New Yorker Fiction Review #298: "The Stuntman" by Rachel Cusk
"The Stuntman" is a short story by British novelist Rachel Cusk that has nothing really to do with stuntmen. I don't necessarily have a problem with that. I do sort of have a problem with this story though, namely that it was one of the densest, most difficult reading short stories I've ever read on the pages of The New Yorker.
Reading this story -- which is almost completely without dialogue -- was like reading the diary of a really, really smart person as they describe their thoughts and feelings. Rachel Cusk is an extremely articulate writer and thinker but at times I grew weary of this story's heavy (if not total) absorption in the mental and emotional life of the narrator. She does narrate about other people, sure, but even in doing so, the narration is so preoccupied with an examination of the main character's inner world and perceptions that it was like being taken on a journey deep inside a whirlpool; often there seemed to be no footing, no up or down, no forward or backward.
There is no plot in this story. There does not always need to be one (I am not that much of a lunkhead). There were, instead, two strands of narration. In the first strand, the narrator expounds upon her feelings regarding the life and work of a famous painter whom she refers to only as D. There is no clear indication within the prose that she knows or has ever met D, but something about the details she brings in about D's life would suggest that she might have, or has at least read (very closely) his biography.
The second strand of narration discusses a time when she was attacked and hit on the head by a woman on the street in a major city where she was living at the time. The attack was unprovoked and, while it did not cause serious physical damage, the psychological effects of the attack echo within her for long after. Most notably, she is haunted by the fact that her attacker was a woman.
Using these two narrative strands, in that "revolver" kind of way -- switching back and forth between them -- the narrator attempts to make sense of D's switch to painting pictures upside down, with the jarring mental displocation that followed in the wake of her attack. If all this sounds like heady, dense stuff, let me assure you: it is. Be prepared to read and re-read passages over and over, and grip the bridge of your nose a lot.
This short story is obsessed with a number of things, among them are perception, violence, and gender roles/expectations.
At least three times, in the first narrative strand, regarding the artist "D," the author writes the phrase: "This is how I imagine it." Once would have been enough to give us the clue that what we are being told is a work of the narrator's imagination, not fact; however, the author punctuates each of the beginning paragraphs with this phrase. We are given the strong idea that what the narrator is telling us -- the picture she is painting -- is carefully constructed, and meant to serve her own purposes.
Violence, both the word and the actual act of it in the main character's being attacked, rears its head several times in this short story. The violence of men towards women, whether in physical, mental, or emotional form, comes into play in some very academic-seeming ways. On the other hand, actual physical violence -- the only act of it in the story -- ends up being committed by a woman to another woman.
Consider the following scene in which the narrator is describing the artist D as he looks at his wife:
"When he looked at her what he saw was his sexual failure, a failure brought about by the interference of society, of civilization itself, in the courage and capacity of their own bodies. Perhaps men had always painted nudes in the same way that they committed violence -- to prove that their courage had not been damaged by morality and need."
To me, in this paragraph (which does not yield easily to interpretation (nor does any part of this story)) the author is attempting to dig deeply into the masculine attitude of possession over a woman. The artist is, in effect, looking at his own wife as a possession, and the simple fact that he has been able to possess her diminishes both himself and his wife. And the author is attempting to connect this to why men paint nude pictures of women, as an attempt to prove something.
In the narrator's world, gender politics are extremely twisted, fraught with underlying meaning, and perhaps impossible to untangle into some coherent theory, or into some actionable philosophy.
As the narrator ruminates on being attacked, she wonders:
"Did I believe that being hit by a woman was my fault in a way that being hit by a man could not have been? I could not have assigned meaning to being hit by a man, could have found no reason for him to hit me, and assigning meaning was my duty...Why did it make sense for a woman to hit me? It was as though a violence underlying female identity had risen up and struck."
For someone who has recently been attacked, it is perhaps no wonder that the narrator sees the world in terms of violence and the possible meanings behind it. But it is telling about her character that she needs to find some meaning in it and that the meaning has something to do with the gender of her attacker. "Why?" we ask. And it seems that she does not even know.
This short story is so densely packed with observation, rumination, thoughts turned inward and inward and inward, that it is difficult to dissect further without a line-by-line study.
What I find interesting is the author's reference to Norman Lewis' painting "Cathedral," a very real painting inserted into this fictional story. Authors do this frequently with other books or texts, a technique known as intertextuality. She does it here as a way to put an endcap on what could otherwise be a story that spins and spins endlessly over themes and ideas that have no resolutions, no firm answers.
But in the end, this herculean synthesis of ideas brought upon by her readings of D's and Norman Lewis' works, brings the narrator to the following conclusion:
"Being hit on the head, I now saw, had been for me both real and unknowable, was the inversion of representation while being ultimately representative. The world is upside down, a friend of mine said when I told her what had happened to me. Yet the reality of violence, painful though it was, seemed to offer a correction to the reality that obeys the laws of gravity."
In a story as occupied in the mental ether as this one, that's about as close to a conclusion as it's possible to get.
Photograph by Patricia Voulgaris.
Comments