After our trauma was met with silence, our lives were to be seen only in terms of pity and abjection. Violence was the key, the aberrant form that instantiated the fullness which we could never hope to achieve, but a recognition of this would have been inadmissible for those of us committed to this dream of wholeness.
These are not actually sentences from Rachel Cusk’s Parade, but they give you the non-flavor of the novel. They could be substituted here or there for hers without really changing anything. This pseudo-academic, pseudo-technical language, not derived from a single field, is most pervasive in the art world, which Cusk has lately chosen as her setting. Cusk had written satires and memoirs before beginning her acclaimed Outline trilogy, whose narrator is a version of her, a writer who roves around Europe. Her last novel was a halfway point between the literary and art worlds: it used a memoir about D.H. Lawrence’s stay in New Mexico as the basis for a story about a famous painter staying at the narrator’s house in rural England.
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