Kudos

The Greek word “kudos” was a singular noun that had become plural by a process of back formation: a kudo on its own had never actually existed, but in modern usage its collective meaning had been altered by the confusing presence of a plural suffix, so that “kudos” therefore meant, literally, “prizes”, but in its original form it connoted the broader concept of recognition or acclaim, as well as being suggestive of something which might be falsely claimed by someone else.

Unlike with Outline and Transit, when the title eventually appears in Kudos, above, it didn't shine much light on the whole project for me. But now that the trilogy is complete, I think I have a better handle on what Rachel Cusk was trying to achieve – I think I finally understand the concepts of annihilated perspective and negative literature that Cusk is exploring with these “novels”; but as with any major shift from the status quo, I can't help resisting it. I still can't answer the question, “Is this art, even if I don't personally connect with it?” Perhaps I should have read this article in  The Guardian  before starting the trilogy, in which Cusk explains why she changed her own perspective on literature after her two memoirs (on motherhood and divorce) were met with harsh criticism:

"Without wishing to sound melodramatic, it was creative death after Aftermath. That was the end. I was heading into total silence – an interesting place to find yourself when you are quite developed as an artist."

For almost three years, she could not write, she could not read. Novels seemed especially pointless. More and more – like Karl Ove Knausgård, whom she cites – she felt fiction was "fake and embarrassing. Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous. Yet my mode of autobiography had come to an end. I could not do it without being misunderstood and making people angry."

I wish I had known beforehand that Cusk and Knausgård (who, himself, seems parodied in Kudos as the apparent inspiration for an unflattering character) were both exploring similar territory at the limits of fiction; I've been grasping for such a frame of reference, even if Knausgård's books have also been slippery for me. I can wrap my head around this trilogy as a new mode of autobiography, but what I'm resisting is the notion that the novel itself is dead; that “making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous”. Is this a transformative moment in literature akin to Marcel Duchamp displaying a urinal in an art exhibition? Who says that isn't art if an artist tells you it is? If Cusk says that the only authentic way to reveal someone's character is to have other people tell her their stories, who am I to say that isn't art? Yet, I resist it.

Once again in Kudos, Cusk repeats and circles and mirrors themes throughout the “narrative”. This book opens, as did Outline, with a conversation between the narrator and the man beside her on a plane. He tells a story about a friend of his who is a pilot; an ambitionless man who detests (but won't leave) his job of flying rowdy Brits to sun holidays (and in a late scene, a local in Lisbon tells the narrator that post-Brexit, it's even more ironic for Brits to come barging down to their resorts, insisting on speaking English, and lounging around like babies). The man on the plane then recounts the story of his elderly dog (named Pilot), and how he figured into their family dynamics. Later, someone comments on the slovenly appearance of writers at international festivals, “Why should I trust your view of the world if you can't even take care of yourself? If you were a pilot, I wouldn't get on board – I wouldn't trust you to take me the distance.” A different character says at one point, “Like the family dog,” she said. “You can treat that dog how you like. It's never going to be free, if it even remembers what freedom is.” Freedom and dogs and pilots; all somehow interconnected. The man on the plane introduces a more central theme when speaking about his challenging daughter:

As she grew older the most serious problem of all became her extraordinary sensitivity to what she called lying, but what was actually as far as he could see the normal conventions and speech patterns of adult conversation. She claimed that most of what people said was fake and insincere, and when he'd asked her how she could possibly know that, she replied that she could tell by the sound.

Later, a young man who is guiding the narrator to a literary event (in, presumably, Cologne), explains:

As a child he had found stories very upsetting, and he still disliked being lied to, but he had come to understand that other people enjoyed exaggeration and make-believe to the extent that they regularly confused them with the truth.

And a fellow author tells the story of attending a writer's retreat at a countess' castle, where the attendees were expected to be entertaining during meals:

Because they were conscious of her, everyone made an effort to say witty and interesting things. Yet because she didn’t conceal herself the conversation was never real: it was the conversation of people imitating writers having a conversation, and the morsels she fed on were lifeless and artificial, as well as being laid directly at her feet.

This concept of the bulk of adult conversation being “fake”, “insincere”, and essentially “lying”, feels like commentary on the authenticity of fiction itself; the ridiculousness of “making up John and Jane and having them do things together”. Cusk is more direct with this bit about the strange hotel her narrator is staying in:

I hadn't realised, I said, how much of navigation is belief in progress, and the assumption of fixity in what you have left behind. I had walked around the entire circumference of the building in search of things I had been right next to in the first place, an error that was virtually guaranteed by the fact that all the building's sources of natural light had been concealed by angled partitions, so that the routes around it were almost completely dark. You found the light, in other words, not by following it but by stumbling on it randomly and at greater or lesser length; or to put it another way, you knew where you were only once you had arrived. I didn't doubt that it was for such metaphors that the architect had won his numerous prizes, but it rested on the assumption that people lacked problems of their own, or at the very least had nothing better to do with their time. My publisher widened his eyes.

“For that matter,” he said, “you could say the same thing about novels.”

And the entire point of this trilogy seems contained in a story from a woman who tells the narrator about a church (identified elsewhere as the Igreja de Sao Domingos in Lisbon) that suffered a catastrophic fire, but was minimally restored before reopening:

“But then I noticed,” she said, “that in certain places where statues had obviously been, new lights had been installed which illuminated the empty spaces. These lights,” she said, “had the strange effect of making you see more in the empty space than you would have seen had it been filled with a statue. And so I knew,” she said, “that this spectacle was not the result of some monstrous neglect or misunderstanding but was the work of an artist.”

Along the way, as the narrator attends literary events (readings, interviews, promoting her work and hobnobbing with fellow writers), Cusk makes it look like there couldn't be a more miserable and unglamourous job than attempting to get one's book out to an audience. Most of the conversations she records involve people talking about marriage, divorce, parenting, and gender roles – and in many cases, these narratives seem a metaphor for Brexit – and many of the conversations are about literature itself (which does appear a bit ridiculous in our post-po-mo world). Although the narrator – once again identified as “Faye” only once, and late in the book – doesn't often respond in these conversations, just like the illuminated yet empty shelves in the burnt-out church, Faye's blankness has “the strange effect of making you see more in the empty space than you would have seen had it been filled with a statue”; it is “the work of an artist”. And yet, I resist. (The three stars simply reflect my personal enjoyment of this book – I could well give five stars for the entire effort.)

If Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgård are indeed at the vanguard of transforming literature by dismissing fiction as somehow contrived and ultimately ridiculous - which is kind of what I assume Duchamp was doing with his art, too - I don't think I'm ready for that. A related tale:

When Kennedy was in her last semester of university, the "capstone" project in her Theatre degree was an ensemble performance, as it had been for every year previous. But when she first got to that final class, her professors had a surprise for their students: instead of selecting a known play that would showcase what they had learned over their four years together, Kennedy's class was expected to write and perform a piece of "verbatim theatre". As it was explained to them, they were to select a social issue (Kennedy's group eventually settled on homelessness), and in a series of scenes meant to illuminate the lived experience of those who are actually affected by the issue, the dialogue needed to be at least 80% "verbatim" - the actors meant to primarily voice those words that had previously been spoken, somewhere. To accomplish this, the group needed to find interviews and essays (newspaper, blog, video), spoken word performances and poetry, government and police reports; anything that could be considered "true" because someone affected by the issue had said it. To the professors, this was the future of theatre; implying that the art of a playwright processing another's lived experience through their own sensibilities to shape a metaphorical truth was somehow contrived and "ridiculous". Kennedy's group was able to create and perform a cohesive series of skits out of what they dug up - the other group wasn't as successful, but they really had no prior training in this format; shouldn't a "capstone" project allow you to display what you know instead of forcing you to teach yourself something new? - and while we enjoyed watching Kennedy (naturally) and appreciated the hard work that went into creating this piece of theatre, I understood why she resisted it; is this art? Is this the future of all art forms? That's what I'm resisting.