative traditionally used to exercise morality through female characters, thereby accelerating her critique of gendered literary norms within her stylistic talents. Resulting from Parade's philosophical rigor is perhaps Cusk's most direct engagement with feminism, a novel that acts out its philosophical project in its composition, performing an investigation into the price of creation and the matter of who is allowed to do it. The entire apparatus of her narration offers a powerful statement on the matter, as do the brilliant bolts of thought that appear throughout: "Their lives are so gendered, she said, it is almost as if they trust gender more than anything else to tell them how to live." Lines such as this resonate with the long Cuskian project towards truth and its complicated relationship with mainstream feminist thought.

The third section, "The Diver," acts as title track, cohering and synthesizing the concerns of the book in both narration and narrative functions that swirl around notions of mimetic representation, demands of the marketplace on art, Modernism, and ambition. We are in the aftermath of a shocking event at a museum, amongst the bustle of a parade, in which our narrator is amongst a group of art-adjacent conversationalists sharing wine and discourse. In a telling example of the novel's broader socio-philosophical implications emerging as facets of its artistic goals rather than the other way round (a Cuskian hallmark, and one way in which she can be distinguished from her peers), these characters at times seem to exist solely for our narrator to work out philosophical problems:

[The artist G] made a conventional prison for herself, Julia said, which it took her many years to break out of. It's true that she didn't actually neglect her children, but the specific violence of her work towards the subject of motherhood and the female body must have been quite disturbing for them. The truth is, she said, that most people have children out of convention. It's only afterward that they start attaching all their ideas about creativity to them, because for most people a child is the only thing they've ever actually produced.

By the end G has become a figure that the novel has shown us through a type of inverted panopticon: varying methods of narration, across character, space, and time, examine the iterations of the artist (one cannot help but note, too, the elegiac examination of a renown artist in this, Cusk's seventeenth book). But G of course is really a prism for viewing, and in turn questioning, the core ideas that have suffused Cusk's oeuvre: societal infrastructures surrounding creation, motherhood, feminism, meaning, and acceptance, reworked with a commitment to pursing art as philosophy.

Parade, while not quite Cusk's greatest work (Arlington Park endures), is nearly so, and among the half dozen of the most brave, skillful, intelligent, and above all interesting novels to appear this century. Cusk remains the most accomplished, talented, and risk-adept novelist writing in English, emerging into that rare and precious force: an artist so comfortable with her craft as to ably disregard—indeed, devour—every rule of the medium, a work of creation that by its very nature calls into question that which has come before it, and from it demands answer. "I see, Mauro said, smiling and showing rather small and pointed teeth. You are taking a philosophical position. I hope the people on this island live up to their part of the bargain," our narrator relates, in her third section. With Parade, Rachel Cusk has herself taken a philosophical stance, a starkly forward position amongst the timid banalities of contemporary fiction, again reimagining what a novel can do and the manner in which it might do so. It is perhaps up to us, the readers, the thinkers, the commentators, to ensure the island on which Cusk writes is adequately supplied with provisions. Then again, she seems unconcerned either way.