뉴요커의 글
문학적으로 특이한 실험이다
소설에서 전통적 요소를 제거하면 무엇이 남을까? 빈 공백이 아니라 하얀 빛이다
Person = character + biography + psychology + motivation + voice
인간에게
일관된 성격이 있고 고유한 과거가 있고
내면적 욕망이 있고 행동의 원인이 있고 자기 목소리가 있다는 가정을 해체하기
그렇게 관습적 인물이 보여주던
나는 이런 사람인데 이것을 원하니까
그래서 이것을 할거야
그 결과 나는 변화하지 라는 구도를 전복해
다른 사람이 말한다
또 다른 사람이 말하지
또 다른 사람이 인생을 설명한다
그녀의 이런 접근은 베켓이 생각나긴한다
사회에서 부여한 여러 역할이 생애주기별로 바뀌는데
예컨대
딸 → 아내 → 어머니 → 사적영역의 돌봄 제공자
아들 → 남편 → 아버지 → 공적영역의 참여자
그런데 이 역할을 수행하다보면 나라는 독립적 주체가 계속 침식되고 정말 내가 자율적인 개체였는지가 흐릿해지고 이야기가 남지 않는다
Rachel Cusk’s Protest Against Personhood
“Life of M,” the novelist’s latest book, continues a career-long attempt to dismantle character in fiction. Has she succeeded?
By Becca Rothfeld
The protagonistof Rachel Cusk’s new novel, “Life of M,” has a peculiar technique for falling asleep. She “visualizes a brick wall. It fills her field of vision; its perimeters are out of sight. With a narrow implement she begins chipping at the mortar around a first brick, usually the one directly in front of her. She works steadily and calmly. The mortar loosens and falls away piece by piece. When it has been removed she pushes the brick forward with her hand. It falls down the other side of the wall, and now in its place there’s a small rectangle of blank white light. With her implement she begins chipping at the brick beside or above it, and then at the one beside or above that. The white shape made of light gets bigger and bigger. When it is big enough, she crawls through it.”
It is as good an image as any for Cusk’s own trajectory. The reigning queen of autofiction, the literary subgenre in which the lines that divide narrator from author are knowingly smudged, she is renowned for her cool, glassy prose and her stark austerity of vision. Her reputation rests on three works that she published to great fanfare in the twenty-tens—“Outline” (2014), “Transit” (2016), and “Kudos” (2018). Their reticent narrator, Faye, resembles her creator insofar as she is a divorced British writer with two children, but we learn almost nothing else about her, and she rarely speaks on her own behalf. Instead, she operates like a recording device as she listens to a series of long-winded interlocutors at literary festivals and dinner parties.
Cusk, by her own account, began to tire of traditional novels in 2012, when she endured a bout of what she described, in an interview with theGuardian, as “creative death” following the publication and hostile reception of her controversial memoir “Aftermath,” which details her acrimonious separation from her husband. For several years, she could neither read nor write fiction, which had come to seem “fake and embarrassing” to her. But a careful examination of Cusk’s work reveals that she had been preparing to jettison the rudiments of the form well before then. She had scarcely started writing novels when she began taking them apart, brick by brick, in search of the white vacancy glaring beyond them.
