# Rachel Cusk Reads “The Stuntman”  ## About - Author: The New Yorker: The Writer's Voice - New Fiction from The New Yorker - Title: Rachel Cusk Reads “The Stuntman” - Tags: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/abc3db30-f53f-42c0-8994-b69300cc9eae ## Highlights > Episode AI notes 1. Rachel Cusk reads her story The Stuntman where she describes a room with a window on the second floor of a building and a tough father sitting in a chair facing away from the TV. 2. Dee's father is jealous of her power to manipulate people's perception of her appearance, and he is vexed and disturbed by the fact that others can see her despite his inability to do so. 3. The speaker reflects on the impact of perception, repetition without permanence, and the eternal recurrence of violence, which can inspire creativity and mark the advent of a new reality that challenges societal norms. 4. Madison Becker chose to declare her femininity and its themes in her art, instead of trying to adopt male objectivity to pass as an honorary man, but she experiences the consequences and is not entirely sure of what it entails. 5. The speaker reflects on the transformative experience of being a mother, comparing it to being a soldier, and expresses the desire to live in the present moment rather than relying on memories. 6. The speaker examines the role of art in allowing individuals to have a voice over society, the objectification of women in art, and the importance of not being silenced by not understanding others. 7. The importance of understanding others in society and the value of not being silenced by examining their attempts in expressing themselves. ([View Highlight](https://share.snipd.com/episode-takeaways/02469396-fa83-4727-bf6d-09d4635dfc76)) --- > Descriptive scene of a room with a window and a bare willow tree Transcript: Speaker 1 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 odor. 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 a pool of its own fallen leaves. The hard winter light filled the hot room. ([Time 0:20:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ef6ad273-0bf3-418a-b8a1-113a42b7c26c)) --- > Description of a Father's Appearance Transcript: Speaker 1 The father sat in a padded leather chair facing the window. There was a television set in the corner of the room but the chair had been moved away from it. The father did not watch television. Next to the chair was a farnished wooden side table with a folded newspaper lying on it. The father's shrunken body was clad in a grey shirt tucked into belted corduro trousers. The clothes hung from him but there was still a toughness to his flesh. He wore an expression of astonishment that never altered. ([Time 0:20:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c988fc45-9b7d-4dbb-a323-7c4758686d2b)) --- > The father's unbearable realization about his daughter's power Transcript: Speaker 1 The father, for instance, was beadily watching her body move through the caressing bounds of dark and light. Why did she not make proper use of her power one way or the other? When Dee 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 realized, 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. ([Time 0:23:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3c011152-93d8-44fa-9a93-e3d80a429d85)) --- > Dee's Wife and the Fundamentals of Discovery Transcript: Speaker 1 That of Dee's wife striped like a wild beast among the kitchen cupboards. 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. ([Time 0:25:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5732fe55-b17e-4716-9882-41d08ce23d56)) --- > The Tragic Genderless Form Transcript: Speaker 1 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 this artist's femininity to unsex the human form. A ([Time 0:27:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/080bc4a7-97f9-4df0-bcad-6b28cf323cdf)) --- > Trying to Understand After an Accident Transcript: Speaker 1 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 one does on waking in darkness in a strange room. As though the world, when unobserved, turns itself upside down, and it was the task of human consciousness to write it. ([Time 0:28:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ecc467a6-fb28-4fd3-aac9-62935a456b15)) --- > Politeness and Gendered Violence Transcript: Speaker 1 She had been standing ahead of me on 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, so as 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 that 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 ([Time 0:30:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/efa341e9-000e-432f-a35d-8f1dede05503)) --- > Commemorating Women in Thread and Cloth Transcript: Speaker 1 The exhibition was a memorial in thread and cloth, a knitted cathedral. How could the female sex be commemorated in stone? Its basis lies in repetition without permanence. Its elements are unlasting, yet eternal in their recurrence, as violence itself is. This notion seemed to illuminate the germ of creativity in my assassin's blow. ([Time 0:32:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/51b59bd4-12b0-4bb0-a995-236f2f5b46fd)) --- > Motherhood and Aging: Recalling Past Battles Transcript: Speaker 1 Her children are adults now, and she looks back on her history with them with a kind of fatigued amazement, like a retired general recalling past battles. She continues to be a woman, yet that fact has lately met with some kind of constraint or opposition. Instead of flowering and putting out its display, her femaleness is growing back into itself. Her body no longer represents any kind of danger. For a long time she felt that she had evaded Dee's knowledge of her. ([Time 0:34:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b5ddd2e0-88a3-4215-9111-6d2b4eae1514)) --- > The Elusive Nature of Possession in Relationships Transcript: Speaker 1 She evaded his possession while wanting him, in fact, to possess her. It had seemed to be her fault that she could not be possessed by him. It suggested that she lacked womanliness. But the terms of possession for him were not what she had thought. It was not easy to live with someone who saw so much in what he looked at. It seemed as though his gaze ought to be effortlessly able to devour her. ([Time 0:35:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e751dcd3-5c96-4806-8141-f93f4510090f)) --- > The Unintended Consequences of Art: A Story of Stolen Beauty Transcript: Speaker 1 She assumed that this development had come from a compulsion toward honesty, and on that basis she took her place beside him on the sofa. But it soon became clear that he didn't realise what he had done to her with the nude paintings. He didn't know that he had stolen something from her. He had made her ugly, and he didn't know how anguished she was to be seen as ugly, when he was the single being who might be said to have an obligation to find her beautiful. The double portrait showed their living room drenched in brilliant morning sun. ([Time 0:37:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5a308e2a-04f6-491d-a2d0-db6063929657)) --- > The Originality of Including Imprisoned Women in Paintings Transcript: Speaker 1 The fact that she herself is imprisoned in the paintings is the unerring mark of his originality. He seems to surrender something by including her, his pride in his masculinity, the egotistical basis of male identity. In this way he marks the advent of a new reality. The aging bourgeois couple, trapped unto death in their godless and voluntary bondage, is the pedestrian offspring of history. Some ([Time 0:40:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f3b54b88-9341-47dc-a7bb-86aab84835e1)) --- > The Choice of Femininity in Art: A Look at Madison Becker's Work Transcript: Speaker 1 Possibility must lie in the female body itself, for it might be said that a woman artist has a clear choice, to adopt male objectivity and hope to pass as an honorary man, or to declare her femininity and its themes from the outset. It is a choice not just about making art, but about living. What is striking is the clarity with which Madison Becker can be seen choosing this second path, and experiencing the dawning knowledge of its consequences. She doesn't entirely know, in other words, quite what it is she is choosing. She is being led by instinct. To be ([Time 0:42:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/26cc81f6-e9ac-4de0-baad-29851a4a1fce)) --- > Perceptions of a Sleeping Husband Transcript: Speaker 1 He hasn't even taken off his glasses. The painting is an exercise in mild wonder, wonder at the familiarity and yet unknowability of this being her husband. Wonder perhaps at the sense of entitlement that allows him to simply fall asleep like that. Wonder at the artist's own power to perceive him when he doesn't know he's being watched, since women perceive their husbands from deep within their subjection to them. It is not usual for a record to be made of these perceptions. ([Time 0:44:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5f0c2032-0d60-4499-a856-7ba2b71ea8a8)) --- > Impatience and anxiety towards children's screams Transcript: Speaker 1 In other words, progressed. The screaming children fill me with impatience and a sort of dread, as though they represented some universal task from which I will never be free. At night I frequently dream that someone has given me a baby to look after and disappeared. In these dreams I'm not impatient. I feel only a harrowing anxiety. In the children's screams I hear something true, so true I want to block my ears. ([Time 0:45:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4e7e6435-f44e-431d-aca3-c239774ce97b)) --- > The Cost of Experience Transcript: Speaker 1 Each time she does it a cost is exacted, the cost of experience. It is experience of almost too formative a kind, like being a soldier and I am a veteran of it. I want medals, a special uniform. When the woman hit me in the street I felt a veteran's outrage at being attacked. It was only this, this part of myself that had been a mother that was capable of outrage. ([Time 0:46:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/00148181-febf-43c2-b80a-aaa6bbad92ff)) --- > The experience of being a mother as a formative, veteran-like experience Transcript: Speaker 1 It is experience of almost too formative a kind, like being a soldier and I am a veteran of it. I want medals, a special uniform. When the woman hit me in the street I felt a veteran's outrage at being attacked. It was only this, this part of myself that had been a mother that was capable of outrage. The rest of me felt that it was what I deserved. ([Time 0:46:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/995eb7af-76b6-4a66-ab64-16a75e3e7d42)) --- > Living in the moment: A woman's desire to feel rather than remember Transcript: Speaker 1 She wants not to remember, but to live and feel. If there were some way of erasing all her memories, she would take it. Almost in the same moment that the sun bursts out, she hears the sound of chatter and of doors banging down below, and sees a family erupt onto the lawn. Her understanding of the secrets of events is far deeper than memory. It is a kind of creativity that applies knowledge to the ongoing moment. There are three small children, a girl and two boys, who speed all together across the lawn, and a young father following more slowly behind them. ([Time 0:48:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9ead4152-dd45-45d1-8aa7-80467819b8b2)) --- > Norman Lewis's Cathedral: A Reflection on Marginality and Productivity Transcript: Speaker 1 Day in an exhibition I saw Norman Lewis's painting, Cathedral, and for a long time afterward the memory of it stood in my mind. Sometimes I searched for photographs of it and looked at them. They resembled the memory but were not the same as it. They were photographs of the memory. The painting itself still existed somewhere in time. It had struck me as small for the reason perhaps that its subject was big. A small painting of a cathedral appeared to be a comment about marginality. It thwarted the grandiosity of man. His products could be no bigger than he was himself. What was absent from the painting was any belief in what the cathedral was. ([Time 0:52:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b7567152-5515-48ba-8561-443ab749e61a)) --- > The Perilous Politeness of Ignoring Power Transcript: Speaker 1 He chose to ignore the cathedral's power, like someone meeting a king and treating him as an equal, an instinctive, if perilous kind of good manners. In a sense he was also choosing to ignore his own marginality, for marginality is not an identity, inalterable and therefore situated beyond change. The marginal becomes the central later on, after the wars of ego have been fought, like a peacemaker arriving on the battlefield after the conflict has ended. In London, at a museum, I unexpectedly saw cathedral again. ([Time 0:54:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/770b294b-a6c9-4f99-81c3-94e9a18f5348)) --- > Marginality as a Temporary State Transcript: Speaker 1 In a sense he was also choosing to ignore his own marginality, for marginality is not an identity, inalterable and therefore situated beyond change. The marginal becomes the central later on, after the wars of ego have been fought, like a peacemaker arriving on the battlefield after the conflict has ended. In London, at a museum, I unexpectedly saw cathedral again. ([Time 0:54:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/235566be-0aa6-40c1-a6a6-13595f9d8dd9)) --- > The Importance of Being Understood in the Pact of Art Transcript: Speaker 1 Might need to see a record of those attempts and to realise how prepared people have been to run the risk of not being understood in making them. Not to be understood is effectively to be silenced, but not understanding can in its turn legitimise that silence and illuminate one's own unknowability. Art is the pact of individuals denying society the last word. There in the commotion of the museum I thought of Norman Lewis, and of how as a child he had learned to draw by copying the pictures in books borrowed from a library in Harlem. ([Time 0:55:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ebb4d0d1-bd34-4ee6-89ae-084a71ea4bd2)) --- > The Objectification of Art in a Museum Transcript: Speaker 1 She herself did not deny it, her body was the entire limit of her being, and she had chosen to deploy her objectification. She had done her work without making a sound. These were her offerings, the offerings of the stuntman, violence and silence. In the museum I walked through the rooms at random trying to escape the noise. In a large long gallery where the paintings had been hung one above another almost a ceiling height, I suddenly saw it, the small smoldering canvas. ([Time 0:58:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0ce9766d-ac6a-428e-b8cf-b9aa4bc86031)) ---