Cusk, Experimentalism and the Limits of Autofiction

Abstract

‘I don’t think character exists anymore’, Rachel Cusk declared in a 2018 interview. This was not the first time Cusk appeared to be announcing the atrophy of the traditional novel. In a 2014 interview with The Guardian, Cusk stated she was ‘certain autobiography’ was ‘increasingly the only form in all the arts’. Inversely, fiction and its conventional preoccupation with ‘making up John and Jane’, Cusk argued, was only becoming more ‘ridiculous’, ‘fake and embarrassing’. It is precisely this disregard for literary orthodoxy that runs through Cusk’s widely acclaimed trilogy of autofictional novels – Outline (2014), Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018). The books are narrated by a divorced writer named Faye who, at first, appears to do very little and divulges even less, and it is from this withdrawn tenor that the trilogy derives its distinctive feel. Throughout the series, Faye documents her conversations with people she encounters in her daily life. The term ‘conversation’, however, may be somewhat misleading here; these are often heavily one-sided encounters dominated by the long, drawn-out monologues of those Faye meets. She therefore ‘receives’, as Heidi Julavits has written, in ways akin to ‘a recording device or a processing machine’. As Faye listens to each of her interlocutors in turn, there is no conventional narrative arc that proceeds from beginning to middle and end. With Faye’s personal details remaining largely concealed, there is also no attempt to follow the linear paths of traditional character development. Instead, each novel fluidly drifts through a mélange of fragmentary encounters that Faye finds herself intimately and often haphazardly enmeshed within. And yet, these spontaneous encounters always extend beyond the immediacies of the moment. As Faye locates within other people’s stories, glimpses into larger questions of life, society, morality and art, passages constantly flicker between the micro and the macro, the split second and the longue durée.