Harsher critics have accused Rachel Cusk of a confessional narcissism that unfairly exposes the private agony of her family
All great art, argues Nietzsche, is a combination of Dionysus and Apollo. Dionysus is the god of the truth that life is chaos and pain, while Apollo is the god of beauty and order. Without Dionysus, art is mere decoration. Without Apollo, life is seen in the raw and recognised as unremittingly bleak. Misery is thus redeemed by style. Thus to Rachel Cusk's account of her divorce, which tests the limits of this theory, and which we review today. Can one be too honest, too truthful as a writer? Not that Cusk's account of her divorce includes any expansion upon its causes. Here she remains coy. Rather it plunges headfirst into the phenomenology of pain, which she wraps in a beautifying prose. The harsher critics have accused it of a confessional narcissism that unfairly exposes the private agony of her family. "Children have to share in their parents' destiny to some extent, like it or not," is part of Cusk's mitigation – though her deeper justification seems to be a vocation for fearless truth-telling, come what may. Nothing is unwritable. Indeed, the unwritable is precisely what needs to be written. For it exposes to the light of day the disturbing truth of the human condition. But can children really be counted as acceptable collateral damage in the self-styled vocation of the artist? Whatever the judgment one reaches here, this sort of literature is a high-wire act with very considerable consequences for success and failure. Sometimes too many others will pay the price for one's own cherished sense of honesty.