Christine Brooke-Rose (1923–2012)
Author of Amalgamemnon
About the Author
Christine Brooke-Rose taught at the University of Paris, Vincennes, from 1968 to 1988.
Image credit: Carcanet Press
Works by Christine Brooke-Rose
A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (Cambridge Paperback Library) (1981) 19 copies
Such 4 copies
The Foot 1 copy
A structural analysis of Pound's Usura canto : Jakobson's method extended and applied to free verse (1976) 1 copy
Gold: A Poem 1 copy
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Brooke-Rose, Christine Frances Evelyn
- Birthdate
- 1923-01-16
- Date of death
- 2012-03-21
- Gender
- female
- Education
- University of Oxford (Somerville College)
University College London - Occupations
- teacher
novelist
memoirist
literary critic
translator - Organizations
- University of Paris-Vincennes
- Relationships
- Peterkiewicz, Jerzy (husband)
- Short biography
- Christine Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland to an English father and Swiss-American mother. Her first language was French, but the family also spoke English and German. Her parents separated in 1929 and she moved with her mother to Brussels, and then to the UK. During World War II, she joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and worked at the secret facility of Bletchley Park as an intelligence officer, assessing intercepted German communications. After the war, she read English at Oxford University and earned a Ph.D. in Middle English from University College London in 1954. She worked for a time in London as a literary journalist and scholar. Her debut novel, The Languages of Love, was published in 1957. In 1968, she moved to France, where she taught linguistics and English literature at the University of Paris-Vincennes. In 1975, she was named professor of American literature and literary theory. Other novels included Out (1964); Such (1966), for which she shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction; and the autobiographical Remake (1996).
Her literary criticism included A Structural Analysis of Pound's Usura Canto: Jakobson's Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse (1976); A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic (1981); and A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971). She was also well-known as a translator of French works into English, in particular the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet. She retired from teaching in 1988 and went to live in the south of France. She was married three times: to Rodney Bax, to the poet Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, and to Claude Brooke. - Nationality
- UK
- Birthplace
- Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
- Places of residence
- Brussels, Belgium
London, England, UK
Paris, France
Luberon, France - Place of death
- near Avignon, France
Members
Reviews
Imagine for a moment that you're an experimental novelist with a strong, if not widely publicised, commitment to avoiding external narrators and past-tense narrative. You're about to set out on what may well turn out to be your last novel. What to choose for a setting? How about a story that starts around 4.5 billion years ago and ends about 10 000 years ago? If you can avoid the past tense and the panoramic view there, then you've probably exhausted that particular constraint...
Displaying show more no shortage of chutzpah, Brooke-Rose sets out to produce a literary treatment of the story of life on Earth, from the formation of the first complex molecules ("...earthfarts in slithery clay") to early human societies that are on the verge of developing agriculture. Obviously, this isn't straightforward. How do you tell a story in which consciousness itself is a meaningless concept until about halfway through the book, whilst language and the first named characters only start to appear in Chapter 13, and uncountable generations of life are still passing between one chapter and the next, right up to the end of the book?
There's a certain amount of linguistic sleight of hand involved, of course, and Brooke-Rose has to bring in the concept of "the Code" — which seems to mean the aggregate of the information stored up in all the planet's DNA — to give some sort of narrative continuity to the story. An appropriate enough image for a writer who started her working life at Bletchley Park. She's also fairly strict about not using conventional names for things like plant and animal species the first few times they appear in the story. We have to work out that something is a tree or a brontosaurus or a honey-bee from a description. Equally, there are no place-names: sometimes in the later chapters we can guess where we are, but in the earlier part of the book geography doesn't help us much, even with the help of the period maps in the cover art.
It all works surprisingly well, and it did prompt me a couple of times to wonder about things I thought I knew — there's quite a lot about the competition for resources between homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and about how male and female roles might have evolved, and about how some key bits of technology might have been invented and lost many times over — but on the whole it is probably the sort of book that is more interesting for the writer than for the reader. If you haven't read at least some of the sort of science books Brooke-Rose lists in her bibliography, you'll probably be a bit lost in the text; if you have, you're probably not the sort of person who reads experimental novels... show less
Displaying show more no shortage of chutzpah, Brooke-Rose sets out to produce a literary treatment of the story of life on Earth, from the formation of the first complex molecules ("...earthfarts in slithery clay") to early human societies that are on the verge of developing agriculture. Obviously, this isn't straightforward. How do you tell a story in which consciousness itself is a meaningless concept until about halfway through the book, whilst language and the first named characters only start to appear in Chapter 13, and uncountable generations of life are still passing between one chapter and the next, right up to the end of the book?
There's a certain amount of linguistic sleight of hand involved, of course, and Brooke-Rose has to bring in the concept of "the Code" — which seems to mean the aggregate of the information stored up in all the planet's DNA — to give some sort of narrative continuity to the story. An appropriate enough image for a writer who started her working life at Bletchley Park. She's also fairly strict about not using conventional names for things like plant and animal species the first few times they appear in the story. We have to work out that something is a tree or a brontosaurus or a honey-bee from a description. Equally, there are no place-names: sometimes in the later chapters we can guess where we are, but in the earlier part of the book geography doesn't help us much, even with the help of the period maps in the cover art.
It all works surprisingly well, and it did prompt me a couple of times to wonder about things I thought I knew — there's quite a lot about the competition for resources between homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and about how male and female roles might have evolved, and about how some key bits of technology might have been invented and lost many times over — but on the whole it is probably the sort of book that is more interesting for the writer than for the reader. If you haven't read at least some of the sort of science books Brooke-Rose lists in her bibliography, you'll probably be a bit lost in the text; if you have, you're probably not the sort of person who reads experimental novels... show less
In typical CBR fashion, this is simultaneously a very serious attempt to say something important about the nature of narrative and a joke at the expense of the conventions of literary criticism. Because this turns out to be not the usual, quasi-random collection of essays assembled over a period of years on different topics that the format teaches us to expect, but instead an extended critical study of that widely-overlooked modern novelist, Christine Brooke-Rose.
Hardly anyone, it turns show more out, has noticed or made any proper attempt to discuss the specific technical aspect of her novels that she herself considers the most interesting, the way they use grammatical constraints to break out of stale, conventional ways of writing narrative. She did explain it all to one person, apparently (her new boss at Vincennes, Hélène Cixous), and that person did write an article about it in 1968, but seems to have done so without actually reading the books and thus got it all wrong...
The discussion of the constraints, where they came from and what she was hoping to achieve with them is very interesting, and clears up a few little mysteries for me — but I'm glad I read all the novels first. If you read a novel conscious that there's a specific "trick" behind it (as with La disparation or B.S. Johnson's The unfortunates) you end up spending more time looking at how it's done rather than at what the trick actually does for the book as a novel.
Another book that comes with an implied reading-list: not only critical texts and books about language that I haven't read, but also some of the authors Brooke-Rose talks about as important influences, like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. The discussion of House of leaves in the last chapter makes that sound interesting too... show less
Hardly anyone, it turns show more out, has noticed or made any proper attempt to discuss the specific technical aspect of her novels that she herself considers the most interesting, the way they use grammatical constraints to break out of stale, conventional ways of writing narrative. She did explain it all to one person, apparently (her new boss at Vincennes, Hélène Cixous), and that person did write an article about it in 1968, but seems to have done so without actually reading the books and thus got it all wrong...
The discussion of the constraints, where they came from and what she was hoping to achieve with them is very interesting, and clears up a few little mysteries for me — but I'm glad I read all the novels first. If you read a novel conscious that there's a specific "trick" behind it (as with La disparation or B.S. Johnson's The unfortunates) you end up spending more time looking at how it's done rather than at what the trick actually does for the book as a novel.
Another book that comes with an implied reading-list: not only critical texts and books about language that I haven't read, but also some of the authors Brooke-Rose talks about as important influences, like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. The discussion of House of leaves in the last chapter makes that sound interesting too... show less
For Christine Brooke-Rose, the process of turning your life into a book is essentially the same as that of making a new version of an existing film, so for this autobiographical novel - in which all the names have been changed and there are no personal pronouns, but there's otherwise no serious attempt to pretend that it's meant to be read as fiction - she employs a team of imaginary technicians, John the focus-puller, John the best boy, John the psych, and so on, to keep her on the rails show more and warn her when the story is running off in the wrong direction. And of course there's a good deal of cutting-room trickery to make sure that we don't get the facts in anything boring like chronological order...
But we do get a fairly comprehensive account of her life and what it feels like to look back on it from the comfortable situation of an "Old Woman" - or a "harmonious Houyhnhnm" - living in retirement in her cottage in the south of France. Her childhood shifting around between Geneva, London and Brussels, the father who absented himself from her life, the mother who eventually retreated into a convent, office work as a teenager in Liverpool, war service at Bletchley Park (apparently she did know all about Colossus, which perhaps explains some of her later fascination with computers), two marriages (apparently there was a third, but that's not discussed here), her difficulties being taken seriously as a writer and an academic in fifties London, and eventually, well into middle age, the almost accidental discovery of a role for herself at the new university in Vincennes.
As always, reading this has elements of crossword-solving about it, as Brooke-Rose plays about with the possibilities of several different languages and inserts bizarre new words into all of them, but it's also rewarding in a conventional memoir-reading sort of way, with wafts of nostalgia, embarrassment, comedy, pain, plus the pleasure of reading about places and times outside our own direct experience. And admirably concise: Brooke-Rose never seems to stray over a 200-page limit in any of her books, and in this one she finishes comfortably within that distance. show less
But we do get a fairly comprehensive account of her life and what it feels like to look back on it from the comfortable situation of an "Old Woman" - or a "harmonious Houyhnhnm" - living in retirement in her cottage in the south of France. Her childhood shifting around between Geneva, London and Brussels, the father who absented himself from her life, the mother who eventually retreated into a convent, office work as a teenager in Liverpool, war service at Bletchley Park (apparently she did know all about Colossus, which perhaps explains some of her later fascination with computers), two marriages (apparently there was a third, but that's not discussed here), her difficulties being taken seriously as a writer and an academic in fifties London, and eventually, well into middle age, the almost accidental discovery of a role for herself at the new university in Vincennes.
As always, reading this has elements of crossword-solving about it, as Brooke-Rose plays about with the possibilities of several different languages and inserts bizarre new words into all of them, but it's also rewarding in a conventional memoir-reading sort of way, with wafts of nostalgia, embarrassment, comedy, pain, plus the pleasure of reading about places and times outside our own direct experience. And admirably concise: Brooke-Rose never seems to stray over a 200-page limit in any of her books, and in this one she finishes comfortably within that distance. show less
Xorandor
REVIEW
This marks something of a radical departure for Brooke-Rose: an experiment with straightforward linear narrative, a story with an easily identifiable beginning, middle and end, presented in that order! What's more, the opening has an unmistakable feel of E. Nesbit around it, as two unusually self-sufficient children, the twins Jip and Zab, describe their encounter with a mysterious - but profoundly intelligent - talking rock in a ruined Cornish castle.
Naturally, there's a bit show more more to it than that, as the story evolves into a kind of science-fiction "first-contact" structure with vaguely Doctor Who overtones, and Brooke-Rose has fun with the linguistic possibilities opened up by dialogue between a silicon-based lifeforms and a pair of computer-obsessed twins - we are constantly zig-zagging between the woolly logic of English and the more precise world expressible in a computer language rather like BASIC (although I've never come across a computer language that needed the ENDJOKE keyword...). And even in English we are in the world of the twins' private language, replete with computer- or tech-derived exclamations like "maxint", "boolesup" and "megavolt". Leaping leptons!
The rocks turn out to live off radiation, with a dangerous appetite for alpha particles, but they also like to tune into broadcast channels. The one they meet is named XORANDOR by the kids, but the scientists talk about alphaphagai and the press have soon turned this into alphaguys. Which brings in further possibilities for Brooke-Rose to bring the subject around to the problems of nuclear waste and atomic weapons, and the glorious opportunity for a rock that has found its way into a nuclear reactor to go rogue, identifying with Lady Macbeth...
Great fun, and probably the most accessible of the CBR novels I've read to date, if you can cope with 1980s-style program listings.
ENDREVIEW
Verbivore
This book takes up the story - for, yes, there is a story this time, too, if not quite such a straightforward one - about 25 years after the events of Xorandor (which would be just about now, I suppose...). It takes for granted that the reader has already read Xorandor, and also brings back Mira Enketai from Amalgamemnon, but you don't really need much previous information about her.
There have been a series of unexplained failures of radio communications around the world, which gradually build up into a total blackout. It seems that something is eating our words out of the ether, and it starts to look as though it might have something to do with the silicon-based creatures from last time: could the alphaphagai somehow have mutated into logophagai?
To make it more fun for us, Brooke-Rose goes back to the trick of using unflagged changes of narrator, as the story is told by Mira, the now grown-up twins Jip and Zab, the microwave engineer Tim (now head of the BBC), the playwright Perry Hypsos (formerly known as Perry Striker), and two fictional characters from one of Perry's radio plays (one of them a unit of measurement...). And a few other people...
It's an interesting idea, and Brooke-Rose was surely quite prescient in putting her finger on how ill-equipped a tech-based society is to cope with the failure of a basic technology that everything else relies on: the result of her verbivore-imposed radio silence is a bit like the panic we actually experience whenever there is an Icelandic volcano or an inconveniently-located war shutting down aviation. Or when LibraryThing goes down for half an hour.
But the core of the book seems to be about information overload and redundancy in the modern world. Do we really need to hear every news story a dozen times in slightly different wording, or every contentless pop song a thousand times? And what are we not listening to any more whilst our senses are bombarded with all that? What is all that negentropy costing us? Fascinating to see how Brooke-Rose develops that idea at a moment when the internet has not really got going (no, the Sir Tim in the book doesn't seem to have anything to do with that Sir Tim) and when mobile phones were only just beginning to be a concept. Neither play a role in the book: Brooke-Rose imagines us in the early 21st century reading ebooks on screen, but they come on diskettes.
As usual, the text is full of postmodern verbal jokes, there's a slightly updated version of the Jip/Zab twidiolect, and the alert will spot all sorts of other things flashing past. Just for instance, Zab has become an MEP (or "Euromp" in the language of the book): Brooke-Rose imagines that the eternal nonsense of the Brussels-Strasbourg-Luxembourg shuttle will have been solved by the creation of a European Capital District ("le Washington d'ici") in Charlemagne's old city, with a splendid new European Parliament "bubble" in the Soers district of Aachen. And if you read her description of the site attentively and look at the map, you'll realise that it's the very spot where, at the time she was writing, a splendid new prison was being built for the city of Aachen... show less
REVIEW
This marks something of a radical departure for Brooke-Rose: an experiment with straightforward linear narrative, a story with an easily identifiable beginning, middle and end, presented in that order! What's more, the opening has an unmistakable feel of E. Nesbit around it, as two unusually self-sufficient children, the twins Jip and Zab, describe their encounter with a mysterious - but profoundly intelligent - talking rock in a ruined Cornish castle.
Naturally, there's a bit show more more to it than that, as the story evolves into a kind of science-fiction "first-contact" structure with vaguely Doctor Who overtones, and Brooke-Rose has fun with the linguistic possibilities opened up by dialogue between a silicon-based lifeforms and a pair of computer-obsessed twins - we are constantly zig-zagging between the woolly logic of English and the more precise world expressible in a computer language rather like BASIC (although I've never come across a computer language that needed the ENDJOKE keyword...). And even in English we are in the world of the twins' private language, replete with computer- or tech-derived exclamations like "maxint", "boolesup" and "megavolt". Leaping leptons!
The rocks turn out to live off radiation, with a dangerous appetite for alpha particles, but they also like to tune into broadcast channels. The one they meet is named XORANDOR by the kids, but the scientists talk about alphaphagai and the press have soon turned this into alphaguys. Which brings in further possibilities for Brooke-Rose to bring the subject around to the problems of nuclear waste and atomic weapons, and the glorious opportunity for a rock that has found its way into a nuclear reactor to go rogue, identifying with Lady Macbeth...
Great fun, and probably the most accessible of the CBR novels I've read to date, if you can cope with 1980s-style program listings.
ENDREVIEW
Verbivore
This book takes up the story - for, yes, there is a story this time, too, if not quite such a straightforward one - about 25 years after the events of Xorandor (which would be just about now, I suppose...). It takes for granted that the reader has already read Xorandor, and also brings back Mira Enketai from Amalgamemnon, but you don't really need much previous information about her.
There have been a series of unexplained failures of radio communications around the world, which gradually build up into a total blackout. It seems that something is eating our words out of the ether, and it starts to look as though it might have something to do with the silicon-based creatures from last time: could the alphaphagai somehow have mutated into logophagai?
To make it more fun for us, Brooke-Rose goes back to the trick of using unflagged changes of narrator, as the story is told by Mira, the now grown-up twins Jip and Zab, the microwave engineer Tim (now head of the BBC), the playwright Perry Hypsos (formerly known as Perry Striker), and two fictional characters from one of Perry's radio plays (one of them a unit of measurement...). And a few other people...
It's an interesting idea, and Brooke-Rose was surely quite prescient in putting her finger on how ill-equipped a tech-based society is to cope with the failure of a basic technology that everything else relies on: the result of her verbivore-imposed radio silence is a bit like the panic we actually experience whenever there is an Icelandic volcano or an inconveniently-located war shutting down aviation. Or when LibraryThing goes down for half an hour.
But the core of the book seems to be about information overload and redundancy in the modern world. Do we really need to hear every news story a dozen times in slightly different wording, or every contentless pop song a thousand times? And what are we not listening to any more whilst our senses are bombarded with all that? What is all that negentropy costing us? Fascinating to see how Brooke-Rose develops that idea at a moment when the internet has not really got going (no, the Sir Tim in the book doesn't seem to have anything to do with that Sir Tim) and when mobile phones were only just beginning to be a concept. Neither play a role in the book: Brooke-Rose imagines us in the early 21st century reading ebooks on screen, but they come on diskettes.
As usual, the text is full of postmodern verbal jokes, there's a slightly updated version of the Jip/Zab twidiolect, and the alert will spot all sorts of other things flashing past. Just for instance, Zab has become an MEP (or "Euromp" in the language of the book): Brooke-Rose imagines that the eternal nonsense of the Brussels-Strasbourg-Luxembourg shuttle will have been solved by the creation of a European Capital District ("le Washington d'ici") in Charlemagne's old city, with a splendid new European Parliament "bubble" in the Soers district of Aachen. And if you read her description of the site attentively and look at the map, you'll realise that it's the very spot where, at the time she was writing, a splendid new prison was being built for the city of Aachen... show less
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