Sometimes you can find the essence of a book in a single passage. I had that experience while reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline.
The book is constructed as a series of conversations the unnamed narrator has with various people she encounters during a stay in Greece. We know that she has—or at least had—a husband and two sons back in England, but we do not know exactly what circumstances have brought her to Greece without them. We sense there has been some sort of a breach. What little we learn about her previous life is revealed as she carries on conversations with people she meets in Greece—she, as first-person narrator, never divulges anything about circumstances except in conversation with others.
These other characters are more than just mirrors in which we try to catch a glimpse of her story. In fact, we suspect that their stories are often variations of hers—that is, they are stories about relationships gone awry and difficult children.
Anyway, just before the passage that I want to discuss, the narrator has accepted the invitation of an older Greek man to spend a day on his boat. The woman is observing children as they dive into the water from a nearby boat:
I said that when my sons were the ages of those two leaping boys, they were so intimate it would have been hard to disentangle their separate natures. They used to play together without pause from the moment they opened their eyes in the morning to the moment they closed them again. Their play was a kind of shared trance in which they created whole imaginary worlds, and they were forever involved in games and projects whose planning and execution were as real to them as they were invisible to everyone else: sometimes I would move or throw away some apparently inconsequential item, only to be told that it was a sacred prop in the ongoing make-believe, a narrative which seemed to run like a magic river through our household, inexhaustible, and which they could exit and re-enter at will, moving over that threshold which no one else could see into another element.
But then there is a change:
And then one day the river dried up: their shared world of imagination ceased, and the reason was that one of them—I can’t even recall which one it was—stopped believing in it. In other words, it was nobody’s fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.
I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living. Without their shared story, the two children began to argue, and where their playing had taken them away from the world, making them unreachable sometimes for hours at a time, their arguments brought them constantly back to it. They would come to me or to their father, seeking intervention and justice; they began to set greater story by facts, by what had been done and said, and to build the case for themselves and against one another.
Cusk gives this account the stripped down mythical feel of a parable. Discord has erupted into an idyllic world. We are in Greece, after all. The passage moves us because we know that childhood can really be like that—we think of ourselves and our siblings in the long ago. But of course, childhood isn’t exactly like that because we don’t just one day step out of our imaginary universe into the cold light of strife and competition. Some strife and competition will have always been there, and the loss of innocence is intermittent and by degrees. Also, we gain as well as lose by growing up, and siblings who have lost their shared imaginary world may well find new reasons to be close in the world they share with everyone else. Cusk has selected and arranged the details to make it as affecting as possible. And no doubt the boys’ experience is meant to reflect a parallel development in their parents’ lives. That seems to be what Cusk is suggesting in the continuation of the passage:
It was hard, I said, not to see this transposition from love to factuality as the mirror of other things that were happening in our household at the time. What was striking was the sheer negative capability of their former intimacy: it was as though everything that was inside was moved outside, piece by piece, like furniture being taken out of a house and put on the pavement.
Negative capability, inversions, these concepts are at the heart of Outline. The narrator’s first conversation had taken place on the plane during her journey to Greece. Curiously, the last conversation in the book relates another passenger’s conversation on another such journey—it is told by the woman who will be taking over the narrator’s position as an English teacher in Greece. The new teacher has been listening to the passenger next to her talk about his life, and she experiences a rather strange metaphysical sensation:
He [the other passenger] was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This antidescription, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her, for the first time since the incident, a sense of who she was.
Notice that the book’s title appears in the middle of that paragraph. Here’s the picture that I would have chosen for the book’s cover:
