Rachel Cusk, Second Place (II)

 

Okay, so I'm back. Having re-read Second Place, having done my charts and graphs, having met with my cohorts to discuss the book, I'm going to try to work through a couple of ideas I have in my head at this point.

I suppose the biggest question for me as a reader, and I suspect for other readers as well, is what to make of the narrator, M. The whole book is essentially a monologue on her part, and that's sort of a problem, in that what she has to say about her hopes and dreams is frequently at odds with her behaviors in pursuing those hopes and dreams. For example, she claims to love her husband Tony and to be grateful for what he has done for her, but she invites the painter L into their home and spends most of the novel conducting what certainly feels like an extended flirtation with him. Right from the start, M is drawn to L's work because it seems to represent to her an escape, a portal from what she is experiencing as a constricted life to one that might offer her freedom and transcendence. Even as she tries to articulate this, she seems to be aware that her yearnings are to some degree inexplicable:

There's no particular reason, on the surface, why L's work should summon a woman like me, or perhaps any woman—but least of all, surely, a young woman whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallized in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom his paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentantly male down to the last brushstroke. (11)

M's frustration at the limitations she faces as woman, and her resentment of L (and Tony) for the freedoms they possess as males, seem to be rooted in the way she was treated, or remembers being treated, as a child. As she says later in the same paragraph, "The fact is that I received the clear message from the very beginning that everything would have been better — would have been right, would have been how it ought to be — had I been a boy." (12)

In a climactic and emotionally fraught scene at the end of the novel, after M has finally talked L into painting her portrait, she puts on the only dress she owns that fits her closely, her wedding dress, and heads to the studio. Tony sees her going and screams at her to come back. She refuses, and walks into a situation that is even more fraught than the one she's walking out of. 

By the end of the novel, M seems to have arrived at some sort of realization about the nature of truth and freedom and transcendence, but it's a realization shrouded in a sort of mystery:

The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it. True art means seeking to capture the unreal. (180)

That's the basis of her attraction to L's work, why it speaks to her, and what in the end she takes away from her interactions with him and with his work: that there is something on the other side of the surfaces of things, something that is accessible to us only through art, something that could set us free if only we could find our way to it. It cannot be apprehended directly by the senses or stated directly in words. This of course is not a new idea. Franz Kafka once said "I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones." Many other writers have made similarly enigmatic observations along these lines. (Anais Nin: "The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.")

M's struggles to get past her very individual and very personal limitations in order to arrive at Whatever It Is that is on the other side are at the heart of the dynamism of the plot of this book, such as it is. But there's a larger question that my group touched upon in our discussion: what is Rachel Cusk, the author, up to? She presents us with a character struggling against her own inclinations and her own limitations, a character who is drawn to art and also to some degree frustrated by art, a character who is perhaps admirable in her aspirations, but also hard to sympathize with, since so many of her frustrations seem to be the result of self-inflicted wounds.

I've thought about this and I'm not sure I have a definitive answer. But my working hypothesis is that it is precisely the inconsistencies and problematics of M's struggle that interest Cusk. It would have been easy enough to make M into a more insightful and capable character, and to make this book into feel-good story where L arrives and M is reborn as a triumphantly free and happy and fully realized person. But that kind of story arc is, well, a cliché, and if there's anything Cusk is not interested in it's clichés. She is regularly dinged by snarky reviewers who consider her work to be "frosty" and "humorless" and "astringent" and "convoluted." Several reviewers have gone so far as to object to the publisher's use of Optima, a sans serif type face, in her books; Dwight Garner, for example, makes the rather puzzling remark in his Times review that "Optima is unusual to see in a novel; it delivers to my eyes a chill sense of the void." Anthony Cummins, writing in The Guardian, goes him one better: 

Cusk’s sans-serif Optima typeface, now as much a part of her brand as high-pressure deliberation on gender and selfhood, adds to an indefinable sense of threat, with the novel’s diction caught between the lecture hall and the analyst’s couch. 

Obviously, these guys are going pretty far out of their way to find things to carp about. Equally obviously, Rachel Cusk's novels are not everyone's cup of tea. But I find them to be thought-provoking and relevant and insightful, not in the sense of delivering satisfying prefabricated epiphanies, but in the sense of posing questions well worth thinking about, both in terms of the workings of the novels themselves and in terms of they mirror the often muddy and complicated events of our own lives.

Rachel Cusk, Second Place (I)

 

This evening, in preparation for a meeting of my book group coming up this Friday,  I finished re-reading Rachel Cusk's book Second Place. I had read it for the first time back in November and found it intriguing. Here are some of the preliminary notes I made at that time:

The Cusk book was inward and awkward and psychologically astute in ways that I have come to expect from her. The narrator is M, a middle-aged woman who has had a long-time fixation on a painter she refers to only as L, whose work spoke to her when she first saw it when she was a young woman. Now she's living with her husband Tony along a marsh on a farm of sorts that has an extra cottage called the Second Place. She winds up writing a number of times to the artist asking him if he'd like to visit; she thinks he would find the landscape inspiring, as she does. She also seems to be entertaining the hope that they will become friends, if not lovers. She hears nothing for a long time. Then she gets word that he is coming, and when he shows up, he's not alone; he's brought along a beautiful young woman named Brett. Most of the book has to do with the time he spends there, and the various disconnects between the narrator and L. There are subplots involving her daughter Justine and her husband Kurt, who have moved in just before L arrives. Justine is befriended by Brett, Kurt spends a period of time as a kind of assistant to Tony on the farm, and L navigates a series of psychological and physical crises, including a having, toward the end of the book, a stroke that radically re-shapes his life and the lives of all the people around him. The bulk of the book consists of interior monologue  rendered as direct address toward someone identified only as Jeffers. We're inside the narrator's head the whole time, but the conceit is that M is not talking to us, she's talking to Jeffers, and we are thus in the oddly oblique position of seeming to be listening in on the one-sided conversation. M is clearly a very intelligent and articulate woman who as a narrator and the conduct of her life is ruthless in pursuit of existential understanding. Her upbringing and the events of her life have led her to be suspicious of men on the one hand and family on the other. Her hopes and expectations of finding some formula for freedom and happiness in her life are more or less consistently thwarted by her own impulsive behaviors and insecurities. I liked the feel of the book as I was reading it, the way that the narrative never seemed to move in the ways in might be expected to move, but was insistently making its own way in its own time. It's the kind of book that would necessitate re-reading, and some not insignificant amount of study, to fully appreciate. I may go down that road, I'm not sure. At least enough to pull some quotes and think them over. Cusk has some interesting things to say about being a woman and about being an artist and about how hard it is to make sense of anything when you are in the middle of it.

I guess I'd say after a second reading that I feel the same way, only more so. There are, as Francis Bacon famously noted, lots of ways of to read. ("...some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested"). This is a book that I suppose can be read for pleasure. That's the way I read it the first time. I was intrigued by these particular characters in this particular situation, and I was reading mostly to find out what happened. Which was fine at the time. But on second reading, knowing what was going to happen, I was much more attuned to the multi-layered psychological dynamics of the characters individually and in their interactions with one another: M and Justine. M and Tony. M and L. Brett and Tony. Brett and M. Justine and Kurt. Tony and L. And so on. I feel like for me to fully grok what is going on in the book, I'm going to have to go back and start pulling quotes that relate to particular themes and laying them out on paper and making charts and graphs in order to be able to figure them out. In other words, to be the reader that this book needs me to be, I've got a lot of work to do, quite probably more work than many readers would likely want to sign up for. Cusk is a thoughtful, demanding writer, and my sense is that there are rewards to be had in meeting her halfway.


So fine. But wait, there's more. As it turns out—and this is something I did not become aware of until I was halfway through my second reading of the book—the basic plot of Cusk's book has been appropriated from Lorenzo in Taos, an early 20th century novel by an American writer I had never heard of named Mabel Dodge Luhan. (Apparently, in at least one of the editions of Second Place there is an endnote in which Cusk acknowledges the primary source that she is working from. But that endnote does not appear in my paperback version of the text, and so I wasn't aware of it until I started perusing the reviews of Second Place.) Cusk uses the scaffolding of that book's plot in much the same way that Barbara Kingsolver uses David Copperfield as the template for Demon Copperhead, which I put aside midway through in order to re-read Second Place. So if I really wanted to do my due diligence, I suppose I would need to read Lorenzo in Taos as well. Not sure that's gonna happen. Obsessive-compulsive as I may be, I have to set myself some limits, especially inasmuch as I have a stack of about twenty other books waiting for me on my nightstand.

Anyway this is my preliminary attempt to process Second Place. My tentative plan is to do some of that culling and graphing and charting, then talk with my group, and come back with some further thoughts next week. Till then...


 

Artifactual

 

 

 Artifactual

What's the point? What if
there is no point? What if
the pointlessness is the point?
At what point does whether
or not there is a point become
a pointless question to even ask?


Do you feel like you owe it
to yourself to be able to offer
some kind of explanation?
What is there you can say?
It is, as they say, what it is:
right there in black and white:


Why this and not that? Why not
something else entirely?
Fact is, I can't say. I'm not sure
myself. I am just trying to make
space for something to exist
where before there was nothing.

 

Process Reflection:

I have for some years enjoyed playing around with mark-making in various contexts. One of the simplest forms of mark-making is simply doodling, and at departmental and administrative meetings I found that doodling gave me something to occupy the part of my brain that was going quietly crazy while my left brain was trying to keep up with the flow of the conversation. It's a simple process: apply the point of the pen to the paper, and see what wants to show up. The stakes are low, and if what you have drawn doesn't pass muster, who cares? It still feels good while you are doing it. At least it does to me.

At some point I began, in the comfort and privacy of my study, trying more ambitious projects for which I felt the term "doodling" was reductive and dismissive. I preferred to think of them as black-and-white drawings. In some cases those drawings included some recognizable real-world elements. In many cases they did not. (Samples here and here.) I was primarily interested in exploring the ways in which these two simple elements, black and white, interact with one another, particularly in the negative spaces they create for one another. And the time I spent drawing began to feel a lot like a meditation exercise for me as well; I feel calmed and focused while drawing, and I'm often pleased with the results even when I can understand why someone else might not see them as being "art" in any sense of the word they might be familiar with.

The other night I happened to be in the mood to draw, but as it happened I had two sheets of blank paper in front of me rather than one, and while I drew I was also thinking about what to write for the weekly meeting of the poetry group that I host on zoom. So while I was drawing I began turning over in my mind the whole question of the value and worth of what I was doing, both as an artist as a writer, and as the words presented themselves I write them down, and as the movement of the lines proceeded I did that as well, more or less contrapuntally. The finished drawing is above. In writing the words, I was aware of trying to mimic, in a playful manner, in the sequences of the sounds the repetitive movements and patterns in the drawing. 

The next morning I took the lines I had written and did several revisions, of which the poem you see above is the product, but quite probably not the end product. I have yet to get feedback on the poem from my group. But it seems to me at this intermediate point that the poem is driving at something that I feel is at the core of both drawing and writing: they are disciplines based on a certain sort of magic, which is to make something out of nothing. And I do believe that what results from any particular exercise need not necessarily meet anyone else's criteria of excellence. It's quite enough for me that it makes me feel good when I'm done with it.
 

 

 

The Death of the Essay? I Think Not.

 

There has been a raft of articles in the last few weeks about ChatGPT and the threat that it supposedly represents to high school and college teachers. There's been much weeping and gnashing of teeth about how the threat posed to academia by artificial intelligence. The titles of many of the articles tend to be alarmist: "The End of English!" "The Essay is Dead!" Teachers are quizzing one another about What Is To Be Done. How will we be able to tell if the students are cheating? Do we go back to making students write essays by hand? Should we just stop having students write at all?

All of this hand-wringing is symptom of a much deeper set of problems that has been around since long before the advent of ChatGPT. And those problems have to do with 1) the ways in which schools have historically been teaching writing, 2) the purposes for which student writing have been employed, and 3) the lessons that students have been absorbing after being subjected to those practices.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that most teachers treat the essay as an evaluative instrument. The purpose of assigning an essay is to put the student in the position of being able to demonstrate whether or not s/he has learned something that the teacher has determined to be of importance. Not only is the content prescribed, but the form as well. Particular attention must be paid to the shape of the essay and to each of the paragraphs within it. The classic model is the five-paragraph thesis essay, a genre of writing that is not valued and pretty much does not exist outside of the confines of the classroom. (If you are in doubt about that, pick up any copy of Best American Essays published in the last twenty years and see how many five-paragraph thesis essays you find.)

In many cases there are other arbitrary rules. The writer must affect a kind of disembodied professorial objectivity. No use of the pronoun "I." No forms of the verb "to be." Each paragraph must have a topic sentence with the following sentences offering supporting details. And so on. Students who follow these rules are rewarded with A's, which they take to mean that they are good at writing. Students who don't follow the rules are penalized with low grades, which they take to mean that they are not good writers. Both conclusions are demonstrably wrong. But that is not the fault of the students, it's a fault baked into the system.

So what's wrong with the system? The problem is that it starts with a narrow, transactional view of writing and hammers it home early and often. Many students have, by the time they reach middle school, become convinced that the ONLY reason one would ever choose to write is when required to do so by a teacher. A student who has interiorized that attitude toward writing is exactly the kind of student who would be delighted to be able to turn over the grunt work over to a robot. 

I worked with a first-year teacher some years ago who shocked our English department by objecting to the school's plagiarism policy, on the grounds that he himself had plagiarized often in college, because he saw plagiarism as a very effective time management device. And if you squint at it just right, you can see the logic of his position. "I've a lot of demands on my time. Some of the things I have to do are getting in the way of the things I want to do. So why shouldn't I budget my time accordingly?" The simple fact was that he didn't see writing as something valuable for him, but only as something valuable for the teacher.

I spent most of my career as a middle school and high school English teacher trying to give students a different sense of the purposes and possibilities of writing. Part of that effort is of course to make the principled case that writing is ideally something that you do for yourself, in order to teach yourself how to think more clearly and more deeply about whatever it is that you actually do care about. Ask a room full of students of an age whether there is anyone who believes that it's better to be a thoughtless person than a thoughtful person, and it's unlikely you'll get any takers. I've asked that question every year, and I've never had any.

So what does writing have to do with thoughtfulness? A lot, as it turns out.

First of all, as almost all those who write regularly because they choose to understand, writing is generative of thought. Students assume, largely because their teachers have repeatedly told them so, that you must know what you are going to say before you write. (Teachers teach outlining for exactly this reason, and many require students to have an outline before they begin an essay or even a story.) But from my own personal experience, and from the testimony of many many writers, that is exactly wrong. If you already know exactly what you are going to write, there's not much point to writing it. On the other hand, if you simply make it a point of discipline to regularly put pen to paper (or fingers to the keyboard) and see what happens, you will often find yourself writing something you would never have thought of outside the context of the act of writing itself. If you are very lucky, you will find yourself writing something that comes as a complete and pleasant surprise to you.

Every year I ask the students in my classes how many of them have had the experience of having what they thought was a good idea and then finding, when they try to write it out, that it's not coming out so well. All the hands go up. Then I ask How many of you have had the experience of sitting down to write and having the writing turn out to me much better than what you had anticipated it would be, so much so that it fills you with surprise and happiness? Once in a great while a hand or two will go up, but not often. And that's a shame. Because the reason most students have never had that experience is that their teachers have never provided them with the opportunity to do so.

A second reason that writing fosters good thinking is that writing makes thinking hold still, which allows you to reconsider and re-evaluate your first thoughts and at least potentially find your way to second (and maybe third or fourth) thoughts. Once you have something on paper that will hold still long enough for you to consider it, opportunities arise for you to revise your writing for the better. One of my favorite articulations of the power of re-vision is from David Huddle, in his excellent essay "Let's Say You Wrote Badly This Morning":

Revision is the hope you hold out for yourself to make something beautiful tomorrow though you didn’t quite manage it today.  Revision is democracy’s literary method, the tool that allows an ordinary person to aspire to extraordinary achievement.

I especially like that he links the revision of writing—and thinking—to the idea of democracy. A well-informed, well-read, thoughtful citizenry is at the heart of the whole notion of democracy. If people do not think clearly and do not understand what they are defending (or more often, these days, attacking), then democracy itself is in trouble. Q.E.D. (Yes, I am aware that he was not using "democracy" in its overtly political sense here, but the parallel still holds.)
 

The salient point, Allen Ginsburg notwithstanding, is that first thoughts are in fact very rarely best thoughts. I believe it's critically important for teachers to encourage students to put their first thoughts into words. But that's only one step in a multi-part process that might involve any number of followup steps. One that I often have my students rehearse is to ask them, once they have written something that they think works, to write at the bottom of the page, But there's another way of looking at it, and then go ahead and try a counter-argument on for size. The ability to shift your point of view and consider lines of thought different than your own is perhaps the single most important critical thinking skill students can be encouraged to develop. So why don't we give them practice in doing that?

Another very instructive followup step that students can benefit from practicing is simply to take something they have written—an essay, a poem, a story, whatever—and set out to cut it by twenty percent. The operative thinking and writing skill here is concision. If you can say the same thing in 240 words that you were saying in 300, that's a gain in forcefulness and clarity. It doesn't matter, really, whether you hit twenty percent on the head. What is important is that at some point in the writing process you spend time weighing each sentence, each phrase, each word and asking yourself Is this necessary? This is how one can become more thoughtful about what one writes.

Of course, none of what I am advocating for here makes any sense at all if you are simply trying to get an assignment—an assignment that you did not ask for and do not care about— over with.

I read a lot of commentary by teachers now about how they are going to have to change the prompts they are giving in order to make it harder for students to cheat. Well, how about this for a prompt?

Every Tuesday and Friday I would like you to hand in a "writing sample" that you have written on any subject that interests you. It can be in any form or genre you like: a literary essay, a personal narrative, a story, one or more poems, a dramatic skit, a chapter of a novel. The only constraints are that 1) it should be your own, current work (going back and pulling old pieces of writing off the computer is not acceptable) and 2) that it should represent a minimum of 20-30 minutes of time on task. Be aware of the fact that some of your classmates will do more.

I have employed this exact prompt for more than thirty years. The writing that resulted varies wildly from student to student. I do not attempt to "grade" these pieces of writing; I simply give the students written and verbal feedback about what I saw developing on the paper. Some teachers are entirely freaked out by the prospect of having students doing all different kinds of writing all over the place. How am I supposed to evaluate it? they cry. But now we're back to writing primarily as a vehicle for assessment. One obvious response to the question is to accept the fact that not every piece of writing needs to be assessed or revised. Revision begins with selection. Once a student has five or ten pieces of writing on file it makes all the sense in the world to ask them to pick one that they feel good about and work on it some more. And that's where any feedback they might get from their peers or from the teacher may be useful and relevant. Otherwise they write, they get a grade, and it's over with. No further thinking required or expected.
 

My purpose in using an open-ended prompt of this kind is to get myself as a teacher out of the position of being the one to determine what it is important to write, how it is to be written, and whether it is worth further revision. Making those kinds of decisions in advance for students has the effect of crippling their ability to think and write on their own.

Some years ago, an educational consultant named Everett Kline came to the school where I was teaching to speak to the faculty on the subject of "authentic assessment." At that point, I had been teaching for more than 25 years. Like most teachers, I had throughout my career put in an inordinate amount of planning time into designing assessments, none of which were particularly well received by the students. What Kline said literally blew the circuits in my brain. He said, "If you want to know what students know and what they can do, why don't you ask them?"

I spent the second half of my teaching career exploring the implications of that very simple and very powerful question. The prompt I wound up with above was one of the moves that I made in that direction. (There were others.) One of the unanticipated benefits of allowing the students to write what they wanted instead of what I wanted—at least some of the time—was that these "writing samples" gave me a great deal of insight into how their minds worked individually. I got to know what students were thinking and how they were thinking in ways that would never have happened had I been a traditional teacher in a traditionally organized class. That made me a better teacher, and I believe it made them better students.

And here's my point with regard to artificial intelligence: if students are given the chance and the encouragement to write in their own voices about what really matters to them, what possible reason would they have for wanting a robot to do that work for them?  It's not about AI signalling the death of writing. It's about giving students the chance to write about things they care enough about not to cheat.




 

 

 

 

 

 

By Way of Sorrow

 

 

In the December 11 New York Times Book Review, Sarah Weinman made a series of recommendations for Best Crime Novels of 2022. One book she recommended was by Robyn Gigl, whose debut novel I was able to get from the local library.

By Way of Sorrow is a court procedural involving the killing of a white man by a black transgender woman, who claims to have done it in self-defense. The main character in the book, a defense attorney named Erin McCabe is a transgender woman as well. As is the author herself.

I grew up in an era when the existence of people whose sexual identity was different than that assigned to them at birth was not part of any public or private discourse I ever took part in or heard of. I'm sure that there must have been such people, probably many of them, but nobody in my world ever talked about that, or seemed to be aware of it. I've become more aware of the issues in recent years, mostly as a result of the efforts of LGBTQ advocacy groups, and, more recently, because of the backlash in certain parts of the political arena against those efforts. But I still, to the best of my knowledge, have never personally interacted with a transgendered person, nor have I read anything that made it clear to me what it was that I didn't know. I had no clue about what it would be like to be transgendered, or about the kinds of treatment that transgender people are likely to be subjected to by others: their families, their friends, the police, the criminal system. Until I read this book.

Erin McCabe, and her law partner Duane Swisher, agree to take on the case of Sharise Barnes partly because Erin feels an intuitive bond with Sharise based on their shared experience. But it becomes apparent early on to the two lawyers that there is arrayed against them and their client a complex and multilayered network of unscrupulous people with influence in the criminal justice system, and that those people will be willing to do whatever it takes to keep the trial from moving forward.

Let me be clear: this is a terrific book from a purely storytelling standpoint. It's clearly written, and carefully plotted. It features likeable, wholly believable characters who are subjected to a series of escalating tensions that lead to a very dramatic conclusion. And it's very difficult not to experience alarm and indignation on behalf of the protagonists as the dangers confronting them continue to mount. It's an intense reading experience for sure. But the book also seems to be intended as a kind of primer for open-minded readers into the challenges and complexities of living as a transgender person in a world which is still largely hostile to the very idea that such a person can, or should, even exist. 

I'm not going to go into detail about the way that the story unfolds. Suffice it to say that it was an amazing read and that along the way I learned a whole lot about gender politics that I never knew. That educative function is most certainly one of the author's objectives as a writer, and she carries it off without sermonizing or letting it draw attention away from the story she is telling. 

By Way of Sorrow is, on balance, one of the best books I've read in the last few years. And as it happens, Robyn Gigl has just come out with a second Erin McCabe book, Survivor's Guilt, which Sarah Weinman thinks is even better. So I'm looking forward to reading that.