“Out from Under the Cloud of
Unknowing”
By Francine Prose
Author’s Argument
• Francine Prose believes that in order for a political story to
truly capture the attention of the reader, it needs to be a story
first with a subtle political message.
Conveying the Message
• “Life was short. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t face the
prospect of not being particularly entertained and instead
spending hundreds or thousands of pages being told more or
less what I’ve just said about gender inequality in a couple of
paragraphs” (Prose 35).
Conveying the Message
• “And politics can slip its way into poetry in a way that’s
serious, graceful, and sly” (37).
Conveying the Message
• “Maybe that was the trouble with the novels I tried to read:
They were insufficiently mysterious. A led to B, which led
directly to C without a skip or side step into something more
unexpected” (40)
Conveying the Message
• “Maybe, like other arts, political art might as well start from
there-not from the impulse to teach or inform, but from the
desire to discover and grope our way out from what a
fourteenth-century English monk called the cloud of
unknowing” (41).
• Francine Prose used an allusion to The Cloud of Unknowing,
a Christian Mystic book from the Late Middle Ages that
suggested that spiritual experience with God could only be
achieved through contemplative prayer, without any other
form of thinking. Her opposition to this idea of unthinking
conveys her argument of a book must first attract a reader’s
thought away the bliss of not thinking to be able to teach
anything.