Saturn of Suburbia
Cosmophagic Narration in Arlington Park
New Critique || November 2024
Consciousness is persistent; we can never seem to get beyond it. It is the medium through which experience is vectored, and thus remains our genesis. In reading his study of the writer Jean Genet, Sontag tells us that “Sartre’s solution to the anguish of consciousness confronted by the brute reality of things is cosmophagy, the devouring of the world by consciousness.”1 In literature—which might, of course, be reality—this concept can be applied narrationally, grounded in the manner in which a novel is written: the method that the narrating entity of a third-person novel uses to depict both the external scenic events and the internal goings-on of a perspective character’s mind.2 The creation of a world leads inexorably to rebellion: Saturn, devouring his children, thereby creates himself, a lasting image on Goya’s black walls; a novel, constructing a reality, might find among its characters one with the power to usurp that narration.
In Modernist literature this appears as cosmophagic narration: the consciousness of a perspective character (i.e. one whose thoughts we can directly access, as related through various point-of-view techniques) rendered so completely as to remake the composition of the work itself. This is most famously seen in the High Modernism of Woolf and Joyce especially. Episode 18 of Ulysses (1920), in enacting the “locus classicus” of Dorrit Cohn’s autonomous monologue,3 becomes the foundation stone of cosmophagic narration as well. “Penelope” does not depict Molly Bloom’s thoughts so much as they devour any sense of order the chapter’s narrative entity might have tried to impose, to a degree not seen before or since.4 Similarly, the contrast between the experience of reading Woolf and Jane Austen, two supreme technicians navigating reasonably similar narrative landscapes, is instructive in comprehending the distinction of High Modernist fiction and the totality of the revolutionary shift represented by Modernism as a whole – a move that can be mapped onto an employment of cosmophagic narration and, as this essay argues, continues into the present day.5 There is never a sense in Pride and Prejudice (1813) that the narrative entity has anything less than complete control over the situation and how it “chooses” to render the fictive events as they occur.
Towards A New Teleology
Art as Philosophy
L’Esprit Literary Review || June 2024
The first thing I thought of walking into my Paris hotel room was that the photograph above the bed conveyed an essential teleological impulse that the photo by the door did not. Teleological is one of those odd words that are extremely, even officiously, common in certain circles, and effectively unknown elsewhere. Squarely within the former circle lays the UIC English Department, for reasons that principally involve an ongoing, inexhaustible obsession with a certain Prussian rabblerouser. Despite my best efforts, a few things have suffused my vocab.1 Dialectics aside, the pictures struck me. They were both of the Louvre.2 The first one, on the wall over the twin beds pressed together in the European fashion, foregrounded the pyramid, with its glass and angles and insistent modernity, placing a portion of palace wall alongside side, on something of equal footing. The other photo, near the door, I only noticed on turning around. Its composition instead relegating a sliver of pyramid to the extreme corner of the frame, spotlighting the ornate Cour Napoleon façade in all its splendor. The photos on each door of the Louvre Floor presented similarly engrossing claims about a possible linear progression of history; my voyages to the elevator were beset by the philosophical potential of radically extant hotel artwork.
Senseless Ilium
Speedboat and the Amoral Consciousness
L’Esprit Literary Review || May 2024
In the English language, there are tricks. Following these tricks are clues—hints and whispers of reason, sense, method to the madness, as one great moralist said of a rather unscrupulous protagonist. Polonius, of course, was referring to Hamlet’s words, and the insouciance with which he used them. Insouciance, from the French, comes approximately to sans souci, a quintessence of trick—no worries. Another tricky word, at least for me, is morality, which often as not I find to have typed out as mortality, that slippery little T, audible for us, forming at once a jeu des mots and inciting incident for this very paper. Indeed, to read the novel as it stands today, the moral and the mortal are not so very distinct at all.
It is another Shakespearean epicenter who kicks off Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, as Maria, speaking for a moment in her own voice, candidly approaches evil, picking it up like a stone and examining it: “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.” In his Introduction to the novel, David Thompson especially admires this moment; it strikes him as notable, that a heroine of a major novel knows of this thing called evil—“I think it’s true of the modern novel, and perhaps the novel as a whole, that it does not often speak of evil.” On first glance it is a rather odd comment from a major literary critic; how could one contend that novels (and we can take Thompson to mean literary novels—the categorical angst over Capote’s In Cold Blood comes to mind), could avert so foundational a component of lived experience? But he’s not wrong, indeed far from it. More it seems than any other art form, it is the novel which is made to traffic in the ethical, the righteous, the right and the wrong. The, in a word, moral. What might account for this demand? Perhaps it is due to the medium; language has a way of achieving an elucidation that is at once more intimate and less expansive than, say, artwork (had we but time, Horatio, we might speak here of Wittgenstein)—there is simply not as much room, in a novel, for the audience to maneuver through the shadowed Acheron of interpretation. What is said, is said: it is indicated, pointed towards, called into being. And because we as a species think very highly of thinking very highly of ourselves and our opinions, what is allowed to be exposed in so stark a manner must, of course, be good.
There is no God in the Garden
Point of View, Narrative Mode, and Feminist Existentialism in Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park
L’Esprit Literary Review || October 2023
Time, we learn from birth, is unconcerned with death. Or perhaps they are one, two cloaks worn by the same end. It all depends, really, on one’s point-of-view. The blackness of Goya’s walls, the warlike lamentations of pensive Macbeth, the cagey advice Teiresias lends to Odysseus’ katabasis. Time, with his sickle and his certainty, seems prepared for any eventuality. And this we know to be true, despite the comfort of denial. However, if there are no equals there are at least worthy adversaries to eternity; none so intrepid or resilient as narrative. If there is one remedy to an untimely death, it is the story of the life that preceded it.
In her most accomplished work, the preeminent novelist of the twenty-first century creates a world of suspended narration, bound by atemporality and infused by void. Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park is a novel of supreme technique, principally in its use of narrative mode and point-of-view, one that remains the most perfectly executed of her works even in light of the Outline trilogy’s peerless innovation, and stands at the vanguard of her revolution in the novel form.(1) It is her approach to narration, propelled by exemplary mechanics and an inspired interpretation of poetic structure,(2) that both sets her apart from her contemporaries and unlocks her novels as works of literary genius. Arlington Park, as her greatest achievement, is thus worthy of extended treatment.
Someplace Between the Damned and the Dreaming
Narrative Mode and the Rendering of Consciousness in Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport and Mathias Énard’s Zone
A Thin Slice of Anxeity || July 2023
Who are we, when alone with our thoughts? The philosophers differ. More importantly, perhaps, what are we? What do we sound like, how does the world with its endless errata of life find its way into cogent being, dialectically opposed to that ghost we call the self? What, in short, does it sound like in our minds? This a central question to realist fiction written in both the third- and first-person[1], albeit it in a rather different formulation than is typically found. For to frame the issue another way, we might ask how the thoughts of a character in a life-like novel should sound to us as reader. We might ask how the narration could best portray a verisimilar sense of interior life, to mind and close the gap between hero and audience. We might even ask about point-of-view.
There are many disquieting trends in contemporary (let’s say twenty-first century, even if the new millennium begins to feel rather far off) fiction, none of which we will explore here.[2] The overall slide and stumble towards accessibility and ease of consumption in the literary novel, mirroring the worst of society’s impatient whims, can be viewed as either a top-down or bottom-up problem, and is probably a bit of both. Mainstream presses are loathe to publish, and readers are frightened to open (and, most alarming, writers are intimidated to attempt) novels that take chances in form and style[3], that command and apply advanced concepts in literary theory, that demonstrate bold and original interpretations of fictive elements. However, before we go on too long and risk meeting the definition of ‘explore’, let us shine a light on a corner of the literary cave, which we can barely see from our spot amongst flames and shadows, but which nonetheless offers respite, even break, from the chains.
The Schemes of Poseidon
Point-of-View, Narrative Distance, and Risk-Taking in Contemporary Fiction
West Trade Review || June 2023
In his magisterial study of reality in Western literature, Mimesis, Erich Auerbach asserts, in a rather bold aside, that our conception of the Judeo-Christian God can be ascribed to, in effect, point-of-view. (1) Auerbach’s point is about the two branches of narrative mode that came to dominate storytelling in the Western tradition—split between a direct Homeric mode and a more fractured Biblical one—but there is something resonant about the nature of that mercurial beast. Point-of-view—which, here and elsewhere, I have and will use to mean the narrative mode employed to render a given perspective, which itself is narrative alignment with a specific character—is the engine of fiction. It is what makes literature literature and not journalism; (2) on another level, it is what makes fiction fiction and not, say, personal narrative. In the world of narrative, it is how the story is told, as opposed to simply what takes place, that makes it worth telling.
This distinction between the what and the how is a central component to literary theory of the past century, and has been articulated in a number of complex and contradictory ways. (3) Effectively, however, it’s a question of point-of-view. (4) I prefer to think of this dynamic as a book’s textual and narrative functions—these are imprecise analogues, suited more as they are to a writer’s definitional requirement than a scholar’s—taken to mean the book’s acting as a crafted piece of writing and its telling of a fictionalized story, respectively. Under whichever label one likes, however, I would (and have, and do) argue that point-of-view is that which defines fiction as such and give it its singular ability to alchemize life into art. The ‘right’ narrative mode, one that unlocks a work’s potential, one that is in accordance with all the innumerable characteristics of a piece as it comes together, is what allows it to achieve the fundamental purpose of fiction–to immerse the reader in a fully imagined and realized fictive world.
Ghost in the Machine
Dialogic Intimacy, Temporal Fluidity, and First-Person Free-Indirect in Rachel Cusk’s Outline
L’Esprit Literary Reivew || April 2023
The mind, we are told by Cartesian philosophy, is separate from the body. It exists on its own, invisible, inherent, indispensable. It is in the combination of mind and body, a vital if uneven relationship, where human life, in some manner, comes into being. Je pense, donc je suis. Descartes himself believed that the mind could carry on without a body, that it was the thinking matter towards which the universe aligned. In her Outline trilogy, Rachel Cusk demonstrates something of this concept in formulation of her own—even if, in true English fashion, she’s far more the empiricist. In following its protagonist across three novels, the reader of Cusk’s most groundbreaking work delimits the frontiers of consciousness-forward fiction.
With Outline, via her innovative use of point-of-view, Rachel Cusk achieves in the first person a degree of temporal fluidity and dialogic intimacy typically only found in third, a spotlighting of the mind that is able to remove itself from its own fictive body even as it tells that body’s story. Should Descartes be correct, and his own mind somehow lives on, he would perhaps enjoy a series of novels that explore with fearless ingenuity the limits of consciousness, and just how far from its body a thought can stray.
London in the Rain
Time, Character, and Literary Ancestry in Virginia Woolf’s The Years and Rachel Cusk’s Arlington Park
The Montréal Review || March 2023
There are many ways to measure the greatness of an artist. One might look at technique, influence, or vision. One might consider instead how certain works speak to the individual, drawing no distinction between celebrated masters and overlooked practitioners. All methods are inherently and viciously subjective, and to attempt to paint too bright a line is to miss the point entirely—the personal relationship between artist and audience is at the core of artistic expression and experience. The literary world is no exception to this individualism, but there is one measure, perhaps, that can be used in the consideration of the ‘great’ novelists that will satisfy if not all (an impossible dream), then at least many. Among many of the most effective and talented writers, there is a recurring pattern: their ‘minor’ books, the lesser known and lesser celebrated, the novels that they have ‘also’ written, alongside whatever classic(s) for which they are famous, are in their own right novels of immense power and skill. It is this depth, perhaps, of an oeuvre than can be used as a fair barometer of a writer’s legacy.
By this measure, two novelists—strikingly similar in aesthetic and design, each hailing from the same overabundant and overambitious island, nearly a century apart—stand out as especially ‘great’. This essay will consider The Years and Arlington Park, supposedly secondary works of Virginia Woolf and Rachel Cusk, respectively, in light of a few common craft elements. Both novels rely on incredible skill at the sentence level, along with a panoramic, free-flowing narration set in an exact structure, to render in great detail the collective lives of a group of people. While Cusk follows a set of wives and mothers across a single day in a London suburb, and Woolf rather astonishingly manages to paint a portrait of an entire extended family over a fifty year span, each operates on similar principles and achieves similar success. With neither representing the most famous or lauded books by their author, they both illustrate the depth and range of achievement enjoyed by two of England’s and English’s greatest novelists.
An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day
Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds and Methods of Rendering Consciousness in Ulysses
L’Esprit Literary Review || February 2023
As one would expect for a book regularly placed atop the “greatest of all time” lists, there are nearly as many avenues to traipse down in discussing Ulysses’ importance, accomplishments, and legacy as there are people who’ve (actually) read it. In fact, the number of versions of the very opening sentence of this very essay, acknowledging just how many studies have come before, is itself surely an outrageously high figure. But the preeminent reason for the continued importance of Joyce’s masterpiece (apologies to friends of Finnegan) is its place as the foundation stone of the revolution of the mind in fiction. Virginia Woolf famously talked about the luminous halo enveloping consciousness, and, a bit ironically given her initially limited interest in it, Ulysses stands as the greatest assemblage and demonstration of methods of rendering consciousness in fiction. Of course Woolf eventually came around, as did the rest of us, and now, 100 years after its publication, Ulysses remains unassailed by any serious challenger to its claim.
The Revolution Comes From Within
Interiority and Point of View in Selected Works of Rachel Cusk
A Thin Slice of Anxiety || December 2022
Good writing follows the rules, it is said, but great writing breaks them. Expanding on this rather didactic, if illustrative, maxim, it can be further said that truly exemplary writing makes up rules all it’s own. It is here, perhaps more than anywhere else, where Rachel Cusk cements herself as a preeminent novelist of her time, the most radical revolutionary of the form. While her prose is consistently excellent, her characters singular and compelling, and her stories vibrant and finely drawn, she is truly peerless in her innovations. Her mastery of technique and style are without equal in contemporary fiction, and it is in her grasp of point of view—that most daunting of technical swampland—where she sets herself apart. This essay will examine Cusk’s employment of various methods of point of view across a selection of her novels, with the intention of illustrating how she uses the craft to further her central goals and answer her central questions in each.
Point of view is, to coin a Cuskian simile, like a raccoon. Unlike plot, character, or setting, big and brash apex predators prowling comfortably atop fiction’s pyramid, point of view does its work when no one is watching, only rarely—and then often disastrously—spotted full on. It is the element of writing that is the hardest to see, even harder to wrangle into effectiveness, but one which represents the largest range of possible outcomes, from painfully lumbering fiction to sharp and multidimensional prose. Like some foraging animal, one typically notices point of view only after waking up in the morning to see the trash cans have toppled over and nothing is quite as it seemed. Cusk, then, is the leader of the pack.
There is no other living writer as technically proficient or naturally gifted in this subtle, infuriating art. Throughout her industrious career, she has operated across the spectrum, from straightforward talkative first- to Woolfian third-person to techniques all her own, blending parts of stylistic approaches to build a tool perfectly designed for the novelistic task at hand. Innovation, perhaps, is the marker of the artist.
Notes from the Overture
Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day and the Beginnings of High Modernist Literature || Pushcart Prize Nominee
A Thin Slice of Anxiety || November 2022
‘Dreams and Realities’ is the title of the sole manuscript of Virginia Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day. This working title captures the period in which the book was written—a society scarred by World War One and a cultural landscape tumbling into the most significant literary epoch in history. In a moment when the past and the future were so openly combative, dreams and realities were equally at odds and, for many, unattainable. This turbulent genesis is fitting for a novel that, while routinely and egregiously overlooked, laid the groundwork for the most successful and important English language literary career of the twentieth century.
Such an assessment would not have found an amenable audience in the book’s author; literary scholar Julia Berg notes Woolf’s angst in writing that ‘interminable Night and Day,’ a novel she felt to be antediluvian even before it was finished. But like so much else in her career, Woolf is far too hard on herself—even if, on this point, others seem to agree. In his study of Woolf’s oeuvre, the otherwise insightful David Daiches contends that Woolf ‘had not yet discovered a technique’ of her later career in Night and Day, and others have seen it merely as the second of two early ‘conventional’ novels before a major shift in Jacob’s Room. This point, however, is as superficial as Night and Day itself is said to be—and as plainly incorrect as those charges, too.
100 Years of Modernity
Language, Point of View, and the Declining Role of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction
Roi Fainéant Press || February 2022
In the early twenties of the new millennium, as we move towards and through the hundred year anniversary of these lines and the revolutionary literary movement they epitomized, it is fair to ask ourselves just how far we have gotten over the past century. Surveying the landscape of literary fiction, there is perhaps something to be desired, a hesitance in the approach to the novel as an art form that emanates, if not from convention, in that antiquated, Edwardian term, then from custom and from that most menacing word of our own age, marketability. It seems that there has been a death of the reader(1) at the base unit level of fiction. The scale of work, the division of labor between the writer and the reader, is a broad spectrum. An author can employ point of view and language in such a way that requires very little effort from her audience, on the one hand, to asking much of her, on the other. In modern publishing, at those fundamental levels, there has been a general decline in how much a reader has to do, how much work is required of her, in order to access and navigate a book and its central concerns. Instead of presenting a fictive world as it may be on the sentence level, messy and chaotic but with verisimilitude and reflective of its subject matter—consciousness, reality, and the human experience—the writer is doing ever more of the labor. The scale has slid to the point where the author seems to be enjoined to come to the reader, to present a world that, no matter how complex and imposing it may be, must be rendered so that there is little risk of losing many readers along the way.
dwhitethewriter 