The Spy: the art and ethics of attention

A few thoughts about Rachel Cusk's Parade

Towards the end of her 2024 novel, Parade, Rachel Cusk explores a mode of seeing she associates with a figure called the spy. The spy is someone who looks without being looked at, but his voyeurism does not make a fetish of what he observes. He has renounced “being and defending” himself by remaining anonymous in public life. He has no place to stand in the world. Thus, he no longer feels compelled to “cloak the world in [his] subjectivity.” The spy, she continues, “understand[s that] the discipline of concealment yielded a rare power of observation. The spy sees more clearly and objectively than others, because he has freed himself from need: the needs of the self in its construction by and participation in experience” (166).

In the novel, Cusk calls the spy “G,” but it doesn’t take much sleuthing to realize that Cusk is describing the life and art of the French filmmaker Eric Rohmer. “Eric Rohmer” was the pseudonym of a filmmaker who worked with such obsessive secrecy that not even his parents or sibling, when they died, knew that he ever made films. (About ten years ago, Rohmer’s Six contes moraux received the Criterion treatment. He’s a wonderful filmmaker; I recommend starting with Ma nuit chez Maud [1969].) “Invisibility was his conduit to self-expression,” Cusk writes of G/Rohmer. In G’s films, in Rohmer’s films, the camera doesn’t penetrate the social or physical space of the people it records, and it rarely scans them for visual pleasure. Most of the time, it is content to sit and watch and record characters played by actors who were not glamorous movie stars. In many cases, the actors were people that G/Rohmer hired off of the street. The camera watches, and it waits--for what? “he watched them lovingly, for the good and the bad in them. He brought them no drama. He forced nothing on them, extended as they were by the task of living” (168). “His style, so uninterfering,” the narrator continues,

drew attention to itself without meaning to. He rarely, for instance, showed his characters in close-up, believing that this was not how human beings saw one another. His films had no particular aesthetic. They often took place in public spaces, and his characters seemed barely to notice that they were being watched. They wore ordinary clothes and rarely looked at the camera. They were absorbed in their own lives. 156

A different auteur might reach out with a camera and try to re-make the world in his or her own image. Here is an aesthetics of conquest and domination: the camera acts as an vehicle for the imposition of a personal vision of the world or how it should be, marrying this vision “with extraordinary public impact and power.” Not so with the spy, and not so with G/Rohmer. “[G] wasn’t interested in change. He was interested in the fragments that change leaves behind behind in its storming passage towards the future” (174).

Cusk divides Parade into four sections, and each section includes a meditation on a different artist. The artists are based on real people, but in each story Cusk refers to them rather cryptically by the initial G. However, by the time she comes around to discussing the last of the four G.’s, the one based on Rohmer, the tone shifts. The fourth G. stands out as an icon or an ideal. G. intuits that the connection between art and the self is a problem in need of demolition. As Cusk or whoever the narrator is puts the matter, it is only by severing the bond between art and the public identity of the artist that G. is able to see anything true or real in the world. If one’s work is successful, then the work will inevitably be connected to the performance of a particular kind of personality or “vision.” But it is precisely this form of relation that G. finds incompatible with his understanding of reality. G is drawn to film in particular because “its unbodied mode of perception--even if it was to some extent an illusion--furnished him with a hiding place. When he was behind the camera, he believed he could not be seen” (173-4).

***

One of the dogmas of modernity is that the making of art is fundamentally disconnected from morality. Art may reveal truths about the human condition. It may show us authentic ways of living that we were previously blind to or were otherwise inaccessible to us. But the making of the art often has little to do with the character of the artist. There are lots of ways this idea gets expressed. Most often, I hear people repeat something along the lines of the following: the truly great artists all had troubled lives. It is as if their being difficult to live with were a sign of a special calling. Perhaps this has more to do with the cult of genius in our country, but I’d be surprised if it were a peculiarly American phenomenon. Of course, the same idea can be expressed from a internal perspective, too (that is, not pseudo-sociologically). The idea goes like this: the daimon of an artist requires them to hold connections to other humans more loosely than other people are required to. You never know how far your art may ask you to go, or what it may require you to do to others (abandonment, betrayal, etc.). To think otherwise is to place artificial constraints on an autonomous practice or a discipline that, in principle, should have no other rules than the ones it chooses to accept for itself.

There is a genealogy to these patterns of thinking that is much more complicated than I have space to discuss here. It involves the attempt to replace religion with art at the dawn of the twentieth century; with art and artistic practice becoming a religion unto themselves, complete with their own idiosyncratic rituals and rules and attendant pietisms and forms of devotion. Under such a regime, it is often the personal idiosyncrasy, a process, or “style” that is taken for the unique contribution of the artist, as if a particular vision or essence of self could be encoded and reproduced through the unique combination of signifiers, whether they be literary, painterly, cinematic, and so on.

I see Parade and Cusk’s earlier work in the Outline trilogy as an attempt to unsettle this dogma, and to do so from within what has to be the most self-obsessed aesthetic form in human history, the modern novel. It’s an odd selection for anyone setting about sifting through the ethics of literary authorship. It’s an especially awkward task for Cusk, the famous novelist and memoirist, who has made a small fortune and a large reputation by writing so publicly about her own life. In 2001, Faber published Cusk’s very famous memoir about becoming a mother. Nine years later, she wrote another one about marriage and divorce. Her fiction, too, is larded with autobiographical detail. The narrator of the Outline trilogy, Faye, is a writer who travels across Europe speaking at book festivals and fiction workshops. Critics often point to her novels and short stories of the last decade and a half when discussing the turn to “autofiction,” a portmanteau that designates the current taste for blending first-personal fact and fiction in novels and short stories.

One of Parade’s unnamed narrators seems to acknowledge the awkwardness as they discuss G.’s decision to leave behind fiction writing and take up film. The novel, Cusk writes, “of all the arts[,] was the most resistant to dissociation from the self. A novel was a voice, and a voice had to belong to someone. In the shared economy of language, everything had to be explained; every statement, even the most simple, was a function of personality” (167). For G./Rohmer, though, it is precisely the connection between language and voice that stands in the way of bearing witness to reality. Film, he concludes, is the natural medium for severing this connection. As a form, it is made possible by a team of actors pretending like there isn’t a camera recording them, while all the time the camera captures every ripple of emotion that passes across their faces. The camera’s invisibility is an illusion, an artifice; it’s there, it’s just that the art of film makes it such that the actors have to pretend that it’s not. What makes G.’s art unique is the decision to continue the severing of language and voice through to life itself. No one knows the true identity of G., and it is the key to the power of his art. “He has no doubt that his anonymity is what allows him to see what he sees. Because of it he has no investment in the game of life. He is a spy; his ego, is exiled, at bay. Like the spy, the difficulty is that he can’t make things happen--he just has to be sure he’s there when they do” (188).

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Are there certain modes of seeing that require the abandonment of the self of the seeing agent? In the Sovereignty of Good, the philosopher (and novelist) Iris Murdoch argued that there are. For Murdoch, the act of attention to something outside of yourself (a soaring hawk and an annoying daughter-in-law were two famous examples) requires a discipline of “unselfing,” of willfully forgetting the subject who sees but who may otherwise desire, fear, crave, resent or regard with indifference who (or what) they happen to be looking at. Drawing on the work of Simone Weil, Murdoch argues that attention is the fundamental condition of being a moral agent. To act virtuously requires us to see the world and our place in it clearly, unselfishly. Often, the just and right act, when it proceeds from a mode of pure seeing, arrives without any kind of private discourse or interior reflection on the part of the agent. The action itself speaks.

More recently than Murdoch, the philosopher Jonardon Ganeri has drawn on the “unselfing” of attention to explain our situatedness in the world as agents. “Attention precedes self in the explanation of what it is to be human,” Ganeri writes, and it is doubtful (he argues) whether there is anything defensible in the concept of the self at all. He is working within the tradition of Indian philosophy to mount a critique of post-Enlightenment ethics. In particular, he has in mind the idea of the self as “the concept of a detached author, the simple origin of willed directives, a concept that forces us to understand the mind in terms of a dichotomy between free voluntary actions and purely passive happenings.”

I’m not aware of Cusk ever explicitly alluding to Murdoch, much less Ganeri, but the concept of the self as a detached author is one that Cusk seems especially keen to demolish in her fiction. She does so through a motif that pops up throughout Parade and her other experimental novels. The motif is of a person standing outside a house or an apartment and looking in through the window and watching people who do not know they they are being watched. It’s a creepy idea, but Cusk returns to it again and again in Parade and in other works. Curiously, in Parade, it is a habit or an act that is never explicitly associated with G., but it seems to mimic the kind of looking he achieves in his films. In the fourth section of Parade, another unnamed narrator, speaking inexplicably in the first person plural, describes looking out from their apartment and watching the lives of neighbors unfold around them:

At night, when the lights are on, the scenes playing high up in the windows are framed by the emptiness, like paintings. They are paintings of people in rooms, together or alone, seen through windows or across spaces by an eye that seems larger and more omniscient than a human eye. It could be the eye of a god, or equally that of an animal or a child. The human figures have a theatrical quality: in the recurrence of their own lives they seem to exist outside time. That quality in the view from our window arises not because the people are consciously enacting themselves, but because perception itself--the pure perception that involves no interaction, no subjectivity--reveals the pathos of identity. (160)

The windows of a building are like paintings which frame the occupants in a stylized tableau of domestic routine. When the windows light up, we are able to see people absorbed in their lives, unaware of being watched. The eye who sees them is like the eye of a god or an animal, an eye who sees everything and nothing. Crucially, for Cusk, this sort of vision doesn’t come automatically from a person passing by. You don’t get “pure perception” by peering in voyeuristically, seeing your own assumptions or designs i the faces and actions of others. Nor do you get it when the people realize they are being watched and “consciously enacting themselves.” What matters is “no interaction, no subjectivity.”

In a passage in Outline, the first novel in a trilogy Cusk began in 2014, Cusk explores a similar scene, but here the characters who peer in the window cannot help but see reflected back to them their own wants and fears:

I thought often of a chapter in Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff and Cathy stare from the dark garden through the windows of the Lintons’ drawing room and watch the brightly lit family scene inside. What is fatal in that vision is its subjectivity: looking through the window the two of them see different things, Heathcliff what he fears and hates and Cathy what she desires and feels deprived of. But neither of them can see things as they really are. And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own. (75)

In the Wuthering Heights passage the narrator is recalling, Young Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw spy on their wealthy neighbors, the Linton children, by looking in from the outside, but each sees something different from the other. Heathcliff is repulsed by the sight of rich children fighting over a little dog; Cathy is apparently drawn in by the opulence of the rural gentry. Heathcliff and Cathy begin mocking the children from the outside, and the Linton’s, hearing the noise, let their guard dog loose. The dog latches onto Cathy’s leg, and while the family brings her in to have her leg treated, Heathcliff, the adopted foundling, is refused entry to the house. When Cathy returns, her behavior towards Heathcliff is mannered and distant.

For the narrator of Outline, personal disintegration is figured as an uncanny return of the self in the guise of others. It is the paranoid projection of one’s own disappointments in other people, of seeing other people as an implicit commentary on your own life. Subjectivity, as Cusk puts it in Parade, gets in the way of seeing people in the way that they really are. Contrast this with the “pure perception” of the first passage, where attention doesn’t project uncanny versions of self onto the lives of others, but finds itself absorbed by the theatricality of a performance that is no performance at all. Only by not disclosing your presence, by not engaging, and most of all, by not being seen, does the “pathos of identity” disclose itself.

There are two other window scenes in Parade that I want to discuss briefly. Both come at the very end of the novel, and both are inside paintings that the plural narrator sees on a visit to a museum. The paintings, the narrator says, were once thought to be the product of a very famous painter. Later, it was discovered that they were made by a different painter of the same school, but this time, the painter’s identity was “virtually anonymous.”

In the first painting, there is “a middle-aged woman” in a chair reading a book in a room “full of a bare light.” The windows behind her are dark, but in one of them there is a child’s face looking in at her. The child “wanted something, was waiting out there in the dark for something,” but the woman doesn’t, perhaps can’t, see him. She is too “immersed in being herself, [...] indifferent to how she was seen.” In the second, there is a different woman in the same room, but this time, the woman is leaning towards the dark window and the viewer can’t see her face. On the other side of the window is the face of the same child. “The woman was waving at the child through the glass, her hand and face almost pressed to it, the chair nearly toppling with her enthusiasm” (197).

What are we to make of these two paintings? Maybe Cusk’s descriptions are based on real artworks. Probably not. I’m inclined to think that they’re made up, but I don’t think it really matters. Cusk is giving the reader a diptych of attention: of one person so absorbed in themselves that they are no longer in a position of being able to see the needs of others, and in the other, of being so captivated in the giving and receiving of attention that they do not, that they could never see, that they are being observed. The narrator tells us that the paintings are a parable of “the rarity of love”--of a child’s gaze that is answered in a woman’s reaching out, in touch, if only through a pane of glass. But it also seems to be a parable about the limits of art. The first woman holds a book, and as long she holds it, she’ll never see the child. So it is with the giving and receiving of attention.