Spotlight on … Christine Brooke-Rose Textermination (1991) *

‘The marvellously playful and difficult novelist Christine Brooke-Rose, who has died aged 88, was fond of the device of omission. In her 1968 novel Between, she left out the verb “to be” throughout, to stress the narrator’s disoriented sense of personal identity – the year before George Perec’s novel La Disparition omitted the letter “e”. She left out the word “I” from her autobiographical novels Remake (1996) and Life, End Of (2006), instead describing the narrator as “the old lady”. In her 1998 novel Next, which had 26 narrators, each of whose names began with a different letter of the alphabet, she omitted the verb “to have” to emphasise the deprivation of the homeless Londoners in the book.

‘As if to continue the theme of erasure, Britain has all but airbrushed one of its most radical exponents of experimental fiction. When Brooke-Rose published a volume of criticism in 2002, it was not, perhaps, entirely devotion to Roland Barthes’ death of the author thesis that led to her to call it Invisible Author.

‘Many critics hailed her fiction, for all that it was sometimes scarcely comprehensible or pleasurable to those ignorant of the underpinning theory. Ellen G Friedman put Brooke-Rose among those 20th-century experimental female writers – Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein – whose novels “explode the fixed architecture of the master narrative”. Brooke-Rose wrote 16 novels, five collections of criticism and several collections of short stories and poems. Frank Kermode considered that her originality and skills deserved “a greater measure of admiration and respect than we have so far chosen to accord them”.

‘In 1974, Brooke-Rose began writing her first novel, The Languages of Love, much of which was set in the Reading Room of the British Museum. The Sycamore Tree (1958) similarly involved London intellectuals, but her third novel, The Dear Deceit (1960), saw the first stirrings of narrative experiment. In it, a man traces the life of his deceased father backwards from death to birth. Throughout this period, she worked as a reviewer and freelance journalist for the New Statesman, Observer, Sunday Times and Times Literary Supplement.

‘In 1962 she underwent kidney surgery. One result of this was her first truly experimental novel, Out (1964), which was compared to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s formally adventurous La Jalousie (1957). Brooke-Rose was becoming a nouveau romancier: later she scorned that description while conceding the influence of Robbe-Grillet, whose novels she translated, on her reinvention as a writer. Out was narrated by a white character facing racial discrimination in the aftermath of a nuclear war, with pale skin now indicating radiation poisoning and dark skin health.

‘Increasingly invisible in Britain, Brooke-Rose crossed the Channel in 1968 and flourished. She had already that year separated from her second husband; a third marriage, to Claude Brooke, was to be brief. She taught linguistics and English literature at the newly founded University of Paris (Vincennes), a bastion of counter-cultural thought where, in 1975, she became professor of English and American literature and literary theory. After retiring from teaching in 1988, she settled in a village near Avignon on the grounds that French public healthcare is superior to Britain’s.

‘Her critical works included A Structural Analysis of Pound’s Usura Canto: Jakobson’s Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse (1976), A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (1981) and the relatively jaunty A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971), produced alongside wildly inventive fiction.

‘It was the conceit of Thru (1975) that the students on a university creative writing course collectively construct the narrative. The resulting text included student essays with handwritten changes to typed text, musical notations, mathematical formulas, diagrams, and CVs. In an interview she conceded that this self-conscious deconstruction of narrativity was written tongue in cheek “for a few narratologist friends”. Textermination (1991) was set at a conference in San Francisco, attended by characters from Austen, Flaubert, Eliot, Pynchon, Roth and Rushdie, who petition potential readers with the help of literary critics who “interpret” them for the masses.

‘In Life, End Of, her final novel, the 80-something narrator finds that the world has grown dull, even those parts of it that were supposed to be ring-fenced from stupefaction. As the narrator writes: “Montaigne says life’s purpose is to teach us to die. However, the standard of teaching is now so low that the task is getting tougher and tougher …” The pleasures of writing now become mere palliatives: in a mock-technical lecture from a character to an uninterested author, the author comes to accept that her experiments in narrative are like pain-killers, and that, like life, they no longer matter.

‘Decay is ubiquitous: the old lady disintegrates physically as meaning, too, falls apart. Her legs “flinch wince jerk shirk lapse collapse give way stagger like language when it can’t present the exact word needed, the exact spot where to put the foot”. Never mind: she has Samuel Beckett’s gallows humour and can still pun bilingually. She recalls that Descartes thought the pineal gland to be the seat of the soul, “thus putting de cart before dehors”.

‘Questions remain. Was this last book written to fill a spiritual gap, and to teach us to die? Was the old lady’s life story, ultimately, the author’s? Did the author see her fictional experiments as finally unimportant? Brooke-Rose omitted, surely programmatically, to give us answers.’ — collaged

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Her

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Further

Christine Brooke-Rose @ Wikipedia
‘Christine Brooke-Rose: the great British experimentalist you’ve never heard of’
Christine Brooke-Rose: An Inventory of Her Papers
‘Celebrating Christine Brooke-Rose’ @ TLS
‘R.I.P. Christine Brooke-Rose’ @ HTMLGIANT
‘The life and work of the late, great experimental writer, Christine Brooke-Rose’
Christine Brooke-Rose © Orlando Project
Christine Brooke-Rose’s ‘The Lunatic Fringe’
‘The Criticism of Christine Brooke-Rose’ @ Waggish
‘Hello Christine Brooke-Rose, R.I.P.’
Podcast: Christine Brooke-Rose and A. S. Byatt, in conversation
Excerpts from CB-R’s ‘Amalgamemnon’
Interview with Christine Brooke-Rose
Anna Aslanyan on the Christine Brooke-Rose symposium
Buy Textermination

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Manuscript

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Interview
from The Review of Contemporary Fiction

In your essay “Ill Iterations,” which you wrote for “Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction,” you mention the difficulties experimental writers face when they are male, but you say also that the differences are compounded when the experimental writer happens to be a female. Will you talk about those difficulties for the woman writer?

CBR: Yes, although it took a long time to become aware of them. Once in Paris, quite a long time ago, Helene Cixous rang me up and asked me to write something about the difficulties I’ve had as a woman writer. Naively, I said, “Well, I haven’t had any difficulties as a I “woman” writer. I’ve had difficulties that “any” writer would have; can I write about that?” And she said, “Oh, no.” She wanted something feminist. I was a bit antifeminist in those days, in the early 1970s. I didn’t consciously feel that I had had any difficulties. My later revision of that feeling came from genuine experience. As I look back over my career I realize that, in fact, I did have difficulties, but I took them for granted, as part of the nature of things. From the moment I went experimental, however, when I wrote “Out,” and my then-publishers couldn’t understand it and turned it down, I did actually start having difficulties. And when I wrote that essay for you, I started looking back and thinking about it, trying to fathom it out, and I became aware that the woman experimental writer has more difficulties than the man experimental writer, in the sense that, however much men have accepted women’s writing, there is still this basic assumption, which is unconscious, that women cannot create new forms. They can imitate others, they can imitate their little lives, tell their love stories and their difficulties and so on, and they do it extremely well. I’m not downgrading that kind of writing. But if by any chance they dare to experiment, then they are imitating a male movement, and usually one that’s already dead. In my case, I always get the label “nouveau roman” in English because “nouveau roman” is, from the English point of view, safely dead and no one talks about it anymore. In other words, all one is capable of as a woman is to do what the men do, and not so well. There is an unconscious refusal, really, to look at what I’m doing in any kind of detail. Whereas men experimenters or innovators of any kind do get that sort of attention.

What does the phrase “utterly other discourse” from your novel Amalgamemnon mean for you? Do you feel that you are writing “utterly other discourses”?

CBR: In Amalgamemnon, it doesn’t actually mean that. It doesn’t refer to the writing, it refers to the woman reading and thinking quite other things until she has to switch back to talking to the man. In fact, though, I do feel that my writing is different. I haven’t actually seen other writing quite like mine, but it is very difficult for me to say how “other” it is, or even whether it’s any good. I can’t really judge it, so I can’t really answer that questions. I do what I want to do.

But you did make a conscious decision at one point in your career to write the indeterminate novel, rather than something realistic?

CBR: What a strange opposition. The realistic novel has its own indeterminacies. But anyway, it didn’t happen that way at all. It was much more negative than that. I was simply dissatisfied with what I was doing. I had written four novels, which are really quite traditional, satirical, comic novels. I did experiment with time in one of them, which was written backwards, for instance, so that in each chapter the hero gets younger and younger. But that was still classical irony. They were basically traditional modern novels, if I can use such a phrase, in that the main concern was, like most novels, epistemological, concerned with reality and illusion. But I felt it was too easy. It was great fun, but it wasn’t what I wanted. Originally, when I was very young, I used to write poetry every day, but I soon discovered that I was not a poet; but that urge to write poetry . . .

But you are a poet.

CBR: Perhaps, but I had to get around to it in a very different way. I then thought I had found myself as a novelist, but after those four early novels I realized it still wasn’t what I wanted. So eventually—yes, I do now write very poetic novels, more deeply poetic at any rate than the poems I was writing every day. At the time of this dissatisfaction, I suppose it was Nathalie Sarraute’s The Age of Suspicion, and her putting the modern novel in question, which was the first turning point for me, much more so than her novels, for although I like them very much, I can’t say there’s a direct influence of Nathalie Sarraute on what I write. Whereas Robbe-Grillet did have a direct influence, at least on Out. But I soon got out of it. So it wasn’t a decision to write indeterminate novels as such. It was simply a decision not to go on writing as I used to write. But the other thing that happened was much more important. I had a very serious illness, lost a kidney and had a very long convalescence. I fell into a semi-trancelike state for a long time. I was very much thinking of death as the meaning of life. And I began to write Out, which is a very “sick” novel. I think one can feel that. I imagine a time when the whites are discriminated against; the whole color bar is reversed. But the reason the whites are discriminated against is because they are sick, dying from this mysterious radiation disease to which the colored people are more immune. My protagonist is a sick old man who cannot get a job and cannot remember his previous status. This exactly reproduced the state of illness that I was in, so in that sense of protection it was still a very mimetic novel. But I wasn’t consciously trying to do anything different. I started writing a sentence and fell back on the pillow exhausted. I didn’t really know where I was going, and it took me a long time to write it. I was groping. So I don’t think it was a conscious decision. But then with Such I really took off on my own. I don’t think there’s any more influence of Robbe-Grillet on Such. I would say that Such is my first really “Me” novel, where I don’t owe anything to anyone else.

Can you characterize that “Me-ness”?

CBR: I think Such is more imaginative, for one thing. It’s still, of course, concerned with death since the man dies and is brought back to life. Again, I don’t explain why. I get much more interested, in fact, in the impact of language on the imagination. I suppose it’s really with Between that I discovered what I could do with language. With Such it’s still a fairly straightforward use of language, but very much in another world with this slow return to reality as the man comes back to life, but he then sees the stars as radiation. And having hit on that idea but not really knowing where I was going, I then had to do a lot of work, learn something about astrophysics, for example, since I was using it as a metaphor for the world. It’s in Such that I discovered that jargon, of whatever kind, has great poetry. For instance if you take a scientific law and use it literally, it becomes a metaphor. Of course, this is a schoolboy joke. If the teacher says, “Weight consists of the attraction between two bodies, ” everybody giggles. But if you take it further and use more complicated astrophysical laws about bouncing signals on the moon, for instance, to express the distance between people, then it becomes a very active metaphor. Yet it’s treated as ontological in the world of the fiction, like a sunset or a tree. So this sort of thing, you see, isn’t a conscious decision, it’s a discovery.

Is that how you would define the experimental novel?

CBR: Yes, in a way. People often use the term “experimental novel” to mean just something peculiar, or as a genre in itself (on the same level as “realistic” or “fantastic” or “romantic” or “science” fiction). But to experiment is really not knowing where you’re going and discovering. Experimenting with language, experimenting with form and discovering things, and sometimes you might get it wrong and it just doesn’t come off. When I discovered that there is great beauty in technical language (and this comes into its own in Thru where I actually use critical jargon as poetry), I also discovered that there’s beauty and humor in confronting different discourses, jostling them together, including, for instance, computer language. In Such it’s astrophysics and in Between it’s all the languages, the lunatic, empty speech-making of different congresses, political, sociological, literary and so on, and of course, actual languages, different languages, all jostled together, since my protagonist, who’s a simultaneous interpreter, is always in different countries. Discourse became my subject matter. So discovery is one meaning of “experimental,” and this would be, to answer your earlier question, my “utterly other discourse,” where the actual language is different from the language you and I are using now, or that I find in other books. The second meaning is to see how far I can go with language, with vocabulary and syntax, and this is much more conscious.

Can we assume that we do not need to worry that you’re moving towards realism?

CBR: Were you worrying? Well, I might be, you know. I have nothing against realism. Why not? I think I say somewhere in “A Rhetoric of the Unreal” that realism may come back, but in a new form, refreshed by all this. We already have magic realism and hyper-realism after all. Fantastic realism. The real made unreal and vice versa. Sometimes there is a period of tremendous experiment, and then somehow the old thing comes back again, renewed by all the experimenting that’s been going on. That may be the only useful purpose of such an experiment, I just don’t know. But that doesn’t concern me too much. I also think that the way “experiment” is set against “realism,” the way I and others are said to be working against the “realistic” novel, is a great oversimplification. Even the most experimental, most postmodern writer is still basically realistic. They may not be “imitating” reality, in the sense of reproducing a familiar situation, but ultimately they’re representing something. There’s always a representative function simply because language is representative. There have been very naive attitudes towards representation, and we’ve all become much more self-conscious about it, but I don’t think we can actually get out of representation.

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Book

Christine Brooke-Rose Textermination
New Directions

‘In Textermination, the eminent British novelist/critic Christine Brooke-Rose pulls a wide array of characters out of the great works of literature and drops them into the middle of the San Francisco Hilton. Emma Bovary, Emma Woodhouse, Captain Ahab, Odysseus, Huck Finn… all are gathered to meet, to discuss, to pray for their continued existence in the mind of the modern reader. But what begins as a grand enterprise erupts into total pandemonium: with characters from different times, places, and genres all battling for respect and asserting their own hard-won fame and reputations. Dealing with such topical literary issues as deconstruction, multiculturalism, and the Salman Rushdie affair, this wild and humorous satire pokes fun at the academy and ultimately brings into question the value of determining a literary canon at all.’ — New Directions

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Excerpt

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hey, j. The only Julie Decorneau film I’ve seen is ‘Titane’, which I really didn’t like at all. But people have encouraged me to look earlier in her oeuvre, and I mean to. And ‘Raw’ sounds like a place to start. Thanks! Yeah, blood exiting the body’s interior has a real power when it’s not something you’re not accustomed to seeing, I guess. Even with the slaves I corral for those posts,  the ‘no limits’ ones usually say ‘except blood’. My day was kind of spruced up, which in my case means wasn’t boiling hot, which counts, I think. Less sweat = more spruced up? ** Dominik, Hi!!! Glad the post spoke to you. Pitt definitely had some … what do they call that … face sanding (?) somewhere along the way. I hope love fixed your lift. I’m on the 4th floor, so I feel you. Love wondering if Green Day, while aesthetically uninteresting, are admirable in some other respect, G. ** Misanthrope, Do you realise how rare it is that people actually gasp out loud? I guess that’s why causing one is such a goal. Whew, glad ‘Flunker’ didn’t derail anything. Birthday tomorrow. Have a big one. 53 is nothing, man, it’s chickenfeed, enjoy. ** David Ehrenstein, Huh, in a way, yes, but a lot less shy. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yes. Whoop, PT awakens from its thankfully brief slumbers! ** Jack Skelley, Yeah, I was strangely wide awake yesterday. ** Darby 😺, If you’ve been messing up, I sure didn’t notice it. My ear is more like a well except with mud instead of water inside. Right, you’re in the hurricane zone. Sounds fun. Never had the privilege myself. I’m reading a book/novel called ‘Adorable’ by Ida Marie Hede. It’s very good so far. That is soon. No, Breakfast in America is really little. Not a big call here for American breakfast food. Fingers thoroughly crossed about the pet shop job. Well, I can certainly understand why your mom named him Cooper, haha. Dude, you’re not boring, I’m boring. Maybe I’m just hiding it well. The thing I enjoy in life is making things. I haven’t seen any movies lately. I’m watching a documentary about Syd Barrett today. That seems like it would be worth watching. ** Tosh Berman, Hi. Goodness, I inspired you linguistically! Whoa, I’m patting my back, or I guess my shoulder. ** Uday, If woody actually smelled like wood I would consider it, but I bet it doesn’t smell anything like wood. Adler as in Renata? I like her crits. Good luck surviving the excessive constant company. I’m going to find out what all wicking means. I’m betting it means something nice. So I’ll wish you the exact same. ** Lucas, I think a lot of people want to use the Olympics to get a boner or its equivalent, and said people have very conventional erotic tastes. That’s my theory. Well, at least you don’t have to stay with him, so that’s a victory. Yeah, on further thought, anger is not a good creativity creator. When I get angry, I just get frozen. Wow, both of your new collages are just great! You’re so good, pal. Deep bow. Everyone, Go check out two new collages by the fireball of talent Lucas. Here. So exciting! No, I don’t think you told me about your friend having a personal encounter with Leaud. That’s so cool, obvs. ** Joseph, Hi, J. Oh, too long a story for the likes of here, but … Zac and I decided to do something crazy and go to Antarctica. You take a ship there from Argentina, so we traveled around in Argentina and a bit of Chile on the way. Us and a bunch of mostly really rich people voyaged for two days on the ship through extremely rocky waters, literally nauseated and often vomiting the entire time, and then we spent 10 days in Antarctica, or rather on a ship traveling beside Antarctica with mostly daily short visits on land. And one day we got to kayak in the aforementioned bay. Antarctica itself is jaw-droopingly beautiful and utterly foreign in general, but that kayak day was the ultimate. You can only go there during their summer, which is very short and I think falls in our January/February as I recall. ** Steve, He was already a star, just not a gigantic one. He’d already been in ‘True Romance’ and ‘Interview with a Vampire’, etc. when I saw him. Self-distribution would be last ditch. That’s an incredible amount of work. Ideally we’ll find some kind of distributor for the film. ** Harper, Hi. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that I had to stop smoking weed in my teens after my two LSD freak outs because all it did was brings aspects of them back. ‘Against the Day’ is one of my favorite Pynchons. Curious what you’ll think. I did know that about McCartney and Lennon. It’s one of those things that sticks in your head. I’ve never seen that Bernstein piece before. It’s really nice. Thanks! ** Nika Mavrody, Interesting. Huh. Thanks, Nika. ** Diesel Clementine, Huh. The surgeon who repaired my head told me I might be prone to brain tumors afterwards, but not so far. Well, as far as I know, eek. I’m always surprised when people look at my blog on their phones. I can’t even really imagine how that’s even possible. But obviously it is and can even be effective, it seems. Interesting. You’re very good with a tiny keyboard. ** Dev, Hi again to you! Oh, okay, gotcha on the faux-interview. So it’s kind of like an acting exercise maybe? Except with more at theoretical stake? Being from LA, I have had my times with the famous. I’ve even been good friends with famous people, although I was usually friends with them even before they got famous. I even dated a famous person, but I’m sworn to secrecy about that. Anyway, blabla. I think the only Denzel Curry album I know is ‘Ta13oo’. I liked it. Okay, I’ll stream the new one and see if I start bopping around in my chair. Thanks, pal. ** Thomas H, Hi, T. Thank you for the link to the article. I’ll read it once I’m out of here. Well, relief that it sounds like there are people who can keep the venture afloat and going at least. I have friends who are furries. An occasional commenter here and very good writer is a furry. The Flatsos were kind of an invented species that was kind of based on cosplay kids who hung around the building I lived in — which was above the big Emo fashion outlet of the time, April 77 — and who aspired through their makeup and clothes to look one-dimensional, or at least that’s what it looked they were trying to do. Productive day! I need one of those. Yes, Duncan, I’m glad you looked into his work. It’s something else. Best of the best to you! ** Justin D, Hi. I suspect since he’s still making that work that he hasn’t felt like he got to his on bottom on those subjects? I wonder if there actually is a bottom or clear answer or something. I’ve certainly never come close to finding one for me and my interests. The problem is my ear is only kind of annoying. I usually have to be in terrible pain to see a doctor. But, yeah, kind of annoying is getting very old. Thanks for asking. Did ‘The 400 Blows’ live up to its historical hype for you? ** Gabriel Hart, I agree. Good thinking, man. ** Jacob, Well, hello there, Jacob! Roblox “games” … I know that term, but I don’t think I know precisely what it entails. I’ll hunt. Congrats on the double concluding. Yeah, summer is almost history again, thank fucking god. ‘Coder le Monde’ sounds like it’s in French, so I’ll just appreciate your appreciation. Philosophers … well, I’ve never even heard of Mill, Shannon, Rawls, or Carnap, so, if they’re in the definition, I don’t know. I have a feeling that writers I love who I think of as philosophers like Blanchot or Deleuze, for instance, probably aren’t actually? I’ve read Nietzsche, and he must count, no? What do you think? I also don’t give a fuck about Elvis, but that shebang sounds really fun. Elvis fanatics are kind of interesting. They seem like the angelic equivalent of MAGA people or something. Hm, it’s true that I can’t recall seeing impersonators here. The French really, really seem to love tribute bands and artists though. A lot. Bands that pretend they’re like, The Cure, and call themselves The Curry and things like that. That abandoned Mississippi River basin thing sounds really exciting to me. I love that stuff. In fact, I just put together a post about defunct tourist attractions yesterday. Thoroughly enjoy. Good to talk with you, pal. ** Oscar 🌀, Howdy! Beatles references are the great unifier, I guess. Be sure to tell me the day when you remember it because I am going to parade down the middle that street like you can’t even begin to imagine. And since everyone who lives and hangs out there undoubtedly reads my blog, I anticipate that, as I parade, I will be bombarded with shouts of ‘Say hi to Oscar for me’ from the huge crowds gathered on the sidewalk. Apropos of almost nothing, I visited the little town in Florida where ‘The Truman Show’ was filmed. Not on purpose. And it felt disappointingly un-surveiled. My weekend looks like it might be doable on Saturday, but, starting on Sunday when the heat is supposed to go up into the upper 3os, I suspect it will be rather insufferable. And your weekend? Surely, you have plans galore. xo. ** Right. I decided to restore an old post about my favorite novel by one of my favorite novelists Christine Brooke-Rose for your hopeful delectation today. Thus … See you tomorrow.