The Shared Trance: Outline by Rachel Cusk
“What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.”
Outline is a book of listenings. Its characters need to be heard, almost in a “if-a-tree-falls-in-the-woods” kind of way: If you didn’t have someone to listen to your story of who you are, would you even know who you are?
Rachel Cusk’s trilogy, starting with Outline, is one big story made out of listened-to stories. It is therefore a story about how people talk about their own lives. But it is also, I would argue, a portrait of a person who is trying to see through a story — past its performativity — into its core truth.
Cusk represents, over and over, our very artful, often beautified and romanticized, ways of narrating our own lives. Whether we admit it or not, we narrate for an audience. Judging by the storytellers in these books, Cusk might argue that we tend to narrate with the intent of proving our own valor: “This was a story,” her narrator avows at one point, “in which I sensed the truth was being sacrificed to the narrator’s desire to win.” Is it that the act of being listened to makes us dishonest?
While overhearing the stories that Faye is privy to in these novels, you start to sense — vaguely, even uncannily — that you are learning about Faye, too.
I personally love a good tête-à-tête. It took me a long time to realize that not every single person in the world is a huge fan of deep, face-to-face, heart-to-heart, personal conversations — that not every single person I meet will want to hunker down in a booth at a restaurant, or on a couch, or on a patch of grass, and talk for hours. Too bad. But this is what I love so much about these novels: somehow, everyone in them wants to go there. Everyone gets to monologue. The weird thing is, though, that the audience of one — the narrator and protagonist, Faye — is a notably passive interlocutor. She doesn’t cut in with questions, she doesn’t say, “Me, too!" or “That reminds me of…”; she’s a blank canvas onto which her friends and students and colleagues and dinner party acquaintances can project their narratives. She spectates from the nose-bleeds, in the dark, while they take the spotlight, one by one.
Or is she just a spectator? While overhearing the stories that Faye is privy to in these novels, you start to sense — vaguely, even uncannily — that you are learning about Faye, too. The echoes are not always obvious, but like a twinkle of light in the corner of a room, you sense that some illumination hovers in the periphery, and you desperately need to stick around to catch whatever sidelong glimpse you’ll be allowed.
Faye’s life is relatively obscure to us, but it sharpens into focus with each passing conversation. Amidst others’ stories, we catch these glimpses of her in rare moments of personal narrative and recollection, most of which she saves for us and withholds from her conversation partners. Regarding her two young sons, for instance, who rarely feature in all three of the books, she shares a memory of a scene that is at once entirely abstract, and entirely human and vivid:
They used to play together without pause from the moment they opened their eyes in the morning until the moment they closed them again. Their play was a kind of shared trance in which they created whole imaginary worlds, and they were forever involved in games and projects whose planning and execution were as real to them as they were invisible to everyone else: sometimes I would move or throw away some apparently inconsequential item, only to be told it was a sacred prop in the on-going make-believe, a narrative which seemed to run like a magic river through our household, inexhaustible, and which they could exit and re-enter at will, moving over that threshold which no one else could see into another element.
A “shared trance” is a great way to describe siblinghood, friendship — and marriage, for that matter (Faye is divorced). It’s also how we might describe reading. Others have written about Cusk as a kind of innovator of modern fiction, and this is where she’s doing something really clever. The reading experience itself is in a kind of allegorical relationship with the message of these books: a message about how we can know ourselves in the presence of others.
As Faye starts to let us in, in pinpricks, we begin to see that these conversations with her friends are not as one-sided as they may have seemed. Just as her conversation partners are selecting details that will cast themselves in favorable light, so is she choosing to conceptualize their stories through themes that, apparently, matter to her: gender relations, sex, parenthood, success, aging. Faye has been here all along, silently, in the interstices of these interactions. Even if she isn’t telling us much directly about herself — Why did she get divorced? How does she feel about her career? What does she think of feminism? — Faye nevertheless earns your trust. She is a cherished guide through these conversations because she is leading us to each person’s truth, not as they state it verbatim, but as they imply it through their narrative. In one of her conversations, the takeaway is redemptive: “In recognizing his father-in-law’s suffering, he began to recognize his own.” In another, it’s devastatingly wise: “Your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.”
These are hard-won truths of which we can’t be persuaded by anything other than experience — the direct experience of life lived. “What I knew personally to be true,” Faye says, “had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others.” But what’s the point of knowing the truth if you can’t try to persuade others of it? Perhaps this is why Faye’s conversations are more like secondhand soliloquies. Maybe, Cusk is suggesting, it’s wisest to learn what a conversation partner needs from you: to learn not what is right, but what is right for them. These soliloquizers want, simply, to be heard. They want their truth to exist outside of themselves and be recognized. And Faye gives them that.
“It seems success takes you away from what you know, while failure condemns you to it,” a character muses, in a different context from the previous comment about success. Uncannily, he is in another conversation, one that only we as readers know is happening: the one in Faye’s head, as she accumulates more and more angles on this question of success, and other questions, too. This uncanniness happens again and again in these novels, but only if you’re really listening. Since Faye is not interested in “the process of persuading others,” she manages to “hear” these echoes — Cusk gives us access to them, but not to a direct account of Faye’s life. I don’t think Cusk trusts us with a monologue from Faye. It’s not our fault; it’s just how stories work. If Faye tries to utter her truth, it will quickly become fiction, tailored to its audience and shaped by her “desire to win,” her inevitable prejudice for herself. Instead, in the tradition of centuries of artists, her truth will be indirect, mimetic. Out of the churn of repetition — generated by her own mind — Faye’s consciousness emerges. By the end of Outline, her tree has fallen, and somehow we’ve heard the sound of its distant fall. Would we have recognized it otherwise?
The outline of a life, recounted over coffee or on a plane, is not enough to access the deeper truth of a person’s story. It will always have an arc, an agenda, an angle. But this is a book that’s interested not only in the shape of a good story, but in how that story should be received. It’s a book that teaches us to listen like a good reader. As anyone in therapy knows, a good listener can listen you into being — can, simply put, require your life to become a story. Faye’s listening grants the other characters the space to narrate themselves into existence. But her listening, too, is a narrative. It’s up to us, therefore, to enter into the “shared trance” of author and reader, the intimate chance to know the outline of another’s life — and in so knowing, know ourselves a little better.
