Outline

“I was finding it difficult to assimilate everything I was being told. The waitresses kept bringing more things, oysters, relishes, special wines. He was easily distracted, like a child with too many Christmas presents. But when he put me in the taxi he said, enjoy yourself in Athens, though I didn’t remember telling him that was where I was going.”

From the very onset, Faye feels overwhelmed by the details of the world, which demand too much of her attention. The billionaire embodies this surfeit of details with his life, with its outlines and acquisitions, the antithesis of Faye’s. Cusk uses the simile of a child distracted with Christmas presents to show the billionaire’s immersion in food and objects. Faye’s literary magazine, an immaterial idea, is the last thing on his mind.

“The air hostess stood in the aisles and mimed with her props as the recording played. We were strapped into our seats, a field of strangers in a silence like the silence of a congregation while a liturgy is read.”

As this passage shows, author Rachel Cusk often imbues everyday occurrences with mystery and lyricism. Here, the ubiquitous flight-safety demo becomes a sacred sermon and the passengers a congregation. The plane turns into a field of strangers, with the metaphor of the field evoking the unusual image of the plane’s passengers as hushed plants.

“It was impossible, I said in response to his question, to give the reasons why the marriage had ended: among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious. What was real, in the end, was the loss of the house […] To move from the house was to declare, in a way, that we had stopped waiting.”

A repeating conceit in the novel is that objects are more permanent than ideas and relationships. Faye has come to this conclusion after the breakdown of her marriage. She often locates reality in things as a way to remind herself not to take abstract ideas and beliefs seriously. Here, she tells the neighbor that what affected her more was giving up the family house, but the narrative suggests that this is not the whole truth. Faye is in deep mourning not just for the house but also for the idyll of her happy marriage.

“My neighbor turned to me again, and asked me what work it was that was taking me to Athens. For the second time I felt the conscious effort of his enquiry, as though he had trained himself in the recovery of objects that were falling from his grasp.”

Though later in the novel, Faye is taken aback by the neighbor’s move to seduce her, the narrative foreshadows this turn of the events from the first chapter itself. Here, Faye observes that the neighbor is not easily quelled, as he keeps pursuing her for answers in a practiced move. This indicates that the neighbor can and will be pushy, though at the time, Faye does not read much into his actions. Their subtly fraught interactions introduce The Complexities of Relationship Dynamics.

“As it happened, I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even self-definition. I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another […] I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.”

Although Faye makes this observation after the neighbor hurriedly hides his pulp fiction novel, it can also be seen as a metafictional comment on Cusk’s writing of Outline. Cusk does not want to persuade her reader of anything or influence their interpretation of her work. She does not even wish to structure her work as a traditional novel. Therefore, she merely observes and writes, leaving the meaning of her writing open-ended.

“On his first visit to the gym, he saw a beautiful girl exercising on a machine while at the same time reading from a large book of philosophy […] that was the image he had internalized, not just of the girl but of the imaginary staircase itself, and of himself forever climbing it with a book dangling just in front of him like a carrot in front of a donkey. Climbing that staircase was the work he had to do to separate himself from the place from which he had come.”

This passage illustrates the visual quality of Cusk’s writing and also showcases the text’s use of the stairway as a symbol of aspiration and self-improvement. The image of the woman on the treadmill reading a book unites most of Ryan’s aspirations at the time—having a beautiful girlfriend, writing a book, and losing weight. Thus, he uses it as inspiration to make himself over. The drive for self-improvement is described in satirical terms, a comment on the contemporary culture’s exhortation of finding and transforming the self, reflecting The Difficulty of Defining the Self.

“Ryan was watching the waitress moving in and out of the shadows, proud and erect, the tresses of her hair hanging perfectly still. I put my things in my bag and moved to the edge of my seat, which seemed to catch his attention. He turned his head to me. What about yourself, he said, are you working on something?”

Although Faye wishes to frame her narrative as the stories of others, she often peeps through. Faye’s tone is neutral and observational, but the details she chooses to tell, and the placement of those details, convey an impression of deep irony. Faye notes that her movement to leave “seem[s] to catch his attention,” indicating that Ryan has not been paying attention to Faye at all. The reluctant turn of the head and the half-hearted expression of interest in Faye are situated right at the end of the chapter, indicating that Ryan does not really want to know the answer to the question. Their interactions suggest the roles of storyteller and listener in shaping narratives.

“This room contained, as well as many books, several painted wooden models of boats […] When you looked more closely, you saw that the sails were attached to countless tiny cords, so fine as to make them almost invisible […] It required only a couple of steps to move from the impression of wind in the sails to the sight of the mesh of fine cords, a metaphor I felt sure Clelia had intended to illustrate the relationship between illusion and reality.”

The description of the ships in Clelia’s apartment highlights the novel’s preoccupation with the subject of illusions (See: Symbols & Motifs). The ships are a failed illusion since Faye can see the tiny cords that pull the sails to make them seem wind-blown. Her willingness to look closely at the ships reflects her eagerness to dispense with all forms of illusion.

“It was very broad and fleshy, leathery with sun and age, and marked with numerous moles and scars and outcrops of coarse grey hair […] His aged back seemed to maroon us both in our separate and untransfigurable histories.”

Faye’s narration contains detailed—and sometimes cruel—descriptions of people’s physical appearances, as her impression of the neighbor’s bare back shows. The back produces a sensation of disgust and disappointment in Faye for many reasons. First, its sight robs her of the illusion of a possible romance with the neighbor since he is much older than her, which is why she refers to their “untransfigurable” or unchangeable histories. Secondly, the neighbor’s performative stripping before Faye is too definite an action. In her passive state, such definitiveness repels Faye, reflecting the complexities of relationship dynamics.

“I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had.”

In the process of self-effacement, Faye has rid herself of every kind of illusion. As she swims far into the sea, she wants to melt into the water. However, she knows that this does not indicate an illusory, metaphysical summons by death, the universe, or nature. It is simply the desire to get away from responsibilities. The lines are possibly an allusion to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), in which the protagonist, Edna, swims too far off to sea to escape her life.

“But his own mother had once said to him, in the period after his first marriage had ended when he was deeply concerned about the effect the divorce was having on the children, that family life was bittersweet no matter what you did. If it wasn’t divorce it would be something else, she said. There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise.”

One of the recurrent motifs of the text is parents and children (See: Symbols & Motifs). Characters often discuss the impact that divorce has on the offspring of a marriage, though both the neighbor and Angeliki observe that children are affected by any childhood since growing up itself involves pain.

“You might remember in the Odyssey, he said, the character of Elpenor, Odysseus’s crewmate who falls off the roof of Circe’s house because he is so happy he forgets he has to use a ladder to come down. Odysseus encounters him in Hades later on, and he asks him why on earth he died in such a foolish manner. Panitois smiled. I always found that a charming detail, he said.”

Panitois’s observation is an example of the text’s use of a literary allusion. Through the allusion, Panitois is making a case for finding joy in the childlike and the absurd, just as a character in a classic epic dies because he forgets to use a ladder to get down a roof.

“I replied that I wasn’t sure it was possible, in marriage, to know what you actually were, or indeed to separate what you were from what you had become through the other person. I thought the whole idea of a ‘real’ self might be illusory: you might feel, in other words, as though there were some separate, autonomous self within you, but perhaps that self didn’t actually exist.”

These lines illustrate Faye’s struggle with the difficulty of defining the self, both in writing and in real life. Since the self changes, and is influenced by the people around a person, there can be no definite, true self toward which humans strive. Faye has accepted this for the time being, which is why she does not make her decisions according to the calling of her “autonomous” self: As much as she can, she lets life take its course. Faye’s remarks are also a bittersweet reminder of the shared self of an intimate partnership. Though marriage made her lose her individuality in this shared self, she also tends to miss the accompanying sense of communion.

“My mother once admitted, I said, that she used to be desperate for us to leave the house for school, but that once we’d gone she had no idea what to do with herself and wished that we would come back. And she still, even now that her children were adults, would conclude our visits quite forcefully and usher us all off to our own homes […] Yet I was quite sure that she experienced that same sense of loss after we’d gone, and wondered what she was looking for and why she had driven us away in order to look for it.”

These lines illustrate the contradictions of human nature: Faye’s mother simultaneously longs for solitude and is terrified by it. She misses her children and is yet exasperated by them. Given these contradictions, the idea of an autonomous, unalloyed self is even more absurd, reflecting the difficulty of defining the self.

“‘For many women,’ she said, ‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,’ she said, ‘the mother’s sacrifice of herself is absolute, which mine never could have been, and which no woman’s ought to be these days.’”

The topic of motherhood crops up repeatedly in the conversations of women in the novel (See: Symbols & Motifs), as evident in Angeliki’s statement. Angeliki determines that a child can only remain “a created object,” or an object that can be shaped as one pleases, when a mother watches the child constantly. Since such attention is impossible, it is better for mothers to seek creative fulfillment elsewhere.

“The woman who said this was of a glorious though eccentric appearance, somewhere in her fifties, with a demolished beauty she bore quite regally. The bones of her face were so impressively structured as to verge on the grotesque, an impression she had chosen to accentuate […] [with] exotic blue and green shadow and then drawing, not carefully, around the lids with an even brighter blue; her sharp cheekbones wore slashes of pink blusher, and her mouth, which was unusually fleshy and pouting, was richly and inaccurately slathered in red lipstick.”

Faye’s description of Marielle is an example of Cusk’s use of description and imagery in the novel. Marielle is described in detail, with her jutting, “impressively structured” facial bones, her fleshy mouth, and bright eyes. The fact that Marielle emphasizes her already prominent features shows that unlike Faye, Marielle wants to assert herself. Faye emphasizes that Marielle’s makeup is applied “not carefully” and “inaccurately,” with Marielle’s carelessness being a deliberate act that is meant to draw attention to her.

“‘I would like,’ she resumed, ‘to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown where I have no identity and no associations.’”

Outline is very much a postmodern novel, with characters grappling with how to be themselves and form authentic opinions in a world drowning in a surfeit of information. Penelope, one of the students in Faye’s writing class, spells out this problem: Penelope cannot tell a story because she does not know which story is hers to tell. Therefore, she wants to withdraw to a place where she can mute the noise and see the world with fresh eyes, reflecting the roles of storyteller and listener in shaping narratives.

“She had obviously been mistaken. […] She had been told this was a class about learning to write, something as far as she was aware involved using your imagination. She didn’t know what I thought I had achieved here, and she wasn’t all that interested in finding out.”

Faye’s matter-of-fact description of Cassandra, the disgruntled student, is nevertheless filled with observational humor. Cassandra’s body language has been growing more severe by the second, and when she talks to Faye, her manner is filled with righteous indignation. Cassandra’s question of whether what Faye is teaching is writing at all is a sly nod to the novel itself and the issue of the roles of storyteller and listener in shaping narratives.

“One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying—it seemed to me—was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction that they did not naturally want to go […] the artificiality of that vision and its consequences had become—to put it bluntly—anathema to me.”

These lines, spoken by Faye to the neighbor, constitute her manifesto in the book. Faye believes that making anything happen constitutes an artificial action. However, the irony is that speaking these lines leads to Faye having to do something decisive. The neighbor assumes that Faye wants him to take charge of their relationship and makes a pass at her. A shocked Faye declines his advances. The entire sequence indicates that for women, passivity is a fraught choice, reflecting the complexities of relationship dynamics.

“If a man had a nasty side to his character, she wanted to get to it immediately and confront it. She didn’t want it roaming unseen in the hinterland of the relationship: she wanted to provoke it, to draw it forth, lest it strike her when her back was turned.”

Illustrating the theme of the complexities of relationship dynamics, Elena states how she uses defensiveness to protect herself from men. She immediately tries to draw out the worst in men so that there are no nasty surprises later.

“I would like to be a D.H. Lawrence character, living in one of his novels. The people I meet don’t even seem to have characters. And life seems so rich, when I look at it through his eyes, yet my own life very often appears sterile, like a bad patch of earth, as if nothing will grow there however hard I try.”

Faye’s student Sylvia echoes the motif of the illusion that shames reality (See: Symbols & Motifs). To Sylvia, the lives of people in a D. H. Lawrence novel or story appear so rich that they mock her own seemingly mundane existence. Thus, she voices a common predicament of contemporary life, where people forever feel short of perfection.

“The sun shone like a scimitar at the edge of the rooftops.”

This is an example of Cusk’s use of figurative language; the sun here is explicitly compared to a scimitar. The simile emphasizes the little room that the crowding buildings leave for the sun since it is the shape of a curved blade. At the same time, the sharpness of the scimitar suggests that the sun will carve space for itself no matter what.

“At the time, he had got rid of her so efficiently and so suavely that she had felt almost reassured even as she was being left behind.”

Anne’s description of a polite divorce is an example of the text’s use of bleak humor. The divorce produces a sense of relief yet is also a hit job since her husband “got rid of her.” The use of “efficiently” implies a clinical procedure.