For a decade, Rachel Cusk (Saskatoon, Canada, 1967) tried to live "like a hermaphrodite, with a male half and a female half." So did her ex-husband, who quit his law job to stay home and care for his two girls. They wanted to cohabit "as a transvestite couple", through a new formula that invalidates traditional gender roles. However, the agreement was not perfect: as modern as it seemed, she kept doing two things, being "man and woman at the same time". "While my husband, with good intention, only did one", writes Cusk in Despojos(Libros del Asteroide), brutal summary of the shipwreck of their marriage. The experiment did not work, exposing the mirage of symmetrical equality and the interference of the damned biology in our cultural constructs. In the end, there was no other choice but to extract the tooth. It left a considerable gap, a crater on which, for a long time, nothing grew again.
The result of that experience was this stark book that Cusk published in English in 2012, causing a major scandal. He did not like his description of that languid suffering that was becoming less and less bearable, his avowed hatred for other families, his firm desire to mate with his daughters, leaving every male out of the family equation. Neither is his criticism of the toxic model that the Christian family implies nor the determinism that his continuous evocation of Greek myths gives off. "She was raising things too troublesome and painful for those who still believed that their marriages were fully equal," recalls Cusk from her home in the coastal city of Norfolk, as her second husband brings her a cup of coffee. “The literary world murdered me. The European publishers who had published me until then did not even want to open this book. They thought it was not intellectual enough, ”he says to explain the mysterious delay in this translation, considering that his previous novels, such as Arlington Park or The Bradshaw Variations, had been acclaimed throughout the world. “Now I think it was ruthless punishment against a woman who was trying to represent her experience honestly. I see it as something systematic, which has more to do with the gender anxiety caused by what I write than with my person. Or maybe it's just easier for me to think that than to be convinced that everyone hates me, ”she says ironically.
It's hard to believe I didn't see it coming. In 2001, her essay A Life's Work, offering a somewhat egregious portrait of the motherhood experience, already made her a public enemy in the UK. “If you ask any woman why she decided to have a second child, she will answer that it was when she arrived at the delivery room that she remembered how painful it is to give birth. Otherwise, he would never have done such a thing again. That is what happened to me with this book ”, affirms Cusk, never lacking in metaphors. "I didn't think I was saying anything groundbreaking when I said that divorce is a terrible experience. And yet the people were enraged. Now I think divorce is such a destructive experience that it only generates more destruction around you. " She also didn't like that she opposed feminism's orthodoxy and described it as a concept with different meanings for each person, which may seem obvious now, but it was less so just eight years ago. "The women of my generation are a unique case: we were the first to have completely different lives from their mothers. Our daughters could take us as models, but we had none ”, explains the author. “We have internalized many contradictions and tried to resolve them as we have been able. Marriage and motherhood are things that we were not clear about how to live in the light of feminism. They are the rocks that our ship crashed into. ”
"The literary world murdered me. It was a ruthless punishment against a woman who tried to speak honestly of her experience"
Her books seem signed by a writer addicted to the immeasurable pleasure of opposing, guided by the will to reveal the truth, especially in places where it is most vehemently denied. “It is not deliberate, but it is true that this is my natural state. I have never adhered to the rules, "he admits. Cusk attributes this to having grown up between different countries: the daughter of English Catholics, she was born in Canada, then lived in Los Angeles and returned to England while still a child. “I have grown up in Anglophone cultures, although all of them very different. I understand language everywhere, but not necessarily its meaning. ” He urges her to be introduced as a British writer, but reluctantly. "I've never felt English, I'm just stuck here. I feel like an animal in the zoo. I don't like the zoo, the keeper, or the other animals. I would like to run away, but surely I would perish in nature. "
Despojos changed his way of writing. The celebrated trilogy formed by A contraluz, Tránsito y Prestigio, with which the intelligentsia won again, is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, dialogues and conversations, anecdotes and digressions not always relevant, in which the notion of argument ceases to matter. If it didn't sound a little ridiculous, we could almost talk about postfiction . “That book was a complete change in my work and in my life. The story he believed in until then fell apart. And, in parallel, I was no longer able to return to that state of faith that fiction imposes on you as a writer and as a reader. Today I still can't read novels. I don't believe them anymore ”.
In Prestige he affirms that the English like to live in old houses, although renovated with all the modern comforts. "That led me to wonder if perhaps the same principle could be applied to novels," Cusk writes. There is no doubt that she is involved in this reform project: building new interiors for the old building that is the novel. “Building something new is delicate: it is very easy for it to be ugly, useless or not to last. With the trilogy I wanted the design to be as light as possible, the building to take up almost no space, to have an invisible structural plan. I wanted my work to be free from the influence of the imagination, ”he says. “The English novel continues in a Victorian scheme of introduction, knot and denouement, always closely linked to the author's fantasy. I am not trying to be a radical writer, but against this model it is very difficult not to be. ”
"That book was a complete change. I did not manage to return to that state of faith that fiction imposes on you as a writer and reader. Today I still cannot read novels. I no longer believe them."
Cusk's self-fiction seems critical to itself. "The self is finished. I don't think I can go back to using the form of my latest books or write in the first person, ”he says. The author reveals that her new book, written during confinement, will be a remake of another old one: again, a way to take up as little space as possible. At times, she glimpses a more personal project, which would speak of the feeling of invisibility that she experiences at this moment in her life, of “the futility and redundancy” that she feels as a mature woman, of how much she has devoted to family life and what what little he has left now that his daughters are in college. “But I will not be the one to write those truths. They've thrown enough stones at me… ”, he laughs out loud. The question is whether he will be able to keep them to himself.
Offal . Rachel Cusk. Translation by Catalina Martínez Muñoz. Asteroid Books. 176 pages. 17.95 euros.