A Region That Outlay Human Identity: Rachel Cusk's "The Last Supper" Show Notes
Cordelivres Criticism Club Club Episode Six Show Notes
This post contains the show notes for the most recent edition of our Cordelivres Criticism Club podcast; check out the episode if you haven’t yet—it’s free!
And there’re a couple photos of my edition down below.
Let’s get into it!
Rachel Cusk's Memoiric Style
We started off with a little bit of a wider discussion about Rachel Cusk and her career; I’m teaching a graduate class on her novels this semester for the first time, in addition to the undergraduate classes I typically teach, and I talked a little about that before getting into the heart of the matter. I’m at work on a scholarly project on her narrational style and got the chance to work with her a bit at a writing workshop in Greece this summer. I also complained about having to go back to school and start a new semester, as one does.
Cusk’s memoirs are unusual and very cool—one way of thinking about them is that she really writes them like a novel; style and narration are much more prominent, I think it’s fair to say, than the typical memoir. For our conversion on The Last Supper, we talked about her distinctive language and her interest in how language mediates experience, which really ends up being the central question in this one.
While her memoirs on motherhood (A Life’s Work) and divorce (Aftermath) are probably more well known—for controversial reasons, to some extent—The Last Supper might be the most engaging and interesting, from a prose perspective, of them all.
Experience-as-Language [?]
The first thing we really get into is the way in which Cusk’s work, both in this book and elsewhere, reveals a deep interest in the ways in which language mediates human experience. As we say on the show, on one level this is super obvious—what else would literature be [about]? And that manner is present here too—questions around language as a medium, as something that is the tool by which the writer practices her art—but there’s something else going on too.
That second level is concerned with language as a subject: how is it that we translate our experiences into language, and how does language encounter (encapture?) the world? I heroically manage to avoid mentioning Wittgenstein in this episode (except for when I mention how I’m not mentioning him—fun with meta-language!), but there’s a large, Alice-esq rabbit hole sitting right next to this topic down which we will definitely fall, at some point, on this show.
At night I would often be woken by noise from the road, and afterward would lie awake for hours, unable to sleep. The noise, which was of a strange drunken revelry, would usually begin long after the pubs had closed, though in the deeps of the night I never knew exactly what time it was. I was merely summoned by the sound of unearthly groans and shrieks outside my window that seemed to belong neither to the world nor to my dreams but somewhere in between. They might have been men's voices or women's, it was hard to tell. The noise they made came from a region that outlay human identity Their long, inchoate monologues, vocalized yet senseless, seemed to name something that afterward could not be specified, to describe what by daylight appeared indescribable.
We start off by looking at this first paragraph of The Last Supper, which as we can see in the quote grapples directly with language, meaning, and the tenuous relationship between them. In this passage, and even more so elsewhere, we can also see what I consider to be Cusk’s superpower as a writer: her ability to capture large, complex, abstract ideas or concepts in language, often figurative, poetic, and quite powerful. At the root of it we’re talking about metaphor, but in a manner that ends up forming the architectural core of her books, instead of serving as ornate embellishments.
On the show I mention something I wrote in my notes: Cusk’s investment to (and ability to) blend the abstraction of human thought with the detail of human experience. Her use of figurative language is key to this, wherein she introduces fully-formed ideas "like dropping a stone in a pool," as we said, allowing her—and her reader—to navigate between complex ideas and conventional narrative structures. This is what gives her work such depth and rigor beyond the relatively uncomplicated presentation of her writing on the page. It’s also what occasionally befuddles my students in their papers!
Art and Reality
We spent a fair bit of time on a passage recounting the two nights Cusk and her family spent in France, en route to Italy. Possibly my favorite line in all the Cuskian canon is in this passage, and it may or may not have been the epigraph for the podcast post. It’s a moment that reveals something else at the center of The Last Supper: art, of course, and its relationship to reality—both of the individual and the community:
Bertrand watches him, a glint in his eye. This couple have irritated him, gray and complacent and ungiving as they are. They swallow his food without comment; they weigh up his domain coldly, rationally, indifferent to all but their own preferences. Why does he expose himself to the world in this way? I don't believe he does it entirely for money: there is no need to treat us as lavishly as he does. He does it, perhaps, for the same reason that artists show their work, for the same reason I choose to publish the books I write rather than lock them in a drawer. Indeed, this couple have their exact equivalent in the field of literary criticism. It doesn't trouble them at all that they could never create something beautiful, as Bertrand has. Nonetheless, their presence here indicates that after all Bertrand does need the world, so that it may look on what he has done. In the end he needs reality, to measure his creation against.
I think Cusk sees herself in this passage; in one way she obviously does, as she compares Bertrand’s house to her books. But beyond that, I think she too feels that she requires reality to measure her own creation against; in her ongoing quest to determine subjectivity into art, she seems to me to be both suspicious and desirous of language, and of allowing language to take her as far as she can in this journey. It is art as product and production, as enouterned-object and ongoing imperative of creation. The artist does what they can to navigate and express life; for a writer, such as Cusk, the available tools are of language, and the it is language with which she goes into this conflict.
A Bit of First-Person Free Indirect
We jumped ahead and talked about her use of “first-person free-indirect,” as I’ve called it, in some passages about tennis. This technique deserves much more space than it gets in this episode, and it will when we come to the Outline series; I’ve written a lot about it elsewhere, too.
Cusk uses her dense, conceptually rich sentences and free-indirect speech—malgré being in first person; malgré being in a memoir—to create depth in this seemingly straightforward narrative. We meet Jim, a Scottish expat in Italy, who is consistently characterized as being a bit aloof and hard-to-pin-down—except when he’s organizing games of tennis.
But the tennis: will we play? His friend, the one with the court, is keen to know, It is obvious that Jim himself is keen to know: he asks us how good we are, whether we play at home, and how often. Here at last is a subject capable of flushing Jim out of his habitual cover, out into the wide-open spaces of commitment, It seems that where tennis is concerned there is nothing compromised about him at all. He admits that he plays it: what's more, he says he's not bad. He's got an eye for a ball; he always did, When he was younger he played on the junior squad of a Scottish foothall team.
As we dive into in the show, Cusk excises the traditional authorial tags—“he said,” etc—to push Jim a bit closer to the reader; ushering him to the front of the stage, so to speak. This might seem innocuous but it’s pretty revolutionary, especially in its more fully-realized Outline form. Basically her approach allows us to experience Jim as a character with minimal modulation from the narrator; not in dialogue, but in that free-indirect hybrid which blends interiority with scene. That she’s able to do this in first person is wild, and is the defining trait of her mammoth trilogy. (Which again, we will get to). But we can see a bit of it here in The Last Supper.
This ability to capture both the subject and medium of language, weave together traditional storytelling with philosophical ideas about art as a defense against daily life, gives her memoir impressive depth amongst the lively, even funny, story of her summer spent in Italy. A super interesting memoir and definitely worth the read, especially if you haven’t read much of Cusk’s work.
Thanks so much for listening and hope everyone enjoyed the talk.
À bientôt. In the meantime, au revoir—and stay critical.
