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Authors: Rachel Cusk
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BOOK: Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
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At the counter the women are absorbed in their task. They haven’t realised, perhaps, that we are here. We could leave and they would never know that we had come. My friend goes to the counter. Excuse me, she says, and all three of them look up.
My great-uncle and -aunt were husband and wife for more than seventy years, and to talk to them was to walk the razor’s edge of marriage, where self meets other. Do you like music, uncle? Oh yes I’m very fond of music, but
she
can’t tell the difference between Beethoven and ‘Jingle Bells’. Aunt, what are your summer plans? I’d like to go to Spain, but of course
he
won’t go there, he says he can’t stand the people.
she
can’t tell the difference between Beethoven and ‘Jingle Bells’. Aunt, what are your summer plans? I’d like to go to Spain, but of course
he
won’t go there, he says he can’t stand the people.
As a child I liked to visit their house, where my great-uncle’s golf clubs stood in a leather stand in the hall and my aunt’s knitting machine, like a vast steel spider in its trap of yarns, could be glimpsed through the spare-room door. Unlike ours, their Christmas-tree decorations were the edible kind: they would give us one each when we left, taking the little foil-wrapped chocolate shapes down from the branches. Their sitting room smelled of Pledge and of the long, silken-haired lapdogs they kept, and under the window was a tan-coloured piano whose lid was always closed. My uncle often talked of how he used to play, but one day I asked him to and stood beside him in acute embarrassment while his large old hands moved meaninglessly around the keys. How was it possible to forget to play the piano? It was alarming to me, at eight or ten, to learn that
competence could be lost as well as gained, that life was not merely a series of acquisitions and enlargements, of linear evolutions. Apparently it was possible to go backwards: blankness and ignorance were things to which one could be returned at any time.
competence could be lost as well as gained, that life was not merely a series of acquisitions and enlargements, of linear evolutions. Apparently it was possible to go backwards: blankness and ignorance were things to which one could be returned at any time.
He
never bothered to keep it up, my aunt said.
never bothered to keep it up, my aunt said.
She
never liked it when I played, my uncle said.
never liked it when I played, my uncle said.
To each other they were He and She, the primary object, the thing that was not I. They had met and married at nineteen, had children together, lived together through war and peace. As they grew older they became ever more concrete to one another, while their own selves grew increasingly formless; after seventy years of marriage they were imprisoned in one another like water imprisoned in its courses of sculpted rock. Often they would neglect to mention themselves at all, as though they had become less real to themselves, were vague spaces of pure inference, like shadows.
Are you enjoying the garden in this lovely weather, uncle?
She
says that at our age we ought to be living in town because of the services.
says that at our age we ought to be living in town because of the services.
Once, perhaps, their differences had invigorated them, but as time passed they seemed to find something more troubling in them, something whose deadliness became ever more apparent as they themselves neared death. It was as though, in old age, they were coming to the realisation that because of one another they had not lived. Then, one day, my uncle did die, and for a few weeks my aunt was as though lit up by a great flash of lightning. She blazed with wild, unrefined life, threatened to alter the will that represented her first experience of financial independence, played one family member off against another, bristled with new opinions and a new intransigence that could, earlier in her life, have become authority
but now was a tragicomic parody of it. She uttered heresies on the subjects of marriage and motherhood that had the gunpowder smell of personal truths, argued with and disinherited her children, and then, all at once, like the sea after a storm, retracted into a profound passivity. She lay in bed, beside a small framed photograph of my uncle taken in earlier years. ‘That’s him’ was all she’d say, to those who visited and who, abruptly, she no longer appeared to recognise. She was moved to a nursing home, and in the beige hush of her featureless room lay day in and day out with the photograph in her hand, unspeaking and unmoving, until she herself was no more.
but now was a tragicomic parody of it. She uttered heresies on the subjects of marriage and motherhood that had the gunpowder smell of personal truths, argued with and disinherited her children, and then, all at once, like the sea after a storm, retracted into a profound passivity. She lay in bed, beside a small framed photograph of my uncle taken in earlier years. ‘That’s him’ was all she’d say, to those who visited and who, abruptly, she no longer appeared to recognise. She was moved to a nursing home, and in the beige hush of her featureless room lay day in and day out with the photograph in her hand, unspeaking and unmoving, until she herself was no more.
I have entered a phase of resistance, of reaction. The sight of families makes me irritable. In the park they pass me on bicycles, mother and father and children, all clad in safety helmets and luminescent strips and rucksacks containing emergency supplies. They make manifest their own fear: their obsession with their safety is evident. Of what, precisely, are they afraid? They call out orders and directions to one another, as though the rest of us were uncomprehending natives.
I blame Christianity – as far as I can see, that’s where the trouble started. The holy family, that pious unit that sucked the world’s attention dry while chastising it for its selfishness, that drew forth its violence and then in an orgy of self-glorification consigned it to eternal shame, that sentenced civilisation to two millennia of institutionalised dishonesty; compared with the households of Argos and Thebes, that family has a lot to answer for. In the park I view them through narrowed eyes, these well-organised heirs of Christian
piety. They seem to me to have taken all the fun out of life: spoilsports! What happened to passionate conflict and reunion, the kinetic of man and woman that drives the life blood around the body? These men and women now wear protective helmets to pass through a public park. From a bench I ruminate on it darkly. The day feeble Joseph agreed to marry pregnant Mary the old passionate template was destroyed. That was an act of fundamental dishonesty all round: the new template of marriage – a lie! The family was reinvented, a cult of sentimentality and surfaces; became an image, bent on veiling reality – the stable in all its faux-humility, the angels and the oxen, the manger to which kings come on bended knee, the ‘parents’ gathered adoringly round the baby – an image of child-worship, of sainted unambivalent motherhood, of gutless masculinity and fatherly impotence. And it still comes through the twenty-first-century letterbox at Christmastime; I remind myself not to send any cards this year.
piety. They seem to me to have taken all the fun out of life: spoilsports! What happened to passionate conflict and reunion, the kinetic of man and woman that drives the life blood around the body? These men and women now wear protective helmets to pass through a public park. From a bench I ruminate on it darkly. The day feeble Joseph agreed to marry pregnant Mary the old passionate template was destroyed. That was an act of fundamental dishonesty all round: the new template of marriage – a lie! The family was reinvented, a cult of sentimentality and surfaces; became an image, bent on veiling reality – the stable in all its faux-humility, the angels and the oxen, the manger to which kings come on bended knee, the ‘parents’ gathered adoringly round the baby – an image of child-worship, of sainted unambivalent motherhood, of gutless masculinity and fatherly impotence. And it still comes through the twenty-first-century letterbox at Christmastime; I remind myself not to send any cards this year.
These days, of course, the ancient Greeks are back in fashion: we find their honesty, their emotional violence, their flouting of taboos therapeutic and refreshing. We sit in exquisitely neutral consulting rooms, discuss our Electra complex; but at the end of it all we go home to the manger and the holy child, to the roles and relationships that constitute our deepest sense of family reality, though they themselves are not real. Reality is our visceral knowledge and desires: the image exists to control them, and out of them creates a strange half-reality of its own. And I too was once in uneasy thrall to that image, directed by it as by a puppeteer unseen in the darkness of the wings. Its propriety and its safety chastised me, consigned me to eternal shame; yet it seemed the only thing it had to teach – like any image – was to be more like itself.
So now I find that the sight of those cycling families calls for the intellectual equivalent of a stiff drink, and I procure it in the form of the ancient dramas. There are no devoted mothers here, no perfect children, no protective dutiful fathers, no public morality. There is only emotion, and the attempt to tame it, to shape it into a force for good. The question of what constitutes authority, in the tempestuous Greek world of feeling and psychological fate, with its mingling of mortality and divinity, is eternal and unresolved. It is a question with which I am preoccupied too: what will authority be, where will it come from, in my post-familial household?
There’s a moment in Sophocles’s play
Antigone
when something new is born, or rather, when one thing becomes two; when one kind of authority is no longer enough and must produce a second, just as Christianity would itself propose two authorities, the authority of the creator – God – and the authority – Jesus – of self-sacrifice. The play is set in Thebes, in the immediate wake of the Oedipal drama. King Oedipus has blinded himself and been expelled to wander the catacombs of Athens as a beggar. His wife Jocasta, having learned that she was also his mother, has killed herself. His two sons, Eteocles and Polylectes, have murdered one another in their failed attempt to share power. Creon is Jocasta’s brother: Oedipus’s sons being dead, the burden of leadership has passed to him.
Antigone
when something new is born, or rather, when one thing becomes two; when one kind of authority is no longer enough and must produce a second, just as Christianity would itself propose two authorities, the authority of the creator – God – and the authority – Jesus – of self-sacrifice. The play is set in Thebes, in the immediate wake of the Oedipal drama. King Oedipus has blinded himself and been expelled to wander the catacombs of Athens as a beggar. His wife Jocasta, having learned that she was also his mother, has killed herself. His two sons, Eteocles and Polylectes, have murdered one another in their failed attempt to share power. Creon is Jocasta’s brother: Oedipus’s sons being dead, the burden of leadership has passed to him.
I feel a certain sympathy for Oedipus. His story expresses what to me seems the central human tragedy, the fact that we lack knowledge of the very things that drive us to our fate. We do not fully know what it is that we do, and why. Oedipus did not know
that his wife was also his mother. He did not know that the rude stranger he killed at the crossroads was his father. Yet he was punished for these acts as though they had been conscious. There were people – Oedipus’s adoptive parents, for instance – who did know something of his origins but did not disclose it. It is a kind of authority, this hidden knowledge. Sometimes, when my children have done something wrong, I pretend that I don’t know it; I wait to see whether they will find their own path to contrition, their own way to make amends. But what if they don’t? I have to tell them that I know, that I saw, and in doing so somehow the truth passes from me to them. My authority is no longer truthful; the truth becomes the truth of their own acts.
that his wife was also his mother. He did not know that the rude stranger he killed at the crossroads was his father. Yet he was punished for these acts as though they had been conscious. There were people – Oedipus’s adoptive parents, for instance – who did know something of his origins but did not disclose it. It is a kind of authority, this hidden knowledge. Sometimes, when my children have done something wrong, I pretend that I don’t know it; I wait to see whether they will find their own path to contrition, their own way to make amends. But what if they don’t? I have to tell them that I know, that I saw, and in doing so somehow the truth passes from me to them. My authority is no longer truthful; the truth becomes the truth of their own acts.
In
Oedipus Rex
every kind of authority is damaged by precisely this process. Leadership and masculinity, the concept of family, marriage itself: all has become a perversion, the sibling bond turned murderous, motherhood mutated into self-destruction. The world Creon has inherited is a post-authority, post-familial world: it is aftermath, and Creon has the job of governing it. But how do you make people obey you, respect you, believe in you and in the new reality you represent? Creon’s idea is that you give commands and then don’t turn back on them, no matter what – a strategy the modern parent, presiding over chaos and unrule, occasionally adopts, only to find themselves insisting on a course of action long after its necessity and even its rationality have passed. This is more or less Creon’s fate. The body of Polylectes, Oedipus’s son, is still lying where it fell at the city limits. Creon decides he needs to send out a strong message of disapproval of the Oedipal household, in order to mark his separation from it. He proclaims that Polylectes will not be buried, but instead must lie there to rot, picked at by
ravens and wild animals. No one is allowed to touch the body. The punishment for doing so will be death.
Oedipus Rex
every kind of authority is damaged by precisely this process. Leadership and masculinity, the concept of family, marriage itself: all has become a perversion, the sibling bond turned murderous, motherhood mutated into self-destruction. The world Creon has inherited is a post-authority, post-familial world: it is aftermath, and Creon has the job of governing it. But how do you make people obey you, respect you, believe in you and in the new reality you represent? Creon’s idea is that you give commands and then don’t turn back on them, no matter what – a strategy the modern parent, presiding over chaos and unrule, occasionally adopts, only to find themselves insisting on a course of action long after its necessity and even its rationality have passed. This is more or less Creon’s fate. The body of Polylectes, Oedipus’s son, is still lying where it fell at the city limits. Creon decides he needs to send out a strong message of disapproval of the Oedipal household, in order to mark his separation from it. He proclaims that Polylectes will not be buried, but instead must lie there to rot, picked at by
ravens and wild animals. No one is allowed to touch the body. The punishment for doing so will be death.
Antigone is Polylectes’s sister, daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta. She inhabits an aftermath of her own: hers has been the experience of intimate loss. Her family has been atomised; questions of identity, of moral choice, that might once have been family matters have devolved to her. She has been awoken and forced into active being. She has become herself, yet this self has been contaminated by the drama of her parents. Therefore she is only as good as what she does, as what she chooses to do. And what she chooses to do is bury Polylectes, because having thought about Creon’s edict she can find no justice or logic in it. She challenges his authority with an emotional authority of her own that has stronger links with justice, with truth. Creon asks, astonished, whether she realises the punishment for her act will be death. Isn’t she afraid to die? No, she replies, she isn’t afraid of death. What she’s afraid of is neglecting to do something that she knows to be right. Doesn’t she realise she’s breaking the law? he says. It was only you who made that law, she replies. Why should I obey it?
‘Now she would be the man, not I, if she defeated me and did not pay for it,’ Creon says to himself. ‘Though she [is] my niece, or closer still than all [my] family, she shall not escape the direst penalty.’ And so Creon manoeuvres himself into a position where his authority will directly attack and destroy what he himself loves and values the most, in order to nourish and sustain itself. He summons Teiresias the seer for reassurance. Creon believes Teiresias to be wise, prizes his advice, as one prizes the advice of certain friends until they say what you don’t want to hear. And Teiresias, indeed, gives him the darkest warnings: ‘Once more you tread the razor’s
edge,’ he says. What he means is that Creon’s authority is recreating the very perversity from which it was born. It has become the form that imprisons truth and must be broken. Creon falls out with Teiresias and insults him in every possible way, but afterwards he is more honest with himself. This, after all, is aftermath, the second harvest: life with knowledge of what has gone before. He admits that he is frightened. He admits that what frightens him most is the idea that he will have to sacrifice himself in the name of authority, that true responsibility is an act of self-destruction.
edge,’ he says. What he means is that Creon’s authority is recreating the very perversity from which it was born. It has become the form that imprisons truth and must be broken. Creon falls out with Teiresias and insults him in every possible way, but afterwards he is more honest with himself. This, after all, is aftermath, the second harvest: life with knowledge of what has gone before. He admits that he is frightened. He admits that what frightens him most is the idea that he will have to sacrifice himself in the name of authority, that true responsibility is an act of self-destruction.
‘To yield is very hard,’ he says. ‘But to resist and meet disaster, that is harder still.’
In the school holidays I take my children horse riding in Devon. Their desire to ride horses is so consistent it almost seems impersonal. It seems to be something I can bank on.
I rent somewhere to stay near a riding school where they will ride every day. I drive west, through unfamiliar hills. I am shaking with nerves; in fact, I can’t remember what it feels like to be at ease. This ceaseless effort to manufacture normality is a kind of forger’s art, so laborious compared with the facility that created the original. It is a fine evening and the sun slants long and golden from the horizon. For me these voyages are like the first outings of the Vikings into the mystery of the ocean, by turns terrifying and thrilling: I have no idea what will happen, what we will find. It is the idea that we won’t find anything at all that terrifies me. Yet what exactly we are looking for I don’t know.
At a service station we stop, and stand in the car park drinking
hot chocolate with the sharp western sunset in our eyes. The place we are going is a picturesque country town near Dartmoor: everyone seems to agree it’s lovely there, though I’m not sure anyone I spoke to had actually been. Like tales of America, these were the rumours that drew us from the safety of home. But I feel buoyed up all the same, by the obliging beauty of the landscape and by the feeling – so powerful and so fleeting, so hard to understand or defend – that we have been liberated from the strictures of some authority and are free. I don’t identify this authority as my husband: the authority is marriage itself, and in these moments of liberty I feel him to be just as browbeaten by it as me, feel, almost, that I could conscript him into my own escape and reencounter him there, in non-marriage, both of us free.
hot chocolate with the sharp western sunset in our eyes. The place we are going is a picturesque country town near Dartmoor: everyone seems to agree it’s lovely there, though I’m not sure anyone I spoke to had actually been. Like tales of America, these were the rumours that drew us from the safety of home. But I feel buoyed up all the same, by the obliging beauty of the landscape and by the feeling – so powerful and so fleeting, so hard to understand or defend – that we have been liberated from the strictures of some authority and are free. I don’t identify this authority as my husband: the authority is marriage itself, and in these moments of liberty I feel him to be just as browbeaten by it as me, feel, almost, that I could conscript him into my own escape and reencounter him there, in non-marriage, both of us free.
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