62 pages • 2 hours read
Rachel CuskOutline
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Difficulty of Defining the Self
One of the key ways in which Rachel Cusk tackles the theme of the self is by having the form of her novel reflect its subject. Outline may have a first-person narrator, but unlike most works featuring such a protagonist, the novel contains very few descriptions of Faye’s feelings or her own interior life. The narrative functions more in the form of Faye describing other people and, in the process, bits of herself. In undertaking this complex narrative structure, Faye explores the difficulty of defining the self.
Faye wants to efface herself as a person and thus effaces herself on the page. Both in life and in her writing, Faye wants to wait, listen, sit back, and go with the flow. This process of self-effacement is not self-destructive but more like an experiment. Since what she created—a marriage, a nuclear-family home, and even a literary reputation—has been challenged, Faye wonders if there is any point in being a person who imposes structure on a chaotic reality. Perhaps a better approach to life is to develop a new consciousness, one that records and imbibes the experiences of others. However, because Faye’s self shines through the novel despite all her attempts at staying in the background, this indicates that the self cannot be contained as easily as she thinks. It resists definition, whether by Faye or the other characters.
Faye is not the only person in the novel who is looking to define herself. The people whom Faye interacts with, excepting some of her students, are mostly in their forties and older. Many of them have children, and most have experienced break-ups and divorces. They have built and unbuilt careers, moved cities, and gone through crises. Thus, they have cluttered pasts of which they want to unburden themselves and start afresh. The novel’s portrayal of middle-aged people who are still evolving reverses the trope of the coming-of-age story, showing that the quest for a self is not limited only to the young. For instance, the neighbor, who is in his sixties, tells Faye that he yearns for new romantic adventures, despite the failures of his marriages, because they offer him the chance to find a new self. The prospect of an affair welcomes him “with its largeness and brightness, to offer him an anonymity that might also constitute a re-evaluation of his whole persona” (174).
Selfhood is also challenged when the illusion of a safe, shared reality ends. This can happen with a childhood or a marriage. For example, Faye notes that as young boys, her children inhabited a single reality, locating their collective self in an imaginary universe. It was hard to “disentangle their separate natures” (79). She also tells Angeliki that finding one’s self is tough in the space of a marriage since one becomes a new person in relation to the spouse. Thus, after the end of a marriage or a childhood, people are again forced to find their individual, solitary self. Faye’s method to find this self, as she tells Angeliki, is to acknowledge that perhaps there is no authentic person hiding within one’s persona.
However, the novel suggests that even Faye’s concept of selfhood is incomplete, as it relies too much on negation and passivity. Instead, the self can be conceived of as a continuum, a series of episodes, or a collage of experiences. When Panitois offers Faye the photo from happier times, he reminds her not to view the picture as an illusion. The picture was the truth for her in the moment it was taken, just as her married self was her own self. There may be no authentic Faye to discover, but there is also no inauthentic Faye to conquer. There is only the slippery, changing reality of the self, which one must accept, as Panitois does.
The Roles of Storyteller and Listener in Shaping Narratives
Storytelling is a central theme in the novel since that is what most of its characters do. Faye writes the story of her trip to Greece, the people she meets tell her their life story, and her students tell her the story behind their stories. These layers of narrative show how storytelling is important in trying to make sense of one’s life and reality, as well as in advancing one’s purpose. While it is often the role of the storyteller that is discussed in conversations about stories, the novel shows how the audience of the story is equally important in shaping a narrative.
An example of this can be seen in Faye’s first writing class. The assignment that Faye gives out is storytelling in action since her students try to seize upon an observation and turn it into a story. Most of the students rise to the assignment, telling their stories volubly. However, one student—Cassandra—acts as the surly listener to the entire episode. At the end of the class, she tells Faye that her storytelling exercise has failed. Cassandra’s response changes the narrative of the story of Faye’s class, showing that what other students find interesting is a waste of time for her. Thus, the story changes in response to its listener.
Stories are also performances, with characters using them to reveal certain aspects of themselves and hide others. The neighbor tells the story of his life to Faye as a narrative meant to charm and seduce her. Faye’s interruptions change the narrative, to which the neighbor adapts in various ways. For instance, when Faye calls out the neighbor for idealizing his first wife and demonizing the second, in his next meeting, he describes his first wife as a cold, cruel woman. Similarly, when Faye shows disapproval at the revelation of the neighbor’s infidelity against the first wife, he immediately responds that the cheating was inevitable since he and his wife had been married since they were teenagers. The story of his first marriage—which he had described as “ideal” the first time he met Faye—now becomes one of restlessness and boredom.
Even the story that Faye narrates is a performance, despite Faye’s insistence that she is a passive recorder of happenings. Faye manages to convey irony and sarcasm with a neutral tone simply by juxtaposing contradictory facts about her characters. She notes that she likes Angeliki, yet she describes in detail Angeliki’s involved instructions about the food with the server, as well as the fact that despite these instructions, when the food finally arrives, Angeliki “serve[s] herself only miniscule amounts, her forehead furrowed with frowns as she prod[s] her spoon into each one” (114). Faye, the narrator, is assuming a jokey complicity with the listener of her story when she is delivering this particular narrative.
The importance of the role of the listener in a narrative is emphasized by the fact that people will tell their stories only to an interested, curious, and willing listener. Faye is proof of this phenomenon: She is able to get people to reveal so much about themselves because she gives them her quiet attention. This is why Anne pours out her heart to Faye, a woman she has just met. Anne’s story exists because Faye drew it out and listened to it. This makes the listener an indispensable shaper of a narrative. Furthermore, Faye’s ability as a listener and observer acts as metafictional writing advice: To write a story, one must first listen.
The Complexities of Relationship Dynamics
With most of the main characters having dealt with romantic break-ups and divorces, the subject of the fraught relationship between women and men threads throughout the narrative. Romantic happiness is a goal that most characters aspire to but few can sustain. Thus, throughout the novel, Faye examines the complex relationship dynamics between men and women.
Faye is divorced, and it can be inferred that it was her husband who initiated the break-up. The neighbor has been married and divorced thrice and has had affairs. Panitois is also divorced from his wife, Chrysta. However, even though these characters have had painful relationships, they cannot resist the lure of romantic happiness. Faye feels a yearning when she sees a happy couple with their children; the sight of Faye’s family in its heyday filled Panitois with such a pang that he felt like a failure. The desire for romantic happiness is forever in conflict with the complex dynamics that they experience while in love (the novel does not discuss same-sex relationships or relationships between people who are not cisgender; Melete, who identifies as a lesbian, is not shown with a partner).
Gender affects a character’s view of the other sex as well as romance. For instance, the neighbor blames his wives for his divorces, presenting the women as puritanical (his third wife), boring (the first wife), or empty headed (the second wife). Faye herself is prickly about men’s treatment of women, as is obvious when she shows her disapproval at Ryan staring at the waitress. Faye also corrects the neighbor whenever he is too critical of his wives. As a woman, Faye is used to society’s judgment and is therefore quick to notice the tendency of men to judge and mistreat women. The romantic and marital relationships that endure in the text are also far from perfect and tend to be transactional: Ryan says that “there’s a business aspect to running a household” (46), while Angeliki describes a Polish journalist called Olga who speaks of her husband and herself as “parts of an engine” (126).
While the text does not openly discuss gender politics, it is clear that what the neighbor calls the war between women and men involves gender bias, male privilege, and the threat of violence from men. This is underscored with the narrative’s descriptions of unpleasant encounters where a man shakes up a woman: Anne was nearly strangled by a mugger, left with lingering trauma and an altered voice, and Faye, who assumed that she could just be passive, is propositioned by the elderly neighbor. The breach in decorum makes Faye realize that women do not have the luxury to go with the flow or let down their guard. Perhaps the most balanced view on the relationship between women and men is offered by Melete, who says that it should be accepted that there is always a flaw in the equation. She suggests that accepting that flaw enables women and men to forge better relationships.
