This chapter will explore Cusk’s treatment of authenticity in her recent writing, predominantly in her fiction since The Bradshaw Variations (2009). Much of the renewed critical interest in Cusk over the last decade centres around the sincerity of her autobiographical and autofictional hybridity, and this essay will explore those debates through the prism of her fictional writing and, in particular, the struggle for an authentic selfhood. Interest in authenticity has surged in recent years after a long period in which it was derided as an embarrassing vestige of humanism. It suffered a two-fold elision - first into (postmodern) simulacral shadow plays where reality and artifice lose shape and substance, and second, into (post-postmodern) revivals of sentimental individuality disoriented by the incessant demands for self-realisation that consumer society fosters. Cusk’s writing spans the decades in which these elisions have occurred and bears the marks of both, yet her frequent references to the authentic also evidence a more straightforward understanding reminiscent of her modernist reference points. Authenticity as a substratum of self, rather than as a performance of identity or ironic contradiction, emerges as a theme in Cusk’s later-period writing, and particularly in the novels that will be considered in this essay: The Bradshaw Variations, The ‘Outline’ trilogy (2014-18), and Second Place (2021). Here, authenticity is a horizon of coherence beyond the definitions produced by family life, gendered embodiment, or bourgeois-bohemian success. It is an elusive, but discernible point of connection between the shifting surface identities that figure (and disfigure) shared living and the needs of others. Cusk’s idea of the authentic self contains the constructivism of postmodernism and the confessional sincerity of the post-postmodern, but its true root is the Romanticist, Existentialist tradition that informed the writing of many of the modernist influences that emerge in the pages of these novels – Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence among them. This is the authenticity of the artist as genius and of the work of art as a transcending artifact whose insights give meaning to the lives of her protagonists. Yet it is a reading of authenticity strangely at odds with the work not only of those contemporaries with whom she is most often compared (Karl Ove Knaussgaard, Sheila Heti, Olivia Laing), but also with the kind of fiction she is producing, characterised as it is by a studied lack of depth and affective intensity. This tension, between the desire for an experience of the self as unmistakeably real and profound and narrative strategies that fight shy of any such thing, will be explored in this essay. How does Cuck understand authenticity, it will ask, and how does she balance a tendency to romanticise the experience of the authentic with an approach to narrative during this period that is so resistant to psychological depth and self-examination?
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Lea, Daniel
Department of English and Modern Languages
Year of publication: [in press]Date of RADAR deposit: 2023-01-06
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