Freedom from language: the life and work of Rachel Cusk

Relocation and upheaval have been a feature of Rachel Cusk’s life. Born in Saskatoon, Canada in 1967, she spent her early childhood in Los Angeles before moving to East Anglia in the UK to be educated at a private Catholic girls’ school. She attended New College, Oxford in the late 1980s and moved to London in the early 1990s. After having children, she moved to Bristol, Brighton and the Norfolk coast, before her latest move to Paris. In a recent interview with Merve Emre, Cusk has reflected upon moving to Paris and how it relates to her own writing, as well as her sense of time in the French and anglophone novel:
“I wonder why I have never used my ability to slow down time and why, actually, in the anglophone novel, it’s really a rare thing for anyone to do – to make time go very, very, very slowly in a book. I’ve moved to France, I’m reading French novels in French all day, every day, and the thing that I’m most struck by: they go much more slowly. Time pauses.”
Emre’s interview concludes our new book, Rachel Cusk: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, which explores how Cusk’s writing illustrates a conflict between restlessness and stasis – an attention to the ways in which time pauses and passes. Withdrawal, transition and renewal have been constant themes throughout Cusk’s 13 novels (most famously the Outline trilogy, consisting of Outline, Transit and Kudos), as well as her non-fiction and short stories.
Despite Cusk’s prolific output, she has recently stated, “I always think and feel that I’m coming to the end of writing as a useful occupation, which is maybe a suicidal impulse given to female creators.”
Cusk’s literary output is one of experimentation and a desire to push against established models. Her early novels, Saving Agnes (1993; the debut that won her the Whitbread First Novel Award at age 26), and The Country Life (1997), are comic, protagonist-focused Bildungsromans that depict the trials and tribulations of young, educated, middle-class, white women. These novels were written during a period in which career and lifestyle aspirations and expectations for certain women had shifted in comparison to the previous generation.
The opening chapter of Saving Agnes captures a disjuncture between the required performance of female empowerment and the inner lives of young women living in a patriarchal culture that makes few real concessions to their needs: “Agnes usually managed to sustain the appearance of a thrusting young professional running on a tight schedule; but then someone switched on the lights, pulled off the mask, revealed the pretender for exactly who she was.”
The tone of Cusk’s Noughties novels and nonfiction is darker than her early work. These books explore the tension between the desire to live fully as an artist, or even just as an autonomous, sentient adult, while being subject to dominant cultural expectations and judgments on maternal behaviour and family life.
In A Life’s Work (2001), Cusk’s writes of her pregnancy, “it is the population of my privacy, as if the door to my room were wide open and strangers were in there rifling about, that I find hard to endure. It is as if I have been arrested or called to account, summoned by the tax inspector, isolated and searched, I am not living freely but in some curious tithe.” She goes on, “motherhood, for me, was a sort of compound fenced off from the rest of the world. I was forever plotting to escape from it”.
The next phase of Cusk’s writing career was initiated by the 2012 memoir Aftermath, about her divorce from her second husband, Adrian Clarke. “Nothing belongs to me any more. I have become an exile from my own history,” Cusk writes. “I no longer have a life. It’s an afterlife; it’s all aftermath.” As with her fictional work, Aftermath is intensely concerned with gender expectations, with who holds narrative power, and how relationships and lives blend into each other, alongside the moral difficulties which arise when conflicting narratives take place.
Early in Aftermath Cusk describes the battleground of her divorce: “My husband believed that I had treated him monstrously. This belief of his couldn’t be shaken: his whole world depended on it. It was his story, and lately I have come to hate stories. If someone were to ask me what disaster this was that had befallen my life, I might ask if they wanted the story or the truth.”
Aftermath raises questions about the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity, as Cusk asks readers to reflect upon what shape each narrative takes and who gets to do the telling. These questions are interrogated throughout Cusk’s writing, as she frequently returns to the conflict between “the story and the truth”. Aftermath received a vitriolic critical response for the candid and partial way that it portrayed the breakdown of Cusk’s marriage, and the backlash she faced had a significant effect on Cusk’s writing style.
Echoing the criticism that, several years earlier, was directed at A Life’s Work, Aftermath was dismissed as pretentious and self-indulgent. In The Sunday Times, Camilla Long condemned Cusk as “a brittle little dominatrix and peerless narcissist who exploits her husband and her marriage with relish”. Patricia Lockwood has noted how it is such a commonplace confession to dislike Cusk and expressed surprise that no one has ever begun a review of her work with: “I, too, dislike her.”
The criticism of Cusk’s character tends to ignore how Cusk highlights negative qualities and traits within her writing, accentuating her own fallibility for dramatic effect, with a self-awareness that is both pronounced and difficult to gauge. In her fiction, Cusk’s characters are often privileged middle-class white people, who fail to interrogate their social status, but the discomfort Cusk causes may be generated by her depictions of the societal and cultural narratives that we live by.
Cusk depicts many scenes of cruelty – from the everyday way we treat one another in public to deeply personal feelings of spite and malice – and when encountering this cruelty, as readers, we end up asking ourselves if it is directed inward, towards her characters and herself, or outwards, towards society, towards us.
Cusk’s response after publishing Aftermath was to abandon the notion of character almost completely. The Outline trilogy breaks down boundaries between fiction and life writing, as the narrator and protagonist, Faye, appears to be a lightly fictionalised or autofictional version of Cusk herself. This blurring between biographical and fictional selves can also be read as a pointed response to the frequent conflation between women writers and their fictional creations, and Cusk both invites and complicates this association through the formal innovation of these novels.
Faye’s presence and character take shape in the Outline trilogy through the stories that other people tell her, and these stories gather up, until: “she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank”.
Cusk revisits the instability of identity in her latest novel Parade, published in June. If the Outline trilogy disrupts novelistic expectations of plot, character and narrative, then Parade, which is populated by a cast of anonymous artists, explores “the inversion of representation while being ultimately representative”. In a section called The Stuntman, the novel considers what it might mean to delegate difficult personal experiences to an “alternate or double self whose role it was to absorb and confine them so that they played no part in the ongoing story of life”. This method is metaphorically realised through a “stuntman”: “this alternate self took the actual risks in the creation of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity”.
[ Parade by Rachel Cusk: Daring and discombobulatingOpens in new window ]
The narrator in one section of Parade is assaulted on the street in a random attack, and this narrative disrupts the withdrawal of character and lack of corporeality that we see in the Outline trilogy. As the narrator notes, “the violence and the unexpectedness of the incident in the street had caught my stuntman unawares”. In an interview, Cusk reveals that the attack is based on her own personal experience: “It’s true that I was brained in the street in Paris, completely randomly, and the difficulty for me as a writer lay in the use of a personal experience that was so anomalous.”
Parade touches on the twin notes of violence and silence that are explored extensively throughout Cusk’s work, often through subtle and inverted measures. As Cusk notes in her interview with Emre, “somehow death or exhaustion or not being defined attains a weird adverse value”.
Writing about the French author Annie Ernaux last year, Cusk uses language that perhaps more accurately describes her own work. On the one hand, Cusk considers writing “as a sphere where the self, the soul, is entitled to find refuge”. On the other hand, Cusk claims that Ernaux’s “art bears no relation to a privileging of personal experience; on the contrary, it is almost a self-violation”. In these ways, Cusk’s work excavates the relationship between fate and freedom, as well as the relationship between silence and violence, which we see in Parade. Silence also speaks to Cusk’s interest in the visual arts, which loom large in her latest novel, as her style of writing is deeply entangled with the limitations of language. In her interview with Emre, Cusk concludes of her work, “If there is a desire for freedom, it is freedom from language.”
[ Rachel Cusk: ruthless and formidable observationsOpens in new window ]
There is often a line drawn between the different phases of Cusk’s writing career, as sketched above, especially between her pre- and post-Outline writing. However, many common concerns span Cusk’s writing career, and we can see shared themes in Cusk’s debut novel, Saving Agnes, and her latest, Parade, which are traced throughout the chapters of Rachel Cusk: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Distinguishing Cusk’s work into neat phases, then, may be as complicated as the depictions of selfhood and biographical innovations of her novels, as Cusk’s work continues to subvert and confound readerly and critical expectations, and as she refuses to stay still.
Excerpted from Rachel Cusk: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Roberta Garrett and Liam Harrison (Bloomsbury Academic)