The Stuntman
At a certain point in his career the artist G, perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history, began to paint upside down. At first sight the paintings looked as though they had been hung the wrong way round by mistake, but then the signature emblazoned in the bottom right-hand corner clearly heralded the advent of a new reality. His wife believed that with this development he had inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition, and wondered if it might have repercussions in terms of his success, but the critical response to the upside-down paintings was more enthusiastic than ever, and G was showered with a fresh round of the awards and honours that people seemed disposed to offer him almost no matter what he did.
They lived in a region of forests some distance from the city, for despite its approval of him G was angry and hurt by the world and could not bring himself to forgive it. His early work had been brutally criticised, and though people assured him that his power to shock was the surest proof of his talent, G had not recovered from these attacks. His was the type of strength not to withstand attempts to poison and destroy him but rather to absorb them, to swallow the poison and be altered by it, so that his survival was not a story of mere resilience, but was instead a slow kind of crucifixion that eventually compelled the world to chastise itself for what it had done to him. It was because of the forests that G had found a way out of his artistic impasse, caught as he had felt himself to be between the anecdotal nature of representation and the disengagement of abstraction. He had spent a great deal of time observing the activities of the local foresters, and each time he saw a tree being felled this question of verticality had suggested itself to him. First he had painted the men and the trees in a sort of joint condition of existence, in which the trunks were interchangeable with the bodies. Then he had seen how the bodies too could be felled, severed from their own root and likewise turned on their side or cut into sections. The notion of inversion finally came to him as a means of resolving this violence and restoring the principle of wholeness, so that the world was once more intact but upside down and thus free of the constraint of reality.
When G’s wife first saw the upside-down paintings she felt as though she had been hit. The feeling of everything seeming right yet being fundamentally wrong was one she powerfully recognised: it was her condition, the condition of her sex. The paintings made her unhappy, or rather they led her to acknowledge the existence of an unhappiness that seemed always to have been inside her. G made a painting she particularly loved, of slender birch trees in sunlight, and the demented calmness and innocence of these upside-down trees seemed to suggest the possibility of madness as a kind of shelter. How had he understood this nameless female unhappiness inside her that made madness such a temptation? Unlike other artists they knew, G could not have been accused of exploitation: he didn’t suffer from blind male self-importance, and nor had he ever taken any kind of liberty that the public value of his gaze might have seemed to legitimise. He had told her that before he met her he had resorted greatly to masturbation. Was he in fact claiming this marginal perspective as his own? If so he had had to lay down his masculinity, however temporarily, to claim it. He had approached the marginal sidlingly, as it were from a sideways direction, participating in its disenfranchisements, in its mute and broken identity, with the difference that he had succeeded in giving it a voice.
The early paintings were large portraits, fluid and somewhat naive in style, of recognisable individuals from their region and from the circle of their acquaintance. They were simple and formal, as though G were making a statement about his own honesty at the very moment that he was turning the world upside down. Why were these people upside down? It was all one could ask, yet the answer seemed so obvious, it felt as though any child could answer it, and so the paintings succeeded in illuminating a knowledge that the person looking at them already possessed. G began to paint large, intricate landscapes in which nature seemed to be in its heyday, seemed to speak of its power of recovery from human violence, its vigil through successive dawns to re-emerge perennially into the light. It basked in a wordless moral plenitude, innocent and unconscious of the complete inversion it had undergone, and it was this quality of innocence, or ignorance, that succeeded in entirely detaching the representational value of the painting from what it appeared to represent.
The question of whether G was actually painting an inverted world, or had simply turned the paintings on their heads and signed them when they were finished, was subject to a curious silence. The first scenario represented a formidable technical challenge; the second was more of an absurdist joke that could be passed off in a matter of minutes. Yet he was never publicly interrogated about it, and the question went unmentioned in the many critical writings about this radical development in his work. Sometimes people asked G’s wife about it in private, as though in her presence they were finally safe to risk a display of stupidity. In such moments she felt realised in her role as a repository for weakness. She didn’t resent it, because one learned so much more this way, but it summed something up for her, and not just about art, that so enormous a confusion around the truth could remain veiled in tacit muteness. She guessed this was how everything that was noble was eventually destroyed. G would have agreed with her wholeheartedly, and in fact she noticed that he began to speak openly about his technique of his own accord, explaining the difficulties of inverted painting that could be resolved only through the use of photographs. Later he rejected the photographic medium and the paintings became even larger and more dreamlike and abstract. The question of what a human being actually was had never seemed so unanswerable in any case. He often painted a man cowering alone in bed, the sullied oceanic blankness of the sheets, with the little tormented man somewhere at the top of the frame.
G believed that women could not be artists. As far as G’s wife was concerned this was what most people believed, but it was unfortunate that he should be the one to say it out loud. She wondered whether it was her own indefatigable loyalty to him, her continual presence by his side, that had brought him to this view. Without her, he might still be an artist but he would not really be a man. He would lack a home and children, would lack the conditions for the obliviousness of creating, or rather would quickly be destroyed by that obliviousness. So she thought that what he was really saying was that women could not be artists if men were going to be artists. Once, she was in his studio for the visit of a female novelist, who was struck as though by lightning by the upside-down paintings, much as G’s wife had been herself. I want to write upside down, the woman exclaimed, with considerable emotion. No doubt G found this a preposterous thing to say, but G’s wife was quietly satisfied, because she herself felt that this reality G had so brilliantly elucidated, identical to its companion reality in every particular but for the complete inversion of its moral force, was the closest thing she knew to the mystery and tragedy of her own sex. There had been a plaintive note – of injustice, perhaps – in the novelist’s tone, as though she had just realised something had been appropriated from her. G was not the first man to have described women better than women seemed able to describe themselves.
* * *
The lady had asked us to leave, for suddenly she wanted her apartment back. There could be no delay in satisfying this desire – though we had nowhere else to go, we must be gone straight away. We had lived there for more than a year: the walls of the apartment had been our safety in the move to this foreign city. We felt sheltered there, high up on the top floor where we could open the windows and look down at the street without being seen ourselves. After we left, the lady would sometimes call us out of the blue, to find out how we were getting on. She made sure to sound casual and friendly, but the calls themselves spoke of guilt.
There had been a mirror in that apartment, ornate and gilded, that was so large it reflected the looker not as the centre of the image but as part of a greater scene. To look in it was to be seen in proportion to other things. The loss of the mirror was like the loss of a compass or navigation point. It was surprising how deeply it had bestowed a feeling of orientation. Sometimes a minor change can bring down a major structure, and this was the case with the lady’s apartment. After we left, a number of things happened whose roots, when you unearthed them, could usually be found there. It was reported to us that the lady had not remained long in her apartment after all. It had disappointed her in some way, so she had gone back to where she had been living before and now it stood empty. She had cultivated an image, perhaps, of her old life in the apartment that had drawn her away from the new life she had established elsewhere. But the apartment, when she got there, did not contain the old life. The old life had become the new life that she was already living.
For several weeks we stayed in one place after another, never unpacking our suitcases. We were natives neither of the city, nor of the country itself, nor of its language: the lady’s apartment had been like a boat, and now we were cast into the sea. It had been full of her possessions, and I had derived a deep security from living among her things, which were of a kind I would not have chosen myself. It was not only the liberation from my own tastes and preferences that had comforted me, but also the immersion in the sensibility of another. I did not, in fact, need to ask myself why it felt so pleasant to live in a world created by someone else. Yet that same surrender, in the places that followed, was increasingly disturbing. We spent a lengthy period in a small blank apartment where the occupant of the rooms overhead paced the floors rapidly and ceaselessly every hour of every night, and I was drawn into the inquietude of this unseen stranger, which came to seem like my own inquietude – suppressed for the past year – awakening. The only mirror was a rectangle above the bathroom sink, and the front door was fitted with a succession of heavy steel locks, as though the concept of individuality had all at once become more limited and more threatened.
Nearby there was a park where a great cherry tree grew. Its giant boughs were so ancient and so heavy that they rested all around it on the ground. In the sudden sunshine of the premature spring the tree had blossomed and given forth a startling white foam of flowers like the breaking of an enormous wave. The blossoms made a bridal canopy around the trunk that undulated and rippled in the breezes. This canopy was so large that it formed a sort of shelter, like a tent around the huge gnarled trunk. I thought often of the home we had left, our own home, left of our own volition.
We moved to another temporary apartment and then another. We stayed for a few nights in a place with a broken boiler, where we could not remove our coats. Rain and freezing sleet hurled themselves from the sky, a reprise of winter. I thought of the cherry tree in the park that had put out its blossom so early. In the streets people were sleeping huddled in doorways or under bridges and walkways, or sometimes in tents they had pitched on the pavements. Everyone walked past them, these reproaches to subjectivity, with apparent indifference. We ourselves, outsiders, in a limbo of our own making, perhaps felt the reproach differently. At home people also slept in doorways: here it took us longer to forget them.
We moved from place to place until spring returned for good and the trees regained their foliage and the streets became lively again. Walking through the city in the fierce fresh sunlight, the element of freedom in our rootlessness could intermittently be felt. We had finally found somewhere to live, an apartment of our own, which would be available in a few weeks. With this harbour in sight, our true feelings – which bore now the toll of experience – became more evident. A certain bloom – an innocence, or perhaps just an ignorance – had been stripped from us. We had envisioned a life here in this city and then we had gone about trying to make the vision real, and in that process the role of imagination appeared especially ambiguous, appeared to have exposed something we hadn’t known about our relationship to reality itself. This other death-face of imagination flashed before us now and then, in the periods when one thing could not be linked to another and a lack of sequence or logic was apparent in the enactment of our plans.
One morning, walking along a quiet sunny street where people sat at pavement tables drinking coffee, I was attacked by a stranger who hit me forcibly in the head. My assailant was a woman, deranged by madness or addiction, and this fact of her gender caused difficulties both in the recounting of the event afterward and in my own response to it. I had not noticed her approach or prepared myself for the blow, which left me bleeding on my hands and knees in the road with no understanding of what had happened. A crowd instantly gathered: people rose from their tables, shouting and gesticulating. In the pandemonium the woman walked away. The onlookers were pointing at her: she had stopped on the street corner and turned around, like an artist stepping back to admire her creation. Then she shook her fist in the air and she vanished.
It occurred to me in the time that followed that I had been murdered and yet had nonetheless remained alive, and I found that I could associate this death-in-life with other events and experiences, most of which were consequences in one way or another of my biological femininity. Those female experiences, I now saw, had usually been attributed to an alternate or double self whose role it was to absorb and confine them so that they played no part in the ongoing story of life. Like a kind of stuntman, this alternate self took the actual risks in the manufacture of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity. Despite having no name or identity of her own, the stuntman was what created both the possibilities and the artificiality of character. But the violence and the unexpectedness of the incident in the street had caught my stuntman unawares.
Even after we had moved into our apartment I was unable to forget or recover from what had happened, and the pure sorrow I felt seemed to stem from the consciousness of a larger defeat to which this incident had contributed the decisive stroke. The blow itself, which both belonged to memory and stood outside it, could not be digested: it stuck as though in the throat, impossible either to swallow or to spit out. Those few seconds repeated themselves over and over before my mind’s eye, like something trapped and unable to find an exit, and the question of who my assassin was, of why she had attacked me and what it was she had seen in me that she wanted to break, gradually gave way to the knowledge that what I was experiencing was the defeat of representation by violence.
When the lady next called, I took a perverse kind of pleasure in telling her my news. How awful! she shrieked. I noticed she ended the call more quickly than usual. I guessed we wouldn’t hear from her again.
* * *
G decided to paint his wife in something approximating the classical manner, as a nude. But the paintings were chaotic and dark: far from freeing him from subjectivity, inversion seemed merely to disclose an unpleasantness inside himself, a crystallised hatred that both objectified his wife and obliterated her. She couldn’t be seen, or at least not by him: something brutal in their contract, the contract of marriage, surged forth and shattered the perceptual plane. It was not unusual for violence to spill out of the upside-down paintings, but it was a violence that he already knew he contained: he had inherited it, could answer it, was occasionally its victim; what he did not desire was to become it.
G and his wife went to visit G’s father, who lived in a stuffy little room in a retirement home out in flat countryside. It was difficult to find reasons to visit him, since the home was not near or on the way to anywhere that G and his wife ever wanted to go. Yet at one time his domination of G had been such that it was indistinguishable from fate. There had been a period of years in which G and the father had not spoken, an estrangement for which G’s father blamed him entirely, while also appearing to be perfectly content with it. His lack of self-reproach was more tormenting to G than almost anything else. There were stories of people who were redeemed by the approach of death and the light it shed on the truth. G had believed the father could never die because it was impossible he would be redeemed in this way. Then one day he had summoned G to the stuffy room out in the flat countryside, and so it seemed that after all he would die. G was privately frightened of going. He believed the father might kill him, annihilate him as he had once created him. Then G’s wife had said that she would come. It was surprising to discover this insurance policy of marital love, which he had never thought to count on. Now she always accompanied him on these visits.
The father was standing red-faced at his window, which looked out on the small round lawn and the driveway and the winding access road that came across the flat fields in front of the building. In the centre of the round lawn was a bare weeping willow. When the father saw them arrive he moved away from the window, where the winter sun made hard geometric shapes on the glass. His furious red face had seemed trapped behind the shapes but now it was gone. The empty glass glittered. Later, during their visit, he returned several times to that window to look out. It seemed to be a territorial instinct that was also a compulsion of memory, as though he were being forced to carry the burden of memory to the window to offer it up.
The room was on the second floor. Its thick beige carpet gave off a chemical smell. There was also the slightly rancid smell of old age. Through the window the day was windless and still, and at the centre of the motionless scene the bare willow, now seen from above, stood in the pool of its own fallen leaves. The hard winter light filled the hot room. The father sat in a padded leather chair facing the window. There was a television set in the corner but the chair had been moved away from it. The father did not watch television. Next to the chair was a varnished wooden side-table with a folded newspaper lying on it. The father’s shrunken body was clad in a grey shirt tucked into belted corduroy trousers. The clothes hung from him, but there was still a toughness to his flesh. He wore an expression of astonishment that never altered. He had a history of participation in certain evils of which G knew only part, and against G he had committed many indelible acts of speech that remained uncorroded in G’s recollection. They never changed or faded – it was the father who changed, as time ate away at him. G’s growing inclination to forgive the father for the things he had said was also an inclination to forgive him for the things he had done, even though the first lay in the terrain of personal memory and the second in that of public record. But G had not succeeded in disentangling them, and together they filled him with such a darkness that his instinct was to rip them out of himself and fling them away without further examination.
G’s wife moved around quietly at the other end of the room, preparing coffee in the small kitchenette. It was darker there and her form glimmered strangely among the slashing diagonals of light that reached it from the window. The winter sun was low and the petrifying white lines laid themselves over the cupboards and walls so that she was rayed like a zebra where she stood. The same distance that had beset G in the nude paintings was suddenly present here, in this oppressive room. His wife’s freedom, so partial and malformed, had a crippling effect on him. She was only a few feet away. He could neither use her nor dispense with her, could not, because of her, be entirely free himself. It was her undeveloped equality with him that was crippling. She was not the pure object of his desire, nor was she his rival and equal in power. Instead she was his companion: she situated herself there, only a few feet away, in the terrain of weaknesses, of need, of plain daily requirements. Yet she herself could be desired – the father, for instance, was beadily watching her body move through the caressing bands of dark and light. Why did she not make proper use of her power, one way or the other? When G tried to see her, he simply saw his effect on her, saw in other words himself. Another man looking at her would see something different – this, he realised, was what he was unable to tolerate. It was unbearable that she could take his power of sight away from him and still be seen by everyone else. When he looked at her what he saw was his sexual failure as an animal, a failure brought about by the interference of society, of civilisation itself, in the courage and capacity of their own bodies. Perhaps men had always painted nudes in the same way as they committed violence – to prove that their courage had not been damaged by morality and need.
The father was talking in the monotone he had adopted in old age, the affectless flat tone of loneliness. G’s wife would ask him the simplest question and the answer could last for fifteen minutes, the voice neither rising nor falling but moving steadily over the surface of things and levelling them, like a tank steadily reducing a field of action to flatness and dust. The regional accent of his youth that had lain dormant through all the years of his adult vigour had crept back into his voice. G heard in that accent the problem of history itself, as it insidiously bequeathed its dark inheritance to each unsuspecting new generation. G’s wife had returned with the coffee and placed it on the low table in front of them. She sat down beside G on the small hard sofa. With her malformed freedom was she free also of history and of responsibility for the past? What had she herself inherited that bound her to the ongoing story of time? The father was looking at them, sitting there side by side. Together on the sofa, G and his wife now composed an image that told its own story, that could easily be read, unlike the image of minutes earlier, that of G’s wife striped like a wild beast among the kitchen cupboards. Side by side on the sofa the question of her insufficient self-realisation – her lack of effort, as it were – was now out in plain sight, as was his own crippled courage. These were the fundaments of his discovery of inversion, because reality would always be better than the attempt to represent it, and the power of truth, which lay entirely in the act of perception, could stand free of that attempt. A feeling of immense relief passed through him. Tomorrow, when they were home again, he would start a new painting.
* * *
After I was hit, I desired for several weeks to hit in my turn. It was as if the violence were an actual object that had been transferred to me and that I needed to pass on. What I passed on would be more or less exactly what I had received – a blow to an unsuspecting stranger in the street. It would not, it seemed, have been altered in any way by its passage through my self. The only difference was that I had no feeling for – no interest in – the consequences of this action. I remembered the way my assassin had turned around, once she was at a safe distance, to look at what she had done.
We went away for a weekend to another city, to see an exhibition of works by the female sculptor G. The exhibition occupied the entire top floor of a grand museum, accessed by a broad walkway that circled a vast central atrium. Light cascaded from the glass ceiling down to the marble floor far below. Beyond the open doors of the entrance, where the attendant sat checking tickets, one of G’s characteristic giant cloth forms could be seen hanging in space, suspended from the ceiling – a human form without identity, without face or features. It was genderless, this floating being, returned to a primary innocence that was also tragic, as though in this dream-state of suspension we might find ourselves washed clean of the violence of gender, absolved of its misdemeanours and injustices, its diabolical driving of the story of life. It seemed to lie within the power of G’s femininity, to unsex the human form.
A sickness had taken possession of me since the attack, of body but also of mind. The boundary of possibility had been moved, and the world was now a different place. Its properties had been inverted: the self and its preoccupations were shrunken and impotent, and the exterior plane with its prospects of imminent danger and disorder greatly enlarged. I watched people move blithely through their days, unconscious of what could at any moment befall them. It was from the impulse to wake them from this trance, perhaps, that my desire to hit was being generated. For the first time in years, I thought about the violence of childbirth, when I had passed as if through a mirror into an inchoate, animal region, a place with no words. A part of myself, I saw, had been abandoned there, the part played by the stuntman. But now my stuntman had stepped out of the shadows. If the body was an object, could be treated as an object, the stuntman attained a new authority. It was she, not I, who now walked around in the guise of myself.
Yes, of course, I had thought when I awoke after a smashed interval to find myself lying in the street in blinding pain with no knowledge of how I had got there. Automatically I had tried to understand what had happened, where I was, as when one wakes in darkness in a strange room – as though the world, when unobserved, turns itself upside down and it is the task of human consciousness to right it. This awful effort, this responsibility to locate oneself in space and time and apply logic to one’s situation, was somehow immensely pitiable. A crowd of people had gathered and in the moments before they began to react, they seemed simply to be looking at me as they might look at a picture in a museum. They were waiting for my reaction: they needed it, this representation, to be able to act themselves. Their instinct was to disown the violence or to pretend they hadn’t seen it. It was up to me to place it in reality. I thought that I had perhaps been hit by a car, or that some heavy object had fallen on me from the buildings above, but the street was a pedestrian street and the paving stones were empty and clean. Then I remembered the woman I had glimpsed, shortly before turning to cross over to the other side. She had been standing ahead of me along the pavement beside some temporary railings that blocked the way forward. I had briefly registered her image and then instinctively turned away, out of politeness in order not to encroach on her, and remembering this I thought yes, of course.
Did I believe that being hit by a woman was my fault in a way 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, just as it was my duty to get off my hands and knees and stand up. 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. This was the domain of the stuntman, this attack on me that had originated within myself, but now the stuntman seemed to have taken an actual human form and been externalised. In the exhibition I found different reflections of this notion, there in the vague and exalted light of those lofty silent rooms, which opened one upon another, so that one felt drawn deeper and deeper into G’s secret being, where the making of art bore a relationship at once childlike and savage to the living of life. Here, sanity and insanity were not opposites but rather were the two faces of animate matter, the point at which the existence of consciousness can get no further in breaking down the existence of substance, of the body. Art, rooted in insanity, transforms itself through process into sanity: it is matter, the body, that is insane.
Copyright © 2024 by Rachel Cusk
