on stakes and abstraction
Because of an issue with the United States Postal Service, I never got the October issue of Harper’s and so didn’t know there was a Rachel Cusk essay in the October issue of Harper’s until about two days ago, when I saw it on the Harper’s website. The USPS issue has been rectified, and in the meantime I printed out the essay and read it on the train on the way to work today.
I’m going to write here about the Cusk essay and some related ideas about writing that have been on my mind. I don’t pretend that this will be interesting to most or even any of the people that read this newsletter (about 1,500, thank you all, sorry I’ve been silent since November, there’s a lot going on in the world). If you want to click this straight to your mailbox trash can, I totally understand. But I need to work something out, and it’s useful for me to try to make my point or points to an audience, to add a sense of stakes to what I am writing.
The question of stakes is in fact what I want to think about, specifically in relationship to literary abstraction. Abstraction is perhaps the quality of Cusk’s work to which I am most drawn, particularly and especially in her novels. There is a sense of protection that abstraction creates, both around the characters in a novel and around the author. It grants the characters a certain degree of autonomy, an inner world and motivations that exist outside of their perception by the narrator. And it grants the author a sense of divestment, free license to engage with whatever might be in front of her rather than to write in the service of an outcome. Plot and its contrivances can fall by the wayside, so can character development. There doesn’t have to be a point. Abstraction makes room for focused concern with ideas and the feelings that might surround them; it can have the effect of a homing missile, finding the humanity that exists in every reader, despite the fact that it might not be located in the same place. (Every few months on Twitter a discussion about Mark Rothko’s abstractions pops up, usually in response to some bot or troll saying they could do it themselves, and almost without fail someone makes the point that in their deceptive sparseness the canvasses tap into something almost pre-civilized in the viewer.) (I’m sorry about the weapons metaphor.)
In fiction, I find even very high levels of abstraction to be liberating for the reader and courageous on the part of the author, a testament to the belief in the intellect of everyone involved in the writing-reading exchange, and an embodiment of the idea (my idea, at least) that the highest purpose of the written word is to ask questions properly.
In non-fiction, I struggle to find a high degree of abstraction as fruitful or as generative. I can’t keep writing this without getting a bit, well, less abstract about what I’m referring to. It’s the Cusk essay, yes, and in particular the fact that it hovers so far above its subject—specifically, the death of Cusk’s mother—that I find it at times difficult to engage with its content because the abstraction blurs out the stakes. This isn’t to say I think it’s bad, far from it, and if I were writing a legitimate analysis I would need to read it many more times than I have (one and a half), but it’s to say that it made me think about what non-fiction does, for me, what I want to find in it, both in reading and in writing it. And I think the answer to that question is that insofar as a piece of nonfiction poses a question, I want to understand what is at stake in finding or not finding the answer. I want to know what is at stake in getting it right or getting it wrong or not getting it at all.
Basically, I think life is a high-stakes mission; I think all of its component parts are as high-stakes as the whole; I think the moment, for example, one pours hot water into a cup for tea is a microcosm of every other action one takes and deserving of as much attention. I don’t want an essay to tell me what to think; I want it to make clear what will happen if I don’t.