A couple of months ago we attempted something new on the Substack: a serialized essay. It seems like that went alright, so let’s try it again. Over the next fortnight we’ll be releasing two installments of an essay by Indirect Books Publisher, and L’Esprit Literary Review Editor, Dan White. Together the installments will constitute a preview of a chapter from his forthcoming book, Rachel Cusk & The Art of Narration, this one specifically about Cusk’s latest novel, Life of M.
We thought it’d be fun to both preview the book and dip into the rather raucous discourse around this novel, most of which is predictably silly. “A Sign of Good Character” takes a look at Cusk’s compositional project in Life of M, and interrogates the point that so many critics are clamoring to make about, evidently, Cusk’s quest to “dismantle the novel.” Does she still write characters? Is her new book about anything? Where’s Natalie Portman? Etcetera.
Part I is below. We hope you enjoy this preview of Chapter Five from the forthcoming book The Revolution Comes From Within: Rachel Cusk & The Art of Narration. Thanks so much for your support!
A Sign of Good Character:
The Language of Convention in Life of M
Think how little we know about character—think how little we know about art.
—Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”
There is a famous—if you’ll find some generosity in your definition of that operative word—interview that Rachel Cusk once did with The New Yorker, following the release of Kudos, the third installment of her Outline trilogy. This was in 2018. At the end of a response about the nuances of Faye (the protagonist), Cusk tacks on the line, “I’m not interested in character because I don’t think character exists anymore.” Naturally, the interviewer Alexandra Schwartz followed up a couple times on this—it makes for a great article title—and ever since, critics and commentators have been taking Cusk’s comment to and beyond anything like proportion.
The problem, like so much else, has to do with context, and with thinking a bit more deeply about what she might have meant and been trying to express than is required for, say, social media optimization. Because there’s more to that answer, and the interview as a whole, than a rather thin interpretation of Cusk’s point as being a literal one; she seems to be getting at something else, a something that surely does permeate her later-career work, although perhaps not in the way popular criticism has maintained. Thus I’d like to start here, in an interview from a near-decade and three novels ago, in discussing Cusk’s most recent work, Life of M, which (like all her fiction) has in fact quite a bit to say, and do, about character.
What does it mean to be famous? It must be in some way relative; a famous musician and a famous scientist aren’t contesting the same ground. Being in the “public eye” (whatever that might mean) seems to qualify; more specifically a way in which what one does or says becomes part of the public record, and a part that people care about. There are degrees. One might be locally famous, or briefly famous, or infamous. Writers are rarely famous in the broadest sense, although they used to be. But these days literature as a whole is too niche, relative to the torpid mass of culture, to really create fame (infamy is of course a different matter); only a few of us care all that much. Life of M is, in some ways, about fame; and this element is the angle that both Cusk’s publishers (understandably) and critics (less understandably) have worked in their selling and reading of the novel.
In some sense the book is “about” a movie star, but in no way that’s overly interesting, either to this chapter or (it seems clear) to the novelist herself. We had better say from the outset, here, that we’re not going to talk about movie stars, either generically or specifically, in relation to this novel; or about which particular movie star might have waltzed through the cosmic background of Cusk’s own writing process in crafting it. We’re not interested in fame, here; we’re interested in art—and it’s been a very long time indeed since those difficult neighbors shared an address.
So what are we going to talk about? Let’s try that issue of character, to start. The 2018 interview has come up again in the early responses to Life of M, including back in the New Yorker itself. The principle thing to note, vis-à-vis that (infamous?) comment about character, is that Cusk is referring more to real life than she is to a craft element of fiction:
“I think character is sort of a little low, and there’s a homogeneity afoot that I think everyone would accept in terms of our environment and how we live and how we communicate, and those things seem to be eroding the old idea of character…I’m trying to see experience in a more lateral sense rather than as in this form of character. Which, as I said, I don’t actually think is how living is being done anymore. And it’s one of those ideas that hangs around in novel writing that I don’t really believe anymore.”
The notion Cusk is replying to here is essentially a Victorian one, as she overtly calls it; the concept of people (figures) rendered as stock characters who, for example, will never ever desert Mr Micawber. In a part of her reply buried beneath the sands of my ellipsis, she says that her understanding of a “Victorian template of novel writing” is focused on this definition of character, and she then asks / asserts, “How much does character actually operate in a person’s life? I think it probably operates to create what we might fairly see as a dysfunction—not sticking to what you’re meant to be doing.” Again this is a fairly proscribed—and, perhaps, odd—definition of character, one that seems to be “outdated societal expectations for conduct.” However It’s important to understand what Cusk is saying, and what she’s not. She clearly is using “character” (and its nonexistence) as something out in real life, a passé way of expecting people to behave, and wants to shape her novels to reflect the new reality. A likely better term for what she’s getting at in the interview seems to be caricature, in the sense of having various traits overblown or exaggerated such that they override an authentic, mutable personality.
It’s certainly debatable as to whether one might agree with Cusk about, in effect, everyone living in a poststructural personality pond wherein we all swim through various blending temperatures in the watery makeup of our selves. (I rather do not). But the point—both hers then and mine now—is that she’s talking about how to best fit her fiction to the ways of living as she understands them and has encountered them out in the world. This is what novelists do. She’s not talking about “getting rid of characters in her novels” which is a ludicrous idea that belies a lack of respect for Cusk’s career accomplishments in being attributed (interpreted) to her.
The New Yorker review that I’ll be in part responding to in this chapter, while correct in identifying Cusk’s “dream of disintegrating the particularities of selfhood into the warm liquid of universality” is wrong in assuming her goal therefore is to “expung[e] character from her work.” Instead Cusk’s goal in Life of M is the latest in a long series of attempts to rethink and reimagine what the form of the novel might be and do; despite, alongside, or within her own (personal) disquiet about how the artistic medium she’s been given (by the fates or muses or whomever else) might be interacting with the modern world. The manner in which she goes about this attempt—given the tensions that Rothfeld and others have rightly identified between novelistic demands for specificity of self and Cusk’s interest in a universality of experience, or its possibility—is at issue here, as we again look to form.
Thanks for reading. Come back next week for Part II—and in the meantime, stay critical!