Outline Trilogy Part 1 Review
by Rachel Cusk
I came away from my reading experience of part one of Rachel Cusk’s Outline series with a feeling of overwhelm. While feeling very inspired by its novelty, I felt equal parts defeated by the deluge of her innovation with the work. I have to admit, it’s been quite a while since I have been so intellectually challenged by an artist’s composition. The book is phenomenal and a copy of the second work in the series Transit recently arrived on my doorstep. The content of the novel is about a recently divorced mother of two sons who is a writer and is teaching a course on “How To Write” alongside several other instructors at a school in Athens, Greece.
Outline is phenomenal for the way that it expands the defining lines and boundaries of female identity after the breakdown of a marriage. It operates in a liminal space; a kind of place that as a female creative I find myself very drawn to. The book happens in a place where a woman can reinvent herself, and perhaps better yet, be renewed. Although the novel is set during an arid summer in Athens, the reading experience is refreshing and coolly saturated. One feels a sense of renewal and expansion gradually seeping in as they advance through the book. Cusk’s main interrogation throughout the work is whether the idea of a “real” self, or an autonomous self that exists inside of us despite social structures and alliances, exists. I believe that Cusk is arguing, by means of her narrator Faye, that there is not. For this reason, the work is intensely contemporary on behalf of its lack of sentimentality, austerity, and impersonality.
It is not until the final tenth or so of the book that the reader learns the narrator’s name. Until then, the narrator, Faye, appears to readers as a shadow of the characters whom she encounters and is juxtaposed with. Faye provides the audience with little, if any, information about herself that would point to an individual personality or selfhood (apart from her social and political identity as divorced wife, mother, and writer). Her character is drawn for us entirely by the reflection of her conversation with other people. In other words, we only come to know who Faye is with respect to her milieu. In the very last pages, Cusk reveals in a rather direct way what her project is wringing out in a section that mirrors an earlier part of the novel. At the end of the novel, another writing instructor, Anne, arrives at the apartment where Faye stays, and she recounts her experience of sitting next to a diplomat and conversing with him on her plane ride from Manchester to Athens – an account that reproduces the long conversation readers observe at the beginning of the book between Faye and her neighbor on the plane ride over. Anne explains to Faye as they are meeting and chatting in the sitting room at the writer’s retreat apartment:
“She [Anne] had asked him about his childhood, his parents, his education, about the development of his career, the meeting with his wife and the marriage and family life that ensued, his experiences at different postings around the world; and the longer she listened to his answers, the more she felt that something fundamental was being delineated, something not about him but about her. He was describing, she realised, a distinction that seemed to grow clearer and clearer the more he talked, a distinction he stood on one side of while she, it became increasingly apparent, stood on the other. He was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative…This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.”[1]
I would coin this the “Outline” passage and it is the one that demonstrates the method Cusk is using over the course of the entire work to portray both Faye’s transformed and new identity and Faye’s experience of it.
An overarching theme Cusk is interested in is that of reality versus illusion, as it applies to one’s understanding of themselves and the relationships and structures of their lives, like in the case of Outline, marriage and motherhood. While taking notes, I counted seven different instances when the theme is quite blatantly foregrounded. One of these instances that perhaps was the most interesting to me and the most challenging to think through occurs in a section where Cusk references a famous scene from Wuthering Heights:
“I said that I found appearances more bewildering and tormenting now than at any previous point in my life. It was as if I had lost some special capacity to filter my perceptions, one that I had only become aware of once it was no longer there, like a missing pane of glass in a window that allows the wind and rain to come rushing through unchecked. In much the same way I felt exposed to what I saw, discomfited by it. I thought often of the 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. When I looked at the family on the boat, I saw a vision of what I no longer had: I saw something, in other words, that wasn’t there. Those people were living in their moment, and though I could see it I could no more return to that moment than I could walk across the water that separated us. And of those two ways of living – living in the moment and living outside it – which was the more real?”[2]
While this passage resembles the one cited above to a certain degree, like the way that Faye confesses to seeing other people’s lives as a commentary on her own, it also presents a new and fascinating concept: the illusions that people devise in their conscious, that deal in their ideas of themselves and their family lives and relationships, can be a reality that is not the same for all parties involved in that family unit or relationship. Because Faye is still so tied to the shared illusion of marriage and family that she is departing from, she struggles to find a new reality for herself. Cusks shows quite masterfully in her treatment of this theme how blurred the lines between reality and illusion are when it comes to our selfhood and domestic lives.
In support of the exploration of a “real” self as illusory, Cusk is really interested in how the structures people exist in socially, politically, and materially – the context or backdrop of our lives – shapes and frames our identities as individuals, and too, our subjectivities, and can even operate as a sort of imprisonment. One of the students in Faye’s class announces:
“I would like,” she resumed, “to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown, where I have no identity and no associations. But how such a thing could be accomplished, and even where such a place might be, I have no idea; not to mention the relationships and responsibilities themselves,” she concluded, “which drive me mad but at the same time make escape from them impossible.”[3]
There is another section I particularly liked, and found charming, which relates to Cusk drawing out how the material conditions of our lives affect our conception of marriage as a romance, and in it a Greek novelist is discussing her experience of the hardness of Polish women and their lives. The Greek novelist, Angeliki, says:
“While I was in Poland,” she said, “I vowed to develop a less sentimental view of life, and if there is something I regret in my novel, it is that the material circumstances of the characters are so comfortable. It would be a more serious book, I believe, if that were not the case.”[4]
***
Talking to this journalist,” she continued, “whose name as I have mentioned was Olga, I wondered whether my whole existence – even my feminism – had been a compromise. I felt it had lacked seriousness. Even my writing has been treated as a kind of hobby. I wondered whether I would have had the courage to be like her, for there seemed to be so little pleasure in her life, so little beauty – the sheer physical ugliness of that part of the world is astonishing – that I wasn’t sure under similar circumstances whether I would have had the energy to care. That was why I was surprised by the numbers of women who attended my readings – it almost seemed as though my work was more important to them than it is to me!”[5]
While the whole of Outline functions as a meta-reflection on how literature as a medium represents human subjectivity - and the limitations of this mode of artistic representation – Cusk includes in the novel a number of interesting contemplations on the ways that artistic representation alters one’s perception of reality and how these variances can depend upon the artistic medium: when Faye arrives at the Athens apartment she observes a photograph that while looking at it “for a few disturbing seconds you believed that people were bigger and happier and more beautiful than you remembered them to be”[6] and several minutes later, after Faye has entered the apartment, she notices a sculpture of a woman that “makes reality seem, for a moment, smaller and deeper, more private and harder to articulate.”[7] Cusk’s skepticism of the autonomous self pervades different spaces in the novel, like the sitting room in the apartment. For example, Faye notes that:
“There was a marked perception against compositions that glorified the solo voice or instrument, very little piano music and virtually no opera, with the exception of Janáček, of whose complete operatic oeuvre Clelia had a boxed set.”[8]
Cusk’s description of setting is adept and, as I stated above, her style feels ultra contemporary. The work makes me think of Woolf’s Orlando for its experimentation with subjectivity and identity according to sociopolitical context. I feel like I ought to return to that text once I finish the Outline trilogy.
Sources Cited:
Cusk, Rachel. Outline. Part 1. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
[1] Cusk, Rachel. Outline. Part 1. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
[2] Cusk, Outline, 75.
[3] Cusk, Outline, 157.
[4] Cusk, Outline, 125.
[5] Cusk, Outline, 108.
[6] Cusk, Outline, 51.
[7] Cusk, Outline, 55.
[8] Cusk, Outline, 54.