Against Premature Articulation: Empathy, Gender, and Austerity in Rachel Cusk and Katie Kitamura

AFFECTIVE AUSTERITY (VAROUFAKIS'S MATURITY)

The negotiations between Greece and its creditors—represented by the "Troika" of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—that started after a first bailout in 2010 are a crucial episode in the recent history of austerity. If the economic meaning of austerity is fairly straightforward and refers to "the policy of cutting the state's budget to promote growth" (Blyth, 2), the notion is overdetermined by moral and affective resonances (if only because there is no robust empirical evidence for austerity's economic efficiency [Schui, 6]). Austerity, Mark Blyth notes, is less a coherent theory than a "sensibility … concerning the nature and the role of the state in economic life" (Blyth, 100); it relies on a moralizing conviction that self-inflicted "virtuous pain" (13) can redeem the state and its citizens from all too indulgent consumption and serve as "a source of moral strength and spiritual salvation" (Konings 2015, 127). Such affects, aspirations, and anxieties are not only the province of economics and politics but are also negotiated in artistic and literary engagements with austerity. In this essay, I explore how two recent novels set against the background of a ravaged Greece—Rachel Cusk's Outline (2014) and Katie Kitamura's A Separation (2017)—engage both the obvious devastations and the undeniable attractions of austerity. They do so in ways that directly confront the gendering of postures of austere self-limitation and self-control (as opposed to indulgent profligacy) to claim a form of feminine unsentimentality.

To get a sense of the ambiguous attraction of austerity and its implicit gendering, we can do worse than turn to one widely publicized account of the Greek debt negotiations. Former Greek minister of finance Yanis Varoufakis's memoir of those negotiations derives its title—Adults in the Room—from an offhand comment by Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the IMF, who "at one point … remarked that to resolve the drama we needed 'adults in the room'" (3). Varoufakis agrees but is dismayed when he discovers that the media report Lagarde's words as a personal attack on him and begin to describe him as "adolescent"—"an addition," he writes, "to the long list of epithets they had used to describe me thus far" (432). Varoufakis confronts Lagarde (or "Christine," as he consistently calls her), pouting that "the press report that your we-need-adults-in-the-room comment referred to me." Lagarde provides the consolation Varoufakis craves: "'Nonsense,' she replied amicably"' (432). Varoufakis's panicked eagerness to be counted as an adult and his fear of being considered immature, childlike, and overly emotional also surfaces at other moments in the book: when Varoufakis dismisses a political opponent for "spouting adolescent inanities" (437), when the Greek populace is likened to "unruly children screaming" (125), or when Varoufakis notes that his fraction is split between his own "team of professionals" and the "younger Syriza cohort" who make their leader feel "like a childminder" (342). The one moment Varoufakis and Benoît Coeuré, second in command at the ECB, indulge in less than mature behavior and "chat … like naughty schoolchildren" (380), Varoufakis is caught off guard by the threats implicit in Coeuré's words. Reason enough, then, never to surrender maturity and lose control again.

If Adults in the Room chronicles a crucial episode in the recent economic and political history of austerity, it also embodies a posture of austere self-curtailment. Indeed, Adults in the Room is an anxiously sustained performance of rationality, self-control, and carefully curtailed exasperation at others' passionate mediocrity. If debates over austerity are typically cast in moralizing terms as a struggle between the derelict indulgence of consumers on one hand and the principled self-control of responsible adults on the other, Varoufakis's anxious self-renunciation reveals the appeal of such a posture of severe emotionlessness to even someone intellectually (but, it appears, not temperamentally) opposed to the politics of austerity. Austerity, in other words, emerges in Varoufakis's memoir as an aesthetic and an affective issue...