In the end he needs reality, to measure his creation against.
—Rachel Cusk, The Last Supper (2009)
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.
Rachel Cusk is the most vibrant literary descendant of Woolf and Joyce, a Modernist in her own right—indeed the writer who most clearly illustrates the need to expand our parameters for the term.6 This essay will examine Cusk’s employment of cosmophagic narration in the first chapter of Arlington Park (2006), by which declension we will come to a more expansive, useful, and precise definition of Modernism, one that can contain Cusk as well as Woolf; anyone, in fact, with enough madness to create this peculiar type of destruction.
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Encountering an existence deprived of given meaning, cosmophagic narration remakes the fictive world in its image, thereby re/defining both character and text. Among contemporary writers, Cusk is unparalleled in her innovation of narrational modes for accessing the self, and her dexterity is nowhere as accomplished as in the roving narration of Arlington Park, a work of cosmophagic consciousness which wields its point-of-view to deftly explore the inner worlds of each character. The novel follows a group of married mothers across a single day in the titular London suburb, opening with a Dickensian rain emergent from the darkness of Bleak House (1853), and culminating in a party a la Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) It is a book suffused with its ancestry, though it is in its narration where this acute composition reaches its apotheosis.
As with all works of heterodiegetic narration7, the narrating entity of Arlington Park must delimit its own powers of narration. It must define terms and impose itself in a specific and delineated manner upon the world of its creation. When the rules of this fictive world are challenged by that which the narration creates within it, as an inverted Saturn, we see cosmophagic consciousness in the Modernist sense; that god against which the revolution might come:
All night the rain fell on Arlington Park.
The clouds came from the west: clouds like dark cathedrals, clouds like machines, clouds like black blossoms flowering in the arid starlit sky. They came over the English countryside, sunk in its muddled sleep. They came over the low, populous hills where scatterings of lights throbbed in the darkness. At midnight they reached the city, valiantly glittering in its shallow provincial basin. Unseen, they grew like a second city overhead, thickening, expanding, throwing up their savage monuments, their towers, their monstrous, unpeopled palaces of cloud.8
We begin with a comprehensive demonstration of narrative and textual functions—the book acting as a story and the book acting as a crafted novel—both of Arlington Park itself and of the novel as an art form. The narrative entity outlines its range, perception, and attitude in this evocative, ominous opening. With the coming clouds the narration creeps into the city itself—the city which will be the focus of the novel, more so than any one woman—and displays at once its overwhelming descriptive abilities and its idiomatic worldview. There is a characterization to this narrating entity, it has its own way of seeing, evaluating, and rendering. In short, it has opinions. It can also go where it likes, to glimpse people around the city and move freely among them. But it does not approach the world with an all-powerful, objective understanding of events—it is not god, and is vulnerable to usurpation.9
That rebellion begins in the form of Juliet Randall, the first character we meet, and surely the narration’s favorite. She wakes up in the morning, aware through the shroud of sleep of the pounding rain and remembering the dinner party she and her husband Benedict had gone to the night before:
She recalled that Matthew Milford had spoken harshly to her. The lord of the manor had spoken hardly from amidst his spoils, from his unjust throne, to Juliet, his guest. And Benedict called her obnoxious!
What was it he’d said? What was it Matthew had said, sitting there at the table like a lord, a bull, a red, angry, bull blowing air through his nostrils? You want to be careful. He’d told her she wanted to be careful. His head was so bald the candlelight had made it shine like a shield. You want to be careful, he’d said, with an emphasis on you. He had spoken to Juliet not as if he’d invited her to his house but as if he’d employed her to be there. It was as if he’d employed her as a guest and was giving her a caution. That was how a man like that made you feel: as if your right to exist derived from his authority. He looked at her, a woman of thirty-six with a job and a home and a house and two children of her own, and he decided whether or not she should be allowed to exist.10
Juliet’s consciousness, as it begins to consume the composition of the text in which she appears, brings the focus from the opening down to an immediacy more in line with her idiosyncratic concerns, further destabilizing the narrative linearity which might otherwise position her on a more conventional trajectory resonant of the traditional female narrative. Her memory takes over, backgrounding the fictive present in a grammatical elision of the narration itself. The world exists as Juliet sees it, and the meaning of things that occur is provided not by any omniscient being—be it god or narration—but from the manner of perceiving and meaning-making within the subjective, devouring mind of the character herself. Cusk’s principal method of achieving this effect, and the foundational one to her novel as a whole, is an immersive free-indirect discourse.
Later in the chapter, Juliet reminds Benedict that they’ve another event that evening:
Benedict looked displeased.
“Are we? Again?”
“We’re having dinner with the Lanhams.”
He frowned. He didn’t know any Lanhams. How could he be expected to know about Lanhams when another day awaited him at Hartford View, where giant sixth-formers threw tables across the classrooms and people got down on their knees before Benedict in the corridors?11
An excellent example of Cusk’s aptitude in free-indirect style and the type of character-specific colorization that might be called idiomatic narration, this passage demonstrates a protagonist’s conjecture as to the inner thoughts of another, non-perspective, character, as a cosmophagic method of novelistic creation. The world-as-constituted is ‘real’ only in the sense that Juliet imagines it as such, and therefore is equally liable to destruction; her own and that of the other cosmophagic minds working upon and within the text. The latter half of the quote above is Juliet’s inner synopsis of her husband’s thoughts, complete with the self-serving hyperbole she would expect him to have towards himself (and while staying in the person and tense of the narration and Juliet, a marker of free-indirect).12
This moment, too, implicates many of the philosophical-thematic situations that will arise throughout the novel: the challenges of motherhood and marriage, the strictures of quotidian domesticity on individual meaning,13 and the subject/object dichotomy of gender. In this way the passage exemplifies another central compositional facet in Arlington Park: Cusk’s ability to deepen her work’s thematic concerns and critique of gendered literary conventions through its narration and, specifically, innovation in point-of-view. In this, she inherits a strong tradition, furthering her literary ancestry with Woolf especially, within which Cusk breaks new ground in her narrational techniques. Following Wittgenstein’s limitations of language in sense-ably elucidating lived experience, Modernist cosmophagic narration achieves meaning beyond grammatical rules and linear plots, prioritizing words as individual units of resonance over conventionally coherent grammatical articulation of language.
If interior lived reality is mimetically inaccessible via narration, then language (as words) is left to achieve ontological coherence aesthetically, and not didactically. This is the Modernist invocation of meaning, and Cusk enacts it principally through the immersive floods of idiomatic free-indirect discourse in evidence here. The novel’s composition creates a comprehensive world, one that in turn is consumed by the expansive consciousness of each woman navigating the transcendent ordinary of her daily life, communicating a meaning that the reader knows more than reads, a cognitive intimacy reflecting the notion that “there are, indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest,” with nimble verisimilitude.14
The opening scene, devoured and then re/created by Juliet’s consciousness, likewise implicates existentialist theories of ecstatic temporality, the passage of time as filtered through individual encountering with the world, that will carry throughout, coming on the timelessness imbued by the novel’s opening. It is this method, time and again, that Cusk employs to unite the thematic with the technical in her work. “It is easy to understand why she is ruled by routine;” de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex (1949), “time has no dimension novelty for her, it is not a creative spring, because she is doomed to repetition, she does not see in the future anything but a duplication of the past.”15 Arlington Park unfolds along these lines, beginning in darkness with its torrential downpour and then its most disillusioned character, before asserting a creative power, a destructive agency possessed by the perspective characters that redefines both them and the novel as a whole—rejecting the type of linear plot that defines a traditional, morally-derived narrative. While the landscape has begun to shift—around both the critical conversation and the works themselves—the vast majority of novels in the twenty-first century foreground a straightforward narrative leading to a clean resolution; the space given to exceptions is predominately carved out for male writers and male characters. Cusk has long challenged this convention, with Arlington Park representing her first major approach. It is the meaninglessness of the women’s lives that gives them meaning, as their consumption of the world in which they have been made in turn creates themselves, à la Saturn, imbuing their existence with a meaning that derives from the devouring act.
The rain also presents a narrative difficulty for the women to encounter, a textual greyscale, and an Aristotelian frame to the narrative itself. Departing from Plato, who in his world of forms sees something greater and more solid behind life as we can make sense of it, Aristotle posits an existence with no backstop, and that the frame surrounding a work of art—its, we might say, narrative—is that which gives it its mimetic power. Taking this a step further we might think of narration itself as having an ontology; in creating worlds, it thereby is the world. In Woolf and especially Joyce, this accelerates an aesthetic ontology that, like poetry, renders meaning through the phenomenological invocation of words more than the grammatical explanation of language. For Cusk the technique is quieter, although no less powerful: Juliet and her subsequent perspective characters devour not only the composition in which they appear but the modern world which has created them all. Language is acknowledged as being subject to Wittgensteinian limitations—even if grammar rules are left far more intact than in the work of Cusk’s High Modernist forbears—leading to a movement towards words in the assertion of meaning, propelled by a deep understanding of the possibilities of cosmophagic narration:
On her last day in the sixth form her English teacher, Mrs Mountford, had hugged her with tears glittering in her hard, unhappy little eyes and said, “Well, I expect I’ll be hearing about you.” Juliet should write her a letter. Dear Mrs Mountford, just to let you know that I found another school that was kind enough to take me in. Dear Mrs Mountford, just to let you know what I did with all that education you gave me. I found some other girls and gave it to them. That was good, wasn’t it, Mrs Mountford? Dear Mrs Mountford, you may have been wondering why you haven’t heard from me in all these years. The thing is, I was murdered, Mrs Mountford. My husband Benedict murdered me. He was very gentle about it; it didn’t really hurt at all. In fact, I hardly knew it was happening. But I’m all right now, Mrs Mountford. You’ll be glad to hear that I’m being careful.
Behind her, Benedict touched her hair. She shrank from the feeling of his hand. She turned around so that he couldn’t touch her any more and his hand was left suspended in mid-air. There was his face, smooth and red-cheeked like a baby’s face, with his little knowing eyes in the middle of it. In his smock, with his red cheeks and his eyes that were like the twinkling eyes of an old man, he looked like an illustration from a fairy tale. He looked like a woodcutter, or a shoemaker. She did not want to be touched by a shoemaker from a fairy tale. She was prepared to acknowledge his magical qualities, but she didn’t want him touching her.16
The totality of Juliet’s mind-style has taken over the novel (again, alongside memory, here one slanted towards her present concerns), and thereby remade it in her own image: her husband, the shoemaker, has killed her, and the unfilled promise of her one-time exceptionalism leaves everything stale and flat. It is the depths to which Cusk explores her characters’ lives, the differences she is able to show between them, that gives the novel its power.17 Realized through a narration at once consumed and created by its own offspring, the cosmophagic minds of a typical London suburb perform a Wittgensteinian transubstantiation of meaninglessness into meaning.
This approach to point-of-view is the route by which each woman’s consciousness consumes the composition of the text, moving towards the novel’s most profound statement, one emergent of time. It is their warping of the novel’s temporal structure that enables the women to exercise an agency as beings existing in their present situation, eschewing any clean narrative progression with its attendant moral overtures.18 There is therefore only the characters themselves, living outside a teleological progression towards righteousness, inhabiting a void shaped by their own cognition. The characters, beginning with Juliet, are entombed within this rainy Friday, itself a liminal space between week and weekend, between leisure and responsibility, between school and home, as a day that represents all the days, past and future, of their lives. The novel’s true progenitor, then, is perhaps Hamlet; as with the Black Prince, whose vengeful melancholy eventually consumes his very play–and his play-within-the-play–thereby making him the first cosmophagic consciousness in literature. The time also is out of joint in Arlington Park, precisely because in their devouring of narration, the characters’ respective minds leave it as all that remains.
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D. W. White writes consciousness-forward fiction and criticism. He serves as Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review, Prose Editor for West Trade Review, and Executive Editor and Director of Prose for Iron Oak Editions. His writing appears in 3:AM, The Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches undergraduate courses on Rachel Cusk and the Self.
Notes
1 Sontag, Against Interpretation, 98.
2 That is to say, along the lines of the distinction between histoire and discours in French Structuralism or fabula and syuzhet in Russian Formalism. When speaking narratively about Arlington Park, we would consider the events of an interconnected group of English mothers across a rainy Friday; when speaking narrationally, we will discuss the roving, intermediate-range third-person that studies these characters, brings them to life, and–to some extent–is consumed by them, cosmophagically.
3 Cohn, Transparent Minds, 217.
4 Obviously, Joyce intended this. The frame of analysis in this essay takes as a useful fiction the idea that the Modernist consciousness usurps the “original design” of the narration, in order to better illustrate the degree to which the artist shapes her composition around the mind of her hero.
5 High Modernism is a useful term to speak specifically of the most rebellious period of Modernist literature, that of the 1920s. Some scholars have begun to look at select 21st century writing as embodying “New Modernism”; there is merit to that categorization, although this essay argues for Cusk specifically as a Modernist, full stop, via the technique of cosmophagic narration.
6 A number of commentators have made the Cusk-Woolf connection; less so with Joyce. Virtually all critics, however, place “modernism” in a neat box that closes sometime around the Second World War. This is unduly limiting; the term “neo-modernism,” which has been applied to, among others, Cusk herself, is an especially unhelpful example of literary theory’s penchant for neologism run amok.
7 Third person, meaning the thing doing the telling (diegesis) is outside (different than) the story itself. Gérard Genette’s narratological term is usefully precise for our purposes here.
8 Cusk, Arlington Park, 3.
9 It is also not a person; the term “narrator” is nonsensical when applied to heterodiegetic fiction.
10 10-11.
11 26.
12 See Dorrit Cohn’s system of heterodiegetic narration, Transparent Minds 134-6 and passim. Her narrated monologue is analogous-enough to free-indirect style for our purposes.
13 One can see the implications of Camus’ conceptualization of the absurd as the confrontation of the irrationality of existence and man’s quest of clarity in the description of Juliet’s typical routine, which involves her running full-tilt from the school where she works to that which her children attend in order to pick them up in the afternoon, a daily event that, significantly, is not undertaken on the last Friday of the month, of which the novel encompasses. See p.21.
14 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, §6.43. Emphasis original. Later Wittgenstein applies as well; both his notions of the impossibility of private language and a usage-based understanding of meaning illuminate key aspects of Modernist narration projects.
15 de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 640.
16 24.
17 That, and the sheer elegance of her prose, it must be said.
18 In short, the marriage plot in Arlington Park is presented as post-apocalyptic; well beyond the end of the narrative traditionally assigned to female characters, Juliet and the others are at once trapped within and creators of an ouroboros, alinear, ekstatic, single day in the life.
Works Cited
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes of Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Cusk, Rachel. Arlington Park. New York: Picador, 2008.
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books, 2011.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 1966.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by Michael Beaney. Oxford, England: Oxford UP. 2023.
New Critique 