Writing lives in contemporary British fiction (the article is a revised version of a lecture given at Perm State University in September 2018)

breath, its heartbeat — however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be moulded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.”

Now of course this is a question on the surface about politics – the Soviet desire to reshape man. But it is also in this novel, full of poets and aware of its own status as a story, a comment on the reshaping of the stories we tell about our lives – indeed, the political shaping of a life is enabled by the stories that give shape to life in a first place.

These are questions which are not specific to Dr. Zhivago , for they have surfaced throughout the history of world literature. What is the shape of a life? Does it have a shape of its own that we need to set free – or does it need to be shaped by our stories, and our politics? What is the relationship between the stories we tell about our life and how we live that life? Do stories help us make sense of who we are? Or do they impose a false and damaging shape on something that is protean, shifting, never fixed?

These are questions that have become one of the most prominent features of contemporary British fiction – its concern with the question of ‘How to write a life’. These are fictions which are concerned with more than autobiography – the writing of the self, in a whole and single narrative: they are more concerned with the idea of writing life in general, and as we shall see, they focus just as much on writing one’s own life, as on exploring how others shape and tell their lives to us. These are novels which are also concerned with: how do I write about my daily life when it is a life curated by the images and posts of digital technology – as in the fiction of Joanna Walsh such as Break.up ? They are novels wherein writers, in the middle of their career, turn themselves into their own character to reflect on their own work, as in the recent novel of Amit Chaudhuri, Friend of my Youth .

Or they are works which try to seek out new ways of writing about a life in progress, as in the living autobiography of Deborah Levy. .

In its turn towards the question of what it means to write a life, contemporary British fiction is part of wider trends in world literature, and indeed it is influenced and in dialogue with it. Contrary to what British politics might have you believe, British fiction is not an island cut off from the world. There are many names I could mention, many of which you may be familiar with. The Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six volume work, My Struggle, presents us with the intimate detail of his everyday life, details which, as the final volume explores, so upset his family that they tried to sue him, or whose revelation to the public so upset his wife that she fell deeply into a depression. You might also think of the New Zealand novelist Chris Krauss, whose novels I Love Dick and Summer of Hate have become cult favourites in Britain and America: they ask us to think about the personal as a philosophical question. Or the American poet and novelist Ben Lerner, whose novel 10:04 is about an American poet and novelist called Ben. Or we might think of the Canadian novelist Sheila Heti, whose novels hew close to the life of a woman called Sheila in their exploration of what it means to be an artist, and what is means to be a mother. Or we might think of the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, whose autobiographical writings reflect on what is means for a fiction writer to turn to writing the true story of his life. Or we might think of the Belorussian Nobel prize winning writer Svetlana Alexeivitch, whose works are symphonies that weave together oral histories of Russian people.

Where does this come from? Why the sudden popularity, all over the world, of writing which seems to turn away from inventing fictional situations and which concerns itself with the stories of real individuals? One reason comes from developments within literature itself: a boredom and frustration with the idea of writing novels. As the Nigerian writer Teju Cole has observed, much of the interesting writing happening today comes from a desire to step away from the idea of the novel – instead blending essays, reportage, and autobiography, and criticism. This I think is what distinguishes contemporary writing from previous proclamations of ‘the death of the novel’ – a claim which serves, in fact, to generate new forms of the novel. These writers are neither concerned with continuing the tradition of the novel, nor, like the avant-garde, with proclaiming its death. Instead, like Melville’s Bartleby, they would just ‘prefer not to’. There is something calmer in the impulses of these new ways of writing lives, something unconcerned with polemic, definition, and labels. In fact, many of these writings are emerging out of other genres: criticism, essays, and autobiography, and these genres are taking up the space previously occupied by fiction and novel writing.

Another reason might be a distaste for the idea of artifice, not just the artifice of writing novels but the idea of artifice in general. So much of our lives today involves things we know are artifice – by artifice I mean things we know aren’t even trying to pretend to be real, things whose artifice we acknowledge and don’t even contest. I don’t just mean the rather ahistorical concept of fake news – I mean things like political spin, the entire world of social media, the world of the gig economy where your career is your brand. These are things no one really rails against any more, because for two generations we have known nothing else. Pointing this out is no great radical artistic act – as perhaps previously was the case. What might be more radical, or least more artistically promising, is to try to write about the one thing we know –that is the lives of selves and others.

These novels are not naïve or unquestioning; they have absorbed the full force of twentieth century scepticism about the nature of the self. Nor is it to say that these writers have completely turned away from registering the historical uncertainty that characterizes the contemporary world. What we see is the impact of longer term changes, those happening beneath the surface of the media-driven news cycle. We see the impact of long term changes of the relationship between men and women; of what it means to have children, and of the impact of technology on human lives. But first we need to place this turn to writing lives in the longer context of British literary history. Because, as so often in the case, these writers are in many ways reinventing the novel by turning back to some of its most traditional concerns.

The History of Autobiography and Fiction in English Literature

There is a classic story about the rise of the novel in English. It says that in the early eighteenth century, a new kind of writing emerged in the space between epic poetry, on the one hand, and exotic tales of knights and ladies and travels abroad, on the other. This was a kind of writing produced for a new middle class, who because of the profits generated by British imperialism and improvements in agriculture, had more leisure time – and more time to read. And they were a Protestant people, whose sense of an individual relationship towards God, outside of ritual and institutions, encouraged a strong sense of interiority and also belief in the importance of events in this world, rather than the next. Capitalism, imperialism, a rising middle class, and a Protestant sense of individualism led to the emergence of books about the ordinary daily lives of ordinary individuals. Consider the titles of these novels: Robinson Crusoe , Joseph Andrews, Pamela, Clarissa, Tom Jones , Tristam Shandy. They were books narrated by these characters, who constantly reassured us that what we are reading is the true history of their life: this really happened, they tell us with a wink and a nudge.

Throughout the nineteenth century, however, the novel and the writing of lives went their separate parts. Although novels around first person narrative heroes and heroines continued to be written – Jane Eyre and David Copperfield – the realist novel shifted into its characteristic mode of third person narrator – and on the other side of the divide, the writing of autobiographies and diaries flourished: it was a great age of the biography of the Victorian sage and his spiritual crisis: John Stuart Mill and Charles Henry Newman.

In the early twentieth century modernist fiction in British became deeply concerned with the nature of the self. According to Virginia Woolf, ‘an ordinary mind on an ordinary day […] receives a myriad impressions ‒ trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel ‒ Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?’ But by and large, when modernist novelists attempted to represent this new form of life, in novels like Mrs Dalloway, by Woolf, or Ulysses by James Joyce, or The Golden Bowl by Henry James – they did so by transforming the techniques in which they wrote about fictional characters. The great modernist concern with the self was mostly explored through imagined selves.

The Suspicion of the Self

Towards the end of the twentieth century, however, a new scepticism emerged about the nature of the self, and beginning in the early 1980s, British novelists began to question many of the beliefs that had previously kept autobiography separate from the novel, and life separate from fiction. As Julian Barnes’s 1984 novel Flaubert’s Parrot noted, in the pretend exam paper set by its narrator: ‘It has become clear to the examiners in recent years that candidates are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between Art and Life.’ This confusion marks this era of British fiction, one which we might call the age of the suspicion of the self: an age where novelists began to believe that there was no true self that exists alone, prior to the act of writing; instead – the self is not just a fiction, but something we create by writing fiction: that the self is a product of writing. One term is ‘the post-modern age’.

In the aftermath of the postmodern suspicion of the self, these questions began to come to the fore in work of British novelists who explored the relationship between writing and life. They began to become suspicious of suspicion, and sceptical about scepticism. Rather than assuming that the self is just a fiction, they set out to explore, in their writings, the borders between the self and fiction. This became a theme of the later work of Britain’s two Nobel Prize winning novelists, Doris Lessing and V. S. Naipaul. That these writers turned back to the question of how to write a life in their old age is relevant here. For Naipaul, in his 1994 The Way of World, the great unresolved contradiction lay in how to make sense of the self born into a part of the world – Trinidad, in the Caribbean, in his case – which was a world ‘wiped clean’ of the past by colonization. Often we get our sense of who we are by turning to our past, by researching our family history; or by turning to the landscape in which we and our ancestors have lived for generations – something we see so much in contemporary British fiction and poetry, with its exploration of nature and landscape. But as Naipaul’s novel points out: this is just not an option to people who have been colonized. The historical record office in Trinidad, where the narrator works as a child, is a tool of colonial administration. And the landscape of the island, which another section explores, is haunted by the traces of the indigenous people who were all killed by the Spanish. Who are we if we don’t have access to a past to tell us who we are? Are we therefore doomed, as one of Naipaul’s other novels puts, to only have ‘half a life?

A similar sense of history not simply as a myth that we can chose to invent and remake at will, as Rushdie and Barnes believed, but as an almost physically form of damage that we cannot simply wish away, overshadows the work of another writer whose work in the 1990s because obsessed with the telling of lives, W. G Sebald. Although Sebald was born in Germany and wrote in German, he lived most of his life in England, and his novels have been enormously influential in the English-speaking world, and especially in its turn towards the writing of lives, its concerns with the historical past, and the creation of new genres of writing. In what Sebald called his semidocumentary prose fictions, especially books like The Emigrants from 1993 and Austerlitz from 2001, the writing is not structured by the traditional logic of plot, but by the shapes of the stories of lives. These life stories are conveyed through a narrative form that Sebald called ‘periscopic’ narration: a periscope being a device made up of a number of mirrors, so what we see in one reflection is the product of another reflection. For example in Austerlitz, the title character tells the story of his life – how he fled the Nazis as a child, was adopted by a family in Wales, and only late in life did he return to Prague to discover his mother – to a shadowy narrator. This narrator tells his story to us – and this makes us wonder about what it means to have a life story. Is it only something we construct to make others understand us – rather than being something we need to understanding ourselves? In that sense, are ‘lives’ the product of relationships between people – and in that sense something we can’t control, because when I enter into a dialogue with you, I can’t control how you see me? And what is the purpose of the stories we tell about our lives? In Sebald’s novels, the discovery of the truth of one’s past is not a consolation, not a climax, not a source of peace. When Austerlitz finally, in his sixties, discovers a photograph of the mother who was left behind in Prague and murdered in the concentration camps, he doesn’t believe he has found out who he is. He sets off, at the end of the book, on another quest in search of his father, doomed to repeat, endlessly, the search for his true self in the past.

Whereas novelists of the 1980s looked at the ways in which the self was produced by language, Sebald’s work – like Naipaul’s – looked at the self beneath language: what were the physical and material objects lying underneath language: the diaries, manuscripts, computers, and physical books that enable language to last in the first place? We only have language insofar as it is preserved, and the physical things that preserve our stories are one of Sebald’s concerns. However, his works also remind us that historical documents are never what they seem, and we should no more naively believe in physical evidence that we should naively believe in theories that the self is nothing more than a product of language. In one book, The Emigrants , we are presented with a photograph of a diary which pretends to be written by one of the fictional characters, Ambros Adelwarth – but which in fact was written by Sebald himself. These manipulations aim to make the reader consider ‘one of the central problems of fiction writing, which is that of legitimacy and arrival at the truth on a crooked route’. What are the truths provided by fiction as a form – and how are they different from those of history, memory, or auto/biography? What are the responsibilities of the novelist – and to whom?

Sebald’s entangling of fiction and life-writing has been so influential that Hari Kunzru saw it producing ‘an emerging genre, the novel after Sebald, its 19th-century furniture of plot and character dissolved into a series of passages, held together by occasional photographs and a subjectivity that hovers close to (but is never quite identical with) the subjectivity of the writer’. Indeed for Kunzru these are the characteristics of the form of writing across the world, with which I opened the lecture: novels that lack standard plots, which frequently include long passages of what we more commonly call essays, criticism, or memoir, and which so often feature a character who is a narrator who is often almost identical, but never identical with, the subjectivity of the author. This mixture of genres, all of which circle around the question of how to write a life, characterize the two volumes of the ‘living autobiography’ published by the writer Deborah Levy. She has struck out on a new way of writing a life, she has said, because she knows of no model that exists to capture the shape of a life of a woman, in her fifties, who no longer has children but who feels at the peak of her powers as an artist. And it characterizes the short, fleeting series of stories written over a number of years by Joanna Walsh, who is trying to capture the texture and rhythms of intimate life conducted over digital technology. To appreciate contemporary literature, we need to survey quite a lot of writers, to pull out what they have in common. This leads to a sense of flying above a landscape and seeing lots of beautiful lakes and rivers below, but not being able to immerse oneself in them – at least, I hope this is the sense you are getting. Beside these mysterious pools writers are staring, entranced by their reflections.

I would now like to consider in depth, as an example, the recent memoirs and novels of Rachel Cusk, the writer who, I think, has written the most quietly complex and challenging novels that make us rethink what it means to say we have a life of our own. In a trilogy of novels called Outline, Transit, and Kudos, which was completed in 2018, she has done so by inventing a form and style so simple and yet so radical it makes us wonder why no novelist had thought it before. These novels are narrated by a writer whom, only at the end of the first novel, do we discover is called Faye. But Faye, the writer, is what we can call an absent centre in these novels: she drifts through the world, travelling through unknown countries, without telling us anything at all about herself. Instead she acts as a filter, or a conduit, for the stories other people tell about themselves: people she meets on planes, or trains, at bars, or as literary festivals. All these stories are written in a slow, measured, hypnotic style, so that only upon reading and re-reading do we discover the parallels and connections we are being asked to discover between the life stories Faye hears, and the life story she is struggling with herself.

But to appreciate these novels, it is important to know that Cusk first wrote a number of novels very unlike this. Cusk, who was born in Canada but grew up in England, before studying English at Oxford, began her literary career writing five or six fairly standard satirical novels about middle-class adultery – they aren’t bad, but they aren’t especially interesting, and they are more concerned with the shallow surface mores of class than of what it means to have a self. But then Cusk’s marriage broke down, and she wrote a memoir, called Aftermath (2012) which challenged the very idea of writing a memoir – and which set the stage for the novels that followed. In many ways, the events of Cusk’s memoir could seem sadly all too banal: marriages break up, a couple gets divorced, and they don’t get reconciled. They hate each other, and it is ugly. But Cusk dares to treat the events of everyday life with all the philosophical significance that novelists previously accorded to great battles in history. (This is a trait of much international writing at the moment, and there are times when it can go horribly wrong, so that the novelist just seems like Narcissus: navel-gazing, self-obsessed, and irritatingly convinced of his or her own importance.) Cusk’s work avoids this danger, I think, because she seems, in the consideration of ordinary events, not to be exalting the writer’s self, but rather examining its potential humiliation. Her memoir opens telling us:

If someone were to ask me what disaster this was that had befallen my life, I might ask if they wanted the story or the truth. (2) …They’re trying to make the story true again, or to make the truth untrue. I’m happy enough to hold his hand, but my husband doesn’t like it. It’s bad form – and form is important in stories. (3)

From the outset we get a sense that the writer has a problem with the form of the memoir, the shape it imposes, in retrospect, upon the events that happened. But listen also to the pun she makes – her behaviour, as the divorced woman who hates her husband more than he hates her, is ‘bad form’ – it is socially unacceptable, in British idiom. The memoir asks us to think about the relationship between these two ideas of form: the shape that narrative imposes on our lives, and what emotions are considered socially acceptable. Form, for Cusk, is a condition like fate: looking at her son’s tooth she notes that: ‘Superficially the condition of this one was not so bad, but form is destiny; form, not content, that which is shaped and therefore shapes its own fate (30). This idea that the form of art reveals the fate of our lives is something she traced back to classical Greece – and Cusk is deeply versed in the classics and has directed versions of tragedies by Aeschylus and Euripides in the theatre. Reflecting on the story of Clytemnestra, she states:

Form is both safety and imprisonment, both prosecutor and dissembler: form, in the end, conceals truth, just as the body conceals the cancer that will destroy it. Form is rigid, inviolable, devastatingly correct; that is its vulnerability. Form can be broken. It will tolerate variation but not transgression; it can be broken, but at what cost? If it is destroyed what can be put in its place? The only alternative to form is chaos. (55)

In writing her memoir Cusk doesn’t feel consoled: ‘I say to her, all my memories are being taken away. Nothing belongs to me any more. I have become an exile from my own history. I say to her, I no longer have a life. It’s an afterlife; it’s all aftermath. (91) So the aftermath of the title is the narrative memoir itself: ‘narrative is the aftermath of violent events. It’s a means of reconciling yourself with the past. […] I want to live, I say. I don’t want to tell my story. I want to live. (121) Notice here the strange claim Cusk makes – that telling a story is the opposite of life. But neither is she so naïve to claim that she can jump into chaos – none of us can survive that. But how to live without telling a story? ‘It had been my belief that the only way to know something is to experience it, that the truest forms of knowledge are personal. Now I imagine a different kind of knowledge, knowledge without exposure, without risk; the knowledge of the voyeur, watching, assessing, staying hidden.’ (73) This technique and this form – with all the implications behind it, will be the form of her next three novels.

As I have said, Cusk’s trilogy of novels tells the story of Faye, a writer, whom over the course of the three novels we learn has left her husband, with whom she had a child, but who, towards the end of the third book, has decided to return to him. But this summary doesn’t really express what these novels feel like to read. Faye is extraordinarily withdrawn – she no longer wants to tell her story. So instead she listens. In listening to how other people tell the stories of their lives, she begins to learn more about the false form her husband has imposed on her life. She also tells us as to what this technique of listening has revealed to her:

He 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 details filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank (240).

What she begins to notice, as other people tell the stories of their lives, is how often, even in the space of talking to them on a plane journey, she notes that they make things up; that they lie about how happy they are, or how they feel about their parents. We all know this feeling – when you meet someone for the first time, and you give an introduction only to feel – as T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock put it – ‘that is not what I meant at all’. Faye is a writer, who in the first novel, Outline teaches a writing class to students in Greece. There she enters a debate with a student called Georgeou, who too wonders about this habit, we have, of fictionalising our lives in our most casual conversations.

He saw the tendency to fictionalise our own experiences as positively dangerous, because it convinced us that human life had some kind of design and that we were more significant that we actually were (137).

One of the other students, argues the counter position

It is surely not true…that there is no story of life; that one’s own existence doesn’t have a distinct form that has begun and will one day end…(137)

These are the two positions on life and autobiography that the trilogy of novels explores: is there something dangerous in the belief that our lives have form, and therefore a purpose – dangerous because it makes us think we are significant? Or, is it true that one’s life does have a distinct form, that will one day come to an end? As her memoir suggests, Cusk sees these questions as having first been raised by Greek tragedy, and never having been answered in literature since. But she also, in very subtle ways, explores the ways in which life in the twenty-first century is transforming the dangers and comforts of giving sense to a life.

The first book opens as follows:

Before the flight I was invited to lunch at a London club with a billionaire I’d been promised had liberal credentials. He talked in his open-necked shirt about the new software he was developing, that could help organizations identify the employees most likely to rob and betray them in the future’ (3).

In this age of globalized capitalism and digital technology, is the shape of our lives nothing more than an algorithmic pattern, to be predicted by an oligarch in the service of profit?

The second novel, Transit , also opens with a uncanny scene of the digital world transforming the self – with a paragraph I would like to read just to give you a sense of Cusk’s dry, calm style, but also the ironic humour.

An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in the immediate future. She could see things that I could not: my personal details had come into her possession and had allowed her to study the planets for their information. She wished me to know that a major transit was due to occur shortly in the sky. This information was causing her great excitement when she considered the changes it might represent. For a small fee she would share it with me and enable me to turn it to my advantage.

– The sad fact, she said, is that in this era of science and unbelief we have lost the sense of our own significance. We have become cruel, to ourselves and others, because we believe that ultimately we have no value. What the planets offer, she said, is nothing less than the change to regain faith in the grandeur of the human. …how would we act if we believed that each and every one of us had cosmic importance?

But this too is an email generated by an algorithm, a computer bot that had been scanning Faye’s internet activity, and which composed a generic email that none the less accurately surveyed the concerns of her life. Here too, and in this trilogy as a whole, Cusk is interested in the traces of ancient archaic concerns in our technological lives: we understand technology so often as a form of magic; new technologies are bringing us back to our primal selves. In Transit, the second novel of this trilogy, between her conversations with her hairdresser, and her neighbours, Faye comes to believe, by the end of the novel, that the popularity of astrology and algorithms stems from the same source as the popularity of the belief that our lives have a shape and a form: that they both indicate our desire to believe in fate: to believe that we are important:

I was beginning to see what other people called fate in the unfolding of events, as though living were merely an act of reading to find out what happens next. That idea – of one’s own life as something that had already been dictated – was strangely seductive until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy (198).

And so the novel begins to develop Cusk’s criticism of the belief that life has a form, like literature – we are not characters in a story, and believing this is what enables us to inflict pain on one another.

The full total of what Faye learns by listening is revealed in the final novel, Kudos which was just published this year. Since in these novels, as in all novels, much of the pleasure lies in uncertainty, I won’t tell you what happens. But I will end with one scene in which, by listening to others, Faye is confronted with the consequences of her radical attempt to draw a line between life and the shape of art, one which sums up the larger questions circulating in literature today, about what it means to write a life. In this novel Faye is interviewed by a male journalist, who although he talks over her, also reveals the truth of her approach:

Negative literature, he had noticed, got much of its power through the fearless use of honesty: a person with no interest in living and hence no investment in the future can afford to be honest, he said, with the same dubious privilege accorded to the negative writer. Yet their honesty he had said, was of an unpalatable kind: in a sense it went to waste, perhaps because no one cared for the honesty of someone jumping the ship the rest of us were stuck on. The real honestly, of course, was that of the person who remained on board and who endeavoured to tell the truth about it.

We all know the forces in contemporary life that diminish our sense of self: technology, the destruction of the environment, mass political uprisings. This we all know. And we know the power of negative literature that exposes this, tells us how terrible we are, tells us that we are nothing but robots and algorithms – tells us our lives are meaningless. There is a powerful honesty in that, but that is like the honesty of all those postmodern sceptics – that of those who have jumped ship and stopped caring. What I have hoped to suggest in this article is that contemporary British writers, in trying to explore the difficulties and confusions that come with writing lives, are trying to stay on the ship on which we all live – that ship of birth, life, and death, and to try tell the truth about that – or so we are led to believe.