Rachel Cusk's radical, creative state of femininity

In Outline, Cusk gets away from speaking for all women, and from the fashionable burden of relatability

Emily M Kelly

September 1, 2015

Rachel Cusk is used to the limelight. After her two memoirs, of motherhood and the end of a marriage, were torn to shreds in the British press, the Toronto-born UK novelist has returned to fiction with Outline, a peculiarly riveting book featuring a creative writing teacher working in Greece, trying, perhaps in vain, to get outside her experience of herself.

Rachel Cusk

Faye, the teacher in question, talks with other visiting writers, with locals, and with students, and the book is made up primarily of the things she is told. Less a hero than a kind of receptacle, the reader is invited to examine the contents of Faye’s few days in Greece and come to their own understanding of a woman who has done away with trying to understand herself.

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Answering my questions over the phone from a writer’s retreat in Scotland, Cusk explains, “Your marriage breaks up, then you are forced, cast into a new place where those things don’t exist any more. You have to find out what the next thing is.” Faye, her mirror-like narrator, reflecting her surroundings back to the reader, has recently faced a kind of personal crisis, though it’s unclear until very late in the book just what happened before her trip to Athens.

The book opens on the flight over from London, where Faye finds herself sitting beside a short man who is long on things to say. Striking up an intimate conversation in the confines of the aircraft, they make a plan to meet later in the week for a ride on the man’s boat. Despite their having little in common, one gets the sense that Faye feels somehow fated to spend time with him — her time in Athens is porous, and so is her fragile sense of self. Cusk calls it a kind of breaking point for reality; “Where does our concept of reality come from,” she asks, rhetorically. “It’s highly personal, no matter how hard we might try to make it otherwise.”

From her fellow interlocutors, a hazy picture of Faye emerges. Aside from her seat mate on the plane, she converses with her students, with another writer, a feminist novelist named Angeliki, with friends, and occasionally with herself. Even so, the biographical (and even physical) details about Cusk’s protagonist are mostly absent. It’s a bracing technique to apply to a female character, when feminine experience is so often framed as a detailed performance — what she looks like, what her familial and sexual relationships tell us about her. Cusk is here getting away from having to speak for all women, or from the fashionable burden of relatability. Because Faye is such a cypher, the reader can never relate to her the way that the various people who randomly come into her life can. Cusk calls this an investigation into a more psychological reality, telling me, “I don’t have her being described the way other people own her or want or don’t want her. Her body is nothing in this.” Instead, Faye is a mind, the shape of which becomes apparent only through her handling of other people’s stories.

Femininity is a radical state, either you prepare to be radicalized by it or you distance yourself from it

 

Her lunch with Angeliki, which Cusk tantalizingly suggests was based on a conversation she really had with another writer, touches on so many of the intellectual themes Cusk is grappling with in Outline. The feminist novelist has just returned from a book tour in Poland, where she met a woman whose response to the book caused her to reflect on the different textures of marriage. Angeliki tells Faye, “One’s existence as a wife and mother, for example, is something often walked into without question, as though we are propelled by something outside ourselves; while a woman’s creativity, the thing she doubts and is always sacrificing for the sake of other things…has been her own idea, her own inner compulsion.”

On the phone, Cusk describes how the section was motivated in part by a kind of narrative radicalism, saying, “that’s when this novel becomes a story within a story within a story. Somebody telling me about a conversation in which they are telling me about somebody else, and what that other person said, and even what that other person said another person said.” Becasue Angeliki, who is Greek, is describing her experience to Faye, who is British, about meeting a woman in Poland, there is a kind of global comedy at play, where the reader can be invited to see, and laugh at, how badly we want to feel our experiences are distinct when in fact so much is the same. “That, to me, is absolutely the radicalism of the female experience,” Cusk says. “It’s possible in the world of female experience in the way that it isn’t in some other worlds. Maybe it’s harder for a contemporary man to tell a story at so many degrees of remove that absolutely concerns and unites everyone. I enjoyed that feeling of globalism and specificity at the same time.”

Outline is peopled by writers, and because the book’s central tension is pulled taut by a feminist hand, primarily on the experience of being gendered, I asked Cusk if she thinks femininity itself is a creative crisis. “It’s a radical state,” she corrected me, “and, therefore, either you are prepared to be radicalized by it – and that’s risky, self-exposing, uncertain but politically necessary – or you distance yourself from it, and you create in areas where that radicalism is not a problem, where it’s not threatening.” For a novelist, she says, that might mean “you write—I don’t know—in a different genre, you write a historical novel.” After a beat she adds, “lots and lots and lots of successful women writers in this country, for instance, do precisely that. The very last thing they would write about is domesticity, motherhood. They write male books in a way, because they just don’t want to get into it.”

It, as Cusk has it in Outline and in conversation, “is absolutely a radical identity, and therefore, a creative … not a crisis exactly, but a force, a fire, an event. You can hurt yourself in it, but it’s a region to sort of be transformed and get somewhere through it.”

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