A couple of months ago we attempted something new on the Substack: a serialized essay. It seems like that went alright, so we’re trying it again. This is the second part of an essay by Indirect Books Publisher, and L’Esprit Literary Review Editor, Dan White. Together with last week’s post, it’s a quick 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 II 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”
As Cusk put it in an interview about Life of M with The New York Times, she wanted to “truly exclude the content of the self with all of its assumptions and prior knowledge and its associations and perceptions,” in Life of M, a task she found quite difficult.
Let’s interrogate those underlying tensions—assumptions—a bit more robustly. Cusk seems to have invested fairly heavily in a broadly postmodern notion of plurality, or the rejection of polarity and, to use a loaded term, binary. As a socio-cultural commentator she seems to be viewing our contemporary “moment” as one in which personality is an inexhaustibly changeable thing, one with several (endless?) inputs and just as many outputs; like all relatively straightforward postmodern configurations, the crux is that X (here our public selves) is posited as being the multifaceted product of all aspects of existence, rather than a single stable solid thing. The buzzword being “intersectionality.” As our old friend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, glossing Jean-François Lyotard, the “loss of a continuous meta-narrative therefore breaks the subject into heterogeneous moments of subjectivity that do not cohere into an identity.” (We’ll come back to the specific relationship between Life of M and conceptions of narrative / narration arising through this type of postmodern sensibility later). In other words, Cusk’s point is: old ways of defining ourselves in society no longer fit, because various factors have caused individuals to become increasingly metamorphic and pluralized (taken more agency for themselves) to the point that the software of selfhood overloads the capacities of socio-linguistic hardware to manage it.
Her question, then, is what to do about the novel—a form she remains very much invested in—when the whole point of a novel is to express the human condition, and to do so in a way that reflects real human life? Putting aside the particulars of whether one agrees with her intellectual starting point, and to repeat the central issue at hand: Cusk is skeptical of what she sees as a Victorian-Edwardian inheritance present in the manner that (her, any) novel responds to this vision of the modern world and formulation of personality. Therefore, in her attempt to capture character, she has tried to craft novelistic modes (instantiations of the novel form) that reflect what, in her view, is the authentic nature of contemporary human experience, while still being A Novel. In this way, her recent-career approach reminds me not of a “dismantling of the novel” or an insistence on “solipsistic voicelessness” as has been claimed, but rather Virginia Woolf. The upshot of Cusk’s comments and actual work in the novel over the last ten years reminds me nothing so much as the way Woolf lays out the problem of Edwardian novelistic convention vis-à-vis her milieu in “Mr Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”
In a talk that become an essay in 1924, Woolf says famously (there we go again), that “on or about December 1910 human character changed” (“Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”). Her paper is in response to an article of Arnold Bennett, an Edwardian novelist that few non-specialists have heard of today, who maintains that there are no good young writers in the early 1920s, a take that has not aged super well, we might put it. It’s an excellent, lively essay for anyone who’s not read it; Woolf is at her wry best. She starts off by agreeing with Bennett about the first principle for good literature:
“My belief [is] that men and women write novels because they are lured on to create some character which has thus imposed itself upon them…I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and that it is to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved. To express character, I have said; but you will at once reflect that the very widest interpretation can be put upon those words.”
Woolf is making effectively a compositional claim, in that she sees the novel as oriented towards itself, towards something internal to its structure as an art-object. Her contrast is against what we might think of as the political in fiction; we could exchange her “glories of the British Empire” for any number of current causes célèbres popular today. Of course the issue is, what constitutes the expression of character? As she puts it, there “is nothing that people differ about more than the reality of characters…I find it very difficult to explain: what novelists mean when they talk about character, what the impulse is that urges them so powerfully every now and then to embody their view in writing.” The crux of the essay is about the varying ways someone like Bennett or his fellow Edwardians might craft (a) character versus how contemporary Georgian writers—like Joyce and Lawrence (and surely, although silently, herself)—do so.
“Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” then, traces a similar anxiety to that seen in Cusk’s 2018 interview: character is essential to novels, but the current way of crafting character is not suited to the current state of the world. Woolf spends a good portion of her essay on the notion of convention, and how novelistic convention (like conventions in daily life and human interaction) change and (d)evolve over time. Cusk’s point seems well summed up by Woolf’s rousing critique of the Edwardians: “And so they have developed a technique of novel-writing which suits their purpose; they have made tools and established conventions which do their business. But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.” So in effect, human character—and that adjectival modifier seems important in clarifying what we mean—is subject to the changing mores of society, and novel-writing must change with it. Simple enough. It’s the exact point Cusk is making, about a hundred years later and facing similarly outward. But what strikes me as abundantly clear is that, just as Woolf is not striving for the expurgation of character in, say, Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse (the next two novels she’d write after giving this talk), Cusk is equally attempting to rethink her approach to character, rather than excise it. That this point has been lost in critical response to her recent work, including Life of M, is a wrong turn that, it seems to me, has led into a rather malignant detour.
To be fair, it’s all a bit strange. A well know (dare we say, famous?) novelist making a comment in an interview with a very well-known literary magazine, in which she says “she doesn’t believe character exist anymore,” and subsequently writing three novels that do highly unconventional things with, among other elements, character, is an appealing and complicated topic for critical response. (To also be further fair, Rothfeld calls the line of discussion about identity of the movie star in Life of M “tedious”). However, the center in no way holds for an interpretation of Cusk meaning “character” in the typical sense. Even a cursory read of Second Place, Parade, and Life of M reveals that these are not novels attempting to remove or withhold the element of character from their composition. Instead, they are rather clearly vectoring their formal concerns through the background tension generated between an increasingly refracted (as postmodern) ontological situation in the real world and the foundational demands of The Novel in needing fictive people to populate, indeed narrate, its pages.
And instead of seeing this result for what it is—essentially an updated bout of Cartesian disquiet, wherein a novel’s requisite narrational epistemological certainty runs into the issue (as Cusk sees it) of no one being able to comment accurately on anyone’s true sense of self—and celebrating, or at least discussing, the way in which an accomplished novelist has continued to explore her medium, several critics have used a disingenuous reading of her comments to build themselves a platform upon which they could happily smirk at a writer who foolishly wants to get rid of character in fiction and can’t even manage to do that. This line of critical response to Cusk’s work is not only in keeping with the response to her entire career—not by all but by enough—but also reveals a lack of serious textual analysis alongside an ongoing impulse (or editorial mandate) to distill cultural commentary to the lowest common denominator, amongst an ever-self-defeating quest to “entertain.” Like most mainstream fiction, most mainstream criticism is superficial and deeply hesitant to challenge its reader. One cannot fault Cusk, or any other writer who is attempting difficult things, from growing tired of such a state to play.
As should hopefully be clear by now, I’m not even necessarily saying that Cusk is successful in what she’s doing; we’re going to have to find out in the course of our reading of the novel (which is, in fact, en route). And as I’ve already said, I don’t quite agree with her about (a more accurate interpretation of) her comments on the continuous existence of character. However, I am certain that she remains a novelist and that she’s put a bit more thought into her project then she seems to have been given credit; again I feel that this chapter more than the rest is a something of a live response to “the discourse.” In any event, Life of M certainly has something original and daring to say about the form of the novel—including characterization—and it’s worth a measured look at what that something is and how (successfully) she manages it. So, all soap boxing aside, let’s see what we find on the page itself.
Thanks for reading. Come back next week for something new—and if you enjoyed this preview, learn more about the full book here. In the meantime, stay critical!