Word-Worlds: Language, Identity and Reality in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose (European Connections)

Word-Worlds: Language, Identity and Reality in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose

Michela Canepari-Labib

Peter Lang

Word-Worlds

European Connections edited by Peter Collier

Volume 4

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Michela Canepari-Labib

Word-Worlds Language, Identity and Reality in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose

PETER LANG Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York • Wien •

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Die Deutsche Bibliothek – CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Canepari-Labib, Michela: Word-worlds : language, identity and reality in the work of Christine Brooke-Rose / Michela Canepari-Labib. – Oxford ; Bern ; Berlin ; Bruxelles ; Frankfurt am Main ; New York ; Wien : Lang, 2002 (European connections ; Vol. 4) ISBN 3-906758-64-8 British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain, and from The Library of Congress, USA

ISSN 1424-3792 ISBN 3-906758-64-8 US-ISBN 0-8204-5080-4

© Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2002 Hochfeldstrasse 32, Postfach 746, CH-3000 Bern 9 [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net

All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. Printed in Germany

Contents

Dedication.................................................................................................7 Acknowledgements...................................................................................9 Foreword.................................................................................................11 Preface ....................................................................................................13 List of Abbreviations ..............................................................................17 Introduction: ‘Dis-Placing’ Christine Brooke-Rose ...............................19 Section 1: The Refusal of Realism Introduction to Section 1 ........................................................................59 Chapter 1: The ‘Free Direct Speech’ of Brooke-Rose’s Characters and Other Narratological Issues..........................67 Chapter 2: Possible Worlds, Open Works and Writerly Texts .............115 Section 2: Word-Worlds and the Juxtaposition of Different Languages Introduction to Section 2 ......................................................................157 Chapter 3: Stories of Identity................................................................161 Chapter 4: Heteroglossia and Polyglossia ............................................167 Chapter 5: The Language of Theory and History – The Attempted Colonisation of the Feminine ‘Dark Continent’ .................219 Chapter 6: The Textuality of History and Memory ..............................253 Conclusion: Deconstruction..................................................................271 Bibliography .........................................................................................281 Index .....................................................................................................301

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Dedication

To Maria Teresa, my mother, for all her love, strength and spirit.

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Acknowledgments

I should like to thank Dr. Jeremy Lane for his many helpful comments and the Foreword he wrote for this book. I am also greatly indebted to Nicholas Currey, who read the text at various stages and whose remarks on the more recondite aspects of the English language proved invaluable. A special thank you to Joanna Turner and Lucia Arnò, for their patience and all the help they provided with the preparation of the final manuscript. I should like to extend my thanks to my family for their unfailing love and support. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Christine Brooke-Rose for all her help, her constant encouragement and her precious friendship.

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Foreword

Critical studies of the fiction of Christine Brooke-Rose are conspicuously rare – indeed there has been only one full-length book published to date, as far as I am aware, and that was over seven years ago. The critical neglect of this important writer is something of a scandal, especially given the quantity of attention paid to more lightweight and accessible contemporaries or juniors. I’m ashamed to say that I have myself been somewhat dismissive of Brooke-Rose’s work in the past – and in print too. Michela Canepari-Labib has helped to open my eyes to the value and depth of Brooke-Rose’s fiction, too often seen as merely ‘experimental’, and it is a great pleasure to welcome her substantial and comprehensive study. And it is well-timed – at the moment when Brooke-Rose has announced the end of her writing career (although such announcements have to be treated with caution) – there is the opportunity, which Dr Canepari-Labib has seized, to provide a fully informed survey of her achievements as a writer. Although the early Realistic novels are not discussed as such, an awareness of them informs the treatment of Brooke-Rose’s major fiction, the extraordinary and sustained sequence of fictions that runs from Out, published in 1964, to Subscript, published last year. Brooke-Rose’s engagement and achievement as a critic – she is perhaps better known for her critical than her creative writing, doubtless to her own chagrin – are also discussed, as is her more recent and intriguing quasi-fictional autobiographical writing. The critical parameters of this study are wide – a formidable range of approaches is embraced. There is an eclectic but sophisticated use of narratological theory, Structuralist and Post-Structuralist, and PostColonial and Feminist readings are also brought into play, as well as interesting analogies between fictional experiment and post-Newtonian scientific thought. Moreover, the theoretical frames are not simply assumed but are themselves subjected to scrutiny in relation to the critical reflections on narrative pursued by Brooke-Rose herself.

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The historical context of Brooke-Rose’s writing career, which spans much of the second half of the twentieth century, is also acknowledged, as is her unusual situation as an English writer based in France – the crucial importance of ‘displacement’ to Brooke-Rose’s creative imagination is well recognised. Michela Canepari-Labib also pays scrupulously close attention to the novels and writings she discusses, always responsive to their intricate and demanding verbal texture and alert to their idiosyncrasies, refusing to submerge the particular and variegated imaginative forms chosen by Brooke-Rose under an over-generalising thesis. At the same time, there is a sustained and salutary emphasis on the essential humaneness of Brooke-Rose’s purposes as a writer. The focus on language and the stress on the play of signification are seen to be driven by a fundamentally ethical concern with interrogating and often satirising the idées reçues, the prejudices and obfuscations too easily masked by the unthinking and occasionally malign exploitation of our all-too-human capacities as ‘language animals’. I have the impression of a renewed interest in Brooke-Rose’s writing, at least in academic circles – there have also been respectful reviews of her recent publications. As Brooke-Rose nears the end of her writing career, it seems an excellent opportunity to provide a serious and substantial critical estimate of her work. Dr Canepari-Labib has taken that opportunity and produced, I believe, an important study which recognises and should serve to enhance the stature of this often insufficiently regarded writer. Jeremy Lane, Sussex University

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Preface

Although many different ‘categories’ of readers can benefit from this book, it was written bearing in mind the needs that academics, researchers and graduate students might have when approaching the narrative of Christine Brooke-Rose. With the exception of Sara Birch’s Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction (Oxford UP, 1994), criticism of Brooke-Rose’s work mainly consists of a few critical articles published in different countries, the odd mention in companions to literature and single novel reviews. Due to Brooke-Rose’s prolific writing, however, Birch’s book cannot include the study of Brooke-Rose’s entire oeuvre. Word-Worlds is therefore the only full-length study of BrookeRose’s work available, and although it doesn’t include a separate study of the Realist novels she published in the 1950s, focussing rather on her more experimental texts, it integrates the discussion of those early texts within the analysis of the rest of her work. The aim of this book is actually to assess Brooke-Rose’s work and consolidate the place the author deserves amongst major contemporary writers and thinkers. Producing fifteen novels, three major critical works and a plethora of articles and essays (as well as poetry and a few extraordinary translations), Christine Brooke-Rose has in fact earned her place amongst major British writers of the twentieth century, extending the scope of the novel and stretching the possibilities of language to its limit, offering an insightful representation of our society. As my work will show, her novels can be read in many different ways, and according to the perspective the reader adopts, they reveal new meanings and new Truths: they can be read as a criticism of colonial practices and classical psychology, as meta-fictions that refer to the creative work of the writer, as gender-conscious fictions which expose the phallocentrism of Western societies, as criticism of certain literary theories and so on. All these come into play in her novels, and the implications on linguistic, psychological, philosophical, social and political levels seem endless.

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For reasons of space I had to make a choice regarding the line of analysis to follow, leaving the discussion of certain problematics to a different occasion and concentrating on the issues of ‘reality’, ‘identity’ and ‘language’. However, in spite of the ‘omnipresence’ of these issues, my book makes clear that although Brooke-Rose maintains these concerns throughout her career, the way she approaches her subject matter, the formal devices she uses, and the tone and the rhetoric she adopts are very different from one novel to the other, and even though she deals with the same problematics in all her novels, in each one she explores the same questions from a different perspective and re-thinks the same issues in different ways. This is also the reason why a close analysis of the critical works that Brooke-Rose has produced over the last thirty years would be extremely interesting and would offer further insights for the study of her narrative, as her two sides of creative writer and critic have always been very close to each other. If one assesses the kind of reviews, articles, and essays she has been producing alongside her novels, the link between the two aspects becomes undeniable: most of what comes into play in her fiction (all the influences she has undergone, the various movements she has approached and the varying concerns her novels exhibit), all these have been the object of her critical study as well. For reasons of space, however, I could not grant her extensive critical work the attention it deserves, but I nevertheless referred to it in order to explore, if only superficially, the consistencies and inconsistencies between the two kinds of production, to clarify certain concerns the author seems to address in her novels, and to show how, just as in her novels, so too in any kind of criticism she engages in, what she concentrates on is the language used, revealing how the actual words used in a particular sentence and in a particular position, imply contradictions, dubious premises and ambiguities on the user’s part. The object of this book is in fact to analyse Brooke-Rose’s attitude towards language and the way in which, since the beginning of her career as a writer, she has called into question the notions of identity and reality which Western tradition (both philosophical and literary) has proposed. With a sort of respect for the eclecticism that Brooke-Rose displays in her work, my analysis is itself eclectic in its approach, as reference to 14

the different theories which have informed her work (directly or indirectly) are used to clarify her aims and the conceptual tools she had at her disposal in order to better understand the results she achieved. In order to be as systematic as possible while dealing with such vast material, my book is divided in two main sections, but even though I have tried to deal with these central issues step by step, because they are interrelated at all points, my separate analysis of one of them always presupposes, and at times penetrates, the discussion of the others. After the Introduction – where, in spite of being very succinct, I hope to suggest the complexity and multiplicity of Brooke-Rose’s work by introducing many elements which will receive more extensive attention in the following chapters – there follows the first section of my work, dedicated to Brooke-Rose’s refusal of Realism. The two chapters of this section deal respectively with Brooke-Rose’s ‘narratorless’ technique and the worlds her novels construct. These two chapters are mainly centred on the narratological choices Brooke-Rose makes in order to deconstruct the traditional idea of Reality which nineteenthcentury narratives have established. The third chapter, which opens the second section of my book, is one of transition and, by introducing Lacan’s theory of identity and Barthes’ concept of a war of languages, directs my study of the various ways in which Brooke-Rose deals in her different novels with the problematics related to language, and the fictionality of the Real and of identity. The second section of my work therefore focuses on the way Brooke-Rose exposes the fictionality of the Real and, in particular, the linguistic nature of all forms of identity, thus concentrating on the various languages which she sees as constructing the individual. Chapter Four deals with the way in which the jargons of science and astrophysics mould the individual, and while the sub-section on Out takes the form of a political criticism aimed at clarifying how this novel can be read as an early approach to the problematics related to the colonial Other, in the sub-section on Such I refer to near-death experiences and Laingian theories to show how Brooke-Rose – in a way similar to R. D. Laing’s reaction against classical psychology – deconstructs the idea of a fixed identity which classical psychology assumed as fundamental, and blurs the dividing line between sanity and insanity, exposing them as constructs. In the following sub-section of 15

Chapter Four I show how, in Between, the author more consistently proposes the notion of the loss of identity through language, and I apply a retroactive reading of the novel from a Barthesian perspective to show how even before certain ideas were put into a theoretical form, BrookeRose was already working on some of the concepts that would later be demonstrated as fundamental in the advancement of intellectual debate and the creation of new narrative forms. In the fifth chapter, I analyse the way in which she exposes the phallocentrism of History and Theory (Structuralist theory in particular), showing how her various novels expose the imposition of feminine identity on woman, whereas in Chapter Six I deal with the textuality of history and memory, underlining how the past (both racial and individual) is sensed by Brooke-Rose as a text through which a sense of identity is constructed and imposed onto the individual. Finally, in the Conclusion, I examine the general deconstructive principles lying behind Brooke-Rose’s fiction and, adopting a wider perspective, I highlight the features which characterise her production as a whole.

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List of Abbreviations

SE: PFL: TLS: n.d.e.: UOD:

Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud The Penguin Freud Library Times Literary Supplement Near-death experience Utterly Other Discourse, ed. by Ellen Friedman and Richard Martin, Illinois, Dalkey Archive Press, 1995 OC1: Oeuvres Complètes by Roland Barthes, Paris, Seuil, Volume I, 1993 OC2: Oeuvres Complètes by Roland Barthes, Paris, Seuil, Volume II, 1994

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Introduction: ‘Dis-Placing’ Christine Brooke-Rose

Once upon a time there is a little girl born in French, of an English father and a Swiss mother born of an American father and an Anglo-Swiss mother (Remake, 10).

With these words Christine Brooke-Rose begins to describe her life in her autobiographical novel, and continues: The English father lives in London, the American-Swiss mother in Geneva, with the now Swiss grandpère and the Anglo-Swiss grand’mère. That’s the first split. Très wagon-lit, as Ian the joker, a brief wartime husband, says. Back to London, back to Geneva, back to London, back to Brussels, back to back. Forgetting French, forgetting English, relearning French, relearning English, learning Flemish, learning German, forgetting Flemish, relearning English not really forgotten. Etc. That’s the thirteenth split or so, scatterings and smatterings (Remake, 10/3).

From these few words and the basic autobiographical details one might find in companions to literature such as An Encyclopaedia of English Women Writers (1988) and The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers (1993), one is struck by the many displacements (both physical and linguistic) the author has undergone throughout her life. This feeling is corroborated and magnified when one embarks on reading the novels she has produced since 1964. Here, more often than not, the author’s lack of a strong national identity – the feeling of not belonging to either French or British culture – coupled with her bilingualism, is reflected in the indeterminate settings. The novels may be set in unspecified places (non-existent countries in Out, the inner space of the character’s psyche in Such, and the never-mentioned settings of Thru and Subscript), in varied places (as in Between, Xorandor and Verbivore), or places of relative localisation – which sets the novel in a particular place that is however only mentioned, never described, and determined by internal factors of the novels themselves more than anything else – and which suggest such wide references as to

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make the indication of a precise place almost irrelevant (as in Xorandor, Verbivore, Textermination and Next). As well as the lack of a precise setting, her novels also display an absence of cultural markers, and if both these aspects relate to BrookeRose’s refusal of the literary conventions which characterised Realism and have strong implications for her aims as an experimental novelist,1 they also show the influence of the feeling of being a foreigner that she experiences in whatever country she inhabits. As she recalls in Remake, every place has been a foreign land to her (20), and this sense of being an outsider has coloured her whole life and, as I will show in the following chapters, her entire output. In addition, her war time experience of reading German messages while serving in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force allowed her to witness war from the enemy’s, the other’s, the outsider’s point of view, thus intensifying her sense of being a foreigner. As she recalls, it was this experience which formed her as a novelist (Remake, 108), and because of the importance this position on the borders has had in her career as a writer, any attempt to place her in terms of a cultural/geographical tradition has failed, leading to the paradox that, while in Britain she is considered as the one who attempted to introduce the French nouveau roman and Structuralist/PostStructuralist theory to this country, in France she is seen principally as a teacher and critic of British and American narrative, which she taught there from 1968 to 1988, before retiring to Provence in order to concentrate on writing her novels. Of course, we cannot deny the influence that the nouveau roman and Structuralism had on her work, but we also cannot ignore the distance that she soon put between herself and these groups’ positions, and the fact that she made a clear choice regarding the language and, consequently, the nationality of the readers she addresses: although different languages often come into play in her novels, they are definitely written in English, and were all published in Britain. Until very recently, however, she has been dismissed by critics as an author 1

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By Realism I mean a set of literary conventions derived from nineteenth-century modes of writing. In this book ‘Reality’ refers to both the fictional worlds created by the Realist novels of 19th century fiction, and to the worlds constructed by various languages used to describe reality (the extra-textual world which works as a referent for language), that is the equally fictional worlds that cultural, historical and social conventions create for us to live in.

who has been over-influenced by French culture and, like many other British authors, she has never been granted a place in the Great Tradition that Leavis xenophobically and anti-experimentally described in 1948. Her novels have always been coolly received by the British reading public (academic and otherwise) and looked upon with suspicion because she was felt to be not really British. The experimental, ‘nonBritish’ quality which has characterised her writing since 1968 has gained her the label of ‘difficult writer’, and only recently has this reputation begun to fade and her work begun to break through. The reason for this development is probably the changes that took place on various levels of society since Brooke-Rose first started to publish her experimental novels: since the publication of Out, a great deal of Post-Colonial theory has been published, and the travelling habits of people have changed considerably, thus enabling the reader of Between to recognise him/herself more easily in the central character of the novel than would have been possible thirty years ago. In addition, as Brooke-Rose admits, a great part of the problem has been solved thanks to the fact that many of the theories she absorbed some thirty years ago (central in Thru) are increasingly becoming the object of scholarly study (1996a), and even though the general reader might not partake of this knowledge, her work is achieving recognition, at least amongst academics of different countries. The difficulties her novels pose, however, have never been of a lexical or syntactical nature: on the contrary, the language she uses is very clear and very rigorous, almost of a scientific precision. Furthermore, the same phrases, words and often entire passages are repeated throughout the text. Thanks to this device, which has many implications for the aims Brooke-Rose sets herself as a writer, the message transmitted is therefore clarified. What has caused most problems for the reader seems to derive from the narratological choices the author makes and the frustration of the reader’s expectations her novels create. It is in fact difficult to recognise the various learned references in her novels (which readers of Brooke-Rose have often considered the means by which they could access the text), and if this tendency relies heavily on the reader’s search for the pleasure of recognition against which Brooke-Rose fights, it also partly explains the more recent accessibility of her novels experienced by her readers since they have gained the skills to handle the theories which informed her 21

intellectual development and which they see at the heart of her narrative. Simultaneously, however, there are further problems the reader has to face when trying to follow the way these references work in the texts themselves. If Brooke-Rose makes use of learned references – whether scientific (mainly in Out, Such, Xorandor, Verbivore and Subscript), literary and historical (in Amalgamemnon and Textermination), or relating to literary theories (mainly in Thru and subsequent novels) – they are however never gratuitous, and their use is always justified by the way in which they interact with one another and with the rest of the narrative. Consequently, the recognition of their derivation is often irrelevant to an understanding of what the author is striving for. By inserting references to various cultural domains in a different context, and by juxtaposing them with new elements, Brooke-Rose actually manages to reactivate these references and give them new meaning, the discovery of which can be attained by readers only if they concentrate on how these elements work in the text and, instead of merely attempting to identify their origin, make an effort to see what is happening on the page. The pleasure Brooke-Rose offers her readers is thus the pleasure of discovery: discovery of the new meanings that an old and overused reference can assume, of the possibilities that language can offer, and of the arbitrary fixation of meaning. Readers – accustomed to the effortless ‘reading for the plot’ approach – often could not see what she was driving at and felt betrayed by her novels which prevented them from attaining the pleasure of recognition they were accustomed to. Frustrated in the expectations that a long Realist tradition had formed for them, and failing to see the possibilities opened up by her work, they spurned her texts, dismissing her as an author over-influenced by French culture. However, we cannot attempt to see Brooke-Rose either in one national context or another, as she is neither here nor there: in fact, by remaining on the borders of different cultures, she creates a personal synthesis of whatever different cultures offer her. She could therefore be best described by the title of one of her novels: Between. Between countries, languages, cultures, Brooke-Rose appears as a junction where many roads converge, and any attempt to place her must consider the various intellectual stimuli and influences she underwent. In her work we can recognise influences as disparate as Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, Mikhail Bakhtin, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and the nouveau 22

roman, and her narrative shares features common to that produced by the Tel Quel group, the Surrealist movement OuLiPo, certain exponents of what we can loosely call French Feminism, and various trends of British and American fiction. Furthermore, one should always remember that Brooke-Rose did not read any theory until 1968 when, after the publication of Between, she moved to France and plunged into the Structuralist and PostStructuralist debate. We cannot therefore read her novels of the 1960s as a narrativization of the theories formulated in France during the same period, because these same theories were still unknown to her when she started to write experimentally, and were approached by the author only later whereupon she welcomed them as a confirmation of what she had been trying to do with her first experimental texts. The path that BrookeRose took from 1964 should therefore be described as a parallel and independent investigation of the same problematics that were the focus of much theoretical discussion, and though the general intellectual atmosphere obviously stimulated her development, the change of perspective in her works was brought about by personal reasons. The novels she wrote during the 1950s were mainly light and witty social satires, and even though the thematics she developed in her later production were already present in embryonic form, she failed to adequately integrate into these early narratives the kind of investigations she wanted to pursue. When looking at her production as a whole, one is struck by the consistent interest the author has displayed for language, the way language works, and the way it can produce meaning. As she describes in Remake (146), in her early years at Oxford she became immersed in philology, which enabled her to study how the physical transformations of words produce changes in meaning, and for her doctorate at University College, London, she chose to study the use of metaphor in medieval English and French literature. A reworking of this text became A Grammar of Metaphor, her first critical work, published in 1958, in which she is interested not so much in what metaphors communicate at the level of content, but how their grammatical status renders possible the production of meaning and how it inhibits or highlights the efficacy of the metaphors. Her study (in which she anticipates the type of metaphoric substitution that will be central in her later production), shows how most types of metaphors contain both proper and metaphoric 23

terms, and so fundamentally negates the assumption that the metaphor acts on the basis of replacement. Moreover, her study stresses the importance of the context and the possibility for a term to participate simultaneously in many different metaphoric relations. As I will show in the following chapters, her belief that the way in which metaphoric terms interact with each other is far more important than their relation with their implicit proper term, is fundamental for the kind of discursive metaphor she develops in her post-1964 novels, where she seems to appropriate Kittay’s belief that any unit of discourse can be used as a frame for metaphors (1987, 64/8), and by positing a discursive system as her frame, she uses the various discourses within that system as metaphors, allowing them to interact with one another. The kind of approach Brooke-Rose adopts in her first critical work also characterises her A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971), a critical work commissioned as an introduction for students. Here her interest is focused not so much on the determination of the original sources of the many references to classical mythology, history, science etc. that Pound inserts in his poems, but on the way these references interact with each other and with the other material the poems consist of, the ways in which the poet orchestrates these elements and the effects thus obtained. Her study consequently avoids the biographical, chronological and thematic approach, and by working on the text itself, it offers a fresh outlook on the Cantos which also illuminates some of the features of her own writing. As I will point out below, the kind of criticism Brooke-Rose pursues is clearly influenced by the approach adopted by the New Criticism (in the attention given to the text itself and the irrelevance of biographical details), and later on the Structuralists (in the importance given to the relation existing between the various elements), and it is fitting that her second book on Pound – in which she uses the principles of poetic analysis as proposed by Roman Jakobson (1963) to show the intrinsic dynamism of this Canto – bears the title: A Structural Analysis of Pound’s Usura Canto (1976a). Her interest in language is also implicit in the first four comparatively conventional novels she produced, and the title of the first (The Languages of Love) is symptomatic of her fascination not only for language, but for the idea that there exist several, different languages interacting in the same person, a notion which became the focus of all her production of the 1960s. Although her 1950s novels brought her a 24

fair amount of popularity, her attempt to integrate other fields of knowledge such as philology and philosophy into her essentially traditional narrative was inadequate and half-hearted. As she admits in an interview, after her first four novels she realised that it would have been too easy to carry on writing in the same way (1989, in UOD, 30), and as her dissatisfaction with the Realist tradition intensified (shown plainly in The Dear Deceit, in which she presents the protagonist’s search for his origins as a journey back in time which leads to the retroactive description of his father’s life), she started to look for new ways to deal with her main concerns. The urge to find new tools for her investigation was precipitated by her illness of 1962, which she believed would prove fatal. Although she eventually recovered completely, the experience had a profound effect on her: approaching the boundary between life and death awoke in her a new awareness, and brought her to a higher level of consciousness. She described this as ‘a sense of being in touch with something else’ (Hall, 1976, 183), and this experience deeply influenced her approach to reality and to her work as a writer. Immediately prior to her illness, she also discovered the nouveaux romans which, published a few years before, seemed to share the same literary concerns as Brooke-Rose’s novels. As she recalls, ‘it was Nathalie Sarraute’s The Age of Suspicion […] which was the first turning point for me’ (1989, in UOD, 30), convincing her of the necessity for a fundamental change in her way of writing. During her long convalescence, Brooke-Rose realised she couldn’t bring herself to read the kind of novels she had been writing and she began to devour scientific books instead.

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i. Theories The New Science In the same way that different fields of the humanities were revolutionised by the linguistic theories proposed by Saussure and their application to various disciplines accomplished by Structuralism, during the first decades of the twentieth century traditional science was shaken by new theories which profoundly changed the mode in which people thought about the universe and about science itself, namely Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (1915), and Quantum Mechanics. By abolishing the old notions of absolute space, absolute time, and a flat universe, and by stating that no measurement is more correct than any other, Einstein’s theory basically undermined the claims made by science to discover universal and fundamental Truths in relation to any event. The notion of absolute concepts was destroyed, and time and space appeared to be the interdependent elements of what was then called space-time which, in 1915, Einstein suggested was curved by the distribution of mass and energy in it, thus giving birth to what is now called the General Theory of Relativity. In addition, the General Theory of Relativity also predicted the abolition of the notion of a static universe for, if it were actually static, it would soon start to contract and collapse under the influence of the gravitational force. This was also predicted by the Russian Alexander Friedman who, basing his investigation on two fundamental assumptions (namely that the universe looks identical in whichever direction we look, and that it would look the same from wherever we looked at it), proposed that the red shift of a galaxy’s spectrum should be directly proportional to its distance from us. Three different models of the universe were found which would obey Freidman’s two assumptions, and the main common feature of these three models is that at some time in the past, before the universe began to expand, the distance between the galaxies must have been zero, and the density of the universe and the curvature of space-time infinite. This moment corresponds to what is popularly known as the Big Bang, at which the universe and time itself are considered to have begun, and which Brooke-Rose uses metaphorically in Such.

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Because it was assumed that the early universe was infinitesimally small, the small-scale effects could no longer be ignored. It was on the basis of the Quantum Theory formulated by Max Planck in 1900,2 that in 1926 Werner Heisenberg formulated the Uncertainty Principle. By demonstrating the impossibility of measuring precisely the present state of the universe, Heisenberg’s Principle illustrated the untenability of a deterministic notion of the universe. In order to predict the future position and velocity of a particle, in fact, the present velocity and position of that particle must be measured accurately. It is only by observing the way in which short wavelengths of light are scattered when directed onto the particle that its precise position can be determined. According to Planck’s theory however, the light emitted must correspond at least to a quantum, and this quantum will disturb the particle and change its velocity in an unpredictable way. Furthermore, because the shorter the wave-length of light the more precise the determination of the position of the particle, the more accurately we try to measure the position of the particle the less accurately we can measure its velocity (and vice-versa), in so far as – because a quantum of light of short wavelength has more energy than a quantum of light of longer wavelength – the velocity will be more disturbed by a larger amount of energy. On the basis of the Uncertainty Principle, during the 1920s Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac reformulated mechanics into a new theory called Quantum Mechanics, which becomes fundamental in Brooke-Rose’s Such. In this theory, particles and waves were considered to behave identically, and could not have separate and precisely defined positions and velocities. Rather, they were said to be in a quantum state, in which position and velocity were combined. Because Quantum Mechanics cannot calculate a single and definite result for an observation, but predicts a number of possible outcomes, it introduced an element of unpredictability into science. The impossibility of determining with absolute certainty the result of scientific observations, and the acknowledgement of the consequent undermining of the claims of absolute Truth made by science, appeared to Brooke-Rose to be very much in accordance with her own views. In 2

According to Planck, waves could only be emitted in ‘packets’ which he called quanta.

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all her experimental novels she makes reference to Heisenberg’s Principle and to the theorem he formulated in his Physics and Philosophy (1958), suggesting that scientific discourse, like literary discourse, is a construction we use to make sense of the world (181). The discovery of the linguistic nature of all symbols (or the symbolic nature of all language), thus enabled scientific and poetic language to be placed on the same level, and as a result the discourses of science and literature were then seen as equivalent codes in the larger system of language and both were recognised as contributing to the formation of the individual. The idea that was already present in Brooke-Rose’s very first novels (where language was tackled as philology and exclusive learning, but also an ensemble of different discourses), and in some of the shortstories she collected in Go When You See the Green Man Walking (1975) (where she began to integrate scientific discourses such as mathematics into the narrative), thus found new material, and Brooke-Rose began to explore how the specialised jargons of science (ranging from chemistry, physics, astrophysics, psychoanalysis and so on) interact with other discourses, in particular that of fiction. We can therefore see how her position on the borders of cultures, which taught her to see one language, country and culture through another, assumes here a fundamental importance, enabling her to see one field of knowledge through another. This, to an extent also explains the similarities between Brooke-Rose’s approach to the novel as a genre and Bakhtin’s theory. Bakhtin On Brooke-Rose’s admission, Bakhtin’s work played a fundamental role in her development as a writer and a critic, and even though she often refers to him in her critical texts, demonstrating the importance that his theories had for her work, her novels prior to 1968, when she began to read theory, already demonstrate a similar concept of the novel to his. Her marginal position gave her a tendency towards the polyglossia and the heteroglossia which Bakhtin describes as characteristic of the novelistic genre. According to him, the former derives from the fact that the novel was born between two cultures and languages (the Latin and the Greek), 28

and the latter from the fact that the novel incorporates various discourses in different forms. For this reason, the Realist conventions which rendered the devices the novel originally relied on alien to its modern form, cannot be considered, in Bakhtin’s opinion, the sole and necessary organising principle the novel has at its disposal. It is for this reason that he welcomed the ‘new’ return to the origin of the novel which was in his opinion inaugurated by Dostoevsky. Bakhtin saw at the heart of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic or dialogic novels (in which one voice is made to speak through another, and interact with one another in a sort of dialogue, where no voice is subordinated to a higher authority) the same peculiar perception of a language, culture or knowledge which is achieved when this is seen through the filter of another language, culture, or knowledge, characteristic of the origins of the novel (1981, 61). In order to understand the affinities between Brooke-Rose and Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva’s essay ‘Word, Dialogue and the Novel’ (1969) appears particularly useful, as it highlights the logic on which the dialogic novel is based with extreme clarity. In this essay, Kristeva shows how the rigidity of Structuralist categories and their scientific objectivity is always undermined by the other side of language which operates according to a logic other than scientific, and which she identifies with the subversive tradition of carnival and Manippean satire described by Bakhtin. Kristeva then relates how the poetic word, for Bakhtin, exceeds the logic of codified discourse and becomes an intersection of, and a dialogue among, different writings. Dialogism, which is inherent in language itself, thus identifies writing as intertextuality, and makes all poetic language at least double. It is because the poetic logic works on an interval of 0 – 2 (or disjunctive inclusion), that any system based on a 0 – 1 logic (that is the Aristotelian logic of the excluded middle on which the opposition of true/false and the binary logic of Western metaphysics is based) cannot account for poetic language. This 0 – 2 logic is that of the carnival and of the polyphonic novel which Brooke-Rose also practices: it is the logic of analogy and non-exclusive opposition at work in her novels, the logic which can escape the unitary 1, prohibition and definition. Against the monological discourse of the epic, the historical and the scientific discourse (all relying on causal logic), the dialogism of the Menippean type contradicts the formal logic from within which it operates. The ambivalence that the words assume at the moment when the writer uses 29

‘another’s word, giving it a new meaning while retaining the meaning it already had’ (Kristeva, 1969, in Moi, 1986, 43), thus pushes the language towards the eccentric, makes the discourse transgress ‘identity, substance, causality’ (Kristeva, op. cit., 56) and, just as in Brooke-Rose’s novels, points the logic towards other forms of thought based on analogy, relation and opposition. This dialogic strategy (together with polyglossia and heteroglossia), characterises all Brooke-Rose’s experimental texts, where one discourse is articulated through another. From 1964 on, Brooke-Rose has in fact integrated specialised jargons in her narrative, and by juxtaposing them one to the other, and positing them in new contexts, she manages to expose their construction – the fact that, as Heisenberg emphasised, they too are subject to linguistic constraints – thus criticising, as the Structuralists did in part, their claim to convey universal Truths. Structuralism Although some of the more fundamental assumptions of Structuralism became the target of Brooke-Rose’s most vociferous criticism, one cannot deny that Structuralism had a strong influence on her. As she stated, however, some of the concepts literary Structuralism proposed as revolutionary, seemed oddly familiar to the English-speaking world, due to what I used to call the University gap. Roland Barthes, for example, proclaimed the death of the author – long implicit in the New Criticism which was dogmatically interested only in the text (1996g, 95).

It was perhaps the fact that she went through the New Criticism, and that for her D.Phil. dissertation she had to rely on written texts produced by authors mostly named Anon., that from the very beginning of her critical career what she held as fundamental was the way the written text worked. It was also because of these reasons that when she read Saussure in 1950, it all seemed quite natural to her, and she had no idea it had been ignored and would be so important later as ‘post-Saussurean’. As she admits, she must have absorbed ‘difference’ very early (1996f), possibly more as experience rather than theory. Because this concept of 30

difference (and the idea that meaning is the product of a phonic and graphological difference which distinguishes one linguistic sign from all other signs available in the system of language), was at the basis of Saussurean linguistics and Structuralist analysis, it enabled her to assimilate Structuralism into her fiction more easily than, for example, the nouveaux romanciers. The main novelty of literary Structuralism, and that which was probably most welcomed by Brooke-Rose, was the attention to narrative structure which it inherited from its predecessor Russian Formalism. The starting point of Structuralism (whether literary or not) was that the meanings that cultural and social phenomena bear make them into signs, hence – in the terms Saussure used to define the system of language – they have a social dimension and are arbitrary and conventional. Since the aim of the Structuralists was to bring to consciousness the system of conventions that they assumed must be operating on an unconscious level to render meaning (whether that of a literary text or any human/social action) possible, Structuralism posited itself as essentially a theory of reading (of life as much as literature) which, starting from the effects that certain acts have, tried to clarify the process which leads that act to have a particular effect/meaning. Consequently, any human phenomenon was seen as the product of a system of conventions, and its meaning was seen as the result of the relation it had with all the other elements existing in the system. Even from my few comments on Brooke-Rose’s fiction, one can see that the Structuralist notion of a system of conventions, and the idea that the meanings we give to the world are conventionally, historically and socially determined, underlies her view of the world and the Real. In addition, the concept of an unconscious set of rules which enable the subject to accomplish the different acts s/he performs in life and enable these acts to have a meaning, basically corresponded to a rejection of the notion of subject. As I will show in the following chapters, this concept of a decentred subject which led theoreticians such as Barthes to perceive the subject simply as a construct, implied a rejection of the author-centred approach to literature (hence the special status accorded to the reader) and is relevant in a discussion of Brooke-Rose’s approach to her characters, as it played a fundamental role in her and RobbeGrillet’s choice of narrator. Moreover, the idea that every conception of Reality is determined by a series of cultural codes among which 31

literature seems to hold a privileged position, implied that somehow every writer and reader sees the world through the representation which previous writers have given of that Reality. Brooke-Rose likes in fact to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, who maintained that the nineteenth century as we know it is a creation of Balzac (1990b, 33), and this does not simply imply that all text is basically an assembling of fragments of preceding texts, but also that all perception of Reality is filtered through preceding versions of that Real, and that every new version of it is simply a reassembling of old elements (this is the concept of bricolage that Lévi-Strauss first introduced in 1958 to account for the fact that new mythical meanings are simply a reorganisation of old myths). However, far from reducing all texts to stagnation, the use that Brooke-Rose and other authors make of intertextuality is fundamentally aimed at giving old texts new life and new connotations, while showing that what they were based on was not the Real, but simply a construction of it, which was historically and socially determined. By making readers look at old texts (in the broader sense of the term) from a different perspective, the defamiliarisation enacted by authors such as Brooke-Rose thus comes close to achieving what was the aim of Structuralism, that is to bring to consciousness what is taken as natural and reveal it as a construct. To say that Brooke-Rose assimilated some of the concepts of the Structuralists does not mean that she accepted their theories in toto, and this is what rendered her attitude towards literary theory after 1968 so fresh and new, and which, beginning with Thru, led her to question these theories more openly than she had done in the novels prior to 1975. By moving to Paris, Brooke-Rose plunged into the theoretical debates of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, and finally realised she was not alone in what she had been trying to do with her work since she turned experimental. As she recalls in ‘Stories, Theories and Things’, the discovery of theory opened immense strengths in her (1991a, 13),3 enabling her to formulate more precisely the concerns that, somewhat unconsciously, she had felt when still living in England. At the same time, however, it somehow spoilt the practice of reading, it rendered 3

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References to Brooke-Rose’s essays collected in her A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981) and Stories, Theories and Things (1991a), will be to the versions of these essays found in these collections.

writing more demanding and, as she recalls in ‘Self-Confrontation and the Writer’ (1977), it made the split in her between creative writer and critic reach its peak. The attitude of demystification which characterised her initial works, thus became mainly directed towards a number of theories whose dogmatism and over-systematization Brooke-Rose wanted to expose. Hence, Brooke-Rose’s aesthetic attraction towards theory and her interest in beautiful systems which she can use and play against one another, is counterbalanced by her suspicion of theory and her refusal to subordinate her narrative to it. Consequently, if in Thru (the first novel she wrote after moving to France), references to theory are so abundant, it is not simply because Brooke-Rose, since arriving in Paris, had grown obsessed with theory, as one could think when reading such reviews as that which Mason produced at the time of the novel’s publication (TLS, 11 July 1975, 753). Since discovering theory she had grown more conversant with it, but far from submerging her, the proliferation of new theories that France witnessed in those years brought a more distanced and cautious attitude on her part. As my work will show, as early as 1964 Brooke-Rose had already figured out her personal positions vis à vis the issue of the unification of science and literature and unwaveringly distanced herself from the dogmatic belief held by the Structuralists in the possibility of what Barthes called ‘integral writing’ (1967, 433),4 in which science would become literature (the position more or less held by Robbe-Grillet); in Between she exposed the implications of the opposition between ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ that Saussure posited, in terms of gender, and with Thru she furthered her exposure of the sexist bias of many Structuralist theories. This attitude led her to question more systematically the authority of such theories and explore, through her post-1968 fiction, the inconsistencies she recognised in them, thus contesting the dichotomies which lay at the basis not only of Saussure’s linguistics, but of Western metaphysics which, since Plato, always posited the superior term of various dichotomies as positive, while the inferior as a negation and a deviation from the first. In addition, she called into question the very notion of structure which lay behind all Structuralist investigation by 4

Unless otherwise stated, the translations provided in this book are my own.

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creating narratives which cannot be accounted for in terms of that structure. Brooke-Rose therefore parallels Derrida’s questioning of Western assumptions and his own deconstruction of the notion of structure which led from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism (whose aim was to investigate the way in which the Structuralist project to develop a grammar which would account for the form and the meaning of literary works is subverted by the works themselves), and while in her critical writings she uses and analyses theory, stressing the pleasure to be derived from theoretical systems, in her fiction she exposes the inconsistencies of the theories she approaches by parodying them. If we can suggest a major influence on her in the years after 1968, I would say it was the discovery of Derrida’s deconstruction, that is to say a theory which is itself against all dogmatism and which continually questions the naturality of our received conceptions of Truth. The reading of Derrida’s books of 1967 offered Brooke-Rose new tools to pursue, and maybe clarify, the kind of unconscious deconstruction she had already begun to operate in her previous novels, where she deconstructed the idea of national identity (Out), the idea of an original and fixed identity postulated by classical psychology (Such) and some of the phallocentric clichés on which Western society is based (Between). Thus, because what she does in Thru corresponds consciously to what in Derrida’s opinion the deconstructive text should do, which is to show how it [a discourse] undermines the philosophy it asserts, or the hierarchical oppositions on which it relies, by identifying in the text the rhetorical operations that produce the supposed ground of argument, the key concept or premise (Culler, 1983, 86),

it is not by chance that Brooke-Rose defines Thru as a very deconstructive and a very Derridean text (1976, 41; 989, in UOD, 36). Deconstruction It is Brooke-Rose’s love for language which, since Out, enabled her to deconstruct some of the Truths on which our societies are based and – to prevent her readers from seeing construction as nature, confusing text 34

with Truth and to make them aware of the various ways in which the text might manipulate them – capacitated her to develop the investigation of the relationship between language and Reality, fiction and Truth. As she admits, this has been her main concern since her very first novel (1996b), and this book aims at clarifying the various ways she deals with this aspect by showing the process which led her from an awkward integration of these concerns into her first narratives, to the more sophisticated treatment of these problematics she achieves in her later novels. As I will show, since 1964, through her use of language, Brooke-Rose blurs the distinction between language and Reality, and because this concern for language also takes the form, especially in her first experimental novels, of an investigation of the relationship between the linguistic nature of the subject and the supposed real self of the person, my work will often refer to the question of identity so as to demonstrate how, in her novels, the idea of a real identity (racial, sexual, national) is deconstructed and fundamentally exposed in its fictionality. In order to do this, Brooke-Rose exploits her position of outsider and gives her central characters the same marginal position within the system she is dealing with (whether colonial Empire or male-dominated society): her characters are variously the sick and racially discriminated against in Out, the survivor of a near-death experience who comes to be seen as mentally ill in Such, women, and children. By concentrating on these positions of marginality, she exhibits from the very beginning an unconscious deconstructionist approach which in many ways recalls that of Derrida, whose central aim was to disrupt the metaphysics of presence which he saw at the root of all Western philosophy. It is on this metaphysics of presence that various oppositions such as meaning/form, soul/body, speech/writing, conscious/unconscious, normal/pathological, serious/non-serious language, and man/woman have relied, according a privileged position to the ‘presence’ intrinsic in the former term and defining the latter as a lack, a void, an absence. For Derrida, the aim of deconstruction is to expose the fact that the ‘presence’ which is considered inherent in the first element is itself not a given, but a product which, in order to function, must already possess the qualities which belong to its opposite. So, Derrida argues, Saussure’s dichotomy between signified and signifier is based on logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence, but even though he considers writing simply as a representation of speech, he uses examples drawn from 35

writing to explain the nature of the linguistic sign, thus unwittingly admitting that speech is a form of a more generalised writing called by Derrida ‘arche-writing’ (1976, 109). By so doing, Derrida basically reverses the hierarchical opposition which made speech into the positive term and writing into the negative. In his other discussions of the various Western philosophical dichotomies, the same deconstructive movement leads him to posit a generalised figurative, non-serious language of which both literal, serious and figurative, non-serious language would be particular cases (1977, 90). To the metaphysics of presence which tries to impose a certain degree of coherence and logic on the text, Derrida opposes a metaphysics of absence: by concentrating on the ‘inferior’ element, by using the same language and the same principles it deconstructs, and by ‘overturning the classical opposition’ (1982, 329), deconstruction produces a general displacement of the system, thus disrupting our traditional habits of thought and creating new associations which had been concealed by the traditional dismissal of the second term. This is basically the same aim that Brooke-Rose pursues in her work, and it is perhaps not by chance that the two authors make use of common devices such as multilingual puns, ludic manipulations of etymologies and allusions from disparate fields of knowledge. In addition, Brooke-Rose’s concentration on outsider figures parallels deconstruction’s attention to marginal elements, and in the same way the deconstructionist acts from within the system, so Brooke-Rose posits her figures inside the system, making them interact with it. By using the same language, by taking it literally and by pushing it to its logical conclusions, Brooke-Rose’s outsiders create a whole series of new connections, expose the constructs on which the systems are based, thus creating new perspectives and new possibilities. Through the central character of Out, for instance, Brooke-Rose is able to posit the scientific discourse as fundamentally metaphoric, and this operation could be seen as a parallel to Derrida’s deconstruction of the opposition between serious/literal and non-serious/metaphorical use of language which concluded with his assertion that a literal expression is a metaphor whose figurality has been forgotten (Culler, 1983, 150). In order to reverse the traditional hierarchies, Brooke-Rose also makes her outsider figures exploit, whether consciously or not, their position of marginality, allowing them to use the system’s language in a 36

slightly different way. In fact, they make use of the marginalised creativity inherent in all language, and adopt a ‘non-serious’ language (which accounts for the linguistic games and the metaphoric and associative processes her central characters use). In this way, she makes them bend the system’s language and demonstrate the possibility of alternative versions of Truth. The exploitation of this creativity is presented in her novels as the means to oppose the coercive use that the Western-male-dominated systems have made of language, and it is precisely to make the reader aware of the potentials of language that she works in her narratives. For this reason, even though critics have often dismissed BrookeRose as an ivory tower intellectual separated from reality and dealing only with beautiful ideas,5 she has always borne in mind the Reality she shares with her readers. Her works must be looked at as an appeal to readers both as consumers of literature but also, and more importantly, as human beings, citizens of society and users of language. In her novels, Brooke-Rose tries in fact to give a new perspective to readers, a new point of view from which they can approach not only literary and theoretical works but also the society they are living in, the institutions they have to confront, other human beings and their selves, offering them new tools with which they might reach a better understanding of these elements. Feminism By appropriating the Other’s discourse in a parodic way, Brooke-Rose’s work is similar to that of some of the French Feminist writers of the same period who have also been influenced by Derrida’s deconstruction. Cixous, for example, inserts into her work pre-existing texts, makes great use of linguistic games and plays with syntax; but while Cixous offers, through her novels, a response to male discourse in a feminine voice, Brooke-Rose works directly on that same male discourse and deconstructs it. Similarly, Wittig makes great use of intertextuality, but she assumes a much more radical position than Brooke-Rose. For this

5

For example Daniela Carpi (1996).

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reason, as in the case of the movements previously analysed, BrookeRose cannot be easily assimilated to Feminism. As my book intends to show, in her novels she often highlights problematics related to gender and to the relation between sexual difference and language. Furthermore, in her narrative and theoretical works she exposes the phallocentric clichés on which society, history and much theory are based. Because of this – along with the fluidity of her writing, the open endings of her fictions, and her use of parodic appropriation of other texts – her work could be read by Feminists as an example of ‘feminine writing’. Indeed, it has been read in this way: she has been included in The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (1990), and she has been often cited as an example of a Feminist writer (Friedman and Fuchs, 1989) with her narrative succumbing to the fate of becoming the object of women studies seminars in the United States. Yet, she refuses to be labelled ‘feminist’ (1990b, 31), she rejects the assumption of a feminine writing based on the essence of womanhood and attacks the exaltation of instinct – for Dorothy Richardson the essential quality of women – the pre-symbolic (Kristeva’s semiotic), and flux and chaos (Cixous’ chaosmos), as determining elements for a feminine writing which would allegedly liberate women of their oppression. On the contrary, she shows how the characteristics of writing which have been appropriated by Feminists are also typical of many male writers (1991a, 229). While using, for example, the same techniques as used in Speculum de l’autre Femme (1974), in which Irigaray juxtaposes to her text sentences from different male philosophers (anonymously inserted in her writing), thereby exposing their phallocentric premises, Brooke-Rose sometimes treats Feminist issues ironically. As she maintains in Stories, Theories and Things, she is always very suspicious of any movement which creates blind obsessions (1991a, 226) – be it the Structuralist obsession with structures or the Feminist obsession with essential womanhood – and this leads her to shun all blind adherence to any movement.

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ii. Poetry and Poetic Narrative As discussed above, language has remained Brooke-Rose’s main passion throughout her career. One of the ways in which this concern for language manifests itself is the way she uses it, stretching its possibilities and encouraging the reader to rediscover its poetic qualities. By showing how scientific jargons and specialised discourses can – when taken literally – originate metaphors, she also shows how they can generate ‘a kind of poetry’ (1987). Her first love had actually been poetry, which she wrote mainly during the 1950s, and this led to the composition of novels which are very poetic. Pound Brooke-Rose got to know Pound in the mid 1950s, and his influence on her intentions and techniques throughout her work is undeniable. Pound’s aim, like Brooke-Rose’s, was to make the reader suddenly see in a new light what s/he had long taken for granted, and through the intentional difficulty of his texts he wanted to make the reader think. In order to do so, he uses several devices which have also entered BrookeRose’s repertoire after she became experimental. For example the juxtaposition of different elements (on which different methodologies of both art and science were based); his bringing together of both art and science; his use of ideograms which (like the different languages in Between), block the reader; the importance he gives to the signifier, the plastic quality of words and the indivisibility of form and content which derives from it; his use of several languages in the same text; his intertextual introduction of different references in his texts; his game of repetitions and echoes, through which he places the same element in new contexts and by obliging the reader to see it from a different angle he gives it life. Above all, however, it is perhaps the importance he gives to the precise choice and placing of every single word he uses, and his lifetime concern with the creation of a new language that people might think in, which inspired Brooke-Rose’s approach to all her works.

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Beckett Considering her love for poetry, it isn’t so surprising that another main influence Brooke-Rose cites is Beckett, whom she also discovered in the mid 1950s and whose poetic shadow falls over some of her works. We can clearly recognise the influence of Beckett’s novelistic voice in certain of her texts, and commenting on the influence Beckett had on her, Brooke-Rose says: It’s a very different kind of influence, very different from that of Pound. With Pound it is almost a technical influence; with Beckett it is much more, let us say, an attitude-nihilistic, if you like […] this obstinate humor in the face of despair […] and of course the flowing syntax, which is something I have tried to develop very much in my novels (1976, 14).

iii. Narratives French Post-War Narrative Brooke-Rose’s positing the deconstruction of various forms of Truth as her aim must be seen as closely related to her rejection of the Realist conventions and their assumptions that the writer was only transcribing the real which was understood as an absolute and immutable given. This is the same position held by the exponents of the nouveau roman. The movement’s main concern, in fact, essentially consisted of a critical enterprise which questioned the assumptions of Realist writing as practised by Balzac, i.e. the notion of vraisemblance on which all Realist fiction has relied. The movement supported the principle that the supposed real is simply a text which, because of its familiarity, is not perceived as a text, and was concerned to expose the mere repetition of already received forms of Reality which Realist fiction submitted to its readers as an accurate transcription of reality. Just as for Brooke-Rose the Truth is relative to its domain, so the romanciers considered the Realist work as simply corroborating and stemming from a contemporary and relative definition of Reality. The 40

means by which they tried to question Realist assumptions was to execute a continuous defamiliarisation of their material. This idea, also fundamental to Structuralism, is what the Russian Formalist Victor Shklovskij defined, in 1929, as the device by which all art makes us aware of forms which are simply received passively, thus helping us to rediscover the perception of objects as seen, not as assumed through our mechanical habits. The novel is thus seen as a means of research and exploration of new possibilities both in the domain of language (hence the importance of the concept of manipulation of linguistic forms), and in that of narrative organisation: by rejecting the narrative devices on which Realism has relied to reinforce the reader’s process of naturalisation, the romanciers expose their rhetorical nature, and by offering the reader alternative ways of organising the narrative, they show the existence of other Realities. Thus, the chronological structuring of narrative is abandoned and often, instead of a description of what happened next, we have an account of what might have happened, which leads to the insertion in the text of different versions of the same situation, this causing discontinuity and, in the case of Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon, to a narrative composed entirely without constative verbs. The setting becomes irrelevant, as the need to provide a recognisable place is no longer felt; the traditional detailed description aimed at rendering a place recognisable becomes redundant, and the usual conception of the characters is now challenged. The well-rounded characters of nineteenth-century fiction are replaced by the psychologically impoverished characters of Robbe-Grillet and the anonymous characters of Sarraute (an approach which, in Such, Brooke-Rose takes to an extreme by calling one of her characters ‘Someone’): these are characters who most of the time do not even possess a name, or who possess too many, thus preventing the name from fulfilling the function it held in Realist fiction. Specifically, it is Robbe-Grillet’s treatment of the narrator that is of particular interest when we consider Brooke-Rose’s debt to the nouveau roman. Beginning with her first experimental novel, she adopts his first person narrator, positing at the centre of her narrative a consciousness which is simply hit by external phenomena and which merely registers in an objective and almost scientific way his/her surroundings as if s/he were a camera. Because these descriptions most of the time do not correspond to what the reader would expect or would notice, they 41

become another means to defamiliarise the Real. Together with the abundance of detail, they strive to oblige readers to change their modes of reading, and are used by both Robbe-Grillet and Brooke-Rose as a means to wake the reader up, to make him/her actually read the words on the page and to shatter the passivity implicit in the Realist type of narrative. Whereas in the Realist novel many of the detailed descriptions present in the text had the sole purpose of rendering the narrative more vraisemblable, their function in Robbe-Grillet and Brooke-Rose is in fact different; it is however with regard to this point that perhaps one of the main contradictions inherent in Robbe-Grillet’s work and (despite what critics have always implied by defining Brooke-Rose as the English Robbe-Grillet), one of the main differences between the two authors can be discerned. For the early Robbe-Grillet (author of ‘Nature, humanisme, tragédie’, 1958), the aim of his detailed and objective descriptions was to operate a cleansing of the language of literature which through the use of metaphors had perpetuated an anthropomorphic description of the world. For him, literature therefore offered the possibility to expose the falsity of the assumption of the existence of a relationship between the world and man. His aim was in fact to make readers recognise that the world simply is, and that any attempt to attach a meaning to the things of the world or to assume a participation of the world of things in the world of men is simply mystification. However, although for him scientific description should restore the object’s physicality, its ‘being there’, without implying some meaning behind it, by positing a world that this objective vision could describe, Robbe-Grillet implies the existence of a given reality which the writer can reproduce in the scientifically precise words he uses. He thus maintains the existence of a reality which, once it is cleansed of the anthropomorphic metaphors it has been submerged by, will appear in all its naturality, thus implying not only that a vision can be objective, but also that there exists a natural state of language in which language can simply describe the world without interpreting it. On the contrary, Brooke-Rose contests any idea of natural reality and language, and her integration of scientific discourse in her novels is intended to show the non-existence of such a thing as the neutral and instrumental language Robbe-Grillet wishes to posit. Hence, in spite of using a similar device to that of the romancier, Brooke-Rose nevertheless has a different goal, and this is evident in her first 42

experimental novel in particular, which she makes into a parody of Robbe-Grillet’s chosisme. In her novels, Brooke-Rose wants in fact to show that any description, no matter how scientific, is already an interpretation of the world, that the language we use is always loaded with social and conventional meaning, and that the very process of ‘visioning’ is already a reorganisation and a construction of the object of that vision. By implying that the mind of the subject always organises the real, she therefore assumes a position close to that of another romancier, Claude Simon, who was particularly intrigued by the distortions the psyche operates when apprehending the Real. Like him, she organises her narrative following metaphorical as opposed to temporal or causal relations, mainly determined by associations of words. In order to demonstrate that supposedly scientific language also operates on metaphoric processes, Brooke-Rose actually uses the kind of metaphors that Robbe-Grillet criticised.6 Against his assertion of the incompatibility of language and reality, she claims that language is the ‘material of life’ (1976, 23), and works to show how the only reality we have access to is in her opinion fabricated by language. Despite the differences highlighted above, the importance that scientific discourse assumes in both Brooke-Rose’s and Robbe-Grillet’s fiction demonstrates the influence which the cultural atmosphere of their times had on their work. The initial aim of literary Structuralism was actually the definition of a model of the literary system which, by using the rigorous and scientific methods of modern linguistics, would give a scientific basis to literary studies, thereby giving birth to the new ‘science de la Littérature’ Barthes wrote of in Critique et vérité (1966, in OC2, 40). For this reason, Structuralism sought the unification of the new sciences, held as fundamental the application to different areas of human knowledge of the same principles drawn from linguistics and, being ‘a response to the need [...] for a coherent system that would unite the modern sciences and make the world habitable for man again’ (Scholes, 1974, 2), was applied to anthropology by Lévi-Strauss and to history by Foucault to name but two examples.

6

In reality, Brooke-Rose’s metaphors resemble the structuralist metaphors which Robbe-Grillet, somewhat contradictorily, uses in his novels.

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This issue of the unification of science and literature was indeed discussed in different countries concurrently. In 1968, for example, Calvino gave two interviews on the subject in which he made reference to Barthes’ ‘Science vs. Littérature’ and Queneau’s ‘Science et Littérature’, both published in 1967, and it is perhaps the different terms in which these two authors discussed the matter that account for the different positions held by Brooke-Rose and Robbe-Grillet, the latter seemingly more influenced by the position taken by the Structuralist Barthes. If one looks at the works of such authors as Queneau, Perec and Calvino, it is quite easy to recognise the many concerns and devices they share with Brooke-Rose. The authors mentioned above were members of the group OuLiPo (‘Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle’),7 and they share an imaginative conception of science and a love for ludic manipulation of linguistic forms. This and some of the devices they used (such as the original juxtaposition of different elements and the imposition of arbitrary linguistic constraints on their writing), together bring them close to Brooke-Rose’s attitude towards language. Clearly, these various elements are put into practice very differently in the various works produced by these authors. Hence, while Queneau and other members of the group such as Roubaud use mathematical principles to structure their works, it is perhaps the linguistic manipulations operated by Perec which bring him closer than the others to Brooke-Rose. For example, if in Between, Amalgamemnon, Xorandor, Remake and Next, Brooke-Rose imposes rigorous linguistic constraints on her prose, eliminating respectively all forms of the verb ‘to be’, all use of constative verbs, all use of non-dialogic forms of narrative, all use of personal pronouns and all use of the verb ‘to have’, Perec writes the whole of his novel La Disparition (1969) without once using the letter ‘e’. However, although both Perec’s and Brooke-Rose’s linguistic impositions always assume a thematic value,8 in Brooke-Rose they find a motivation more internal to the novels themselves. Consequently, the concerns and devices she 7

8

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The group was founded by Queneau and the mathematician François le Lionnais in 1960 with the aim of applying the principles of mathematics to literature so as to explore the possibilities of language and narrative organisation. The disappearance of the letter ‘e’ might be rooted in the loss of Perec’s parents in the Holocaust. Furthermore, his deletion of the letter which appears most frequently in his name could be read as a questioning of his own identity.

shares with OuLiPo must therefore be seen as a similar, but in many aspects different, approach to language. It is possibly because of her refusal to be associated with any particular group, that Brooke-Rose’s fiction is more readily associated with that of two independent authors, Maurice Roche and Michel Butor, the second of these using, in his Mobile (1962), the myths of American culture and history in the same way Brooke-Rose uses Herodotus’ Histories in Amalgamemnon. It is however Roche and, in particular, his Circus (1972), that has served on several occasions as a point of comparison for Thru, as both novels display many typographical tricks, linguistic games and the insertion of many intertextual borrowings. As Brooke-Rose admits, when she first met Roche in Paris it was a sort of ‘dazzle’ (ibid.), but while his insertion of extracts from the Michelin Guide recalls her integration of mineral water labels in Between, she adds with reference to Thru that she does many things not attempted by Roche (1990b, 34). What they principally have in common is the attitude towards language as a material (which distances them from Butor, for whom language seems mainly to be a tool for getting hold of ‘the external world’), the use of devices such as juxtaposition, the insertion of other texts in their own and a strong tendency to parody. In particular, what Brooke-Rose really praises in Roche is his humour, which she sees as central to all her production and to her attitude towards life in general (1976, 15). Indeed, because she works intentionally to communicate joy, she sees humour as a means to achieve serenity despite everything else, ‘almost out of disillusion’ (1989, in UOD, 33). As in Roche, this humour is mainly directed towards the theories both authors play with, and somehow it exorcises the risk of taking all this theory too seriously because, as Brooke-Rose would have it, after all it is ‘just letters on a page’ (1976, 4). Although she is profoundly interested in theory, Brooke-Rose refuses in fact all dogmatism, and never subscribes to any theory without reservation, but critically deals with what these various elements offer her. However, if this attitude was already present in her early novels (where she parodied the philological circles and the pseudo-intellectual, middle-class atmosphere of 1950s London), it became more marked in the novels she wrote in the 1960s: for example in Out, where she exposes the inherent dogmatism of Robbe-Grillet’s statements; or in Such, where she attacks psychoanalysis. 45

This healthy attitude of demystification became even stronger once Brooke-Rose left England for Paris in 1968, when her increased awareness of theoretical constructs brought her closer to the Tel Quel group, whose fictions bear many resemblances with hers. For example, both Brooke-Rose and the members of the group (in particular Sollers, editor of the eponymously named journal), made extensive use of unattributed quotations from other texts which they inserted in their own, shared a view of language as an event and all felt that what we accept as reality is in fact a construct. The members of Tel Quel shared both Barthes’ idea that the writer’s work on literary form is a sort of political commitment (in so far as to change the language society speaks is to change society itself), and Althusser’s view that what constructs Reality is the ‘material’ ideology (1971, 152/165) which in the novel took the form of the vraisemblable. Hence, their attacks on Realism, which was seen as representing the bourgeois ideological construction of society, and their adherence to the notion that literature also had the power to contest ideology. As Althusser stated, ‘What art makes us see [...] is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes’ (quoted by Britton, 1992, 92), but whereas his conception was very general and could be applied to all literature, the Tel Quel group didn’t see this subversion of ideology as typical of literature, but rather saw it as a more conscious intervention and struggle. For this reason they proposed a programme for a specific kind of revolutionary literature based on textual production, which opposed the idea of Realist/bourgeois (the two terms seemed to them equivalent) textual representation, revealing the Truth of the text (namely that it is made of language), and implying the negation of all fixations of meaning, as the text was seen as continually producing new meanings. This concept of literature is quite similar to Brooke-Rose’s, as in her opinion literature can and must expose the conventions on which our ideas of Truth are based, must show the reader the very process by which these notions of Truth are created and, by defamiliarising what readers take for granted and as natural, must make them aware of their status as constructs. What Brooke-Rose shared with Barthes and Tel Quel was, moreover, the involvement of the reader in the process of producing a plurality of meaning. However, while the Tel Quel group was funda46

mentally politically engaged in the disruption of the bourgeois ideological order of society through the production of subversive texts, BrookeRose did not share this political aim. In addition, while their fictions were dominated by, and subservient to, their theoretical and critical positions, in her novels she operated a playful manipulation of theoretical and literary devices. We can therefore see how of all the various movements she approaches, Brooke-Rose agrees with some of their characteristics, and regrets others. The love/hate relationship she has with everything that stimulates her, consequently makes it difficult to categorise her work precisely. International Postmodernism Some of Brooke-Rose’s novels have often been described in terms of science-fiction, but this categorisation appears inadequate to me, because if her novels share some of the characteristics of this genre (in terms of their temporal and spatial setting and the supposed presence of aliens), they also distance themselves from it. Their inclusion in the genre can therefore be relevant only if we broaden the concept of science-fiction and consider it as an investigation of the effects that the new sciences (ranging from psychoanalysis to computer technologies) have on the way we relate to the world and other human beings, the way they affect fiction and what possibilities they offer it. For example, the science fictional aspects of Out are inserted and exploited by the author to give life to an allegory whose political implications I will analyse in the second section of my work. Such, on the author’s admission, is more a ‘poetic fantasy’ than real sciencefiction (1990b, 32), and even the categorisation of Xorandor as pure science-fiction (proposed by McHale in 1992 and Friedman in 1987), is in my opinion problematic. In fact in this novel (focused on, among others, narratological, philosophical and linguistic matters), Brooke-Rose inserts expressions which parody classic science-fiction and, consequently, ironically distance this novel from it (201). In addition, on a formal level too the novel couldn’t be described as classic sciencefiction: contrary to both Realist and science-fiction texts which, as Brooke-Rose writes in A Rhetoric of the Unreal, tend to eliminate all 47

ambiguities, in Xorandor the mysteries enveloping Xorandor (namely its origin and the reason it broke its silence), are never solved. Moreover, the presence of many epistemological questions (for example how Xorandor gets to know the surrounding world and how it remembers), would render an inclusion of the novel in the genre of science-fiction as described by McHale questionable, as for him science-fiction is concerned with more ontological issues (1987, 59). Not only this, but also the hesitation between this world and the other world which McHale recognises as the main characteristic of science-fiction seems to be collapsing and dissolving by the end of the novel, when the existence of another world is in doubt, Xorandor being thought to come not from Mars but from our own planet. Despite the fact that the novel still fits one of the definitions of science-fiction Brooke-Rose gave in an interview – namely a fiction which delineates a world familiar to ours, in which only one parameter has been changed (1990b, 31) – because of the possible absence of the alien, Xorandor seems to be more akin to the genre of the Fantastic as described by Todorov, where the hesitation between a natural and super-natural explanation is never resolved. I do not intend to define this hesitation in terms of this and the other world, but rather as the impossibility of deciding in favour of a superhuman/Martian explanation of the Xorandor phenomenon over a human/terrestrial explanation. Even though I will show that such a reading is possible, then, this hesitation is not dependent on an allegorical reading of the novel, but it applies literally to the issue of Xorandor’s origin. The problematical inclusion of Brooke-Rose’s novels in the science-fiction genre is closely related to their similarly dubious inclusion in what has been called Postmodernist fiction, of which sciencefiction has been declared the genre par excellence (McHale, 1987, 65/72). Even though she has often been considered a Postmodern writer, Brooke-Rose dislikes this category, on different occasions defining Postmodernist fiction as a ‘meaningless’ name,9 and I would submit that such categorisation is not always relevant. The definitions of Postmodernism are often so vague that it is in fact difficult to consider them critically useful, and many typically Postmodern characteristics such as selfreflexivity, open forms, circularity, hierarchical disruption and parody 9

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See for example 1996g, 97 and 1981, 345.

appear in works which Postmodernists themselves wouldn’t describe as Postmodern. If any attempt to define Postmodernism more precisely is made, then the labelling of Brooke-Rose as Postmodernist becomes even more ambiguous. For example, her novels cannot easily be classified as Postmodernist according to McHale’s definition of the term, because whereas for McHale Postmodernist poetics is characterised by a dominance of ontological issues, throughout her career she maintains both epistemological and ontological concerns. Moreover, according to Hutcheon’s definition of Postmodernism as historiographic metafiction (1988), amongst all of Brooke-Rose’s novels, only The Dear Deceit, Remake and maybe Subscript would, strictly speaking, fit the bill. However, by broadening Hutcheon’s definition of Postmodernism, we can see how the interest Brooke-Rose shows for the fictionality of the Real, which, as I will show, often takes the form of an exploration of the ways in which memories and the past are constructed, could be perceived as similar to that which ‘recognised’ Postmodern American authors like Pynchon, Barth and Barthelme showed since the 1960s, when they began to explore the borders between fiction and history by means of self-reflexive and multiple narratives. Because these characteristics are also shared by the cyberpunks William Gibson (Neuromancer, 1984) and Bruce Sterling (Islands in the Net, 1988), who use science-fictional developments of technology to overcome narrative problems of point of view as Brooke-Rose does in Xorandor and Verbivore, this term could be applied to her too. Furthermore, we could, like Birch, use the term ‘cybernetic interface fiction’, which McHale coined to describe ‘Postmodern narrative which emerges at the convergence of cybernetic technology and the humanities’ (Birch, 1994, 222). However, if we are to overlook, as Birch does, the problems that the use of the term ‘Postmodern’ still poses, I think that we should then include in this category not only Xorandor and Verbivore, but also Amalgamemnon, where the relationship between computerised technology and the humanities is central. All things considered, I think that the most useful category Birch suggests in relation to Brooke-Rose’s novels is that of American ‘surfiction’, which Raymond Federman defined as a kind of fiction which ‘exposes the fictionality of reality’ (1975, 7) by means of devices such as non-linearity, typographic innovations, the blurring of the ontological status of characters and events, and discursive heterogeneity. 49

Although these characteristics are still very general, in fact, because the term was coined to account for many different fictions including those produced by the nouveaux romanciers, the Tel Quel group and authors such as Barth and Cortázar, it has the advantage of an international dimension which is fundamental to Brooke-Rose’s production. Her internationalism also accounts for the characteristics she shares with J. M. Coetzee, perhaps the most interesting of South-African contemporary writers. Because Coetzee’s narratives stem from the situation that South Africa witnessed during the years of Apartheid, they are marked by a very particular political dimension that Brooke-Rose’s work generally lacks (even though, as I will show, all her novels could for various reasons be defined as political). In spite of this, the two authors share various devices: in Coetzee’s Dusklands (1974) and In the Heart of the Country (1977), for example, we find the same ambiguity of the ontological status of characters and events, the same use of repetition, alternative versions of the same events, the use of intertextuality, the same self-reflexive dimension and the same precise language characteristic of Brooke-Rose’s work. Moreover, he too blurs the distinction between language and reality and exposes the various myths on which white civilisation in South Africa has fed for centuries as constructions achieved through the language coercively used by the system. The main difference which distinguishes the two authors is therefore one of tone which, especially in Coetzee’s early works, is very dark and brooding. Following Lacan, both Coetzee and Brooke-Rose acknowledge the alienation provoked by language and the necessary distance which language interposes between the real and its linguistic substitution. However, contrary to what Coetzee seems to do in his novels, Brooke-Rose approaches language from the other end of the spectrum, as hers is a joyful and playful investigation of the possibilities that the very alienatory force of language can offer, and she invites her readers to exploit its potential, instead of passively succumbing to it. British Post-War Fiction Although British writers did not accomplish the same break with Realism achieved by the nouveaux romanciers, many writers of the 1960s, while not dispensing completely with the conventions derived 50

from nineteenth-century modes of writing, began to question them, assuming a different attitude to the established elements of fiction such as the plot and the character. Hence, even though they retained an undertow of humanist Realism, they began to inquire into the concepts of history and reality, exploring and evaluating fictionality per se. Among these authors, Christine Brooke-Rose perhaps stands alone in the radical rejection of Realist conventions. However, her fiction shares some of the features which characterise the works produced by British authors of the 1960s and 1970s: not only do these authors use the tendency towards fantasy as an initial and partial opposition to Realist conventions, but they also exhibit a self-conscious dimension similar to the investigation of the possibilities of language she pursues. For example, Anthony Burgess seems to share the same profound interest in languages and etymologies typical of Brooke-Rose, makes great use of puns and linguistic games so as to create (just as BrookeRose does in Xorandor), new languages such as that spoken by his gang of young criminals in A Clockwork Orange (1962). Furthermore, even if he does not share her critical approach to theory and makes a very different use of it, he does nevertheless draw on Structuralism, particularly in MF (1971), where Lévi-Strauss’ Structural anthropology is used to compose a novel of riddles. Angus Wilson, whose early fiction was marked by a tendency towards social Realism, in his Late Call (1964) makes use of intertextuality, parody and pastiche, destabilises identity and, by setting his As If By Magic (1973) mainly abroad, tries to enlarge the framework of the British novel. In spite of this, he remained a liberal writer, and while Brooke-Rose deconstructs in all her novels the very notion of identity, Wilson proclaimed to the last the need for human self-awareness and the recovery of a sense of identity. John Fowles similarly attempted to break with Realism: The Magus (1966), while starting realistically, soon moves into a world of enchantment, where the power of fiction is explored; The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), while reconstructing the Victorian novel, simultaneously deconstructs it and exposes the doubts and inconsistencies of the conventions laying behind it. However, even though he acknowledges that he belongs to the age of Barthes and Robbe-Grillet, that in The Magus he has his character declare ‘all here is illusion’ (quoted by Bradbury, op. cit., 357), and that in ‘The Enigma’ he acknowledges that ‘Everything is fiction’ (quoted by Bradbury, op. cit., 360), his works 51

seem fundamentally to rely on Realist assumptions without ever questioning the representational modes. The same is true of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962): although this novel meta-fictionally focuses on issues such as factuality and fictionality, attempting to go beyond the notions of traditional identity and subjectivity, it does not completely dispense either with these themes or with the Realistic representational mode. Similarly, although Iris Murdoch acknowledges that the only means of understanding human beings have at their disposal is through language, she adds that ‘the quality of a civilization depends on its ability to discern and reveal truth, and this depends on the scope and purity of its language’ (quoted by Bradbury, op. cit., 371), thereby positing a Truth to be discovered and the existence of a transparent language. Closer to the kind of exploration accomplished by Brooke-Rose might be the work produced by B.S. Johnson, who considered the modes of the nineteenth-century novel exhausted and, in the Introduction to his Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973), declared that the contemporary narrative should account for the dramatic and chaotic changes that reality has undergone since the previous century. On the one hand, Johnson succeeded in breaking through conventional ways of structuring narrative by interrupting the fictional illusion dear to the Realists of the previous century and self-reflexively referring to the problems he had to face in his writing. Furthermore, the typographical tricks he employed – such as the organisation of the text in two columns and the insertion of blank pages in the text (Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, 1973) – echo Brooke-Rose’s use of the same kind of devices. On the other, however, although she never went so far as punching holes in her pages (Albert Angelo, 1964) nor, in her attempt to make the reader participate in her writing, obliged them to arrange the pages of the novel itself as he did with The Unfortunates (1969), which he presented in a box containing twenty-seven loose bundles of papers, the concepts of fiction and reality lying behind his works are profoundly different from hers. In fact, by rejecting fiction as lies, and by trying to bring it closer to autobiographical and social truth (1964; 1973), he basically affirmed the existence of a pre-verbal reality which could be communicated by a transparent and appropriate language, a notion which is openly in contradiction with Brooke-Rose’s more radical position. 52

The same stated attack on English tradition characterises the works of Eva Figes (who endeavoured to find new ways to account for a reality she perceived as changed), and Alan Burns, who in Babel (1969) rids his narrative of order, applies the ‘cut-up method’ to newspaper jargon and uses mid-sentence switches of context (similar to Brooke-Rose’s Between) in order to explore the manipulations that citizens have to endure. In Dreamamerika! (1972) – where, as in Brooke-Rose, the plot is reduced to a minimum and inter-hetero-textuality is used in order to juxtapose different texts – Burns expands his use of bricolage, and composes a collage text in which the familiarity of the subject, i.e. the Kennedy family, focuses the reader’s attention more on the signifiers and the way in which the story is presented. The use of this hetero-textuality is also characteristic of a number of authors of the 1980s who, like Burns, insert documentary modes in their texts (it is not by chance that his The Angry Brigade, published in 1973, bears as the subtitle ‘A Documentary’). This device is used for example by William Golding in Rites of Passage (1980), and is similar to the device Brooke-Rose uses in Xorandor and Verbivore, where letters, offprints, and newspaper cuttings are inserted into the narrative. It is a similar device which is used by Angela Carter in Nights at the Circus (1984), one of the finest examples of magic realism, and by Rushdie in Midnight’s Children (1981), where the power of stories, invention and fantasy is celebrated. In this novel, the literalisation of metaphor (a favourite device of Brooke-Rose) becomes fundamental. So, just as in Such figurative expressions like ‘I take your point’ engenders a game where the two characters win and lose points, Rushdie’s character can physically ‘smell the truth’ about emotions and personal qualities. In a similar way, in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) – which in spite of exhibiting a high degree of self-conscious intertextuality which takes the form, as in Brooke-Rose’s Thru, of a list of borrowings, still conforms to the genres on which it draws – credit cards are created through which people can draw on their future on the principle that ‘time is money’. In Rayner Heppenstall’s The Connecting Door, for example, as in Brooke-Rose and Robbe-Grillet, the ambiguity that lingers in the novel inhibits the reader’s ability to decide whether certain characters do actually exist in the fictional world of the novel or are doubly fictional and are simply the products of some other character’s imagination, just as the occurrence of certain events described as actually happening in the 53

narrative seems negated by either the description of another event whose occurrence would contradict the previous one, or by the insertion of alternative versions of the same event from which the reader cannot distinguish which one should be held as true. This aspect, which is evident in Brooke-Rose’s Out and Such, and remains a fundamental element in all her works, also characterises the works of Gabriel Josipovici who by blurring the ontological status of characters and events in his novels – for example The Present (1975), in which two alternative stories are narrated in parallel – implicitly questions the adequacy of Realist conventions to tell of a Reality which is increasingly perceived as multiple and refracted. Just as in the first two experimental novels by Brooke-Rose this device was used to explore the dividing line between ‘normality’ and ‘madness’, and was one of the main devices used to explore the question of identity, so in many other novels of the period the exploration of the inner space of the psyche took the form of the recounting of schizophrenic and amnesiac conditions. For example in the narrative of Andrew Sinclair (Gog, 1967), Eva Figes (Nelly’s Version, 1977), Ann Quin and Doris Lessing, whose Briefing for A Descent into Hell (1971) tells a visionary and hallucinated story of a breakdown, which shares with Brooke-Rose’s Such the Laingian vision of mental illness as a means to acquire a new awareness and a better understanding of the subjective reality of the self. In particular, it is the narrative of Ann Quin which seems most akin to Brooke-Rose’s novels, and their similarities could account for the fact that Quin herself was dismissed by the British public as an author overinfluenced by French and American culture. For example in Berg (1964), the mentally unstable protagonist reminds us of Brooke-Rose’s central character in Out, the ‘actual’ occurrence of events remains ambiguous, and associative lyrical passages are inserted in the narrative. In addition, in Quin’s Three (1966) and Passages (1969), components of the psyche become external characters in the novel, in the same way that many of the characters in Such are externalisations of the character’s unconscious. Both Quin and Burns share with J. G. Ballard – an exponent of the new wave science-fiction of the 1960s – a predilection towards surrealism, which took the form of a more direct concern with composition,

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the investigation of the codes of popular culture and of alternative ways of organising the narrative other than the causal linearity of Realism. From what I have said, I hope it is clear that I believe the use Brooke-Rose makes of theory and her narrative experiments are always very personal and original, and she herself acknowledges this when, commenting on her multiplicity and cohesiveness in Stories, Theories and Things, she writes: I have a knack of somehow escaping most would-be canonic networks and labels: I have been called ‘nouveau roman in English’ and nouveau nouveau, I have been called Postmodern, I have been called Experimental, I have been included in the SF Encyclopaedia, I automatically come under Women Writers […] I sometimes interest the Feminists, but I am fairly regularly omitted from the ‘canonic’ surveys (chapters, articles, books) that come under those or indeed other labels. On the whole I regard this as a good sign (1991a, 4).

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Section 1: The Refusal of Realism

Introduction to Section 1

From what I have said above, I hope it appears clear that Brooke-Rose’s refusal of Realist practices goes beyond mere technicality, as behind her rejection of the formal devices instituted by Realism there lies an altogether changed conception of the world. Her search for new representational tools is therefore not simply a calling into question of the Realist mode of narrative per se, but of narrative as a reflection of the world, and it is because the Reality which lies behind the narrative is perceived differently that new narrative devices capable of accounting for this Reality must be sought. With the beginning of the twentieth century, a ‘dialogical’ and unstable Reality began to be discovered behind, and in opposition to, the monological and stable world which Realist fiction claimed to transcribe. The element of randomness and uncertainty that entered science thanks to, amongst others, Einstein, Planck and Heisenberg, affected all conceptions of reality (entailing a journey from the cosmic to the individual), in the same way that Freud’s discovery of the individual’s unconscious was extended to society as a whole. Both the universe and the subject became thus de-centred, and because they were perceived as affected by indeterminable factors, faith in absolute knowledge began to fade. Man was faced with what Brooke-Rose calls ‘a philosophy of indeterminacy and a multivalent logic’ (1981, 7), and thanks to the theories of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, it was then recognised that man could know and control the nature of the world and of the human being only because it consisted of an artefact whose meaning was created by human conventions. The world began to appear as a construction of man and his language, and because all description of reality was recognised as subject to linguistic constraints and to be marked, to some extent, by uncertainty, it was felt that no version of the world could any longer be considered wholly faithful and truthful. Consequently, the claim made by Realism to convey the Truth about the world was perceived as a fraud, the world described by Realist narratives

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was seen as a construction of the narratives themselves, and authors such as Brooke-Rose began to try and create not only new narrative forms but, thanks to the equation of word with world, a new Reality in which the impact language has on the world and the uncertainty intrinsic in all human knowledge, might be acknowledged as such. After the first four conventional novels Brooke-Rose wrote during the 1950s, Out (1964) marked a new phase in the author’s career, characterised by a different conception of narrative. The novels she produced after 1964 are in fact all marked by a questioning of the very notion of reality on which Realism had relied, resulting in the refusal of the notion of the vraisemblable and of the idea that the author is simply transcribing the world. Parallel to the Structuralists and the Post-Structuralists, Brooke-Rose sees the Real, in all its social, political, and historical aspects as conventionally determined and, more profoundly, as a concrete effect of language. From the very beginning of her career as an experimental writer, Brooke-Rose states that ‘reality is language’ (1973b, 614), and discussing the situation of the contemporary writer in ‘Fiction, Figment, Feign’, she writes: Once upon a time, out there, were the Gods, the Vices and Virtues, the Personifications, and the Gods and Personifications died. So then several times upon a time, out there, was Nature, and when Nature also revealed itself, at an ever-increasing pace, to be made in our mortal image, once upon another time, out there, was Reality, which also turned out to be discourse, languages, systems of significance, continuing their own negation, signifying nothing (1991a, 161).

This notion of Reality as constructed through and through by language, is at the heart of Brooke-Rose’s new conception of the novel, whose ambition was then to make the reader aware of the fact that what s/he has been led to believe to be real is actually a non-original product. Because the novel comes to be perceived as a means of research and exploration of the possibilities of language and narrative organisation, it was felt to be very much at odds with the devices used and over-used by authors who thought of themselves as simple scribes of a given and transcendent reality, hence the rejection of the Realist type of narration as pursued by Balzac and which Modernism had already begun to question. The stimulating and experimental spirit of this Modern age underwent a great change, however, when, confronted with the First World 60

War, it had to deal with a shattered world where the progressive view of history and the sense of stability characteristic of the world opened up by the new century was lost, and where everything was felt to be temporary and provisional. Modernism then became marked by its more fragile, decadent tone, and if on the one hand it coincided with the experimental freeing of forms and with an increased attention to consciousness, on the other it was experienced as a reaction to the fragmentation of both culture and the psyche, the violence and the feeling of history as catastrophe that war brought about. It was in this climate during the postwar 1920s that most of the fundamental Modernist books were published: D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and Conrad’s The Rescue were published in 1920, Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922, E. M. Forster’s Passage to India in 1924, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in 1925, followed in 1927 by To the Lighthouse. Even though Brooke-Rose denies any direct influence of Joyce on her work, as she only read him years after she began to write experimentally, yet she does admit that the cultural changes brought about by Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (1939) did affect her, if only indirectly (1976, 13). As a matter of fact, her experimentalism can undoubtedly be accounted for in terms of Modernism: Modern are her major influences (Pound and Beckett), her ‘narrators’ (principally fragmented, selfdivided, dispersed and impersonal characters), the epistemological concerns (according to the definition of the term McHale gave in 1987) that all her experimental novels exhibit, her interest in issues related to gender (first approached by the Modernist Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and, above all, Virginia Woolf, who first introduced the concept of feminine flow and, with her process of femininisation of Modernism, rendered it intensely personal and internalised), and her technical devices, her defamiliarisation, her juxtaposition of discourses and her use of different languages (equally used by Pound and Joyce). However, when Brooke-Rose began her career as a writer, the mood and the atmosphere of literary London had drastically changed. By the end of the 1920s, the sense of historical uncertainty, political disillusionment and social and economical pessimism had grown, fomented by the stock market crash in 1929 and, in the new decade, by the rise to power of Stalin in Russia, the Nazi ideology of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini’s Fascism in Italy and the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The proletarian fiction produced in this age of political and 61

historical instability was filled with a sense of historical, political and psychological crisis, and the commitment of literature initially took the form, for example in Orwell, of historical Realism (social and political documentary, regional fiction, battle reportage), ending, after the collapse of the Marxist argument for proletarian Realism, in an experimental tendency towards fantasy, parody and satire through which (as in Beckett’s novels) the psychosis and absurdity of the world, and the surreality and threat of history (which earlier writers had tried to portray realistically) could be expressed. By the end of the decade, a dark and shadowy mood, brought about by the outbreak of war and the death of many writers who had shaped the previous decade, engulfed the intellectual and literary world. By the end of the war, writers had to face a world which was geographically, politically, socially, economically and ideologically shattered; they had to confront the Holocaust, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the Cold War, and the military potentials of space travel. It was then felt that the whole intellectual and political world (crushed under the weight of the war) had to be re-constructed, and in this now post-Modern world, in which history was perceived as dangerous, human nature as unreliable and life as tragic, many writers felt as though mute, and those who tried to speak had to confront the inadequacy of literary humanism in front of the absurdity and the horrors of war. Considering the general atmosphere of these years, the predominance gained by Existentialist philosophy comes as no surprise. After the acknowledgement of the emptiness, the absurdity and the meaningless of the world, Existentialism exhorted writers to re-construct the word which during the war had been corrupted and robbed of its transparency, and to re-valorise the sign which had become a weapon. Consequently, the tendency towards Realism, which had run through British fiction in the previous decades, was more markedly felt, and historical Realism and the need to report the changes of the post-war period became widespread, with its traditional plot and characters, its linearity and its humanism. However, the experimentalism which was still very much alive in other countries (such as France, Italy, the United States and South America) was not completely dead in post-war Britain either, and in an attempt to deal with what W. H. Auden called ‘The Age of Anxiety’ (1947), some writers moved in other, more experimental directions such 62

as Gothic, metafiction and fantasy. Modernism was not, after all, completely dead. Indeed, it was kept alive, for example, by Samuel Beckett, who, with his absurdist and parodic approach and his lost, increasingly character-less characters, questioned the nature of language and of human identity, the power of language to speak Reality and the powers of the imagination. Despite these tendencies, however, a large part of 1940s and early 1950s Britain was marked by a strong anti-experimentalism, opposed to the élitism of the experimental circles which posited a different social source for literary production, a tendency towards Realist fiction which was also strongly encouraged by the literary criticism of F. R. Leavis (The Great Tradition, 1948), Lionel Trilling (The Liberal Imagination, 1950), and Eric Auerbach (Mimesis, 1953). It was in this climate that, in 1957, Christine Brooke-Rose, alongside Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Doris Lessing and William Golding amongst others, began to publish the Realist novels of her very first tetralogy. The following years were characterised by a questioning of the process of history and Reality which took the form of a renewed wave of experimentalism. Brooke-Rose followed suit. As discussed above, her illness of 1962 represents the first big break in her career, which provoked a basic change in her practice as a writer. In fact, not only did her long and painful convalescence impose practical constraints on the process of her first experimental novel’s writing,1 and increase her interest in the underdog theme which, beginning with Out (where, by mimetically reproducing her own sickness, she investigates what it means to be sick and to be made an outsider because of sickness) will remain a constant in her work, but the illness-induced ‘semi-trance like state’, as she recalls, fundamentally changed her perspective on life (1989, in UOD, 30). This new outlook on life, combined with the other elements I mentioned and the discovery of the nouveau roman, precipitated her dissatisfaction with Realism and stimulated her discovery of new ways of writing narrative which, as a consequence, gained her the label of experimental writer. By demonstrating how the writer can, by modifying the way s/he organises the narrative and the language s/he uses, create a different 1

As Brooke-Rose maintains, this was literally written ‘one sentence a day falling back on the pillows’ (1990b, 32).

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Reality for the reader, and by laying bare the devices through which the text can and does manipulate the reader, Brooke-Rose proves not only that language has the power to affect the world in a concrete way, thus constructing the Real, but also that by changing the way society uses language, society itself can be changed. It is for this reason that it becomes imperative to consider the way in which Brooke-Rose actually uses language, in so far as the narratological choices she makes and the technical devices she uses become fundamental for her project as a writer, as a woman and as a human being. In fact, because of the close relationship which is posited between the ‘world’ and the ‘word’, the questioning of Realism Brooke-Rose conducts in all her texts turns her novels into an interrogation not only of the ‘world’ created in the narrative, but also of the world that readers have been accustomed to believe was natural and which, Brooke-Rose maintains, is equally determined by language. Her fiction thus becomes one which undermines both the notion of Realism as a mode of writing, and the notion of reality on which it relies. It is precisely as part of this world that the notion of identity is questioned and disrupted, as by dislocating the sense of identity which, in the Realist narrative, is created progressively through precise narratological choices, Brooke-Rose also dislocates the conventional sense of identity proper to the Western philosophical tradition reflected by Realism. By analysing the narratological means she exploits in her novels, the first section of my work seeks to introduce to the reader BrookeRose’s texts as written, and show how through the adoption of a different language and different formal devices, the author questions the very notion of identity and reality at the basis of Western, Cartesian philosophy. The first two chapters of my book – which analyse chronologically the particular narratological issues developed in the various novels – show how Brooke-Rose’s experimentalism becomes a way to deal with a Reality which is perceived as changed: if the rounded character of nineteenth-century narratives stood for the ideal (and idealistic) individual, normally distinguished by his/her fixed identity, Brooke-Rose’s characters (characterised by their instability, their lack of coherence and their psychological fragmentation) stand for the new individual which for many lies behind the surface of each human being, an individual whose conscious self coexists with the unconscious, whose

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fragmentary identity is perpetually changing and determined by the language the individual is exposed to. As the second chapter of my work suggests, as a consequence of the particular status that Brooke-Rose assigns to her ‘non-narrators’, the worlds her novels construct, and which are filtered through the eyes of the characters, appear so unusual as to give the impression of referring to a different Reality altogether. By defamiliarising the Real, and by showing how the language that describes it actually constructs the surrounding Reality which is then taken as natural, Brooke-Rose not only demonstrates the rhetorical nature of all description of the world, but by creating, through her unstable characters, a Reality which is itself unstable, she obliges the reader to face the element of uncertainty necessarily present in all description of the world, and demonstrates the coercion implicit in any claim to convey universal Truths. To the perfectly coherent worlds of 19th century narratives, Brooke-Rose thus opposes worlds which do not cohere as the kind of Realism pursued by Balzac would like, worlds in which the ontological status of the individual and his/her world is openly problematic, and for this reason, the ontological questions her novels raise haunt readers and oblige them to question the ontology of their own selves and Realities.

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Chapter 1: The ‘Free Direct Speech’ of Brooke-Rose’s Characters and Other Narratological Issues

1.1. The Absence of the Narrator in Out, Such, and Between As discussed supra, it is with Out that Brooke-Rose begins to parallel the refusal of Realist conventions enacted by the nouveaux romanciers and for the first time replaces the narrator of Realist fictions with an anonymous ‘non-narrator’ whose physical and psychological realities are never described. If the narrator is, as Brooke-Rose reminds us in A Rhetoric of the Unreal, ‘the one who speaks the narrative’ (1981, 35), we can see how, for most of Brooke-Rose’s texts, we can use the expression ‘non-narrator’ quite accurately, in so far as, instead of narrating what happens to them, her ‘undramatised narrators’, as Wayne Booth would define them (1961, 151), rarely utter a word, and simply register what happens around them, occasionally imagining their life or remembering scenes from their past Brooke-Rose’s ‘non-narrators’ are so undramatised and impoverished that they cannot be identified with characters in the conventional sense, and because they corresponds to a perceiving consciousness which is simply ‘hit’ by external phenomena,1 apparently unable to act upon the surrounding Reality, passively receiving external stimuli and registering what is happening around them in a highly objectified (even though subjective) narrative,2 they do not simply coincide with any one character but, more specifically, with the character through whose eyes everything described in the texts is filtered, that is the character that 1 2

In my discussion, the expressions ‘non-narrator’, ‘central consciousness’ and ‘character’ will be used as equivalent. Although their narrative is extremely subjective (as their mental activities influence what they perceive and the way they perceive it), it appears as a depersonalised and objective re-creation of their mental status.

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Genette, drawing on a concept introduced by Russian Formalism, calls ‘focal character’ (1972, 206/11). Furthermore, because in Brooke-Rose’s novels, the whole narration is delivered in what Genette would call internal focalisation, that is a narrative in which the character through whose point of view the events are described is never viewed from the exterior, the ‘non-narrator’ with whom the focal character coincides is simply reduced to – and can be only deduced from – his/her focal position. This is why Brooke-Rose’s narrators are, in reality, ‘non-narrators’. Brooke-Rose’s characters, in fact, do not narrate at all, which means that the author has after all done away with the confusing figure of the narrator (a mere invention of literary theory), and gone back to what Booth’s would call the Implied Author, that is a ‘narrating author’ who puts him/herself inside the mind of characters and registers all that hits them, even if they do not grasp it or are confused by it (as it often happens in Out, Such and Subscript). Brooke-Rose’s technique, therefore catches the moment of hitting, or/and (depending on the character), reflecting it or reacting to it, a process which can then be constructed by the reader. Her characters therefore experience their world directly, and this is why her narrative, although anti-Realist, could be defined as ultra-realist, in the sense of instant experience (whether understood or not). The author therefore lets her characters speak and think directly without any intermediary, and in opposition to traditional Realist texts – relying on the distinctions between Direct and Indirect Speech and the Sentences of Represented Speech and Thought described by Ann Banfield (1982, 23/108) – Brooke-Rose opts for what could be called ‘free-direct speech’, that is direct speech but not in dialogue (see Brooke-Rose, 1991a, 79). This way, the novel dispenses with the narrator, and the recuperation of the narrator in a traditional sense is made into an arbitrary imposition of meaning. Analogically, the definition of a fixed and immutable identity so dear to Cartesian philosophy, is exposed as both an imposition of significance and the result of man’s urge to categorise and render more coherent (hence meaningful) a reality which, as Robbe-Grillet put it in 1958, ‘simply is’. Consequently, BrookeRose’s elimination of the narrator becomes the means through which the novels challenge both received conceptions of identity and the entire 68

process of naturalisation that readers, relying on the parameters defined by the Realist tradition, try to impose on the narrative. As Culler would later underline in Structuralist Poetics (1975), if on the one hand readers are attracted to literature because it is something which surpasses the ordinary, they feel at the same time the urge to lessen its power, to recuperate and naturalise, if only partially, its strangeness, in order to make sense of it. Hence, as Culler says, to assimilate or interpret something is to bring it within the modes of order which culture makes available, and this is usually done by talking about it in a mode of discourse which a culture takes as natural (1975, 137).

Since one of the primary ways of naturalising fiction corresponds to the identification of the narrator, Brooke-Rose’s replacement of the traditional narrator with a character who – either through his/her lack of a proper name or through his/her multiple names (which, paradoxically, equally give anonymity) – gets dispersed and reduced to a mere focal point, is intended to impede the banalisation implied in the concept of naturalisation. As Barthes would state when discussing contemporary literature in general, ‘All subversion, or all submission, of the narrative text, begins with the proper name [...] what is transient, today, it’s not the narrative, but the character; what cannot be written anymore, is the proper name’ (1970, in OC2, 618). In the Realist novel, the name functioned as the anchoring point of all the semes which, by being repetitively attached to the same name, constituted a character defined by his/her peculiarity. But once the name disappears, once the semes cannot converge in any precise space, the claims they make to reveal the real individuality of a particular character lessen. The name thus loses its function, the same semes are attached to more than one name (or, as in the case of Textermination, the same name is shared by more than one character), and individuality, which was once unified, is refracted and fragmented, the semes pointing not to a single identity, but to shifting, variable identities, behind which no entity such as the character of Realist tradition can be singled out. As Brooke-Rose admits, the new approach to the narrator that she exhibits beginning with Out represents her major debt to Robbe-Grillet, whose La Jalousie (1957) works as an intertext for her first experimental novel (1989, in UOD, 30). Despite the many allusions to Robbe-Grillet’s 69

novel on the level of the plot (Birch, 1994; Reyes, 1995), the main aspect the two novels share is an altogether new conception of the narrator and the scope of the novel, which was then aimed at exposing the rhetoricity of all descriptions of the Real. Although Brooke-Rose’s search for new narrative tools would only acquire a definite personal quality after she broke free from the influence of Robbe-Grillet, the effects of the new perspective she gained after 1962 make her first experimental novel a splendid new start not only for her career, but also for the British novel in general, and can be observed in the description of copulating flies (reminiscent of Robbe-Grillet’s centipede) with which Out opens: A fly straddles another fly on the faded denim stretched over the knee. Sooner or later, the knee will have to make a move, but now it is immobilised by the two flies, the lower of which is so still that it seems dead. The fly on top is on the contrary quite agitated, jerking tremulously, then convulsively, putting out its left foreleg to whip, or maybe to stroke some sort of reaction out of the fly beneath, which, however, remains so still that it seems dead (11).

The detached and objective tone of this opening passage remains constant throughout the novel and is justified on a narrative level by the fact that the society depicted in the text is founded on the supposedly objective approach characteristic of science, and that the focal character himself must be assumed to have been trained as a chemist. The reader is therefore presented with the Reality of the novel as perceived by a character who simply records what goes on around him, the partial conversations he hears, the words he reads and the pictures he sees. The entire narrative is therefore constituted by these depersonalised, camera-like descriptions, and since the narrative never offers a point of view other than the focal character’s, he is never described (the reader can in fact only deduce from the other characters’ words his approximate age, his race and, fundamentally, his very existence), and he is never precisely designated his proper name; too many names are actually assigned to him by his wife during her retelling of their first meeting (92/3), and because no certain clue enables the reader to decide whether one among the many could correspond to his real name, the ‘nonnarrator’ comes across not as a cohesive, but as a refracted and multiple individuality, a ‘schizophrenic’ subject whose identity is permanently shifting. 70

It is exactly the negation of the fixed and unified identity which Western philosophy postulated, that Brooke-Rose – perhaps more overtly in the texts collected in the Omnibus3 – proposes in all her following novels. In particular, in her second experimental novel (Such) she more strongly suggests the absence of a fundamental self of the person, and even though she maintains here the same approach to the narrator which characterised Out, she nonetheless frees herself of the direct influence of Robbe-Grillet. Consequently, in spite of the impersonal descriptions of her focal character, she is able to use the technical jargon of astrophysics she inserts in her narrative in a much more imaginative way. Indeed, beginning with this novel the metaphorical potential of technical language is more consistently exploited. Such itself is actually based on analogies between the natural and the human world, resulting in an even more poetic novel than Out (where the games of echoes and repetitions originate a sense of rhythm worthy of poetry), an almost metaphysical novel which the author herself defines as a ‘poetic fantasy’ (1990b, 32). The novel narrates the ‘death and amazing recovery’ (223) of a psychiatrist working for the astrophysics department of some unspecified University, and presents, through the eyes of the central characetr, the journey that he makes into the after-life during his clinical death. As I will show below, in this novel Quantum Mechanics, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the Big Bang Theory provide the leading metaphors for what we could define as Brooke-Rose’s cosmic theory of identity, and through the analogies posited between the birth of the universe and the birth of the individual, she is able to demonstrate the fallacy of theories like classical psychology and philosophy, which all assumed the existence of an original self which could be studied and understood. In opposition to the fixed and stable identity for which the individual’s name stands in Western tradition, the focal character of Such is provided with multiple identities, some of which are represented by the various names he is assigned. Consequently, the various ways in 3

This thematic also remains constant in the following novels. However, whereas in the first experimental texts the ‘identity’ motif is central, in the subsequent novels, Brooke-Rose analyses more consistently some of the consequences that Western mis-conceptions of identity have led to.

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which the character’s original name, Laurence (256), gets transformed and shortened by different characters – Larry (281) and, relevantly, Lazarus (222) – on one hand connect his experience both to Christ’s miraculous resurrection of Lazarus and to reports of the survivors of near-death experience. On the other, they suggest the character’s variable identity. In fact, in order to underline the fact that the multiple identities which the character takes on strip him of what the society he inhabits led him to think of as his own fixed identity, Brooke-Rose makes the girl called ‘Something’, who accompanies Larry on his journey in the afterlife, name him ‘Someone’ (205).4 It is through the eyes of this ‘Someone’ – who, having been originally trained as a physicist, is able to maintain throughout the novel the impersonal tone of the opening passage5 – that the realm of the afterdeath is described in a narrative in which the rigor and precision of each detail is assured by the fact that the function of the camera the character of Out undertook by providing detached and objective descriptions, is here made into a concrete element of the narration, a physical aspect of the bodily shape Larry assumes during his journey in the after-life: the round and flat scar discovered in the middle of his abdomen which, looking like a ‘protruding camera-lens’ (221), could in fact be used as a real ‘camera-eye’ (215) to photograph what he sees during his journey (211). If the character can act as a camera and provide detached descriptions of what near-death experience survivors often describe as an initially frightening experience (Moody, 1975, 28), it is because BrookeRose’s elimination of the narrator enables the author to note all that hits the consciousness of the character, whether the character understands it or not. However, because Larry doesn’t really comprehend what he sees, and has no clear memory of what happened during the time he had been clinically dead, once he comes back to life he is unable to discuss his experience with anybody. There is therefore a tremendous contrast between the depersonalised and objective descriptions the reader is faced 4 5

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Larry himself occasions the name ‘Someone’ in a cliché which is taken literally: ‘I would like to call you something / All right then, call me Something’ (205). ‘Silence says the notice on the stairs and the stairs creak [...] The coffin lid creaks open. Voices hang on a glimpse of five moons, five planets possibly’ (203). As Brooke-Rose recalls, this sentence was literally the result of the notice on the stairs of a hotel during her journey to Portugal in 1964 (1990b, 32).

with in the first part of the novel, and the subjectivity at the basis of the whole hallucinated journey Larry makes during his death. However, following Something’s advice ‘When you don’t understand something, Someone, continue as if you did’ (240), Larry goes through his journey initially limiting himself to registering what he perceives as the external reality, and once he comes back to life, he remains trapped in the disoriented state he experienced during his death. In fact, not only does Larry begin to insert extracts of conversations and references to the places and the people he encountered during his death in his everyday dialogues with those who surround him in his waking life, but also, without initially being able to make sense of it, he retains the same kind of camera-like approach that had characterised him during his journey which, in the absence of the ‘camera-scar’ on the body he occupies in his waking life, he exercises through his eyes. Once he comes back from his journey in the after-life, his eyes become in fact two ‘dish-telescopes’ (276) through which he is able to see people as radio-telescopes see the stars, discerning the waves that people emanate beyond the visual spectrum, and the particles they let loose while moving or conversing (338, 355). Larry initially finds his new abilities distressing and, not being able to understand the significance of what he is now able to see, he simply registers it in his objectified narrative. With the passing of time, however, Larry finally understands the depersonalised descriptions he made, and on the basis of the pseudo-scientific details he had been noting, he creates his own theory of identity, one in which the Western myth of identity is deconstructed. Yet, if both Out and Such are concerned with the demonstration of the absence of an original unified self and of the fact that identity is moulded and constructed through the language the individual is exposed to, it is only in Between that Brooke-Rose explicitly proposes the notion of the linguistic nature of all forms of identity, focussing her text on the idea of the loss of identity through language (the same loss which Brooke-Rose herself experienced as a child growing up in a trilingual family). The same approach to narrative typical of the first two experimental texts, also characterises the subsequent novels, the only exception being Textermination, in which this approach had to be modified so as to deal with the numerous characters present in the text.

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As in Out and Such, in Between the reader is therefore confronted with a central consciousness whose physical aspect and age is never clearly introduced in the text, and the novel – which focuses on the character’s job as a simultaneous translator and is consequently written in many different languages – opens with a detached description of a plane in which the central character is introduced as a body that floats: ‘Between the enormous wings the body of the plane stretches its one hundred and twenty seats […] Between doing and not doing the body floats’ (395). Whereas in the previous novels the objectivity of the descriptions offered by the ‘non-narrators’ contrasted with the metaphors and the poetic passages they produced, in Between the impersonal tone of the narrative (which finds a justification in the fact that the character, being a professional interpreter, supposedly uses language very precisely), contrasts with the metaphors produced by the mistranslations she makes. On the one hand, the reader is therefore confronted with an imaginative use of language made by the central consciousness, thanks to which the assonance of a word with another can displace the scene described to another place and time. On the other, s/he is confronted with the objectivity of her descriptions which in Between is applied to the character’s personal life and memories. These are related throughout the text as if they belonged to someone else, and precisely because the central character recounts her life in a very impersonal tone, the identification of the events, the characters and the subject of the enunciation of her ‘de-personal’ account becomes at times quite difficult. For example, although her job as a simultaneous translator is hinted at early on through a reference to ‘the glass booth’ (398), her gender will be clarified only when further references to her hair (429) enable the reader to attribute retrospectively to the central consciousness the initial reference to ‘The girl [who] lays her rich auburn head on the lap of the handsome man cross-legged’ (397). The reader is therefore not able to make sense of the first few pages until later in the text, and even then cannot always identify with certainty the subject of the enunciation. As a consequence of the loss of identity which the character experiences due to her exposure to many languages, this ‘woman of uncertain age’ (445) is never introduced by name. The waiters and other characters she encounters during her flight/s mainly refer to her as ‘Mademoiselle’ and ‘Madame’ (423, 444), whereas she is affectionately called ‘ma poupée’ by her mother (523), ‘Liebes’ by her friend Siegfried (418), and the 74

‘gentildonna’ (511), ‘ma douce amour’ (534) and ‘ma déesse’ (543) by her French suitor infatuated with the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti. The character thus comes to stand for different persons according to whom is perceiving her, and her supposedly unitary and fixed identity is therefore dispersed in the various social individualities she has to assume in her everyday life. Furthermore, having the proper name she was christened with not only never been acknowledged by others, but replaced by impersonal (although affectionate) appellations, she paradoxically becomes a ‘non-person’, an ‘impersonal person’ in the depersonalised story of her personal life, another version of ‘Someone’ who, like him, being a nobody/anybody, becomes the emblem of the absence of the unitary identity which would be implied in the recognition the individual is granted when called by his/her name.6 Although in Between the notion of the loss of identity through language is central, the translator’s consciousness still filters what is described in the text, and every description must be assumed to be filtered through her. Contrary to this, in the following novel BrookeRose wrote after moving to Paris (Thru), the author goes even further, creating a text in which the reader can identify neither the narrator nor the focal character.

1.2. Metalepsis and the Dispersion of the Narrator in Thru In this novel the author deals with the history of narratology and Structuralist/Post-Structuralist theory through the various typographical devices and the many linguistic games she introduces in her text. The technical and scientific jargons of the preceding novels are here thus replaced by the technical jargon of modern linguistics and critical theory, whose poetical potentials Brooke-Rose exploits in order to create, as she admits on several occasions, a fiction about ‘the fictionality of fiction’ (1976, 4), a ‘novel about the theory of the novel’ (1990b, 33), a 6

In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) Hegel writes: ‘it is in the name alone that the difference of the individual from everyone else is not presumed, but is made actual by all’ (1977, 311).

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‘narrative about narrativity […] a text about intertextuality’ (1991a, 8). In Thru, the narrator is lost forever in the extraordinary intertextual play the text exhibits, and even though the concept of metalepsis played a fundamental role in the experimental novels Brooke-Rose published before 1975,7 it is here that she begins to exploit the potential inherent in this notion more overtly so as to foreground the fictionality of the Real and of identity. It is precisely as a form of metalepsis that, following the example Brooke-Rose sets in A Rhetoric of the Unreal,8 we should consider the play with intertextuality that she presents in this novel, where many other texts are cited, often without quotation marks, and where other languages, musical symbols, mirror texts, anagrams, hieroglyphs, acrostics and so on become fundamental to the narrative. In this game of texts, even the pale shadow of the narrator is lost forever, as the central consciousness which, in the previous novels, filtered all that was described, is now replaced by multiple focal points which take turns at narration without any clear warning to the reader. Also, because as the narration proceeds all the characters who at the beginning seemed to be the creators of what was described turn out to be the creation of someone else’s discourse (that is fictional characters themselves in a story that a never identified primal narrator is relating), the issue of the problematic identification of the narrator becomes central in this novel. By so doing, Brooke-Rose confounds all easy assumptions of identity, and by finally rendering it impossible for the reader to answer the question ‘Who speaks’ which, borrowed from Barthes (1968, 491; 1970, 582), is repeatedly posed in the text, the author is able to foreground more effectively the impossibility of locating the identity that Western tradition postulated. Furthermore, by showing how everything and everyone in this text is fundamentally a creation of words, she not only plays with the reader’s assumption of, and trust in, a reliable narrator, but also, through the understated analogy between literary text and world, fictional characters and human beings, she more effectively

7 8

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The term metalepsis was introduced by Genette in 1972 to indicate a character’s transgression of narrative level (244). ‘When there is no “story” in the usual sense, and no narrator in the usual sense, the only form of metalepsis possible […] is intertextuality’ (1981, 334).

propounds the notion that language has concrete effects which concur in the determination of Reality and, more particularly, of identity. In a similar way to the previous novels, Thru also opens with an impersonal presentation of an object or occurrence, this time a drivingmirror in which the iconical representation of a triangle which mimes the nose reflected in the mirror (in its turn echoed by the traffic signal for danger with which it forms an ‘x’ capitalised in the word ‘exact’) is inserted in the narrativised description (579). As the text proceeds, the reader realises that certain parts of the text have been written by some student who is participating in a seminar in Creative Writing that Dr. Armel Santores teaches in some university. However, because the text begins in medias res, on the very first page of the novel we do not yet know who the person in the car is and whether s/he is speaking or thinking. Hence, the question ‘Who speaks’ posed here – a question of author-ity which becomes ontologically fundamental – remains unanswered, as it is impossible to attribute what is described to any point of view. 9 This first positing of the problematic identification of the text’s author/narrator, however, is immediately followed by a first answer: ‘le rétroviseur’ (579) which, in French, means ‘driving mirror’ (579). In the text, the ‘viseur’ in the following page becomes ‘the vizir’ (580), and the description of the eyes and their owner which is provided by an external observer finally ends with a mention of Nourennin. We still do not know who Nourennin is, but because he will later assume the first name of ‘Ali’, thus sharing his Arab origin with the previously mentioned ‘vizir’, he appears as the possible author of what has been described until now. As it proceeds, the text also gives another answer to the initial ‘Who speaks?’, namely ‘Some tale-bearer’, a mistranslation of Todorov’s homme-récit or porte-récit (1970), leading to ‘O capital!’ which, in the following columns, is linked to the previously mentioned ‘a thousand and one’ (recalling the ‘vizir’ and Scheherezade, who has either to tell a

9

Using analysis based partially on the reading Brooke-Rose gave of this text (1996h), I think it is well worth following some of the steps which lead to the final impossibility of determining who the narrator of the novel is, both because of the complexity of this novel and also the many typographical devices that BrookeRose uses, though never gratuitously, either to blur further, or to clarify the issue of the narrator’s identity.

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never-ending story or die), but also introduces the names of real capitals (580). The acrostic of the various capitals spells ‘brain’ – indicating the writer behind what is written – and leads, on the next page, to another column, where the acrostic spells ‘which’ and that concludes with ‘sintagma tricks’, a different spelling for ‘sintagmatics’ which is here split (581). The ‘brain’ playing ‘syntagma tricks’, however, is also the brain which – if we read the acrostic of the following rectangle – ‘creates’ ‘death’ and, in the rectangle following that (which brings the reader back to the driving mirror and is signed by Ali Nourennin), ‘she’ and ‘the truth’ (581/2). Ali Nourennin therefore appears once again as the possible author of the first pages of the novel, and his identification as a student is hinted at in the following paragraph. Here the image of the rectangular driving mirror is evoked again and transformed into an iconical representation of a rectangular classroom, which limits and shapes the narrativised description of the classroom made by the teacher (582). At this stage, though, the identity of the author of the previous pages (referred to only as ‘he’) is still uncertain. Immediately after, we are taken back to the driving mirror, and the mysterious person who in the opening sequence was staring at it is identified as the ‘mistress of the moment’ (582). It is by reading the acrostics of the following rectangles that we also find a conclusion to the previous statement. Here it is in fact clarified that the truth created by the ‘brain’ is ‘ever escaping Through Swift Switch of signifiers’ (582/3), thanks to which Brooke-Rose warns the reader to trust neither the narrator nor the narrative, as, since the narrator is simply a sign on a page, it can be suddenly changed and replaced. With the first ‘switch of signifiers’, however, the position of the eyes previously described is thought to be too low by ‘some teller or other’, a narrator who is clearly not the author of the previous pages for, as an answer to the inquisitive ‘Who’, we find ‘Oh her’ (583). It is by exploiting particular typographical devices and the assonance of the word ‘eye’ and the first person pronoun ‘I’ that BrookeRose is able to question very effectively the narrator’s identity in the diagram on the following page. This diagram re-proposes the problematic identification of the narrator as the ‘Mystery of the Eye’, and concludes by asserting the fictional nature of these characters who are not only identified with ‘PapYrus eye’s’ (584), but also, in a more open 78

warning to the reader, with the ‘fictitious persons’ (586) we reconstruct by reading the acrostics of the following rectangles. A diagrammatic description of a love-scene between the male character and his mistress follows (588/9), introducing the sexual thematic which, because of the strong link between sex and text posited by the novel, becomes central to Thru, this being a text on textuality. Thanks to her ‘iconic nose’ (594), this mistress can be retrospectively identified with one of the two persons initially sitting in the car, finally solving the mystery which had been hermeneutically delayed until now.10 In order to answer the question ‘What is she in a name’ (594) that the acrostics of the following rectangles pose, the Master of Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste – who, together with Jacques, seems at times to be the producer of this text – gives her the name Ruth through which, this being a perfect anagram of Thru and Hurt, and a less perfect anagram of Truth (595), Brooke-Rose urges the reader to be suspicious of any Truth s/he might achieve in this novel. Armel – who, through the two portraits given of him can be identified with the other person first sitting in the car (591) – writes to Larissa concerning this girl during a faculty meeting (603/4). Later in the novel it will become clearer that Armel Santores, lecturer, was once married to, or living with, Larissa Toren (640), another teacher who, because of the letters she exchanges with him and the different academic staff she belongs to, we must assume to be lecturing at another university (599). Following this, is an alphabetical list of the students’ names, next to which a mark is provided, clearly identifying Ali and his colleagues as the students attending Dr. Santores’ classes (611). Furthermore, the setting of the novel during a university course is made even clearer by the details provided of the students’ registration (612), by the fact that extracts of the students’ essays are introduced in the text followed by the hand-written comments of the teacher (612/3), and by the iconical representation of a faculty meeting in which the icon recalls the amphitheatre classroom in which the meeting is held and which, by miming the ‘desegmentation’ in discussion, shapes the various teachers’ interventions (615). 10

In S/Z (1970, 567/8) Barthes identifies the five codes that in his opinion can be found in every narrative. Amongst these, the hermeneutic code determines the way in which the resolution of a mystery is postponed.

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Just as the reader has reached the conclusion that Larissa and Armel are actually the teachers who direct the students and are the ones who create, if not the entire text, at least some of the descriptions, because Armel, Ruth and Larissa actually appear in an exercise produced in the second semester by Myra Kaplan (626), one of Dr. Santores’ students (611), the doubt is raised whether they are fictional characters in the world of the novel, or simply the doubly fictional characters of a story that the students are inventing. To complicate matters further, Armel Santores and Larissa Toren also appear as the possible producers not only of the text, but of each other, as in the following pages Larissa seems to identify Armel as one of her students (who happens to become her lover) who is producing a text in which he is inserting her as a character (630/1). Suggesting that if her representational paper-being were different, she would undergo the same change, she asks Armel to re-write his text and ‘reinvent’ her in the present tense (631). This letter (which might be taken also as a further indication of the fact that she actually is a doubly-fictional paper-being), is obviously a farrago of pretentious Structuralist and Post-Structuralist lingo which refers to the fact that he shouldn’t be harping on the past and should read her as she is now, and it also constitutes a good example of Brooke-Rose’s irony. Although Armel seems therefore to be the producer of the text, the words ‘Whoever you invented invented you too’ (631) that Larissa writes to him, hint that he is himself the paper-creature of some other narrator which could be either the students (who then appear to be the producers of this text) or Larissa herself. In fact, when Jacques and his Master discuss the text, they present Larissa not only as a teacher who is courted by a young student whose first name, Armel (639), coincides with Dr. Santores’, but also as a writer who is herself producing a text. ‘But which text?’ – the Master pertinently asks (644): the same text the reader was led to believe to be the product of Armel Santores, or a different one? Indeed, Larissa, in an attempt to get rid of the young suitor called Armel, pretends not to be separated (644), and despite the confusion which the homonymity of the young suitor and her alleged husband creates, it now appears that the husband is (or better was) the same Armel with whom she was exchanging letters (Dr. Santores) and whom she indicated as the one who was creating her. Hence, he now appears to be born out of her imagination, and despite the fact that the 80

surname she uses to introduce herself to Armel-the-suitor (which, it being an exact replica of the surname on the book her interlocutor is holding, further emphasises the fictionality of Larissa, who acquires a name and an identity from a book), and the surname that Armel-thehusband has been provided with in the novel, do not coincide, their similarity indicates Larissa’s and Armel’s closeness and justifies the fact that, although separated, they are still very good friends (706/7). The names Armel Santores and Larissa Toren are actually anagrams of one another – except that she cannot find her ‘I’ in his name, and he doesn’t find his ‘ME’ in hers – and therefore come to indicate the variability of the characters’ identity, their interchangeability in the role of narrator and, consequently, their shifting ontological status. Although the text, with a further twist as to the ontological status of the characters, proceeds as if it were collectively created by the students of Dr. Armel Santores, in which Armel and Larissa are fictional characters (653), by ascribing the invention of Larissa to ‘A man, probably, suffering from anorexia in slow fluvial eruption’ (659), and that of Armel to ‘A woman probably, binary to the bone’ (669), the students seem to delegate the position of authority to some other author, a further narrator who might be the creator of Larissa and Armel’s story, but who remains however hidden and absent from the story itself. It is however the students who invent the first contact between Armel and Larissa well after they appear in the text as a married couple (660). Who then created the married couple? The doubt arises that the group of students of which Nourennin is a member is actually not the same as the group of students the novel focuses on in the final pages and which seems to have invaded the class of the first students (618), thus destroying all that was described earlier. The text, however, renders the identification of the narrators even more ambiguous when Larissa and Armel are not only re-proposed as the possible creators of each other, but the one creating the other in the act of creating the one: ‘it follows therefore that if Larissa invents Armel inventing Larissa, Armel also invents Larissa inventing Armel’ (686). In fact, not only do the characters of this story become, by stereotyping the various aspects of their personality, the creators of themselves (729), but also, once they have been created, they seem to acquire an independent life and become in turn the narrators/creators of each other. It is precisely through these transgressions of narrative level and through the 81

ontological instability to which she confines her characters, that BrookeRose, showing how no ‘existence’ is ever unproblematic, obliges readers to question the ontological status of their surrounding Reality and their selves. It is the students however, who, by discussing the destiny of the characters and their personalities (728/9), finally posit themselves as the ‘authors’ of Larissa, Armel and of the entire text. However, just as the reader has reached the conclusion that what s/he has been reading is a text produced by some students whose characters create, in their turn, other characters, the narrative undergoes a further twist which proves the reader’s hypothesis to be false, as the students admit themselves to be the creations of some other author: ‘this is the text we are creating it verbally we are the text we do not exist either we are a pack of lies dreamt up by the unreliable narrator’ (733). As we read the acrostics of the rectangles which follow the second iconical representation of a faculty meeting (734), we reconstruct the words ‘exeunt narrators [then, in the following rectangles] with a swift Switch of signifiers no more I superimposing’ (735/737), and the text ends with they whom the reader was led to believe were the narrators (i.e. the students) leaving the scene which someone else is creating. Immediately after this, the reader is faced with a list in which, next to the names of all the real authors who played a role in Thru (who are assigned a mark),11 the names of all the ‘irrecoverable/narrators/gone’ (737) are inserted. Even though this intertextual map should clarify the theoretical background of the novel, by presenting such a list, the text actually blurs the issue of the reality/fictionality of the wor(l)d further. In fact, not only is the fictional existence of all the characters appearing in Thru questioned, leaving the reader unable to recognise who is narrated and who narrates, but this list also seems to interrogate the ontological status of the authors whose names indicate real persons but who nonetheless seem to become, once inscribed in the text, just more ink on paper.

11

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A play on the Genettian phrase ‘il ya des degrés de presence’ which, referring to the absence or presence of the narrator in his/her narrative, has been translated as ‘there are degrees of presence’. The double meaning ‘degree’ has in English (both ‘level’ and ‘diploma’) justifies the allocation of marks of presence by the students.

The question here is, of course, which text do these authors enter as fictional characters, because if it is quite clear that by being cited in this novel they undergo a process of fictionalisation, then Brooke-Rose seems to proclaim here the death of the author even more explicitly than before. Of course, this ‘dead author’ – which Brooke-Rose simultaneously also seems to resurrect by making a reference to the ‘brain’, the actual writer who produces the text – must be intended as a figure very similar to Booth’s ‘implied author’ (op. cit., 151), that is a fictional transposition of the real person that the author is in his/her extra-textual quotidianity. This is the author who, by writing a text, dies in that text as an actual author and becomes him/herself a construction of words, a personal pronoun, that is the subject of the enunciation behind which, Barthes says, there is no person. Further to this, however, by showing how it is only through the words they write that these authors become real in their readers’ world (both the fictional readers present in the novel, and the extra-textual readers such as myself), Brooke-Rose finally demonstrates that the writer’s identity (and the way s/he is perceived by others) is created and moulded by the language s/he uses. If this is the destiny of the writer, however, the same can be said of every user of language who through the words s/he speaks projects him/herself as the ‘implied author’ of his/her enunciation, as the ‘I’ subject of the utterance whose identity is shaped and constructed by the language s/he projects him/herself in.

1.3. Transworld Identities and Ontological Jumps in Amalgamemnon Although Thru remains a unique experiment in Brooke-Rose’s career, after its publication she begins to play more overtly with the ontological status of her characters and increasingly to blur the boundary between the first degree fictionality of the world she creates and the second degree fictionality of the worlds to which her characters give birth in their narrative. By so doing, she more openly foregrounds the impossibility of escaping from the fictionality which, stemming from the

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effects language has on Reality, envelops our world and our notions of identity. However, although this motif remains central in the following novels, after 1975 Brooke-Rose began to make an effort towards more readability, having realised that if she were to remain publishable, she could not maintain the same standard of difficulty she enjoyed imposing on Thru (1989, in OUD, 36). After a gap of nine years, she thus published Amalgamemnon, a novel entirely focused on the opposition between the past and the future in different areas of society, in which, in spite of still using the technique of registering all that hits her central consciousness without perception mediations, Brooke-Rose creates an altogether different novel from those collected in the Omnibus. Amalgamemnon is in fact characterised by the parodic tone with which various preconceived notions derived from Western history are treated;12 by the fact that, for the first time in Brooke-Rose’s experimental career, her character posits herself as the ‘I’ subject of the enunciation; by the rhythm created by the tense used (predominantly future); by the mythological imagery her novel evokes and by the rhetoric of classical history which her text reproduces both by inserting into her narrative passages from Herodotus’ Histories as translations or paraphrases, and by assigning names of Latin and Greek origin to her characters (thus demonstrating how the past cannot be washed away). Contrary to what she did in Thru, in Amalgamemnon Brooke-Rose goes back to a single consciousness which, in the case of this novel, is clearly imagining all that is described, occasionally remembering or reassembling characters, into which she enters as the author enters into her. The narrative material of the novel, in which the character projects her fears and her expectations for her future, is constituted by her thoughts, memories and fragments of her classical knowledge mixed (or rather amalgamated) with both the situations, fairy-tales, love-affairs and dialogues with students, friends, and relatives she creates in her mind (who often desert the roles she assigns to them and enter the first degree fictional world that she inhabits), and with extracts from the news, advertisements, quiz-games and talk-shows that the radio broadcasts and

12

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The whole of Amalgamemnon is a parody in the sense defined by Genette in Palimpsestes (1982, 24).

which often function as a trigger for her imagination, displacing the discourse to another time, space and narrative situation. Hence, even though the reader is still confronted with a character who remains, despite her ‘I’, completely undramatised, and that the novel consists of a mosaic of different sub-plots, everything can be assumed to be filtered through the same consciousness which is apparently easily identifiable. In spite of this, in the passage which opens the text by positing most of the thematics that will be developed throughout the narrative, the ‘I’ we find in the opening line (reminiscent of Beckett’s Malone Dies) remains anonymous and assumes a name only later: ‘I shall soon be quite redundant at last despite of all, as redundant as you after queue and as totally predictable, information-content zero’ (5). On the following page, the character is identified by the surname ‘Enketei’ (6), a term composed of the Greek forms for ‘inside’ and ‘whale’ which, as I will show, determines the central consciousness’ choice of a first name (namely Mira, finally introduced on page 32), and the astronomical imagery the novel exploits.13 However, before the reader gets to know what we must assume to be her first name, the character already assumes a second identity, that of Cassandra, the prophetess doomed never to be believed by her fellow Trojan citizens (7). The mechanics of this primal split, which leads the character to be identified in the text primarily as Sandra, is repeated throughout the novel and opens up a series of further identifications through which Mira empathises with the figments of her imagination, perpetually assuming several, shifting identities. The continual transgression of narrative levels by the central consciousness and by the doubly fictional characters imagined by her thus assume a fundamental role, as it is through these metalepses that Brooke-Rose can propose the problematicity of any exact definition of the ontological status of the characters and the worlds the novel constructs. Not only this, but the instability of the characters’ ontological status is stretched to the extreme for example when Mira asserts the 13

‘Enketei’ translates into Latin as ‘in cetus’, and I presume it is an allusion to Orwell’s essay ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940), in which he claims that the totalitarian age the world was witnessing had silenced writing. The writer, then, is reduced to silence, just like Cassandra (imprisoned by victorious Agamemnon) and Mira (as both a woman and, as I will show below, as a woman writer).

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confusion between her ‘I’ and Orion’s through her misuse of the reflexive pronoun in the sentence ‘But first I have to get out. I must get himself out’ (21). The situation, however, is further complicated by the fact that not only does she make Orion accomplish the ontological jump which enables him to become ‘actual’ in her fictional world, but also by the fact that, as late as page 30, she claims not to have created him yet, thus further blurring his ontological status and the whole issue of when and by whom he was first created. After this statement, however, the central character immediately reassumes the identity of the creator for the first time under the name of Mira (from the Latin mirare, which means both ‘to aim’ and ‘to look’) and, in accordance with her statement on page 14, creates herself as a star in a constellation: ‘still inside the Whale, In Cetus, Mira Enketei’ (32). Because in astronomy Mira has connotations of variability – it being the name of a variable star in the constellation of Cetus which, in Latin meaning whale, also recalls the mythical image of Jonah, with whom Mira at times identifies (17) – the name the central character assumes, becomes an indication of her shifting identity. However, if the interest in astronomy Brooke-Rose shows in Amalgamemnon is related to the interest in scientific discourse, in this text it is more relevantly connected to her desire to demonstrate the extraordinary weight that the past necessarily has on our present and the impossibility, in all areas of society, of deleting our heritage from the way we think and talk about the world. We can therefore see how Brooke-Rose, while urging the reader to find new ways to approach reality other than those inherited from past tradition, she simultaneously emphasises the necessity of maintaining this legacy alive. As the next section of my book will show in more detail, Brooke-Rose does not believe in burning all the theoretical systems on which our civilisation relies to ashes, nor does she believe that the past could and should be swept away. What she does believe in, however, is a more critical attitude towards this past, which she urges the reader to be attentive to by exploiting the etymology of the words she uses and by intertextually introducing many classical allusions which, by inflecting the modernity she wants to express through her experimentalism, stimulate the reader to acknowledge the history in language and the fact that words stem from an undeletable past. 86

Since astronomy is so closely related (on a linguistic level) to mythology and classical history, this science can thus be seen as a counterpart or extension of Herodotus’ Histories. In addition, by exploiting the imagery suggested by astronomy (which pertains to pure science, that is science which deals with supposedly natural products), and by positing it on the same level as classical history (which pertains to human science and deals with cultural products), Brooke-Rose not only emphasises the classical heritage of a modern science like astronomy, but also effectively blurs the distinction between the two. Consequently, by obfuscating the dividing line between the cultural and the natural, she shows how a ‘pure’ science such as astronomy must adopt the same metaphorical language that literature (and other human sciences) use, thus demonstrating how all descriptions of the world fundamentally correspond to metaphorical constructions. Thanks to Brooke-Rose’s exploitation of the metaphoricality of the denomination of stars and constellations, they become in fact a source for stories: just like the central character’s, the name of most of the characters present in the narrative derive from the names of stars, and it is their name which determines the role and personality that Mira creates for them. For example, the surname of one of Mira’s students, Thuban (6), indicates the star once considered the polestar in 3000 B.C., and because it is part of the Dragon constellation, it bears connotations of threat and aggression which Mira ascribes to her by creating her as an annoying student who keeps criticising her, and by later transforming her into the dragon of the fairy-tale she introduces in her narrative (92). The constellation of Cygnus – in accordance with both its homophony with Signum (Latin for sign) and the analogy between the French Cygne (swan) and Signe (sign) exploited by Mallarmé – becomes a professor of semiotics (78) and is later turned into Professor Swann (108). Orion – the mythical hunter marked by his impetuosity who fell victim to Artemis, the virgin huntress, and who gave his name to a constellation recognisable by a series of three stars like a belt – becomes in Mira’s narrative a political dissident (55, 64). Finally, Andromeda – the mythical daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia who, having offended the Nereids (the sea maidens) was punished by Poseidon and rescued by Perseus, and who gave her name to a large constellation – in the novel plays the role of the woman who always depends on men, and re-appears in the text under different names: ‘Anne de Rommeda’ (32), 87

‘Anadyomene’ (33), ‘Anna Crusis’ (34, a play on the metrical term ‘anacrusis’ which indicates an element external to the metrical pattern), ‘Anna Coluthon’ (43, that is anacoluthon, the rhetorical term which indicates a shift in construction), and ‘Anna Biosis’ (59, from the biological term anabiosis i.e suspended animation). If these polyvalent names reflect and originate from the characters’ ambiguous ontological status and are chosen by Mira to represent their fragility and variability, this causal chain might also be reversed. We could in fact identify the profound ambiguity of the characters’ ontological status as a consequence of the ambiguity which characterises their names and what they indicate. Since the names we find in the novel simultaneously designate stars, mythological figures, fictional and doubly fictional characters in the world of the novel and of course fictional characters in the extra-diegetic world, the characters present in the text have four ontological statuses. Furthermore, if everything in this novel can become a character and sign letters (58) or make telephone calls (64), it is because all the words, objects, ideas and stars are assigned a name.14 Thanks to the power which language assumes in this novel, in fact, once they are designated a name, all these ‘things’ become ‘actual’ characters in Mira’s world, and can therefore appear in the genealogical trees she creates. Although each person can really only have one family tree, in Amalgamemnon, where the emphasis is on the variability and instability of the novel’s world and the character’s ontological status, the reader is confronted with three. In all these alternate family histories, Mira attributes a role in her own family to some of the characters she has inserted into her narrative, but because after the first tree (38/9) she realises that in order to meet the requirements of the stories she has so far invented she must slightly alter her own genealogical tree by adding more characters (openly asserting the fictionality of her self and of the world she inhabits), Mira produces a second tree in which, like the first, she respects the roles she assigned to each character and puts them in their appropriate genealogical position. However, even though this tree seems reliable, the ‘alternate family’ history it presents appears intentionally ‘mythical magical’ (37), as not only is the progenitor of her 14

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For example, Mira transforms a transistor-radio into her cousin Nelson (72), and puts at the centre of one of the main sub-plots of the novel Pound’s Usura.

family the mythological and Adamic figure of Charlemagne, but Mira also inserts herself in her family constellation together with her mother. By offering readers family trees which are clearly unreliable, BrookeRose thus demonstrates how, by manipulatively playing with their habits, a narrator (or, better still, a ‘non-narrator’) can lead them to believe that a pure construction born of the imagination actually corresponds to Reality. The same is true for the third and last family tree provided in the text. Though this tree appears to be the most unreliable of all, as it includes many abstract ideas, constellations, books and events, it is possibly the most reliable, because it doubles as a map of this text and includes all the characters/constellations that appear in it (103). Among these, we find Mira Enketei, and even though the central consciousness refers to herself as ‘Mira’ more often than by any other name, and that she will return in the following novels under this name, Brooke-Rose renders her ontological status more indefinite than ever, since her identity in Amalgamemnon as Mira Enketei appears simply as one identity among many. In my opinion, a doubt is in fact raised whether what readers have assumed to be the cause of her identification with a constellation (her name) might be the effect of that identification, which might have occurred independently from, and previous to, her assumption of a name. Mira Enketei, in fact, could simply be one of the many stars in this novel which come to life as doubly fictional characters, merely another projection of an unidentified first ‘nonnarrator’ who remains hidden. Even though it is easier to recognise the double fictionality of the characters present in the novel when the names designating them are different (as in the case of Sandra), on closer reading we realise that the Mira we find in the novel as the character of the Usury subplot, for example, does not coincide with the Mira that we assume to be the first creator of the narrative, as this Mira is a fictional Mira who coincides with the projection of a ‘non-narrator’ who remains on a superior narrative level. Strictly speaking, this ‘non-narrator’ does not directly coincide with the first, but with Sandra who, in her turn, is a projection of the ‘real’ fictional Mira of the first degree fictional world of the novel. It is precisely in this confusion of narrative levels that the determination of the central character’s ontological status – and consequently her

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identity – is lost, and the reader is left with a series of ‘Miras’ to whom s/he cannot assign a precise place in the novel’s universe. I would therefore submit that we should look at this novel in terms of its different narrative levels, as from the start most of the narrators of the various narratives are narrators on the third degree, since they are created by Sandra, who inhabits the second degree Reality of the novel which the first Mira begins to shape as early as the first page, when she projects herself as queuing at the Labour Exchange and meeting Willy. Hence, it would appear that, while the first doubly fictional world of the novel is created during a night when Mira is unable to sleep because of her feared redundancy, all the other stories are created during the nights when Mira-as-Sandra leaves the bed where Willy is sleeping and finds refuge in Herodotus and her transistor-radio. It is therefore Mira-as-Sandra who identifies with Emma (12), who ‘mimages’ herself as the Abyssinian maid (14), who is abducted by terrorists (16), identifies with Orion (17) and the streetsweeper (47), receives a letter from Orion (64) and uses him as an excuse not to see Willy (23). Because Sandra maintains all the essential properties of the first ‘non-narrator’ (that is a woman teacher of the humanities who is possibly going to be made redundant), she becomes what Eco calls a ‘potential variant’ of the first ‘non-narrator’, that is an example of transworld identity.15 They in fact share the same identity to such a point that it is at times difficult to distinguish one from the other, and I think this is what leads readers to identify Mira as the name of the first ‘nonnarrator’. In accordance with the second page of the novel, we must assume that Enketei is the actual surname of the ‘non-narrator’, which is passed onto her projection in the doubly fictional world she creates. In this second degree world, Sandra plays with the surname she has been given, and decides to project herself as Mira Enketei (32), thus reversing their roles and attaching this name onto the first ‘non-narrator’ who has never introduced herself as Mira, but simply as Miss Enketei. This Mira2 is another transworld identity who shares with Mira her ‘necessary properties’ (Eco, 1979, 135) such as being a teacher of the humanities who receives letters from an annoying student called Ethel 15

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The term indicates the fact that a prototype in a world W1 has only one potential variant in a world W2 and therefore coincides with an ‘identity through worlds’ (1979, 143).

Thuban (another transworld identity). In addition to this, however, she also acquires the accidental properties characteristic of Sandra, such as living on a pigfarm, and she finally gains distinctive characteristics when, during the Usury subplot, she declares she has a daughter. This Mira2 is therefore the creator of the fairy-tale about the Princess Fatima my Folly, the narrator of the love-story between the Abyssinian maid and Roland, and (as a transworld identity which has maintained the memory of the first tree created by Mira-as-Sandra) the creator of the second genealogical tree (108). The woman who imagines herself receiving the letter of redundancy and who meets Wally (124), should therefore be identified not with a projection of the first ‘non-narrator’, but with a projection of this Mira2 (Sandra2), who decides to retire to a pigfarm, and who in her turn hints at the possibility of being abducted by a band of terrorists (138). Hence, although Amalgamemnon seems to be a circular novel which ends where it first began, I would submit that, in reality, the best representation for this text is a spiral. The image of the spiral – introduced in the text as the ‘spiral of repression-terrorism-repressionterrorism’ (41) – recalls on one level the image used by Giambattista Vico to represent the notion of the repetition of history delineated in his La scienza nuova (1725) (closely connected to Brooke-Rose’s idea that the past perpetually returns in our present), and simultaneously it can be used to illustrate, as Barthes did, the continuous shifts in narrative levels which become an important feature of what Barthes calls the ‘plural text’ (that is a text which rejects the imposition of a univocal meaning): ‘the circle is religious, theological; the spiral, as a circle which extends infinitely, is dialectic: in the spiral, things return, but at a different level’ (1973a, in OC2, 1630). Consequently, it is my submission that the structure of the novel should be represented as follows:

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This structure is justified by the fact that, even though the various transworld identities projected fundamentally coincide with the first ‘non-narrator’, they are also characterised by different accidental properties according to each doubly fictional world. These make them precisely into potential variants of the first ‘non-narrator’, characterised by their transworld identity, as opposed to absolute identity (in which both necessary and accidental properties coincide). The various worlds that Mira creates are therefore not only different (even though interrelated) from one another, but also consequential, in so far as, for example, Mira wouldn’t have been able to imagine herself as held hostage by terrorists on her pig farm if she hadn’t already projected herself as having retired to that pig farm. So, even if we imprecisely consider the various transworld identities as being on the same level, and the various second degree worlds created as different states of the same possible world which develop along a horizontal line, the relationship between ‘non-narrator’ and characters remains unchanged, as the various characters created by the ‘non-narrator’ accomplish ontological jumps. Even though the world inhabited by Mira shouldn’t be accessible to their doubly fictional

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worlds, they are yet able to access it and contact her.16 By so doing, not only do they become conscious of being creatures of someone else, but (going beyond the transworld identities of the various narrators) they identify their creator as the first ‘non-narrator’ who lies behind Sandra and Mira2 (58, 61, 96). Hence, on the one hand, the various narrators have access, in virtue of their ‘transworldliness’, to the information stored in the first ‘non-narrator’, who passes her thoughts, fears and knowledge along the spiral of narrative levels to the various transworld identities she chooses to assume. On the other, the various characters also seem to be able to travel freely from one narrative level to the other, making their text coincide with the metatext they create each time they address their creator. The dividing line between one level and another is therefore blurred, and adumbrates the identification of who the narrator and the narrated are. The narrators of each level accomplish various ontological jumps through which they reverse the role between themselves and the subworld characters they create, who seem to become more ‘real’ than themselves (32, 48). These ontological jumps are the consequence of the first inversion between character and narrator operated when Mira decided to project herself as a character, and while they should be read as an acknowledgement of Brooke-Rose’s character’s fictionality in relation to the extra-diegetic world, they also should be read as Mira’s acknowledgement of her lack of concreteness in the world of the novel. As I will discuss in more detail infra, in the world of this novel the central character is deprived of her identity and has to substitute the ‘real’ fictional Mira with the conception that the novel’s society has of her. It is precisely to prevent this idea from becoming more solid and concrete than herself that Mira struggles throughout the text. In order to do this, she identifies with other characters and shifts identity continually, thus becoming unrecognisable and, consequently, uncategorisable. The numerous metalepses that Brooke-Rose inserts in this text thus correspond not only to the way she unsettles her readers in order to stimulate their reading capacities and to demonstrate the fictionality of the world of the novel, but they also become the tool through which the central consciousness can oppose society’s coercive imposition of a precise and fixed identity. Through the many shifts and variations it has 16

See also Textermination, p. 63.

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to endure throughout the text, in fact, this identity is demonstrated to be non-existent and to be only a construction of the words spoken by society and of the words that Mira utters, magically creating for herself different identities, variable genealogies and alternative ontological statuses. By creating herself again and again as different characters, and by giving life to characters which, in their turn, become independent from her, Mira simultaneously coincides with both the ‘narrator’ and the ‘narrated’, with the creator and the creature, and by so doing she questions the control that man for centuries has believed to have over a world which he assumed his language could account for. Brooke-Rose’s character hints at the fact that language does not simply represent, but actually creates the Reality (and identity) it supposedly describes, and thanks to her ontological instability and her double role, Brooke-Rose makes the reader aware of the fact that Reality is always an effect of language.

1.4. Hetero/Homo-Diegetic Narrators in Xorandor and Verbivore The same alternation between the roles of story-teller and character which characterises Mira, also distinguishes Jip and Zab, the twins who, in Brooke-Rose’s following novel (Xorandor), dictate an account of their discovery of a talking stone into their pocket computer. Although in this instance the two central characters can be identified with true narrator-characters, Brooke-Rose’s technique remains the same, and in the novel the author (and therefore the reader) is constantly inside either Jip or Zab. In spite of this, as Brooke-Rose herself admits, this is a much more Realistic and straightforward novel which returns to a defined plot and to fairly conventional characters (1989, in UOD, 36). Her approach to the narrators seems in fact quite traditional, and the twins, who self-reflexively discuss the art of storytelling as they proceed with their narrative, openly posit themselves as the narrators of the Xorandor episode, giving a description of their

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physical selves (9) and their family (13). For the first time in the author’s experimental career, the novel thus gives the background of everything described, and despite the hesitations, false beginnings and re-writings of the story (caused by the twins’ inexperience as narrators), the narrative is definitely put in context. Despite the apparently traditional approach and the emotional involvement their narrative betrays (evident in the anthropomorphisation of the talking stone), the twins’ way of describing events is very telegraphic and matter-of-fact, as it reproduces the way in which new information is loaded into a computer. In fact, the twins (whizz-kids accustomed to operating new computer programmes), not only try to compose the most precise and scientific report possible, but also, by inserting in their narration printouts of various conversations, aim to relate the way in which they communicated with the talking stone through their computer. In reality, they soon realise that the talking stone is actually a sort of mega-computer able to use correct operands: ‘AND OR for the basic and the full ASCII code, meaning non-exclusive OR, and OR for exclusive OR or XOR, for sounds as pronounced’ (18). Hence, because its ‘logic could be both absolutely rigorous and contradictory at crucial points, some arguments could be both XOR and AND, or XOR and OR’ (18). Consequently, they decide to christen it Xorandor. Even though Brooke-Rose’s approach to the narrators seems more traditional, their roles are not as straightforward as they initially seem, as although Jip and Zab remain the narrators throughout the novel, alternating the role between them, once the adults of the village discover Xorandor and suggest the hypothesis of its Martian origin formulated on the basis of its replies to their questions, they are obliged to assume a different position in relation to the narrative material. In spite of this, the difficulties posed by the changes in their status as narrators and their focal position remain fairly traditional and can be analysed not as transgressions, but as exemplifications of the classification of various types of narrator Genette accomplished in his Figures III, where he defines the status of the narrator on the basis of both his/her narrative level (distinguishing between the narrator of a first degree narrative, which he calls extra-diegetic, and of a second degree narrative, which he calls intra-diegetic), and his/her relation to the story (distinguishing between a narrator absent from the story s/he is narrating, which he calls 95

hetero-diegetic, and a narrator present in the story s/he is narrating either as a witness or a hero, which he calls homo-diegetic). On the basis of Genette’s study, then, the twins seem to be extrahomo-diegetic narrators at the beginning of the novel, but once the discovery of Xorandor is made public and they are somehow left out of the technical speculations made by the scientists, they become extrahetero-diegetic narrators. Although they are initially able to stay informed for example by secretly recording various meetings in which the Xorandor phenomenon is discussed, they soon feel that they are ‘First In, First Out, real FIFO’ (127). In particular, once the twins are sent to Germany in order to avoid becoming the centre of Media attention after having saved the planet from the nuclear threat enacted by the terrorist Xor 7 (106), they admit to not being able to see everything and, by having to rely on the Media just as everybody else does, to have lost their privileged position as witnesses. As a result, not only do they leave their role of ‘authors’ to assume that of ‘readers’ (154/9), but while having begun the narrative as story-tellers who also are characters, they later simply become characters (for example in the newspapers’ articles that mention them) who are also storytellers. It is precisely this change of priority in their double role that induces the story’s ambiguity: if initially the twins posit themselves as the depository of the Truth regarding Xorandor, the further the novel proceeds, the clearer it seems that in the fictional Reality of this text the only one who could assume the role of the omniscient narrator is Xorandor itself. However, because the talking stone finally refuses to talk to humans, the lacunae caused by the twins’ shift from what the reader assumed to be zero to internal focalisation will never be filled. As we shall see, the novel will never offer a sure answer as to why Xorandor first decided to break its silence by contacting the twins, and the reader will never really solve the mystery of Xorandor’s origin, in so far as the talking stone’s final negation of its Martian origin does not correspond with any certain proof of its terrestrial (or other) origin, but only the twins’ speculations. By finally revealing that the Truth the scientists believed they had discovered about Xorandor was nothing more than a legend, BrookeRose deconstructs the notion of an exact science and proposes that scientific language fundamentally coincides with the poetically loaded language of myth, thus suggesting that human language cannot hope to 96

be a transparent window onto the external world, as language always entails interpretation and, consequently, construction. As I will submit in the following section, although the issue of the narrator’s identity seems non-problematical in this novel, by positing as fundamental the idea that language imposes an identity onto the individual, Brooke-Rose manages, alongside other thematics, to develop further her discussion of identity, and by introducing many unsolvable ambiguities into her narrative, she shows how a narrator who initially appears as entirely reliable can be, in actual fact, entirely unreliable and lead the reader to false conclusions. This is also true of Verbivore (the sequel to Xorandor which describes how Xorandor’s offspring interrupt all terrestrial wavecommunication), where Brooke-Rose uses the same technique except that, because of the many characters through whom to see, the viewpoint changes much more often. Despite the final ambiguity with which the text ends, in fact, for most of the narration the reader seems to be able to determine precisely who the narrator is. It is actually in this novel, distinguished by the same multiple points of view which characterised Thru, that the results of Brooke-Rose’s effort towards more readability can be perhaps better observed, since despite the continuous change of focal character and the many ontological jumps they make in order to assume the role of narrator, the ambiguities posed by the text are usually resolved shortly after. Also, the mysterious reader who, in the opening passage, surveys the various reports of the first encounter with Verbivore made by different anonymous ‘I’s, is a few pages later discovered to be Mira Enketei, the narrator of Amalgamemnon who reappears in this novel as the producer of a radio-play (8). Because Verbivore is narrated through different points of view, it appears as a collage of small narratives which not only draw on different genres (mainly the epistolary novel and the personal journal, although we also find a radio-play script, newspapers cuttings, extracts from television programmes and printouts of recorded conversations), but are also characterised by the idiolects of the various persons writing or speaking, the correctness of their grammar and orthography, the different rhetorics they use, their inflection, the tone of their words, which shows even in writing, and so on. As a result of these differences in the way each narrator uses language, a change in focal character can usually be discerned, even though the novel never makes the change explicit.

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However, if it is always clear who is delivering the different segments, some of the sections that Mira narrates clash with her role of internal focal narrator. For example, although she was never present in Xorandor, she refers to the novel’s events as if she had witnessed them,17 and she always seems to be in possession of information which should be unknown to her. For instance, Mira mysteriously proves to know the second, secret story Xorandor told the twins (84); although no communication is possible during Verbivore she knows that Perry Hupsos – a talk show host in Amalgamemnon (74) who returns in this novel as the author of the radio play – is stuck in Moscow (124),18 and although she describes in detail a conversation between the twins and their mother as if she were present (84/6), and relates the attempt made by the twins to contact the talking stones (173), there was never a hint that she was ever present even if only as a hidden witness. Mira’s narrative seems therefore to be filled with what Genette calls paralepses (1972, 211/3), that is segments in which the narrator gives more information than his/her code of focalisation would authorise. In spite of this, whereas in Genette Mira’s shifts between internal and zero focalisation would be orchestrated by the author Christine Brooke-Rose, in this novel they might find a justification internal to the narrative if we consider Mira not only as one of the many characters involved in the story, but also as the creator of all that is described. The ontological jumps which in Amalgamemnon enabled her to interact with the characters she gave birth to, in Verbivore seem then to involve every single character present in the text from the beginning, in so far as not only can she receive a visit from the obviously doubly fictional character of Decibel (who is not only a doubly fictional character but also an ineffable entity which feeds on noise), and have a telephone conversation with Julian (one of the characters of the radio-play inserted in the text), but she can also work from the beginning with the doubly fictional characters of Perry Hupsos and Tim, both already present in Xorandor, 17

18

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Furthermore, although she first sees Jip on page 124 and meets Zab only towards the end of the novel (174), she nevertheless gives the impression that she is well acquainted with the twins (30/6). Like most of the names in Amalgamemnon, Perry Hupsos derives from Greek: peri (meaning ‘about’) and hupsos (meaning ‘the top’). As Brooke-Rose states, this name was intended as an allusion to Longinus, who used perihupsos as the title of his treatise On the Sublime (1990b, 31).

thus confining Decibel and Julian to the role of three times fictional characters. In this light, some other segments of Verbivore, which had remained until now somewhat suspicious, finally acquire a meaning. For example, the words that Mira speaks – namely ‘I only had to ask for the interview to occur’ (32), and when, after having been given a photograph of the small Xor, she says ‘It was the first time I’d seen actual pictures, instead of just imagining’ (176) – can be read as a confirmation of Mira’s authorship, in the same way as could the words spoken by Tim and Perry.19 However, in order to justify Mira’s knowledge of the Xorandor episode and her words ‘being at least partially responsible for the Xorandor episode’ (28), we must assume Mira to be not only the creator of both Amalgamemnon and Verbivore, but also of Xorandor itself. Consequently, the insight Zab demonstrates when, in Xorandor, she says ‘We are characters too, Jip’ (9) assumes a new dimension and can be read – like a similar insight the twins’ mother shows in Verbivore (77) – as a further ontological jump thanks to which the characters become conscious of their status as paper-beings. Hence, not only do the metalepses that both Decibel and Julian accomplish suggest the linguistic nature of identity, but also, once all the characters are revealed to be not the ‘real’ fictional figures the reader was led to believe they were, but mere doubly fictional mini-narratives, they become reminders of the power of words to bring an entire world to life, and by blurring the distinction between the first degree Reality of the novel and the second degree Reality created by the first ‘non-narrator’, they analogically make problematic any definition of what is extra-textually real and fictional. The loss of all certainties about reality and identity which the reader experiences at the end of Verbivore, is perhaps magnified when, through the insight gained from this novel, s/he realises that also in Xorandor his/her trust in the narrators was misplaced. Consequently, Brooke-Rose is not only able to shake the trust that readers were taught to have in the narrator, but also to make them question their own capacity to discern what belongs to the frame and what belongs to the picture, what is inside and what remains outside, fundamentally, what is real and what is not, 19

‘Weird old Mira, she sometimes behaves as if I had sprung ready-armed from her head’ (88); ‘Or maybe it’s all Mira’s fault. Probably she imagined the whole thing and it occurred’ (129).

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suggesting that the dividing line between the fictional and the real is very fine and can hardly ever be accurately drawn.

1.5. Intertextuality and Ontological Instability in Textermination If the insight the reader gains in Verbivore retrospectively clarifies the preceding novel, it might perhaps also throw some light onto the status of the narrator in the novel Brooke-Rose wrote next (Textermination), where Mira participates, as a representative from the novel Amalgamemnon, in the Convention of Prayer for Being in which the fictional characters of narratives written by authors of all nationalities and all times converge at the Hilton Hotel in San Francisco to pray to the Reader (26), their Almighty God Who can decide the life or death of each character by reading or not reading particular novels.20 In Textermination – that monument of intertextuality – all the characters derive from the original text they were created for, and although Brooke-Rose invents their reactions to the situation they find themselves in once they arrive in San Francisco, they maintain the identity (here openly proposed as a construction of language) and personal qualities they were given in their narrative of origin. Consequently, Textermination does not simply appear as a collage of different texts, but also as an inter-national and inter-temporal meeting point where the fictional worlds the different texts construct (with their beliefs, religions and systems of knowledge) meet, often provoking amusing incidents caused by the clash of different cultures and eras. Textermination therefore presents itself as a polyhedron of different worlds and, because in this novel more than in any other world is equated with word, of different languages: not only the different national languages or dialects spoken in the characters’ fictional country of birth, 20

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This issue is present in embryo already in Xorandor (154), but whereas in this novel the emphasis is still on the author to the detriment of the reader, in both her later critical writings and Textermination, Brooke-Rose approaches this question from the reader’s side (see 1991a, 215).

but also the sociolects and the idiolects which distinguished them. As a result, the whole novel appears as a collage of various personal jargons, and in virtually every sentence of direct speech we have sudden changes in style, tone, rhythm and rhetoric. Because the novel deals with so many different characters, in spite of maintaining her normal technique of ‘instant experience’, BrookeRose replaces here the ‘non-narrator’ of her previous texts with a more traditional narrator who anonymously begins by describing in the third person the gathering of the various characters. Hence, following the opening half sentence from Jane Austen’s Emma (1), the reader begins to be introduced to many other characters whose identification is likely to remain ambiguous. Recognition of the guests’ identity depends in fact on the reader’s knowledge, and even though the author offers many clues to enable the reader to recognise them, s/he cannot identify them all. Consequently, as Brooke-Rose herself admits, it is highly improbable, if not impossible, to assign a precise origin to all the characters present (1992, 33), and the sense of loss felt by the reader (represented in the novel by the reaction that the hosts of the Convention, the so-called interpreters, experience) comes to stand for the impossibility of determining an absolute Truth about the world and the individual. Furthermore, the whole issue of the characters’ ontological status is further complicated by the fact that all the guests present at the Convention are already the characters of some other narrative from which they have been lifted in order to be gathered in San Francisco. Hence, all the guests become three times fictional, as these paper-beings, originally created by authors of all nationalities and of all times, are now re-narrated by Christine Brooke-Rose via, of course, the narrator she creates. Because each guest brings with him/her part of the world s/he inhabited in the original narrative for which s/he was created, the issue of the characters’ ontological status becomes even more blurred. This is particularly true when the characters involved were already distinguished in their narrative of origin by their complex and fragile ontological status. Such is the case, for example, with Calvino’s nonexistent knight (who was already ‘non-existent’ in the original novel), Fuentes’ Felipe Segundo (who in Terra Nostra is given a different family history than the historical Felipe of Spain), Philip Roth’s fictional novelist Zuckerman and, of course, Gibreel Farishta, from Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Farishta, in fact, was already a very complex 101

figure in Rushdie’s text (an expatriate, divided between two worlds and cultures, who is a film actor specialising in roles of Hindu divinities), and since at the end of the novel he appears as one of the characters he has acted, he becomes four times fictional. The characters’ existential status becomes however even further complicated by the fact that the same name (and consequently the same identity) is often shared by more than one character, as different versions of the same story might have been written, or sequels to the main story might have been produced. In addition, because many of the original narratives the guests come from have been turned into films, another character (the one represented by the actor) who shares their same identity has been created, thus adding at least two other ontological statuses, in so far as each actor is, simultaneously, both the character s/he portrays, and the person s/he is in reality.21 Thus, if more than one actor can be the same character, the same actor can be more than one character (117/8), and if the various characters are initially perceived to be the actors who play them, finally the actors, who accomplish the same reversal which in Verbivore enabled the actress who played Decibel to become Decibel (134), are the ones perceived to be the characters they play (121/4). However, if the ontological status of the guests is openly problematic, the same can be said also for the interpreters, in so far as, even though they appear real to the guests, they are nonetheless fictions created by Brooke-Rose who, in this novel more than in any other, plays with different levels of fictionality. Just as the policemen called to investigate the terrorist attack that a group of Islamic fundamentalists perpetrated against Gibreel Farishta, the journalists who want to report this incident, the staff of the hotel and that of the Convention are gradually recognised by the interpreters as fictional characters out of different books and television programmes, so the interpreters, whom the reader has been led to believe were Real, will be finally revealed in all their (double) fictionality. The first hints of this to the reader are given by the various organisers of the Convention who question the Reality of their existence (37, 89, 120), and their existential 21

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Strictly speaking, because these actors are not present in the flesh, but are turned into fictional characters at the moment Brooke-Rose introduces them into her narrative, they add not two, but three ontological statuses.

doubts are finally confirmed when one of the interpreters reads her name on the list of characters who have been ‘texterminated’ and, openly stating her fictionality, disappears from the text (92). ‘Textermination’ is also the fate that Mira, the narrator who anonymously delivered the descriptions in the first part of the novel, has to face when she reads her name on the list of dead characters and is obliged to abandon her role as narrator (105). For the first time here, Mira openly declares she is a narrator, and it is precisely by discussing her role as a narrator who projects herself as a character that she confirms the hypothesis I formulated above, thus offering the reader the key to reading all the novels of Brooke-Rose’s second experimental tetralogy. During a conversation with Orion, Mira in fact explicitly declares she has ‘invented’ not only all that happened in Amalgamemnon, but also the whole Xorandor episode (65/6). Furthermore, because she claims to have invented four books (66), Mira is likewise confirmed in her role of narrator of Verbivore and, partially, Textermination, in which she is indicated as the author of the text (92). Throughout the novel, then, Mira further defines her role as the narrator-character who can direct the development of the story (67,103), and because having died as the representative of Amalgamemnon – ironically killed by Brooke-Rose herself, acknowledging her novels’ finite readership – she also dies as the narrator and creator of Textermination, the reader would expect the novel to be interrupted here. However, after her disappearance, the narration is assumed, on the very next page, by another narrator who initially remains unidentified: ‘If she can’t go on, I suppose I’ll have to. I am not Mira of course, though many readers think I am’ (106). Via references to the changes which took place in the domain of critical theory during the last fifty years, this ambiguous narrator finally identifies herself not only as a (non)omniscient narrator (107), but as the author of the text: ‘not of course the real author […] but the Author, Implied, Ideal, or whatever […] I am the author, take it how you will, and I am still alive and well’ (106/7). It is precisely in consideration of Brooke-Rose’s reinstatement of the author’s persona in this text – the Implied Author Booth described in his The Rhetoric of Fiction as a projection (or superior version) of the real person (op. cit., 151) – that McHale’s reading of Textermination (1992) appears arguable to me. He writes:

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we understand Mira Enketei to be the author’s fictional surrogate, so that her passing from fictional existence reads irresistibly as Brooke-Rose’s rehearsal of her own death, a runthrough or imaginative pre-enactment of what one day must inevitably come to pass in reality. The reading is confirmed, it seems to me, by the intervention in the text, immediately after Mira’s disappearance from it, of the author ‘herself’, speaking in her ‘own’ voice – not of course the author herself at all, but another surrogate […] [this is] a text in which death lurks; a world that is terminal (UOD, 209).

However, the only terminal event which is staged in Textermination is the death of the capacity of reading, not Brooke-Rose’s termination as a producer of texts (confirmed by her production of further books), nor her own termination as a living being. Reading Mira’s disappearance as more than an ironical note on the part of Brooke-Rose, in particular interpreting it as a representation of Brooke-Rose’s physical death, is parallel to reading Mira’s redundancy in Amalgamemnon as a biographical detail, a reading which not only is refuted by the author (1996g, 105), but is further disproved by her career at the University of Paris VIII (from which she retired five years after the publication of the novel). So, even though I agree with the fact that the author who claims the authorship of this novel in the passage from Textermination quoted above is, as the text clearly says, not the real author – whose flesh and bones could hardly find a place in a text made of ink on paper – but the Implied Author, it is precisely because the author becomes a paper-being that her survival is assured. Far from being a terminal world, Textermination represents in fact an assertion of the ever-lasting power of literature, of the novel still doing things which only novels can do. If it is true that the tone of the final section of the novel is apocalyptic, as a fire destroys the Hilton Hotel and an earthquake demolishes San Francisco, the fictional characters can nonetheless return to their narratives of origin, and by so doing they assert the survival of literature. Textermination thus proclaims, after the ‘exit the author’, the ‘reenter the author’, after the ‘Literature of Exhaustion’ (Barth, 1967), the ‘Literature of Replenishment’ (Barth, 1979). Clearly, this posited author is no longer the author of Realist fiction, s/he is a diminished author, marked by absence and fictionality, but an author who can still claim his/her authority – if only partial – over the text and in the text. It is in fact with the author in the text that we are dealing here, and it is for this 104

author that Brooke-Rose reclaims the role: clearly the real author is nobody’s concern (except, perhaps, for a biographer), but the author Brooke-Rose has finally recognised her place in the production of the text. Hence, the bracketed ‘(she says)’ referring to Mira (108), ironically reminds the reader of the author’s presence, and simultaneously underlines the fact that we cannot escape from being reduced to linguistic constructs, it being impossible for the real author to say ‘I’ without becoming a surrogate and a fictional representation of the real person s/he is. Thus, by emphasising the fictionality of the entire world of Textermination, Brooke-Rose attracts her readers’ attention to the fact that in a narrative work everything and everyone is simply ink on paper. Simultaneously, because of the strong parallels posited between these paper-beings and human beings, she underlines that all forms of identity are always a construct of words, historically and culturally determined. Just like the meaning/identity and very existence of the characters in Textermination changes depending on the context and the readers’ interpretation, so human identity depends on the individual’s social context, the language s/he is exposed to and the Other’s recognition. As the characters in Brooke-Rose’s novels finally recognise and learn to play with the variability of their identities, exploiting it in order to resist the coercive imposition of a univocal and fixed identity made by Others, so Brooke-Rose’s readers are stimulated, in her novels, to recognise the imaginative power of their language and to finally acknowledge and learn to enjoy the linguistic determination of the Real and their own identity.

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1.6. The ‘Invisible’ Narrators of Next Brooke-Rose maintained a concern for identity in her following novels. As we shall see in Remake, the autobiographical novel she published in 1996, she suggests the absence of a fundamental identity, not only by eliminating all personal pronouns from her text,22 but also by questioning the notion of biographical truth. As we have seen, throughout her work Brooke-Rose has endeavoured to deconstruct the Cartesian notion of identity, and here too she suggests we should replace this concept with that of identity as a linguistic construct, the person assuming different identities with each speech act s/he accomplishes or endures. In Next, which focuses on homeless in London, Brooke-Rose openly suggests that the ‘obsessive search for identity was just a sick humanoid joke’ (91). In this novel, she imposes yet another grammatical constraint on her prose (one which, as in Between and Amalgamemnon, is justified on a thematic level), and since she deals with the homeless (who do not own anything), she completely eliminates the verb ‘to have’ from her narrative. Consequently, words such as ‘my’ only appear when the various characters are with someone else. In all, there are twenty-six characters in the text (one for each letter of the alphabet – a recurrent theme in this novel, in which one of the characters teaches another to read), and they are all loosely connected by the murder of one of the ten homeless characters whose initials, when taken together, form QWERTYUIOP, the first line of a typewriter. In this novel, Brooke-Rose again exploits her technique of ‘immediate experience’, entering the psyche of each character without the mediation of a narrator. Just like Thru and Verbivore, the whole novel is actually narrated through different points of view and is characterised by the differences and the idiosyncrasies of the different levels of ‘Estuarian’ dialect the various characters speak, their knowledge of English, the correctness of their grammar, the rhetoric they use, the inflection of their speech, their accents and so on. 22

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The only exception to this constraint is chapter 3 which, being based on the pages of her diary describing her mother’s death, uses personal pronouns to emphasise her strong emotions.

The tale passes from character to character, and the whole narrative flows uninterrupted, avoiding any division into chapters or paragraphs. If this obliges the reader to pay attention to what is happening on the page, it is also the means through which Broke-Rose is able to suggest that these characters (and all the other homeless people who are not in her novel), appear as one and the same to the occasional ‘reader’. The novel, in fact, not only openly denounces the responsibility that both the Government and the Media have for the creation of such a situation, but also suggests (in a similar way to what Brooke-Rose did in Out), that the guilt has to be shared by all the people who, one way or another, helped to create and to maintain the conditions which made it possible for educated men and women, privileged or semi-privileged representatives of the English middle-class to turn into beggars and rough sleepers. This is, for example, the case with the two intellectuals who not only vehemently refuse to help Ulysses in any way in the Bangladeshi restaurant but, without recognising that it is exactly their kind of attitude that perpetuates this situation, openly admit that ‘noticing’ is completely irrelevant and deny Ulysses any right to be there – ‘even in this shabby place’ (95/7). This novel then, emphasises that the homeless are not only deprived of their homes, jobs and social role, but of their identity as well, appearing alike to the outsider who hastily passes them by and who would like them to be completely invisible. As we read in the text, ‘drop-outs mustn’t be visible’ (9), and the whole murder investigation revolves around the fact that the primary suspect, a man wearing blue jeans, a black leather jacket and a red woolly hat, who was seen sitting on a bench in the park where the body was found, cannot be identified. ‘It could be anyone at all’ (152), says the inspector conducting the enquiry, and although some questions are asked (more out of routine than real interest in the crime or desire to do justice to a black, homeless girl who was raped and strangled), the murder remains unsolved. Simultaneously, however, by phonetically transcribing the different levels of ‘Estuarian’ language they speak, Brooke-Rose not only obliges readers to slow down, to read attentively and think (as Ezra Pound used to do with his ideograms), but she also compels readers to read aloud in order to hear the characters’ voices, and by so doing, she renders them less invisible to us. In fact, by reflecting their unique accents, she shows 107

that they are, after all, different from one another, and by so doing not only does she render the changes of perspective that occur in the text very clearly, but also enables her characters to oppose the attempted obliteration of their individuality enacted by their society. ‘Disappearing. That’s what the government wants after all’ (184), says one of the characters towards the end of the novel, and later on: ‘If the government states in morphed stats that we don’t exist. Then we don’t. Presto! We disappear. We’re words, we’re statistical curves and columns’ (204/5). And yet, thanks to her prose, Brooke-Rose manages to make these figures visible, to make their voices heard, if only for a few hours, the time readers take to finish the novel. Brooke-Rose’s novel could thus be seen as one of those ‘Inconvenient Fictions’ that Bernard Harrison discusses in his book of the same name, that is fictions which give us what Harrison, while discussing the relationship between literature and theory, calls ‘dangerous’ knowledge. This is the ‘knowledge the price of whose acquisition is the risk the reader runs of being changed in his or her self by what he or she reads’ (1991, 4), the kind of knowledge which enables readers to transcend their limitations of perspective and which, perhaps, might make us less blind to what happens not only on the page but also, in the specific case of this novel, on the streets. Hence, even though the distinction Harrison poses between ‘serious’ literature and literature which simply offers knowledge as ‘amenity’ does not appear particularly precise, the remarks he makes are nonetheless useful to understand what the ‘Inconvenient Fictions’ he discusses (to which I add Brooke-Rose’s work) try to achieve. In a passage that could well apply to Brooke-Rose’s novels he states that: One of the functions of serious literature [...] is to widen this gap, by setting our familiar words sedulously against one another in unheard-of contexts, until it yawns, allowing other, alternative possibilities of construal to jostle into view within it (1991, 16).23

23

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This is a similar approach to ‘dangerous’ literature that Italo Calvino, who followed developments in literature and literary theory very closely, echoes in an essay from 1967, where, analysing the role that literature has in our society, he states that modern literature endeavours to give voice to that which certain conventions have buried in the social unconscious and, contrary to Realist

What modern literature as practised by authors such as Brooke-Rose endeavours to do, is precisely to see Reality differently, to make readers see it differently, and to show them how any description of Reality offered, for example by governmental statistics and the Media, is just that, a description, always subject to linguistic constraints. As one of the characters of Next rightly points out, the fact that unemployment is declared to be down to almost nothing has no bearing for the people who live on the streets (181, 184), that large mass of ‘half persons’ (187) whose existence everybody seems determined to ‘refuse to recognize’ (193). Hence, although many of the issues raised in this novel are already addressed by Brooke-Rose in some of her previous texts, the tone here has become darker and the author’s outlook less optimistic. This is fundamentally the same kind of society Brooke-Rose describes in the novels of her second tetralogy (in particular Amalgamemnon and Verbivore). However, whereas in those novels she presents this society as a future possibility, in Next she is forced to acknowledge the fact that the future has exploded into the present. Hence, if she sets both the annihilation of humanity that Mira sees approaching in Amalgamemnon and the alleged end of both Xorandoric and human races in Verbivore in the future, in Next Brooke-Rose has no other choice but to place the English government’s catastrophic handling of social problems and poverty in the present. This is perhaps the reason why the tone of the later novel seems darker and more brooding: this is a world where, as we read at the very beginning of Next, ‘There’s usually more than one horror for each letter’ (3); where men are, allegedly, born equal, ‘giving rise to natio, but the Declaration forgot that a slave is not a national, that a refugee, like a dropout, ceases to be a citizen’ (2); where the welfare apparatus cannot avoid people getting trapped in the vicious circle of the ‘no address no job, no job no address’. It is, in words which recall Verbivore, a ‘televorous and posthuman age’ (33) characterised, like the society of Amalgamemnon, by the solitude of a people who are ever more isolated and cut off from one another (132, 169, 178, 183). literature which worked to consecrate the values on which society was based, refuses to see and speak of the world as it used to (1967, in 1980, 178).

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However, whereas in Amalgamemnon loneliness only pushed people to alienate themselves in front of a computer screen and a television set, in Next it actually breeds violence and, according to one of the characters, is at the root of ‘civil wars’ (196). As we read in the text, this is the age of the death of God […] the withering of the state, the collapse of communism, the corruption of capitalism, the end of meritocracy, after other ocracies, the cancerous growth of burocracy, eurocracy; the end of the nation-state, of ideology, so they say, though it still misleads millions (202).

Fundamentally, it is the age of ‘the end of mega-narratives, of all the fictions we live under’ (202), that is all those theories which, as Jean François Lyotard suggests in La condition Postmoderne (1979), have been used in the past by states and various systems to guarantee the truth and legitimacy of their versions of the world and have now been declared finished. As Brooke-Rose also suggests in Amalgamemnon, in spite of the state of semi-emergency, everybody who can afford it, carries on ‘as if’, trying to disregard the social problems which are becoming increasingly urgent, attempting to ignore the destitution of the homeless and basing their decisions on purely economic factors (113). As the author suggests in Verbivore, the government keeps passing contradictory laws which seem to be designed specifically to impede people trying to get out of the vicious circle of a life of vagrancy (122); as in Out, ‘all institutions develop their own jargon against the public they’re supposed to serve’ (124) and, as in Between and Amalgamemnon, under the illusion of serving the nation’s interests, they destroy the few jobs there are, making the condition of the underprivileged, of the third world and other countries worse and worse. However, whereas in Out integration means salvation and survival, in the society of Next, ‘integration’ still leads to ‘segregation’ (34); whereas in Amaglamemnon it is only the humanities that are obsolete, in the world of Next both the arts and computer studies lead to unemployment (178, 182, 183) and most ‘education’ turns out to be useless (50, 181). Furthermore, whereas in Between it is the interpreters who seem younger and younger to the central character, here it is the homeless who are ever more youthful (80). Even the attacks against the 110

European Union which Brooke-Rose stages in Amalgamemnon, by ironically asking, in different parts of the novel, ‘Europe, shall we ever make it?’ (Amalgamemnon, 24), are here given a bleaker note when one of the characters says: They used to say, when the Common Market began, that nationalism was now as dead as the religious wars. And look where we are now, religious wars and all. Scholars try to preserve a nugget of cultural difference and presto, it becomes separatism (185).

Fundamentally, whereas in Out, as we shall see, the emphasis is on the power of language which, after the conclusion of one story, permits the beginning of another, in Next there is ‘no next, no story’ (203). Hence, whereas Such investigates whether there is life after death, Next tries to investigate whether there is life before death, at least for the people on the streets, and the novel concludes with a sad ‘no next’ (210).

1.7. The Narrating Author and Absent Narrators in Subscript As we shall see in more detail in the following chapters, in her novels Brooke-Rose deals with both the present and the future of Western society. In her last published novel, however, she abandons both contemporary and future settings in order to deal, as she allegorically did in Out and, more explicitly, in Between and Remake, with the past. In Subscript, the past she is particularly interested, however, is neither the historical past of Western civilization that she implicitly discusses in Between, nor the personal past or biography with which she deals in Remake. The focus in Subscript is in fact pre-history, that is the past of humanity itself. In this novel, Brooke-Rose adopts the same technique of the ‘narrating author’ she exploited in her previous novels, thanks to which she can eliminate the narrator from her text. Here the author actually enters into the prehistoric creatures that, if we stretch Realist definitions, could be considered the ‘characters’ of her novel. As she has done before, Brooke-Rose enables creatures with no need or capacity for 111

speech to inhabit a world of words and self-expression, but the real difference between this and her previous novels, is that for part of the book these beings lack any real consciousness at all. In fact, not only does Brooke-Rose, in this as in other novels, lends words to creatures which have none – in reality, it takes a while for her creatures to learn how to emit any kind of sound (61) – but for part of the book, they cannot be said to have a consciousness. The novel is entirely told from these beings’ viewpoint, and from a single cell, the story is passed from female organism to female organism, in ascending order of complexity, evolving into the creatures which will eventually become humanity. Brooke-Rose’s usual technique is therefore stretched to its utmost possibilities in this novel of prehistory, since the author doesn’t allow herself to mention anything that the creatures – through which everything is filtered – couldn’t know the name of. Subscript therefore begins with the same impersonal tone that characterises the other novels, and beginning with a poetic description of a pre-biotic chemical reaction millions of years ago, it catapults the reader on, to the very moment when life on our planet began: Zing! Zinging out through the glowsalties the pungent ammonia earthfarts in the slithery clay and all the rest to make simple sweeties and sharpies and other stuffs. Dust out of vast crashes and currents now calmer as the crust thickens and all cools a bit. Over many many forevers. Waiting. Absorbing. Growing. Churning. Splitting. Over and over (1).

Because everything is filtered through these creatures and the whole text is in internal focalisation, everything seems doubtful: ‘Only the code knows, being responsible’ (22), whereas the creatures are left to wonder at the meaning of what is happening around and to them. For example, often what is described is referred to as a ‘mystery’ (24, 35, 64), and unable to decide on the reality of things, the creatures contemplate different possibilities: The larger kin, totally forgotten except by the code, are there after all. Possibly much larger. Either they were here before, or a few also managed the great escape, however slowly. Or perhaps much faster and more slithering than others. And then

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increased, hidden away further on. Perhaps they swam the sea instead of following it. Or else they’re just everywhere, all of the time, however many die, masters of all landmasses (44).

We often find words such as ‘maybe’ (46), ‘perhaps’ (79), and many question marks: The animals that are many seem to change very little […] while the kinds that are fewer seem to change more drastically and right out of range. Is that because they are fewer, rarer? Yet being fewer is bad, says the code, no top kind is fewer. Could the code be wrong? Why should some get eaten and others not? Why should whole generations get killed in some underwater cliff collapse or some deepfreeze or sea-flooding or other landmass movements far off? Why should whole huge trees vanish? (47).24

Furthermore, occasionally the reader is left in doubt as to what it is that characters are describing. For example, the perceiving consciousness initially describes what she calls ‘another sea far up, much paler in tinge and not wet at all. At least like a sea but not made of water’ (26), an ‘upper sea [which] can also darken’ (27), and although the reader soom reaches the conclusion that the creatures are seeing the sky for the first time, confirmation of this only comes later in the text, when it is said that ‘the new dry sea [is] made of air’ (32) and when it is explicitly referred to as ‘sky’ (43). The only exception to this technique is to be found in the titles of each chapter which, by referring to the millions of years elapsed, are obviously the product of the author and are directed at the reader. We can therefore see how, once again, Brooke-Rose tries to stimulate her readers’ attention and cooperation, leaving to them the decipherment of part of the novel. It is in fact readers who have to recognise everything described and, by identifying the various creatures, the surroundings, the period and so on, recreate, as they read, the history of human evolution. Consequently, through these creatures’ eyes, readers are encouraged to see the world (the same world studied at school in science, geography and history books) from a new perspective, with the surprise,

24

See also pages 59, 80 and 93.

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the candour and the enthusiasm of a new-born being, and appreciate all that which has so often been taken for granted.

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Chapter 2: Possible Worlds, Open Works and Writerly Texts

In this chapter, my attention will focus mainly on the worlds that Brooke-Rose’s novels create and her approach to the causal linearity on which Realist fiction is based. In fact, just as her novels challenge the traditional conception of the character by positing a ‘non-narrator’ at the centre of the narrative, they also challenge that of the fictional world by creating worlds which, against the reader’s attempts at naturalisation, are almost impossible to place in either time or space.

2.1. Atemporal and Atopographical Possible Worlds By attempting to find valuable alternatives to Realist conventions, by creating worlds which cannot be placed as firmly as those created by a Realist narrative (although there is always an attempt to locate them in both space and time), by defamiliarising the Real, and by explicitly showing her readers that the Reality depicted by a novel changes according to the formal devices adopted, Brooke-Rose’s novels interrogate the traditional ways of structuring narrative and, because of the strong link posited between the world of the novel and the extra-textual world, they simultaneously try to expose the rhetoricity of Reality and to demonstrate the existence of possible Realities other than that which the reader was led to believe was unique. Since the problematic nature of the characters’ ontological status affects the ontological status of the worlds they construct, making them equally unstable and uncertain, Brooke-Rose’s narratives are never quite placed in context: no background explanation of the characters’ situation is offered, and the novels point not to an ultimate fictional Reality but, by presenting different versions of the same events, to several possible outcomes of the same situation. 115

Brooke-Rose’s focal characters therefore become the means that allow the author to deconstruct given ideas of identity and Reality, as either their plain unreliability renders the discrimination between Real and unReal problematic from the very beginning, or, as in the novels of the second tetralogy, the central characters initially seem to be reliably constructing a world, but are later revealed to be unreliable too. Because Brooke-Rose’s concern is the investigation of the relationship between the ‘world’ and the ‘word’, by making the ontology of the worlds the novels construct problematic, and by blurring the distinction between ‘possible world’ and ‘subworld’,1 contrary to Realist fiction which claimed to deliver accurate transcriptions of either the physical reality of the extra-textual world or the psychological reality of the character, her texts openly construct worlds which are overtly the result of the central characters’ linguistic acts. Consequently, by suggesting how difficult it is to define Reality and to neatly separate it from unReality, by insinuating that the Reality readers perceive as extra-textual is, like textual Reality, the result of linguistic acts, and by creating complex associations, Brooke-Rose’s novels refute the easy assumptions which Realist narratives have created, and although they cannot remove those assumptions completely, they at least disturb the powerful illusion of an unchanging Reality and an absolute Truth.

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In the chapter ‘Strutture di mondi’ of Lector in Fabula (1979), Eco defines a possible world as a cultural construct which depends on the ‘prepositional attitudes of someone who affirms it, believes in it, dreams it, foresees it etc.’ (128). Thus, the novel conceived as a fictional work constitutes, in relation to the extra-textual reality, a ‘possible world’ imagined and created by the author. Inside this possible world, however, the narrators can assume propositional attitudes, and by alienating themselves from the fictional Reality of the first-degree possible world the novel consists of, can create in turn a possible world on the second degree which Eco calls a ‘subworld’ (quoted by McHale, 1987, 34).

The Present Tense and Ambiguous Topography in Out, Such, Between and Thru The ontological ambiguity between the fictional possible world of the novel and the doubly fictional subworld, is crucial from Brooke-Rose’s first experimental novel, Out, where for the first time she frees her narrative of a definite geographical setting whose precise determination is ultimately impossible.2 Her novel is in fact set in a future which, because of the central character’s mental confusion, remains indeterminate (23), and takes place after the ‘displacement’ (which we can infer was a nuclear holocaust), when the relations between races are inverted, geographical borders subverted and new countries such as ‘AfroEurasia’, ‘Sino-America’ and ‘Chinese-Europe’ created (131). In this novel, Brooke-Rose thus creates what McHale describes as a ‘zone’ (1987, 43/58) – where countries which are not contiguous in the real world-atlas are juxtaposed – and because the reader is never offered a point of view different from the central consciousness, the ambiguities Out presents remain insoluble, the reader being left with the suspicion that the sick character might simply be lying on his bed projecting events which never occur in the possible world of the novel, but only in his internal, psychic subworld. The determination of time, place, the occurrence of the events described and the existence of certain characters therefore remains dubious, and while on certain occasions the central character affirms the real occurrence of what he has been describing (48), at other times he himself uncovers the double fictionality of his discourse,3 and doubting the Real occurrence of episodes he has just related, he adopts a deductive way of proceeding in order to find out what actually happened, taking 2

3

Although the novel offers some climatic and botanical clues, its science-fictional setting remains obscure. This is confirmed by Brooke-Rose who, referring to the setting of Out, states: ‘it’s a place in some North African country or maybe the South of France’ (1990b, 31). For example, after reporting Mrs. Mgulu’s words, he implicitly admits them to be simple fantasies by saying ‘No, this would only be a thought. Mrs. Mgulu thinks, I do hope etc.’ (52) and, after having described how his wife fell ill while working on Mrs. Mgulu’s premises and how Mr. Mgulu took care of her, he reflects: ‘Dr. Mgulu is not a medical doctor but a Ph.D. (Tokyo), Economics and Demography. This fantasy is therefore ruled out of order by the Silent Speaker’ (67).

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into consideration various hypotheses to see which one might sound most plausible (108/9). The same doubts which distinguish Out also permeate Such, where the dividing line between possible world and subworld is similarly blurred and no recognisable topography is provided. In fact, because Such describes the charcater’s journey in the after-life, not only does the space with which this novel is concerned correspond more to the internal space of Larry’s psyche than to any physical place, but also no reference is made to the topography (real or imagined) of the place where Larry has spent his life, where he died, and where he attempts to recover, which remains suspended in a sort of no-man’s land, outside time and space. From the first line of the novel we are in fact inside Larry’s mind, and his ‘real’ life has very little impact on him. Indeed, because the perception of time in the after-life seems so altered,4 a comparison between the mortal and the immortal, time and eternity, seems useless, thus making the definition of a temporal setting very difficult. However, by considering the laws of astrophysics introduced in the text, the reader can deduce the approximate moment in time when the events might take place, and s/he is also provided with enough information to determine the lapse of time covered by the novel. Despite what many critics have affirmed,5 Larry’s son makes it clear that the novel covers more than two years (351) and, if we believe Something, precisely three years (230). In addition, his wife indicates ‘three-days’ as the exact duration of Larry’s death (254), and this time span connects Larry not only to Lazarus, but also Christ Himself and relates Such to the body of Medieval literature on near-death experience, which – following from Christ’s experience – usually exploits the symbolism of the three-day absence of the soul from the body. Because between the account of Larry’s death and that of his recovery there is no neat separation, the two stories running simultaneously, it becomes difficult at times to determine whether what is described belongs to the first or second degree Reality of the novel. 4 5

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For example, in the after-life Larry treats minutes, months, years and decades as equal (242/3). For example, the compiler of the ‘Brooke-Rose’ entry in The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers, Hall in Contemporary Novelists and Khol in An Encyclopaedia of British Women Writers, all affirm that the time-span of the narrative is three minutes (respectively: 1993, 68; 1976, 184; 1988, 62).

Characters like Something (205) and the planet-children (205/6) are clearly constructions of Larry’s mind, which creates this interstellar subworld during his death. However, because during his waking life Larry inserts words spoken in the after-life, the determination of which realm Larry is describing at any particular time can be very difficult. A similar ambiguity as to what exactly happens in the novel’s possible world, is also shared by the non-science-fictional Between, which distinguishes itself by the presence of various languages and, as I will show below, by the particular syntax Brooke-Rose adopts and the constraint she imposes upon her text. In fact, since only the present tense is ever used, it is never clear whether the central consciousness is remembering past events of her life or describing events that she experiences at the moment of her narration. Consequently, the reader cannot decide whether the character, during the only flight she makes in the novel, remembers the many flights she has accomplished in the past, or whether she presents the reader with a sort of journal written throughout her whole life span. Because the first three experimental novels by Brooke-Rose are all in the present tense, they present everything depicted as instantaneous but, simultaneously, they seem trapped in a timeless continuum, concerned rather with the space and the time of the central characters’ psyche. In all three novels, the flattening of clear markings in a perpetual present has the effect of blurring the Reality or unReality of events and characters, and, as a result, the reader is never certain not only when, but also whether something is occurring, recurring or simply being remembered, the only time markers being contingent, lost in the play of repetitions and based on almost imperceptible variations of detail. We can therefore see how, contrary to the use of the present tense in traditional novels, where it acts as a sort of historical present to bring the scene actively before the reader, Brooke-Rose uses it not only to challenge the notion of character and background, but also, thanks to the ambiguity it creates, in order to challenge the very notion of Reality and, as she writes in A Rhetoric of the Unreal, ‘the traditional notion of representation in fiction, where nothing is “lived” except by the author in his writing experience and the reader in his reading experience’ (1981, 314). As in the previous novels, in Between the time dimension and the Reality of what is described are completely ambiguous, as it is never 119

clear how many journeys actually take place in the possible world of the novel and how long the lapse of time covered by the text is. The inability to determine unambiguously the kind of analepses which are inserted in the text (if they be analepses at all),6 renders the whole temporal dimension of the novel dubious, and prevents the reader from establishing what Genette would call the ‘duration’ of the novel, that is the lapse of time it covers (1972, 122). Similarly, the whole spatial dimension is rendered problematic, and the novel’s setting remains in between different countries whether we favour the ‘multiple-flight’ hypothesis (according to which most of the globe is covered), or the ‘one-flight’ hypothesis: in fact, because the localities to and from which the character travels remain un-named, the setting becomes irrelevant, in so far as on a plane, between two wings, between different borders, between different languages and ideas, the ‘non-narrator’ remains suspended above countries, in the immobility of a plane flying ‘at eight hundred and thirty kilometres an hour’ (395). This tension between mobility and immobility is central to this novel, where the emphasis on the inertness of the body confined in the plane seat is balanced by the shifts in time and space which are accomplished through language: for instance the language (intertextually inserted in the novel) of the menus served on the plane and in hotel restaurants, that of the labels on the bottles of mineral water the character orders, that of the various shops seen while passing on the bus to/from the airport, the plaques indicating the lifts or the toilets in hotels, and the instructions found in various bathrooms. Furthermore, we have the various languages in which the airline companies welcome the passengers on board the plane, the language the waiters and chambermaids use to address the character, and that she uses to respond to them. However, more important than the various languages the character is (or has been) exposed to during her journeys, it is principally the language and the syntax of her own discourse which makes possible the many displacements of the text, actual or remembered. From the very beginning, the text presents in fact sudden alternations and displace6

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In his Figures III (1972), Genette identifies the two fundamental asynchronies between the time of the diegesis and that of the narrative with the prolepsis and the analepsis, which are narrative segments that respectively evoke events which will either occur later in the diegesis or which have already occurred.

ments between the descriptions of the plane and that of various hotel rooms which are introduced on account of a common element such as the presence of a stewardess or a chambermaid bringing food, the metal locks of a cupboard or the bathroom door. Hence, the curtain dividing first from economy class leads to a tabernacle and memories of the character’s marriage (395), and the door hiding the captain’s cabin leads to the Vatican’s door in Rome, behind which the private testimonies necessary for the annulment of her marriage are heard (434). Conversely, the mineral water on the hotel bedside-table brings the character back to the plane where the stewardess is serving drinks (399), and the cloud of dust provoked by some street drilling brings her back to the plane flying above the clouds (401). Thus, in the same way that, as we shall see, in Amalgamemnon a single word can bring about a displacement from one subworld to another,7 thanks to the free-ranging syntax of Between – through which ‘a sentence can start in one place or time, continue correctly, yet by the end of the sentence one is elsewhere’ (Brooke-Rose, 1991a, 7) – the geographical displacements correspond to temporal displacements, and this sense of mobility is also suggested by the many active verbs BrookeRose is obliged to use, having decided to altogether eliminate the verb ‘to be’ from her narrative. Hence, although the novel is never set in any precise post-war period (even though the fact that Structuralism is presented as just beginning hints at the early 1960s as possible setting), we can find many references which indicate the passing of time, demonstrating that the novel covers, whether through analepses or first degree narration, most of the character’s life.8 Hence, by the end of the novel, the ‘Fräulein’ (444) has transformed into a ‘desiccated skeletal alleinstehende Frau’ (565), and the text has 7

8

For example, the song that the Abyssinian maid imagines her Mussa is singing (66) leads to the lyric inserted on the same page, sung by a certain Chuck, whose friend Dave, by saying ‘Let’s run through it again shall we?’ (67), displaces the narrative to the Usury subplot, in which what is ‘run through’ is a terrorist plan. The ‘young beginner in the art of understanding immediately’ (429), initially addressed as ‘mademoiselle’ (422), soon becomes a ‘madame’ (466). As her age increases, although never precisely (424, 466), the cause she began to have her war-time marriage annulled progresses and is finally resolved ‘just in time for the menopause’ (570). Simultaneously, time passes for Siegfried too, who grows balder and balder (457, 514).

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covered the period ‘between the zest of youth and the wisdom of old age where lies a not so long period of relief repose and resignation called the middle ages’ (558). The span of the narrative could therefore vary from the few hours of a single flight to many years, and by raising the doubt whether the world of the novel actually coincides with a world of (fictional) things such as toilet doors and hotels, or only with a world of words, the text interrogates pre-conceived notions of Reality. The ontological ambiguity with which Brooke-Rose permeates everything described in Between, becomes however increasingly evident in Thru, the novel she wrote after her move to France so as to bring together the critic and the writer in her. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the alternation of construction and destruction Brooke-Rose exploits in this novel in order to continually destroy what she has Realistically created, gradually reveals that all the characters and all that is described simply correspond to linguistic constructs of an unspecified ‘other author’, a first narrator whose possible world is never placed and who creates, in a moment of his/her present which remains unidentified, the first subworld of the text. No reference is actually ever made either to the location of the universities the novel introduces,9 or to the lapse of time covered by the text: the novel, hermeneutically postponing the clarification of the obscure references with which the reader is initially confronted, opens in fact in medias res, and the absence of traditional free indirect discourse, author-comment, flashbacks and explanatory dialogue makes it impossible to determine the ‘duration’ of the novel, and the amplitude and the portée of its analepses.10 Indeed, if initially the reader might conclude that the novel covers one academic year, during which the students of the seminar in Creative Writing produce the text, when it appears clear that the students are the fictional characters of someone else’s story, the reader is not provided with any additional information, and even though the theories the novel introduces approximately limit its temporal setting to the year 1972, the duration of the text remains forever uncertain. The world of Thru is 9

10

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Despite the lack of spatial indications, the most probable location of these universities seems America, since no European universities at the time taught Creative Writing. Respectively the distance from the present and the duration of the action described (Genette, 1972, 89).

therefore exposed as a world of words, and although the reader is continually promised the localisation of the possible world of the novel, what s/he is finally left with is a series of subworlds created by a narrator who remains hidden. In the alternation between construction of what the reader is led to believe is the Truth about the novel and its destruction, between the inflation of the reader’s expectations and their deflation, the setting of the novel’s possible world is lost forever. By blurring the ontological status of both the narrators and the worlds they construct, the text thus obliges the reader to admit the problematicity of any definition of Reality, to recognise the fallibility of his/her judgement, and through the strong link posited between the textual and the extra-textual, raises the question as to whether the world the reader was led to believe was natural is actually a non-original product. Non-Constative Verbs and Uncertain Ontologies in Amalgamemnon Beginning with Thru, and in all the novels of the second experimental tetralogy, the characters’ confused ontology increasingly becomes a means to interrogate notions of both identity and Reality, but it is in Amalgamemnon in particular, the novel which perhaps best exemplifies the double fictionality of the world constructed by the central character, that the characters’ ontology renders all definition of Reality dubious. However, whereas in Thru the distinction between what is Real and what is not is proposed as problematic, in Amalgamemnon the double fictionality of everything described in the text is openly asserted from the very beginning. The novel is in fact entirely written using non-constative, nonrealised verbs (that is the future, the conditional, the imperative and the subjunctive), and this type of tense becomes, more than in any other novel, fundamental to the distinction between possible world and subworld. Contrary to the preceding novels, where the present tense rendered the distinction between the two ambiguous, in Amalgamemnon the imposition of this constraint – which began as a technical challenge to Genette’s theorisation of narrative asynchronies – puts all that is described in the text under the sign of (double) fictionality and, as Brooke-Rose underlines (1991a, 8), enabled her to create a proleptic novel. 123

The only exceptions to this modus narrandi are found either in direct speech (especially in interrogative and negative clauses), or in the expression ‘Listen: I/We promise’ repeated several times in the novel. However, because none of these exceptions can be submitted to a true/false test, they cannot confirm whether an event has actually occurred in the possible world of the novel. As a consequence, nothing actually happens in Amalgamemnon, and contrary to what reviewers said on publication, its subject is not ‘a woman humanities lecturer who is suddenly made redundant’ (Morton, 1984, 10), for Mira’s redundancy is presented from the very beginning as a future possibility – ‘I shall soon be quite redundant’ (5) – and is never confirmed.11 As a result, differently from what Lecercle suggested when he wrote that ‘perhaps she [Mira] never leaves the queue at the Labour Exchange’ (1991, in UOD, 158), the visits Mira pays to the Exchange must also be read as specious projections. By saying I could anticipate and queue before the National Education Computer for a different teaching job, reprogramming myself like a floppy disk, or at the Labour Exchange for a different job altogether, recycling myself like a plastic bottle (5),

Mira makes it in fact clear that her visits are anticipations of an anticipation. As a consequence, the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of the possible world of the novel is never clarified, and even though it is highly probable that Mira never leaves her room, the text doesn’t offer any clue as to its whereabouts, as Mira could set her fantasies in any corner of the globe, without necessarily being (or having been) there. Furthermore, whereas the following novels (extended subworlds of Mira) are partially localised, in Amalgamemnon even the settings of the subplots the character creates remain ambiguous: the fairy-tale is in fact set in a nowhere/anywhere land (86), the love-story between the Somali girl and Roland the Englishman takes them around the entire world (139), and the whole of Mira’s monologue touches not only on many mythological and ancient places, but also, thanks to the world news broadcast on the radio, on many contemporary countries. 11

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Twenty pages before the end of the novel, Mira says: ‘Soon there will come the expected letter in burotechnish that will make me definitely redundant beyond the shudder of a doubt’ (124).

The unification of ancient and modern history accomplished by Mira’s amalgamating imagination also renders the temporal setting of the novel extremely ambiguous, and even though the cuts in the university programmes indicate that the novel is set in a moment in a near future which shares with our present the prejudices represented in the text, this future is never defined. In addition, because the sub-plots Mira creates are not chronologically organised, the lapse of time covered by the novel remains equally undetermined, and the text as a whole could be either the result of several nights of insomnia, or the product of a single night’s imagining during which Mira, unable to sleep because of the feared redundancy, creates several imaginary worlds. The fictional Reality of the possible world of the novel is therefore unspecified, but precisely because everything described remains a possibility, and because all the hypotheses the reader might formulate can never be proved, I would submit that the world constructed in Amalgamemnon becomes the possible world par excellence. If it is true that, as Lecercle recognises, the text never introduces a world of comparison in relation to which the world of the novel could be considered ‘possible’, the ‘I’ subject of the enunciation nonetheless posits the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of the enunciation in relation to which the events described can be set in the future, and although this ‘here’ and ‘now’ is never specified, the future necessarily points to a present moment – that of Mira’s speech acts in the possible world of the novel – in relation to which the subworlds she creates can be placed. If the double fictionality of the various subworlds of Amalgamemnon is easily identifiable thanks to the constraint Brooke-Rose imposes on her writing, because all the subsequent novels turn out to be a creation of Mira, they must also be identified with further, enlarged subworlds which equally depend on the never specified possible world of the character. Consequently, although in the following novels BrookeRose provides the reader with more precise spatial and temporal indications, the settings of the texts, as subworlds created by Mira, become irrelevant, and do not permit more precise localisation of Mira’s possible world.

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Dispersed Settings in Xorandor, Verbivore, and Textermination Since most of the world’s nations are affected by the two episodes, in both Xorandor and Verbivore spatial and temporal indications are so numerous as to render the determination of the setting irrelevant, and even though for example in Xorandor, there are very precise temporal indications which allow the reader to infer that the novel takes place over approximately four years (185), the narrative does not offer any sure element that fixes the moment in time when the events described might have taken place and what kind of relation this moment has to the present of the first narrator. We do know that the novel is set after 1983 (84), and although the future to which the novel hints seems to be very near our own times (as we share its social, political and cultural codes), it must be sometime in the twenty-first century.12 However, no certain element is offered to enable the reader to determine how near to our present Xorandor’s society is, and because of this, the same is true of Verbivore – which can only be said to cover a period of more than two years (191) – as not only are most of the temporal references the latter text offers related to the Xorandor affair, but they are also inaccurately determined (36, 66, 118). These minor incongruities (which support the main thematics of both novels, namely the inaccuracy of any past recollection) are solved when the twins finally contact one of the talking stones, which sets Verbivore ‘Twenty three years three months fourteen days’ (105) after Xorandor. However, because the temporal setting of Xorandor was never determined, the ambiguity passes on to its sequel: we know that many changes have affected the economic system (126, 132), but although two precise dates are given in the text (8, 114), these numbers seem to contradict the fact that with the passing of time the number of years increase, so they do not help much. Similarly, Zab’s reference to Christa Wolf (109) places the novel sometime in the first half of the new century, but that is about as precise as we can get. 12

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When Zab places the sudden increase in transmission in ‘the last century’ (190), she is clearly referring to the 20th century, because even though the first Marconi radio transmissions started in the last decade of the 19th century, the world took no interest in his discovery until 1901, when he transmitted a message across the Atlantic.

Since the irrelevance of the temporal and topographical evidence of Xorandor and Verbivore fundamentally depends on the ambiguity which distinguishes the localisation of the possible world of origin, the same vagueness also distinguishes the last subworld Mira creates, that is the novel which concludes Brooke-Rose’s second experimental tetralogy: Textermination. Indeed, even though the convention of fictional characters is explicitly placed in San Francisco and, if the reader were able to recognise all the characters present, s/he could infer their fictional nationality, precisely because so many countries are suggested, and because most of the action takes place either in the hotel or in an unspecified café, the few topographical pointers mentioned but not described (48, 63, 110), somehow lose significance. Even though we can infer that Textermination covers five weeks (176) and ten days (16, 180), and we know that the convention takes place in December (63), nothing enables the reader to specify when the novel is set: given the existence of ‘aerobrains’ which transport the characters to San Francisco (9), the reader could assume the text be set in the future, but there is nothing which would contradict a ‘parallel universe’ theory either, and because not only places, but also many historical periods are evoked and brought together in a suspended state in which causal logic and linear organisation is reversed,13 the whole temporal dimension of this text is made uncertain. The Exception of Next Contrary to the novels of Brooke-Rose’s first and second experimental tetralogies, Next is openly set in London. This is explicitly said on several occasions (55, 77, 189), and is often hinted at through the specific names of particular streets, buildings and pubs inserted in the text: ‘Edgware Road’ (4), ‘Beacon Bingo Hall’ (5), ‘Hyde Park’ (17), ‘Oxford Circus’ (24), ‘Kensington Gardens’ (82) and so on. Furthermore, through this topographical precision, the temporal setting of the novel seems to be precisely determined. The mention of the

13

Kelly, for example, is allowed to die as a non-read character even before the novel she belongs to is finished and before she could be made available to the reader.

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various dole offices, the laws which are passed and the jobcentres opened, all point to the present as the most likely setting of the novel. In spite of this, both spatial and temporal settings become somehow irrelevant in this novel: to the homeless every doorway is exactly like every other, each bench is the same no matter which park it is in, the questions asked in a jobcentre are repeated again and again, and the sleeping conditions of dropout centres are always similar. Similarly, to rough sleepers each day is a bit the same, except perhaps Sundays, when all the shops are shut (33). And each day seems to last a lifetime. Between breakfast at one centre and lunch at another, a walk in the park, a nap on a bench, a cup of tea in a café and the night on the streets, the days of these men and women seem interminable. This is why the rough sleepers we meet in the novel seem older than what they really are (186), and why we do not know the precise moment in time in which the novel is set. We do know that everything described takes place in the cold season (99/102) but, as this is England, this doesn’t help much. Furthermore, although towards the end of the novel there is a hint as to its duration, the text apparently covering a single week (208), this ‘time-stretching effect’ (also corroborated by references to soap operas, which often take a whole season to represent what could be acted out in a two-hour show), might lead the reader to the wrong conclusion. Consequently, the temporal dimension is a bit blurred; as one of the characters tells the inspector investigating the murder, ‘one night’s much like another, it’s hard to remember. Tuesday’s prehistory’ (148), and every day is spent in the company of the ever present television set and its ‘next’, followed by the programs that will be shown afterwards (170). The word ‘next’, which emblematically gives the title to the novel, actually accompanies the homeless through their life, as ‘next’ is how they are called when queuing at the jobcentre or going for an interview (22, 58). However, if ‘next’ might represent a vague hope for the future (64), it simultaneously indicates the fear that that future might turn out to be worse than the present (89). Having forgotten and done away with their past, however, they can only live for the future. In spite of the fact that, as one of the characters says, ‘miracles do occur’ (58), and although eventually five of the ten rough-sleepers to whom the string of letters ‘QWERTYUIOP’ refers have been ‘accommodated’ – ‘Two with jobs, one with death, another to die soon perhaps, one with a foot-on-earth’ (208) – the end of the novel, with its dry ‘no next’, sounds particularly 128

sad, as it seems to relegate the remaining characters to a perpetual present. We therefore see that, although for the first time Brooke-Rose actively gives many hints to enable readers to identify the novel’s settings, this precision is simultaneously undermined by the subject matter of the novel itself. Indeed, it becomes one of the means through which the author emphasises the fact that by living on the streets these people alienate themselves from London’s life. They remain outside the social, working and family life of those who, by having a job and an address, manage to be an integral part of London society. In this novel, Brooke-Rose once again focuses on marginal figures and, by subverting Realist devices, she uses the specification of time and space not to render the setting more real for her readers but to do exactly the contrary, and create a sort of no man’s land, out of space and, somehow out of time, within London itself. Subscript and the Beginning of Our World In Subscript Brooke-Rose takes the indeterminacy of the setting which has characterised all her previous texts a step further, and creates a novel about the history of evolution which, by focussing on the very beginning of our world, cannot be precisely placed in either time or space. In spite of disclosing the total span of time covered by the novel (4,500 million years), the indications we find in the titles of the various chapters refer to such extended periods of time that they do not allow readers to determine with any kind of precision the particular ages in which what is described takes place. By covering millions of years in a few pages, the novel is characterised by an extreme ‘velocity’ (which Genette defined as the ratio between the time covered by the text – measured in days, months, years and so on – and its length, measured in lines and pages) and, as a consequence, all temporal indication cannot but be approximate. Further to this, however, it is necessary to bear in mind that the imprecision of the setting also finds a justification internal to the novel itself, as it is mainly due to the subject matter of Brooke-Rose’s text. Not only do most of the episodes described in this novel derive from BrookeRose’s imaginative effort and refer to events which cannot be known for 129

sure – but only guessed at with a greater or lesser margin of error – but also (and this is perhaps a more fundamental reason), we cannot overlook the fact that for a good part of the text it is as if time has not yet begun. Early in the text we actually find several expressions emphasising the sense of eternity which must have permeated the early stages of our planet: Waiting. Absorbing. Growing. Churning. Splitting. Over and over […] Alone, totally alone. Growing, churning, splitting. For ever […] carry the foreverness […] Inside the acid strand the forever must exist. From the waiting, the absorbing, the churning, the growing, the repeating. For ever. And ever. And after endless forevers, the scattered strands of many parts now stretch slowly and reach out to each other, though each so different, and try to work together […] So that slimy life begins. For ever and ever […] The process could go on, and on, and does, unchanging except by growth and split, growth and split, over and over (1/2).

Soon enough, though, we find references to the fact that the solitude of this first being is destroyed, together with the sense of ‘foreverness’ (5). Although, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, it is perhaps inappropriate to talk about ‘consciousness’ with reference to creatures which, strictly speaking, can’t even be described as ‘cells’,14 it is nonetheless the dawn of consciousness which enables time to begin (11, 38), after which the expressions of eternity are followed by ‘Or so’, indicating the more restricted meaning that ‘foreverness’ now assumes (14/5). As a consequence, the undifferentiated continuum which initially characterised this world, gets split and broken down into ‘coolturns’ (8) and ‘warmturns’ (10). If at first it is not clear whether these expressions refer to entire eras or shorter spans of time, they eventually appear to indicate (without any doubt) winters and summers, in the same way that ‘light turns’ and ‘dark turns’ (27) come to more precisely indicate the difference between day and night. At the beginning of this world, though, the elements appear to be merged in a single mass, and both time and space seem to have no

14

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This is because, whereas a ‘cell’ must, by definition, be provided of a nucleus, in Brooke-Rose’s text the nucleus only appears on page 4.

meaning. So, as well as the lack of precise temporal indication, the novel is characterised by a similar lack of spatial indication. What we know for sure is that initially we are somewhere in water, and that later on the creatures discover the existence of ‘landmasses’. But although we can make an educated guess as to where the first life form actually began, in the text there is no precise indication as to the whereabouts of the first pre-biotic chemical reaction with which the book opens or the following events. Thanks to Brooke-Rose’s technique of ‘unmediated experience’, the author places herself inside these creatures, offering the reader a description of the birth of the world as it might have appeared to these beings. Consequently, as I mentioned in Chapter 1, the terminology that scientists would later adopt in order to describe these events eludes them, and most of the time they cannot be sure of what is actually happening, the reasons for these changes or, more relevant here, the place or the time they are living in. Hence the abundance of question marks, alternative versions of the same event and descriptions such as the following: Out of the bay, if there is a bay, beyond the ridge, if a ridge, between the rounding landmasses and into some outer sea, much cooler. This makes non sense […] But what is the decision? What is this better outfit anyway? (23)

These creatures are confused by the fact that the same terrain which was once covered by the sea is now dry land (41, 70, 71), and they cannot find answers to any of their questions: ‘Outside. What is there outside? Sometimes the earth rumbles far away. Plains? What are plains? How do animals hide there, or live? Water? Hills? Plains? Mountains? Ice?’ (82). Most of the time they do not know where their journeys (initially caused by earthquakes, seaquakes, volcanic explosions etc., and only later determined by more conscious decisions) are going to take them, and even after they have evolved into more social creatures which recognise the benefits of travelling together, they still cannot decide the direction or final point of arrival of their expedition: Maybe this new landmass is the same as the one left behind, with the pleasant protective warmth before things got hot and angry then icy. But that can’t be, that’s many coldturns and egg-scatterings behind and much too far. This landmass seems

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rather to be a protecting ridge of rock, with more water on the other side. Unless things have changed again since (18/9);

And then: This curve of land separates the new shallow sea from the old deeper one. What is this strip? Is it solid or does it float? Is it long enough to take the pack to other land beyond this new shallow sea? Is there any. Or will it simply stop in the middle of the water, so that the pack will have to whimper back? Or will it the sea engulf and drawn them all? Or would it carry some […] But what is the sea’s direction? (65).

And again, further on in the text (and in the history of evolution): Perhaps the chief male simply wants to go up, away from the shuddering land into the sky. The mountains get barer and barer, higher and higher, the movements underfoot are more and more shifty and hotter […] We have surely gone high enough, we can’t climb on and on to those immense summits that are spitting blood anyway. Have we reached the other side? Is there another side? Does it go again? We try to find ways that go down the mountain not up. But keep going up all the same, it’s impossible not to except across a huge chasm over which a solitary prickletree leans as if about to plunge. Then suddenly trees reappear (85/6).

Hence, either through the absence of temporal and topographical indications, or through the multiplication of indices, in all Brooke-Rose’s experimental novels the settings remain indeterminate, and by so doing, they become an important tool for the defamiliarisation of the Real, emphasising the fictionality of the world of the novel. By broadening the gap between possible world and subworld, Brooke-Rose thus stimulates the reader to reconsider his/her attitude towards the relationship between the extra-textual and the fictional world of the novel, and is finally able to demonstrate that, just like the novels’ world, the reader’s world might also correspond to a construction of words of some other narrator who remains concealed so as not to reveal the ways in which s/he coercively exploits language in order to manipulate others.

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2.2. Open Works If time and space in Brooke-Rose’s novels are unrelentingly ambiguous, their dénouements are even more so, as instead of resolving all the doubts and the uncertainties the narrative has encouraged from the very beginning, they actually multiply them, and by constructing worlds whose existence is never confirmed, they prevent the reader from deciding which one, amongst the many, is the actual Reality the novels depict. For example, in Such the ontological instability of the novel’s world overtly prevents the reader from discovering the Truth of the novel, as because of the continuous shifts and intrusions of one world into another, it becomes difficult to attribute the words reported to a precise character, to establish which realm Larry is describing at any one time and, fundamentally, to work out what the ending of the novel is. This novel posits in fact a final ambiguity as to the destiny of the character, and the reader cannot tell with absolute certainty whether he lives or dies a second time. Referring in his final, incoherent discourse, to things he has learnt in the after-life, Larry concludes his delirious monologue by saying: We love like ancient innocents with a million years of indifference and despair within us that revolve like galaxies on a narrow shaft of light where hangs the terror in her eyes as the life drains away from blood-vessels, nerve cells, muscle spindles, bones, flesh and such, once and for all in a spasm from the attitudes, the created situations and the circular gestures, with the little individual flan already dead in her meridians, out of the story of a death and amazing recovery and into the unfinished unfinishable story of Dippermouth, Gut Bucket Blues, my sweet Potato Head, Tin Roof, Really, Something, and me (390, my italics).

Even though this last passage seems to affirm Larry’s second death and the final shift from one world to the other, because what has come before it has accustomed the reader to be suspicious of everything and not to take anything ‘as such’, the doubt is raised whether this could simply be another flight of the character’s imagination. However, although no sure element is offered to the reader so as to confirm one hypothesis over another, it would appear that the novel as a whole fundamentally contradict Judy Little’s opinion that ‘As words 133

begin to assume and simulate new relationships during his midlife journey, Larry also grows into a relationship with his family and his clients [...] Larry’s world comes together as his language does’ (1995, in UOD, 70). Indeed, as I hope will become clear later, Larry’s near-death experience renders him alien to his waking and social life, obliging him to live in this world as a split subject, continually shifting between his outer/social life and the other inner life which he began at the moment of his death. It is for this reason that Larry’s final demise assumes the same role death held in the second Realist novel Brooke-Rose wrote during the 1950s, The Sycamore Tree, where, in a way thematically similar to what happens in Such, the unity of the characters, after having undergone many splits and divisions, is restored and sealed by death. The Sycamore Tree centres in fact on the question of split identities and psychic divisions which almost all the novel’s subjects experience, in particular, the protagonist Nina, whose initial innocent duplicity (24/5, 98) – implicit in her double origin as half Italian and half Irish – becomes exasperated (153) and leads her to schizophrenia (222). Because of her husband’s love for her, Nina is finally able to restore her identity which, through the typical association of love and death of classical psychology – which also determines Zoltan’s split subjecthood (171) – is sealed upon her by what she perceives as a peaceful and benevolent death. Even though this thematic is not adequately mastered here by the author (and consequently the novel produced is sometimes incongruous and, despite its adherence to Realism, full of improbable and unrealistic situations), it will remain a constant focus of both Brooke-Rose’s Realist and experimental work (in fact, this death-motif is maintained in The Middlemen, published 1961, which ends with the apocalyptic eruption of a volcano). The theme of death, which is foregrounded in many of her novels, thus becomes a very powerful tool for the investigation of the subject’s identity, a way of thematising and dealing metaphorically with the issue of absolute identity. However, even though this motif is particularly present in Out (centred on the terminal malady which affects the Colourless), and Such (focused on the clinical death of the character), it also underlies the narrative of Verbivore, where the ending is equally ambiguous, the reader left unsure whether or not the novel expresses an apocalyptic vision of the end of humanity as a whole. 134

Verbivore (the novel) ends in fact with what seems to be a second and definitive Verbivore (the phenomenon), but because the very last line of the text announces the death of Decibel (196), it seems to point not only to a definitive interruption of wave communication, but to a more general extinction of the human race. Given that Decibel measures and consumes all human noise (177), and should therefore still be able to survive in the absence of the mass-media broadcasts by feeding on face to face human conversations (19) and even on mere thoughts of noise (20), her final death seems to point to an apocalyptic end of all human thought, which could only correspond to a sudden extinction of humanity. Furthermore, because this ambiguity also affects the other fundamental uncertainty posed at the end of the novel, that is whether the talking stones – which according to Zab need information as human beings need oxygen – might re-open the channels of waves (195), what is at stake seems to be the survival of two entire species. Whilst in all other novels by Brooke-Rose, every doubt which is aroused in the reader’s mind is very precisely defined, in this novel the ambiguity which the apocalyptic hypothesis presupposes seems somehow accidental and determined by the general incongruence of Decibel’s character who, on her death on the last page, seems to have lost the attributes which defined her character throughout the novel (namely the ability to feed on all human noise). It is Brooke-Rose’s usual kind of ambiguity, however, which also distinguishes Xorandor, where more than one mystery is maintained throughout the novel. In the first instance, the reason why the talking stone decided to break its silence is never completely clarified: was it to warn man of the syntactical error he had made when programming Xor7 (192)? To warn the human race of the dangers of nuclear energy (193)? Or was it only because the time had come for it to express itself in the language it had been listening to for thousands of years? As well as the ecological reasons that might justify Xorandor’s breaking its silence, we might in fact also consider a linguistic reason, as Xorandor’s development (obviously assuming that the stone wasn’t only pretending not to know English), seems to follow the same steps which determine the human process of learning a second language. In this sense, the difficulties Xorandor has in handling English pronouns (16/7) and abstract and humorous expressions (87), could be read as paralleling the difficulties that both the learners of a first and second language 135

experience with the personal pronouns (reflexives in particular) and with figurative speech. It has actually been demonstrated that both the child and the learner of a second language first acquire the rules of the basic order of words, then slowly learn to comprehend more sophisticated structures depending on factors such as the frequency with which a structure is heard, its grammatical complexity, the adequacy of the linguistic surrounding and the possibility of interaction. Xorandor’s case could therefore be read as a confirmation of the hypothesis formulated by various studies such as Carroll’s (1967) on the importance of a natural linguistic surrounding and on the fundamental role that interaction plays in the learning process, for it is only when Xorandor interacts with others that its English improves. In addition, we might ascribe Xorandor’s attitude towards promises (147, 181) to the Principle of Here-and-Now which, providing an extralinguistic and concrete referent, researchers such as Newport, Gleitman and Gleitman (1977) indicated as determinant for the acquisition of both a first and a second language: a broken promise could in fact be read as a figurative use of speech which requires, in order to be understood, the development of the learner’s ‘processing centre’ and his/her encyclopaedia. Alternatively, Xorandor’s attitude towards promises could be seen as what researchers such as Weinreich (1953) and Haugen (1953) termed interference, that is the influence that habits and mechanisms acquired during learning the first language (in the case of Xorandor its rigorous computer language) have on the new structures of the second language. The reason why Xorandor broke its silence could therefore be the fact that, by the time the twins found it, it had gained enough linguistic maturity to begin to express itself in English after the period of silence which for example Postovosky (1974, 1977), Gary (1975) and Swaffer and Woodruff (1978) demonstrated renders the acquisition of both first and second language easier. The reason why it decided to address the twins in particular, and hence learnt to use expressions such as ‘jumping nukes’ (50/1), could be that this ‘youngster’ (185) takes what it perceives to be beings of the same age as its reference, as Labov (1972) and Milon (1975) demonstrated most children do. More fundamental than the reason why Xorandor broke its silence, however, is, of course, the mystery enveloping its supposedly Martian origin, an idea which insinuates itself in everybody’s mind even before the chemical analysis of Xorandor’s sample (which it faked by altering 136

the isotopic composition of the strobe the scientists were going to analyse) confirmed the level of radioactivity which it would have absorbed during its long journey through space (180). However, when Xorandor tells the twins its second story, according to which the talking stone came not from Mars at all but was born on Earth, where its race had existed for millions of years feeding on natural radiation (185), its supposed Martian origin is exposed to be only ‘A playful, or logical, confirmation, or even interpretation, of an expectation’ (181), only ‘A great courtesy […] As mothers with children, and sometimes women with their men’ (190), a new theory which, in spite of being posited as the Truth by the twins (180, 184), is never confirmed in the novel, the doubt remaining that Xorandor might have told another lie (180, 199, 210). Having decided not to tell anybody the Truth, and knowing for sure that two of Xorandor’s offspring would remain on Earth silently neutralising warheads forever, in the end Zab and Jip make a solemn promise to delete all the files they have been writing for the whole length of the text (211), and the novel ends with a prolepsis which remains outside the narrative. Consequently, at the end of Xorandor, not only is the reader left unsure about the real origin of the talking stone, but also with the suspicion that the Xorandor affair might not be concluded after all: as Xorandor once told the twins, only time would tell whether it had told further lies or spoke the Truth (196), and it is only with the publication of Verbivore four years later, that the external prolepsis is finally developed, and the reader discovers that Jip broke his promise by keeping a copy, symptomatically marked with an X, of everything he and Zab wrote (52). However, although some of the ambiguities which marked Xorandor are clarified – the reader now knows for sure that Xorandor’s offspring are still active (Verbivore, 105) – Verbivore never resolves the fundamental uncertainties regarding the origin of the talking stone, and the twins’ uncertainty about the truthfulness of Xorandor’s second version of its story is in fact posited here more radically.15 As a consequence of the ambiguity which characterises BrookeRose’s works and the impossibility of deciding what belongs to the possible world and what to its subworld, all her novels could therefore be 15

Pp. 45, 47, 60/1, 146.

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described as what Umberto Eco calls Open Works, in which the ‘inferential walks’ all text induces the reader to embark on (1979, 117) – that is the formulation of suppositions as to the changes which the occurrence of an event in the narrative might originate – are multiplied, and all the hypotheses the reader might formulate make the narrative coherent (1979, 121).16 In Brooke-Rose’s works, the habit of the reader to formulate hypotheses gets actually frustrated and simultaneously overstimulated, in so far as, as soon as the reader formulates a certain hypothesis in relation to the development of the narrative, there is a twist which exposes it as either false or uncertain. In addition, because her novels often present the reader with alternative versions of the same event and repetitive descriptions which, through the modification of a small detail, point to an equally plausible Reality, the elements provided in the text might equally support different hypotheses among which no one can be said to be ‘truer’ than any other. Thanks to Brooke-Rose’s elimination of the narrator, the author is able to reject the linear/chronological organisation of the traditional novel by creating narratives which are organised more on the basis of metaphorical correspondences and in which the description of what happened next is replaced by a description of what might have happened, by simultaneous descriptions of different stories or by several versions of the same event. However, because the repetitions we find in BrookeRose’s texts are not, most of the time, exact replicas of the original segment, but introduce barely perceptible variations in which usually only a minor detail is changed, it often becomes impossible to categorise these segments as repetitive, singulative or iterative.17 Consequently, if on one level the repetition of the same textual segments clarifies the text for the reader, on another level, because, as Culler says, we can always make the meaningless meaningful by producing an appropriate context, 16

17

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The phrase ‘open work’, which was the title of Eco’s book of 1962, indicates fictional works in which ‘in spite of the many possible interpretations, one evokes the other, so that every interpretation does not exclude but reinforce the others’ (1979, 58). In his study of narrative frequency Genette identifies various types of segments: singulative (when the narrative describes ‘n’ times, what occurred ‘n’ times in the diegesis), repetitive (in which what happened once is narrated ‘n’ times), and iterative (in which what happened ‘n’ times in the diegesis, is narrated only once) (1972, 145/8).

the repetitive patterning of the narrative can be partially naturalised by assuming the mental instability of the central consciousness. In Out, for example, the malady that the central character contracts from the radiation he absorbs during the ‘displacement’ – which makes him and all the other Colourless of the novel sick, thus turning the Coloured population into the hegemonic race – not only makes him physically weak, but also alters the way his mind works, the way he perceives time, space, the discourses he is hit by, and so on. His confusion therefore works as a distortive and deforming filter affecting his perception of Reality: being obsessed with irrelevant details (just like the soldier in Robbe-Grillet’s Le Labyrinthe), he repetitively describes these matters throughout the narrative,18 and being unable to discern what is Real and what is not, he offers alternative versions of the same event, thus preventing the reader from determining what actually happened in the diegesis. These repetitions and different versions of the same event, however, find their justification on many other levels, as they can also be explained by invoking Brooke-Rose’s reaction against Realism, her reader-oriented position and her willingness to reactivate old formulas and demonstrate the metaphorical nature of all discourse. Similarly, in Such, the words and descriptions of what Larry sees during his journey are repeated throughout the novel, and because he continually alternates between ‘this world’ and ‘the other’, these references to the after-life are inserted in the new context of his waking life. The reverse, however, is also true, and in the same way that during the night elements from a person’s waking life are inserted in the new context of his/her dreams, by the end of the novel the reader recognises that some of the elements which first made their appearance in Larry’s description of the after-life actually derive from the social life he led prior to his death.19 However, while in Brooke-Rose’s first two experimental novels the repetitions of textual segments can be naturalised by assuming a mentally sick character, with Between the author begins to 18

19

For example the copulating flies, the table in his kitchen (15), the gruel he is brought (16/7), the Settlement where he lives (20), and the house of Mrs. Mgulu (25). For example the ‘primitive jazz’ played by Jonas is the same which his son Martin used to listen to (350), and the name of Larry’s planet-daughter (Potato Head) derives from the name of one of his colleagues (266).

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explore a motif which will be completely exploited only in Amalgamemnon and Verbivore, that is the redundancy of the information to which each individual is exposed in his/her everyday life. In the particular case of Between, the repetition of entire passages finds its justification at the level of the narrative in the fact that the information given to the passengers boarding a plane and the security measures are always the same, that the questions asked by Customs officers never vary, that everything delivered by the Media,20 despite each change of language, always coincides, and that the time is always filled with ‘travel-talk’, which most of the time consists of nothing but overused formulas and monotonous remarks. Despite the thematic value which the repetition of the same segments assumes, we cannot however ignore that it also becomes, in all of Brooke-Rose’s novels, the target of the text itself, in the same way that the importance given to detail also coincides with the conscious means she adopts to shatter readers’ expectations and change their perspectives.

2.3. Writerly Texts The introduction of a large amount of detail which the reader does not expect, is one of the means that Brooke-Rose uses, in parallel with the nouveaux romanciers, to change her readers’ habits and make them abandon the passivity implicit in the Realist narrative – where the only function of detail was to make them recognise the social, historical and cultural contexts – in order to actively participate in the production of meaning, thus demonstrating the textuality of all descriptions of Reality which, because of its familiarity, is not perceived as text. A few years after the publication of Brooke-Rose’s first experimental novels, Barthes would state, in relation to the fiction produced in France after the War, that in the modern text ‘everything is significant’ (1970, in OC2, 589), and readers are now obliged not to skip anything, 20

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Whether it is the news (418, 498), advertisements (419, 432/3), or horoscopes (401, 476).

because if they do, they miss the point of the whole work. This is particularly true for Brooke-Rose’s text, where slightly altered versions of the same descriptions come up again and again throughout each novel, and where meaning is produced exactly in the almost imperceptible variations that every repetition presents. The reader must therefore be attentive not to what s/he expects to see, but to what is actually happening on the page, and must let him/herself be caught up by the author’s language: the meaning of the text can in fact only be produced in the encounter between the text and the reader, who now is not only expected to receive passively what the text has to tell him/her, but is asked to produce the meaning of the work, to write (if only in his/her mind) the text itself. Hence, just as in the French novel of the post-war period, where the reader is put at the centre of the creative act and faced with responsibilities s/he must share with the author so as to reach an understanding of Reality and of him/herself, so in Brooke-Rose’s experimental novels the author’s declared object is to wake readers up and teach them to read (1989, UOD, 35), by forcing them to abandon the effortless search for the pleasure of recognition for the more sophisticated pleasure of discovery. The narratives of authors like Brooke-Rose therefore stimulate readers to become the constructors of these works, and consequently they anticipate the central role the reader would attain in the theoretical discussion led by authors such as Booth, Eco, Iser, and Riffaterre among others, in which, despite their differences in approach and degree of freedom left to him/her in the interpretative process, the reader – previously marginalised in favour either of the author (before the New Criticism) or the text (in the New Criticism) – has been granted a primary position in the interpretative and critical process. As discussed in the Introduction, the importance given to the position of the receiver, to which Brooke-Rose gives a voice in her novels and on which the theoreticians I mentioned above focus (to whom she directly refers to in Textermination),21 was also fundamental to the 21

The reader of Textermination seems to be a compound of Iser’s Implied Reader, who actively fills in the gaps present in the text by actualising what the text leaves indeterminate (1978), Riffaterre’s Super Reader, who undertakes a second retroactive reading in order to organise the various clues the text offers into a coherent whole (1978), and Booth’s Ideal Reader, who continually encounters patterns that suggest coherence (1979).

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Structuralist enterprise, which posited itself as a general theory of reading and, by postulating that the possibility of meaning is determined by unconscious rules, rejected the notion of ‘subject’. This, among other consequences discussed below, strongly affected the role of the author, in so far as, if the author is simply reassembling pre-existing elements (the Structuralist notion of intertextuality), if the speech acts human beings accomplish are only possible because there exists a series of systems that the subject does not control, and if the author can create his/her work only because there exists a system of conventions which makes the creation of that work possible, delimiting and determining the possible varieties of discourse, then the author’s control over his/her material is very much undermined. Not only this, but because at the moment when s/he begins to write the author becomes him/herself a product of language, in the text – and, because everything is assumed to be text, in every utterance – it is language which speaks (Heidegger, 1957, 161; Barthes, 1968, 492, Benveniste, 1966, 260). The author having lost his/her total control over the meaning of his/her work, the process of the production of meaning passes to the reader, who doesn’t simply consume or impose a meaning, but participates in its production by activating the connections and the possible meanings the text offers which may be quite independent from the author’s intention. Although the notion of the death of the author as described by Structuralism and the unconscious structures it posited as the origin of the work have been rejected by many authors such as Brooke-Rose – who, in reality, most of the time are very conscious of what they are doing – the notion of textual production which Barthes elaborated in 1970, and the idea that the structure the author produces is designated in such a way so as to go on transforming itself, is fundamental for the understanding of works such as Brooke-Rose’s, where the web of meanings expands endlessly. The role of the reader is therefore to appreciate the plurality of the meanings of the text, that is the connections – sometimes unexpected – that the language of the text activates. Consequently, Barthes describes the reduction of the text to a single and univocal meaning as a castration, and the practice of reading as a tireless process of approximation and revision in which the reader first finds and names the meanings, then unnames them in order to re-name them in the light of new elements found in the text (1970, in OC2, 562), determining the hermeneutic delay for 142

which the insoluble ambiguities posed by Brooke-Rose’s novels stand as an example. The meaning of the text is therefore thought to be found in the sum of all the different readings, and it is by letting him/herself get caught up in the plurality of the text, and by adopting the ‘plural reading’ Barthes described in 1970 (in OC2, 564), that the reader engages in a practical collaboration with the author and becomes him/herself a producer of the text and of the discourse. As Italo Calvino states in ‘Cibernetica e fantasmi’ (1967), where he posits the death of the author proclaimed by Barthes in 1968 and considers the possibility of creating machines which – by combining pre-existing elements – would supplant the author in all his/her capacities, at this stage, the modes of reading become determinant; the reader is responsible for literature to explicate its critical force, and this can happen independently from the author’s intentions (in 1980, 180).

Despite the interest which various theoreticians took in the figure of the reader, it was however the kind of narrative practised by the nouveaux romanciers and by authors such as Brooke-Rose that, for Culler, first stimulated the reader’s participation in the production of meaning. By demonstrating the impossibility of discussing their works in traditional critical terms, and by showing that the discontinuities and the difficulties of these texts became amenable only if the reader assumed a central role, these authors stimulated the theoretical interest in the reader during the last few decades (1983, 38). It doesn’t seem implausible therefore to say that the kind of text Brooke-Rose began to experiment with after 1964 was that which Barthes would call ‘writerly’,22 where text and criticism are confounded, and which resists the imposition of defined meanings, opposes the 22

The French version of this phrase was introduced by Barthes in S/Z (1970, in OC2, 558), where he first posited the distinction between ‘texte lisible’ (the vast majority of our fundamentally representational literature) and ‘texte scriptible’, the models of which are on the contrary productive. Barthes enlarges here on an idea which he already anticipated in ‘La mort de l’auteur’ (1968), namely the impossibility, in ‘writing’ and the writerly text, of answering the question ‘Who speaks?’ In order to be plural and in order to let language speak, the text should eliminate all indications of origin and authorship because, as Barthes states, ‘The more the origin is nowhere to be found, the more the text is plural’ (1970, in OC2, 582).

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reader’s attempts to compose these meanings into a stable hierarchy, and by constructing itself as a web where new meanings do not develop vertically (i.e. hierarchically), but are created by associations which develop horizontally, denies readers the power to arrest the play of meaning. In an attempt to challenge the reader’s models of intelligibility and reveal that which readers assume to be natural is actually a product, the writerly text therefore resists interpretative reduction, and the tension between ‘lisible’ and ‘scriptible’ found in the text, shows how the naturalisation readers pursue is an arbitrary imposition of meaning and that the reading process depends on relative models of intelligibility. Although some of the implications of these Barthesian concepts will be discussed in the following section, I think that the criticism of Brooke-Rose’s novels I have made thus far already justifies my designation of them as an attempt to create what would later be termed writerly texts. Although the creation of a ‘world’ is, generally speaking, in opposition to the idea of the writerly (as any conception of ‘writerly’ relies on the linguistic nature of the text), because the worlds BrookeRose’s novels construct are, as we have seen, ‘possible’, they overtly posit themselves as a construct of words, and since they continually resist naturalisation and, through the profound ambiguity that permeates them, the imposition of an unambiguous meaning, they can be defined as writerly. Brooke-Rose’s technique and her elimination of the narrator thus become the primary source of resistance, from which derive all other aspects that make these into writerly texts. In fact, since the identification of a narrator and the possibility of designating him/her a proper name are the principal ways of naturalising fiction, the elimination of the narrator impedes the text’s complete naturalisation, preventing the reader from recuperating other fundamentals of the text: as we have seen, the discourse of the central consciousness in Out and Such does not enable us to determine which events occurred in the novel (the true/false opposition Barthes mentions), which characters are ‘actual’ in the possible world, which words have been spoken and by whom (the Barthesian origin of the enunciation), and so on. In the characters’ discourse, different parts of other people’s and their past speeches are brought together without ever making clear where, when, or from what source they derive: different discourses are juxtaposed, extracted from their postulated original context and put into 144

a new one so as to create new connections and expand, just as in Barthes’ plural text, the web of meanings. Hence, just as Ezra Pound once wrote I should like to invent some kind of typographical dodge which would force every reader to stop and reflect for five minutes (or five hours), to go back to the facts mentioned and think over their significance for himself (quoted by Brooke-Rose, 1971, 258),

so Brooke-Rose tries to oblige the reader to follow closely what is going on in front of him/her. Consequently, the difficulty of her texts, such as the insertion of technical jargons into the narrative, the use of different languages and many of the typographical devices she exploits and which, although fundamental in Thru, were first attempted as early as Out (58), all assume a function similar to that of Pound’s ideograms, and are some of the devices she uses to make her readers react and to participate in the writing of the text. The Case of Thru The work by Brooke-Rose which represents her finest example of writerly text is undoubtedly Thru, where she tries to overcome the split between the two people she had then become – ‘teacher and scholar and critic on the one hand, creative writer on the other’ (1977, 135) – by attempting to bring them together in one textual act. Although by inserting early in the text the words ‘There should be placards saying: Danger. You are now entering the Metalinguistic Zone. All access forbidden except for Prepared Consumers with special permits from the Authorities’ (629), Brooke-Rose clearly indicates the metatextuality of her novel and ironically admits its difficulty, she nonetheless insists on the necessity to write it, as she felt that it was only by joining her two sides that the tension between them could be overcome (1989, in UOD, 36). The result is a very demanding text in which the reader encounters textual blocks on several levels: the theories to which the text refers (often anonymously), the ontological ambiguity enfolding the characters and the novel’s world, and many typographical devices, in particular various verbal icons whose sole function would be, according 145

to McHale, ‘to focus attention on the ontological cut: on the one side of the cut, the world projected by the words; on the other side, the physical reality of inkshapes on paper’ (1987, 184). However, although this dimension is undoubtedly present and justified by Brooke-Rose’s effort to demonstrate how everything is language, not only do these typographical devices require the reader’s participation on a physical level (as s/he has to manipulate the book, in order to read the lines printed upside down, for example), but their decipherment also brings additional meanings to the narrative and renders, as with the best writerly texts, the practical participation of the reader essential. Further to this, as I have shown above, Brooke-Rose centres her entire novel on one of the main features of the plural text as described by Barthes, namely the impossibility to answer the question ‘Who speaks?’ (1968, in OC2, 491; 1970, in OC2, 582), and this inability is closely connected to the Barthesian notion of ‘the death of the author’ which is explicitly introduced in the novel (693). Just as in Barthes as soon as the author begins to write s/he loses his/her identity and simply becomes the one who says ‘I’, the subject who only exists in the speech-act that defines him/her and who exists as such only in so far as s/he speaks (Barthes, 1966b, in 1984, 191), so in Thru, in which the notion of character as a discrete individual is dismantled, the authors/narrators introduced in the text are, from the very beginning, simply linguistic subjects. However, their linguistic nature is justified not only by the fact that they posit themselves as the subjects of the enunciation, but also because they are the linguistic constructions of someone else. Consequently, the lack which in Barthes lies behind the ‘I’ is asserted more strongly in Brooke-Rose, in so far as behind the various ‘I’s present in the text there is both the emptiness idiosyncratic to each subject and the emptiness characteristic of a character as such, behind which, s/he being fictional, there cannot be a person but a mere construction of words. The various narrators of Thru being mere linguistic signs, what speaks is therefore language itself, and just as for Barthes ‘By deleting the writer’s signature, death founds the truth of the work, which is enigma’ (1966, in OC2, 42), in Thru the mystery of the narrator’s identity remains unsolved. No certain answers will result from the readers’ interrogations, and the enigma of the text – openly posited in the diagram on page 584, where added to Derrida’s ‘trace’ and ‘architrace’ (1967, 142) we can reconstruct ‘story’, ‘mystery’, ‘text’, and the Barthesian 146

‘enigma’ – will never be resolved. This enigma is maintained throughout the text thanks to the hermeneutic delay Barthes would describe in 1970, but while in his analysis of Balzac’s Sarrasine the enigma is finally resolved, in Thru the continuous game of lures, misunderstandings and partial answers only leads to a final re-positing of the initial question to which no answer has been given. The hermeneutic delay – which is for example represented in the play of brackets that we find in the text (603) – therefore corresponds to a continuous postponement of the Truth, which remains forever unreachable. It is precisely the tension between revealing and not revealing, giving a hint and then demonstrating how it led to a fallacious conclusion, creating something Realistic and then showing that it was simply words on a page, repeating the same words and phrases in different contexts so as to frustrate the reader’s pleasure of recognition, that Brooke-Rose relentlessly upholds throughout the novel. Since the mystery will never be unveiled, the delay found in Brooke-Rose can therefore be seen in close connection to the notion of the deferral of meaning of language which Derrida proposed in Of Grammatology, where ‘an infinite chain ineluctably multiplying the supplementary mediations’ is recognised ‘to produce the sense of the very thing they defer’ (1976, 157). Because this notion of deferral is close to the idea of castration inherent in language – the fact that when we use language ‘we are just taking bits and pieces of reality’ (BrookeRose, 1976, 11), which Brooke-Rose posits as the focus of her novel – it supports the criticism of Structuralism she accomplishes in this text. The Truth being constantly deferred – lost in the play of ‘The show within the show’ (587), ‘The portrait within the portrait’ (602), ‘the text within the text, the myth within the myth’ (608), ‘and so on ad neurotic infinitum’ (631) – the enigma of the work is therefore maintained. At the end of the chain, then, the reader does not find the secret of the novel or the person of the author, but the void which any structure presupposes (705), the lack which founds any discourse (675), the absence which for Barthes lays behind the ‘I’ of the person who says ‘I’ (1966, in OC2, 47), the blind spot or zero-degree through which, for Barthes, the subject and his/her writing has to pass if literary language is to reach the naturality of the social languages (1953, in OC1, 179). By suggesting the notion of a ‘void’ as substituting the core which was supposed to lay at the heart of the narrative, not only does Brooke147

Rose call into question the notion of a fundamental structure that Structuralism set out to investigate, but also, in practical terms, she creates a narrative which cannot be accounted for in terms of Structuralist theory, thus invalidating the idea of an elementary structure of signification. She thus undermines the claims made by the Structuralists to be able to uncover a fundamental structure for each narrative, and shows the reader how the core of the narrative is non-existent: behind the text there is nothing more than more text, in so far as just as each character is revealed to be someone else’s linguistic creature, so the various theories the novel plays with are fundamentally revealed as simply words on a page. Hence, if by having Larissa state ‘one has to pass through it [Structuralism] to understand modern linguistics’ (662), Brooke-Rose acknowledges the importance of Structuralism, and by making her character affirm that ‘Language is all we have to apprehend reality’ (642), and that even when we touch on the essence of things it is always through language (640), she defends a key Structuralist premise, she simultaneously highlights her suspicion of the over-systematisation of the Structuralist enterprise (662). Brooke-Rose does in fact set out to expose its limitations, showing how the Structuralist assertion of the existence of a universal structure is no less dogmatic (and no less in contradiction with the relativity of all Truths claimed by the Structuralists themselves), than the claims made by science and other disciplines to unveil fundamental Truths, and in order to exorcise the risk of taking all the theories she encountered once she moved to France too seriously, she develops an increasingly amused attitude towards theory in general, as exemplified by her humorous rendering of Barthes’ notion of the ‘death of the author’ in fairy-tale form (605), and her transformation of Barthes’ praise for the writerly multiplication of voices into a pseudo-religious commandment which echoes the words God spoke to Adam and Eve (637). Just as in the best plural texts, in Thru the reader is confronted with an ever-increasing number of voices whose origins remain ambiguous: not only is the reader unable to identify the narrator who is speaking at any particular time, but, more fundamentally, the novel plays with many theories whose sources are not always identified, as, while giving many clues to the reader by having her characters recommend to one another

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they read various authors,23 at other times either the novel refers to theories or directly quotes passages from particular books without identifying them. Hence, just like the plural text, Brooke-Rose’s novel becomes a multivalent text constituted by a series of quotations without quotation marks, in which property is transgressed (Barthes, 1970, in OC2, 584). Consequently, the notion of intertextuality – exemplified by the ‘text within the text which generates another text’ (631) – becomes here fundamental, and is therefore given an iconic representation in the central image of the driving mirror, which represents the idea that the author is simply rehandling preceding texts and that, just as the driver has to check in the mirror what is happening behind the car in order to proceed safely forward, so the author, to advance, has to check and internalise his/her past. The image of the mirror is actually fundamental in this novel: it is evoked in the title (reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Through the LookingGlass, 1871), it opens and closes the novel, and is at the basis of the whole play with the characters’ ontological instability. The alternation and reversal between the role of author and that of character – which reminds the reader how s/he too has to reverse the roles and actively participate in the writing of the text – could in fact be read as a game of mirrors which perpetuates the creation both of the meaning and of the text: in Thru, language creates in fact more language, and the deconstructive force of the novel (namely the fact that the text constructs itself just to destroy itself as it develops), becomes its generative force, leading not to the destruction of the text but to the creation of a different text. If Thru can be defined as a deconstructive novel however, it is not simply because of this cycle of construction and deconstruction, but also because more fundamentally it represents the perfect deconstructive text in the Derridean sense of the term in so far as, in a further game of mirrors, by reversing the roles between literature and literary criticism, Brooke-Rose’s novel operates the reversal of roles and hierarchies Derrida posited as the aim of all deconstruction.24 Consequently, if the 23 24

Amongst others: Irigaray (631), Kristeva (647), Lacan (650), Bakhtin (711). ‘Deconstruction […] must […] practice an overturning of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system’ (1982, 329).

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critical theories the novel plays with are used to create the narrative, at the same time the narrative produces the criticism of the theories themselves, and the novel becomes the object of its own criticism no more than criticism becomes the object of the novel. By playing with the theories it refers to in terms of mirrored images, Brooke-Rose’s novel therefore subverts the theories themselves, exposes their limitations and demonstrates the linguistic nature (and hence the relativity) of the narratological theories on which the novel’s existence fundamentally depends. However, in Thru not only does the driving mirror reflect, as usual, the reverse of the original, but also, because of the anti-glare device we must assume it is provided with, it has the peculiarity of displacing and distorting the image it reflects.25 Hence, just as the mirror of Lacan’s mirror phase, as we will shortly see, provides the individual with a false perception of his/her self, so Brooke-Rose’s mirror offers a displaced and decentred reflection, and it is precisely because of this displacement effect that the icons miming the ‘desegmentation’ discussed during a faculty meeting (615, 734) should also be read as a mirror image in which the left side is mirrored, and slightly displaced, on the right. It is in consideration of these mirror images that this novel, until this moment analysed in terms of circularity, should in my opinion really be read in relation to a spiral, as this figure best represents the imperfect coincidence of the object and its reflection which is fundamental to Thru. Hence, the spiral best represents the structure at the heart of Thru not only because both meaning and text are continually created thanks to the many shifts in narrative levels which make it impossible for the text to go back exactly to where it began, thereby leaving the work open, but also because – as the various segments which are turned from positive into negative (592, 690) demonstrate – even though the text seems to repeat itself, the paradigms of the original are slightly altered. In this light, then, I would submit that typographical devices such as the printing of parts of the text from right to left (599, 669, 741) or upside down (605), and the visual arrangements of the text according to which the letters floating on the page are not ordered in circles as it initially seems, but in spirals (618/9), not only stand for Brooke-Rose’s insistence 25

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For example, in the diagram on page 579 the two eyes become four and this second pair of eyes is reflected as if located near the hairline.

on the book’s materiality, but also (and more importantly) function as the reflected images in which the original gets displaced and subverted. Metaphorical Representation of the Text’s Resistance Although the tension between the text and the reader, founded on the ambiguity which stands for the texts’ opposition to the arbitrary imposition of an univocal meaning is fundamental to all Brooke-Rose’s novels, it is perhaps best represented in Textermination, where BrookeRose takes intertextuality further by not only introducing sections of other authors’ texts into the narrative, but also complex structures like whole characters who are ‘quoted’, just like texts, without identifying their source. The whole novel is thus focused precisely on the relationship between texts and readers, and as early as page 26 the reader is put at the centre of the narrative and introduced as the one who takes pleasure in the ‘illogics’ of the text, and ‘is condemned to textuality, that is, to making the apparently incoherent coherent, reducing the aggressivity of the text’ (36). Consequently, not only does this novel constitute a brilliant example of the text’s resistance, frustrating readers’ efforts to unveil all its mysteries and their attempts to identify all the fictional characters they are confronted with, but because the various characters stand, in the final section of the novel, for the resistant text also in the eyes of the interpreters and the rescue-teams who cannot unveil the mystery embodied in the text (179), it also represents the text’s resistance internal to the narrative. Even though following her encounter with literary theory, the production of writerly texts becomes a conscious practice on BrookeRose’s part, determining the nature of Thru and the novels of the second experimental tetralogy,26 yet the preceding novels already share some of these writerly characteristics, and in Out, for example, the determination 26

In Xorandor for example, the talking stone represents the text which, by refusing to talk to the scientists and by blurring the issue of its origin, resists the imposition of meaning attempted by Zab, Jip and all the other ‘readers’, while its fake Martian origin should be read as a representation of the arbitrariness entailed by the imposition of a univocal meaning.

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of the origin of the enunciation is very difficult as the central consciousness, anticipating Barthes’ words, admits ‘it is difficult to tell who’s talking in this type of dialogue’ (63). Hence, although Textermination is the most concerned with the representation of the relationship between text and reader, her previous novels also dramatise this tension, and in Out, for example, the central character – who continually tries to discover the Truth which supposedly lies behind language, the ‘secret’ behind the layers of words, the ultimate story behind the story – stands for the reader who tries to solve the mystery that s/he assumes lies at the heart of the narrative. Similarly, Larry in Such assumes the role of the reader during his journey in the after-life: the reader who does not ‘read’ and cannot ‘see’ what is happening on the page, the reader who receives an omen but is not able to translate it (285) and who, by simply holding onto the parameters that a long tradition has accustomed him/her to, fails to understand what this fantastic experience (representing the process of reading a novel) offers him/her. If these characters stand for the reader, however, they more fundamentally stand for the text itself which fights against the reader’s bid to strip it naked and reveal its core: the character of Out remains in fact unexplained by, and inexplicable to, the system depicted in the novel, and resists the attempts at integration and manipulation enacted by the ‘sane’ society from which he is finally excluded, and in Such, once Larry comes back to life, he is treated as text which is assumed hides a fundamental enigma. The recurrent question that every reader inscribed in the text (his wife, his children, his friends, the journalists) asks of Larry is ‘Don’t you remember anything?’, to which Larry always answers in the negative, claiming that he has no story to tell (267). Larry thus opposes his ‘readers’ with the same kind of resistance with which he originally opposed Something as soon as he arrived in the after-life, and the opaqueness (217), the atmospheric density (ibid.), and the matter resistance (245) which Something laments when she realises that she is not able to get through to Larry (261) is the same resistance and incommunicability that Larry opposes, as a text, to those who surround him in his waking life (319). These people, similar to the readers of the text and the analyst – to whom Larry refers as ‘the inquisitors’ (245) – try to unveil his mystery and discover the deep structure which 152

Structuralism postulated as the origin of the narrative, but, like the central consciousness in Out and ultimately all the members of the society from which he is excluded, Larry’s wife and the other ‘readers’ will not find the Truth about him, and their search for a fundamental meaning will be frustrated. This is the same frustration confronting readers of modern texts which, in Barthes’ opinion, should be thought of as an onion, a superimposed constructions of skins (of levels, of systems), whose volume contains, finally, no heart, no core, no secret, no irreducible principle, nothing except the very infinity of its envelopes (1971, 1271).

Since all the meanings we impose upon a text are, for Brooke-Rose, an arbitrary construction of our own words, no one reading and no one meaning the reader might find is more valid than any other, and this is why the woman translator of Between comes to represent the resistance of the text. As I will show infra, even though this character stands for a very particular, that is Barthesian, reader and text, she also comes to occupy these positions on a general level, in so far as on the one hand, because of her job as a simultaneous translator, she shares with the reader the position of message receiver and, on the other, she coincides with the text itself not only because she is a creature of language written down by the author Brooke-Rose, but also because she is constituted through and through by the languages to which her job exposes her. She is therefore reduced to the status of a linguistic sign which she continually has to translate from one language into another, and consequently her refusal to declare her loyalty to anyone or anything, and the resistance she opposes those who try to make her commit herself to a single idea (413), stands for the resistance of the text which rejects all imposition of a univocal meaning and refuses to commit itself to any single reading which claims to have unveiled the true sense of the work. Hence, the plurality of meaning which is achieved by the metaphoric associations created by the central characters’ discourse constitutes the tool Brooke-Rose uses to stimulate the reader’s cooperation, to fight against the closure of meaning and, by so doing, to attempt a demonstration of the linguistic nature not only of all texts, but of the whole of Reality. In fact, not only do Brooke-Rose’s novels 153

suggest to the reader that the Reality s/he is accustomed to perceive as precisely defined is actually much more ambiguous than s/he is often prepared to accept, and that the contours which s/he sees as clearly marked are much more blurred, but they also suggest that all definition and unambiguous limitation of Reality corresponds to an arbitrary imposition of meaning generated by the human urge to impose an order on surrounding reality. As I hope this section has demonstrated, because Brooke-Rose’s investigation of the relationship between fiction and reality, language and Truth, is closely linked to her treatment of the relationship between what the reader has been accustomed to perceive as the real self and the linguistic nature of the subject, from her first experimental novel on, Brooke-Rose’s ‘non-narrators’ challenge the very notion of subjecthood that Western tradition has formed for the reader, suggesting the ‘I’ of the person is not a given but is the product of the system of language.

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Section 2: Word-Worlds and the Juxtaposition of Different Languages

Introduction to Section 2

Contrary to the previous chapters, the second section of my work will principally focus on the various ways Brooke-Rose, through the juxtaposition of different languages, exposes the effects of language on the construction of the Real and of all forms of identity. By jostling various languages together, she suggests that all languages, even the most technical and scientific, can and do originate poetic effects, and by exploiting the poetic potential inherent in all languages, she shows how all languages are fundamentally metaphorical. By showing how every description of reality basically corresponds to a metaphorical structuring and a linguistic construction that man uses to make sense of the world, to find a pattern of coherence in the surrounding reality and to attach a meaning to what quite simply is, Brooke-Rose suggests that the Reality which, for example science, history and philosophy have proposed as the only existent, is in actual fact only a description of reality, and as such is subjected to the same linguistic rules governing poetic language. The reality which science claims to have uncovered doesn’t therefore correspond to the ultimate reality which is said to exist behind the layers of human words, but is itself part of the many metaphorical descriptions of reality that humanity has produced since the beginning of history. In her novels, Brooke-Rose thus interrogates the very concept of ‘ultimate reality’ which Western philosophers beginning with Plato have described, and investigates where this ultimate reality might be located. By making the fictional fact of the possible world (analogically representing ultimate reality) indistinguishable from the doubly fictional fact of the characters’ subworlds, and by blurring the distinction between language and reality, Truth and fiction, Brooke-Rose suggests that supposedly true reality cannot be localised anywhere. Hence, while not denying the existence of such a reality, in her novels Brooke-Rose endeavours to demonstrate the impossibility, for human beings, of locating it outside the very language which moulds it, and she denounces

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the claims made by various disciplines to have located it as attempts at coercion. Language, then, covers a very large area in Brooke-Rose, and is identified not only with the verbal language which provides human beings with a basic means of communication and which, in a narrative, turns everything and everyone into a linguistic construct, but it also encompasses all cognitive processes that human beings have at their disposal to perceive, absorb and remember surrounding reality. Language thus corresponds to the fundamental mechanism which permits the imposition of a structure and an order on reality, which is therefore perceived not in its totality, but as fragmented and, as Brooke-Rose suggests, castrated (1976, 11/2), and the process through which the individual – from the very moment of perception – structures and makes sense of the fragmentary Reality that surrounds him/her, makes reality more manageable and reduce it to human proportions, adjusting it to each individual’s capabilities, and necessarily falsifying it. As Brooke-Rose expresses in ‘Self-Confrontation and the Writer’, ‘each world is always too much for us, we absorb its totality by reducing it to size, our size, a size we can grasp. We make a model of it. We are all theoreticians’ (1977, 132). As a consequence of the fact that Reality corresponds to a model which each individual constructs for him/herself, a theoretical construction capable of being continually manipulated and altered, all universal Truth is denied. As I will show below, in BrookeRose’s novels Truth is in fact presented as a mere working hypothesis, a theory which, even though people have to act as if it were true in order to function in society, remains nonetheless unproven; a theory at the basis of which, as Kurt Gödel expressed in 1932 in the theorem referred to explicitly in Xorandor (88), there is always some element unproved and axiomatically assumed. In this section, I will therefore show how Brooke-Rose endeavours to demonstrate that the claimed scientificity through which various disciplines try to impose themselves as the depositories of Truth and their version of Reality as natural, is simply an attempt to colonise the Other, fundamentally to impose onto him/her the identity they wish, and have that identity accepted as natural. After a chapter of transition – in which the Lacanian theory of identity and the Barthesian concept of the war of languages (fundamental to Brooke-Rose’s fiction) are introduced – the chapters which constitute this section will therefore focus on the 158

way Brooke-Rose’s novels suggest the fallibility of the Truth provided respectively by science, classical psychology, critical theory and history, and will show how, once the Reality these disciplines propose as truthful is exposed as the result of the language spoken by the various systems, also the identity which the individual assumes in the context of his/her Reality, is finally revealed as a linguistic construction which is forever changing.

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Chapter 3: Stories of Identity

As I hope the first section of my work has demonstrated, Brooke-Rose’s characters can be identified with creatures of language not only because they are written down by Christine Brooke-Rose as the fictional characters of a fictional work, but, more fundamentally, similarly to the way in which human beings are determined by the concrete effects that the language spoken by others has on them, they are created by the language they are spoken through and spoken by. It is precisely on the idea that the ‘I’ of the person is not a given, but only begins to exist when the individual is addressed by (and puts him/herself in relation to) Others, that the whole of Lacanian psychology is based, and although Brooke-Rose’s notion that we are born into language long predates her involvement with Lacan, I think it would be useful to remember, if only briefly, the fundamental concepts of his theory.

3.1. Lacan’s Theory of Identity Lacan developed a general philosophy of the genesis of the individual as a human being by applying the linguistic models developed by Structuralism to the data of psychoanalysis, in particular to Freud’s theory of the unconscious. The notion of sign as composed by a signifier and a signified is therefore used to cast light upon the distinction between unconscious and conscious, and the two main processes of displacement and condensation, which for Freud operate in the formations of the unconscious, are assimilated by Lacan to the stylistic figures of, respectively, metaphor and metonymy. Furthermore, in Lacan not only is the unconscious assimilated in its structure to language (as it is composed by a network of signifiers articulated in categories and governed by metaphorical and metonymic relationships of association), but it is also created by language, just as a 161

‘human being’ as such is only born in and because of language. It is in fact only when the individual enters into the Symbolic Order of language that for Lacan s/he can perceive him/herself as a distinct individuality and become a social human being, as opposed to the biological being s/he was born as. In Lacan’s theory, it is therefore language that, providing the mind with an autonomy from the lived experience by replacing it with a sign, allows the subject to register him/her self as a distinctive entity, and provides him/her with the grammatical categories of the personal pronouns which offer a reference for his/her identity. Entry into language and the resolution of the Oedipus complex are therefore what enable the child to become aware of his/her subjectivity and autonomy as a member of society (Lemaire, 1977, 53/4): before the advent of language, the infant subject is trapped in what Lacan calls the Mirror Phase, during which the child, who does not yet perceive him/herself as an individuality, merges and identifies with the Other (whether his/her own reflection in the mirror, another child, or his/her own mother) in an immediate, non-distanced dual relationship which, although it enables the child to perceive his/her body as a totality, cannot provide him/her with subjectivity. As in this phase the child is unable to distinguish him/herself from the Other and registers him/herself in the Other, s/he first articulates the ‘I’ in the realm of alienation (the realm of a de-centred subject which falsely recognises him/herself in what is nothing more than a reflection), and it is only through the insertion of a third term that the subjectivity which the primary narcissistic identification of the Mirror Phase fails to provide the child with, can be achieved. This third term is the Oedipal father, who intervenes in the dual relationship of mother and child distinctive of what Lacan calls the Imaginary, and by imposing his veto on the bipolar union of mother and child, not only deprives the child of the object of desire but, simultaneously, also introduces the child to the three-dimensional register proper to the Symbolic Order of the Family. When the father is recognised as the representative of the Law, the male subject accedes to the paternal metaphor (the father’s speech or ‘name-of-the-father’), and now identifies with the parent of the same sex, thus acquiring his place in the family constellation.1 Language, in particular the accession to the 1

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I will refer to the possible outcomes that the resolution of the Oedipus complex might have in girls in the next chapter.

paternal metaphor, thus becomes the vehicle of ‘a social given, a culture, prohibitions and laws’ (Lemaire, 1977, 54) which, through the symbolic castration operated by the father, activates the transition from lack to desire and a primal division of the subject between unconscious and conscious discourse (respectively the original desire of union with the mother and its sublimation through its replacement by a signifier). This repression of the original desire coincides with a first access to language, and is then followed by another repression, a further division in which the child is not only the ‘he’ of the parents’ dialogue, but, by replacing himself with a symbol, he names himself as the ‘I’ of his own discourse, thus forever alienating himself in language. The unconscious is therefore for Lacan an effect of language; in particular, it is identified with the discourse of the subject’s Other (that which was repressed and which underwent plural divisions) in which the elementary signifiers replace the signified/desire. Hence, because the unconscious itself is constituted by signifiers, the Platonic and Romantic idea of a true self which lies behind the individual’s social ‘I’ is disrupted, in so far as, although it is true that unconscious language is the hidden meaning, the original layer of signs lying beneath all conscious discourse, the elements which, in a chain of multiple displacements from signifier to signifier, will appear in consciousness under multiple layers of signs, are however already symbolic substitutions of a presumed original signified which cannot be placed. Although the Symbolic Order of language effects the distinctions between the self/interior and the Other/exterior, which allow the subject to register him/herself as a distinct individuality in the dialectic of the ‘I’ and the ‘You’, the process of symbolisation simultaneously formalises and fixes the lived experience. Because for Lacan it is language that turns the biological being into a human being provided with an identity, the concept of a true self proper to Western philosphical tradition cannot be any longer sustained, and the supremacy of consciousness and the notion of ‘fundamental identity’ which Western humanist and Cartesian philosophy postulated (already revealed as fallacious by Freud) are exposed as arbitrary constructions. Lacan reveals in fact that the ‘pure signified’ (or Platonic idea) of a human being is from its very beginning inscribed in language and cannot be separated from its signifier, and it is precisely this notion of identity that lies at the heart of Brooke-Rose’s novels. As we shall see in the 163

following chapter, it is particularly in Such that the author explicitly interrogates the Western concept of identity and moves towards what she would later discover to be a Lacanian position, in which the constructed identity of Western tradition is replaced with the idea of a deconstructed identity, one that is constituted by the sum of the many fragments of identity determined by the structures proper to the Symbolic Order, according to which the child is fashioned in order to assume a definite place in the society s/he is recognised as belonging to. Furthermore, in all her novels Brooke-Rose also gives voice to the Lacanian notion that – because the individual is subjected to the Other, because s/he has to fashion him/herself with reference to and, since the Oedipal drama, in rivalry with, the Other, and because s/he has to wait for the Other’s recognition in order to posit him/herself as a subjectivity – every human discourse fundamentally derives from a demand for recognition by the Other, and therefore tends towards aggression and coercion. Finally, she demonstrates Lacan’s idea that, just as the subject is unable to grasp the Truth about him/herself, so any other Truth is unattainable, as it is always mediated by a language which reduces its essence to symbols. Since for her ‘no discourse is innocent’ (1981, 9), Brooke-Rose acknowledges, in her work, that any claim the various Systems which fashion society make to be delivering the Truth, is nothing but an attempt to achieve hegemony over the other discourses, and this remains one of the central notions of her novels. Here she stages in fact the way in which the languages spoken by the various systems depicted in her texts try to achieve supremacy over the other languages the individual might have been exposed to, and because from the very beginning of her career as an experimental writer, she posits this notion at the centre of her fiction, we can in my opinion retroactively apply to her work the concept of ‘The War of Languages’ Barthes would elaborate in 1973.

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3.2. Barthes’ ‘War of Languages’ Just as for Brooke-Rose the individual is constructed by the various jargons s/he is exposed to, so for Barthes, each day, in a single person there accumulate several different languages, each of which tries to exclude the others. It is precisely this ‘explosion of the listening ability’ (1971, in OC2, 1189) that for him makes the individual into an alienated being, and forces him/her to struggle in order not to be completely submerged by the language of Others. We can therefore see how, although in Barthes the notion of a division of languages is loaded with social and political connotations (as for him it is the division of bourgeois society which creates and perpetuates the division of languages in order to maintain its power), the notions that he posits at the heart of his arguments become central to the societies Brooke-Rose depicts in her novels. In the works of both authors, in fact, in order to survive and have its version of Reality recognised as truthful and natural, one society tries to achieve hegemony over other possible ways of structuring society by imposing models of intelligibility, and by so doing, the society in question turns its own language – once what Barthes calls an ‘acratic language’ (that is the expression of a relative representation of Reality) – into an ‘encratic language’ (a language imposed as universally true), thus becoming part of mass culture, assuring supremacy, legitimacy and unquestionability to the society it is spoken by (Barthes, 1973c, in OC2, 1611). To the stability society thus achieves there corresponds, however, the repression of all other representations of Reality (which are discredited, proposed as deviant from the ‘normal/natural’ and made, precisely, into an acratic language), and it is for this reason that, according to Barthes, the origin of the individual’s alienation is to be found in our cultural institutions: under this total culture which is proposed to the subject by the institutions, it is his schizophrenic division which is imposed upon him every day; culture is in this sense the pathological field par excellence, in which the alienation of contemporary man is inscribed (1971, in OC2, 1189).

It is precisely in order to change this state of things, that for Barthes it is fundamental for literature to reach a dis-alienated language in which 165

every voice is enabled to speak, domination ceases to circulate and the Reality proposed by bourgeois society and the Realist tradition is exposed as a result of precise conventions. Because Reality comes to be equated with text, and because Structuralism establishes a strong analogy between the way we produce and read signs in literature and in other areas of human experience, the novel becomes a place in which models of intelligibility can be challenged and where what is taken as natural is brought to consciousness and revealed as construction. Hence Barthes’ attacks on the Realist tradition, his praise for an integral writing where none of the codes of the greater system of language is privileged and attains hegemony over the others, and his praise for the plurality of meanings of the writerly text. Because, for Barthes, to change the language through which society expresses itself is to change society itself, literature comes to be seen as a powerful tool in the social struggle to achieve an egalitarian society. Hence, although Brooke-Rose refuses to be called a didactic writer (1996a) and, as I discussed supra, on the whole lacks the programmatic political commitment characteristic of Tel Quel, since she aims to teach a new mode of reading, and endeavours to give readers a new way to talk about – and in accordance with her equation of language and Reality, to construct – Reality, she seems to undertake a position quite close to that of Barthes. In order to stage the war between languages and show how everything is simply a linguistic construct, Brooke-Rose thus juxtaposes different languages and makes them interact, objecting, in all her novels, to the claim made by all disciplines which define themselves as scientific to convey universal Truths. Throughout her career, she has in fact endeavoured to demonstrate the coercive potential inherent in any use of language, and she has sought to open her readers’ eyes to the linguistic construction of nature so as to enable them to change the way they interact with Reality, to find new approaches to deal with it and, fundamentally, to give them the tools to act on it.

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Chapter 4: Heteroglossia and Polyglossia

In this chapter, my attention will mainly focus on the way in which, through the juxtaposition of different discourses and languages, BrookeRose demonstrates the metaphoricality of all language and the linguistic construction of all forms of identity.

4.1. The Coercive Language of Science in Out Out, published in 1964, not only signals a change in the technical devices Brooke-Rose adopts, but it also marks a different and more engaged phase of her career. I would in fact submit that the supposed lack of political commitment in her two experimental tetralogies can be argued, as by engaging with issues which cannot be judged as extraneous to politics, they do not simply offer a denunciation of particular versions of Reality as dictated by the policies (racist, sexist or other) of certain societies, but also suggest ways to act on these Realities in order to challenge them and avoid being suffocated by them. In particular, in the case of Out, among the various readings the novel offers, this political dimension is very strong, as the centrality given in this text to the differences of race turns it into a powerful statement about human nature and the practice of racist discrimination. Consequently, resuming the Barthesian vocabulary introduced above, Brooke-Rose’s text can be read as staging the war between the acratic language spoken by the central consciousness and the scientific language spoken by the system depicted in the novel which, once acratic, was made into encratic and thus achieved hegemony. As I briefly discussed above, the fact that Brooke-Rose focuses on the war between the poetic language of the character and the scientific language of the system is indicative of the times, for the unification of different fields of knowledge was fundamental to Structuralism as 167

conceived by the early Barthes who, in the attempt to unify science and literature and try to set the parameters of what was thought of as the new science of literature, perceived the languages of science and literature as the exemplification of the division of languages he would describe in the early 1970s. However, while Barthes and the other Structuralists emphasise the scientific essence of literature, Brooke-Rose moves in the opposite direction, endeavouring to expose the metaphoricality of science. As we have seen, at the basis of her imaginative use of science is Heisenberg’s claim that scientific language is essentially a figurative structuring of reality, and it is in order to show to her readers that both scientific and poetic language are metaphorical, and that what they speak is not the Truth about reality, but the product of specific conventions, that Brooke-Rose juxtaposes scientific discourse with poetic discourse, and by observing the former through the lens of the latter, and by making her central consciousness take the former literally, she shows how it also produces metaphors. This is the reason why, despite the many similarities between Out and Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie, the two authors show from the very beginning profound differences which make many critics’ definitions of Brooke-Rose as the ‘English Robbe-Grillet’ unjustified.1 Contrary to the early Robbe-Grillet, who insisted on the necessity of modelling the language of literature on the supposedly natural language of science (1958), Brooke-Rose endeavours in fact to expose as false the idea of a natural reality and language, as all use of language is, for her, an interpretation. Indeed, the simple act of visioning is, for her, re-organisation, and by taking Robbe-Grillet’s statements literally, by pushing them to their logical conclusions, and by treating his accurate descriptions of phenomena ironically,2 in Out she demonstrates that the claims made by science to be simply describing in a transparent language the supposed reality (inherited by Robbe-Grillet) are fundamentally false, thus exposing the dogmatism of his claims and his attempt to make his discourse the deliverer of the Truth.

1 2

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See for example Brooke-Rose, 1984b, 221. For example, various instruments used to observe reality in detail are metaphorically associated to aspects which are incongruous with the use that science normally makes of them (pp. 11, 20/1, 39, 71, 102, 163).

The detailed and objective descriptions we find in Brooke-Rose and Robbe-Grillet therefore have a profoundly different target, and whereas for the nouveau romancier they restore the substance of the object as it is in reality, for Brooke-Rose they reveal the impossibility of locating reality as such, as the latter is to be apprehended only as mediated through language. Because despite the objective tone of the character’s discourse, the ambiguities of Out are never solved, Brooke-Rose is able to contest the claim of scientific discourse to deliver fundamental Truths, and suggest that such a claim derives from the need of this discourse to assure its own survival by being made into encratic. Consequently, if the introduction of the discourse of science in the novel is justified by the fact that the central character (who we must assume to have been a chemist prior to the ‘displacement’) mingles the discourse he used in his working life with other parts of more recent discourses, it also becomes the means by which Brooke-Rose exposes the claims of universality made by scientific discourse as being the tools used by the Colonial system of the novel to conceal the will to power inherent in the language it speaks and to justify the policy of racial discrimination it perpetrates.3 Throughout the novel, the Coloured – in a similar way to other ‘empires’ (Said, 1993, xxvi) – stress those elements which differentiate their society (organised on the basis of scientific Truths) from the previous Colourless one, based mainly on emotions and prejudices (83), and we see how the language the Coloured system uses to replace the old myths on which the Colourless society was based is so powerful that not only do all the Coloured believe in it without ever questioning the legitimacy of the description of the world the system offers them, but it also gains for the system the support of most of the Colourless. The Colourless get in fact excited about the new medicines they can obtain (13), and if this frenzy can be explained by their need for these treatments, because it often transpires that they are not the right treatments for the symptoms they suffer (18), it seems that the Colourless feel that sharing the same medicines with the Coloured will somehow make them less different, hence less liable to discrimination and death (183). The novel seems therefore to represent Lyotard’s idea that one day States will 3

The following analysis is loosely based on my article ‘The Deconstruction of Racial Identity in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Out’ which appeared in Anglistica, Vol. 4 (2000), 1.

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fight for knowledge and his notion that science fundamentally coincides with cultural imperialism. In this new world, in fact, new scientific treatments are thought to provide the answer to everything, and science is basically made into the new religion.4 Like all religions, however, this faith reveals itself as inherently dogmatic, and just as the exegetes supposedly found proof in the Bible of the inferiority of woman, so the scientists find evidence of the Colourless’ inferiority in chemistry and physics. Consequently, because on the basis of tribal history, the fundamental difference between the Coloured and the Colourless lies in the cold-heartedness of the Whites as opposed to the warmth of the Coloured (149), they turn the second law of thermodynamics into a metaphor for discrimination: warmth cannot flow from a cold to a hot body, from a weak body to a strong, from a sick spirit to a healthy spirit […] It is thus very difficult for the strong to love the weak, and for the healthy to love the sick (101).

Hence, in parallel to Lévi-Strauss and the Structuralists, Brooke-Rose shows that the new myths proposed by the scientific society of Out fundamentally correspond to a reshuffling of old myths and prejudices, and because of her exposure of the perpetuation of ancient prejudices, her novel can be read as a strong denunciation of the racist politics adopted by many countries. The creation of a ‘zone’ (McHale, 1987, 43/58), then, not only allows Brooke-Rose to write a science-fiction in which both the technological innovations and the reversal of the colour barrier the novel introduces can be justified, but also gives to Out an allegorical dimension which makes it possible to apply its political denunciation to many different situations in which a discriminatory policy is adopted.5 Indeed, because what is at stake in Brooke-Rose’s novel is the will to power inherent in any use of language, the impact that language has on the individual’s mind, and the process through

4 5

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One of the phrases the Coloured repeat throughout the novel is in fact ‘That’s an article of faith’ (51). This approach is congruous with Derrida’s position, as for him ‘The more indeterminate the date [and the geography], the more ample its possible siting’ (quoted by Cunningham, 1994, 44). The examples provided in this book mainly refer to the history of Apartheid, Nazism and Fascism.

which the identity of any individual is constituted, the novel can be read as a powerful statement about human nature. For this reason, McHale’s insistence on the unfamiliarity of the world the novel depicts (1992, in UOD, 194) appears irrelevant,6 as if it is true that the devices Brooke-Rose uses are meant to defamiliarise Reality, this is however done to make readers aware that also the systems they encounter in their lives could make a coercive use of language and construct their own Reality proclaiming it to be THE reality. Just as for Barthes any text should display a balance between readable and writerly elements, so in Brooke-Rose’s novel, after a moment of destabilisation and discovery, a moment of recognition must follow, making readers realise that the same devices they have been using to make sense of the written text can be applied to other areas of their experience and history. Consequently, because culture, as Said would observe, may predispose one society to the domination of another, supporting and preparing the imperialist enterprise, and yet can also question the whole notion of imperialism (Said, 1993, xiii), Out could be read as a novel of opposition which articulates a discourse of suspicion and posits itself as a denunciation of imperialism, showing, despite the claim the system of the novel makes to have done away with the past, history repeating itself. For instance, although the system of Out presents its era as one of ‘international and interracial enlightenment’ (43), claiming the absence of any racial segregation (125), the Colourless are nonetheless restricted to the ‘Colourless Settlement’ (163), just as Blacks and Jews were relegated to their ghettos in Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Europe; if the Colourless become ill, they can only gain admittance to the Colourless Hospital, next to which there lies the ‘Colourless Cemetery’ (105); although the Coloured claim their society to be egalitarian, the Colourless make up a vast reservoir of servants (114, 162), and despite the claim that everybody has the right to freedom, in Out ‘Compulsory blood tests, permissive death and compulsory birth control’ (82) are suggested by the man in the street, echoing proposals in Nazi Germany for the forced sterilization of the Jews. Hence, even though the discrimination against the Colourless remains ‘barely spoken’ (84), it is nonetheless very real, and the fact that 6

This seems justified by Brooke-Rose’s emphasis on the familiarity of the world she depicts in Out (1990b, 31).

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it is attributed to the malady they contracted during the ‘displacement’, strongly connects the discriminatory practices of the society of Out to those of other oppressive regimes, as the theme of sickness was recurrent both in Fascist and Nazi propaganda. Although the illogical prejudices which ruled the precedent era have supposedly been supplanted by an objective and unbiased approach, it is admitted that among the ruling Coloured ‘there is an irrational fear of the Colourless that lingers on’ (51), the Colourless are considered ‘dirty’ (34) and ‘lazy’ (37, 99, 123) – just as the Whites consider South African Hottentots ‘idle’ (Coetzee, 1988, 11/35) – and, as Frantz Fanon argues with reference to the Blacks (1952, 97), ‘sick’ (109). The irrational fear the Colourless have to confront is thus revealed as the equivalent of the colour prejudice to which Fanon’s Black Man is introduced (op. cit., 95). Because of this, the efforts that Fanon’s Black Man makes so as to rationalise the world are doomed to fail, for just as the proof that the Colourless’ malady is not infectious (58) is not enough to extirpate the Coloured’s fear, so the fact that the scientists admitted that Blacks are human beings is still not enough for them to accept inter-racial relationships (Fanon, op. cit., 96), a prejudice still ingrained in the popular culture of many societies. So, in the same way that the prejudiced Whites, in Fanon, are frightened of the Blacks and expect them to be evil (op. cit., 90/2), in Out, the Coloured Mrs. Mgulu, who likes to pose as a liberal woman who believes abstractly in the equality of all human beings, still doesn’t allow any Colourless, hence ‘sick’, woman to touch her (25/6). Because, despite her claims, she keeps perceiving the Colourless as different, the interest Mrs. Mgulu takes in the Colourless (25, 33) is reduced to the patronising attitude which so often characterises the Colonisers’ mission civilisatrice, and thus simply corresponds to mastery masquerading as charity. Mrs. Mgulu perpetuates in fact the objectification of the Colourless and, by so doing, she becomes an accomplice of the system’s discriminatory policy. The notion the author had already proposed in the Sycamore Tree – where discussing the Hungarian revolution, Zoltan writes ‘We are all responsible, all the time, for everything’ (117) – therefore assumes a stronger impact in Out, as in this novel she more consistently suggests that everybody who is responsible, one way or another, for making the other into the different and inferior Other, is as much to blame for the racist policies adopted by various systems as those who, although not 172

actively taking part in the oppression of the victims, help the system to perpetrate its violence, either by passively accepting it, or by helping to create the conditions in which it became possible. Like Mrs. Mgulu, those people who convinced themselves there was nothing they could do to stop the horrors of state oppression, and, instead of concentrating on ‘prevention’, limited themselves to the ‘cure’ to ease their conscience, must be considered the historical and economic accomplices in the systems’ policy of injustice and discrimination. By showing how the ‘technique for living’ which the scientific system provides everybody with (151) and the ‘Unemployment’ and ‘Pension’ pill schemes it initiates, are simply other means science provides the Coloured with to keep the Colourless under control and restrict their freedom,7 Brooke-Rose’s novel suggests a notion similar to that which Sartre originally proposed in 1961, when he wrote that Western humanism ‘was nothing but an ideology of lies, a wonderful justification for pillage; its tender attitudes and its sensitivity were only alibis for our aggressions’ (1985, 18). Just as in those societies where the will to power of language is made concrete in the violence of those systems and in any other modern society love becomes ‘a further act of violence’ (Laing, 1967, 62), so in the society of Out ‘tenderness’ becomes ‘torrid’ (75), and humanism – which provides a justification and plays an important part in the constitution of the colonialist ideology, becoming itself a form of ideological control – becomes, in Sartre’s words, ‘racist’ (op. cit., 19). In fact, if the main effect of colonialism is, as Fanon claims, to dehumanise the native, then this process finds its justification precisely in humanism’s assumption of a ‘universal man’, whose nature humanism set out to explain, necessarily producing the ‘non-human’ Other against which ‘Man’ could be defined. By exposing the oppression inherent in these forms of humanism, by denouncing the fact that everybody, to a greater or lesser extent, is guilty of it, and by implying that anybody would act identically to obtain and maintain power, Brooke-Rose’s novel speaks of a fundamental idiosyncrasy of human beings, namely that everyone has a latent disposition for oppression. The reasons for this, Brooke-Rose suggests, lie deep in the very nature of human beings, and are inherent in their very 7

As soon as someone refuses to take these pills they become in fact compulsory (155).

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humanity, as the language which makes a biological being into a human is always a language of authority intrinsically disposed to coercion and colonisation. Right from Brooke-Rose’s very first novels, language is conceived as such a powerful tool as to have concrete effects on reality,8 and with Out, she not only reveals that each individual permanently exercises the power of language, but also that when this language is spoken by an entire class, country, or race, it gives rise to the concrete horrors humanity has witnessed throughout history.9 However, it would be a mistake, Brooke-Rose seems to suggest, to believe that these processes remain aberrant exceptions, for the mechanisms at work are, for Lacan as well as for Brooke-Rose, intrinsic to language and to human nature. As Hegel teaches, because the Master always needs, in order to be recognised as a Master, a Servant, the idea of an intrinsic mastery is negated. Mastery always depends on the Other’s recognition, and for this reason the various systems must turn all others into the Other who can endorse their position and acknowledge their language as dominant. The Other, just as the ‘I’, is therefore simply a dialectical position, constructed by the language of authority spoken by the system, and because these positions are culturally and historically determined, everybody is bound to be, sooner or later, constructed as the Other. As Hegel anticipated, the roles will eventually reverse, precisely in the way that, after the reversal of identity the ‘displacement’ brought, the Colourless need the Coloured ex-Servants for recognition. Consequently, the central character can tell a Coloured person that ‘You used to be Us and we used to be Them to you’ (84) and – with words that herald Next, where one of the characters asks ‘what did the Whites bring except slavery and scorn and skyscrapers and squalid city sprawls’ (47) – can continue by saying: ‘we brought you syphilis and identity and dissatisfaction and other diseases of civilization’ (85). 8

9

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In The Languages of Love, one of the characters believes that the words his father spoke when he cursed him were so powerful as to change the course of his life (160), and in the Sycamore Tree the strength of language is acknowledged by Nina, who believes that by repeating certain words her peace of mind would be recovered (210). This power, however, is increasingly identified with the manipulatory capacity of language (to a large extent exposed in The Dear Deceit). It was in fact through the coercive use of the language of propaganda that regimes such as Apartheid, Fascism and Nazism were able to mobilise the masses.

Because the struggle for recognition between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ is undertaken, in colonial situations, by two entire races, what is at stake is the survival of both the individual and the system in question. Hence, in the attempt not to be submerged by the language of Others, both individuals and systems tend to secure themselves within the language that they recognise as theirs, fighting against outsiders, the carriers of other models of intelligibility which must be assumed to be equally trying to impose their own language. By positing an enemy, the illusion is in fact created that one achieves strength and what Western tradition has defined as identity, for turning a part of the population, a country, a class or single individuals into the Other, does not only give the Masters/systems the Servants required for their recognition, but also – especially when the enemy chosen is powerless and does not pose a real menace to the weak system or individual – provides them with a common enemy to fight, thus strengthening the sense of belonging to a group in which these people’s need to merge with the collective and act in harmony with the whole might be satisfied. Without recognising that the seeds of their own destruction as Masters lie in the very process through which they try to obtain recognition, the systems operate a necessary narcissistic reflection of the One into the Other, and project the evil intrinsic in themselves onto Others, turning them into scapegoats to blame for the annihilation which was inherent, from the very beginning, in themselves. This is why the initial weakness of the enemy has to be turned into an immense strength, and why, in a similar way to what Hitler and Mussolini did with the Jews, the system of Out turns an old and weak man into a menacing presence. The creation of the Other is thus rendered possible by the will to power intrinsic in the language of authority which, in the case of Out, is the scientific language spoken by the physicians. Thus, the scientific notion of entropy, provides the justification for the system’s refusal of any contact with the exterior, as it is only when the system is closed that entropy doesn’t increase, and the system can consequently survive (101). This is why oppressive regimes reject all outsiders as dangerous,10 not 10

This was actually the leading principle of Mussolini’s Fascist ideology, summarised as ‘Everything in the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State’ (quoted in Mussolini, 1935, 40).

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recognising that it is precisely the fights they enact in order not to be invaded which disperse energy and turn human culture into what Barthes calls ‘a field of dissipation’ (1971, in OC2, 1188); why one of the articles of faith in Out states that ‘Everything that moves increases risk’ (57, 106), and why art – banned by Plato from his Republic and turned into one of the targets of state censorship in oppressive regimes – is banned from this society and becomes a thing of the past (151). The roots of this prejudice against poetry and its language are to be found in the ancient itinerant character of the poet and the fact that, by arriving at the city’s walls after having wandered the earth, he was perceived as an outsider who not only remained extraneous to the laws governing the city, but also, because he was witness to different realities and different state organisations, could question the institutions the city was based on. Since Plato, the poet has in fact been considered the speaker of awkward Truths, and the power of literature to challenge the models of intelligibility the systems try to impose (through parody, allegory and satire), had been acknowledged long before Structuralism, hence the practice of censorship of which Hitler’s book burning stands as an extreme case. Specifically, it is the power intrinsic in the metaphorical substitutions typical of art which is perceived as most threatening by the necessarily static and rigid systems of oppressive regimes, and which assumes particular importance in the scientific system depicted in Out. Since the characteristic feature of metaphor is its capacity to create associations which activate new meanings, thus adding to the literal and univocal denotation the system imposes on words, sentences or, in the case of Brooke-Rose’s novels, entire discourses, new connotations, metaphor becomes a way to stir up the stagnation the system imposed for fear of extinction, to travel through language and to make language travel, revealing the existence of different possibilities of meaning which the monosemy imposed by the system kept hidden, and exposing the arbitrary imposition of an unambiguous interpretation of the world the system operated. This is why both Plato and the scientific system of Brooke-Rose’s novel would exclude poetic language from their societies, and why the system of Out is always suspicious of the character who, because of his mental sickness, is not able to appreciate the figurative meanings that are so intrinsically engrained in the scientific discourse as to appear literal, 176

the figurality of all language that, Derrida would claim, has been forgotten (Culler, 1983, 150). Being incapable of actively organising a discourse according to the habitual structures dictated by the system, and unable to actively select which segments belong to one discourse and which to some other, Brooke-Rose’s central consciousness passively registers the various phenomena he is struck by, mingles them and distorts them in his ‘sick’ mind, and thus creates an altogether new discourse pervaded by unexpected connotations. Thus, by taking scientific discourse literally, and by juxtaposing scientific expressions to other elements and inserting them into new contexts, the character unwittingly creates precisely the metaphors which the scientific system has tried to ban; he therefore becomes the outsider who endangers the stability of the system, and who, by not submitting to its rules, becomes uncontrollable. In fact, although an article of faith of this society is that everything has its own mechanics (151), and that the new science works to understand the mechanisms that govern everything and everybody (169), the character’s mechanics remain unexplained by the system, as his metaphoric discourse jams the mechanisms according to which the system would expect him to work. Hence the attempts of the system to integrate him so as to make him simply into ‘one of the Colourless’ who acts and reacts according to their mechanics; hence the efforts made to find him a job, the attempt to make him take the dole pills, the continual reminders that he must learn to ‘adapt’ himself to his new ‘displaced’ situation (148) and, more importantly, the ‘privilege’ of ‘psychoscopy’ that he is granted. In this ‘enlightened’ society, doctors have total control over people’s lives, not only because, due to the malady, the people depend on them for their survival, but, more fundamentally, because they (like all emissaries of the various systems) have the power to construct individuals.11 Because discourse, as Foucault states in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, ‘can be both an instrument and an effect of power’ (1981, 101), any act of language becomes an instrument for manipulation and control, a powerful tool which can create what it represents and, by so doing, it becomes complicit in the perpetration of the system’s power and the creation of the Other.

11

‘I am your doctor, father, God. I build you up’ (138).

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Through the practice of ‘psychoscopy’, the doctors in Out are actually able to construct the individual, as by rendering the mechanisms of neurosis completely predictable (151), not only does this practice keep the people permanently under control, but it also enables the doctors to decide what each individual will do next. As the doctor who is ‘psychoscopying’ the central character says: Your profile is coming up very clearly indeed on the oscillograph, and the profile provokes its own continuation, did you know that, the profile moulds you as it oscillates? Diagnosis provokes its own cause, did you know that? To put it more succinctly, diagnosis prognosticates aetiology (138/9).

The ‘displacement’ therefore brought about not only a reversal of the colour barrier and identities, but also a reversal of cause and effect which, in its turn, became the cause of the reversal of the colour barrier. We can therefore see how the re-formulation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle Brooke-Rose introduces here, not only serves to expose the claims of scientific discourse to deliver universal Truths and to approach the criticism of psychoanalysis she would develop in the following novel, but it also enables her to denounce the consequences that the reversal of cause and effect might have in colonial situations where torture is practised. Expanding on a concept she also introduced in one of the short stories from Go When You See the Green Man Walking,12 in Out BrookeRose more strongly suggests not only that it is precisely the reversal between cause and effect which enables language to create the Other simply by defining an individual as such, but also that, in order to turn an individual into the Other, the violence which distinguishes the system’s language of propaganda is made concrete in the physical injuries that the language of torture imposes on the victim’s body. In fact, if what defines man is, according to Western philosophy, a universal essence of ‘manhood’ which is common to all human beings and is not shared by the lower Others, in order to turn full human beings into the Others, the systems must destroy that essence. So, through imprisonment and torture, the systems try, ‘to make the one, the body, emphatically and 12

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More specifically, in the short story ‘Medium Losers and Small Winners’, where we read: ‘Dangerous things, labels – Just a game […] But sometimes labels turn out, later, to speak the truth’ (142).

crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it’ (Scarry, 1985, 49), and by being left with just an injured body, the person now lacks the ‘essence of humanity’ and becomes the ‘sub-human’ the systems have been waiting for. Furthermore, just as in the society of Out one of the Coloured’s articles of faith is that the past – history and memory – does not exist (91) (thereby obliterating all memory of mastery the Colourless might have), through the physical pain and the mental distress they inflict on their victims, the regimes construct the victims’ memory according to their wishes and obtain incriminating declarations from innocent people who, to put an end to the pain, conform to the torturers’ Truth and confess crimes never committed. By becoming the reversal of a trial (as it uses punishment to find evidence and creates the guilt the individual is accused of), torture could therefore be seen as an extreme exemplification of Heisenberg’s Principle, thus positing, I would submit, a strong link between the scars the torturer leaves on victims (which become the signs the systems write on their bodies to create their Otherness), and the biogram which, during the psychoscopy, the oscillograph in Out traces, moulding the individual according to the doctors’ wishes. As Foucault remarks in his study on the birth of the prison, torture is a form of writing the soulhood on the body through pain (1975, 34), and although psychoscopy is a bloodless practice, the image of the ocillographer is sinisterly reminiscent of the infernal apparatus which, literally writing on the victims’ flesh the crimes they were convicted of, Franz Kafka created in ‘The Penal Colony’ (1919) so as to denounce the complicity of writing and torture. It is therefore the ‘civilised’ ability to write (opposed by Hegel to the ‘barbarian’ illiteracy) which creates the Other and, as Benjamin wrote (1973, 248), which renders everybody who participates somehow in the delivery of this ‘civilisation’ to the ‘barbarians’ who lack it, partially guilty of the construction of the Other. Writing thus becomes the practice through which the personal history of the individual can be created, just as it is that which creates the history of humanity in general, because, as Hegel taught in the lectures of 1822 on which his Philosophy of History is based, it is only by writing down events that history can begin (1991, 61). This precondition of history – introduced in Out by textual segments such as ‘Somewhere in the archives there will be evidence that this occurred, if it is kept, and for those who wish to look it up. Other episodes, however, cannot be proved 179

in this way’ (79, 141) – gives an immense power to all the systems willing to use language coercively, as if it is sufficient to change the words in order to change the event and the Reality it will represent to future generations, then the systems are able to re-write the history of individuals, nations and races according to their wishes. History thus becomes another fiction, all historical reports simply another example of the ‘palimpsest history’ Brooke-Rose discusses in the essay bearing this title (1991a), a further relative concept which depends on the means of observation available and – as the character repeats – on the ‘mind’ behind it. In this as well as in various of her other novels, Brooke-Rose therefore challenges the traditional notions of history as a reliable report of events and of memory as faithful, problematising the concept of historical Truth and demonstrating how the past, both racial and individual, is a further text, a construction of words through which a sense of identity is created.13 As ‘the development of phenomena is correlative to that of consciousness’ (110), and because the phenomenon’s existence depends on the language the consciousness has at its disposal to describe it, the Colourless – just as all the populations colonised throughout history – are perceived and, consequently, come into existence as inferiors. This concept – already proposed by Brooke-Rose in her very first novel and The Sycamore Tree14 – is thus fully exploited here, and as the central consciousness suggests by saying, for example, that ‘It is the knowledge of the shape and size of the kitchen table and chairs which make them visible’ (56), Reality as we know it is, according to Brooke-Rose, created by the mind behind the tool of observation and the language it uses. 13 14

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For a more detailed analysis of the notion of history and memory as a construct, see chapter six. In The Languages of Love Julia considers that ‘It was impossible to go there without meeting at least three acquaintances, people who, like the Reading Room itself, did not exist except in one’s awareness of that context’ (74). The Sycamore Tree, on the contrary, is more consistently centred on George Berkley’s theory of reality (the notion that reality is a construction of the mind and that the world only exists when it is observed), and focuses on Ronald Knox’s limerick: ‘There once was a young man who said, ‘God / Must think it exceedingly odd / If he finds that this tree / Continues to be / When there’s no one about in the Quad’ […] ‘Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd: / I am always about in the Quad, / And that’s why the tree / Will continue to be, / Since observed by Yours faithfully, God’.

However, despite the system’s endeavours to obliterate his individuality – exposed by the biological terms used such as ‘symbiosis’ and ‘osmosis’ (110/1) – the character will never be totally integrated, and despite the attempts by the scientific discourse to put a halt to the endless chain of meanings that the metaphoric nature of all language is able to create, the plural language he speaks not only demonstrates how scientific discourse is no more or no less metaphorical than poetic language, but also that there exist different possible meanings that could be imposed on the world other than those dictated by the scientific discourse of the system, whose claims to deliver universal Truths are therefore undermined. Furthermore, by perceiving the microscopes and other technical instruments used by the doctors – the three-dimensional signifiers of the scientific discourse – as ‘conventional weapons’ (76, 128), the central consciousness implicitly, even though unconsciously, acknowledges the will to power inherent in language and heralds Barthes’ definition of language (specifically of ‘la phrase’) as an intimidatory tool (1973c, in OC2, 1612). Not only this, but by inquiring continually whether the scientific language spoken by the Coloured ‘bear[s] any relation to the real thing’ (84), the character, although oblivious of doing so, questions the notion of a transparent language which the system tried to impose on the people. As we have seen, throughout the novel the character tries in fact to discover the Truth which supposedly lies behind language, the secret behind the layers of words, and the final answer (133, 140) which stands not only for the diagnosis the doctors should have formulated after his psychoscopy, but also for the answer to all the ‘whys’, the explanation of all that seems incongruous, that which religion tells us we will find at the moment of death and which science claims to have in its pocket. If the character fails to grasp the secret, however, it is not because his mental instability renders him incapable of adequate cognition, but because the Truth that scientific discourse promised is non-existent, and it is precisely his metaphorical and ‘insane’ discourse which, by invoking the terminology of the scientific discourse, exposes it as such. Consequently, despite the efforts the system makes to integrate him, the central consciousness becomes increasingly alienated from all institutions, and the endless chain of metaphoric associations he produces (which Brooke-

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Rose already began to exploit in The Languages of Love),15 becomes so powerful that it inhibits his ability to deal with reality in the terms dictated by the system, pushing him into a state of semi-permanent hallucination which makes him doubt his own identity and existence (170). Hence, as his wife reproaches him from the very beginning, his dialogues get out of hand (20), and a monologue which begins as a description of the symptoms of the malady, becomes a speculation about the risks entailed by his metaphorical discourse (66). Thus, while maintaining the same terminology and tone of scientific discourse, the character’s discourse creates metaphors which demonstrate how the system’s (and, implicitly, Robbe-Grillett’s) assumption of a natural language is false, as behind language, scientific or other, lies, for Brooke-Rose, not reality, but more language, a mediation which refers to another mediation, creating – in accordance with Derrida’s phrase ‘there have never been anything but supplements’ (1976, 159) – an endless series which progresses and regresses ad infinitum. Because this process affects all spheres of human experience, fundamentally it alters the concept of ‘man’ and ‘identity’ which Western philosophy, Cartesian in particular, passed on over the centuries. It was in fact Western humanist tradition which, by propounding a fundamental essence of man, who was posited as essentially a conscious subject, created not only the hierarchies soul/body and conscious/unconscious, but also implied the privileged status of the first term, founding the metaphysics of presence Derrida sets out to deconstruct. With Structuralism and Deconstruction, however, man becomes a product, the resulting construct of a series of linguistic conventions, and just as behind language we can only find more language, so behind the linguistic pronouns lies not the essential identity of the individual, but – as Brooke-Rose would openly suggest in Next16 – 15

16

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Here, a fictional situation is created out of a semantic slip. For example, while thinking to study hapax legomena and anacolutha in Beowulf, Julia loses herself in a fantasy about a love affair between ‘Anna Coluthon’ – who reappears, as we have seen, in Amalgamemnon (43) – and ‘Hapax Legomenon’ (34/5). Here, one of the characters says: ‘national identity is a cultural construct, er, like identity you know […] there is no national essentialism, and no national exception, in other words, Ulysses, men can’t invade other people’s land, economy or culture with their shaky notions of right, even to the point of genocide […] all people other than the white male, or any male, are not for that sole reason lesser human

a further linguistic construct which originates from the accumulation of the different languages the individual is exposed to. Although in Western tradition the linguistic construction of identity and the deferral of language have often been dismissed as negative, these are precisely what enable Brooke-Rose’s character to assume several different identities simply by means of words, thus precluding his total integration into, and suffocation by, the system. For instance, because the questions he is asked in relation to the job he had before the ‘displacement’ come to stand for an enquiry about his identity, it is by means of language that the character, giving a different answer each time, can create himself as a ‘gardener’ (27, 39), a ‘fortune-teller’ (62), an ‘alchemist’ (78), a ‘psychopath’ (127), and so on. In spite of the risks of complete degeneration implied by the assumption of many different identities on his part, the character realises that ‘With a little concentration from within it is possible after all, to divide oneself and remain whole. At least for a time’ (116), and by facing his deconstructed identity, he survives not only the risk of disintegration, but also the system’s attempted integration and imposition of a fixed and controllable identity. In fact, although he repeats, while waiting at the Labour Exchange and the Hospital, ‘Sooner or later, however, the correct identity, the Colourless identity that belongs, will be, is called out’ (49), this never happens, and all the system’s attempts at categorisation fail.17 His shifting identity therefore puts him outside the system, and makes him invisible to everybody, turning him into different people according to the different interlocutor he is confronted with. However, if this process (which is the basis of any social intercourse in real life) fails to provide the character with recognition from the Other, it is also what enables him to endure, enabling the character, by making ‘mental love’ to his wife (i.e. telling each other stories from their past), to recover the memory that the system tried to destroy.18

17 18

beings to be outflanked or ignored or interrupted or otherwise manoeuvred out of basic human rights’ (136). For example, he is never once called by his name and his occupation keeps being changed in the official files (8, 50, 167). However, because two different versions of their first meeting are given (92, 171), his wife’s words are shown to construct, as all language does, the past they are supposed to describe.

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To the stereotypes which, for Barthes, the bourgeois system tries to inculcate into the people so as to impose its models by means of repetition (1973, in OC2, 1516), the character’s discourse unwittingly opposes new metaphorical associations which – in what seems an early insight into what Derrida would refer to with the words ‘no meaning can be determined out of context, but no context permits saturation’ (1979, 81) – reactivate old formulas, giving them new meaning. By so doing, his speech (in the same way that Heisenberg’s theorem postulated, and that Brooke-Rose already suggested in both The Languages of Love and The Sycamore Tree),19 suggests that ‘Knowledge certain or indubitable is unobtainable’ (60). Just like the poetic language of literature, the discourse of the central consciousness therefore offers an alternative and equally valid Truth to that proposed by the scientific discourse, and breaks the circularity of the repetition of history that the novel denounces by creating lateral paths which deviate from the closed course of the circle, replacing the chain of repetition with a more imaginative and dynamic one. His repetition of sentences and entire passages with almost imperceptible variations or in different contexts, thus assume the double role of enchanting refrains and dynamic elements, and if he is able to do so, it is because he gives free play to the process of metaphoric association which the system tries to restrict. Although the Beckett-like sad and melancholic tones of the end of the novel seem to suggest the total capitulation of the character to the language of authority of the system and the complete disintegration of his self (198), the last few words he pronounces and the phrase he has been repeating in different forms throughout the novel – ‘Sometimes it is sufficient to imagine a way of life for the way of life to occur’ (193) – not only pose the final ambiguity in terms of what actually happens in the first degree possible world of the novel, but also, and more importantly, reminds the reader of the power of language which, after the conclusion of one story, permits the beginning of another, and this, as for Scheherezade, is life.

19

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In the former the concepts of right and wrong are considered dependent on the context (161/2), whereas in the latter absolute Truth, or absolute meaning is denied (84).

4.2. The Language of Astrophysics in Such Whereas in Out Brooke-Rose concentrated mainly on the deconstruction of the notion of racial identity, in Such she expands her discourse and, although she blurs the distinction between ‘sane’ and ‘pathological’ in a more consistent way than she did in the preceding novel, she also disrupts the very concept of identity in more general terms. Having demonstrated the metaphorical possibilities of scientific language in the previous novel, Brooke-Rose now extends her interest in the poetical possibilities of technical jargon, and she more confidently inserts in her narrative the discourse of astrophysics, which she uses as a metaphor for human relations. Thus, the laws of communication studied by astrophysics (which investigates the way in which light and radio waves bounce off astral bodies enabling one to determine the position and the distance of those astral bodies from the source which emitted the signal), are used poetically and are applied to the signals emitted by and directed towards human beings; the theory of an expanding universe metaphorically indicates our society, in which everybody is becoming distanced from one another; the brightness of stars, which indicates their distance from Earth, is used to indicate the distance between human beings, and the interference encountered by the signals emitted by astral bodies before reaching the point of observation (which could cause an erroneous determination of the position of the body), metaphorically indicates the interference which distorts the messages emitted by human senders before they reach their human receivers. More fundamentally, the theory of the Big Bang and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle are metaphorically used to demonstrate the impossibility of defining what Western tradition (in particular classical psychology) proposed as the original self of the individual. Furthermore, because the literalisation of scientific expressions which enabled the character of Out to demonstrate the metaphorical nature of all discourse, is more consistently exploited here so as to use the technical jargon of astrophysics poetically, from the very beginning of the novel, literalisation of metaphoric expressions characterises the discourse of Something (who could be identified with the guide who, in Medieval literature of near-death-experiences, accompanies the newcomer into the realm of death) and the entire world of the after-life. For 185

example, the arguments that Larry effectively sustains in conversation become real points which he loses or gains in the game he plays with Something (211); nervous tension actually spills the characters’ nerves all over the place (322), and the expression ‘I see’ – used to mean ‘I understand’ – indicates literally what Larry views (215). Furthermore, the names of the planet-children – which derive from titles of blues and jazz songs – are literalisations of the shape and function they perform: Gut Bucket, for instance, is often used to contain various fluids expelled by different characters’ bodies (264, 275, 307). Consequently, on one level, the presence of astral bodies can be read as a topos of otherworld narratives representing the ascension of the soul to higher worlds,20 and in this sense the references to astrophysics can be read as the metaphors which Larry, as a survivor of a near-death experience, uses in order to describe, through analogies created by his everyday technical vocabulary, an experience which survivors always claim to be indescribable by human language (Moody, 1975, 25/6; Zaleski, 1987, 117). On another level, these same elements also importantly relate to Brooke-Rose’s exploration of the impact that language has on the human mind and of the role it plays in the structuring of the individual’s unconscious. Because Larry’s job exposes him to the jargon of astrophysics, his unconscious is shaped by this discourse, and by becoming the site where the metaphors which constitute this discourse can assume a literal and concrete form, this makes the subworld that Larry creates the dream-land in which, according to Freud, the unconscious is free to speak. In fact, just as for Freud, during sleep, the nocturnal freedom of instinctual excitations and the diminished control exercised by the ego render possible the formations of dreams in which the wishes the ego represses during waking hours can find an expression (SE XV, 199/227), so the lowering of physical and psychical energy provoked by death, enables

20

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As represented in archaic and medieval literature, a journey in the after-life always had a didactic purpose and was used to invite people to display more rigorous morals. Because the journey was also considered a rehearsal which would prepare the individual for death, in many traditions it was assimilated with philosophical practice (as for example in Cicero’s De re publica, where the astral journey of the after-life is used as an allegory for philosophy).

Larry’s unconscious to speak freely (indeed, death has, both in archaic and modern times, been compared to sleep, not least by Jesus himself).21 However, although Brooke-Rose’s novel relies on Freud’s theory of dreams, she seems to move towards a position which is in many aspects similar to that of Lacan, in so far as, even though she was only to read his Ecrits after her move to France in 1968, the idea of identity as a linguistic construct that she proposes in her novels prior to 1968 and the notion of the unconscious she presents in this particular novel, correspond to an intuitive insight of Lacanian theory. Whereas many of Freud’s texts indicate the unconscious as a pre-existent region of the psyche, in which the individual represses those desires his/her ego cannot accept if the subject is to develop into a ‘normal’ human being, burying them under layers of words (which therefore serve mainly as a protective shield), for Brooke-Rose, as well as for Lacan, the unconscious is shaped and constructed by and through language: in Larry’s case, the language of astrophysics. Thus, while for Freud language is used by the innately present unconscious, in Lacan the temporality is reversed, and the unconscious is identified with the effective product of language. Provoked by language, the birth of the unconscious corresponds, for Lacan, to the first and original split the individual undergoes, during which the original desire is replaced by its linguistic representation, and the individual reaches identity by positing him/her self as the ‘I’ which is differentiated from the ‘You’ and the third ‘Others’ s/he is surrounded by. It is precisely this idea of language as an alienatory device which hides (in Freud) and sublimates (in Lacan) the real desires of the individual, that is at the centre of Such. Here, from the very beginning, Larry perceives names as the tools by which the ‘real’ can be hidden and the original cause eliminated.22 However, just as for Freud what has been repressed always returns to the individual and finds, sooner or later, a voice in the language of dreams, parapraxes and neurotic symptoms, so, even though names help to hide things (247), their effect is only momentary and, as Something and the planet-children point out, what is 21 22

See John, 11.11 – 13. After having insisted that the planet-children be baptised, Larry tells Something that he hid the origin of the children by giving them a name (207). This notion was already present in The Languages of Love, where the protagonist’s lover dismisses her emotions and difficulties simply by giving them an easy label (147, 149, 174).

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sent into repression will, at one stage or another, come back like a boomerang (252, 329). However, if from a Freudian perspective the planet-children represent those desires and wishes that the subject repressed into the unconscious, they seem more relevantly to represent those elements which got repressed at the moment of the first split in language. There would therefore seem to be various overlappings of possible readings here. On one level, what is represented in the novel seems to correspond to the unconscious; an unconscious which, as in Freud’s theory, corresponds to the psychic space where all the elements the individual has repressed might be found, and which finds its voice in the dream-like language made available by the eternal sleep of death. At the same time, it is an unconscious which, as Brooke-Rose would later discover, as in Lacan’s theory, is born in (and structured like) a language. Hence, by being determined by the language of astrophysics, it enables Larry to give birth to five children who are in fact planets, to create an astral subworld and, somatomorphising ethereal elements of his psyche as astral bodies,23 populate it with people who have detachable meridians instead of arms (219) and an almost spherical shape (212). On yet another level, however, what is represented in the novel seems to correspond to a precedent stage, when the unconscious was not yet born and Larry’s psychic space, which had not yet undergone the first split, was constituted by the integral wholeness which would have been alienated at the moment of Larry’s entrance into language. As a demonstration of this, we can look at the insignificance that words have in the after-life world as created by Larry (205), and the fact that he can choose to travel ‘above words’ (210) and ‘supersonic’.24 In fact, if Larry’s ability to travel beyond the ultraviolet end of the verbal spectrum can be connected on one level to another topos of near-death experience literature – from Dante’s La divina commedia (Paradiso, I, 70/1) to modern reports of survivors, in which the guide is always able to communicate telepathically with the newcomer (Moody, 1975, 46) – it 23

24

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‘Somatomorphism’ refers to the descriptions of the soul in terms of a physical body which near-death experience survivors often offer to overcome the linguistic difficulties they encounter when trying to describe their experience (Zaleski, op. cit., 51/2). Survivors occasionally use this adjective, or similar expressions such as ‘at super speed’, to describe their experience of leaving their body (Moody, 1975, 29).

simultaneously relates to the fact that the realm Larry visits during his death corresponds to a pre-linguistic and pre-unconscious psychic dimension, the integral space which would later be split into conscious and unconscious, linguistic and real, signifier and signified. The fact that the pre-linguistic stage Larry travels to during his death corresponds, according to Lacanian theory, to a pre-identity stage, also explains why, during his death, Larry is deprived of the identity he assumed at the moment of the primal split. We therefore seem to have a further overlapping of readings, as on the one hand Brooke-Rose interrogates the theory of identity and the unconscious, investigating what there is prior to the constitution of the unconscious and finally revealing the impossibility of locating anything prior to language. On the other hand, she seems to hold onto a more Platonic and romantic notion of identity, according to which the supposedly real self of the person is substituted by a series of fake social identities. Thus, in order for his journey to be fulfilled, Larry must reappropriate the elements he repressed by sending them into orbit, and has to wait for the planet-children to come back to him. Initially, according to the instructions which Something reads in her book, which correspond to the symmetries the laws of physics obey, Really is thought to be coming back first (213). In fact, if we consider the letters T and P under which Something checks, as corresponding to the symmetry T and P of physics,25 then death could be considered as the reversal of life, and because, considering death as the mirror image of life, we must assume that in death the direction of particles and antiparticles is reversed, Larry’s death would be logically expected to begin with the same ‘Real’ self with which his life first began. However, science has demonstrated that the universe would develop in a different way from the way in which its mirror image would, and that the elements which first left at the Big Bang (which therefore travelled the furthest and are consequently the least subject to gravitational force), once the universe stopped expanding and, contracting onto itself, began to be dragged into

25

According to the former of these symmetries if the direction of the motion of all particles and antiparticles is reversed, the system should go back to how it was earlier, and according to the latter the physical laws are the same for any situation and its mirror image (77/9).

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the Big Crunch,26 would do so only after all the other bodies. Similarly, Really will only return after the other planet-children not only because it can only return after Larry is really ready to go back to his waking life and re-acquire his name (205), but also because it has to travel a greater distance (220), it being the first element sent into orbit/repression. However, because Larry is initially blind to what is going on around him and is characterised by ‘density’ and ‘opacity’ – two properties which relate both to astrophysics and near-death experience27 – the messages which are directed towards him get diverted and distorted, and by preventing him from absorbing and understanding them, make him unfit to return to his waking life. In fact, although Larry initially chose to travel ‘above words’, by holding onto names, he shifts from the ultra-violet to the infra-red end of the spectrum, where waves have a very low frequency, soon becoming too low for us to detect (216). If, as Something tells Larry, we experience a degradation of intensity as speed increases (217), though, it is because once the atoms of stars whose mass is superior to the Chandrasekhar limit, have reached the speed of light, they begin to be subjected to the gravitational force of the nucleus, which makes the star contract and the light waves bend inward. 26

27

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According to this theory the universe is expanding so slowly that the gravitational attraction between galaxies slows and eventually stops the expansion, causing the galaxies to move toward each other and the universe to contract until all matter is concentrated in zero volume. In astrophysics, the more dense a body is, the more it is subjected to its own gravitational force, which impedes the light the body emanates from escaping, forming what scientists call a black hole, the inevitable conclusion of a star’s life cycle. After the formation of the star and a period of stability – called by scientists ‘the main sequence’, to which Larry repeatedly claims he belongs (222, 292) – the star runs out of its nuclear fuels and, after having formed what is called a Red or Blue Giant, begins to contract resulting in a black hole. However, if the star in question has a mass inferior to the limit determined by Chandrasekhar in 1928, the decaying star eventually stops contracting and settles down to a final state as a ‘white dwarf’, a star with a radius (the distance to which the light the star emits can travel) of only a few thousands miles and a density of hundreds of tons per cubic inch, which, like Larry, is very dense and opaque (222, 247, 292). At the same time, Larry’s ‘opaqueness’ can be related to near-death experience literature, as this term is found in many survivors’ reports to describe certain spirits who inhabit a ‘dulled’, opaque zone and who appear particularly confused about their new condition, and by refusing to let their previous life go, persist in their attachment to a particularly object, person, or habit (Moody, 1978, 18).

In Such, this bending of waves therefore comes to represent the bending of words accomplished by any individual who, like Larry, represses some element in the unconscious where, in Freud’s theory, the real thing is replaced by a condensed and displaced signifier. In order to begin his life a second time, then, Larry has to re-appropriate those elements that he excluded from the social person he became in his first life by unbending the words through which they were repressed: namely, he has ‘to give rebirth’ (220) to the planet-children and, once they come back, recognise them as his ‘unprodigal’ children (328). In order to do so, Larry has to descend completely into his psychic space, and he thus embarks on a journey similar to the one the schizophrenic makes ‘from outer to inner/from life to a kind of death/from going forward to a going back [...] from being outside (post-birth) back into the womb of all things (pre-birth)’ (Laing, op. cit., 106), in order to recover those elements that s/he repressed, thus becoming one of the ‘bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to [their] true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world’ (op. cit., 12) Laing refers to. For Laing, the great merit of Freud’s work (and after him Lacan’s), has been to demonstrate that the ‘normal’ person is simply a partial and diminished fragment of the person who s/he could be, but whereas in Lacan’s theory the existence of a human self before the advent of language is negated, Laing’s and Brooke-Rose’s argument is underpinned by the humanistic notion of a ‘real’ self which, after having been forced into repression by the institutions and the Laws which organise our societies, may eventually be recovered. Because the alienation Lacan posited as inherently human is proposed by Laing as being provoked by the violence human beings perpetrate on other human beings through actions and language – one example of which is the violence parents commit against their children obliging them to repress themselves so as to adapt to society – so names, as Professor Head and Stanley suggest to Larry in Such, ‘tell a story, given to people at birth’ (281), and by introducing the child to the linguistic and socio-cultural orders, they abolish the child’s identity as an integral being. By so doing, the parents – as Brooke-Rose would put forward also in Next (51/2) – destroy, in Laing’s opinion, most of the baby’s potential and whereas for Lacan it is never possible to recuperate the original signified, for Laing, the recovery of one’s ‘true’ self is

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attainable through a journey into the inner world which was severed from the outer world of our experience as social beings. The inner world Larry visits cannot therefore be simply identified with his unconscious, but must be recognised as the realm of the preunconscious order which Lacan calls the Imaginary. Consequently, Larry’s journey must be seen as a journey backwards in time towards the original wholeness of the pre-linguistic stage in which the character is deprived of his name. In fact, in the same way that near-death experience survivors feel they have lost their social selves, during his journey Larry also loses his linguistic identity, and being unable to identify himself with the ‘I’ which is differentiated from the ‘You’ or the ‘Other’, like the infant of the Imaginary stage, he merges with the ‘Others’ surrounding him: ‘Sometimes I feel that during my death I became everyone I know and I left myself behind’ (319/20). Because humanity begins, according to Lacan, only with the entrance into language, Larry’s excursion into the pre-linguistic realm corresponds to a journey towards the moment preceding the beginning of humanity: a cosmic wholeness whose split in language would create the linguistically constructed identity of humanity as opposed to other forms of life which (just like the unconscious) Western metaphysics would consider the secondary and inferior. Hence, just as Laing’s schizophrenic describes his/her journey as going further ‘in’, as going back through one’s personal life, in and back and through and beyond into the experience of all mankind, of the primal man, of Adam and perhaps even further into the being of animals, vegetables and mineral (op. cit., 104),

so Larry – who, once back to life, laments ‘I seem to live backwards’ (300) and feels he consists of ‘anti-matter’ (300) – during his journey moves towards an homogeneous moment, the beginning of our time, when the elements of our planet were merged together and, going even further, right back to the beginning of cosmic time, when matter and anti-matter were not yet divided: namely the moment known as the Big Bang of astrophysics (268) which, in psychoanalytical terms, cor-

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responds to what lies even beyond the Imaginary and which Lacan considered beyond thought and belonging to myth.28 The metaphorical use of astrophysics, thus enables Brooke-Rose to propose a theory which contests the assumption of the real, original self of the person as being observable because, just as the Big Bang cannot be observed, so the real beginning of one’s self is lost forever. However, if the mystery of the self is enveloped in its very origin, the possibility to observe death, Brooke-Rose’s novel suggests, would provide a solution to this enigma, in the same way that the observation of a black hole would paradoxically, but unequivocally, throw light upon the beginning of our universe. Death is therefore proposed by Brooke-Rose as that through which a greater understanding of the natural world and of oneself could be reached, new wisdom achieved and the existence of the inner world acknowledged. It is precisely this recognition of the mysteries which death could unveil that led all archaic traditions to assign a prophetic role to neardeath experience survivors, whom death rendered able ‘to survey and reappraise the imagined cosmos, and to return to society with a message about our human place in it, about how we should live’ (Zaleski, op. cit., 100). Similarly, the shaman – who ‘inaugurates his career as a specialist in ecstasy by a symbolic encounter with death’ (Zaleski, op. cit., 13) – was granted this role in his community, and this is fundamentally the same role that Laing hopes one day will be granted to the schizophrenic (op. cit., 110). This is why Laing hopes that the degrading ceremonial of psychiatric examination schizophrenics have to submit to, will be replaced by the same kind of ‘initiation ceremonial’ granted to the shaman, ‘through which the person will be guided with full social encouragement and sanction into inner space and time by people who have been there, and back again’ (op. cit., 106), and which basically corresponds to the excursion into the pre-linguistic stage through which Something guides Larry. It is precisely because the subworld Larry travels to has not been mediated by words yet, that literalisation is here essential, as the insurmountable gap between signifier and signified seems here never to have occurred (or to have been somehow overcome), and words seem to 28

Because socio/linguistic symbolism imposes itself on the subject even before the child makes entry into it, the Imaginary is already marked by symbolisation.

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coincide with the things they refer to. However, precisely because, as Lacan states, the subject undergoes symbolisation even before s/he enters the Symbolic Order and, as Brooke-Rose demonstrates, literalisation only produces metaphors, the language which in the afterlife is used as such (i.e. literally) produces, as a whole, the extensive metaphor which constitutes Such. This is also why the objective descriptions of the astrophysical laws of communication become a metaphor for communication among people, and why the descriptions of the particles people are composed of, can become a theory of the ineffable quality to which Western tradition has accustomed us to refer to as the subject’s identity. From the very beginning, Larry claims to be interested only in people and to have no interest in things at all (215, 236); although during his journey Something explains to him that people also consist of things (239), as they are composed of the same matter particles which constitute the substance of the world around us, Larry is initially resistant to this idea, and tries to hold onto both the notion of humanity and the conception of the universe as static which philosophy, religion and science have proposed over the centuries as true. This is why, when his planet-son Dippermouth makes Larry ‘read his dial’ (230), Larry sees in the ‘Bang Bang’ of the western movie the planet-child shows him (232) the affair his wife Brenda has with Stanley during Larry’s absence. Thus, as Dippermouth tells him, Larry simply sees, in what has now become the ‘Big Bang’, a ‘Steady State’ (233) for, once Larry dies, Stanley fills in the space left by Larry in his wife’s life, and metaphorically becomes one of the new galaxies which, in the Steady State Theory proposed in 1948 by Hoyle, Bondi and Gold, must be created to fill the gaps left by the galaxies moving apart, so that the universe would look roughly the same at all times and at all points of space. Despite his atmospheric density, however, during his journey Larry does absorb some things, and not only accepts that ‘You can’t get rid of things just by giving them names’ (381), but also that ‘Equations operate through people too’ (248). As always happens with near-death experience (Moody, 1975, 65/70; Jungerson, 1984, 248), shamanic practice (Zaleski, op. cit., 14) and Laingian schizophrenic journey (Laing, op. cit., 111/2), Larry comes back changed from his visit to the after-life, not only because he experiences recurrent flashbacks of the 194

otherworld, like most survivors (Giovetti, 1988, 30), but also because he is able to see the surrounding reality from a different perspective, and now able to read the waves and the particles which constitute people, he can see them as a radio-telescope sees the stars (276), his eyes looking ‘beyond the red shift of people’s inmost essence’ (293/4). Yet, although his new abilities allow him to see and read the waves which people emanate, in the same way that during his journey he was not able to decipher the omen he was given, initially Larry cannot decode these messages properly. Not only this, but it is precisely the ability Larry acquires during his journey – which could be compared to the psychic faculties that certain near-death experience survivors claim to have attained after their recovery (Moody, 1975, 66) – that makes it difficult for other people to relate to him once he comes back to life: people are in fact intimidated by his eyes, scared by the power he has acquired, and they only try to steal his secret by spying on him (276/8). Furthermore, Larry’s resistance to people’s attempts to ‘read’ him frustrates those around him, and leads them to perceive him as odd (293), in the same way that, for Moody, doctors often consider survivors’ reports as individual eccentricities (1975, 95) and that, according to Laing, the schizophrenic’s natural journey into their inner world is judged as anti-social and insane by a society which is unconscious and scared of this lost world (op. cit., 103/4). This is why the schizophrenic, for Laing, ‘meets only incomprehension in others’ (op. cit., 103), why the survivors of near-death experience are ‘ridiculed’ (Moody, 1975, 94), and why, in Such, instead of trying to help Larry to re-adjust to reality, everybody tries to take advantage of him: his wife, for instance, asks for a divorce (335/44), his daughter only wants to obtain money from him (376), and unscrupulous journalists only try to scoop his story (368). Just as happened in Out, the failure to re-adapt himself to the social reality which tries to integrate him, therefore leads Larry to be considered the outsider, the ‘mad’ member of a ‘sane’ society who, having lost in the passage from life to death the social self which was imposed upon him by society, and having filled (or at least shortened) the gap between conscious and unconscious, signified and signifier, once back to life lacks the alienation which establishes humanity. In fact, if the biological being can become human only when s/he alienates him/herself in language, then Larry’s physical death, by enabling his 195

unconscious to emerge into consciousness, is the cause of his death as a human being, with which Althusser identifies madness (1971, 190) and which, despite the moral implications (as it denies humanity to the mentally ill), seems a necessary consequence of Lacanian theory. In a society where all values seem reversed, and in which alienation is considered normal, that which Laing romantically considered the recovery of the lost self, instead of being considered a re-birth as a complete and unfragmented being, is dismissed as craziness, in the same way that the survivors of near-death experience who, claiming that their life has been enhanced by their travel into the after-life, bring back a message of love, are considered bizarre (Moody, 1975, 62/8). The way in which near-death experience affects its survivors is actually very similar to the change that Larry endures during his journey. During his sojourn in the after-life, he learns to love Something and the planet-children (272), and realises that during his waking life he has never actually loved anybody except himself and that he has always kept his distance from others by drawing a line between himself and them ‘as a rule between one solar system and another’ (324). However, although he maintains, once he comes back to life, the desire to learn to love also in his outer world, having lost ‘the equations that enable people to move through people easily without love’ (327/8), Larry soon realises that in this outer world – where people seem to speak ‘in strip-cartoon’ (245),29 and where nobody really listens (370) – his message remains unheard. In the same way that, whilst on his journey, Larry couldn’t hear or make himself heard because of the atmospheric density he opposed to his new condition (249), once he comes back to life, he metaphorically uses the life-cycle of stars and the laws of communication in space to describe the absence of communication among humans (361/2): hence, not only do the density and opaqueness each individual protects him/herself with distort the waves through which people communicate (370), but also (because all individuals could be described as decaying matter), in the same way that light-waves cannot escape from a collapsing star, so the soundwaves people emit are dragged back into themselves, their message never reaching the receiver. Moreover, because of the ever-increasing 29

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This image is recurrent in Brooke-Rose’s work. It appears in The Sycamore Tree (191), in Thru, where it is introduced in the text as a verbal icon (596), and in Remake (1).

distance between people (which, each individual representing a small galaxy in an expanding universe, renders the chances of collision/contact among humans negligible), the distance the waves have to cover before reaching the receiving body becomes so extended that the echo which must be sent back to the source in order to determine the actual occurrence of the communication, gets lost in space. Thus, because ‘in this type of communication the echo decreases with the fourth power of the distance between two bodies, rather than with the square’ (241), all conversation dies away in silence. Once he comes back to life, however, Larry is able to retain only a confused memory of the knowledge he acquired during his journey, and feeling that he has left something behind and that with his passage from death to life he lost something vital (293, 342), he understands that he will never be able to love in the outer world as he did in the other. Consequently, the desire to prolong his death forever, which he felt during his journey (272, 330), becomes more urgent once he has to adapt himself to a society he no longer feels he belongs to, and though he is initially terrified at the thought of dying a second time, he finally claims to fear a second life more than death itself, and reproaches those who saved him for not having let him lie in darkness and decay (291). Larry actually admits he doesn’t want a second life, and when he realises that he must try and survive in the outer world, he wishes to live his second life in complete solitude (342), waiting to die a second and definitive time. Hence, in accordance with the way that near-death experience survivors come to perceive death, and that Laing considers the schizophrenic experience, Larry sees his physical death as a desirable rebirth, while his physical resurrection comes to be equated with the end of his life. Consequently, because he has memories of a wish to die again (300), and feels he must go back and find what he has left behind (342), Larry comes to express the death drive that Freud described in his ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), where he postulated a more primitive tendency which transcends the pleasure principle he originally thought all psychic mechanisms obeyed, and that in 1900 led him to propose the revolutionary idea that the purpose of dreams is the fulfilment of wishes (PFL 4, 721). The analysis of anxiety dreams stimulated by traumatic experiences led in fact Freud to postulate the existence of an instinct, ‘an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the 197

living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces’ (SE XVIII, 36) – for Freud birth itself – and it is precisely the integrity of mother and child, the destruction of which leaves on the child’s body, and Larry’s, the physical scar of the navel, that the individual wishes to recapture through death (a return to a prebirth stage expressed by the dark tunnel, symbolising the maternal birth canal, that many survivors claim to have travelled through). The enforced termination of the original wholeness, however, also produces, in both Freud’s and Lacan’s theory, a metaphorical scar on the psyche: the cutting of the umbilical cord corresponding to the first alienating division of the subject, the physical navel finds its counterpart in the chronic state of self-insufficiency characteristic of all human beings which, in both Freud and Lacan, stimulates the child’s attempt to reinstate the merging of mother and son through the Oedipal fantasy of a union with her. What Larry sees when looking through other people, could therefore be identified with the death wish innate to each individual – ‘the death that lies inherent in all living existence’ his wife talks about (303) – and the recovery of Larry’s unconscious – like the schizophrenic’s journey into the ‘womb of all things’ (Laing, op. cit., 106) – could be seen as re-activating and bringing to consciousness the original desire for integrity, namely, from a Freudian perspective, an unconscious desire for re-entry into the mother’s womb from which Larry fears yet another separation. Because he follows the instruction that, echoing Beckett’s Watt, Something often gave to him – ‘When you don’t understand something, Someone, continue as if you did, it will come clear later’ (240), a notion which is often inserted in the novel with small variations according to the context (256, 274,292) – the objective tone characteristic of Larry’s description of the after-life also distinguishes the conversations he reproduces, which are reported word for word (or more precisely, particle for particle), without any explanation as to the meanings the various paths followed by the particles might have. Once back to life, Larry persists in fact in offering descriptions of people in terms of meridians (297) and waves/particles (358/9), and by slowly accepting that people consist of matter, he is able to become a ‘geometrician of the soul’ (269), which he perceives as multi-dimensional and as having at

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least ‘five geometries’ (269).30 Larry therefore proposes a unified theory in which, through the juxtaposition of technical and humanist knowledge, he can give ‘names to the dead satellites in the complex geometry [...] of the human soul’ (281). It is precisely through the unification of psychology and astrophysics, and that of the knowledge he acquired during his outer and inner life, that Larry can achieve a better understanding of human identity and elaborate his original theory of the cosmic birth of the subject, which he describes in terms of geometries. These, being in Larry’s opinion more similar to ‘geologies’ and ‘maps of ocean depths’ (269), come to correspond to the different layers that in Lacan’s Structuralist theory constitute the human psyche, in so far as, through the recognition the individual is granted by Others, other identities are imposed upon the subject’s original linguistic identity according to the different perception that different people might have of him/her (296). Larry’s attempt at defining this geometry of the soul could therefore be seen as both a parallel of the scientists’ attempts to elaborate a unified theory of the life of the universe (from the Big Bang, to the formation of astral bodies and their life and death), and, because it also deals with what is dead (i.e. repressed), as the counterpart of Lacan’s endeavour to create ‘a new geometry’ of the psyche (quoted by McCannell, 1986, 124), in which Symbolic, Unconscious, Imaginary, and Real would be ‘in a relation of equality’ (ibid.).31 Although Larry claims to have understood these different stages while in the coffin (207), they became blurred and inexplicable once he chooses the ‘way of unconsciousness’ (220), and once back to life, he simply has to trust they exist without actually understanding them. It is only at the end of the novel that, by recapturing the knowledge acquired during his journey, Larry learns to decipher the movements of those particles/waves he has observed for so long, and fully understands their implications for the human psyche.

30

31

In the same way, near-death experience survivors claim they finally realise there are more than three dimensions (Moody, 1975, 26), modern science has accustomed us to think about space-time in terms of four-dimensions at least, and psychology since Freud has taught us that consciousness is only a fragment of the individual. To these, we should add the pre-Big Bang stage, the Lacanian Mythical phase Larry’s experience hints at.

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Thus, by applying Quantum Theory to the human psyche and the laws of astrophysics to human communication, not only is Larry able to describe any interaction among human beings as a collision of particles, but also, by bringing together the theory of the history of the universe with a general theory of human identity, he is able to construct a theory of subjectivity in terms of cosmic birth, in which the process leading to the formation of identity is made equal to the original Big Bang that originated our universe: People collide, spinning on orbits and made up of other people in slices that spread out like flat discs of vaporised heavy elements in the plane of their present orbits. And as their initial material cools the atoms condense, forming small particles of dust which through constant collisions aggregate into larger and larger bodies, until perhaps they burst with accumulated identities that pass from one to another like elements, emitting particles of pain. You can never know with absolute certainty that consecutive observations of what looks like the same particle do in fact represent the same. Because since you can’t establish the precise location you can’t claim to have established the identity (385/6).

Brooke-Rose’s character therefore suggests that identity is born, like any astral body, during a collision of particles, and because their position and momentum, in accordance with the Uncertainty Principle, cannot be determined, the same element of randomness and unpredictability which originally infiltrated physical science is also introduced into psychology (the science of the human mind). Even though during the expansion of subjectivity, as well as in the expanding universe, the particles move away from one another, and while a small number of them congregate in different ways to form the individual’s consciousness, others are ‘sent into orbit’ to form the unconscious, just as the particles of each astral body will, sooner or later, begin to be subjected to the gravitational force of the body, all the particles which initially left the individual during primal repression will come back to him/her. However, in the same way that the laws regulating the life and death of the universe are antideterministic, Larry’s return to life couldn’t be either chosen or known (295), in so far as, like his planet-children, the particles/elements which have been pushed into the unconscious will return following an unpredictable orbit. Because, as Larry says,

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every particle of ourselves, whether combined with those of others in normal electrovalence to make up for this or that slice of us, or whether bombarded by those of others until this or that human element mutates into some other, every particle of ourselves returns. So that it has, in that sense, identity. But you can never quite identify it at any given moment (387/8),

it becomes very difficult to determine which particle is which, and although for the sake of appearances and in order to be functional in our society, each individual pretends that what looks like the same particle is, in fact, the same, and that it has the same identity, as one of his friends says ‘we all pretend to come and go as fully ourselves. And all the time millions and millions of particles of us have combined with others or escaped into various orbits to return to us ultimately’ (388). Hence, by juxtaposing astrophysical and psychological discourses, Larry suggests that just as particles and waves, according to the Uncertainty Principle, are only spread out with a certain probability, so the elements of the human mind cannot be determined with certainty because, as Larry says, we only pretend to recognise the identity of each element ‘by an act of faith’ and as a ‘probability’ (388). Truth thus becomes simply a construction which scientists create in order to work, but that can never be said to be definitive because ‘each infallible proof’ becomes ‘merely a working hypothesis which explains things until it has outlived its working usefulness and so ceases to explain them’ (267). By suggesting that no fundamental Truth can be discovered in the physical sciences, thanks to the analogical link posited between astrophysics and psychology, Brooke-Rose’s novel also suggests that psychoanalysis cannot claim to have discovered the Truth about a subject’s identity, as identity consists of a flux of elements which, like particles, come and go, and whose position and momentum cannot be determined. As the interposition of a narrow slit in the path of a beam of electrons so as to calculate their position produces diffraction, making its direction and momentum uncertain, so the interposition of an external presence such as that of the psychoanalyst could cause a diffraction of the elements constituting the analysand, which cannot be observed. In fact, even if the analyst were able, against all the laws of physics, to freeze those elements in a particular position so as to analyse them, the result obtained would still be irrelevant for an understanding of the patient’s psyche because ‘Those particular electrons or whatever that made up the

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slice or disc or sphere of you at twenty-four won’t make them up at forty-eight’ (388). The total elements constituting the self being fully present in the same individual only at the mythical moment of pre-birth and death, the observation of this original self is forever denied, in the same way that the Big Bang and black holes (the singularities representing the wholeness of particles) cannot be observed. This is why the journey back in time Larry embarks on, cannot enable him to reach what Western tradition has accustomed us to think of as the most fundamental self, but only a self which has already been mediated by imaginary representations. Through the parallels she creates between the birth of the universe and the birth of the individual, Brooke-Rose therefore suggests the impossibility of locating what there might be prior to what Lacan would call the Imaginary. We can therefore see how the notion of identity being composed of different fragments and strata which she touched on in The Dear Deceit, is discussed further in Such, where the study of the superimposed layers of the universe and the individual is compared to the peeling back of the skins of an onion (269). In the Realist novel she published in 1960, Philip, in his search for the truth about his father and the identity that would follow, questions in fact the past to find an explanation for his present condition, and embarks on a journey backwards in time which takes the reader from Brussels (where the protagonist grew up with his mother) to London, at his father’s funeral, then moving backwards to the time of his parents’ marriage, and so on, concluding with a return to the present. During this journey, Philip tries to understand whether ‘somebody can leave a sort of spiritual testament behind […] like a legacy, but of the spirit […] a legacy of guilt’ (319), but he has to admit that none of the discoveries he has made about his father can explain his life. The subversion of the causal logic of traditional narrative Brooke-Rose accomplishes by creating a reverse narrative, therefore finds its counterpart in the denunciation of the application of the same logic to the subject’s identity, exposing any attempt to present the individual as a coherent whole as an arbitrary imposition of meaning. Because what we have grown accustomed to consider the original self of the individual is demonstrated to be non-localisable, the peeling away of the various layers will never unveil the mystery of the subject’s 202

individuality: in the same way that, according to Barthes, the modern text behaves, the ‘peeling off’ will simply reveal more layers and more structures, postponing ad infinitum the attainment of Truth, which always shies away from language. Instead of the Steady State Theory of an immobile identity which Western philosophy proposed over the centuries, Brooke-Rose therefore propounds that each subject undergoes an individual Big Bang, resulting in the ever-changing nature of human beings and in a total loss of origin. The fixed identity Descartes assumed is therefore also suggested as nonlocalisable, for, even if present somewhere, it will always remain outside man’s observation. This mythical stage of human identity is, as Lacan says, unthinkable, and even though human beings assume it for convenience, it simply coincides with a working hypothesis which must limit itself to certain paradigms, necessarily excluding others.32 This is why Larry – who always pretended to live without causality (239, 311) – finally accepts that we cannot live without it, as causality is forever present in the development of both the universe and the human psyche for, as Lacan would say, even before his/her birth the individual is caught up into a causal chain, that of the signifiers of the Symbolic Order, of which the human being is a mere effect. The first denunciation of causal logic on which Brooke-Rose’s third Realist novel, focused is therefore furthered in her following novels, and as in Out, so too in Such the dialectic of cause/effect is reversed and man, originally seen as the creator and primal cause of language, is exposed as a creature and effect of language. From this, it follows that if identity as a whole is a construct and an effect of the signifier, so, what is regarded as a ‘normal’, as opposed to a ‘pathological’, identity, is nothing more than a construct, depending on the paradigms considered and one’s expectations. As in Out, the creation of the ‘mad’ person is therefore exposed as an invention which the ‘sane’ need in order to posit themselves as such, ‘madness’ being inscribed on the subject by the language of society. Brooke-Rose therefore denounces here the coercive power of psychoanalytic discourse, which is fundamentally perceived as 32

This is the same notion Brooke-Rose would introduce in Next, where she has one of her characters say: ‘I once saw two different channels give a completely different graphic for the same statistics. It’s not that they lie, but it all depends on how and when you apply this or that different parameter’ (184).

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creating the illnesses it is supposed to cure, and just as torture creates the torturee’s guilt and, according to the same reversal, in Out diagnosis is responsible for aetiology, so in Such the practice of psychoanalysis is proposed as that which can create false memories in the analysands, thus creating them as such. The creation of identity therefore becomes a political act which consequently requires the suppression of the Other whom, once created as such, is perceived as a threat to the system’s stability. However, as happened in Out, the attempts made by the system of Larry’s society to integrate him and obliterate the person he became through his death, are nullified by Larry’s resistance which, by preventing it from understanding what actually happened to him during his journey, deprives it of the original cause of his symptoms, spoiling any search for a cure and once again showing that, in spite of being a painful and solitary path, resistance against the system is possible, and that partial victories against society, and the Symbolic Order itself, can be achieved.

4.3. The Loss of Identity Through Language in Between and Thru Having formulated her own cosmic theory of identity in Such, in Between Brooke-Rose furthers her delineation of the role that language plays in the constitution of the individual’s identity. After her first Realist novels, where she first introduced the notion that the concurrence of different languages in the same subject provokes a split in his/her personality,33 Brooke-Rose more consistently proposed the concept that 33

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In The Languages of Love, when the protagonist Julia accomplishes her doctoral thesis, thus completing her entry into the language of philology and academia, she begins to lose her integrity (211), and throughout the novel she endeavours to restore the undivided self which she feels she has lost. Even though in this, as well as in the following novel, love is romantically seen as the force which can neutralise the attacks of the world against the subject’s integrity, the submission to, or rebellion against, an institution and its language – in this novel academia/philology and Catholicism – is already perceived as either providing or dissolving the individual’s identity. In fact, because Julia initially refuses to submit

what Western tradition has accustomed us to think of as ‘identity’, is not really a transcendental value, but the product of the various languages the individual encounters. In Between particularly, she concentrates on the idea of intertext – the infinite text outside which, as Barthes would state in Le plaisir du texte, we cannot live (in OC2, 1512) – namely the mythology of everyday life whose discourse moulds the subject’s identity and which both Brooke-Rose and Barthes (1957) suggest the Media create. As a consequence of the fact that everything is perceived as a linguistic construct, the romantic idea of a deep communication among human beings is exposed as an unobtainable ideal. This question becomes central in Between, where ‘travel-talk’ prevents any deep contact (399) and where during the conferences/congresses, originally intended to disseminate ideas, ‘the words prevent any true EXCHANGE’ (399),34 with the consequence that ‘no communication ever occurs’ (429). This is the reason why the romantic notion of ‘real love’ is also revealed as an ideal and, because of the layers of words interposed between two individuals, as we read in Thru, a ‘text’ (660). Therefore, despite Paris having husbands lovers wives mistresses of many nationalities who help to abolish the frontiers of misunderstanding with frequent changes of partners loyalties convictions, free and easily stepping over the old boundaries of conventions (437),

because of the double meaning of the word ‘convention’ as both ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘meeting’, the discourse is displaced from a discussion of love relationships to a reference to ‘congresses, commissions, conferences’ (437) where, as we have already learnt, no communication ever occurs. As Brooke-Rose indicates in Thru, love becomes ‘an eternal game of v i n c i p e r d i’ between the ‘I’ of man and the ‘Ø’ of woman (614),35 and if it is true that the sum of two lacks never corresponds to a unit, the

34

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to Catholicism, her identity remains somewhat precarious, and it is only when she converts, that she restores her self (239). This word, which refers here to the exchange of communication between people, is also what enables a further displacement from the plane to the airport, as it also indicates the bureau de change of the airport (399/400). As we shall see, this is a translation of the symbol used by Lacan in 1975 to indicate ‘woman’ (75).

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encounter between two subjects characterised by an original sense of self-insufficiency cannot fulfil the béance Lacan recognises as intrinsic to the human being. As a result, because love simply becomes, in the words that Suleiman uses to comment on Lacan’s seminar Encore, a ‘momentary, oh so vulnerable recognition between two subjects, two split subjects inhabited by lack’ (1987, 146), once she actually meets her suitor (564), the character of Between decides not to pursue the love affair she had begun by air-mail for, once he gets rid of all the words he has been hiding behind, what remains is not, as Laing once suggested, his most real and honest self (op. cit., 33/4), but, on the contrary, the lack of it, the gap, the béance which will never be fulfilled, an abyss which she refuses to enter. This idea of love as words masking the emptiness which lies behind, is also proposed in The Middlemen (1961) where, contrary to the first two novels, the love of Serena’s husband is not enough to prevent her from having a nervous breakdown. Unable to recover her integral self, Serena’s death only seals her split identity, a split which was however inscribed in her as part of the identity she acquired since birth. In fact, because the original single fertilised egg becomes two separate twins, her psyche is, from the very beginning, fragmented. The contradictory elements which constitute one’s identity are therefore constructed in this text as separate characters who, because of the role society imposes upon them, become the carriers of a partial information in relation to their identity. The notion that the exposure to different languages brings about a split of the subject’s identity – already present in The Middlemen, where the original language through which the subject is initially named represses the original self, provoking the alienation of the individual36 – thus remains at the centre of Brooke-Rose’s production, and constitutes the central motif of Between. Here, in fact, by focusing her investigation on the ‘loss of identity through language’ she experienced as a child (Brooke-Rose, 1989, in UOD, 32), she creates a central character who, because of her job, is exposed to so many fragments of various cultures and to so many different languages, that her personality becomes simply 36

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Serena, because of the information inscribed in her name, is forced to enact only certain aspects of her personality, and once the repressed elements burst into her consciousness, she suffers, despite her name, from a nervous breakdown.

a mosaic of other people’s. In this novel, Brooke-Rose therefore proposes in more sophisticated terms a notion she already proposed in The Sycamore Tree,37 and introduces a central consciousness with a passive relationship to language, which she never uses to formulate original ideas but simply to transpose other people’s from one language into another. Trapped between different areas of knowledge, the character feels she belongs to ‘no field at all, just translation’ (467), and both she and Siegfried are not required to have any original ideas (413). In order to translate successfully, in fact, they must abandon their own identity so as to assume that of the author they are translating, and this incessant shift of identity causes the loss of their own. This is why the verb ‘to be’ is never found in this novel, and why its title is a preposition which etymologically derives from the fusion of ‘be’ and ‘two’. We can therefore see how the grammatical constraint Brooke-Rose imposes on her experimental text also finds its justification on a thematic and existential level, as nothing and no-one, in this novel, can simply ‘be’: in the central consciousness’ discourse, places, events and characters are continually transformed into one another, and the woman translator herself keeps shifting identities according to her interlocutors, the conference she is translating, the country she is in, the time zone and so on. Even more fundamentally than the author him/herself, a translator simply coincides with the linguistic subject of the enunciation behind which there is not a person, but a double void: the person represented in the translator’s enunciation is not in fact the translator him/herself, but the person responding to the name of ‘author’ who, in his/her turn, has already become simply the subject of the enunciation and has disappeared from his/her text as a person. The origin which in Barthes’ opinion gets lost in writing, then, is further displaced when the text is filtered through a translator, as the latter loses his/her authorship of his/her enunciation twice, both as the author of the translation (for s/he is the result of systems of conventions and his/her translation depends on systems which s/he does not control), and as the author of the text itself, in whose original production s/he did not participate. The translator thus simultaneously assumes the double role of sender and receiver of the message, which corresponds to that of the 37

Here multilingualism is defined as ‘a substitute for thinking’ (157).

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reader and (because the author becomes a paper-being at the very moment s/he begins to write), that of the text. Brooke-Rose’s character therefore becomes an emblem of the split subject of the Lacanian Mirror Phase – since she coincides with both the one who watches (the reader), and the one who is watched (the text) – and just as the child, for Lacan, recognises him/herself in a misleading narcissistic reflection, the identity she acquires cannot but be alienated. The learning of other languages could in fact be seen as a renewal of the original split which took place at the entry of the individual into language; with each renovation the distance from what Western tradition has supposed to be the original self becomes greater, the break more profound, and the individual more alienated and distanced not only from his/her ideal innermost self, but also from his/her first linguistic self. It is precisely in the attempt to recapture part of her self, that the character tries to obtain a job in Paris: by going back to her mothercountry, she would live in the language of her childhood, and in the hope that through her maternal language she might rekindle a long lost love, she accepts the courtship of her French suitor (516, 540). Furthermore, it is always to restore her linguistic integrity that she tries to have her marriage annulled. This wish, in fact, is in my opinion neither determined by her desire to remarry, nor, as Suleiman suggests, by her sole wish to restore the integrity that her divorce broke (1989, in UOD, 101), but rather as an attempt to restore her linguistic origin, since, through her English husband, she had to assimilate yet another language. Were the split that the English language provoked to be eliminated through the annulment, and the entry into the German language eliminated through the process of denazification which she has to endure, the central consciousness believes that she would be able to live ‘monolingually’ in French, undoing the divisions her identity had to suffer. However, she cannot ‘Persil-Schein’ her German layers away that easily (517), and because the annulment of her marriage cannot eliminate the fact that she was once married, the character’s search for an integral self fails, and her relationship with Bernard results in a hopeless, suffocating love-affair. Through the linguistic displacements her discourse accomplishes, her suitor’s love, through the transformation of the custom declaration into a declaration of love, becomes in fact a plant which obsessively tries

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to suffocate her (537),38 and love itself becomes a construction of the words of the phrase-book which spring to the her mind whenever she thinks about her French suitor (431). Despite her return to her mother tongue, the character cannot therefore overcome the original split which characterises her as a human being, and is consequently unable to recapture her original, undivided self. The various languages she has entered (and the various ‘selves’ which followed) thus correspond to the various layers of Troy which archaeologists have discovered and which, as the woman translator learns from a conference delegate, in spite of being routinely destroyed, have always been replaced by more strata. Hence, as what was once believed to be the first settlement of Troy has since been proved to be the seventh, so what is now assumed to be the first, might yet prove to be only a further layer, the original settlement forever lost. In the same way that the Big Bang cannot be observed, that the original Troy cannot be found and that the mystery of the modern text cannot be unravelled, so, suggests Brooke-Rose, the original self of the individual is lost forever, each signifier only leading to further signifiers. We therefore see how in Between Brooke-Rose, at times explicitly referring to it (562), independently puts forward the same idea of the perpetual deferral of language that Derrida (coining the word différance) and Barthes (speaking of hermeneutic delay) gave. It is this same notion that is also addressed in Thru, but because of Brooke-Rose’s discovery of theory, in this novel it is more directly related to Barthes’ work and to the concept of hermeneutic delay he formulated in the section of S/Z (1970, in OC2, 605) that Brooke-Rose quotes in her text (592). However, this concept of the text as a superimposition of different codes, not only refers to the Barthesian plural text, but also to the pluri-dimensional characters the author creates and, with them, to human beings. Consequently, the semes Barthes writes about, could be read as a parallel to the layers of Troy mentioned in Between, to the particles which, in Such, Larry recognised as constituting each person, to the various aspects of one’s personality which, congregating in the same 38

This is made clear also by the transformation of the custom declaration into a declaration of love: ‘The same question everywhere goes unanswered have you anything to declare any plants or parts of plants growing inside you wildly obsessively stifling your strength with their octopus legs’ (545).

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individual, turn him/her not into a unified and coherent subject, but into a multi-faceted one; fundamentally, as a parallel to the various veils/characters which, in Thru, constitute Larissa (663). The identity which everybody feels compelled to assume, therefore coincides with the invention of the one self that each individual achieves, like Larissa, by ‘stereotyping [his] her twenty-seven veils’ (729). Identity, then, for Brooke-Rose becomes both a construction and, because every characteristic which constitutes it corresponds to a seme, a linguistic fabrication. This is why, meta-textually underlying the linguistic construction of identity, Armel tells Larissa that the two of them ‘were a poem not a couple’ (603), and it is precisely because of its linguistic nature that identity is extremely variable, as simply by ‘rehandling the signifiers into acceptability’ (690), it can transform into something else. As a result, because ‘the semes of portraits travel’ (709), not only can Larissa play all the parts of the libretto she is writing (709), but also every character in Thru needs to be continually reinvented (631), and alternates between the role of narrator and narrated. Because of the close analogy between world and word, just as for the characters in the novel, so the identity of every individual, BrookeRose suggests, becomes a fiction and simply a gathering of various semes which get perpetually rehandled so as to meet the expectations of the various ‘you’ the ‘I’ encounters through life. Since ‘every structure presupposes a void into which it is possible to fall’ (617), just as behind the twenty-seven veils there is no ‘real’ Larissa, but a void – Larissa coinciding precisely with her veils – so behind the various semes of each subject there is not a fundamental signified, but only more linguistic substitutions. The void and the lack we find at the heart of the narrative, which in the writerly text replace the presence of the author and the elementary structure of signification, can therefore be read as a counterpart to the absence of a fundamental identity in the individual: just as the meaning of the novel is plural and, in the perpetual deferral of language, gets continually recreated so as to impede fixation, so the identity of each individual is forever displaced and its determination impossible. Because the elements of the unconscious are also already the signifiers which substitute what Western tradition assumed to be the original signified self, it is alienation which is at the centre of this as well as her previous experimental novels. 210

Besides the fundamental alienation caused, for Lacan, by language, Brooke-Rose has also dealt with the social alienation determined by racial differences (Out) and by ‘mental sickness’ (Such), and in Between she maintains this concern, investigating the feeling of alienation that travelling to a country whose language is not known might provoke. Because in this novel Brooke-Rose explores what ‘it’s like to be bilingual, and what it’s like also not to know all the languages’ (Brooke Rose, 1990b, 30),39 she replaces here the technical jargons of the previous novels not only with the languages of the specialised fields represented in various conferences, but also with the different national languages spoken in various countries. Consequently, even though the plurality of meaning which characterised the previous novels still plays a fundamental role, in Between polysemy works alongside real polyglossia. Thus, further to the metaphoric exploitation of different discourses, in this novel the author also exploits the metaphoric possibilities of translation, and both aspects support each other in their function as agents of transition between different places, times and contexts. Just as the metaphor consists of the replacement of one proper term with another which is linked to the first on account of some shared elements, so the translation corresponds to the substitution of one word with a foreign other with which it shares the signified. But, while in the case of polysemy the displacement of metaphor is operated on the basis of the signified, in Between polyglossia is more fundamentally exploited at the level of the signifier, as it is the signifier of a foreign word, whose signified is not known, which stimulates the substitution of that proper term with a word which, if similar on the level of the sound it produces, bears a different meaning.40 The crossing from one language to another which translation implies, therefore corresponds not only to the perpetual crossing of national borders the character 39

40

Further to a journey she made in 1967 to Eastern Europe, during which she experienced this sense of loss herself, her own experience of being brought up in a trilingual family clearly had a strong impact on the author who acquired, at a very early age, the flair for the multi-lingual puns she exploits in her novels (BrookeRose, 1989, in UOD, 32). As Brooke-Rose indicates, ‘If you read a word in your own language, it can come out like a pun: lecheria, in Spanish, for example, which means milk shop, but of course, she [the character] reads it as lechery’ (1989, in UOD, 32).

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undertakes with each flight, but also to the crossing from one discourse to another which Brooke-Rose, in the best dialogic tradition, accomplishes in her novels. It is precisely this mixing and cohabitation of different languages and discourses that make Between not only a fine example of what Barthes would define as the plural text (1970, in OC2, 564) but, more precisely, a prototype of ‘the text of pleasure’ which he would first describe in 1973. The reader for whom the central character stands, seems in fact to coincide with an early version of the ‘anti-hero’ Barthes would refer to, namely the reader of the text when he achieves his pleasure. Then the old biblical myth is reversed, the confusion of languages is no longer a punishment, the subject achieves pleasure through the cohabitation of different languages which work side by side: the text of pleasure is a happy Babel (1973, in OC2, 1495).

Simultaneously, the central consciousness also becomes an emblem of the ‘text of pleasure’ itself. In fact, because in Between language coincides with both the text and the subject of the text – as the woman, the central character of the text, is language – she can be defined as a piece of writing not only because she is a paper-creature of the author, but also because she shares the fundamental characteristics of ‘writing’ which Barthes would later define in various essays following the publication of Between. For instance, not only is she distinguished by her loss of identity, just as ‘writing’ is, for Barthes, characterised by the loss of every origin/identity (1968, in OC2, 491), but she also shares the ability of ‘writing’, as discussed by Barthes in ‘La paix culturelle’, to borrow others’ speeches and mix various languages (1971, in OC2, 1613), and just as for Barthes the text is composed of multiple writings collected in the reader (1968, in OC2, 495), so Brooke-Rose’s character consists of all the speeches she collects in herself, which therefore come to stand for the various ‘voices’ and the ‘quotations without quotation marks’ which constitute writing itself (1970, in OC2, 568). The authority which the original authors of the various conference-papers lose at the moment they began to write, therefore becomes even more undermined when quotations from these papers are inserted into the character’s discourse without her being able to identify their origin. These plagiarisms therefore work as her intertext, making her into a piece of

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writing, that is, for Barthes, the site where different languages come into play and where all authority is lost (1971b, in OC2, 1217). Consequently, because of the coincidence between text and character, not only the central consciousness, but the whole novel could be regarded as an early creation of the ‘text of pleasure’, and both the plane and the ‘seven-terraced tower’ we often find mentioned in the text (512) can be read as an early incarnation of Barthes’ ‘writing’, which would later assume the shape of the tower of Babel, for him the only site where the war of languages could be overcome (1973, in OC2, 1509). Barthes actually perceives the loss of identity ‘writing’ generates as the only way to annul the power of intimidation of one language over another (1970, in OC2, 620), and as the only possibility to create a language where desire, and not domination, circulates (1973c, in OC2, 1613). Indeed, since his early works, his concept of ‘writing’ implied that language is a vast system where no single code is privileged, and emphasised the role that desire and pleasure play in the literary text, stressing how this pleasure of language was restricted and repressed by the laws of classical art and Realism (1967, in OC2, 432). It is exactly this exploration of the eroticism implicit in language that has become a more integral part of contemporary literature, leading to the definition of the whole relationship between the contemporary text, author and reader, in terms of mutual desire: on the one hand, there is the author’s desire for his/her text and, on the other, the reader’s desire for the text, the author, and the desire for the reader that the author had when writing. It is therefore the desire the author has for both the reader and the text, which makes his/her writing erotic, and this eroticism turns the text into a fetish object for both author and reader. Because this fetish object (impregnated by the eroticism of the author’s writing) is desired by the reader, then also the act of reading (which meets the essential requirement of eroticism, desire being present together with the object of desire) becomes erotic. Since the co-presence of desire and object, and the fact that the reader desires, when reading, both the text itself and the double desire for the text and the reader that the writer had when writing, essentially corresponds to the abolition of the distinction between writing and reading that the writerly text is supposed to achieve by making the reader participate in the act of writing, it would appear that it is not only represented in Between through the character (who embodies both the

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text and the reader), but also fundamentally coincides with the goal of the novel as a whole. Like all Brooke-Rose’s experimental novels, in fact, Between requires the participation of what Barthes would call an aristocratic and applied reader, to whom he opposes the vulgar reader (1973, in OC2, 1500), whose ‘reading for the plot’, frustrated in a text such as BrookeRose’s, renders it inaccessible to the reader, and might account for its cool reception when it was first published. The aristocratic reader, on the contrary, by not skipping anything, may find the pleasure which ‘is produced in the volume of languages, in the enunciation, not in the succession of utterances’ (Barthes, 1973, in OC2, 1500), and enjoy the significance of the text which Barthes defined as the meaning sensually produced. We can therefore see how the sensuality and eroticism of language Brooke-Rose had introduced in The Languages of Love – where the protagonist, once she undertakes entry into the different languages of romantic love, religion and philology, regards the same words she once perceived as the ‘bare bones of language’ (13) in terms of ‘flesh and bones’ (69) – are pursued more consistently in her experimental novels, where this eroticism partially originates from the repetition of words and sentences which Barthes would indicate as the precondition for the erotic text (1973, OC2, 1515). At the same time, however, sensuality is also achieved through the sexual imagery Brooke-Rose introduces in her texts. In Out, for example, the copulating flies on which the attention of the central consciousness remains fixed stand for the proliferation of metaphors initiated by his mind and, in Thru, not only is the minimal plot entirely focused on various love affairs, but also, the novel insistently posits an intimate relation between the sexual act and the creative act of writing. The ‘human body’ actually becomes a ‘text’ (592), ‘textuality’ is always closely related to ‘sexuality’ (590, 691), ‘intertextuality’ slips into ‘intersexuality’ (657), and ‘looks’ are equated with ‘books’ (678, 684, 729). Maybe less overtly than in Thru, it is however a remarkably sensual and erotic language which, in Between, originates from the images of words loving ‘each other’ (517), as during the love-affair the character has by airmail with her suitor, it is as if

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the languages fraternise in a frenzy of fornication by airmail par avion via aerea Luftpost AEROPORIKWS Uçak Ile responded to at one level and plus [...] The languages fraternise in a frenzy of sensuality par avion and find each other delicious at one level and plus (542).

As a consequence of the fact that this eroticism is brought about mainly by the medieval French Bernard uses in his letters, and is closely connected to the attempts the central character makes to return to her mother tongue (of which the language Bernard uses is a dated version), the text becomes even more closely related to pleasure in a Barthesian sense. The mother tongue is in fact identified by Barthes as the only object which is in a constant relationship with pleasure (1973, in OC2, 1513), and therefore becomes, contrary to the character’s expectations, determinant in the loss of identity that pleasure entails. Consequently, in the struggle for identity through which each individual tries not to be completely submerged by the discourse of others, the central consciousness loses, and by completely losing her identity, she accomplishes, as a text, the aim of all ‘writing’ and, in particular, of what would become the ‘text of pleasure’. In her, the power of intimidation of language is annulled and no discourse dominates, for, if one of the discourses she is spoken through reached hegemony, she would (if by nothing else through coercion) achieve an identity. To the attacks that each language mounts in the attempt to make her commit herself to a single idea (413), the character opposes a ‘willing suspension of loyalty to anyone’ (461), and by internalising the phrase ‘all ideas have equality before God’ (398, 426) which Siegfried repeats throughout the novel – and which Brooke-Rose first introduced in the short-story ‘Medium Losers and Small Winners’ (1975, 132) – she puts into practice his conviction that ‘nothing deserves a flow of rash enthusiasm’ (426), or a ‘moment of attention’ (457). Hence, her suspension between ‘belief and disbelief’ (406, 444/5), ‘loving and not loving’ (420, 445), loyalty and disloyalty (which derives from her lack of a strong sense of nationality), fundamentally indicates her assertion of independence. It is actually by assuming in herself the impossibility of an identity and a fixed meaning (to which she opposes a mutable and transliteral one) that she can remain forever ‘in between’, overcoming in herself the war of languages. The central character (and the text with which she 215

coincides), thus seems to correspond to the text on which Barthes, in a passage which seems to describe Brooke-Rose’s efforts, would comment: How can a text, which consists of language, be outside languages? […] How can the text ‘escape’ the war of fictions, of sociolects? – By a progressive work of extenuation. First, the text liquidates all metalanguage, which is what makes it into text: no voice (Science, Cause, Institution) is behind what it is saying. Then, the text completely destroys, to the point of contradiction, its own discursive category, its sociolinguistic reference (its ‘genre’) […] quotation without quotation marks. Finally, the text can, if it wants, attack the canonical structures of the language itself […] lexicon (exuberant neologisms, portmanteau words, transliterations), syntax (no more logical cell, no more sentence) (1973, in OC2, 1509/10).

However, if in Between the languages can fraternise and the power exercised by language be annulled, it is only because, on a plane, the languages remain suspended: E allora the languages do not fraternise down the seven-terraced tower […] Unless perhaps the seven-terraced tower sits suspended between belief and disbelief at a height of twelve thousand metres (512, my italics).

The dream of a disalientated language to which Barthes would assign the shape of the biblical tower, is therefore not only previously contemplated by Brooke-Rose, but also demonstrated to be unrealisable: once the Babel heureuse touches the ground, it would become just another site where power and hegemony are exercised by one discourse over another, in so far as, once the Tower rests on either side of the border, identity (if only national identity) would be imposed on the individual, and the Tower would become merely an expression of the coercive use of language. In Brooke-Rose’s novel, then, all use of language becomes an attempt at colonisation and, as the fact that the translator’s earphones are compared to a helmet indicates (400), a war. On a plane between countries and ideologies, however, languages can ‘fornicate’, and it is precisely because languages can fraternise in the character that she can overcome the system. The woman translator thus becomes what Julia Kristeva would define as a ‘subject in process’ (1977d, 55/106), that is a subject which cannot be pinned down to an essential identity, as this identity is constructed again and again every time the subject makes use of language. 216

Both Brooke-Rose’s character and the text with which she coincides, therefore come to stand for the atopic text which for Barthes, by refusing to identify itself with a particular jargon, posits itself behind doxa and nullifies the attempts at categorisation enacted by readers (1971b, in OC2, 1213; 1973, in OC2, 1509): just like Barthes’ atopic text, so Brooke-Rose’s text and character pose in fact problems of classification, and by so doing escape all imposition of identity, thus achieving a partial victory over the system.

217

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Chapter 5: The Language of Theory and History – The Attempted Colonisation of the Feminine ‘Dark Continent’

Although the novels analysed in this chapter are characterised by the same juxtaposition of different discourses which distinguishes the texts on which Chapter Four focused, I differentiate them from others because they are all partly concerned with the issue of feminine identity. In spite of an emphasis on Brooke-Rose’s concern with gender issues, my chapter will show that although some of her texts are quite overtly Feminist, her interest always transcends ‘mere’ Feminism, and while providing a critique of patriarchal discourse, not only do they simultaneously call into question some of the notions on which Feminism (French in particular) is based, but also work towards the deconstruction of the very notion of gendered identity, demonstrating how feminine identity simply corresponds to a dialectical position and a linguistic construct. For instance, the resistance which Brooke-Rose’s character opposes to categorisation in the first novel overtly concerned with gender issues (Between), does not only exemplify the resistance of the text against the readers’ attempt to impose indisputable labels on it, but also stands for the problematic classification of ‘woman’ and the impossibility of defining ‘femininity’. Hence, by striving to demonstrate the non-existence of a fundamental feminine identity, beginning with Between, Brooke-Rose not only sets herself in opposition to the deterministic theories of femininity which saw in woman’s biology the basis of a ‘feminine identity’, but also distinguishes herself from a whole section of Feminist work which emphasises the essentially different qualities of woman. France is the country where both Structuralism and PostStructuralism originated and developed; the country which saw, in the work of Lacan, the development of the most influential theory of ‘femininity’ after Freud which, despite its phallocratic legacy, emphasised ‘woman in language’ and the relationship between the construction of sexuality and the symbolic construction of the subject on the assumption that it is language that structures sexuality around the male term, that it is 219

in language that ‘woman’ is created as the negative of ‘man’, and that outside language no feminine is possible.1 Finally, it was France which gave birth to one of the first Feminist theorists, Simone de Beauvoir. However, while combining the two trends and concentrating mainly on problems of semiotic and psychoanalytic theory in relation to ‘woman’, French Feminism disregarded the famous assertion Beauvoir originally made in 1949 – ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (1960, 8) – and went back to a fundamentally essentialist theory of femininity defining woman on the basis of an essential womanhood rooted in the pre-Oedipal phase, when ‘femininity’ has not been repressed by patriarchy. Such is the case, for example, with Hélène Cixous, whose whole work is centred on the notion of the female body as the site of woman’s writing, and whose theorisation not only fundamentally relies on the biological distinction between the sexes, but also supports the patriarchal description of woman as the subject of the Mirror Phase par excellence, proposing it as ‘natural’. Similarly, Luce Irigaray’s Spéculum de l’autre femme and Ce sexe qui n’est pas un also fail in their aim to subvert patriarchal discourse precisely because they fall back into essentialism and, in their attempt to define woman, basically reinforce the patriarchal discourse they are trying to undo. 1

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In his return to Freud, Lacan stressed that because sexual identity is achieved by turning the opposite sex into the Other, it is non-essential and non-natural. Following Freud, Lacan posits the Oedipal phase as the moment in which the child (who could indifferently assume any dialectic position/gendered identity) posits him/herself in relation to the Phallus, the privileged signifier which symbolises the Law. The symbolic value Lacan gives the Phallus, thus moves sexuality away from biology, and makes all sexual identity a linguistic representation. Lacan’s assertion ‘Woman does not exist’ (1975, 68) – represented in Lacan by the barred A(utre) (1975, 75) which translates into English as the barred O(ther) Brooke-Rose inserts in Thru (614) – should therefore be read as an admission of the fact that because woman is defined simply against man, she is turned into the Other which, as an absolute category, is a pure construct. This is why – being the position of the Other to which woman is relegated also the position of God – courtly love (embodied in Between in the character’s French suitor) coincides with the ultimate form of mystification through which woman, by becoming she who can secure man’s certainty and truth, is elevated into ‘the place where her absence or inaccessibility stands in for male lack’ (J. Rose, 1982, 48), a position which Brooke-Rose’s character refuses to assume.

It is true that, contrary to such Feminist critics as Patricia Waugh (who refuse theory as a male construct and, in particular, feeling an urge to discover a sense of a unified, coherent and rational identity, they reject Post-Structuralist anti-humanism and impersonality), both Cixous and Irigaray are part of the Post-Structuralist enterprise, but while accepting the deconstruction of the (masculine) subject, they simultaneously apply the same, if reversed, double standard which patriarchy has been using for centuries, and affirm the real existence of the (feminine) subject. Hence, they seem to ignore the fact that Freud himself posited subjecthood as a precarious and partial explicitation of a subject who is marked by the division between conscious and unconscious; that he admitted that his theory was simply an hypothesis (1925, PFL 7, 331/2); that he stated that ‘pure masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain content’ (1925, PFL 7, 342), and that he based his entire theory on the fact that the individual’s heterosexual objectchoices had to be explained, and not assumed as natural, therefore emphasising, despite his inclination to consider heterosexuality as the norm, and the visible sexual organ as the guarantee of woman’s inferiority, that all adult sexuality and gendered subjectivity (for him the key to identity) resulted from psychic, and not biological, development. In addition, they equally adopt a double standard in relation to Lacanian theory, as not only do they forget the fundamental premise of his whole theory (namely that any form of identity is doomed to be forever confined to the realm of the Symbolic), but they also appropriate the notion that woman, by being relegated to the position of the Other, comes close to the unconscious (that which cannot be spoken). Thus, instead of showing how such a definition of woman corresponds to a patriarchal construct, they claim this Otherness to be an immutable and fixed essence of woman, and thereby turn her into the dark, unexplorable continent outside the Symbolic Order patriarchy has always described her as.2 By so doing, despite the contempt for the phallocratic Freud and his theory of feminine inferiority deterministically based on woman’s

2

The comparison between woman and a dark and unknown continent was first made by Freud in 1926 (PFL 7, 326).

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anatomy,3 not only are these theories centred on his postulation of a preOedipal phase and on the importance, for the development of ‘woman’, of the mother – who according to Freud the little girl blames for her castration and perceives as a rival (1925, PFL 7, 338) – but they also appear as a confirmation of the image of woman he proposed, and while criticising the deficient analysis he made of feminine development, they offer the same explanations he gave for the difficulties he had encountered in his research on woman’s sexual development. Isn’t in fact Irigaray’s positing of a language specific to woman – what she calls ‘le parler femme’ which emerges when women speak together – a repetition of Freud’s explanation of the impossibility of answering the question ‘What does a woman want?’ (in Jones, 1955, 468) as a result of his transference relation to women, which could be overcome if the analyst was a woman? (1931, PFL 7, 373). These theories therefore confirm precisely the type of definition of woman which they simultaneously refuse, and it is exactly this essentialism and the emphasis posited on the pre-Oedipal as opposed to the Symbolic, and on what Nin called ‘the music of the womb’ as opposed to logic, that Brooke-Rose strongly criticises in ‘A Womb of One’s Own’ (1991a). Here she questions the very concept of a ‘feminine specificity’ and emphasises that characteristics such as fluidity, open endings, circular structures (often indicated as typical of ‘feminine writing’), are also found in male writers. More fundamentally, BrookeRose contests here the idea that the flow and chaos which define femininity (Cixous’ chaosmos), and the instinct on which, for Dorothy Richardson, woman’s knowledge is based, should be allowed free-play: this would, in her opinion, threaten civilisation, and by proposing the unconscious as Truth and ‘the music of the womb’ as real, these Feminists are, for her, repeating the same process which led to the establishment of Western, logo-phallocentric metaphysics. Not only that, but the very fact that they posit the essence of feminine writing as the eruption of the pre-Symbolic reveals in itself the dishonesty of these

3

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In Freud’s theory, the determinant factor is that the leading sexual organ in little girls is the clitoris which, being perceived as a small penis, obliges the young female to define herself in relation to the larger male penis and to perceive herself as inferior (1924, PFL 7, 320; 1925, PFL 7, 335/7; 1931, PFL 7, 376).

critics who rely in their work precisely on the ‘masculine’ qualities of the Symbolic such as logic and control. In this essay, however, not only does Brooke-Rose treat all the Feminist critics she refers to as part of a group which, for fear that their association with the marginality of the male avant-garde would annihilate them as women, refuse the reading of their works in terms of Modernist or Postmodernist aesthetics, but she also seems to associate Cixous and Kristeva, without making enough differentiations between their theories and criticising their essentialist definitions of ‘woman’: a woman they both relegate to a pre-Oedipal moment and whose writing they consider to coincide with a specific écriture féminine which, in both theorists, consists of ‘an eruption of the feminine pre-Oedipal, or presymbolic (which Kristeva calls ‘the semiotic’)’ (1991a, 223). The theoretical approach of Julia Kristeva is, however, very different to Cixous’, and Brooke-Rose’s critique (which she would counterbalance by paying homage to Kristeva in her lecture ‘Remaking’), seems all the more peculiar if one considers the many points of contact between Brooke-Rose’s practice as a writer and Kristeva’s theory. It was actually Kristeva who coined the term ‘intertextuality’ (1969a, 146) and who first described what Barthes would call ‘quotations without quotation marks’ – Kristeva’s ‘prélévements’ (1969a, 271) – which are fundamental in Brooke-Rose’s novels. Kristeva, furthermore, shares with Brooke-Rose a profound admiration for Bakhtin’s work and a suspicion of Feminism which she identifies as ‘sexist’ (1979, 202). Just like Brooke-Rose, Kristeva refuses a form of Feminism which posits an essence of womanhood (1979, 209), as such radicalism would in her opinion only develop into a counter-ideology which would soon degenerate into an inverted form of sexism. For a subject defined by an absolute identity, Kristeva substitutes a subject-in-process, and like Brooke-Rose, she doubts all notions of identity (1979, 209), considers all belief in a possible definition of ‘woman’ as absurd (1974a, 20), asserts that ‘woman as such does not exist’ (1977, 16), and rejects the very idea of ‘écriture féminine’ (1977a, 496). In addition, Kristeva shared Brooke-Rose’s experience of being both a foreigner in Paris (where she arrived from Bulgaria in 1966), and a woman in a male-dominated environment. By aligning with the Tel Quel group Kristeva, in a similar way to Brooke-Rose, elaborated an understanding of history as text, considered Structuralism as fundamen223

tally oppressive, scientistic and phallocratic, and just as Brooke-Rose attempts, in her novels, to subvert the various scientific discourses which claim to possess the Truth, so Kristeva conceives semiotics (as opposed to Structuralism or semiology) as a mode of thought which subverts established beliefs and the traditional order. Consequently, we can see the use Brooke-Rose makes of scientific jargons as an insight into the way in which semiotics as described by Kristeva in 1969 proceeds: The semiotics concerning us here uses linguistic, mathematical and logical models and joins them to the signifying practices it approaches […] Far from being simply a stock of models on which semiotics can draw, these annexed sciences are also the object which semiotics challenges in order to make itself into an explicit critique. Mathematical terms […] terms from physics […] terms from logic […] etc. can acquire a different meaning when taken out of the conceptual field in which the retrospective terms were conceived and applied to a new ideological subject (in Moi, 1986, 79).

5.1. Between and Thru: The Denunciation of Structuralist Phallocentrism The first attempts Brooke-Rose makes to expose the oppressive rigidity of Structuralism are found in Between, where the language of science on which she focused in the previous novels is partly replaced with the language of theory, the ‘scientific’ jargon of Structuralism which she shows to be attempting the colonisation of the subject and the imposition of its version of the Truth as real. For the first time in this novel, Brooke-Rose, through the mouth of a conference speaker, makes explicit (if funny) reference to Saussurian and post-Saussurian theories of language, and although she introduces the term Structural (468), throughout the text she maintains an ironic attitude towards Structuralism’s project of creating a science of literature.4 In particular, through her central consciousness, Brooke-Rose begins here to explore the implications that the discourse of Structuralist theory has for women. The gender issue is in fact introduced at the very 4

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See also Textermination, p. 26.

beginning through the sentence (repeated throughout the text), ‘in some countries the women would segregate still to the left of the aisle, the men less numerous to the right’ (395, 400), and the whole novel is centred on the idea that the translator has a passive relation to language. In this context, then, the fact that Brooke-Rose decided to change her initially male character into a woman, assumes a particular importance: as she herself suggests in an interview, because the passivity enacted by the translator could be identified with a feminine experience,5 she found the novel ‘mysteriously’ worked better once she had made her simultaneous interpreter a woman (1990b, 32). Since this cliché of woman’s passivity is related to the cliché of woman’s lack of creativity that Brooke-Rose more consistently exposes in Amalgamemnon, the central consciousness of Between comes to stand, on the one hand, for the woman experimental writer who, in our patriarchal society, has almost invariably been dismissed and only ever grudgingly admitted to the literary Canon (represented in Between by the Tower of Babel with which it metaphorically shares its hierarchical and phallic structure); on the other, by being conceived as passive, she comes to stand for ‘woman’ in general, whom the binary logic of Western metaphysics at the basis of both Freud’s and Saussure’s theories has always relegated to the ‘inferior’ side of the dichotomy. For the first time in Between, Brooke-Rose refers to the dichotomies Saussure posited in his Cours de linguistique générale (1915) such as ‘langue et parole’ (561), ‘Code and Message’ (561), ‘System and Syntagma’ (ibid.) and ‘signifié et signifiant’ (563), and introducing his fundamental opposition between ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ (ibid.), she underlines how, because for him, in language there are only differences (561), the difference between absence and presence becomes fundamental for the sign to signify: Et comme l’a si bien dit Saussure, la langue peut se contenter de l’opposition de quelque chose avec rien. The marked term on the one hand, say, the feminine, grande, the unmarked on the other, say, the masculine, grand. Mais notez bien que le non-marqué peut dériver du marqué par retranchement, by subtraction, par une

5

A cliché which, as Brooke-Rose writes in Stories, Theories and Things ‘was nevertheless true enough generally (like all clichés) for the purpose of creating the language of the novel’ (7).

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absence qui signifie. Je répète, une absence qui signifie eine Abwesenheit die simultaneously etwas bedeutet (426).

At a certain level, then, woman becomes, as in Lévi-Strauss’ theory, a sign or symbolic token (1963, 61/2).6 Brooke-Rose seems in fact to offer a confirmation of his theory by suggesting that, in the prehistoric societies depicted in Subscript, the exchange of women is at the very basis of all relationships between different tribes. Consequently, throughout the history of evolution as described by Brooke-Rose, females seem to have no control over their lives. Since the prehistoric times described in Subscript, women are in fact obliged to follow the tribe to which the male they choose belongs (118); they have to accept their parents’ decisions and respect the unions they arranged so as to stipulate alliances (143), and in order to make the link between tribes closer, they are expected to produce offspring, so as to mingle the essences of the different clans (170). However, because in Brooke-Rose’s Between the Saussurian description of the sign is charged with sexual connotations, woman not only becomes a sign, but, since the feminine consists of the masculine with an ‘e’ added, she stands for the marked/abnormal term opposed to the unmarked/normal masculine, and by so doing she is doubly relegated (both as woman and as mere linguistic sign) to the position of the Other. It is precisely this position that, in a linguistic system based on binary logic, ‘woman’ can never escape, for even if the hierarchy posited here was reversed, and the ‘marked’ was assigned to the masculine, from which the ‘unmarked’ feminine was derived (as in the biblical myth of creation) by subtraction, woman would then coincide with the imperfect, mutilated term of the dichotomy. In this instance, as in Freud, woman

6

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In his Structural Anthropology Lévi-Strauss identifies the universal laws regulating all human societies with the prohibition of incest and the exchange of women perpetrated through the stipulation of matrimonial contracts between one kinship system and another. Because through the exchange of women social intercourse is regulated and alliances stipulated, woman becomes not only an object, but the sign through which men communicate (1963, 61/2), that which, being both that which is ‘spoken’ and she who ‘speaks’, is turned into an inherently contradictory creature who, like the character in Between, embodies the subject of the precivilised and pre-Oedipal Mirror Phase.

would then be characterised by the absence and the lack (of a penis) which signifies, what? Her inferiority. Brooke-Rose further exposes the binary opposition of woman as absence (0) and man as present (I) in Thru, where she takes her attack on the phallocentric premises of Structuralism a step further. Although she only undertakes a theoretical discussion of this subject ten years later (specifically in the essay ‘Woman as a Semiotic Object’), in Thru – which focuses on the idea that all knowledge is doomed to be relative and partial – she already focuses on the phallocentrism of the Greimassian rectangle of logic contraries in which an object O (the feminine hole) is exchanged (598). According to Greimas, for each narrative we can construct a diagram in which the elementary structure of signification is represented on the basis of the relationship between subject and object. As we read in Thru, ‘these actants are conceived not as operators but as places where the value-objects can be brought and from which they can be withdrawn’ (633). It is precisely the logical rectangle of contraries that Greimas and Rastier use in ‘Les jeux des contraintes sémiotiques’ (1968), and which Brooke-Rose repeatedly inserts in Thru,7 to show how the model works when semantically invested in sexual relations, and whose phallocentrism Brooke-Rose exposes in ‘Woman as a Semiotic Object’ (1985). Echoing the words which Ethel Thuban utters in Amalgamemnon (97), in this essay Brooke-Rose shows how the rectangle was elaborated to perpetrate the double standard which women have to suffer in every aspect of life ‘in such insidious ways that it has not always been, and is still not always easy to bring up into consciousness’ (1991a, 239). Brooke-Rose therefore first quotes the social model from Greimas and Rastier, in which Culture/permitted sexual relations is set in opposition to Nature/excluded sexual relations: Further semantic investment (more particular) then gave, ‘for traditional French society’: c1 prescribed c2 forbidden conjugal love incest, homosexuality c2 non-forbidden male adultery (1991a, 238). 7

c1 non-prescribed female adultery

See for example pp. 585, 598, 636, 667 and 695.

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The author then refers to the second (economic), and third (personal) models – where we have 1 as profitable/desired, 2 as harmful/feared, and 1 as non-profitable/non-desired, and 2 as non-profitable/non-feared respectively – on which she comments: Thus the old double standard, lingua in sheer semiotic cheek, is made sexplicit as an ‘elementary structure of significance’. The [social] model does not attempt to account for systems in which both marriage and incest are prescribed […] the ‘non-profitable’ falls conveniently on the position of ‘female adultery’ and the ‘non-harmful’ on that of ‘male adultery’ […] the ‘non-desired’ falls conveniently on the position of ‘female adultery’ and the ‘non-feared’ on that of ‘male adultery’ (1991a, 238).

It is precisely the perpetuation of this double standard, which one of the students of Thru acknowledges in an essay where the condition of the proletariat is compared to that of woman, in relation to which it is observed that ‘the double standard is rampant everywhere one is amazed. If the woman objects she is being hysterical and making a scene’ (636). This idea of woman’s hysterization, which is also proposed in Xorandor, Amalgamemnon and, partly, in Subscript – and which Foucault posits at the centre of his historical analysis of the ways in which the individual is governed through the organisation of sexuality (1980)8 – is not only later proposed by Armel in Thru (654), but also introduced early in the text by the diagram on page 584, where we can reconstruct ‘hystery of the eye’, ‘story’, ‘mystery’, namely a story which, the ‘eye’ standing for the ‘I’, becomes the story of a hysteric subject, hence the ‘mystery’ Freud identified woman with.9 The double standard, then, while compelling men to rewrite history continually, forbids women to take part in it and deprives them of their

8

9

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Because for Foucault the social practices/discourses which regulate sexuality construct the body, for him woman’s sexuality is not a natural given but the product of social discourses. The discursive construction of woman’s body thus became central to the constitution of social norms of femininity, and regularly led to woman’s hysterization, which Foucault sees as the basis of her patriarchal subjection and her exclusion from most sectors of public life. An abridged and translated form of the Freudian question ‘What does a woman want?’ – together with the ‘Qui parle’ I previously related to Barthes’ work – reappears in both Lacan (1966, 818) and Thru as the Italian ‘Che vuoi’ (654, 675).

story dismissing it as ‘hystery’, that is a displaced and bad copy of the male story. This is the reason why, in spite of the historical determination of the position of the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’, the ‘O’ into which woman has been always turned, so far has never been able to turn into the ‘I’ (585, 695). The position of mastery, in fact, always remains the property of the male subject and, should the woman try to appropriate it (an attempt represented in Thru by the shifting of the driving mirror), the man would immediately relegate her once more to the position of the Other (582). Introducing a notion that Brooke-Rose would propose again in Amalgamemnon and ‘Illiterations’ (1989a), Doreen’s essay concludes: ‘Women in fact have gained all the responsibilities of men and none of their privileges, losing their own while men have lost something too, their sense of responsibility’ (636), a concept which – tacitly implied in Between already by the character’s mother (524/5) – is proposed again later in Thru (686). The perpetuation of this double standard is not, however, the only result of the logical rectangle, in so far as, when this is used to explain a narrative sequence as a representation of the circulation of value objects, it affects ‘woman’ at a deeper level, turning her into an object of exchange. As Brooke-Rose points out in Thru, the circulation of values, interpreted as a sequence of transfers of value-objects […] means: the hero […] finds somewhere […] the king’s daughter […] and returns her to her parents […]. And if the king’s daughter, settling a pillow by her head or throwing off a shawl, and turning towards the window should say That is not it at all, that is not what I meant at all, you can simply disappear, opening a door into another door, working backwards in a wide circular pattern (667/8).

By juxtaposing a passage from Greimas with her adaptation of T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock (1917), Brooke-Rose therefore exposes the fact that the rectangle basically reproduces the exchange of women as objects which, for Lévi-Strauss, is at the base of human society (667/8). Because ‘the very movement by which the family is constituted is that by which it is dissolved, for to educate children is to destroy the family’ (676), marriage and the family are here identified with a ‘tomb’.10 This tomb, 10

As in Thru – where marriage is defined as ‘a human institution invented to protect property’ (657) – in Verbivore Zab defines the family as ‘simply an idea, a cultural development’ (49). Once again, in Next Brooke-Rose suggests a similar notion, but

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which later in the text will appear alongside ‘womb’ (684), is for many Feminist critics (Kristeva in particular), the grave of ‘woman’ herself, as, through her biological capacity to procreate and the institution of the family, woman is kept in a position of oppression and excluded from most aspects of public life, in the same way that, in Between, women are not allowed to dance (454). It is particularly the idea of femininity as ‘night sensibility, divinity’ – as opposed to man’s ‘light, reason, humanity, that is to say, the city, or politics, which excludes the woman’ (Thru, 676) – that is also proposed in Between, where this notion is linked with the idea of ‘descent’ (502), and is implicitly opposed to the ‘masculine upward myths’ embodied in the Tower of Babel which dominates our supposedly ‘rationalistic age’ turning ‘vital lies’ into ‘fragile truths’ (505). Because the feminine becomes an element of instability which threatens to turn the masculine myth upside down, the ‘fusion’ of the two sexes (as well as between different discourses), could generate, as it does in Thru, an ‘explosion’ (590),11 and it is precisely because of the power woman has to subvert masculine society that she has been silenced throughout history. In the battle between man and woman, the latter is always expected to submit to the former and to become his redundant replica, deleting her individuality. Consequently, just as in Amalgamemnon Mira is expected to give up all her interests to assume those of her lovers, the central character in Between is expected to dedicate more time to her partner (528/9). However, in Between, Brooke-Rose makes clear that if the woman’s need of the male to define herself confines her to the status of a symbolic token, it equally reduces the male to a linguistic signifier (the 1 opposed to the feminine 0). Hence, the fact that the central consciousness ‘Like the Saussurian sign […] defines herself by and through her relations with others’ (1994, 84) is not, as Birch suggests, typical of the female, but extends to all human beings who can achieve a semblance of identity only in the realm of the Other. This, I believe, is made clear through the figure of Siegfried, who experiences the same passivity to language which distinguishes the

11

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the tone has darkened: ‘The family romance is buried […] Personal history’s dead’ (183). This notion is proposed also in the diagram on page 691, where explicit reference to ‘the hystery of the I’ of ‘some Other sex’ is made.

central consciousness. In the text, Siegfried stands for the traditionally patronising male who wants to assume the role of Pygmalion (459), the mentor who, taking the woman under his wing (429, 486), tries to shape her in his image (459), the male who objectifies the woman and considers her as an ornamental embellishment to his persona (414), ‘the unmarked term’ who, as we read in Thru, is scaring, scarring you with his zero, forming you to his pygmalion desire that realises retrospectively that it has worked at something infinitely beyond itself since the diagonal contradictory of the dialectical reply to I want to take you over must necessarily be I want to overtake you whatever the deep structure (681).

However, he is no less spoken through than the translator herself, no less constructed through interaction with other discourses, no less passive in relation to language than she is. As Lacan states in his Seminar Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, man is in fact placed as an object into the Symbolic Order and is subjected to it just as woman is (1978, 304/5); he is, like her, shaped by language and, like her, has to line up on one side or the other of the legislative divide with which sexual difference coincides and which, in Lacan (1966, 499), as in Brooke-Rose’s text (409/10), is represented by the different plaques found on public toilet doors. Passivity and activity are not therefore organically inscribed in the biological sex of the individual, but simply correspond, like gender itself, to dialectical positions which are open to both sexes. Hence, in Between, the roles are reversed, and while the male Siegfried has a passive relationship to language, the woman translator makes a very active use of it and turns it into a means of transport through space and time. Similarly, in Thru, the game of mirrors finally turns the initial masculine ‘I’ into the feminine ‘I’ (resulting in her male companion’s attempts to adjust the driving mirror for himself), and this game of reflections, which coincides with ‘the idyll within the idyll’, is exploited by Brooke-Rose not only to create a narrative which cannot be accounted for in terms of an elementary structure of significance, but also to give voice to the ‘feminine’. In fact, by being relegated to the position of the Other, ‘woman’, according to the Lacanian identification of the Other with the site of the unconscious, basically coincides with the unconscious itself and, as such, 231

cannot be spoken directly but only through an indirect reflection. In addition, just as for Lacan any object which is linked to the unconscious remains outside representation and, as such, ‘is negativity in the specular image’ (Lacan, 1966, 822), not only do Larissa’s eyes have ‘psychic invisibility’ and ‘reflect nothing’ (583), but also ‘woman’ in general, for whom Larissa here stands, like the images of the unconscious and the ultimate Other (God), cannot be represented in specularisation (650). Despite various attempts to silence it, however, the feminine can find, in Thru, an oblique and indirect expression. It can in fact find a voice and speak out of the fissures inherent in the phallocentric language of our society, whose gaps and inconsistencies Brooke-Rose exposes and widens by juxtaposing one discourse with another.

5.2. Amalgamemnon and Subscript: The Mimicry of the Discourse of Western History and the Origins of Sexism As happens in Thru, in Amalgamemnon the feminine is able to find an expression within the discourse spoken by the phallocratic society Mira inhabits, and thanks to her technique of mimicry, she is able to denounce the phallocratic approach that Herodotus assumed in his Histories, which spread the prejudices and clichés which still dominate society’s attitude towards women, albeit unconsciously. In this novel, Brooke-Rose actually points out that these prejudices are transmitted from one generation to the next in such subtle ways that often women themselves assume them to be common-sense and the norm.12 It is precisely this kind of repetitive, brain-washing discourse that Mira is exposed to throughout Amalgamemnon, and because the whole novel is centred on the pseudo-future the Media create by speculating endlessly on every piece of information they can gather, redundancy (one of the central concerns of this text) must be understood both in its social and in its informational sense. In Mira’s technological society, in fact, the humanities are, as such, redundant, and, as a woman, she is relegated to 12

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Thru, p. 716; Amalgamemnon, pp. 8, 12, 23, 37, 40, 69, 135.

be the redundant sign in relation to the male, the feminine ‘u’ after the masculine ‘q’ which we also find in Thru (714). Hence, just as writing has been turned by the metaphysics of presence into a supplement and mere transposition of speech, so woman has been transformed by our phallocentric society into a compensatory of man: woman must feed on the male discourse and simply re-represent it, for, should she dare to dissent and carry different information, man would immediately silence her. This, if we want to believe Lévi-Strauss’ identification of women with mere ‘parts of a meaningful system’ (1963, 61), has been the very basis of human society since pre-history. Indeed, in Subscript, Brooke-Rose offers her readers a history of the world from a female’s perspective, and although the novel is focussed on ontological issues, as it tries to determine what makes a human being a human being, distinguished from other animal species, it also asks questions related to gender. Obviously, initially it is quite difficult to realise we are inside a female organism, but as the species evolve, and consciousness develops, it becomes increasingly clear that the various focal characters always coincide with female beings, as it is openly declared at the end of Chapter Nine (95). As the species evolve, the distinction between ‘male’ and ‘female’ becomes more marked, and the female’s capacity to procreate becomes, as in contemporary society, the basis for unfair treatment. As we read in the text, since the fundamental change in the reproductive process (which enabled females to keep the fertilised egg inside themselves and give birth to ‘little adults’), ‘the original division of labour between male and female has become even more unequal’ (57). This division of tasks, which in a way reinforces the relationship between male and female, was however based, since the beginning, on the female’s position of ‘weakness’ caused by motherhood: many feel completely settled here, especially the females. Each of us belongs to one male who willingly goes off seeking fleshfood while we collect sweet fat roots and stalks and berries to go with it or feed our young under the few trees […] this sharing out of tasks creates a strong bond between us. It began in this lifespan, when more and more of us lost our lives giving out offspring in deep high tearing pain, or survived but weaker and also had to spend all our time looking after offspring somehow damaged because the larger heads couldn’t get out (99).

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In spite of having proved on several occasions to be as good as their male counterparts (95), soon enough the females begin to be considered not only different, but somewhat ‘inferior’. As a consequence, every new idea they might have (and, according to Brooke-Rose’s tale, it was actually them who came up first with all the new ideas which rendered the evolution of humanity possible), is initially met with resistance and dismissed by the males as silly, only to be later appropriated by them, as if it sprang right out of their minds. It was the female members of the pack that began to stand and walk on their back legs (93), who thought that cleaned skins of animals could be used to carry things (102), who invented the ‘mouth-noise game’ (109) which eventually evolved into different human languages, leading to the birth of story telling (129), medicine, simple mathematics and the like. It was the females who first contemplated the possibility of living in caves (118), who helped finding a way to cook meat (119) etc. In spite of this, the males soon learnt to silence women (121) and exclude them from important decision making (130). In fact, comments Brooke-Rose in 1985, ‘since signs do ‘speak’, the system was doomed from the start, or rather, had to depend for aeons on women’s silence, on the repression of their signified into the unconscious’ (1991a, 241). According to the usual double standard, ‘silence in woman, is like speech in man’ (Sir John Daw), and even today, Brooke-Rose says heralding what she would write in Next (42), any reticence or objections a woman might voice are still silenced, not only as before, by the power of man’s desire as expressed in his discourse (amounting to ‘I want it so you must want it’), but, supreme irony of sexual freedom, by accusations of prudery, frigidity, repression, abnormality, anything rather than acceptance that he is not desired […] having ‘won’ her, and assuming he wants to ‘keep’ her, he still tends towards two types of possessive behaviour: the Pygmalion urge (to form her to his own desires, and ceasing his love should she herself take wing), or the demolition enterprise (using his very love to prevent her, in innumerable ways and whatever his verbal assurances, from achieving any kind of self-expression). (Brooke-Rose, 1991a, 247).

It is precisely these male attitudes that Brooke-Rose was already exposing in Amalgamemnon (45), where through the imaginary lovers of her central character she offers a vivid representation of male coercive

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techniques, exposing how the long standing clichés at the basis of primitive societies still shape the mind of the man of the future. In Subscript, Brooke-Rose ironically likens the phallocratic clichés and attitudes men still live by to those of ‘cave-men’, emphasising for example how the males have always liked to complicate things (107, 159), how even in prehistory they used to respond to females’ fatigue or ‘disgruntledness’ by assuming that they were going to be ‘moonstruck’ (151) and how their scorn and resistance to females’ ideas slowed down the development of humankind and human language (113, 120). From the very beginning, men have assumed the kind of monopolising attitudes which still characterise them, and just as in Verbivore, the male of the future tries to silence woman during public discussions, in prehistory they used to impede other people to express their ideas and, ‘barging in with a louder voices’ (128), tried to speak all at once (185). Already in Thru, Brooke-Rose exposed the patronising assumptions on which the male bases himself in his declaration of love to the woman,13 and in Amalgamemnon she pursues her denunciation of man’s attempt to obliterate ‘woman’ completely.14 Just as in Thru Larissa might not want security at all, but adventure, so a woman could want different things from life apart from being a partner to some man. However, as Mira laments, none of her ‘private telematics will interest him’ (60), and the demands for recognition she makes of her lovers will remain forever unfulfilled (142).15 Consequently, woman in the past has never been allowed to be more than witty or less than pretty, and just as in prehistory, a woman ‘asking the questions, as no woman should […] will make him angrier’ (197), so any statement Mira might make ‘to any purpose other than sado-elegant pub-lounge platitudes will already begin 13 14

15

‘I want to take you over / I want to look after you […] I’m offering you security and a calm relationship’ (701). Both Willy and Wally think of themselves as he who can save Mira from her ‘emotional desert’ (10), and invading her existence, they deprive her of her life (8), stop her inquiries and any attempt at conversation she might make, ‘atomising’ her own ‘lifelong passions’ (130), dispossessing her of her ‘friends’, her ‘activities’, her ‘reading’, and also her ‘desire for a television set’ (141). See also Remake, pp. 118, 150. See pp. 18, 36, 46, 136. Furthermore, her attempt to split up (which, in Mira’s imagination always happens at breakfast, and is therefore playfully transformed into a ‘break-feast’) would be dismissed as ‘woman-nonsense’ (61).

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to make him angry’ (22, 141), and both Mira’s lovers wait impatiently for the moment when she, finally made redundant from the university, ‘will accept, and face, being only a woman’ (15, 136), thus devoting all her time to her man (46).16 Since ancient times, exponents of the female sex have been considered, by definition, inferior: they have always been ‘mere girl[s]’ (201), ‘mere daughter[s]’ (202), and just as in our society certain areas are considered as typically male, in prehistoric times females, according to the male members of their group, ‘wouldn’t know which kind of killer stone to make for any one kind of animal’ (107). Hence, they had to come to terms with the fact that only the males could specialise in particular tasks and ‘make all the more difficult finishing touches’ (115), whereas they were put in charge of less demanding tasks. Perhaps more important then any other aspect of human development, though, is the fact that, in spite of having begun the ‘mouth-noise game’, attaching words to things and doings, the females were soon excluded from this activity, as the males took over this task, relegating the females to the role of servants. The females were then allowed to help the males only on a practical level, for example by bringing them food and looking after them, while the creation of new words was left to the males’ genial minds: males do so enjoy hearing males make speech. So we have to bring them food, up in the mountain cave. They won’t stop to join us below by the pool. Balud came down and ordered it. And naturally we won’t be allowed to be present at their grand decisions so they’ll stop talking as we enter […] story says males insisted on aloneness up mountain to do nothing other. Other? Work at words only. Only? Years after years, lives after lives (127/8).

Men soon learnt to exclude women from many other fields (157, 202), and it is precisely this kind of attitude that women still have to suffer in our contemporary society. As one of the focal characters in Subscript states, men never help on women’s work, unless it suddenly interests them and then they take it over and call it men’s work. That’s what Gavrina says, and it’s a secret, that women first worked stone, made ornaments, invented slow cooking in the earth, 16

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These words recall what Brooke-Rose would write in Next, where discussing a job interview, one of the characters says: ‘Elsie […] maybe they thought she was bright enough to manage but girl enough to be managed’ (180).

discovered speech, told stories of the clan and prophesied, sang to our young. And other things perhaps. We teach them to speak so they silence us (191).

As a consequence, it is the males who then began to impose their names (and identities) onto the females (132), and just as in the past women’s queries were met by the usual ‘women can’t understand’ (197), even now, technical areas being considered as typically male, woman is expected not to understand anything about cars (60), to be terrified of electricity (127), to lose herself in ecstasy over a man’s changing a lightswitch (127), fundamentally, to accept to continue ‘seeming idiotic’ (13, 129), to be ‘Pygmalioned’ and shaped, as Brooke-Rose would note in Remake (12, 138), in the man’s image, thus submitting to the ‘unmarked term’ which, in Thru, ‘teaches her to dress to slim to wear contact lenses paint her eyes read learn live but not to love’ (662). And this, would emphasise Brooke-Rose in her last published novel, has always been the male’s attitude, since the beginning of humanity, when men [told] us what to do, not only when to sow and when to gather, but what to think, how to think it, when to act, how to act, how high the bum when kissing the earth, how low the kiss, how long the kneeling, how high the leg when carrying the dead or walking or dancing in honour of the chief, when to adore, when and how to dance and trance, when and how to exchange things (208).

It is against these attempts to ‘amalgamate’ and delete her completely – repeated over and over again by the man of the future society depicted in Amalgamemnon – that Mira fights, carrying out her rebellion during her solitary night/s, when – while listening to the radio, reading pages of Herodotus, and bringing together her different memories of classical knowledge – she creates herself repeatedly. We can therefore see how, like the central consciousness in Out, by continually shifting identities Mira opposes the attempt that society and her lovers make to impose an identity on her and, just as for the woman translator in Between, her loss of a fixed identity coincides with her victory over the system. True, the identities Mira creates for herself must be deconstructed in the morning and replaced by the identity of the ‘semidiotic’ woman which will meet the expectations of society (15), but even though the man ‘dissembles’ her, Mira can ‘quietly and secretly reassemble’ herself later (48), and is able to assert that ‘sooner or later 237

the future will explode into the present despite the double standard at breaking points’ (16). Hence, although she acknowledges that woman has always been turned into the unconscious, Brooke-Rose leaves hope for her final affirmation, that is for the ‘return of the repressed prodigal’ we find repeated so often in the novel (13), the return of that which has been repressed and which, according to Freud, sooner or later finds a voice in the language of symptoms, dreams and parapraxes. As Maria Del Sapio-Garbero suggests in ‘Amalgamemnon: macchine del linguaggio e doppiezze della scrittura’ (1991b, 314/6), it might be actually relevant to refer to the theory Freud proposed in ‘A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad’ (1924), where he compared the human mind to a special writing-pad in which the top end of a double sheet of transparent paper was secured to a slab of brown resin or wax. In order to make use of this device, a pointed stylus scratches the surface, the depressions upon which constitute the ‘writing’ [...] If one wishes to destroy what has been written, all that is necessary is to raise the double covering-sheet from the wax slab by a light pull, starting from the free lower end [...] But it is easy to discover that the permanent traces of what was written is retained upon the wax slab itself and is legible in suitable lights (SE XIX, 229/30).

The two parts of the ‘mystic writing-pad’ correspond, for Freud, to the two different systems (Pcpt and Cs) whose existence he first formulated in The Interpretations of Dreams (PFL 4, 730), and just as the note-book maintains the pale traces of the original inscription, nothing, in the human mind, disappears: what seems to be forgotten or indeed not noticed in the first place, is in fact inscribed in the individual’s mind (if nothing else, Lacan would add, as a signifier), and remains in a dormant state until it finds a signified to attach itself to and, subsequently, an indirect form of expression. In parallel, despite all attempts to silence her, woman cannot be effaced completely: a trace does in fact remain, and beneath what seems to be very similar to the Derridean ‘rature’, she can still be perceived. If Derrida describes this placing of signs ‘sous rature’ in Ecriture et différence – where he extensively analyses Freud’s essay of 1924 (1967, 293/340) – so as to demonstrate that certain concepts of Western metaphysics remain indispensable to any philosophical discourse, the same notion can also be applied to other discourses. Because, in particu238

lar, it can describe the realm of the unconscious (where the signifiers, although repressed, remain present underneath the surface), this phrase may be used to refer to woman. Hence, just as the sous rature unconscious finds a voice in the fissures of conscious language, so the rebellious feminine voice of Mira (the woman par excellence) leaves a trace not only in the various identities she assumes at night, but also in the language she speaks. Although her identities are deleted by her lovers’ discourse, in the same way that words written in sand are washed away by the sea, they will nevertheless compose the ‘story of dissidence’ Mira-as-Orion imagines writing: At dawn I’ll wake exhausted and write my cybernetic story of dissidence on the sand. The waves will wash it away. I’ll write it again and the waves will wash it away again. That will be with the left side of my effaceable memory, for language in random access […] Below that or over and above it will operate the second memory, indelibly imprinted with my escape despite deletions that will be irrecoverably lost (20/1).17

What enables Mira to resist society’s phallocentric discourse is the ‘utterly other discourse’ (15) which originates from a page of Herodotus read at night; what protects her is the ‘rhetoric of repetition’ (17);18 fundamentally, what saves her is her associative grapho-mania (20) thanks to which times and places are fused in her monologue. In Mira’s discourse, ancient history is in fact read through the present (hence the transformation of the rape of Europa into a football match or a reference to the Common Market, and the intermingling of other mythical abductions with typically twentieth-century kidnappings), and the boundaries that society has neatly drawn between technology and the humanities, the first and the third world, are somehow blurred. Through the juxtaposition of different elements, the phallocentrism of patriarchal 17

18

This passage shows how Brooke-Rose’s juxtaposition of different discourses gives a cohesion to her work in so far as, just like Freud’s magic note-book and Derrida’s words sous rature, the ‘cybernetic’ technology of computers, equipped as they are with a phenomenal memory, allows them to retain traces of what has been otherwise deleted. Redundancy therefore also assumes a positive connotation in this novel, and the negative sense of the term is counterbalanced by the generative power of redundancy which enables the generation of more text, the perpetual re-creation of Mira thus assuring her own survival.

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society is exposed and Mira’s resistance posited: by introducing extracts from Herodotus’ Histories in a different context, and by literally imitating Herodotus’ discourse in the various radio talk-shows she creates, Mira actually exposes the fundamental phallocentrism of Western history, and thanks to her linguistic amalgamations turns Herodotus, once the father of history, into the ‘father of fibstory’ (22, 113), the story of lies in which the roots of the prejudice against woman and her objectification can be found (16). We can therefore see how the assimilation of woman to animals and objects that Herodotus suggested, as paraphrased by Brooke-Rose (29, 52, 80, 83) – already the basis of the distinction between andraic and metandraic languages Between refers to (494) and, according to the description Brooke-Rose gives in Subscript, of the very notion of exchange on which human civilisation is based (208) – is at the heart of the matrimonial contract thanks to which the parents of the Abyssinian Maid will receive three camels in payment for their daughter (28). Like the King’s daughter in Thru, the Princess Fatima-my-Folly (who has no intrinsic value in herself, but only acquires one if she comes complete with a kingdom and a treasure) is objectified and becomes the reward that the King of Point X promises the man who will rescue her from the dragon (88). However, if man feels the urge to turn her into a ‘second-class person’ (52) and silence her, it is precisely because woman is perceived as dangerous and her subversive potential acknowledged. This notion of woman as silent is therefore what fundamentally lies behind the cliché of woman’s lack of creativity that Brooke-Rose refers to in Between and Amalgamemnon where, just as for Willy women are not fit for the role of ‘peace-militants’ (13) or for farmwork (44), so, for Wally – as well as for one of Larry’s colleagues in Such (301) – they are not suitable for scientific studies (124). In this novel, then, which seems to represent Lyotard’s idea that knowledge is zealously controlled by a political/ economic elite, it is suggested that woman is hard working and diligent, certainly, but that she hasn’t got the spark of genius that distinguishes real artistic creativity (16) and that makes revolutionary scientific discovery possible.19 Under patriarchy woman can, at best, be a good

19

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Mira laments: ‘Even in the supernew present technorevolution I could at best be the female slave who’ll type the data into a memory for analysis but never, never

performer (138), but, as Brooke-Rose writes in ‘Illiterations’ with reference to the phallocratic remarks Burgess made in 1981, It takes centuries, generations of artists being allowed and expected to practise their art and to show themselves practising it, rather than just looking pretty at a spinet as an asset on the marriage market (composing being for brother Wolfgang), for a Mozart or a Michelangelo or a Shakespeare to emerge (1991a, 253).

For Brooke-Rose these prejudices against women artists and, in particular, the woman (experimental) writer derive from the fact that the literary Canon has always been an essentially male construct. As Brooke-Rose explains in her essay, this opposition between nature and culture goes back to Longinus and the privilege accorded to nature/genius over culture/work which (in contradiction with the patriarchy’s insistence on woman’s illogicality), stems from the divine origin of genius (Plato’s ‘divine madness’), fundamentally reproduces the privilege accorded to man over woman. ‘Genius’ actually derives from the Indo-European root *gen, meaning to beget, and while man begets (genius), woman bears and travails (work). In reality, Brooke-Rose makes it clear that this attitude was widespread long before Longinus, and in Subscript she hints at the fact that since prehistory women have been relegated to the role of mere performers. In spite of being the ones who came up with original thoughts, they have always been dispossessed of their discoveries and have been ‘stuck with the most unchanging tasks, the same old scrapers and footheld choppers. A sitting task, a female task’ (107). From this follows the exclusion of woman from artistic creativity and, with a typical reversal, the perception of the books written by women as substitutes for children, surrogates to fill the gap left by the man’s absence (Amalgamemnon, 116). In Western patriarchal society, then, woman has never been considered able to have direct contact with the gods – and this is exemplified also by the fact that even in prehistoric societies women weren’t allowed into the sacred caverns (Subscript, 193, 210) – and because both her scientific curiosity (exemplified by Eve eating the apple) and her divine madness are considered to originate from the devil, the woman who dares to speak has always been silenced the softquery expert who’ll compose the analytic programme. I wouldn’t understand’ (60).

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as either a witch or, in modern times, a hysteric.20 Because of this, the fact that in Subscript some of the female creatures through whose eyes we see what is described are ‘healers’ (140), and that one of them finally manages to enter the sacred cavern, if only by accident (212/5), becomes fundamental in the author’s subliminal assertion of women’s rights. Furthermore, the fact that in Amalgamemnon Mira identifies with the prophetess Cassandra, assume a fundamental importance. Traditionally, the only examples of women having direct contact with the gods were in fact the ancient prophetesses who, like ‘twittering birds’ (Herodotus, 152; Amalgamemnon, 14), delivered the gods’ messages to humans. However, if the female oracle was not masculinised – like the priestess of Athens who, according to Herodotus, grew a long beard when disaster was approaching (Herodotus, 112; Amalgamemnon, 14) – she was taken over by a male god and reduced either to utter the divine message uncomprehendingly (like the Sibyls) or, as in the case of Cassandra, doomed never to be believed. Although Cassandra died isolated and prisoner to Agamemnon, however, she had nonetheless dared to speak, and consequently Mira as Cassandra comes to stand for those women writers such as Jane Austen and George Eliott who, while still following the formal rules dictated by the Canon, subtly began to challenge them. From her position of marginality, Mira, while using the same language and stereotypes on which her society is based, bends in fact that same language so as to carve a niche where she can exist, and through the imaginative use of language that her associative mania enables her to pursue (evident in the very title of the novel and in the compounds using the prefix ‘mim’ and ‘sex’),21 not only exposes the motives behind the façade of her lovers’ words but, simultaneously, also assumes a different position inside the patriarchal discourse. The assumption on the part of woman of the role expected from her by the phallocratic society – repeated, in Xorandor, by Zab (86/7) – 20 21

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Because of its etymological relation with ‘uterus’, hysteria has been turned into a typically female disorder. The prefix ‘mim’ indicating the inauthenticity and slight displacement of the signified, and the prefix ‘sex’ clearly attesting man’s sexual interest, Mira’s agreement becomes ‘mimagreement’ (14, 144), her ecstasy, ‘mimecstasy’ (15, 127), the meals she cooks a ‘sexplicit currency’ (25) and the man’s exclamations or claims, ‘sexclaims’ (45).

becomes therefore a strategy which allows Mira to survive the attempts at amalgamation enacted by her lovers and poke fun at the clichés which lie behind their expectations. By transforming her ‘smiles’ into ‘similes’ (112), Mira is thus able to give new meanings to old formulas (for example by re-writing old proverbs as to give them different connotations),22 and this strategy not only turns Brooke-Rose’s novel into a fine example of Genettian parody (1982, 24), but also enables Mira to continue to smile secretly at her lovers’ phallocentric remarks (17), exploiting humour covertly so as to oppose, if only furtively, the phallocentrism of patriarchal discourse.

5.3. Feminist In-appropriation of Un-Feminist Texts: The Case of Xorandor and Verbivore Because of the concern Brooke-Rose shows towards gender-issues and her effort to find a voice for the repressed ‘feminine’, in particular in the novels I analysed above, she has often been referred to as a ‘Feminist writer’. However, as I briefly discussed in my Introduction, the assimilation of Brooke-Rose with Feminism is very complex: I have already shown the objections she raises to many contemporary Feminist critics, and even though she does not ‘deny for a moment that control and mastery, logic and reason, the will to power over natural and primitive forces have produced the terrifying and often ludicrously illogical world in which we live’ (1991a, 230), for her the result of the ‘masculine-dominated civilisation turned upside down’ we often find in Between (507, 510), the discourse she pursues in her novels always transcends that of gender. While she admits that because of the Canon’s continuous attempts to silence woman, she has had difficulties as a woman experimental writer, she strongly sustains that ‘specificity in creation is an individual, not a sexual, racial or class phenomenon’ (1991a, 234), and affirms that 22

‘Qui vivra verra, che sera sera, you shall see what you shall see and may the beast man wane’ (30), which undergoes a further transformation later in the text: ‘On verra ce qu’on verra and may the boast man whine’ (52).

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ultimately the writer survives as writer, not as black, Indian, Chinese, female, miner, all of whom first need to learn to read and write […] at least minimally to organize their ideas […] Flux and chaos, like anything else in the cosmos, can be used in art, but they are not themselves art (ibid.).

It is for these reasons that I contest the Feminist reading that Lincoln Konkle, while admitting that ‘Brooke-Rose does not subscribe to the theory of a genre of gender’ (1995, in UOD, 176), has imposed upon both Xorandor and Verbivore in an essay which he begins by stating: This predilection for experimentation over feminism [is] inverted in Xorandor (1986), where Brooke-Rose concerns herself with the fission of discourse into genres based upon stereotypes of gender […] the ‘unsaid other’ of Xorandor is that Xorandor is the feminine, that her breaking silence represents women writers’ breaking the silence of their oppression by the patriarchy, and that her offspring’s shutting down human communications in Verbivore is a wish fulfillment for man’s electronic castration, a poetic justice with tinges of apocalypse (op. cit., 176/7).

There follows a disquisition about the fact that while Brooke-Rose clearly intends ‘to deconstruct gender as an essentialist human attribute, her own text undermines that intention by associating with Xorandor so many feminine codes that they decide Xorandor’s gender’ (op. cit., 181). Of the ‘many feminine codes’, however, Konkle can only produce a couple: the passages Xor 7 quotes from the three witches in Macbeth (who are an example of women who dared to speak),23 and the supposed feminine nature of the name ‘Xorandor’ itself. This feminine sex, Konkle claims, is metaphorically inscribed on the name of the talking stone (which appears as smooth and circular, and therefore, for Konkle, feminine): Phonetically, both ‘Zab’ and ‘Xorandor’ begin with the /z/ sound, and Xorandor’s abbreviated name, ‘XAND’, sounds even more like Zab […] In Verbivore BrookeRose concentrates our attention on the prominent graphemic element of Xorandor’s name by having Jip and Mira Enketei refer to Xorandor-theexperience, -the-text, and -the-being as ‘X’ (54, 73, 85). Even in Xorandor the letter X is the most eye-catching element; it towers over the other letters in ‘Xorandor’ because, as a name, the X is always capitalized. X itself denotes the feminine in genetics: the sex-determining chromosomes are assigned the letter X for the feminine gender and the letter Y for the masculine (op. cit., 182), 23

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The fact that Xor 7 quotes Macbeth himself just as often is conveniently ignored.

and, in footnote seven: This reading exposes another signified of the X in Xorandor’s name: in scientific research, X is an abbreviation for experimental [and consequently indicates Brooke-Rose’s conception of Xorandor as a representative of women experimental writers] (op. cit., 191).

However, I cannot help but feel that Brooke-Rose’s text has been manipulated to confirm Konkle’s theory, and among the many interpretations that both the novel and the X of Xorandor offer (for example the undecidability of Truth) only one, however incidental, has been chosen as the most fundamental meaning of the novel, precisely the type of elementary structure of signification Brooke-Rose deconstructed in the previous as well as in this novel. But let’s do things in order. In the first instance, contrary to what Konkle advocates, I find in Xorandor the same experimentalism that Brooke-Rose displays in previous novels, as it is written entirely in dialogue – a constraint reminiscent of the elimination of the verb ‘to be’ in Between, of the constative sentences in Amalgamemnon, the personal pronouns in Remake and the verb ‘to have’ in Next. Not only this, but, more importantly, by integrating computer jargon into her narrative more consistently than ever before, the author creates here an entirely new language in which the twins can express themselves. If this device can be ascribed to practical reasons, as the generation gap and her long absence from England prevented her from knowing how British children spoke (Brooke-Rose, 1990b, 30), it also has many important purposes in relation to her discussion of the future of literature, and should be seen as a parallel to the experimental endeavour that she exhibited in the previous novels, where different jargons and languages were fused together. Secondly, but more importantly, Konkle seems here to be imposing onto Brooke-Rose’s novels a reading which the texts themselves do not entirely support, thus turning an incidental (and at times accidental) gender-linked interest into the main concern of these novels which deal with other issues more directly and intensely. To an extent, I agree with Konkle when he says that Brooke-Rose is here deconstructing binary oppositions, and I accept that one of these is that which puts man and woman against one another. Also, I accept that a more descriptive kind of narrative is often linked with the narrative produced by women, that 245

an interest in technology is more identified with a male domain, and that intuition has often been opposed to logic in terms of ‘feminine’ vs. ‘masculine’ (see discussion of these clichés above). Consequently, the fact that Zab is more inclined to reproduce conversations extensively in opposition to Jip’s desire to summarise, and the fact that it is Zab who experiences the intuitive brainwaves in opposition to Jip’s reliance on logic, could be read as re-proposing the stereotyped images of man and woman. Furthermore, I agree with the fact that, through their narration, the children learn that both summary and imitation are fundamental, that they internalise the other’s mode of narration,24 that in order to save the world from nuclear holocaust and arrive at the (partial) Truth regarding Xorandor’s origin, they have to rely on both these modes of cognition, that all this clearly hints that both ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ aspects are necessary, and that also in this novel Brooke-Rose makes clear that both modes of writing narrative are for her open to both male and female. However, beyond a concern with gendered genres, Brooke-Rose points to more general problematics which, the children having to face the same problems that any writer has to face independently of his/her sex, concern the story-teller in general. In addition, if we want to look at the incidental concern with gender that Brooke-Rose displays in this as well as all her other novels as a result of the identification of ‘intuition’ and ‘spaghetti logic’ with the female (11), and of ‘logic’ and ‘rationality’ with the male, we can then see how Xorandor (whose name includes both non-exclusive and exclusive operands) could represent the unification of both feminine contradiction and masculine rigour, and that of feminine inclusive descriptions and male exclusive summary, thus turning the talking stone (to which humans assign the role of God) into the androgynous divinity Brooke-Rose already introduced in Between (504). Although Konkle first wonders if ‘the choice of twin brother and sister for the main characters […] may be Brooke-Rose’s attempt to show that when sexuality is not involved, neither is gender’ (op. cit., 177), and then contradictorily lists the many elements which turn Jip and 24

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See for example Xorandor, pp. 75, 87, 93 and Verbivore, p. 157. In addition, just as Zab plays the part of the idiotic girl (87), so Jip pretends to be less advanced in computer knowledge than what he really is (91), and even though he is always criticising Zab for anthropomorphising Xorandor (92), he equally uses emotional words and attributes human feelings to the talking stone (95).

Zab into the carriers of gender definitions of male and female, I agree with his affirmation that Brooke-Rose is here proposing a paradigm of androgyny, because by acknowledging that the differentiation of genders is socially constructed, she presupposes a unitary moment, an original wholeness, when ‘human being’ is simply ‘human being’, Freud’s bisexual child who will later develop into a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’, and whom Woolf tried to represent for example in Orlando (1928). However, if it is important for the twins ‘to be two’ (7), it is not simply because they are the representatives of opposite sexes, and Konkle’s simplistic insistence on this argument proposes once again the complementary states of man and woman as natural and organically determined, from which follows the endorsement of woman’s relegation to motherhood and her subjugation. In my opinion, the importance to Jip and Zab of becoming ‘ZIP’ (66) actually lies more fundamentally in the fact that being twins, they are two halves of an entirety (one fertilised egg).25 The twins’ attempted restoration of their unitary self thus parallels the attempt that Larry makes in Such to recover the ‘original’ self he lost in his waking life and which got repressed in his (pre)unconscious. It is therefore only in the sense that woman has been relegated to the position of man’s unconscious and to the pre-Oedipal moment, that we may consider the unity of the twins in terms of gender, as the twins restoration of their original wholeness comes to stand for the restoration of each human being’s ‘integral’ self which Brooke-Rose tried to locate as early as Such. It is precisely in this ‘human being’ that she seems to be mostly interested, her discourse reaching beyond any discussion of gender divisions. Because of this, the issue of Xorandor’s gender, posited as central by Konkle, becomes a secondary concern, resulting from the more fundamental question of Xorandor’s existential status. As Konkle suggests, the question of Xorandor’s gender is raised only twice, once when Miss Pennbeagle tells the twins’ father about Xorandor and refers to it as a ‘he’ (43), and once when Biggleton reproaches the twins’ father for shifting continually from ‘he’ to ‘it’ in his references to the talking stone (58). However, interpreting these 25

As usual, Brooke-Rose seems to use science poetically, and disregards the fact that it is genetically impossible for boy and girl twins to come from the same egg. Identical twins are clones and therefore same sexed.

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words and Biggleton’s decision to refer to the talking stone as a ‘he’ as ‘a safety precaution against the effects of admitting the feminine into Xorandor’s origin story’ (Konkle, op. cit., 181) seems to me as paranoid as certain radical Feminist notions of language as a male plot against women. Of course, sexism is present everywhere in Western languages, and the masculine is often taken as the general term in opposition to the feminine particular. Hence, if we talk of gender in Xorandor, the ‘he/it’ dichotomy the scientists argue over does hint at the male appropriation of the universal. Yet, the fundamental question is not whether Xorandor is male or female (after all we have agreed that Xorandor is androgynous), but rather, what kind of ontological status he/it might occupy. In his attempt to demonstrate how Xorandor is, after all a ‘she’, Konkle seems in fact to ignore the more fundamental ‘human/nonhuman’ dichotomy I see at the root of the problem. Initially, the question is raised as to whether a stone or a machine could think (39), but also when it is accepted that this machine might, in actual fact, be a ‘being’ of some sort (101), Xorandor is never thought to be human. But what does make a ‘human being’ a ‘human being’? Is it the capacity for motion (101)? The ability to represent (90) and make artefacts (101)? The possession of a purpose to one’s life (192)? In reality, Xorandor displays all the characteristics which in the novel are proposed as determinant for a definition of ‘human being’, but the possibility of identifying it as ‘human’ is never considered, and if this might be read as a parallel to sexism, it must equally be read as a parallel to racism and to any other form of discrimination. Indeed, because the concern Brooke-Rose shows in all her novels by developing the underdog theme, is above all a concern with human beings made ‘lesser’ by circumstances and culture, her concern with woman is in my opinion to be read as a concern with a position of lesser being, the same position, however, to which Blacks, foreigners, exiles, or even white males in certain situations are confined. In a similar way to what happens in these circumstances, through the un-questioned acceptance of Xorandor’s Martian origin, and the clear double standard at work in the definition of its ontological status, an identity is imposed upon the talking stone on the basis of non-pertinent differences, and – just as in the case of woman, the Black and, in Nazi Germany, the Jew – Xorandor is constituted as the Other against which the human race can define itself. 248

Perhaps more explicitly than in any other novel, however, BrookeRose indicates here that ‘the Other’, and identity in general, is simply a dialectical position and it is constructed by language: firstly by the verbal language Xorandor used when first questioned about his origin, and secondly the language of the computer programme it used to change its chemical composition so as to give evidence of its Martian origin. Consequently, I would submit that what the novel deals with, amongst other issues, is not simply the coercive use that man has made of language so as to relegate woman to a position of inferiority, but the tendency towards coercion which is implicit in any use of language, any human being having to construct an Other in order to reach a sense of identity. Similarly, to restrict the many issues that Verbivore raises to an interest in gender, and to play down the novel’s main concern with the addiction to information in favour of this thematic, is in my opinion reductive and restrictive. True, the issue is present (as it is in all BrookeRose’s novels): the mother of the twins – who in Xorandor was, with her husband, the carrier of stereotypical gender information (sensitive, emotional and erratic as opposed to the logical, rational and scientific male) – finally frees herself of her housewifely role and becomes a successful actress,26 but to see the Verbivore episode only as ‘wish fulfillment for man’s electronic castration’ (Konkle, op. cit., 177), seems to me somewhat fanciful. The Verbivore phenomenon might well correspond, as Konkle recognises, to ‘a wife’s revenge on a footballhooked husband who now has to listen to her instead’ (Verbivore, 169, Konkle, op. cit., 188), but the critic conveniently forgets to mention that women are as affected as men by the loss of radio-waves and suffer from the lack of their daily ration of soap-operas (31). Consequently, I would sumbit that if Verbivore represents any kind of vengeance at all, it does not coincide with a woman’s vendetta, but might, at most, be identified with the subliminal revenge which a writer and a lover of literature such as Brooke-Rose might take against the intellectually atrophying effects of the Media.

26

However, as a further refutation of Konkle’s theory, if it is true that in Xorandor the twins’ mother had to give up her career as an actress, their father had to give up research in physics to take the job at the Wheal (13).

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The appropriation of this text by Feminists appears to force BrookeRose into the role of the radical Feminist (a part which she has always refused to play), and turn her concern with gender into an obsession, one which she has always been careful to keep at a distance by ironically criticising both women in general and Feminists in particular. For example, in Xorandor she has the twins criticise their parents’ assumption of the stereotypical roles of ‘woman’ and ‘man’, and through them she makes ‘women’ share, at least in part, the blame for their own oppression (87, 152, 201). Similarly, in Verbivore, Brooke-Rose shows that, even though she rarely does it, woman can react to man’s attempts at silencing her (181), and she treats the Feminist theory of language as a male plot against women very ironically both in Amalgamemnon (14) and Verbivore (137). Furthermore, if she accepts that men traditionally do apply the usual double standard in sexual freedom, she is also ready to acknowledge, through one of her characters, that in power-struggles, it is women (or more generally human beings) who try and take advantage of the double standard and the distinction between the sexes (Next, 183). The conclusion of Konkle’s essay seems to depict Brooke-Rose as a paranoiac whose only hope of evading patriarchy’s oppression is to abolish humanity: If, in the world according to poststructuralists, all we apprehend is a linguistic construct, and we ourselves are nothing apart from what our words say we are, then the gender issue – or, more real-worldly, the women’s movement to liberate itself from patriarchal oppression – is doomed to fail, for from modern languages back to classical in Western civilization, the words that signify female and the feminine are inextricably linked to the male and the masculine as the inferior side of a bipolar system. The only hope would be to destroy all previous patriarchal signifiers for the feminine, and for the masculine, and then to start over, to create new representations of gender not based upon an etymology of inferiority and superiority (op. cit., 187/8).

However, I cannot think that Brooke-Rose would subscribe to this absolute negation of all deconstructive endeavour, including that which she herself has pursued throughout her career. Given the fact that Brooke-Rose strongly defends the contextualisation of all meaning and the eternal deferral of language, it seems to me that she implicitly refutes Konkle’s attempt to turn her text into a denunciation of the male conspiratorial plot against women. Indeed, what she struggles for in her novels is to show how an imaginative use of language, by changing the 250

context of words and sentences, can oppose the coercive use that various oppressors and colonisers have made of it, and can not only disrupt many long-standing assumptions, but also create, ‘ex almost nihilo’ (Amalgamemnon, 55), the new social, political and gender relations which will enable humankind to avoid annihilation. It is precisely this humankind that Brooke-Rose is mainly interested in, beyond the differences of sex, race, class and culture. In fact, even in Amalgamemnon, perhaps the novel most openly concerned with genderissues, the author seems to be investigating something greater. Mira’s remark ‘what future men and women not to mention persons we shall make?’ (21), hints in fact that, beyond ‘man’ and ‘woman’, there still is a human being. While recognising that it is often men who try to amalgamate women, Brooke-Rose therefore suggests a more general abuse of language, namely ‘the violence which we all commit when we’re always trying to amalgamate people and put them in a category’ (Brooke-Rose, 1984a), and that by using language in a coercive or semicoercive way, we try to ‘sell’ ourselves to others. Similarly, in Between her target transcends the denunciation of the attempted colonisation of woman by man. Although Brooke-Rose does acknowledge here that in our patriarchal society Power has taken the form of male power over women (in the same way that in our Western orientated culture it has taken the form of white power over coloured people), she does not identify the imposition of Power as inherently masculine or white; on the contrary, since her first experimental novel, she has made it explicit that even if the roles were reversed, the dialectic of power would not change, in so far as, as the character in Between says, echoing what Brooke-Rose already suggested in the Sycamore Tree and Out, ‘Everybody destroys to some extent’ (497). Although the Tower of Babel often mentioned in the novel evokes, because of its shape, the cliché image of male domination, her real target seems more to be the hierarchical structure of the Tower than its phallic symbolism. Power is in fact inherent in its structure, and it is precisely because of the hierarchy which fashions it that the Tower assumes a phallic shape. Hence, just as the ‘void’ and the ‘lack’ (Thru, 712) are not, as Freud would have it, a prerogative of woman but, like Lacan’s béance, characterise all human beings, and, similarly, the mystery which for Freud envelops the feminine, is not peculiar to woman but represents any subject’s identity, domination is not inherent in the phallus itself, but 251

comes as a consequence of the stratification of our society. In fact, even though the plane with which the Barthesian Tower is substituted in Between bears the same phallic symbolism, because it develops horizontally, i.e. non-hierarchically, it allows for the fraternisation of languages. Brooke-Rose therefore unwittingly shows how Barthes’ dream of an egalitarian society is doomed to failure because the shape he gives to this utopian society maintains the hierarchical relations of power, and she demonstrates that if history repeats itself, it is because the structure of the Tower only allows the development of history to describe a spiral, the image that Vico originally used to illustrate his notion of historical ricorso. Hence, by substituting the Tower with a plane, Brooke-Rose demonstrates that the ‘war of languages’ can be at least partly overcome, and through the use her central consciousness makes of language, she illustrates how at least a partial victory over the system can be achieved. Language is, after all, what enables the character to survive, not only because it is through language/s that she can earn a living as a translator, but also because, on a narrative level, language enables the various displacements which occur in the novel and, just as in the other novels, through the creation of more language, it keeps both the text and the character alive. Thus, the character, who might have originally seemed a victim of the coercive use of language, finally becomes she who, like Mira in Amalgamemnon, resists male-hierarchical society, and because by assuming the impossibility of a fixed identity she escapes all attempts by men to relegate her to a position of subjugation, it would appear that, despite the apocalyptic and pessimistic conclusions that Feminist critics allege she holds, Brooke-Rose leaves hope, in this as well as in her other novels, for woman, and for the woman writer in particular.

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Chapter 6: The Textuality of History and Memory

As I briefly discussed in chapter four, ever since Brooke-Rose became an experimental writer, she has questioned the notion of historical Truth. In particular, in her autobiographical novel Remake and in the texts of her second tetralogy, she strives to demonstrate the fallibility of human memory. In addition, also in her last published novel, Subscript, Brooke-Rose repeatedly proposes genetic memory to be extremely unreliable, as the creatures of the book, while having often the impression of knowing something about the changes they witness in their lifespan, cannot place for certain these events in the past of their species: ‘Yet all this goes against some lost memory about learning, or failing to learn to make noises to tell each other things’ (61); ‘Another glimpse of a memory flits and vanishes’ (62); ‘That lights another brief vision but vanishes’ (66); ‘that […] recalls, well, we don’t know what it recalls’ (73); ‘some memory, unremembered, of erectness and uniqueness’ (94), and also the memory of all the journeys the creatures had to embark on since the beginning of life on our planet is lost (76, 83). Furthermore, in various novels Brooke-Rose proposes the textuality of history and memory as the result of the coercive use of language that various systems have exploited throughout history, perceiving it as the tool which enables the system to impose a particular identity onto the individual. This is the discourse which underlies the whole of Out, where Brooke-Rose strongly suggests the notion that just as the personal memories of an individual can be deleted and reconstructed as one wishes, so the collective memory of an entire race can be obliterated and history itself can be continually re-written. As I argued in Chapter Four, however, because the allegorical dimension characteristic of her first experimental novel contradictorily is both the strongest and the weakest aspect of this text, although Out effectively points to various systems which have coercively exploited the verbality of history and memory, it somehow lacks the strength which only a concrete and actual historical

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setting can provide. It is perhaps for this reason that, with Between, Brooke-Rose moves away from the allegorical/science-fictional setting she exploited in Out.

6.1. The Discourse of War in Between Although in both Between and Out Brooke-Rose strives to denounce the fact that the identity imposed upon the individual is the result of the language which the system oppressively speaks, she only provides a historical basis for this in Between. Here, despite the ambiguity of the text’s temporal and topographical setting, many clues in her discourse point to Germany at the outbreak of the Second World War. As Karen Lawrence recognises, The easy availability of sixties European pop culture is juxtaposed with the darker memories of war […] Even the Vichy mineral water so repeatedly ordered and not ordered in the text contains the memory of Vichy complicity (1995, 82/3).

If no ‘fraternisation’ was possible during the war (491), it was because the need to operate a neat division between the self and the Other became magnified when entire nations had to force other ethnic groups into the role of the Other.1 This, fundamentally, is the reason why the half French, half German character of Between has to submit to several interviews aimed at determining her loyalty before obtaining a job as a translator in Germany (489), and why, after the war, she has to endure identical interviews before working in Paris as a simultaneous translator. Brooke-Rose hence explicitly proposes here the same idea at the heart of Out, and which she tackles again in Verbivore,2 namely the notion that 1

2

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Because Between is extensively inspired by Brooke-Rose’s personal life, many of the situations described here later resurface in the openly autobiographical Remake (128). Here the transmission cuts are imputed ‘either to some mysterious new airpollution […] Or else to the ENEMY, whoever that may be in these days of presumed total disarmament. There is always an evil empire in every government’s policy, it’s necessary to stay in power or get it’ (67).

the position of the Other into which some individuals are forced so as to assume the role of the ‘enemy’ is a relative and historical concept, constructed through language and subjected to continual reversals and displacements: ‘Well but you see, sir, reading English newspapers at the AA, the A.A.? sorry the German Foreign Office one learnt to follow the war from the enemy point of view. The enemy. Ah yes, you mean us’ (487).3 As in Out, in Between Brooke-Rose denounces in fact the risks implicit in a mere reversal of the positions of the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’, and shows how the German and French interviews fundamentally coincide with one another not only by underlining their similarities through repetition, but also by showing, through the juxtapositions and the syntax characteristic of this novel, how the one led to the other (526/7). By so doing, Brooke-Rose makes it explicit that language is used in both cases to force the subject to assume either the identity of the allied or the enemy and, in particular, she shows how, in order to empower the individuals to shift from one role to the other, after the war the government began to dispense to German citizens the certificates of denazification referred to as ‘OMO’, the homophone of the brand name of a new washing powder discussed by Barthes in Mythologies (1957, in OC1, 584/5) and which Brooke-Rose introduces in her text (419, 432/3). Through the slogans the Media use to advertise the detergent, BrookeRose suggests a similarity between the powder and the denazification certificate, and quoting (without quotation marks) an undated letter from Eva Hesse, she has Siegfried observe: ‘quite like the end of the war trying to get a job and a Persil-Schein certificate denazifying us whiter than white’ (473). Through the polysemy of ‘OMO’ and the juxtaposition of television programmes with extracts from the interviews the central character has to endure (418), Brooke-Rose therefore suggests the equivalence of the linguistic techniques these discourses adopt in their attempted colonisation of the Other, and implicitly questions the authority on which the denazifcation process is based. All acts of language, then, come to be perceived as acts of propaganda, and just as in Thru all ideas are identified with ‘words [which] come out of a mouthful of air, jostling each other, bursting like atoms’ (607), in Between not only does she 3

See Remake, pp. 5 and 108.

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propose that all ideologies are fictions,4 but, by juxtaposing extracts from the news (the alleged deliverers of the Truth) with advertisements for new products (418, 519), she also suggests the fictionality of the Truth the Media claim to deliver. Like recent historians such as Hayden White (1973), Brooke-Rose thus elaborates on the same question relating to the status of the historical discourse which dates back to the nineteenthcentury debate between Hegel and Nietzsche, and she proposes the notion of history as a ‘writing’ whose signifiers, as she suggests both in Out and Thru, can be continually rehandled so as to achieve acceptability and conform to one’s Truth.

6.2. Instant History: The Simulation of the Media and the Opposition of ‘Technologies’ vs. ‘Humanities’ in Amalgamemnon, Xorandor, Verbivore and Textermination Whereas in the Omnibus novels the fictionality of history and memory is determined by the language that various political systems impose upon the individual, in the second tetralogy it is increasingly related to the new computer technology and the Media, which both conspire in turning our world into an ‘instant world’ where the concept of history itself becomes redundant. This concept – first explicitly introduced by the author in Between, where simultaneous translation becomes an emblem of the ‘instant knowledge’ (470) which young translators can acquire in this ‘instant world’ (418)5 – is also one of the main thematics developed in 4

5

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By so doing, she heralds Barthes’ words: ‘The ideological systems are fictions […] Every fiction is sustained by a social language, a sociolect, with which it identifies […] every language (every fiction) fights for hegemony; if it has the power, it permeates everyday social life, it becomes doxa, nature: it is the allegedly apolitical language spoken by politicians, by the agents of the State, it’s the language of the press, the radio, the television, it’s the language of conversation; but even when it remains outside power, the rivalry against it is born again, the languages divide themselves, fights against each other’ (1973, in OC2, 1508). See also Remake, p. 81.

Amalgamemnon, where the whole idea of the deletion of the past is at the basis of the grammatical constraint Brooke-Rose imposes upon her text so as to investigate the pseudo-future in which, according to her, we all live because of the Media (1989, in UOD, 33). Because of the priority given by the Media to the non-realised/future event over the actual/past event, Brooke-Rose suggests, the world they construct is marked throughout by the very predictability and redundancy of information which she posits as a central concern of this novel. Further to its social and informational/gender-linked sense, however, the theme of redundancy could be read on yet another level: in fact, because the humanities which Cassandra represents stand for the past and therefore become redundant in the high-tech society that Mira inhabits, as a representative of the humanities the central character also becomes redundant on an informational (but no longer gender-linked) level. In this society, the ‘prestidigital computer’ becomes one of the ‘simulating machines for opinion, arguments, hates, imaginings’ (52) that Mira envisages,6 and by replacing all personal relationships, alienates human beings from one another (37). As she already did in Between and Thru (721), in Amalgamemnon Brooke-Rose inserts in fact several references to human isolation not only by describing both of Mira’s lovers as ‘a foreign body in bed’ (15, 143), but also by alluding to the solitude of people who, because of the lack of communication with other human beings, call radio talk-shows again and again (75). In addition, through Amalgamemnon’s central consciousness the author is able to show how the idea that the Media might have united different societies and levelled cultural differences was an unrealised and unrealisable dream: because of the disinterest Western states and international relief organisations show in the third world (94), their economic exploitation of the countries they are supposed to help (73) and their prefabrication of underdevelopment, which they disguise as willingness to protect tradition (73, 94), in this age of ‘iceaging indifference’ (26), the relationship between first and third world, West and East becomes increasingly arduous. In this world, in which

6

Because these elements play a large part in the formation of an individual’s subjectivity, in this as well as in the other novels of the second tetralogy, identity is once again proposed to be a simulation.

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everybody goes on ‘as if’,7 the people are thus increasingly isolated, the borders dividing the world into separate blocks become more marked, and the egalitarian society the Media should have helped to create is exposed as yet another hierarchical organisation in which an elite of super-technicians retains all the power (6) and unemployment is maintained to keep the people obedient (76). We can therefore see how Brooke-Rose here – as well as in Next, where she suggests that the weapons of future wars will be information (182) – puts forward a concept very similar to the one Lyotard proposed when he suggested that because technology dictates, in our society, the form that knowledge must take (in the same way that advancements in transport and the Media did in the past), knowledge itself becomes a product on sale, and as such is controlled by politico-economic elites. Not only this, but by suggesting that in this society based on computer simulations, one simulation replaces another in an endless chain of substitutions in which ideological positions get reversed (41, 53), meaning is lost (27), the message dies (34), and all Truth gets displaced, Brooke-Rose seems to acknowledge also the work of Braudillard and the description he gave of our world as a world of simulacra, in which all real differences are abolished and only simulated generation of difference remains. As Brooke-Rose does in Amalgamemnon as well as Verbivore, Braudillard actually emphasises the fact that although people have the illusion of being actively hooked into vast information networks, in reality they are only the passive recipients of processed data, more and more isolated from one another in front of their television and computer screens. It is precisely the computer’s ability to simulate that the Media increasingly exploit to construct the world we all inhabit in which the people seem to have lost their capacity to think independently.8 In fact, if the author suggests that the Media like to create the news they broadcast (133), at the same time she proposes that, in accordance with the version of the Uncertainty Principle she introduces in this novel – ‘the expectation generates the expected’ (19) – it is the news they broadcast 7

8

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This expression, which refers to the hypothetical/fictional status of everything described, could also be read as an unconscious reference to Irigaray’s hysterical ‘comme si’ (1974, 70), and as a denunciation of our society’s indifference. It is the Media and their ‘techno-experts’ which tell the people what to think (75, 80, 95, 133) and which edit the Truth delivered to them.

which shapes and moulds Reality (134). Hence, by paralleling the theoretical enquiry on the status of the Media and the new technology in our society and literature which, dating back to Benjamin and his investigation of issues of authenticity and replicability (1955), was conducted by scholars such as Lyotard (1979) and Derrida, who in 1977 claimed that it is iterability and the possibility of being copied which renders possible the authentic and the original, not only does BrookeRose show how the Media – which she had already attacked in Such and in some of her Realist texts (The Middlemen, ‘The Troglodyte’) – convey information no more real than the fictions/prophecies from which they try to distinguish themselves, but she also propounds the mere fictionality/virtuality of the Reality we inhabit. In addition, because the investigation of the relationship between real/actual events and fictional/hypothetical events can also be read as the relationship between past and future events, the exploration of the Media’s discourse Brooke-Rose pursues in this novel is closely linked to her investigation of the humanities/technology dichotomy and her examination of the notion of history. In Amalgamemnon, she then suggests that it is computers – in particular their ‘phenomenal memory’ (112/3) and their capacity to create ‘self-fulfilling prophecies’ (113) – which enable history to cease to exist and be replaced by a perpetual present, the instant history upon which, according to Hans, the new society will be based (109), and since all the following novels share the main thematics Brooke-Rose first approached in Amalgamemnon, they have this concept at their heart. In Xorandor, in particular, by showing how the myth of the talking stone is created through the lies and partial truths that language delivers, Brooke-Rose denounces the fictionality and semi-coercive nature of the Media’s discourse, and shows how history, memory, and mythology (identified here with religion) correspond to a construction of words. Because of the language that Xorandor and the unscrupulous journalists use, the novel can in fact be turned into a Christian allegory, the talking stone becoming a mythological and divine figure, the ultimate and almighty Other: God. In reality, beginning with her very first Realist novel, Brooke-Rose deals, whether implicitly or explicitly, with religion. However, if we consider her production as a whole, we can detect a development in her approach to this subject, as the romantic view of Catholicism she 259

proposed in The Languages of Love, where it was the language of religion which ensured the recovery of the protagonist unified self, already begins to crumble in The Sycamore Tree, the title of which evokes the New Testament (Luke, 19.4), and where religion is presented as a fashionable habit and a hypocritical façade behind which no true religious sentiment exists (249). By the time Between is published, religion is identified with a construction of words proven wrong again and again by history (462/3). In addition, not only are the vital mysteries euphemised and narrowed into convenient dogmas (463), but through juxtaposition, the discourse of Catholicism is equated with the language of a phrase-book (431, 439) and with that adopted during the interviews the translator has to endure so as to get a job (444) and a denazification certificate (473). What in fact, implicitly asks Brooke-Rose, is an annulment if not a further deletion of history which the Catholic system, through the language of the Canonic Law, has the power to perform? And, as Julia lamented in The Languages of Love, what is the Church’s ability to choose whether or not an individual is to be granted a second chance in life if not an imposition of an identity upon the subject (married/not married which then might become sinner/not sinner)? Brooke-Rose therefore suggests that the power of the word which characterised the God described by the Scriptures seems to have been inherited by the men who supposedly speak in His voice. However, precisely because the Church identifies itself with the institution which represents God on Earth, it becomes, by its own admission, a mediated personification of the unrepresentable ultimate Other and, as such, only a partial version of the Truth. The language of the Catholic Church is therefore identified in Between with a further sociolect which, like all jargons, fights for hegemony, and although the violence of the Crusades and the Inquisition remains a rare exception, Brooke-Rose suggests that the Church’s politics of colonisation, exclusion and discrimination (against women, for example) continue to be perpetrated. This attitude of demystification towards religion would increasingly characterise the work of Brooke-Rose, and in Xorandor she underlines, once more, the linguistic construction of all religion. According to a Christian reading, the terrorist incident of Xor 7 could be seen as a sort of second Flood which, by having the same deterrent effect, should lead mankind to repentance. Xorandor-the-God, however, throughout the novel becomes Xorandor-the-Son, a crucified Christ in front of whom 260

people kneel (208) and who, by ascending to Mars, accomplishes the ultimate sacrifice, accepting death to save humanity. Because the value of God which mankind assigns to Xorandor is based on the acceptance of its non-human origin, the new ‘religion’ is eventually exposed as being rooted in both the misleading language the talking stone used when questioned about its origin and the language the press used to portray the supposedly Martian stones. Indeed, as Jip acknowledges, because everybody failed to listen to the attempts Xorandor made to tell the Truth (191), what started as a language-game then became a lie and finally a myth: the myth of origin which is at the root of religion itself (186) – and, more generally, of the metaphysics of presence and its search for origins – and, in particular, the myth of the Fall at the basis of Christianity (the literal fall from Mars to Earth and the symbolic Fall of the original sin represented here by Xor 7 eating, like Eve, the forbidden food). By exposing how the urge to identify an origin that leads to the construction of the Xorandor-myth fundamentally corresponds to that which led to the metaphysics of presence, Brooke-Rose therefore deconstructs the idea of a transcendental and extra-linguistic source from which words are supposed to stem, and suggests that the origin should be identified with language, and, particularly in this novel, the language of the Media. The same discourse of the Media is also seriously condemned in Verbivore – where their redundancy is recognised as responsible for the alien attack and the possible extinction of both human and xorandoric races – and in Textermination – where the existence of many characters from literary texts is engendered by the orality to which the Media have accustomed us, represented by the attack the characters from television programs launch against those from literary texts (91), and by the fact that even those characters who are still read, rapidly fade from people’s minds and die because television has atrophied their readers’ memory (26).

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6.3. Biography and False Memories: Remake, Xorandor, and Verbivore Throughout her second experimental tetralogy, then, Brooke-Rose acknowledges the untrustworthiness of human memory, demonstrating how all memory recollection is a construction and an interpretation through which an event is, if not completely created, at least modified. This concept is also fundamental in Remake, where the personal experiences and memories of Brooke-Rose herself are turned into fiction and give birth to an autobiographical novel in which the problematic distinction between history (personal and not) and fiction is investigated. As Brooke-Rose rhetorically asks in ‘Remaking’ (a reading she gave in Switzerland), ‘Where are the frontiers? Much critical writing is yet another interpretation, in other words another fiction grafted on the original’ (1996i, 2). It is to this question that Remake indirectly responds, demonstrating how, although most of the material used consists of recollections of events that actually occurred, the author’s rehandling of that raw material produces something – and someone – quite different from the person who actually had those experiences, namely a fiction. Hence, if the most interesting aspect of the novel is that it is based on ready-made, autobiographical material, it is not so much because insight into the woman behind the books reveals, for the pleasure of the biographical critic, how certain aspects of her novels derive from personal experience,9 but, on the contrary, because this novel demonstrates to what degree language and the use that Brooke-Rose makes of it can transmute and transform a personal event into something quite other. In particular, the grammatical constraint Brooke-Rose imposes upon her text changes the entire emphasis of her work and creates an autobiography in which, with the exception of Chapter 3, all personal pronouns and all possessive adjectives are absent. As she herself comments in ‘Remaking’, ‘doing without personal pronouns meant using names a great deal, since a pro-noun stands for a noun’ (1996i, 8), and because ‘A pro-noun is’, as we read in Remake, ‘an anti-noun, an antiname, an anti-person / A substitution / A simulation / An identification / 9

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After all, as Brooke-Rose writes in Remake, ‘Only the text matters, if the text survives at all’ (6).

A possession and a dispossession’ (3), in order to overcome the problems posed by autobiography Brooke-Rose borrows the Chomskian ‘John’, thus turning the novel into an extension of the original confrontation between John1 and John1 she accomplished in ‘SelfConfrontation and the Writer’ (1977).10 This ‘John’ – who starts as an example in linguistics and is said to have ‘as many selves as utterances, virtual or realized, as many selves as there are words in lexicons’ (Remake, 3) – becomes split, in the novel, among various ‘Johns’ with a different subscript, each of whom acquires a different personality according to what he says: for example John13 is ‘the litcritter’ (11), John32 is ‘the pedantic’ (16), after which follow the ‘focus-puller’ (45), ‘the script consultant’ (100), the ‘nasty piece of perk’ (107), ‘the psycho’, ‘the young scriptwriter’ (166) and so on. Because ‘John’ assumes a central role in the novel, the name of all the characters who fulfilled an important role in Brooke-Rose’s life and became, to a greater or lesser extent, her mentors, are a variation of ‘John’: her mother is Jeanne (22), her sister Joanne (16), an aunt is Vanna (22), a cousin Jean-Luc (26), her first husband Ian (116), her second Janek (17), her lovers Jon (123) and Sean (139), her friends Janet and Jock (93) and so on. Not only this, but it is actually this John who, constantly intruding into the narrative, enables the old lady to confront ‘the little girl with sidetracks, substitutions and simulations about pronouns’ (4), and who continually questions the reliability of the old lady’s memory (11, 45). The impossibility of differentiating real memories from pseudo-memories created by the stories told by the old lady’s mother (51) and family photographs (17) haunts the whole novel; the old lady admits her memory is faulty about some things (134), she emphasises her difficulty in recreating the life of her younger self (81), and while affirming that ‘images in the mind must necessarily be images of the past, already lived, already filmed, called up by clicking some

10

As Brooke-Rose explains, ‘You may remember that many of Chomsky’s example sentences are about John […] And in the Reflexivity rule, John (subscript 1) killed John (subscript 1): if both Johns are the same, i.e. coreferential, the second must be replaced by the reflexive pronoun: John killed himself. My problem of selfconfrontation was resolved: John confronts himself. Except that I mustn’t use the reflexive pronoun himself’ (1996i, 8).

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kind of key’ (64),11 she also admits that memories can be invented (41, 121). However, although memories are initially identified with ‘files’ (65), ‘diskettes’ (100) and ‘index-cards’ (113), by the end of the novel the old lady, taking the investigation of memory in terms of computer technology that she had begun in Amalgamemnon and Xorandor a step further, says: Memory is not after all a computer, nor, a fortiori, a diskette or even a card-index, cards crushed between coloured tabs in long boxes and manually filled in, manually consulted, crushed again, out of sight. Like index-cards but swifter, the computer has memories but no sense of time, only data-banks retrived only if fed in at this or that moment […] The computer does not see or smell or hear or touch or taste the world, the computer uses the present, each memory effaced by a second’s hiccup of electricity or by the next operation unless stored, called up, the reference printed from the buffer memory.

She continues: Nor memory is like a book, for although old books have the smell and the feel of paper and print and leather, the smells and feels and tastes and sounds named by the word can never, as an image can to the inner eye, be brought to life in nostrils, fingers, tongue and ear, and Proust’s little madlanes of memory can only name, however convolutedly, the reader maybe recalling something quite else. Memory is not like a film either. Films are concocted with all those assistant-cutters, make-up designers, lighting engineers and focus-pullers, where every angle is pre-fixed, with flash-backs to precolour periods done in black and white or sepia […] Seeing an old film means seeing shots forgotten but the same shots, sealed in celluloid forever. But an image in memory may be different each time and suddenly aggregate others. Nor is memory a telefilm, a newsreel or telenews, all prearranged as in fiction […] Chance, evaded by the human sciences imposing pseudo-systems, is at the heart of biology, of life. Memory is unique, random and fragile, like life, and like life dies forever (171, my italics).

11

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This concept is reminiscent of Xorandor, where Zab says that ‘the human memory’s so loopy, it doesn’t have total recall but brings things out in packages, sort of triggered off by something. That package had the callsign “mum”’ (83).

As the old lady admits in the last chapter of Remake, where she directly confronts Tess (one and the same person),12 each ‘portrayal’ is always a ‘betrayal’ (165), so that ‘the remake of a life becomes more and more impossible’ (172). If all memory becomes a remake, however, it is not only because memory is in itself unreliable, but because, as the old lady says – echoing Brooke-Rose in ‘Self-Confrontation and the Writer’ (1977, 132) – ‘All writing, all work […] is necessarily a piece of master, a piecemeal attempt to master a file, a life’ (13). Biography, then, becomes ‘Bifografy’ (81), and ‘Bifografy is always fiction’ (Remake, 11; 1977, 130). This is why – official history being a construction in which lies and omissions are regularly inserted (105, 125) – history also becomes simply ‘A sorry series of sad remakes’ (165), a fiction in which, as the twins of Xorandor learn, the historian faces the same problems as the story-teller. This, essentially, is the point Brooke-Rose makes in ‘Palimpsest History’ (1991a), where she identifies all historical work with the ‘palimpsest histories’ produced by novelists of all ages (182/3). Although she is clearly dealing here with the fictional/alternative histories created by novelists, she also hints at the fact that because of its linguistic nature, history is simply a partial version of the Truth, a collective memory ‘fabricated at school, on models ordered from above’ (Remake, 18), by saying: Of course we should not be surprised that totalitarian governments, and not least theocratic governments, should, when someone draws their attention to such works, object to palimpsest history. It has happened over and over in the Soviet Union. Such governments [of which the system of Out is an example] are always busy rewriting history themselves and only their palimpsest is regarded as acceptable (185).

It is precisely this notion of history and memory as fiction that constitutes the focus of Xorandor, in which the exceptional memory of the mega-computer Xorandor is opposed to deficient human memory (16, 68, 176). Many attempts are made to understand whether the stone 12

As Brooke-Rose explains, this name was intended ‘as a play on text (which gave tisser or weaving in French, and tessitura or the quality of a voice) and on tesselate, to build up with small tiles’ (1996i, 8/9).

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has, like human-made computers, the different kind of memories Brooke-Rose already discussed, in less technical terms, in Amalgmemnon (20/1), but the meaning of the answers Xorandor provides, remains obscure for the scientists: DEC 5 ‘MY INSIDE IS ONLY INPUT FROM OUTSIDE’ ENDEC 5 DEC 6 ‘A STRUCTURE IS NOT A STATIC PHYSICAL OBJECT BUT A PERMANENT SCRATCH PERMANENT REPLACE PERPETUAL TRANSFORMATION’ ENDEC 6 (178).

It is in an attempt to decipher Xorandor’s words that Zab turns to philosophy, and invoking the distinction between speech/inside and writing/outside made by Plato in the Phaedrus – to which Brooke-Rose would refer also in Next (64) – she blames writing for the loss of memory experienced by humanity (179). We can therefore see how Brooke-Rose introduces in this novel – and its sequel Verbivore (44/5) – the same Platonic notion of writing as pharmakon she hinted at in Out. However, whereas Out could be read as an initial attempt to operate a reversal of the binary opposition between speech and writing, in Xorandor she goes even further, and while acknowledging the deleterious effects writing has on human memory, she creates a being in which the hierarchy speech/writing is annulled (Xorandor’s voice being the latest, external addition in the same way that writing was for man), thereby altogether annulling in the talking stone the distinction between the transcendental signified and the signifier (187). In fact, although Xorandor relies on binary logic, because it brings together the various oppositions on which binary logic is based, it nonetheless represents the harmonious union of the contraries: Xorandor can use both exclusive and non-exclusive operands; it can be both logical and illogical; it androgynously incorporates both sexes, and, because its inside is its outside and vice versa, it blurs the distinction between interior and exterior. In an attempt to understand Xorandor’s ‘unthinkable’ ontological status, Zab is therefore forced to recognise that Xorandor, just as Brooke-Rose has done for the reader, has ‘come and, reversed all our, traditional, oppositions, and questioned, all our, certainties, through a flipflop kind of, superlogic’ (157), and that through its computer brain it has emphasised how illogical human languages are, and also that it has

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shown how ‘human languages provide very few clues as to category of meaning [...] It’s not only semantic but syntactic categories’ (87). According to Mr. Manning, this is the reason why Xorandor cannot understand the meaning of figurative expressions (87), why, to Xorandor, a promise is like an instruction (181), and why, from the very beginning, it seems ‘to have infinite trust in verbal exchange as performative’ (70). It would therefore appear that in this novel BrookeRose alludes not only to various theories on the acquisition of a second language, as I have argued in chapter two, but also to Austin’s distinctions between constative and performative verbs (1962, 5) and his theory of the ‘infelicity’ of the performative act (1962, 14/52; Xorandor, 70), paralleling the deconstruction of Austin’s distinction between serious and non-serious language (1962,21/2) which Derrida accomplishes in Limited Inc a b c... and in the chapter of Margins of Philosophy entitled ‘Signature, Event Context’. If Xorandor cannot cope with figurative language, human language cannot cope with the language of an integral being in which the dichotomies matter/spirit, interior/exterior, male/female, speech/writing and, on a linguistic level, serious/non-serious are abolished, and this is why, throughout the novel, the twins lament the inadequacy of the language they have at their disposal (157, 163/4). If this is the case, however, it is only because instead of exploiting the carnivalesque which they recognise as characteristic of their language, they try to turn it into an extremely logical, scientific and ‘serious’ tool, thus depriving it of its strength and halving its possible impact. Forgetting that language is inherently both literal and non-literal, capable of being, like Xorandor, both logical and illogical, constituted by both signified and signifier, Western metaphysics (and the twins themselves) have in fact charged only one of every two aspects with positive value, and by so doing have succeeded in lessening language and, by forcing one side into repression, rendering it alien to itself. Despite their efforts, however, the powerful and creative side of language does, like the unconscious, return; in reality it was never totally obliterated but, waiting just beneath the surface, has from the very beginning undermined the scientificity of the twins’ language and their project to draft the most objective report on the Xorandor episode possible. In the first instance, any knowledge of Xorandor that the twins might have gained corresponds, as I have shown, to a construction of 267

language. Secondly, because the twins try to write their ‘scientific’ report by recollecting the memories they have of the entire episode, the original signified, already substituted by a signifier, has to undergo further elaborations and mediations which increasingly falsify the original. If for Xorandor the opposition between past and present which is at the basis of the process of remembrance seems to be abolished – as, in a similar way to human-made computers, Xorandor can recall something which was stored in its memory in the past without altering the original information and is able to make the past present and vice-versa (189) – in humans, for the past to become present, the original has to be further processed and elaborated by language, thus leaving its distortive effect on all recollection. This is the reason why, throughout the novel, the twins lament the unreliability of human memory (126) and, focusing on the same concept Brooke-Rose would also introduce in Textermination, where the young interpreter Kelly stands for the reader who forgets what s/he has read and learnt, they emphasise the fact that their account, full of uncertainties as it is, is not as rigorous as they would wish (19, 35/7). Hence, while trying to relate the exact way in which events developed at the time of the Xorandor episode, the knowledge they gained only later gets mingled with their memories of the episode.13 Aware of these problems from the very beginning, the twins increasingly recognise that all memory recollection corresponds to an interpretation (93), a fiction which can never be real (105), in so far as, instead of merely recalling, memory simultaneously reconstructs and creates. Consequently, as Jip states in Verbivore (71), one’s memory can never be trusted. By the time of Verbivore, Zab herself admits that they were the ones who had created Xorandor (38), and continues to express doubts about the reliability of memory (36, 39/40). Hence, whether in psychoanalysis, autobiography or history, all memory recollection becomes a fiction; just like the memories from his/her past that the analysand offers to the analyst, and the memories Brooke-Rose delivers to her readers in Remake, so the ‘history’ written by historians is, according to Jip, ‘full of things learnt later or known only to one ROM and not another’ (154), 13

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Jip notes that ‘It’s very difficult to reconstruct a state of ignorance’ (38). See also pp. 33, 83, 87/8, 91, 131, and Remake, pp. 43, 49.

and thus becomes an interpretation which only signifies events and, by so doing, reconstructs them, turning the Truth of memory into a mere ‘probability’ (80).

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Conclusion: Deconstruction

i. The Uncertainty Principle Throughout this book we have seen how Brooke-Rose, from her very first experimental novel, inserts in her texts various versions of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and employs it metaphorically so as to undermine the certainties on which our societies are based. To an extent, the early experimental novels’ concern with the discourse of science (in particular the importance of Quantum Mechanics in Such), accounts for the introduction of the Principle which would be more explicitly applied to non-scientific areas in later novels. Such is the case with the re-formulation of the theorem as ‘it is the expectation which creates the expected’, presented explicitly in both Amalgamemnon and in Xorandor. As we have seen, just as Xorandor’s Otherness originates from the satisfaction of human expectations so, Brooke-Rose suggests in her previous novels, does the Otherness of woman, of the mentally ill and the victims of racial discrimination. It is in fact the expectations male society has about woman that relegate her to a position of inferiority and turn her into she who is silent, she who can only be beautiful and is therefore unable to understand beauty (hence the prejudice against women artists), she who only desires what man desires, and, like Mira in Amalgamemnon, she who is obliged to carry out her rebellion against the patriarchal discourse secretly. Similarly, in Such – although the constant use of the jargon of astrophysics throughout the text renders the reference to Heisenberg’s theorem perhaps more literal here than in any other novel (even though, Such being a fiction, the reference cannot but be, from the very beginning, non-literal) – the same metaphorical version of the Principle is exploited by Brooke-Rose so as to criticise classical psychoanalysis, whose practice might encourage the analysand to create or distort certain aspects of his/her life to meet the analyst’s suppositions. 271

As I argued above, in various novels Brooke-Rose seems to suggest that the effect determines the cause and that just as in countries where torture is practised punishment should be seen as the primary cause of guilt, in many colonial situations the violent nature of the natives and their supposed Otherness shouldn’t be regarded as the cause of their subjugation, but as the effect of the colonisers’ practice of violent oppression. Similarly, the ‘madness’ with which certain individuals are charged cannot be regarded as the cause of their definition as mentally ill but, according to Laing, corresponds to ‘an artefact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves’ (1967, 118), for, just as throughout history patriarchal society imposed hysteria on woman, ‘madness’ becomes a construct imposed by ‘sane’ society on these individuals. By reversing the principle of causality, Brooke-Rose therefore seems to accomplish (with impressive prescience before 1968) what Derrida posited as the aim of all deconstruction, that is the reversal of the hierarchies on which Western metaphysics of presence is based (1982, 329; 1987, 41). However, there are important differences between the projects of the two authors – Derrida producing philosophy, BrookeRose writing fiction – and whereas the nature of his discipline obliges Derrida, for all his imaginative use of language and typography, mainly to theorise on what written language can do, Brooke-Rose, as a novelist, is able to explore its possibilities practically, as she writes it, not about it. Her work might therefore be considered a novelistic equivalent of the disruption of the same metaphysics of presence which Derrida developed in some of his most important works. Reality vs Language: Literal vs Metaphorical Language As I have shown in the previous chapters, one of the main concerns of Brooke-Rose is the investigation and deconstruction of the relation between fiction and Reality. From the principle of causality on which Western humanist tradition is based, it follows in fact that there exists a natural language which simply describes without interpreting – a notion that led to the rejection by the scientific and philosophical traditions of poetic language which began with Plato and was developed by Austin, when he posited the opposition between ‘serious’ and ‘non-serious’ 272

language (1962, 21/2) – and, fundamentally, that there exists a reality that language merely represents, a signified which is present to the conscience of the subject and which is made visible by the linguistic signifiers, mere tools through which the ‘idea’ can be communicated. Contrary to this, Brooke-Rose reverses these hierarchies, and from her first experimental novels suggests that all language is fundamentally metaphorical. The main implication that an acceptance of the metaphoricality of all language bears in Brooke-Rose’s work is that what we have been accustomed to perceive as reality is in fact only a description and a version of reality and, as such, only a fictional construct. Consequently, in all her novels she proposes that language does not simply represent, but constructs Reality, and that a transparent language apt to describe objectively the real doesn’t exist, because any perception of reality already corresponds to an interpretation. She states in fact that ‘all, all is language, even the reader […] all, all is text’ (1991a, 25), and claims that ‘language is all’ (1996a), that even when we touch on the essence of things it is always by means of language (Thru, 640), strongly sustaining the Structuralist idea of intertextuality and the notion that all perception of reality is filtered through previous representations of that same reality. Identity vs Language, Conscious vs Unconscious As I have shown in the previous chapters, from her first novel BrookeRose introduced the notion that identity is moulded by the various languages which intersect the individual, and is consequently identified as a linguistic construct. We have seen how in Out she deconstructed the concept of racial identity and proposed the positions of Master and Slave, the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’, as culturally determined, thus analysing more extensively a notion she would also examine in the following novels. Hence, just as in Out she proposes that the Otherness of the racially discriminated against is the result of the practices of white discrimination, so in the other novels she suggests that the Otherness of the ‘mentally ill’ (Such), ‘woman’ (Between, Thru, Amalgamemnon), the ‘alien’ (Xorandor), and the homeless (Next) correspond to constructs of the language spoken by the sane, male-dominated, human society. In order to draw the reader’s attention to this, in all her works the author introduces focal characters who lack a consistent identity and are 273

quite clearly constructions not only of the language Brooke-Rose uses to write them on the page, but also of the language with which they are confronted in the possible worlds of the novels: the characters of both Out and Such are moulded by the scientific jargons of chemistry and astrophysics respectively; the central consciousness of Between becomes, because of her job, a linguistic sign which she has to translate into various languages; in Thru all the possible narrators are revealed in the end to be linguistic constructions of someone else; in Amalgamemnon the reader is confronted with the various linguistic identities that Mira, and the characters she creates, assume throughout the novel; in Xorandor, as the reader discovers once s/he reads its sequel Verbivore, not only is the identity of the talking stone created by the language it uses, but (in the same way that all the characters in Verbivore are either characters invented by Mira, or computerised simulations created by these characters), all the other personae present in the text correspond to further fictions originating from Mira’s imagination; in Textermination, all the characters are already linguistic signs which, just as humans need to be recognised by the Other to achieve an idea of identity, can maintain their linguistic identity only if they are recognised by the Reader; finally, in Next, the unemployed characters seem to be reduced to mere names on the lists of the various Job Centres. Western philosophical tradition has taught us that ‘man’ is defined by a spiritual essence of which the body is simply the negative and the Other, and that there exists an essential identity of ‘man’ which not only distinguishes him from lower beings, but also remains immutable through the vicissitudes of life, and whose consciousness can be achieved, according to different philosophies and religions, through various practices which generally encourage the subject to disregard the body, letting the soul transcend mere materiality and ascend nearer to God, of Whom ‘man’ is an image. Contrary to this, Brooke-Rose exposes not only the fact that there is no fixed identity permanently present in the individual (as identity itself is a product of language which continually shifts and changes through each linguistic act we accomplish and endure in our lives), but also that, as a consequence, the creation and subsequent marginalisation of the Other is implied in the Western humanist notion of ‘man’. As Brooke-Rose suggests in Between, the fixed identity that Western philosophical tradition has posited gets replaced through language by 274

a fragmented identity, made of multiple and often contradictory facets: the various jobs which the character of Out claims to have been trained for; the particles which constitute, according to Larry/Lazarus, any individual; the various layers of Troy we find in Between; the 27 veils which, in Thru, represent the various aspects Larissa has ‘stereotyped’ to achieve a sense of identity; the numerous characters with which Mira identifies in Amalgamemnon, and the various ‘Johns’ that the old lady has to confront in Remake. By positing at the centre of her narratives her undramatised focal characters, Brooke-Rose actually dislocates the conventional sense of identity proposed by Realism, and through them, she suggests not only that the notion of a rational and conscious self is undermined by the constant presence, in all mental activities, of the unconscious, but also that identity is a construction of language and, as such, can be continually re-constructed through language.

ii. Marginal Positions: Resistance from Within In order to reverse some of the hierarchies on which Western metaphysics is based, Brooke-Rose, in a similar way to Deconstruction, attempts to re-integrate the alleged negative term which tradition has suppressed, focussing her novels on marginal figures such as the colonial underdog, the mentally ill, the Martian, woman, the humanist marginalised in technological society, the forgotten paper beings of Textermination, the homeless of Next and the ‘not yet human’ beings of Subscript. However, despite the central role that these characters play in her texts, she never proposes a re-writing of history and Reality according to their point of view as the solution, but by placing them in the context of the very Reality from which they are marginalised, she makes them interact with the systems which shape that Reality, in such a way so as to reveal the gaps inherent in the systems themselves. In fact, it is by speaking the same language spoken by the various systems that her characters are able to demonstrate the fallacy of their discourses. If they manage to do so, it is by juxtaposing different discourses and by placing original formulas in a different context. By proving that the meaning which the systems originally proposed as fixed and true gets 275

altered and displaced once the same expressions are situated in a different context, Brooke-Rose’s central characters ultimately reveal how the Truth proposed by the systems is not universal, and that there exist equally acceptable versions of Truth. For this reason, although for Brooke-Rose too, a fundamental change in the way we approach reality and think about ourselves and our fellow human beings must take place – as it is only by questioning the old myths on which our societies are based and by disrupting the social/political/gender relations among people that we can avoid the annihilation of humanity Mira sees approaching in Amalgamemnon – she does not assume the kind of pessimistic attitude that many Feminists take and which is exemplified, as we have seen, by Lincoln Konkle. Indeed, for her the generation of a new humanity does not presuppose the complete destruction of the old one, but is created ‘ex almost nihilo’ (Amalgamemnon, 55), and even though she is well aware of the impossibility of destroying Western metaphysics in toto, she does not despair; instead, she demonstrates how it is possible to re-insert that which has been repressed in the dominant discourse without burning our philosophical tradition to ashes. As discussed supra, if all meaning is contextual, then by reinscribing the same meaning into a new context, it is always possible to change and alter it, and Brooke-Rose always strives, in her novels, to show how the same language which the various systems exploit can be used to oppose the coercive use they make of it. Although in Out the possibilities opened up by the re-contextualisation of old formulas were undermined by the consequences of the allegorical nature of the novel as a whole (namely the fact that no matter which historical/social/economic context we deal with, the relations of power remain identical), through this process Brooke-Rose’s characters are able to reveal the inconsistencies inherent in the systems and widen the fissures in which they can create a space for themselves and avoid complete submersion. Not only this, but if meaning is not a spiritual signified lying behind the physical signifiers, but is produced in and by those same signifiers, then, as Mira demonstrates in Amalgamemnon, slight alterations of the same language which the systems speak would displace the meaning of those formulas. The repressed can, after all, return and find a voice through the process of syntactical and lexical amalgamations of which Brooke-Rose gives examples in her novels. Then, by drawing the reader’s attention to the fact that all descriptions of reality are only linguistic constructions, 276

and by proposing that all language is to some extent an act of propaganda, always used to try and sell something to the interlocutor and obtain the Other’s recognition and approval, Brooke-Rose urges the reader both to suspect all systems, and to use language imaginatively, because it is only by exploiting its potential that we can oppose the oppression and coercion inherent in it. In fact, if there is no essential identity (racial, sexual and so on) but only structural constitutions of these as social, political acts, enacted in language, then the same power of language to change things into other things, concepts into other concepts, and identities into other identities, which the systems exploit to create the Other and write history and Reality according to their wishes, can equally be used, through metaphor, juxtaposition and idea transformation, to oppose the systems’ oppression.1 It is actually this very creativity of language that enables BrookeRose’s characters to survive: through language, the old and sick Colourless man in Out can create for himself an entirely new life and can, after the conclusion of one story, begin a new one, and in Between, not only does language enable the central consciousness to earn a living, but also enables the journey and the text to advance, as the various languages with which we are confronted in this novel do not simply block the woman translator, but also stimulate her imagination, her intuitive and associative skills, and through mistranslations ensure the displacements and the development of the text. A similar alternation to that between block and advancement found in Between, again confronts the reader in Thru, where the dynamic of construction-deconstruction leads not to the destruction of the text, but to the creation of a different one: in fact, not only do the characters in Thru feel the urge to narrate (710) and thus turn the deconstruction of the text into the generative source for more text, but the text also ends with an affirmation of its own textuality (text ‘reflecting nothing but text’), in which the ‘exit’ (742) can only lead to more text, namely at the point where the text began. Similarly, in Amalgamemnon, through the text’s 1

As we read in Thru, ‘The pun is free, anarchic, a powerful instrument to explode the civilization of the sign and all its stable, reassuring definitions, to open up its static, monstrous logic of expectation into a different dialectic with the reader’ (607).

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compulsion to repeat, language creates more language, text creates more text, and just as in Thru and Amalgamemnon, so in Xorandor, Verbivore and Textermination (where perhaps more than in any other of BrookeRose’s novels the characters are identified as paper creatures), it is language which ensures the survival of the ‘non-narrators’ themselves. On the one hand, Brooke-Rose therefore investigates and shows to the reader the dangers implicit in language and its potential for illusion, but simultaneously suggests the possibility for a different use of that same language, one which would enable the reader not simply to passively receive the Reality, the Truth, the identity the systems impose on each individual through language, but to participate (just like the reader of the writerly text) in the construction of the meaning of that same Reality and, in so doing, nullify the attempted colonisation enacted by each system. At the heart of Brooke-Rose’s narrative, there is thus a fundamental ambiguity towards language, this being perceived as both dangerous and useful, as that which can render the individual both strong and weak, language, fundamentally, as an alienatory means which can however become the creative device through which the text and the characters can prolong their lives. However, Brooke-Rose seems to suggest, because the power of illusion of language becomes dangerous only when it is not recognised as such and when a linguistic product is assumed to be natural, she stimulates the reader to acknowledge this power, and consequently urges him/her to face, accept and expose all the cultural fictions (identity included) which societies and the individuals in them live by, to understand this process, to enjoy it, to be happy and have fun with it. Language, then, is twofold for Brooke-Rose, and it is precisely for this reason that it can simultaneously express both sides of the various dichotomies on which Western thought relies: through linguistic amalgamations, the repressed feminine can in fact be expressed in the language that Mira adopts in Amalgamemnon, in the same way that both the scientific language of technology and the literary language of the humanities can be united in the language the twins adopt in Xorandor. It is actually in this novel that Brooke-Rose more explicitly than in any other puts forward the idea of the necessity for the unification of the contraries, as through the talking stone, she proposes an androgynous theory of gender and blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior, 278

speech and writing, serious and non-serious language, and by discussing Platonic philosophy in terms of computer programming she demonstrates the impossibility of separating the two and the necessity for both types of knowledge for a better understanding of reality. In order to make her readers realise that a large part of what we call reality is in fact language, and to accustom them never take anything for granted, Brooke-Rose has first to disrupt all certainties. Her novels actually oblige the reader to question the hierarchies on which our societies are based, and call upon the entire Western World – ‘the more dialectical West that has turned civilisation upside down’ (Between, 498) – and every user of language to question the old myths and consequently change the relations of power, urging the reader to re-consider many of his/her assumptions. Against a society run on certitudes, Brooke-Rose’s characters create, through their imaginative use of language, marginal variations of Truth; against the systematicity of theory, they propose a deconstructed version of it; against the systems’ rigidity, they introduce ambiguities and uncertainties, and against the attempted imposition of a fixed and unchanging identity, they oppose a fluid, ever-changing, anagrammatic one. In a world where doubt will always be a ‘luxury’ (Amalgamemnon, 43), Brooke-Rose introduces doubts on both the ontological and narrative levels, in order to stimulate the reader to rethink the world so as to include all those positions that have until now been marginalised. Producing fifteen novels, three major critical works and a plethora of articles and essays (as well as poetry and a few extraordinary translations), Brooke-Rose has earned her place amongst major British writers of the twentieth century, stretching the possibilities of language to its limit and offering an insightful representation of our society. Throughout her work, she has broadened and exploited the imaginative force of the novel, and she has enlarged its whole task which, as she writes in ‘Palimpsest History’, ‘is to stretch our intellectual, spiritual and imaginative horizons to breaking point’ (1991a, 189). By amalgamating various discourses, she has created very poetic texts in which the novel as a genre is revived and given the force it needs to survive in this era of orality, and drawing on ‘two apparently contradictory sources, the electronic revolution and the feminist revolution’ (1991a, 178), she has imaginatively explored the possibilities offered by new technology and shown how, despite concerted attacks 279

from popular culture, the Media and the electronic revolution, literature can and does survive.

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Bibliography

Unless otherwise stated the place of publication is London.

Primary sources Narrative Works by Christine Brooke-Rose 1957. The Languages of Love, Secker and Warburg. 1958a. The Sycamore Tree, Secker and Warburg. 1960. The DearDeceit, Secker and Warburg. 1961. The Middlemen, Secker and Warburg. 1964. Out, Secker and Warburg. 1966. Such, Secker and Warburg. 1968. Between, Secker and Warburg. 1970. Go When You See the Green Man Walking, Michael Joseph. 1975. Thru, Secker and Warburg. 1984. Amalgamennon, Manchester, Carcanet. 1986. Xorandor, Manchester, Carcanet. 1986a. The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus (contains Out, Such, Between, Thru), Manchester, Carcanet. 1990. Verbivore, Manchester, Carcanet. 1991. Textermination, Manchester, Carcanet. 1996. Remake, Manchester, Carcanet. 1998. Next, Manchester, Carcanet. 1999. Subscript, Manchester, Carcanet.

Poetry by Christine Brooke-Rose 1954. Gold. A Poem, Aldington, The Hand and Flower Press. 1956. ‘The Five Senses’, Window 9, 20/1. 1956a. ‘Once Upon a Time’, Truth, 27 April, 479. 1956b. ‘The Lunatic Fringe’, Times Literary Supplement, 17 August, A xxxviii. 1957a. ‘Responses’, Truth, 18 October, 1, 196.

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1957b. ‘Mourning’, Truth, 6 December, 1, 386. 1958a. ‘The World A Catechumen’, Botteghe Oscure 19, 123/33. 1958b. ‘The Isle of Reil’, Botteghe Oscure 21, 101/5. 1959. ‘To My Mother, Taking the Veil’, London Magazine, April, 49. 1963. ‘Today the Acupunturist’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 January, 61.

Translations by Christine Brooke-Rose 1959a. Children of Chaos, by Juan Goytisoto, McGibbon and Kee. 1960a. Fertility and Survival. Population Problems from Malthus to Mao Tse Tung, by Alfred Sauvy, Criterion Books, New York and London, Chatto and Windus. 1968a. In the Labyrinth, by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Calder and Boyars.

Interviews With Christine Brooke-Rose 1964a. ‘Out’s Out – It’ s In to be Anti’, with Myrna Blumberg, Guardian, 7 November, 6. 1965. ‘Writer Out on a Limb’, with ‘Boswell’, Scotsman, 17 April, 3. 1965a. In New Comment, BBC Radio, 3 November. 1965b. In New Comment, BBC Radio, 2 December. 1970a. ‘A Novel Theory’, with J. Hall, Guardian, 16 November, 9. 1976. ‘An Interview with Christine Brooke-Rose’, with D. Hayman and K. Cohen, Contemporary Literature, 17/1, 1/23. 1984a. With S. MacGregor, Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, London, 25 September. 1987. With I. Hamilton, Bookmark, ‘Programme 16. The Yorkshire Ripper, Melvyn Bragg, Christine Brooke-Rose’, BBC 2, 7 May. 1989. ‘A Conversation with Christine Brooke-Rose’, with E. G. Friedman and M. Fuchs, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 9/3, 81/90 and in Friedman and Martin (eds.), Utterly Other Discourse, Illinois, Dalley Archive Press, 1995. 1990a. ‘Global Wordcrunching’, with J. Turner, City Limits, 22/9 March, 91. 1990b. ‘Christine Brooke-Rose in Conversation’, with N. Treddel, P.N. Review, September/October, 29/35. 1990c. ‘News of the Day Programme Four. Lorna Sage talks to Christine Brooke-Rose’, University of East Anglia Video Archive, 9 January. 1990d. ‘Reclaim the Brain. Christine Brooke-Rose Interviewed’, with J. Turner, Edinburgh Review 84, 19/32. 1992. ‘Writing the Rules of the Language Game’, with J. Coe, Guardian, 2 March, 33. 1994. With Maria Del Sapio Garbero, in T. D’Haen and H. Bertens (eds.), Liminal Postmodernism, Amsterdam, Atlanta, Editions Rodopi. 1996a. Personal Interview, 2 September. 1997. Personal Communication, 5 August.

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Published and Unpublished Letters by Christine Brooke-Rose 1983. To Michael Schmidt, in Mark Fisher (ed.), Letters to an Editor, Manchester, Carcanet, 1989, 209/10. 1984b. To Michael Schmidt, ibid., 220/1. 1996b. Personal letter, 2 February. 1996c. Personal letter, 12 April. 1996d. Personal letter, 9 May. 1996e. Personal letter, 8 August. 1996f. Personal letter, 25 September. 1997a. Personal letter, 27 January. 1997b. Personal letter, 14 March. 1997c. Personal letter, 17 June. 1997d. Personal letter, 14 July. 1997e. Personal letter, 31 October. 1998a. Personal letter, 2 January. 1998b. Personal letter, 6 February. 1998c. Personal letter, 27 April. 1998d. Personal letter, 18 June.

Offprints of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Lectures Cited 1992a. ‘Palimpsest History’, at Cambridge University, Stefan Collini (ed.), Interpretation and Over-Interpretation, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1992. Revised version of 1991a. 1994a. ‘A Writer’s Constraints’, Bryce Memorial Lecture at Oxford University, Oxford, Oxford U.P. 1996g. ‘Splitlitcrit’, at Utha university, Narrative, Vol. 4, no.1, January. 1996h. ‘Is Self-Reflexivity Mere?’, at Warwick University. Draft supplied by the author. 1996i. ‘Remaking’, at British Council of Losanna, Switzerland. Draft supplied by the author.

Criticism and Reviews by Christine Brooke-Rose 1947. ‘La syntaxe et le symbolisme dans la poésie de Hopkins’, Europe, NS, 25/17, 30/9. 1955. ‘The Use of Metaphor’ in ‘Some Old French and Middle English Lyrics and Romances’, Ph.D thesis, University of London. 1955a. ‘The Voice of Eternity’, Times Literary Supplement, 17 June, 325/6. 1955b. ‘The Mickiewicz Centenary’, Tablet, 26 November, 527. 1958c. A Grammar of Metaphor, Secker and Warburg.

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1958d. ‘Samuel Beckett and the Anti-Novel’, London Magazine, December, 38/46. 1959b. ‘Mood of the Month – XI’ , London Magazine, September, 45/50. 1959c. ‘The Critic’s Eye’, Times Literary Supplement, 20 March, 160. 1959d. ‘Return from Avilion’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 December, 755. 1960b. ‘Southey Ends His Song’, Times Literary Supplement, 1 April, 208. 1960c. ‘His Name in the Record’, Times Literary Supplement, 10 June, 368. 1960d. ‘Feeding Mind’, Times Literary Supplement, 1 July, 417. 1961a. ‘Ezra Pound. Piers Plowman in the Modern Waste Land’, Review of English Literature 2/2, 74/88. Also in Noel Stock (ed.), Ezra Pound. Perspectives, Greenwood Press, 1976. 1961b. ‘The Vanishing Author’, Observer, 12 February, 26. 1961c. ‘The American Literary Scene. Writers in Search of Community’, Observer, 30 April, 28. 1961d. ‘Anatomy of Originophobia’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 May, 308. 1961e. ‘Buzzards, Bloody Owls and One Hawk’, London Magazine, September, 76/80. 1963a. ‘Notes on the Metre of Auden’s “The Age of Anxiety”’, Essays in Criticism 3/3, 253/64. Revised version in 1991a. 1964b. ‘L’Imagination baroque de Robbe-Grillet’, Revue des Lettres Modernes 94/5, 129/52. Also in Modern Fiction Studies 11/4 (1965/6) as ‘The Baroque Imagination of Robbe-Grillet’. Revised version in 1981. 1964c. ‘Lady Precious Stream’, London Magazine, May, 83/6. 1964d. ‘Where Have All the Lovers Gone?’, London Magazine, June, 80/6. 1964e. ‘Out of the Past’, Spectator, 12 June, 802. 1965c. ‘Dynamic Gradients’, London Magazine, March, 92. 1966a. ‘How Far de Lonh?’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 April, 326. 1966b. ‘Making it New’, Observer, 2 October, 26. 1967. ‘Metaphor in Paradise Lost. A Grammatical Analysis’, in R. Emma and J. T. Shawcross (eds.), Language and Style in Milton. A Symposium in Honour of the Tercentenary of Paradise Lost, New York, Ungar, 1967, 252/303. 1967a. ‘Lettres d’ Angleterre’, Nouvelle Revue Francaise, June, 1, 241/9. July, 116/25. Also in Langues Modernes, March/April, 1969, 158/68 as ‘Le roman experimental en Angleterre’. 1967b. ‘Lay by me Aurelie’, in Eva Hesse (ed.), New Approaches to Ezra Pound, Faber and Faber, 1969, 242/69. Revised version in 1971. 1968b. ‘French Fiction. The Long Revolution’, The Times, 3 August, 18. 1968c. ‘La Dévaluation du livre’, Le Monde, 24 January, Supplement to no. 7, 163. 1968d. ‘Claude Lévi-Strauss. A New Multi-Dimensional Way to Thinking’, The Times, 2 March, 20. 1971. A ZBC of Ezra Pound, Faber and Faber. 1973. ‘Ezra Pound’, Littérature de notre temps, Paris, Casterman. 1973a. ‘View Point’, Times Literary Supplement, 1 June, 614. 1976a. A Structural Analysis of Pound’s ‘Usura canto’, The Hague, Mouton. 1976b. ‘An Excerpt from the Novel Thru. Author’s Note’, New Directions 33, 144.

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1976c. ‘Historical Genres/Theoretical. A Discussion of Todorov on the Fantastic’, New Literary History, 8/1, 145/58. Revised version in 1981. 1976d. ‘The Squirm of the True I. An Essay in Non-Methodology’, Poetics and Theory of Literature 1/2, 265/94. Revised version in 1981. 1976e. ‘The Squirm of the True II. The Long Glasses’, Poetics and Theory of Literature, 1/3, 513/46. Revised version in 1981. 1976f. ‘Letter from Paris. Dramatics’, Spectator, 28 February, 25. 1976g. ‘Letter from Paris. Ganging Up’, Spectator, 27 March, 26. 1976h. ‘Letter from Paris. Tricolore Tape’, Spectator, 22 May, 26. 1976i. ‘Letter from Paris. Le Pop’, Spectator, 12 June, 26. 1976j. ‘Letter from Paris. All the City’s a Stage’, Spectator, 24 July, 25. 1977. ‘Self Confrontation and the Writer’, New Literary History 9/1, 129/36. 1977a. ‘The Squirm of the True III. Surface Structure in Narrative’, Poetics and Theory of Literature 2/3, 517/62. Revised version in 1981. 1977b. ‘Imitations Are Proof of New Writing’s Power’, The Times, 31 May, vii. 1978. ‘Transgressions. An Essay-say on the Novel Novel Novel’, Contemporary Literature 19/3, 378–407. Revised version in 1981. 1980. ‘The Readerhood of Man’, in Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text. Essays in Audience and Interpretation, Princeton, Princeton U.P., 1980, 120/48. Revised version in 1981. 1980a. ‘Round and Round the Jakobson Diagram. A Survey’, Hebrew University Studies in Literature 8/2, 153/82. Revised version in 1981. 1980b. ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’, Granta 3, 161/88. Revised version in 1981. 1980c. ‘The Evil Ring. Realism and the Marvelous’, Poetics Today 1/4, 67/90. Revised version in 1981. 1981. A Rhetoric of the Unreal. Studies in narrative, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P. 1982. ‘Eximplosions’, Genre 14/1, 9/21. Revised version in 1981. 1983a. ‘Théorie des genres. la science-fiction’, in Alain Bony (ed.), Poétique(s). Domaine anglais, Lyon, Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1983, 251/62. 1984c. ‘Fiction, figment, feign’, Fabula 3, 121/32. Revised version in 1991a. 1985. ‘Woman as a Semiotic Object’, Poetics Today 6/1, 9/20. Also in Susan R. Suleiman (ed.), The Female Body in Western Culture, Cambridge, Harvard U.P., 1986. Revised version in 1991a. 1985a. ‘Palimpsestes en paragrammes. Une “phrase narrative” bien cachée’, Caliban. l’ésthétique de la science-fiction 22, 87/99. Revised version of chapter 10 of 1981. 1985b. ‘Illusions of Parody’, Amerikastudien/American Studies 30/2, 225/33. Revised version in 1991b. 1986b. ‘The Dissolution of Character in the Novel’, in Thomas C. Heller et al. (eds.), Reconstructing Individualsim. Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, Stanford, Stanford U.P., 1986, 184/96. Revised version in 1991a as ‘Which way did they go? Thataways’. 1986c. ‘Ill Logics of Irony’, in Lee Clark Mitchell (ed.), New Essays on The Red Badge of Courage, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1986, 129/46. Revised version in 1991a. 1986d. ‘Un poème sur tout’, Quinzaine littéraire 16/31 May, 5/6.

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1986e. ‘Problématique de la réception’, Revue francaise des études américaines, November, 393/8. 1987a. ‘Id is, is Id?’, in Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (ed.), Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, London and New York, Methuen, 1987, 19/37. Revised version in 1991a. 1987b. ‘Cheng Ming Chi’i’d’, PN Review 13/5, 29/37. Revised version in 1991a. 1987c. ‘A for But. “The Custom House” in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Word and Image’ 3/2, 143/55. Revised version in 1991a. 1988. ‘Ill Wit and Good Humour. Women’s Comedy and the Canon’, Comparative Criticism 10, 121/38. Revised version in 1991a. 1988a. ‘Ill Locutions’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 8/3, 67/81. Also in Nash (ed.), Narrative in Culture. The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy and Literature, Methuen, 1990, pp. 154/71. Revised version in 1991a. 1989a. ‘Illiterations’, in Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs (eds.), Breaking the Sequence. Women’s Experimental Fiction, Princeton, Princeton U.P., 1989, 55/71. Revised version in 1991a. 1989b. ‘Ill Wit and Sick Tragedy. Jude the Obscure’, in Lance St John Butler (ed.), Alternative Hardy, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989, 26/48. Revised version in 1991a. 1989c. ‘Stories, Theories and Things’, New Literary History 21/1, 121/31. Revised version in 1991a. 1989d. ‘Illicitations’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 9/3, 101/9. 1990e. ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, 10 May, 25. 1991a. Stories, Theories and Things, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P. 1991b. ‘Whatever Happened to Narratology?’, Poetics Today 11/2, 283/93. Revised version in 1991a.

Secondary Sources Reviews of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Novels Allen, Walter. 1957. Review of The Languages of Love, New Statesman, 12 October, 469/70. —. 1958. Review of The Sycamore Tree, New Statesman, 11 October, 500. Bergonzi, Bernard. 1961. ‘Inanity Fair’, review of The Middlemen, Spectator, 1 September, 297. Cixous, Hélène. 1968. ‘Le language du déplacement’, review of Between, Le Monde, 28 December. Coe, Jonathan. 1992. ‘Writing the Rules of the Language Game’, review of Textermination, Guardian, 2 March.

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Clute, John. 1986. Review of Xorandor, Interzone, Autumn, 52. Cranston, Maurice. 1957. Review of The Languages of Love, Encounter, November, 89/90. Disch, Thomas M. 1986. ‘Rock of Phages’, review of Xorandor, New York Times Book Review, 3 August, 10. Fuller, Roy. 1957. Review of The Languages of Love, London Magazine, December, 62/5. Gerend, Lydia. 1987. ‘Computer Age Story Telling’, review of Xorandor, Science as Culture. Hartley, L. P. 1961. Review of The Dear Deceit, London Magazine, January, 73/4. Hope, Francis. 1961. ‘Suffering Fools Sadly’, review of The Middlemen, Time and Tide, 7 September, 486. —. 1964. ‘I, Julian’, review of Out, New Statesman, 13 November, 741/2. Kendall, Elaine. 1985. ‘Battling the Computer in the Cassandra Mode’, review of Amalgamemnon, Los Angeles Times, 18 March. King, Francis. 1975. ‘Failed Utopia’, review of Thru, Sunday Telegraph, 13 July, 12. Kirkus Review (syndicated column). 1985. Review of Amalgamemnon, 1 February. Joseph, Michael. 1964. ‘Colorimetrics’, review of Out, Times Literary Supplement, 10 November. —. 1966. ‘In the Beginning’, review of Such, Times Literary Supplement, 20 October. —. 1968. ‘Loded Language’, review of Between, Times Literary Supplement, 31 October. Marshall, Bob. 1984. ‘An Egg-head’s Christmas List’, review of Amalgamemnon, Bookseller, 24 November, 2, 159. Mayne, Richard. 1961. review of The Middlemen, New Statesman, 8 September, 316. Mason, Michael. 1975. ‘Textual Tensions’, review of Thru, Times Literary Supplement, 11 July, 753. Morton, Brian. 1986. ‘Words of the Thinking Rock’, review of Xorandor, Times Literary Supplement, 11 July, 767. —. 1984. ‘A Glimpse into the Future Tense’, review of Amalgamemnon, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 5 October, 10. Moss, Roger. 1992. ‘What Maisie Didn’t Know’, review of Textermination, The Independent, 4 January. Price, R. G. G. 1961. Review of The Middlemen, Punch, 30 August, 332. O’Connell, Alex. 1999. ‘Joyced-Out’, review of Subscript, The Times, 28th October, 53. Quigly, Isabel. 1958. Review of The Sycamore Tree, Encounter, November, 86. Quinn, Paul. 1999. ‘A Tale of the Tribe’, review of Subscript, Times Literary Supplement, 8th October, 24. Sage, Lorna. 1990. ‘Wise Stones Cast at Human Waste’, review of Verbivore, Observer, 25 February. —. 1998. ‘Laif-lahk’, review of Next, Times Literary Supplement, 21st August, 21. —. 1999. Review of Subscript, Times Literary Supplement, 3rd December, 11. Seed, David. 1992. Review of Textermination and Stories, Theories and Things, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring.

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Seymour-Smith, Martin. 1966. ‘Heroic Qualities’, review of Such, Spectator, 4 November, 592/3. Times Literary Supplement. 1957. ‘Fiction II. Larger than Life’, review of The Languages of Love, 18 October, 629. —. 1958. ‘Fiction. The Rough with the Smooth’, review of The Sycamore Tree, 3 October, 557. —. 1960. ‘Gallery of Rogues’, review of the Dear Deceit, 21 October, 673. Turner, Jenny. 1990. ‘Global Wordcrunching’, review of Verbivore, City Limits, 22–9 March, 91. Warner, Marina. 1998. Review of Next, The Daily Telegraph, 21st November, 3. Whitley, John. 1968. ‘Girl in the Glass Booth’, review of Between, Sunday Times, November, 62. Wyndham, Francis. 1957. Review of The Languages of Love, Spectator, 11 October, 491.

Criticism of Brooke-Rose’s Novels An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. 1988. Paul and June Schlueter (ed.), St. James Press. Andermatt-Conley, Verena. 1977. ‘A Doll’s Story’, New Literary History 9, Autumn, 181. Berressem, Hanjo. 1989. ‘Thru the Looking Glass. A Journey into the Universe of Discourse’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 9/3. Also in E. G. Friedman and R. Martin (eds.), Utterly Other Discourse. The Texts of Christine Brooke-Rose, Illinois, Dalley Archive Press, 1995. Birch, Sarah. 1991. ‘Christine Brooke-Rose and Post-War Writing in France’, D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University. —. 1994. Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction, Oxford, Clarendon Press. The Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature. 1982. Marion Wynne-Daries (ed.), Bloomsbury. Bradbury, Malcolm. 1993. The Modern British Novel, Secker and Warburg. Burgess, Anthony. 1967. The Novel Now. A Guide to Contemporary Fiction, New York, W. W. Norton Co. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. 1988. Ian Ousby (ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge U.P. Carpi, Daniela. 1996. ‘Christine Brooke-Rose: la defezione del linguaggio’, in L’ansia della scrittura. Parola e silenzio nella narrativa inglese contemporanea, Napoli, Liguori, 61/83. Caserio, Robert. 1988. ‘Mobility and Masochism. Christine Brooke-Rose and J. G. Ballard’, in Novel, Winter-Spring. Also in M. Spilka and C. McCrackenFlesher (eds.), Why the Novel Matters, Bloomington, Indiana U.P., 1990. Contemporary Authors. The International Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Current Authors and Their Works. 1962–1973. Detroit, Gale.

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Index

Althusser, Louis 46, 196 Astrophysics 28, 71, 118, 271, 274 Austin, John 267, 272 Bakhtin, Mikhail 22, 28–30, 149, 223 Banfield, Ann 68 Barthes, Roland 30, 31, 33, 43, 44, 46, 51, 67, 69, 76, 79, 83, 91, 140, 142–5, 146–7, 148, 149, 152, 153, 164, 165– 6, 167–8, 171, 176, 181, 184, 203, 205, 207, 209, 212–7, 223, 228, 252, 255 Beauvoir, Simone de 220 Beckett, Samuel 22, 40, 62, 63, 85, 184, 198 Benjamin, Walter 179, 259 Big Bang 26, 71, 185, 189, 192–3, 194, 199, 202, 203, 209 Booth, Wayne 67, 68, 83, 103, 141 Bradbury, Malcolm 51, 52 Braudillard, Jean 258 Bricolage 32, 53 Burgess, Anthony 51, 240–1 Calvino, Italo 44, 101, 108–9, 143 Cartesian 64, 106, 182 Causality 30, 203, 272 Cixous, Hélène 37, 38, 220, 221, 222, 223 Coetzee, J.M. 50, 172 Colonial/colonialism 21, 35, 169, 172, 175, 178, 272, 278 Culler, Jonathan 34, 36, 69, 177 Cunningham, Valentine 170 Deconstruction 34–7, 40, 182, 185, 219, 221, 267, 271, 272, 275, 277 Defamiliarisation 32, 41, 61, 132 Derrida, Jacques 34, 35–6, 37, 170, 177, 182, 184, 209, 238, 239, 259, 267, 272

Einstein, Albert 26, 59 Fanon, Frantz 172, 173 Federman, Raymond 49 Feminism/Feminist 23, 37–8, 55, 219–23, 243–52, 276, 279 Foucault, Michel 43, 179, 228 Freud, Sigmund 59, 161, 186–8, 191, 197–8, 219, 221–2, 225, 226–7, 228, 231, 238, 247, 251–2 Friedman, Alexander 26, 38, 47 Genette, Gérard 67–8, 76, 84, 95–6, 98, 120, 122, 123, 129, 138 Greimas, A.J. 227, 229 Harrison, Bernard 108 Hegel, G.W.F. 75, 174, 179, 256 Heidegger, Martin 142 Heisenberg, Werner 27, 28, 30, 59, 168, 178, 179, 184, 185, 271 Hitler, Adolf 61, 175, 176 Hutcheon, Linda 49 Identity 19, 30, 34, 35, 51, 52, 54, 63, 64, 65, 68–9, 70–2, 73, 75, 76–7, 78, 81, 83–94, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 107, 116, 123, 134, 146, 157, 158–9, 161–4, 167, 171, 174, 175, 180, 182–3, 185, 187, 189, 192, 194, 199–204, 204–17, 219, 220, 221, 223, 230, 237, 248–9, 251, 252, 253, 254– 5, 260, 273–5, 277, 278, 279 Intertextuality 29, 32, 37, 50, 51, 53, 76, 100, 142, 149, 151, 214, 223, 273 Irigaray, Luce 38, 149, 220, 221, 222, 258 Juxtaposition 39, 44, 55, 61, 157, 167, 199, 219, 239, 255, 260, 277

301

Kittay, Eve Feder 24 Kristeva, Julia 29, 30, 38, 149, 216, 223– 4, 230 Lacan, Jacques 50, 149, 150, 161–4, 174, 187, 188, 189, 191–3, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 202, 203, 206, 208, 211, 219, 220, 221, 228, 231, 238, 251 Laing, R.D. 173, 191–2, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 206, 272 Leavis, F. R. 21, 63 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 32, 43, 51, 170, 226, 229, 233 Lyotard, Jean-François 110, 169–70, 240, 258, 259 McHale, Brian 47, 48, 49, 61, 103–4, 116, 117, 145–6, 170, 171 Metalepsis 76 Metaphysics 29, 33, 36, 182, 192, 222, 225, 233, 238, 261, 267, 272, 275, 276 Modernism 60–1, 63, 223 Moody, Raymond 72, 186, 188, 190, 194, 195, 196 Mussolini, Benito 61, 175 Naturalisation 41, 69, 115, 144 New Criticism 24, 30, 31, 141 Nietzsche, Friedrich 256 Non-narrator 67–75, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 99, 101, 115, 120, 154, 278 Nouveau roman/romancier 20, 22–3, 25, 40–3, 63, 67, 140, 169 Open work 115, 133–40 Orwell, George 85 Phallocentric/Phallocentrism 219, 222, 227, 232, 239, 241, 242 Planck, Max 27, 59 Plato 33, 157, 176, 189, 241, 266, 272, 279 Polyglossia 167, 211 Polysemy 211, 255

302

Possible world 92, 115–32, 137, 144, 274 Post-Structuralism 23, 33–4, 59 Postmodernism 47–50 Pound, Ezra 22, 24, 39, 40, 88, 107, 145 Quantum 26, 27, 71, 200, 271 Queneau, Raymond 44 Realism 20, 22, 25, 40–1, 46, 47, 51, 54, 59–65, 67, 134, 139, 213, 275, 272–3 Riffaterre, Michel 141 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 31, 33, 41–3, 44, 45, 51, 53, 68, 69–70, 71, 139, 168–9, 182 Sarraute, Nathalie 25, 41 Sartre, Jean-Paul 173 Saussure, Ferdinand de 26, 31, 33, 35, 224, 225–6 Scarry, Elaine 179 Shklovskij, Victor 41 Structuralism 20, 23, 26, 30–4, 41, 44, 51, 59, 121, 142, 147–8, 152–3, 157, 158, 161, 166, 167, 176, 183, 223–4, 227 Subworld 93, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 132, 137, 157, 186, 188, 193 Suleiman, Susan Rubin 206, 208 Tel Quel 23, 46–7, 50, 166, 223 Todorov, Tzvetan 48, 77 Transworld 83, 90–1, 92, 93 Uncertainty Principle 27, 71, 178, 185, 200, 201, 258, 271 Vico, Giambattista 91, 252 War of languages 158, 164, 165–6, 213, 215, 252 Waugh, Patricia 221 Wittig, Monique 37 Writerly 115, 140–5, 146, 148, 151, 166, 171, 211, 212, 213 Zaleski 186, 193, 194, 188

European Connections edited by Peter Collier ‘European Connections’ is a new series which aims to publish studies in Comparative Literature. Most scholars would agree that no literary work or genre can fruitfully be studied in isolation from its context (whether formal or cultural). Nearly all literary works and genres arise in response to or at least in awareness of previous and contemporary writing, and are often illuminated by confrontation with neighbouring or contrasting works. The literature of Europe, in particular, is extraordinarily rich in this kind of cross-cultural fertilisation (one thinks of medieval drama, Romantic poetry, or the Realist novel, for instance). On a wider stage, the major currents of European philosophy and art have affected the different national literatures in varying and fascinating ways. The masters of this comparative approach in our century have been thematic critics like F.R. Leavis, George Steiner, and Jean-Pierre Richard, or formalist critics like I.A. Richards, Northrop Frye, Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov, but much of the writing about literature which we know under specific theoretical labels such as ‘feminist’ (Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler), ‘marxist’ (Georg Lukacs, Raymond Williams) or ‘psychoanalytical’ criticism (Charles Mauron, Jacques Lacan), for instance, also depends by definition on taking literary works from allegedly different national, generic or stylistic traditions and subjecting them to a new, comparative grid. The connections of European with non-European writing are also at issue—one only has to think of the impact of Indian mythology on Salman Rushdie or the cross-fertilisation at work between a Spanish writer like Juan Goytisolo and the Latin American genre of ‘Magical Realism’. Although the series is fundamentally a collection of works dealing with literature, it intends to be open to interdisciplinary aspects, wherever music, art, history, philosophy, politics, or cinema come to affect the interplay between literary works. Many European and North American university courses in literature nowadays teach and research literature in faculties of Comparative and General Literature. The series intends to tap the rich vein of such research. Initial volumes will look at the ways in which writers like Thackeray and Trollope draw on French writing and history, the structure and strategies of Faulkner’s fiction in the light of Proust and Joyce, and George Mackay Brown’s interest in Hopkins and Mann. Offers of contribution are welcome, whether studies of specific writers and relationships, or wider theoretical

investigations. Proposals from established scholars, as well as more recent doctoral students, are welcome. In the major European languages, the series will publish works, as far as possible, in the original language of the author. The series editor, Peter Collier, is a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, and University Lecturer in French at the University of Cambridge. He has translated Pierre Bourdieu (Homo Academicus, Polity Press, 1988) and Emile Zola (Germinal, Oxford World’s Classics, 1993), has edited several collections of essays on European literature and culture (including Visions and Blueprints, with Edward Timms, Manchester University Press, 1988, Modernism and the European Unconscious, with Judy Davies, Polity Press, 1990, Critical Theory Today, with Helga Geyer-Ryan, Polity Press, 1990, and Artistic Relations, with Robert Lethbridge, Yale University Press, 1994), and has written a study of Proust and art (Mosaici proustiani, Il Mulino, 1986). He is a member of the British branch of the International Comparative Literature Association.

Volume 1

S. S. Prawer: W.M. Thackeray’s European Sketch Books A Study of Literary and Graphic Portraiture. 459 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906758-68-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5081-2

Volume 2

Patricia Zecevic: The Speaking Divine Woman López de Úbeda’s La Pícara Justina and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. 294 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906766-91-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5607-1

Volume 3

Mary Besemeres: Translating One’s Self Language and Selfhood in Cross-Cultural Autobiography. 297 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906766-98-5 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5614-4

Volume 4

Michela Canepari-Labib: Word-Worlds Language, Identity and Reality in the Work of Christine BrookeRose. 303 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906758-64-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5080-4