To formally kick off Litficiton, I’m excited to provide my thoughts on Rachel Cusk’s “The Stuntman,” which appears in the April 24 & May 1, 2023, double-issue of The New Yorker.

“The Stuntman” is a long short story (approximately 10,000 words)–and admittedly a challenging read due to its modernist characteristics, including the highly abstract and multivalent nature of the unnamed first-person narrator’s thoughts. My efforts to better appreciate this story brought me on a pleasant detour into the visual arts; the works and lives of 20th-century artists Louise Bourgeois, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Norman Lewis are contemplated by the narrator throughout. In reading this story I also wondered about the artwork of a central character in the story who is named, simply, “D”; in googling a description of his art, it became evident that this character represents, at least in part, the real life artist and sculptor Georg Baselitz.

The story begins with the narrator contemplating D’s famous innovation of inverted paintings; she imagines how this innovation came about; she thinks about D’s wife, the nature of their relationship, and her quiet role in his success as a famous artist. Meanwhile, the narrator grapples with a pair of destabilizing events in her own life: first, she is unexpectedly evicted from her apartment–erstwhile, her source of stability and orientation–and then is randomly assaulted outside a cafe by an unknown female assailant (without apparent motive), which leaves her prostrate on the sidewalk, bleeding and disoriented. The titular stuntman emerges from this assault as a long-dormant facet of the narrator’s identity, one whose role it is to “…[take] actual risks in the creation of the fictional being whose exposure to danger supposedly was fundamental to its identity.” Likewise, D’s wife plays the role of stuntman; while not exactly his muse, she is the stabilizing force in his life–a sine qua non whose quiet commitment enables his artistic career and success to flourish–perhaps at the expense of her own self-actualization: “…she had relinquished any possibility of achieving something by giving her life and strength to him…”

What I found particularly innovative about the “The Stuntman” is its structural form. The two threads that comprise the story–i.e., the narrator’s extended reverie’s about D and his wife, and the narrator’s retrospective reflections concerning a challenging period in her own life, respectively–unfold across eight scenes in an alternating A-B-A-B-A-B-A-B format, which evokes an interesting effect of point of view. Specifically, while the story is definitively told in the first-person narrative perspective, the A scenes create an illusion of a limited third-person omniscient perspective. The narrator is completely upfront about this: she states, five times throughout these A scenes, when contemplating the private lives of D and his wife, “This is how I imagine it.” And yet the fictive dream is such that it is virtually impossible not to get pulled into what feels like the more objective third-person narration style–and thereby creating a sense of narrative objectivity that is not actually present. I feel that this narration style is a compelling innovation, one that additionally reinforces the central theme concerns the question of representativeness and truth in both perception and art.

Again, I’ll reiterate that I found this story particularly challenging to read; it poses a number of questions in the exploration of manifold themes, including the complex nature of identity, the struggles of artists–both mainstream and marginalized, representation of truth in both art and life, violence in art and perhaps as art, and, most prominently, inversion and defamiliarization as a way to access previously obscured truths. So a challenging read, to say the least.

I hope that this brief interpretation gets you thinking more about “The Stuntman”; if you have your own insights to add, please feel free to reach out, or, if you like, post them in the comments section below. Thanks for reading!