Make money doing the work you believe in
This is an insightful essay on Rachel Cusk by Paul Franz, one that helped me quite a bit when I was writing my Munro piece, which Paul edited. (There is a link to it in here: substack.com/@secretsqu…. My Munro and Paul’s Cusk have a lot in common, which I’m sure is part of why he solicited my essay in the first place). The draft is a bit more direct than the published essay (linked at bottom), but the published version is worth reading, in particular for its more detailed reflections on Beauvoir.
Paul’s essay made me realize, among other things, that one of Munro’s major stories (“Jakarta”) is a fictional reflection not just on D. H. Lawrence—whom Munro has her heroines, two intellectual 50s Vancouver housewives, discuss at length and compare to Katherine Ann Porter—but on Simone de Beauvoir’s interpretation of Lawrence. This is signaled very subtly, Munro hides her intellectual sophistication so well that it has mostly gone unnoticed even by her legions of academic interpreters. But she confirmed the fact to her daughter Shelia. The housewife nursing her baby, reading, and smoking to escape “the sludge of animal function” is presumably reading The Second Sex.
I certainly don’t claim that Cusk had “Jakarta” in mind when writing Second Place (although you never know), but she’s expressed great admiration for Munro, in particular for Who Do You Think You Are? (thebookerprizes.com/the…; the book was published as The Beggar Maid in the US/UK). Paul’s essay helps show why.
In the first place (this isn’t Paul’s subject) Who Do You Think You Are? is a novel-like cycle of stories that clearly follows the arc of Munro’s own life. It would be very important for many women writers younger than Munro who became associated with “autofiction,” not just Cusk but also and especially Elena Ferrante.
Secondly, there is Cusk’s transformation of Lawrence’s “sexual mythology.” At least one of Cusk’s central preoccupations is also Munro’s great subject: what Paul in the published essay calls “the persistence of the archaic,” of the “old voodoo” of sexual difference on the other side of the change in the lives of girls and women through which Munro’s generation lived. Cusk describes herself as a second-generation immigrant to the land of sexual equality, a land in which—Cusk rather boldly claims—women adopt a masculine attitude towards life. She says that her mother—a woman of approximately Munro’s age—had moved there from another country. Cusk is native-born, but upon becoming pregnant she realized the extent to which she was still a foreigner.
Thirdly, there is Cusk’s commitment to a “frankness” that mediates between abstract truth and the perhaps meaningless detail of what the individual experiences and thinks. Cusk refers to Lawrence’s statement: “[one] is not only a little individual, living a little individual life. […] One is in oneself the whole of mankind.” Munro aspires to a similar quality, hoping to treat personal experience and observation with what she calls “honestly” (also sometimes “honour”). This involves transforming experience by means of the “tricks” of art. Yet if artistic tricks are “honest,” the result is “true, as a dream might be true.” The dreamlike truths that art reveals to us are truths about desire and sexual difference, truths that are presumed to be (as Paul writes when discussing Cusk) “always around us, unconcealed, utterly common, yet also under a kind of ban.” In Munro the “ban” takes the form of prudish traditional attitudes towards sexuality influenced by Calvinism on the one hand, and what one of her characters calls the “dreary secular piety” of modern feminism on the other. Both look away from what she calls “the dark side of human nature,” something one can try to face honestly and honorably but cannot hope to transform. Cusk is less fundamentally pessimistic than Munro, hoping in her own way for what Lawrence called “the establishment of a new relation, or the re-adjustment of the old one, between men and women.” Paul quotes some purple passages from Cusk’s essay on The Rainbow that might surprise readers most familiar with the prose of Outline: “The Rainbow, then, is the story…. of woman as the sempiternal life-giver who through time and change is finally driven to give birth to herself.” Cusk writes that Lawrence’s novel concludes with a “new world” that is “predicated on the potency of the individual, a world that has moved out of the shelter of God’s creation and is creating itself.”
Just what, on both an intimate and on a political level, Cusk thinks the creation of such a new world entails is the central question for her readers to ponder. It is a question that Cusk shares with many other women writers who see themselves as Munro’s heirs, writers who take up Munro’s commitment to frankness or honesty about desire yet cannot reconcile themselves to her pessimism.
