If one would like to introduce Rachel Cusk’s literary sound with a brief sample, this is it: “Occasionally, and due to actual or hypothetical misconduct, my mother and father no longer speak to me.” The trick of this language of thought is to make the felt pain manageable by objectifying it.
The sentence comes from the reflection “Coventry”, which gives the title to the slim volume of new essays by Rachel Cusk. Sending someone to Coventry, Cusk writes, is a common phrase used to describe the kind of dissolution with which Cusk’s parents punished their daughter. Of course, the historical tragedy of the real Coventry, which was largely destroyed by German aerial bombs in 1940, arches over the metaphor.
Rachel Cusk sets up her reflections in this social dystopia. She tells of the losses that growing older brings with it, the wear and tear of marriage, the estrangement from growing daughters. Little by little, Coventry becomes her homeland, lacking in illusions, because the terrible things have already happened there.
The Canadian, Paris-based writer Rachel Cusk is a specialist in illuminating private catastrophes, transforming them into a common human truth with direct, factual analysis. She has found a language for this that moves between descriptive precision and poetic daring, while always sounding an impressively axiomatic tone: “Society is organized in such a way that those who tell the truth are efficiently punished, silenced or denied . Rudeness, on the other hand, is welcomed like a false god.”
This essay on the moral status of impoliteness is about the collapse of language that is a consequence of social inequality. When Hillary Clinton disqualifies Trump voters as a “deplorable bunch,” Rachel Cusk sees it only at first glance as a bold move by the candidate. Close listening unmasks the insult as declassification, as a moral offense in which the value of the individual is denied.
How thin the varnish is on which the privileged author, she says herself, defends her everyday habits is illustrated by the anecdote of a dress fitting in the boutique. The saleswoman, who is obviously obliged to be diligent, becomes a burden for the customer with her incessantly declared servitude. The customer finds her exaggerated willingness to help and her constant asking to be intrusive, and in the end she leaves behind a devastated saleswoman who has lost her routine friendliness. The years of fighting over the question of how a more just world could be designed boils down to the compromise of maintaining good manners as a basic standard of civilization.
Cusk is most persuasive when analyzing herself
The cleverness of this essayist is overwhelming because she never settles with a single truth. Unlike some journalists crowned on Twitter, she does not believe that she is in full possession of moral integrity, but on the contrary: Rachel Cusk always goes through the world as a social and philosophical flawed creature. Car traffic, whose social strategies she tries to fathom in the first essay, is not only the often bloody battlefield of elderly people who risk human lives if they make driving mistakes.
It is also the author’s sinful mile that bears the contradiction between ethical concerns and the need to pack the trunk full of groceries from the distant supermarket for the family: “We accept our guilt for speeding thoughtlessly through other people’s villages, but in our own we would be touchy.”
Rachel Cusk has written novels that are actually fictional variations on her essayistic poetology. They are also slightly weaker than her major attempts at motherhood (“Life’s Work”) and separation from her husband (“After”). Because Rachel Cusk is particularly convincing when she lets herself be skinned in her analytical outlines.
There is great charm in the process of experimentally challenging all certainties
The “after”, i.e. the time after the separation with all the erosion that it triggered, is called up again in this small Suhrkamp volume. The pain that Cusk empathizes with is triggered by her husband’s angry statement: “You call yourself a feminist!” And in fact, Cusk believes that in her lived variant of feminism she only sees a pile of rubble of male characteristics that she inherited from her parents. “I’m not a feminist,” she writes, “but a self-loathing transvestite.”
There is a great attraction in this procedure, to test all certainties in question, to give up the comfort of agreements in favor of quite painful gains in knowledge. Divorce is the basic theme of Rachel Cusk’s essays. It runs through all topics and becomes virulent in the daughters’ attempts to cut their cords.
The horror lies in the fact that the life path that parents and child have committed themselves to suddenly forks during puberty. People now begin to tell each other stories that leave the common horizon. A simple narrator, untouched by the horrors of knowledge, would craft cheerful family stories out of these experiences. Rachel Cusk turns it into great existentialist literature, whose linguistic ruthlessness saved Eva Bonné into German without loss.
Because the horror, the inner Coventry, is the writing impulse of this great essayist in Virginia Woolf’s successor. In addition to the essays, the original English volume also contains reviews and essays on literature, including fascinating portrait sketches of Francoise Sagan, Edith Wharton, DH Lawrence and Natalia Ginzburg. The fact that Suhrkamp decoupled these texts may be an economic decision. Unfortunately, the reader is thus denied a view of the fabulous literary critic Rachel Cusk.
Rachel Cusk: Coventry. Essays, in English by Eva Bonné, Suhrkamp Verlag, 160 pages, 21 euros.