When an author, Rachel Cusk, writes a trilogy, and that too in the genre of fiction, one would expect a strong story line full of actions and reactions that tie up to unravel a neat plot. But Cusk looks deeper into this expectation as she says, “I have tried to write on the plotlessness of life itself.” To illustrate with one novel of hers, “Transit”; the main character is called Faith (ironically enough). Faith is in the process of preparing for a new life with her two sons when her family breaks. We learn about her story through the encounters she has in daily life and that is about it. No back story, no development, no plot…
Cusk explains, “The collapse in middle life of these institutionalised ways of being, marriage, parenting and to exit from those things suddenly can represent a great loss of reality…so about the plotlessness of life…It is this theme of loss of meaning, loss of personal reality…it made me examine it in the novel as as form.”
Cusk takes the philosophical quest back in time as she says, “It is still rooted in the quasi Victorian idea of story telling that relies an awful lot of prior knowledge, an Omniscience..the idea of a God like, all knowing presence…there is faith, there is the story, the ending and the things that are going to happen are completely in their hands…I think there is a degree to which humans, sort of believe that, that presence exists also in their own life; some narrative that is your life, your story that somebody somewhere is shaping or controlling…and the realization that that is not so…”
Out of the box thinking
Cusk identifies this rudderless feeling to be similar to,”…it might be a midlife crisis, it might be depression, it might be divorce…the feeling that things are not going the way you want or planned…that really moved me to find a new way of constructing a book.”
As all novelists say Cusk too did not want to be the puppeteer manoeuvring her characters…the story just rolled out and how? “I wanted to write a novel that…as I say…which had no prior knowledge in it…that anyone walking past could see and hear the same thing that the novel sees and hears. At the heart of that is my true belief that there is a story, there is a form, a form of which human beings have an absolutely innate grasp of…they know how to tell stories about themselves…it is a thing you are taught to do. The minute you can speak you come home and tell your parent what your day was like in the nursery. You realize that if you say this thing people laugh, if you say that thing they don’t quite understand you…so we are honing that skill from the beginning. That to me is the story. That is all there is . That to me is what the book is all about, a patchwork quilt of all the narratives.”
