About this Event
In , Rachel Cusk rewrites Lorenzo in Taos (1932), Mabel D. Luhan’s account of D. H. Lawrence’s (long-awaited) stay with her in New Mexico. M., a minor writer, tells Jeffers (the name is a direct reference to the hypotext) how she invited L., a renowned painter, after she saw his work in Paris. Struck by something ineffable in L.’s pictures, she translates the impression made by the paintings into an enigmatic sentence: “I am here.” (16) This experience of finding herself for once lodged in language is what M. seeks to recreate after many failed attempts to do so in her own writings. Living on a large estate, M. manages to talk L. into coming for a residency, secretly wishing that he creates a work of art capable of ‘formulating’ who she is. Cusk’s main addition to Luhan’s original text is her interest in subjective location/ a sense of place that she addresses in a multi-directional narrative of indeterminacy—reflecting upon gender, painting vs writing, philosophy and modernist aesthetics, pathology and care, and hinting at various genres, including autofiction since Cusk herself hit the news after selling her multi-million-pound coastal estate in 2020 and notoriously moving to Paris during Covid. By portraying an unlovable character who epically fails to be given a place both in her home and at a symbolic level, Cusk dismisses any simplistic understanding of care whilst addressing the vulnerability of subjectivity.
M.’s introspective, paradoxical, at times contradictory self-reflections echo M.’s husband’s desperate attempts to set up an irrigation system on the property, and evoke the overall lack of interpersonal connections. Second Place prolongs Cusk’s 2010s’ ethics and aesthetics of relationality, through the reduction of plot to conversations and the recreation of a form of “utopian interlocution” (Maingueneau). The book tries to pinpoint a core of horror at the centre of the self, which is translated in the words of illness—a tendency that can be seen in contemporary critical and artistic practices (mad studies), i.e. a re-inscription of the pathological to signify the irreducible opacity of the self. The novel probes the symbolic meaning of this network of faulty, intermedial connections through which M. wishes to address her ontological (eco)anxiety, made manifest in impulses of self-destruction and silence, only worsened by her inability to sympathise with her own daughter, and women in general.
What brings all these artistic ventures together is how they are questioned in conversations that, I will argue, are the intermedial site of possible connections (Brownen/Goffman), because if L. eventually produces a work that M. only wants to burn down, his (sometimes silent) conversations with M. have refuelled her creative input (both in art and life), her ability to circumscribe the place of where she can care and be cared for, love and hopefully be loved, in a text that reads more like talk or spoken word, making it into a new kind of “so-called novel” (Woolf).
Nicolas Pierre Boileau is Professor of British Literature at the University of Aix-Marseille, France. He works on 20th- and 21st-century literature, including life-writing and drama. He specialises in questions of gender politics and feminism, and works at the intersection between literature, medicine and psychoanalysis. He has published papers on autobiography, psychoanalysis, and modernism. In addition to the publication of Mrs Dalloway into French, and several journal issues on Woolf, Plath and Modernist exceptions. He has recently published a monograph entitled Mental Health Symptoms in Literature since Modernism, Macmillan, 2023 and contributed a chapter in Jeremy Tambling’s Bloomsbury Handbook to Literature and Psychoanalysis (2023). He is also a member of the Ethical Committee of the Hospitals in Marseilles, France, and a member of the Association de la cause freudienne.
This event is free to attend. The virtual link will be circulated closer to the event. If you have any access requirements, please contact [email protected].
This symposium is hosted by the Affective Experience Lab at the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, Durham University.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Institute for Medical Humanities • Durham University, Confluence Building, Durham, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
