English Studies-Literary Option Bachelor 15 Credits Spring semester-2020 Berndt Clavier
Outline’s Silence
In Search for a Silent Narrator
Table of Contents Abstract ... i Introduction ... 1 1.1 Freedom in Silence ... 4 Theory... 6 2.1 An Absent Narrator ... 6 2.2 Refusing Meaning ... 8 2.3 Narrator’s Authority... 11
2.4 Neutral and Silence ... 14
2.5 The Neutral Writing Mode ... 19
Analysis ... 21
3.1 Choices ... 21
3.2 Faye’s Silence ... 25
3.3 Cusk’s Writing Mode ... 27
Conclusion ... 29
Abstract
Outline’s Silence: In Search for a Silent Narrator is a Bachelor research paper that hopes to
open a discussion about Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014) and the possibility that an absent and silent narrator could lead to a new and innovative writing mode. The paper bases its theory on Hayden White’s “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” (1980) where White argues that moralization is unavoidable as long as there is a narrator in the text (27). Roland Barthes’s theories for a neutral writing mode and the notion of silence as they can be found in Writing Degree Zero (1953) and The Neutral (2002) respectively, are used here as the basis of argumentation. Outline’s narrator and her desire for passivity and silence are analyzed according to Barthes’s theories while its author’s writing is also examined for its neutrality. White’s work is used to support the paper’s argumentation that it is unlikely a narrator will be absent from a narrativized text. The paper concludes that although there is a desire for neutrality and silence both in the narrator’s character and in the author’s writing mode, this proves infeasible to apply in practice.
Introduction
Outline became the first novel Rachel Cusk published after a period of what she has
called “creative death” (qtd. In Kellaway 2014), due to the negative criticism she received after the publication of the autobiographical Aftermath. In “The Truth Alone” Clair Wills argues that Outline is the outcome of Cusk’s years of silence and the author’s announcement “that she was done with both genres”, fiction and autobiography (1). In
Outline, we meet Faye, a writer who, like Cusk, is divorced and a mother of two
underaged children. Faye travels in Athens to teach in a summer seminar for creative writing. She is also the narrator of the novel which according to Wills is “organized around the “absent” voice of the narrator” (1), because Faye is a character who prefers to be silent, or as she herself says: “I had come to believe more and more on the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible” (Cusk 170). Faye, throughout the novel, becomes the receiver of other peoples’ stories and their inner thoughts. While others speak Faye remains silent. In “World of Interiors” Judith Thurman describes Faye as a “passive vessel” (56) that “lends herself as a filter to her confidants” (48) in order for their stories to come out.
Throughout Outline the reader hears the stories of Faye’s fellow airplane ‘neighbour’, her students, and various other characters she meets during her week in Athens. What all these stories have in common is that they are all narrated to us by Faye who has been a patient listener, that hardly stops their monologues. A narrator, who Cusk describes in an interview with The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz, as a blank page for people to write their stories “in inverted commas” (qtd. in Schwartz 2018). In the same interview, Cusk professes her dissatisfaction with the traditional structures and conventions of literary fiction who led her to create Faye, a character who is “the only writer and she doesn’t say anything” (qtd. In Schwartz 2018). Amidst all the monologues, Faye is the only one who does not
express a desire to tell her life’s story. What she tells us is that she has “decided to want nothing at all” (Outline 171).
Here we would have to stop and ask how a character who has decided to remain silent and passive and who wants nothing but to live a life without making any imposing splashes in the water, can at the same time assume the responsibility of becoming the narrator of a story. Wouldn’t that decision contradict Faye’s desire for silence and passivity? If Faye as a character is perceived as passive and silent by her will not to speak her story, then can she also be perceived as a silent and passive narrator by her decision to present other peoples’ stories? Furthermore, how is the reader to categorize Rachel Cusk’s writing in Outline if its author has repeatedly expressed her refusal to work with traditional conventions of fiction and her dissatisfaction with the criticism her autobiographies received (qtd. in Kellaway 2014). In “Rachel Cusk: 'Aftermath Was Creative Death. I Was Heading into Total Silence' ”, Kate Kellaway refers to Outline as an “autobiographical novel of originality and poise” that escapes categorization because “[i]t is about authorial invisibility, it involves writing without showing your face” (Kellaway 2014). Wills seems to agree, calling the novel “an experiment in autobiography in which the self is missing, or is there only in outline” (2). Form, speech, and personal style in a narrative is what preoccupied Cusk’s mind when she wrote Outline (qtd. in Kellaway 2014), with the novel’s core relying on its narrator’s desire for silence and passivity. So, is Outline’s writing mode something uncategorized and fresh that has led critics to praise its ‘innovations’?
This paper aims firstly, to research the possibility of an ‘absent’ and ‘passive’
narrator on a text based on Outline’s narrator, who has been described as such. Secondly, it is interested in Faye’s desire for silence and passivity in correlation with her identity as a narrator. And lastly, will try to research Rachel Cusk’s writing mode in Outline that has led many critics and reviews to praise its innovations on the novelistic genre. It is important at
this point to contemplate and ask what exactly it means to have an absent narrator, whose main desire in life is to not impose and stay silent. Has Faye’s desire to be neutral in life led to a neutral writing mode that cannot be compared or found in any other novel? Does Faye’s desire for an “unmarked” life (Cusk 170), and her silent response to other peoples’ stories, indicate that she does not want to influence the reader by making moralizations and judgments? Roland Barthes explains neutrality as someone’s desire to avoid choosing
between two things, which leads someone to avoid creating meaning in his/her life by simply avoiding moralizing something by choosing it (The Neutral 7). On the other hand, Hayden White argues in “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” that
moralization in a narrative is unavoidable as long as there is a figure such as a narrator who has the power to choose how the events of the story will be represented (27).
Furthermore, in Writing Degree Zero, Barthes extensively argues that a ‘new’ and ‘fresh’ form relies on the writer’s momentary achievement in writing in a neutral mode without an imposing language that produces judgements (77-78). What is more, for Barthes the form is ‘new’ and ‘fresh’ if it cannot be found anywhere else in the history of Literature, and if it is never to be repeated or found again in any other writing mode (76-78). Combining Barthes’s and White’s argumentations, this paper will try to research Outline’s ‘absent’, ‘passive’ and ‘silent’ narrator. Since White argues that moralization is inescapable in a narrative (27), could we have a ‘silent’ narrator? And could we perceive this ‘silence’ as a path that leads us to Barthes’s neutral writing mode?
1.1 Freedom in Silence
As we have seen, silence and passivity are the main intention for Outline’s form. It seems important therefore to understand what is meant by these terms. Josie Mitchell’s “To Endure the Void: On Rachel Cusk's ‘Outline’ Trilogy” (2018) addresses the same question of “WHO IS THE narrator of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy of ‘autofictional’ novels?” (2018) and how we are to interpret the narrator’s silence. To answer this question, Mitchell takes a look back on earlier work produced by Cusk, from her first novel to the much-criticized memoirs. In doing so, the article doesn’t only try to portray the narrator’s character but Cusk’s character as well: “Faye’s recent change in perspective has been
significant and traumatic. The dissolution of the sanctity of marriage has precipitated a series of revelations — for Faye, for Cusk — and yielded a capacity for suffering and insight” (2018). Mitchell sees in the face of Faye a mask that Cusk wears in her pursuit of writing the truth. The review examines Cusk’s Outline and her memoirs, and questions Cusk’s narrative choices when it says: “There is a fertile ambiguity to the mask. It is often unclear to me how to interpret Faye’s silence: is it judicious or judgmental?” (2018).
Like Kellaway and Wills, Mitchell also points out the similarities between Cusk and Faye, so would it be possible to interpret Faye’s desire for silence the way Cusk explains her desire? In “Coventry” (2019), Cusk explains that in her early years she viewed silence as a form of punishment imposed to her by her parents, for reasons she could not understand (1). Existing in the same place with others but not being spoken or referred to signified for her a kind of self-annihilation, like being driven out of a narrative and simply put in a pause filled with silence (2). Over the years her understanding of silence changed and Cusk argues that silence could signify a state of freedom or a peaceful existence since the narrative has ended and the “suspension of disbelief” has vanished in order for reality to take the place of the imagined story (7). Cusk now sees a kind of freedom in silence. A freedom that is based in
the aftermath of the story and in the realization that if the worst has happened inside the story, then being driven out of the central narrative is nothing to be afraid of. If anything, this freedom is created in the absence of the story. It is a form of liberation. If there is no story to participate in anymore, if you are out of it, then there is no conflict in your life. Choosing silence then means avoiding conflict, avoiding participation in any narrative. It seems that Cusk’s silence has turned into a choice, a decision someone makes to not participate in the narrative anymore. But if Cusk believes in the freedom that silence brings after a narrative is over, then how are we to understand the decision to write Outline? And if Faye shares the same views about silence as Cusk, how are we to understand her decision to narrate?
On one hand, we have an author who is tired of fiction and nonfiction and their
implications on her personal life (Kellaway 2014) and on the other, we have a narrator who is “no longer interested in literature” (Outline 19) and who no longer wants “to persuade
anyone of anything” (Outline 19). Nonetheless, the same author published Outline and Faye became its narrator. So, could an author produce a work that resembles nothing we have seen before and could a narrator become invisible in a text? The focus of this research is the passivity and neutrality of Faye as a narrator, and the passivity and neutrality of Cusk’s writing mode that has led critics and reviews to characterize the novel as innovative and that “[i]t defies ordinary categorisation” because “[i]t is about authorial invisibility; it involves writing without showing your face” (Kellaway 2014).
Theory
2.1 An Absent Narrator
Let us first examine the possibility that the narrator of Outline works in absentia (Wills 1), or rather works without showing the reader that she exists in the text, that she is only there to work as a “passive filter” in order for other peoples’ stories and thoughts to come out (Thurman 56). Could we ever find a narrator who is neutral and passive in the text and who does not try to color the events of the narrative under her/his moral views by imputing them with personal judgments? Is there a narrator so discreet that we cannot see his/her choices? Someone that would leave the narrated events to speak for themselves without trying to produce meaning out of them or persuade the reader?
Hayden White would probably argue that such an invisible figure would be hard to find in any narrated story, in any narrated text. In “The Value of Narrativity in the
Representation of Reality”, White asks us to consider: “Could we ever narrativize without moralizing?” (27). Could we ever have a narrative that avoids creating meaning out of its represented events? White firmly believes that we as humans tend to seek meaning in everything in order to understand the social world around us. He finds that:
So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematic only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. (5)
Roland Barthes agrees with White, as he sees that narrative “is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself” (Image Music Text 79). In short, for both White and Barthes, we narrate in order to make sense of our life, as we breathe in order to exist. Narrativity is an unconscious choice for us, we narrate in order “to translate knowing
into telling” (White 5). We might know events have happened, but it is not until we put them in order, bind them together in a plot, that we can see what these events mean, what they tell us. The world might be full of otherwise ‘chaotic’ events that seem unrelated with one another; once we create a narrative, we create a sequence for those ‘chaotic’ events, an order that keeps them together and by the end of that sequence of represented events we found meaning in the narrated story. So, by that logic according to White, to refuse or deny
narrativity would indicate a refusal to create meaning, when narrative appears to be missing, meaning appears to be missing as well (6).
Assuming “that the absence of narrative capacity or a refusal of narrative indicates an absence or a refusal of meaning itself” (White 6), we could turn on Barthes’s argument that any choice we make or when we choose one thing over another indicates the creation of meaning. Because “meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another) and all conflict is generative of meaning” (The Neutral 7). So, by refusing to narrate, one refuses to create meaning. But would not that refusal indicate a choice as well? If for example, we view narration as one paradigm (one pole or sign) then we could view the absence of narration as another paradigm (the exact opposite pole), to choose one would mean to refuse the other. Our choice alone indicates that we are not neutral, we either choose narration or we do not, but by choosing we enter a conflict, we create meaning. For Barthes, the only way for us to be neutral is to not choose at all, to avoid conflict and to avoid the paradigm (The Neutral 7). That being said we are left with a dilemma, we either choose narrative and the unavoidable creation of meaning or we refuse both.
2.2 Refusing Meaning
Let us imagine that we chose to refuse narrative. In this scenario, White would ask us “what
kind of meaning is absent or refused?” (6). The answer for White relies on how the events
have come to us, on what form they are presented to us. There have been instances where narrativization of events has been refused or omitted. The form of a plot narrative with a beginning, middle and end, which shows a cause-effect relationship between events, can simply not be applied to events (6). The historical form of Annals, for example, does not have the form of a narrated story, it rather consists of a chronologically ordered list of various historical events (9). So, are we to understand that meaning is refused? We could ask the same question about the historical form of the chronicles which, according to White, “seems to wish to tell a story, aspires to narrativity, but typically fails to achieve it” (9). The
chronicle’s failure is simply attributed to the lack of an ending that could have completed the story it narrates. Do these forms really refuse to create meaning or do they simply lack a certain quality or an agency that would create meaning? The answer for White seems to be the latter, simply because events do not have the ability to speak or narrate themselves, “they can perfectly well serve as the referents of a discourse, can be spoken about, but they should not pose as tellers of a narrative” (8).
In the case of the annals, White notes that human agency over the recoded events does not exist because the highest authority over the text is a divine one (12). The form of annals does not indicate when or by whom the events where recorded, nor do we have any notion as to why someone would choose to record the lack of crops over a battle (12). The form does not appear to have a plot, it simply records events that have happened under the title Anni Domini (11-12). For White, this indicates that in the annalist’s social reality there is a higher divine agency, whose authority marks the beginning and ending of time. Under this social context the list of the recorded events could go on forever, their importance is of no significance;
under the divine authority, all events are equal simply because they have happened (12). The annalist is therefore not responsible for choosing how the events will be represented or if their form will create meaning. In a sense, the annalist does not refuse meaning by not completing the chronological list since he/she believes that the list will end in judgment day. What is missing from the annalist’s reality is, for White, a central social system that could govern the account of the annal’s recorded events and fuse them with some “ethical or moral significance” (15). In other words a plot. But since the annalist’s reality exists in a world “in which things happen to people rather than one in which people do things” (14), the central social authority is not a human agent that has the ability to narrativize the events into a plot but rather a divine invisible one.
If we are to examine the form of chronicles, we will find that the notion of divine authority is no longer there. What has taken its place in the text is a “central subject” (20). According to White, what we can see in the chronicles is a “greater narrative coherency” because the events here are gathered and evolve around a central social authority that includes human agency (20). What has changed is that we can see a clear time and geographical space where the events take place, there is still a chronological order in the representation but now we know when and by whom the chronicle is written. The chronicle’s account of historical events resembles the form of what we might call contemporary history narratives. But what the chronicle lacks is closure to the narrative, “like the annals but unlike history, [it] does not so much ‘conclude’ as simply terminate” (20). But again, White reminds us that this does not necessarily mean a refusal of meaning in the narrative. What we have to understand is that even if the chronicle stops its narrative, there is still a central plot that governs the text, there is a beginning we can go back to and retrospectively seek connections of cause and effect between the beginning and the end of the narrated account (21). But more importantly, we have someone who has taken upon himself/herself the responsibility to
narrativize the historical events. The chronicle’s “discourse is a fashioned discourse, the narrativity of which, in comparison to that of the annalist, is a function of the self-consciousness with which this fashioning activity is entered upon” (21). Now we have a human agent whose self-consciousness is present in the narrative by the choices it made over the discourse. For White, this exemplifies that the narrative cannot present its events
2.3 Narrator’s Authority
At this point, we should pause and see how, according to White’s argumentation, human agency is at the center of creating meaning. We must also bear in mind that for Barthes the human capacity to choose one thing over something else is in itself “generative of meaning” (The Neutral 7). With that in mind we can see why for White, contemporary history forms are more susceptible and generative of meaning. It is because “[t]he authority of the historical narrative is the authority of reality itself; the historical account endows this reality with the form and thereby makes it desirable, imposing upon its processes the formal coherency that only stories possess” (23). The reality of the historical narrative does not rely on a divine authority; it relies on a central social law. Following Hegel’s argumentation in the
Philosophy of History, White notes that what has changed in this form is the object/subject
dynamic, the same dynamic that has changed in reality as well (15-16). The authority in this reality is the law of the state; the state law presides over the narrativized events and binds them in a plot that, for Hegel, produces a more objective history, the nation becomes the subject in a narrativized history (White 16). This “Hegelian law” seems like the higher authority under which meaning is produced in contemporary forms of narrative. Thus, for White, the creation of meaning out of represented events is indissolubly connected with the notion of an authority that enables the plot of a narrative to unfold. As White explains that “The reality which lends itself to narrative representation, is the conflict between desire, on the one side, and the law on the other” (16). When the law does not exist then “there can be neither a subject nor the kind of event which lends itself to narrative representation” (16). So, even if the author of annals wished for a more narrativized representation of the events, he/she might have been unable to achieve it since in his/her reality the notion of a ruling human law appears to be missing.
But are we to understand that this history form is free of moralization? Do historical events reach us exactly as they happened or are they being subjected to a moral
consciousness? For White, narrativization of events in a plot leads to moralization. When history is written in a narrative, events are bound together in a plot and they are presented as if they have always been there, in this form under the authority of a central social law. But since this social law has human agency, White invites us to question the “historical self-consciousness” according to “its interest in law, legality, legitimacy, and so on” (17). He invites us to consider whether narrativity “of the fictional or the factual sort, presupposes the existence of a legal system against or on behalf of which the typical agents of a narrative account militate” (17). If ‘real’ events are narrated in a form that much resembles the plot of fictional stories or as White notes:
If every fully realized story, however we define that familiar but conceptually elusive entity, is a kind of allegory, points to a moral, or endows events, whether real or imaginary, with a significance that they do not possess as a mere sequence, then it seems possible to conclude that every historical narrative has as its latent or manifest
purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats. (17-18) So, according to White in a narrative either real or imaginary, the representation of events is subjected to the morality of its creator, since its creator is human and humans have “the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine” (18). Thus, we can see that any text that includes
narrativized events runs the risk of them being represented according to the moral system of its writer.
For White, it is clear that since humans tend to desire meaning above all (5), meaning will be created by the end of the story. When history transforms into a plot with a complete
meaning and moralization, we have to wonder who conducts this plot and its meaning. White has pointed out that events cannot really “speak to us” (23), there needs to be an entity that organizes the narrative and chooses how events will be presented and in what order. Since the events of the narrative are being dramatized and carry a moral meaning, then we have to wonder whose morality is imputed in the narrative form. We can only assume that this moral meaning is subjected to the authority of the written narrative, the narrator. The question of objectivity in narrated events is therefore open. White makes the same question when he writes: “Has any historical narrative ever been written that was not informed only by moral awareness but specifically by the moral authority of the narrator?” (24). It seems hard to imagine that any narrative escaped the moral judgment of its narrator. In fact, we could extend the question of authorial objectivity into other forms of narrative. Can events ever be represented without the ‘moral consciousness’ of their narrator? If the higher authority of the text is that of the narrator, then we have to assume that he or she is present in the text by the choices she/he has made in the representation of events. Therefore, we are following a narrative that is subjected to the ‘moral consciousness’ of its narrator. If moralization is inescapable in a narrativized form because it is subjected to human agency, then if we take away the narrator as a component does that mean that we take away moralization? For White, our social reality and our need for meaning is such that makes us rely on the authority of the narrator to tell us a story with a plot, even if we know that it might not be an objective one (27). So, could we ever find a narrative that the narrator is absent? Or as White asks “Could we ever narrativize without moralizing?” (27). It seems unlikely, as Barthes reminds us that our need to narrate compares to our need to breathe (Image Music Text 79).
2.4 Neutral and Silence
If a narrator is unlikely to be absent in a narrative, is there a possibility that a narrator may be ‘silent’ and ‘passive’? In other words, could a narrator be neutral? Could there be a writing mode that supports such a narrator? If we wish to examine the silence and passivity of Cusk’s narrator, we should first find a way to describe the notion of silence and the notion of a neutral writing mode that might support such a narrator.
Roland Barthes’s theory of the Neutral and of a neutral writing mode might be able to help on this research. As mentioned before, for Barthes to enter the Neutral means to avoid the paradigm, to avoid conflict by choosing something or refusing something else (The
Neutral 7). The Neutral became the subject of his lectures during 1977-1978 at the College
de France, the lectures where later published as a book, titled The Neutral. Here we see that Barthes explains the Neutral as follows:
I define the Neutral as that which outplays {dejoue} the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm. For I am not trying to define a word; I am trying to name a thing: I gather under a name, which here is the Neutral. (6)
Barthes’s Neutral has certain parameters and restrictions in its definition. His definition is a structural one as “the Neutral doesn’t refer to “impressions of greyness, of “neutrality”, of indifference” (7). Barthes’s Neutral is found in avoiding the conflict of choice, the paradigm that is generative of meaning (7). Barthes narrows down his definition of the Neutral and explains that it “embodies the refusal to dogmatize: the exposition of the nondogmatic cannot itself be dogmatic” (10). We can “search for the Neutral and [the] the performance of the Neutral” because the Neutral can be displayed (11). We can describe its nuances “as the Neutral is the shedding of meaning” but we cannot point it out as that would be the antithesis of its very purpose, we would turn it into a paradigm (11-12). We can desire
the Neutral and dream about it, for “He who desires, postulates (hallucinates)” (12). Our Neutral relies on the desire to inhabit it, it can be seen by others in our will to not possess something, on the refusal to categorize our discourse, on our will “to dissolve one’s own image” (12-13). We may desire the Neutral but once we speak and point to our Neutral, we turn it into a paradigm and therefore we lose it. But “[t]he desire for the Neutral stages a paradox: as an object, the Neutral means suspension of violence; as a desire, it means violence” (13). But we cannot exactly express this violence; “that there is a passion of the Neutral but that this passion is not that of a will-to-possess” (13). Barthes finds a problem with this desire, because “[a]s a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires” (13). For Barthes, the Neutral relies most of all on “its absolute singularity … that it is nonmarketable” (13). The beauty of the Neutral is that it is the only desire we cannot sell, if we do, we destroy our desire for it.
To better explain his Neutral, Barthes examines if we can find it in silence. By definition, silence refers to “stillness, absence of movement and of noise.” (21-22), and we could find this ‘stillness’ and ‘absence’ in something that is yet to be born, named and categorized. We could find this silence in nature for example, but once speech comes forth and describes the silence of nature, then silence is sacrificed (22). But as Barthes explains, everyone has the right to speak and everyone has the right to be quiet, or “the right for silence” and “the right not to listen” (22-23). The problem comes when this silence is destroyed and ‘polluted’ by words (23). The Neutral here “postulates a right to be silent- a possibility of keeping silent” (23). Our right not to speak, our right to remain silent relies on our desire to do so.
However, this particular desire for silence could be misinterpreted by others. To stay silent could be interpreted as a desire to conceal our inner thoughts, to hide something; since speech reveals our inner world, then silence conceals it. Our silence then could signify
something, ‘speak’ itself about something, it works “at the level of the implicit” (24). We stay silent therefore we hide something. And in a society where the ‘right to speak’ is the right to proclaim your freedom, silence could be perceived as a sign of guilt. Then “the implicit is a crime, because the implicit is a thought that escapes power” (24), for no one could categorize you by your thoughts if you do not speak them.
For Barthes, silence tries to outplay speech, to outplay the paradigm. If we use silence as a sign then we do not outplay the paradigm, we become part of it (26). If speech is a dogmatic proclamation of our thoughts, reasoning and meaning; silence comes as the opposite. As a nondogmatic manifestation of our inner world. So, if speech is a sign then its absence could be viewed as the avoidance of the paradigm. However, silence becomes
problematic when it is used as a sign. When silence means something, it takes the “form of an image” to be used as the opposite of dogmatism like “something that outplays signs” then it “is very quickly recuperated as a sign” (26). If our silence is used as a tool to be measured against speech, then our silence becomes a sign in itself. It is not Neutral; it is the paradigm. On the other hand, when speech signifies nothing, when it communicates nothing that can create a significant meaning then it becomes silence (25). Speech in a non-imposing form, for example a chit chat about the weather, is a speech that does not articulate a thought or a reasoning, is “accepted in its superficial, contingent form” (25) As long as speech is opposed to dogmatization, then “we could say that ‘chatter’, being a discourse of pure contingency, is a form of silence insofar as it outplays words” (26).
But what happens when we use speech to signify and point to our silence? Barthes quotes an anecdote found in Francis Bacon Advancement of Learning to display this paradox of silence.
There goes an old tradition <…> that many Grecian philosophers had a solemn meeting before the ambassador of a foreign prince, where each
endeavored to show his parts, that the ambassador might have somewhat to relate of the Grecian wisdom; but one among the number kept silence <Zeno, according to Diogenes Laertius>, so that the ambassador, turning to him asked: ‘But what have you to say, that I may report it?’ He answered: ‘Tell your king that you have found one among the Greeks who knew how to be silent’ (qtd. in Barthes 26)
Here for Barthes lies the paradox where silence becomes a sign “if one makes it speak” (26). Zenon did not display his silence by continuing to remain silent and allowing others to perceive the meaning as they wished to; he pointed out the meaning himself. He signified his silence; he revealed his desire for it, so the Neutral was not achieved (27). We could therefore see that once we refer to our silence, once we speak the unspoken, we turn it into a paradigm. We do not outplay it, we become part of it. But can silence be outplayed? For Barthes silence is a “weapon assumed to outplay the paradigms (the conflicts) of speech” (27). If silence becomes a paradigm then the Neutral will automatically turn against it, since the Neutral tries to outplay the paradigm, then it will try to outplay silence as well (27). How then are we to find the Neutral in silence? Are we to keep silent forever in order to avoid the paradigm? Wouldn’t that be a systematic silence as well as a dogmatic one? (27). What if we are to balance speech and silence in order to break the opposite systems of speech vs. silence? In the figure of Pyrrho, Barthes finds a position that is “pragmatic, antisystematic … a kind of signpost: ouden mallon” which means “neither this nor that” (27). A signpost between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ that indicates that nothing is said at all, because you do not really choose ‘yes’ as a sign and at the same time you don’t refuse the sign of ‘no’ (27). This way someone “doesn’t contradict himself when he speaks or keeps quiet according to the occasion … what’s
important for him … [is] that the game of speech and silence not be systematic: that, to oppose dogmatic speech, one not produce an equally dogmatic silence” (28). Barthes
suggests that one does not have to enter a mystic silence in order to avoid the paradigm nor to speak about his/her silence, since that would signify it as part of the paradigm. The Neutral seems almost impossible “to speak it is to defeat it, but not to speak it is to miss its ‘setting up’” (29). The Neutral silence does not rely on the total absence of verbal communication, is more a desire to inhabit inner silence by avoiding judgements and qualifications, this silence is a borderline act (29). A life between ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Silence in Barthes’s Neutral is
displayed both externally and internally, it is a mental process that requires of us the stillness that is found in nature, to become non-judgmental, nondogmatic and to not speak the
2.5 The Neutral Writing Mode
The notions of the Neutral and of silence in a non-judgmental speech can also be found in Barthes’s Writing Degree Zero, where he asks us to consider if there is a writing mode that can outplay the paradigm of Literature. Here Barthes defines the writing mode as an
equation, where language + style +form equals the writing mode of the writer. Language is described as a “social object by definition, not by option” (9), a cognitive tool that every writer possesses, which is socially inherited. Style on the other hand is very personal , it “has its roots in the depths of the author’s personal and secret mythology, that subnature of expression where the first coition of words takes place, where once and for all the great verbal themes of his existence come to be installed” (10). While form is described as a system that carries the intention of the content, a framework which includes the writer’s language and style in order for the mode of writing to exist (14). Form is a technical “instrument” that has the ability to work differently for every writer, but same “type of conventions, the same technical reflexes” can be found in writers who are separated by generations through time (14). Form, therefore, is the technical ingredient that completes the equation of literature’s writing mode. It is the framework of the content, the common
inherited language, and the individual style of the writer.
With that in mind, Barthes invites us to consider if a writing mode could ever separate itself from Literature’s history and stand alone and independent by avoiding previous
paradigms. And if a writer could produce a writing mode that does not repeat previous conventions, intentions of the form and language. In Albert Camus’s The Stranger, Barthes sees a pivotal moment in Literature’s history where the writing mode is close to zero because language, style and form are neutral. Here, Camus’ s language forgoes the tiresome use of elaborated metaphors, judgments and imitation of real speech that made the form of realism so imposing (67-72). The language here simply reports in an amodal way allowing the
intention of the form to be free of codified structures, the form becomes innocent by not imposing an ideology and the writing becomes “colourless, freed from all bondage to a pre-ordained state of language” (76). Here, everything works towards silence. But the neutral language style is achieved momentarily; once it is reproduced the form becomes stylistically enhanced with mechanisms and takes a place in Literature’s discourse (78). If the form is repeated then it can be codified. Structures begin to appear once again the very moment they were heading into silence. The very moment you create something ‘new’, you set in motion mechanisms that can be repeated. The form then takes its place inside the history of
Literature. It can be found, pointed, and repeated. The writer who once stood outside the history of Literature, who stood outside the paradigm, is now a paradigm of his/her own. Even if Camus’s The stranger reached the writing degree zero, the repetition of Camus’s writing mode will always signify that his writing stands as a fixed point, a sign. Thus, its original neutrality and freedom dies the same moment it is born, because “there is no writing which can be lastingly revolutionary” (75). The writer will either enter the paradigm every time he/she writes or will fall into total silence.
Let us now take a look at Cusk’s text itself, and Faye, our narrator, who seems to appear missing from it. Is Faye really absent and silent and does that affect the text making it harder to categorize its form? We have seen that, for Hayden White, as long as there is an authority in the narrative who chooses how events will come to us, moralization and meaning are inescapable. While Roland Barthes finds silence almost impossible and the Neutral in a writing mode only momentarily being achieved. Every time a writer tries to break away from the paradigm of Literature by entering a neutral writing mode, he/she will unavoidable create new structures that can be repeated, the form will be codified and reenter the paradigm of Literature (Writing Degree Zero 78).
Analysis
3.1 Choices
Very early in Outline Faye meets her fellow passenger, an elder Greek retired businessman who travels back to Athens for the summer (5-31), and whose name remains a mystery until the end of the novel. This first encounter consists of a dialogue exchanging information about the weather in Athens and Faye’s reason for visiting the city and the reader begins to know a little bit about them both (6-18). Here, Faye describes the man sitting next to her as “a small man in a pale linen suit, richly tanned, with a silver plume of hair” (5), the language seems impartial, consisting of declarations that do not seem to carry any judgments. A few pages later, Faye gives us an insight of how she perceives his character when she says: “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”(17). She then goes on to compare his way of asking questions with the way her children had learned how to drop things on the floor only for someone else to recover them (17). Here, the language does not seem to stay neutral. Faye uses a metaphor and lets the reader know how she feels about her ‘neighbour’s’ questions. The language here, according to Barthes’s argumentation, is not free or ‘innocent’ since it does not avoid comparison or judgment, it does not simply report something in “an amodal form”, it rather imposes an image upon the reader which leads us to believe that the language and the form are not impassive and neutral since the absence of the imposing tone of
judgment must be complete throughout the writing (Writing Degree Zero 76-77). Here, Faye’s language leads the reader to create an image of the man sitting next to her. An image that it is not simply a report of his exterior looks. Here, we see the ‘neighbour’ with the eyes of the narrator, a narrator who a few pages later tells us that: “I did no longer, want to persuade anyone of anything” (19).
Faye’s desire is simple; she wants to live a life unimposing, passive, and neutral. In short, a life that does not create moralizations, at least this is what she tells the reader. That she “has come to believe more and more on the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible” (170). For Faye, making choices and trying is a “sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go” (170). How is the reader then to understand Faye’s choice to be a narrator? As we have seen, White argues in “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” that the higher authority in a text is the narrator, under whose moral consciousness and decisions, events are represented in the narrative (27). So, is Faye an absent narrator whose choices on the representation of events we cannot see in the text? It is true that for the most part of the text, Faye as a character rarely speaks or makes a statement. She chooses to let others speak about their lives and their stories as she remains silent. Though she, as a narrator, chooses the form and presentation of other peoples’ stories. Let us examine the difference between the ‘neighbour’s monologues about his first marriage and the reasons it fell apart. And let us examine Faye’s choices of representing events sometimes in direct speech and ‘inverted commas’ and sometimes in indirect speech. Very early in the novel, we learn that “It was thirty years since his first marriage ended, and the further he got from that life, the more real it became to him” (15). Here the reader learns in the form of indirect free speech that the man’s first marriage has ended years ago and that he views his old life more real than his current one.
Much later in the novel, the reader learns how the man’s first marriage came to an end, but this time Faye chooses that the events will reach the reader in the form of direct speech rather than indirect. While Faye and the ‘neighbour’ are out in the sea with the man’s boat, the reader learns first in direct and then in indirect speech the events that led to the man’s divorce. First, in indirect speech we learn that “His first marriage , he said, had really
come to an end on a day when they had had a large family party”, the party ended and the man had fallen asleep on a sofa (172). Just a few lines later the speech representation changes and now the events come directly from the man’s mouth. “‘I believe,’ he resumed presently, ‘that what my wife did then was premeditated, that she saw me lying there and intended to force a confession from me by surprise… she asked me whether I was having an affair” (172-173). In the following lines, we learn that the man did have an affair and that he does not forgive his wife for making him admitted while he was half-conscious and half asleep and that this was the first fight that led them to divorce (173), all of which are presented to the reader in the form of direct speech. Is the reader to understand that the man’s monologues present two different versions of the events? That when his speech is in indirect from, he is maybe concealing something while when his speech is presented in direct form the truth comes out? That might lead us to think that the narrator makes a conscious choice of how the man’s character will reach the reader. Faye clearly makes a choice on how the truth will reach the reader.
In instances like the first example of indirect speech, where Faye chooses to use the past tense and the third person in her narration, we could note following Barthes
argumentation in Writing Degree Zero, that her choices on the narrative form much resemble the form of realism. The use of past tense, the third person and the linguistic choices such as metaphors belong, according to Barthes, in a writing mode that much resembles the form of realism, a form that cages the content, due to its imposing tone and the codification of its aesthetic elements (67). Thus, in these instances, the neutral and innocence in the narrative that would lead us to a ‘new’ and ‘fresh’ writing mode are lost. Faye’s choices on the representation of events (direct vs. indirect speech) reveal to us that the Neutral is not achieved. Since the moment we choose something automatically leads to the refusal of something else (The Neutral 7) and Faye chooses to use direct speech over indirect in order
to reveal how the man’s marriage truly fell apart. The choice alone destroys the passivity and neutrality that Faye desires in life, since every choice leads to the creation of meaning and meaning leads to moralization (White 27); then Faye’s desire to live “a life unmarked” (Cusk 170) is compromised when she becomes the narrator of Outline.
Furthermore, it seems that White and Barthes would agree that since Faye chooses to become the narrator of the story she assumes the responsibility over the representation of events which are completely subjected to her own moral judgment; she becomes present in the text not by what she says but by what she chooses to show us. For Barthes, every choice creates meaning whether you want to or not (The Neutral 7). By choosing direct over indirect speech and vice versa, she does not avoid the paradigm and the creation of meaning. Faye is present in the text exactly because she is the narrator, a narrator whose choices we follow throughout the narrative. As long as Faye narrates, she is showing herself in her choices, by entering the paradigm. When Faye stops making conscious choices over the presentation of events, then we might find the Neutral and her absence.
3.2 Faye’s Silence
Let us now take a look at Faye’s desire for silence as a character and if that desire can somehow be connected with the intention of the form that has led some critic to refer to Cusk’s writing mode as innovative and uncategorized (Kellaway 2014) . We have seen that, for Barthes, silence and the Neutral are next to impossible (The Neutral 28-29). We have seen that Faye’s desire is to be unimposing (19), to live a life of passivity because she feels at peace when she wants “nothing at all” (170-171). In fact, we learn towards the end of Outline that what Faye likes most of all while visiting Athens is to take a walk in the ancient Agora and “look at the headless statues of the goddesses in the colonnade” (247). There she finds peace amongst “the massive marble bodies in their soft-looking draperies, so anonymous and mute” that she feels it is “strangely consoling” (247). While at the very last page of the narrative we learn that Faye’s intention, her true desire, is “solitude” (249). In a brief dialogue over the phone with her ‘neighbor’ we see the difference between the two
characters. Faye declines his offer for a trip at the sea and he replies to her: “In that case, he said, I will spend the day in solicitude” (249). Faye perceives this as a mistake and she quickly corrects him: “You mean solitude, I said” (249). These two little words carry with them the desire of each character and their fundamental difference. Faye desires solitude, to be left alone with the company of ‘mute’ and ‘headless bodies’, while the neighbour desires company above all.
If we combine these instances, where Faye expresses her desire for silence and solitude, then we can examine three different things. Firstly, if silence is achieved, secondly if silence leads to solitude and thirdly if solitude is the intention of the form. Then does that make Cusk’s writing mode unimposing, free, and new? Barthes argues in The Neutral that if we declare our desire, or speak for it then we dogmatize it, we are entering the paradigm and we fail to be Neutral (26-27). In Outline, we have three instances where Faye speaks out loud
her desire for silence and passivity. She tells us: a) “I have come to believe more and more on the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible” (170), b) “look at the headless statues …so consoling” (247), c) “You mean solitude, I said” (249). All of those instances bring in mind Barthes anecdote where Zenon speaks about his silence rather than displaying it. And here is the paradox which Faye creates by speaking for her desire. Suddenly her silence becomes imposing because “silence only becomes a sign if one makes it speak, if one doubles it with a caption that gives it a meaning” (The Neutral 26). And the meaning that is created out of Faye’s silence is the intention for solitude. Now if meaning is created retrospectively in a narrative (White 23), then at the end of Outline we can see that Faye’s intention was solitude and silence all along. An unimposing non-dogmatized silence that tries to avoid the creation of meaning. But is this achieved?
Let us examine the moment Faye points her desire to admire the ‘headless’ and ‘mute’ statues that bring her comfort (247). In a city that it is famous for its dialogues, for rhetors, philosophers and politicians, Faye chooses to see only ‘headless’ and ‘mute’ statues.
Anonymous bodies and not named busts. In a way she is pointing to silence. What Faye tells us is that she prefers a silent unnamed form. A silent body over a talking head. She points to silence and to an extent, she points to the intention of an unimposing and neutral form. But according to Barthes, the very fact that she points to silence and neutrality in the form
signifies a choice. To choose something is to refuse something else, you do not avoid conflict and the paradigm, but rather you create meaning by simply making a choice (The Neutral 6-7). Furthermore, Faye points and speaks about the unspoken. She desires solitude, passivity, and silence but the very moment she speaks about her desire she gives it a name. She no longer displays the Neutral; she turns it into a paradigm.
3.3 Cusk’s Writing Mode
As we have seen, the intention of the form is in alliance with Faye’s desires. A desire to be unimposing and neutral, a desire for passivity and silence. Is this something new that could lead us to a writing degree zero? Does Cusk’s writing mode escape Literature’s paradigm? According to Barthes, a writer can only momentarily escape the paradigm and achieve a neutral writing mode that does not resemble anything of past literary modes (Writing Degree
Zero 78). Every time a writer creates something new and breaks away from past structures,
runs the risk of repeating the writing mode and making it part of Literature history or avoiding that by entering a state of agraphia (74-75). Has Rachel Cusk created something new that it cannot be found in any other writing mode of the past? Has her desire to avoid conventional fiction (qtd. in Kellaway 2014) led to something new?
We have seen that for Barthes, Camus’s The Stranger is a novel where language, style and form united create a zero point of reference inside the history of literature (Writing
Degree Zero 77). For Barthes, “Camus’s Outsider, achieves a style of absence which is
almost an ideal absence of style; writing is … in favour of a neutral and inert state of form” (77). If Camus’s The Stranger has achieved the Neutral by the absence of judgment in its language and by its unimposing form, then we can only conclude that any other writing mode that has the same intention has as a reference point the writing mode of The Stranger. If we wish to be more specific, let us compare two instances between Outline and The Stranger, where the protagonists are both asked to give a reason for their actions. In The Stranger, the sun and its unbearable heat are given as reasons for Meursault’s behavior, leading him to kill a man, or as he explains in the court: “it was because of the sun” (60). In Outline, Faye gives a similar answer to justify her action of going for a swim with the neighbour’s boat. When she is asked why, she simply replies: “It was hot, I said” (184). Faye as a character seems like someone who does not want to provide meaning or justification over everything. She has
expressed her desire for living a life ‘unmarked’ and passive (170). And for the most part of the novel Faye rarely speaks to another person; she simply listens to what everyone else is saying about their lives. Like Meursault in the courtroom, Faye just sits and listens to others. For Barthes, Camus’s language and form are “transparent” and unjudgmental (77). His writing form is not imposing because the language is innocent, it has reached a level of reporting rather than “being a cumbersome and recalcitrant act, [it] reaches the state of pure equation” (78). Camus has produced a “colourless writing” that achieved the Neutral and innocence because the form works in the absence of elaboration, comparison, judgments, and ideologies (77-78). The writer reached the writing degree zero; anything that might try to reproduce the same mode as Camus will unavoidably have him as a paradigm. Therefore, a writer whose form aspires to the dissolution of structures and the silencing of narrative mechanisms that leads to moralizations, might have him as a paradigm. For Barthes, the writer is destined to either repeat something that has been done before or fall into a state of agraphia because
Unfortunate nothing is more fickle than a colourless writing; mechanical habits are developed in the very place where freedom existed, a network of forms hem in more and more the pristine freshness of discourse, a mode of writing appears afresh in lieu of an indefinite language. The writer, taking his place as ‘classic’, becomes the slavish imitator of his original creation, society demotes his writing to a mere manner, and returns him a prisoner to his own formal myths. (Writing Degree Zero78)
To achieve the neutral writing mode seems like an impossible task. The very moment you create something ‘new’, you set in motion mechanisms that can be repeated.
Conclusion
So, could we ever find a writing mode that reminds of nothing we have ever read before? As mentioned before, Cusk’s language is not free of judgments and comparisons. While there is a desire for the Neutral, for a form that breaks away from literary structures, that desire relies on the narrator being Neutral. Following White’s argumentation, we will probably conclude that Faye as a narrator’s is not absent from the form since she is the central moral
consciousness that decides how events will be presented. Furthermore, Faye’s desire for silence and passivity in life are not in accordance with Barthes’s Neutral, since her silence is spoken and not displayed. We could, however, argue that if we separate Faye the narrator from Faye the character, we might be able to perceive Faye’s desires in another light. As a character, Faye balances between silence and speech. For the most of part the novel, Faye much like the reader listens to other peoples’ stories, she hardly makes a statement herself. There are instances where Faye’s speech is undogmatic and can be perceived as if nothing was said, like her first dialogue with her ‘neighbour’ where they talk about the weather in Athens (Cusk 5). Here, we could see Barthes’s notion of the Neutral in silence since nothing of importance and meaning is conveyed and the speech is nonjudgmental (The Neutral 24-25). On the other hand, Faye as a character has a systematic refusal to participate in dialogue, she prefers the ‘headless’ and ‘mute’ statues (247). A refusal so systematic which can be a sign in itself and not “something to outplay signs” (The Neutral 26).
Faye the narrator, on the other hand, could not exactly be perceived as silent or passive, even if that is what the character desires. Outline’s narrator, as we have seen, is present by the choices she makes. The very fact that she makes choices on how the story will be told leads us to see that she does not avoid the paradigm. She is not Neutral because meaning is created by her choices whether that is intended or not (The Neutral 7-8).
second marriage, Faye notes: “I remained dissatisfied by that story of his second marriage. It had lacked objectivity; it relied too heavily on extremes, and the moral properties it ascribed to those extremes were often incorrect” (29). Informing us that she believes that the
representation of events by the narrator is subjected to his/her moral judgment and that the truth of the story relies on finding a balance between positive and negative representation, otherwise the truth is “sacrificed to the narrator’s desire to win” (30).
What this paper hoped to argue is that Faye’s identity as a narrator is not always in alliance with her desire for passivity and silence. If anything, silence becomes a sign when the desire for it is repeatedly pointed out, destroying ones will not impose (The Neutral 27-29). As we have seen Rachel Cusk’s form in Outline aspires to a neutral writing mode that much resembles Albert Camus’s The Stranger where the language is free and innocent and the form unimposing (Writing Degree Zero 76). Faye and Meursault seem like two
characters who have a lot in common. They are both narrators in a first-person narrative who are willing to stay silent, but it seems that Meursault’s silence was judged as a manifestation of his guilty character (Camus 58-62). Barthes would probably argue that this silence works “at the level of the implicit” (24) and interpreted as a sign of guilt. Faye’s silence, on the other hand, is hardly noticed by other characters in the novel, if anything Faye is the only one that refers and points to her desire (Cusk 247-249).
This paper has suggested that the narrator of Outline is not exactly ‘absent’ from the narrative due to her choices over the representation of events. Of course, this only one interpretation of the novel. This paper has also suggested that Faye’s desire for silence is not always in accordance with her decision to narrate and that Cusk’s narrative form cannot be perceived as a neutral writing degree since it does not avoid the paradigm of Literature but rather repeats a writing mode. After all, according to Barthes “It is impossible to write without labelling oneself” (Writing Degree Zero 1). We must also remember that the desire
for the Neutral is in itself a paradox: “as an object, the Neutral means suspension of violence; as a desire, it means violence” (The Neutral 13).
Works Cited
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