Cusk’s Outline trilogy advances anti-fiction by erasing character and plot

Evidence

So many critics’ darlings openly urge this stifling. Rachel Cusk frankly assesses Knausgaard’s visceral “crisis of narrative’s distance from reality,” testifying that fiction is “fake and embarrassing … the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things seems utterly ridiculous.” She proclaims her much lauded Outline trilogy instead “intensely real,” hewing to a “fiction-averse component to human experience.” Cusk’s self-secreting realism in which she presents herself as a screen for people she encounters to speak for themselves has been received as a brilliant new mode of passive fiction, even though there can be no mistaking her active antifictionality. Obsoletizing character by staging a series of appearances of often-unnamed persons, puncturing narrative impersonality with the icy charisma of an upstage genius estranged from the writing classes and literary festivals that furnish the books’ settings, and propelling plotlessness with cumulative sponging of every iota of “the unmediated,” Cusk achieves novel evacuations. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 121

Categorization

• XREF: Cusk’s ‘screen’ technique recalls the passive, self-secreting narrator type and connects forward to her defense-of-mediation project.
• DEFINE: Names Cusk’s antifictional techniques concretely: unnamed characters, plotlessness, refusal of narrative impersonality.