Merging & mumblecore

The impulse to merge art and reality

Sobekcis, Untitled, 2021

When I was a kid, I remember feeling frustrated reading dialogue in books. It made me more dissatisfied with real life. In my experience, conversations in reality weren’t as polished. People didn’t speak in full sentences, they were often interrupted by others or themselves, they often paused and used filler words and got distracted. They told two or three stories at a time, like my mother who never seemed to arrive at her original point without prompting.

Real life was squishy, amorphous, messy, chaotic. People were constantly changing. Circumstances shifted. I often felt like I help multiple contradictory beliefs about myself, my feelings, and the world and none of them were “real” until I put pen to paper. Any thought that I said out loud, felt temporary. Any thought that I wrote down, words that made sense one after another, felt final.

This morning I finished Rachel Cusk’s Outline. I started reading it at the recommendation of a handful of people in my life, including several people in my writing workshop.

The form is the best part about the book. It’s written in first-person, and close to the entirety of the book is dialogue. Paragraphs and paragraphs of conversation, sometimes dialogue between two or three people and sometimes monologues with a captive audience. It’s the closest to itching that frustration I have had since my early days as a reader that novels don’t feel like real life. It’s the closest book I’ve read that resembles mumblecore.

Mumblecore is a genre of indie films. In these films, the acting is very natural, dialogue is often improvised. The actors might be non-professional, and the budgets are very low. The screenplay is driven by dialogue rather than action or plot, and the core of the film is conversational, confessional, personal. 

Some of my favorite mumblecore films are Blue Jay and Outside In. The most famous is probably Frances Ha. The genre has morphed quite a bit and its inspiration has seeped into higher-budget films like Lady Bird and international films like Ida (although Ida is probably more similar to The Lighthouse in that it has very little dialogue, very little action, and the screenplay mostly relies on moodiness and cinematography to move forward. Plus, the main character is played by a non-actor which ads to the “natural” feel). 

There’s literature that resembles this kind of mumblecore style—The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, On The Road by Jack Kerouac, maybe even some short stories by Raymond Carver (several of which inspired films!). If we’re talking more contemporary fiction, some people think that Sally Rooney fits here though that’s definitely a bit of a stretch. Ben Lerner might also fit here. But really none of the books I’ve read have the kind of hyper-realistic dialogue of Rachel Cusk’s writing. Next on my list are Sigrid Nunez, Sheila Heti, Jenny Offill, Annie Ernaux.

I made the mistake of reading an interview with Cusk as I was just starting to read her work, and to my dismay she came across as quite defensive and insufferable. The interviewer was quite friendly but all of her answers were contrarian. Though maybe this kind of antagonism was warranted as she had recently come under harsh (and in my opinion unwarranted) scrutiny in the literary world for her portrayals of motherhood.

We get hints of pretension in the narrator, as well. She has a knack for getting others to confess intimate details of their lives, while remaining relatively unknown to us—though the details we do know about the narrator bear quite a resemblance to the author herself, bordering autobiography and fiction.

The narrator is incredibly passive, and we get very little of her interiority and very little of her contributions to dialogue. When she does talk, she is challenging those around her, friends and strangers alike. We follow her as a source of authority, and we are led to believe that she is somehow “objectively” listening. This leaves me with questions of power and context.

As a writer, I disagree with Rachel Cusk on several things. As a reader, I want to devour all of her work. She explains about what led her to writing in this format after a devastating divorce,

“You are chucked out of the house, on the street, not defended any more, not a member of anything, you have no history, no network. What you have is people, strangers in the street, and the only way you can know them is by what they say. I became attuned to these encounters because I had no frame or context any more. I could hear a purity of narrative in the way people described their lives. The intense experience of hearing this became the framework of the novel.”

There is something compelling about the mumblecore aesthetic both in film and in literature. There is an impulse to merge art and reality—rather than forcing life to become more ordered, art becomes unpredictable and chaotic like life. I am enjoying the messiness.