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
A Relation between Theory and Machinic Imagination
This is Brooke-Rose's last book. Reviewers routinely remark on the differences between it and her earlier, more experimental novels. What matters, I think, is what it reveals about the psychology of the narrators in the other books: their forms of attention and their preferred subjects. Those traits are hers aside from her concerns with linguistics or the postmodern novel (as in "Thru"), and also aside from the chosen subjects and narratives show more of those earlier books.
Brooke-Rose's narrator (at first implicitly, later more carelessly and openly, the author herself) is full of the concerns that can be found in other books written during the authors' last years. She complains, as Gaddis, Howard Brodkey, and many others have, about the specifics of her medical condition, her burning feet, her fluctuating blood pressure, her strategies for keeping her balance. Not all of this is specific to this book: she has often had an intense preoccupation with the observable and describable quirks of the body and its appearances. The confusing double reflection that sometimes appears in a car's rear-view mirror, which recurs throughout the novel "Thru," is an example: it's a minute, exacting physical description of a particular part of the body (eyes and eyebrows).
This sort of attention seems empirically exacting, and I think she wants it taken that way; but it is better described as compulsively machinic: it's closer to an autistic presentation than a realist novelist's delight in detail. She thinks of the body as a sort of machine, susceptible to exacting perspectival and formal description: our bodies are humorous, quirky things, comprised of detachable parts and pieces, each of which needs to be put into precise prose. There is little, in Brooke-Rose, of the body's gestalt, of the body's motion or its elegance: it's a construction of pieces, an ultimately unpleasant, tenuously constructed machine.
The narrator (author) like to report on conversations and encounters from a certain distance, as if the author and narrator wasn't fully present. When she's fully present -- when the texture and objects of conversation return -- it's often a matter of facts and figures. She is interested in verifiable information, reports, summaries, things that she can use to solve questions she has, or things that fill in details she hadn't known. Other than that she's skeptical of friends and their motives and uses, and in general she keeps away from people in different ways, sometimes by simply cutting them off.
I'm trying, in the compass of a few paragraphs, to sketch a picture of Brooke-Rose the author, as well as her narrators: like her other novels, "Life, End of" is dry because it is skeptical of human contact; scientific because it fears everything inexact, including emotions; and cold or unpersuaded when it comes to the body. She thrives on theories, texts, references, links, lists, catalogs, inquiries, problems and solutions, puzzles. She loves dissecting, listing, analyzing, diagramming, parsing. (This is especially clear in "Thru," which revels in, and supposedly critiques, some French poststructuralist theory.) That personality drives her work, and gives it both its power and its obstinate love of fragmentation.
Nathan "N.R." Gaddis's review on Goodreads has the following lines, riffing on Brooke-Rose's repeated use of "T.F.," meaning True Friend, and "O.P.," which might mean Other People, or Opinionated People:
"Opinion People with their talking over and on top of. Who’s crotchety here? You probably know all the crotchety old men with all their crotchety old books, their last books. I know that Gaddis guy did one. Collapsing and decaying. It comes. Just let me tell you, 'Life, End of' has its rights but more it has its obligation upon you, True Friend, Reader. Sympathy, empathy? Gelassenheit, better."
Gelassenheit, usually translated "releasement," is one of the late Heidegger's invented words. It means, roughly, the capacity to let people and things exist in their mode of being. Personally, I don't find much of Heidegger's nearly mystical, abstract acceptance in 'Life, End of': I find anger and dissatisfaction, tempered by physical and mental inability. There is, often, a lack of both sympathy and empathy, but it's because the narrator's at the end of her tether, not because she finds a way to accept what is. show less
This is Brooke-Rose's last book. Reviewers routinely remark on the differences between it and her earlier, more experimental novels. What matters, I think, is what it reveals about the psychology of the narrators in the other books: their forms of attention and their preferred subjects. Those traits are hers aside from her concerns with linguistics or the postmodern novel (as in "Thru"), and also aside from the chosen subjects and narratives show more of those earlier books.
Brooke-Rose's narrator (at first implicitly, later more carelessly and openly, the author herself) is full of the concerns that can be found in other books written during the authors' last years. She complains, as Gaddis, Howard Brodkey, and many others have, about the specifics of her medical condition, her burning feet, her fluctuating blood pressure, her strategies for keeping her balance. Not all of this is specific to this book: she has often had an intense preoccupation with the observable and describable quirks of the body and its appearances. The confusing double reflection that sometimes appears in a car's rear-view mirror, which recurs throughout the novel "Thru," is an example: it's a minute, exacting physical description of a particular part of the body (eyes and eyebrows).
This sort of attention seems empirically exacting, and I think she wants it taken that way; but it is better described as compulsively machinic: it's closer to an autistic presentation than a realist novelist's delight in detail. She thinks of the body as a sort of machine, susceptible to exacting perspectival and formal description: our bodies are humorous, quirky things, comprised of detachable parts and pieces, each of which needs to be put into precise prose. There is little, in Brooke-Rose, of the body's gestalt, of the body's motion or its elegance: it's a construction of pieces, an ultimately unpleasant, tenuously constructed machine.
The narrator (author) like to report on conversations and encounters from a certain distance, as if the author and narrator wasn't fully present. When she's fully present -- when the texture and objects of conversation return -- it's often a matter of facts and figures. She is interested in verifiable information, reports, summaries, things that she can use to solve questions she has, or things that fill in details she hadn't known. Other than that she's skeptical of friends and their motives and uses, and in general she keeps away from people in different ways, sometimes by simply cutting them off.
I'm trying, in the compass of a few paragraphs, to sketch a picture of Brooke-Rose the author, as well as her narrators: like her other novels, "Life, End of" is dry because it is skeptical of human contact; scientific because it fears everything inexact, including emotions; and cold or unpersuaded when it comes to the body. She thrives on theories, texts, references, links, lists, catalogs, inquiries, problems and solutions, puzzles. She loves dissecting, listing, analyzing, diagramming, parsing. (This is especially clear in "Thru," which revels in, and supposedly critiques, some French poststructuralist theory.) That personality drives her work, and gives it both its power and its obstinate love of fragmentation.
Nathan "N.R." Gaddis's review on Goodreads has the following lines, riffing on Brooke-Rose's repeated use of "T.F.," meaning True Friend, and "O.P.," which might mean Other People, or Opinionated People:
"Opinion People with their talking over and on top of. Who’s crotchety here? You probably know all the crotchety old men with all their crotchety old books, their last books. I know that Gaddis guy did one. Collapsing and decaying. It comes. Just let me tell you, 'Life, End of' has its rights but more it has its obligation upon you, True Friend, Reader. Sympathy, empathy? Gelassenheit, better."
Gelassenheit, usually translated "releasement," is one of the late Heidegger's invented words. It means, roughly, the capacity to let people and things exist in their mode of being. Personally, I don't find much of Heidegger's nearly mystical, abstract acceptance in 'Life, End of': I find anger and dissatisfaction, tempered by physical and mental inability. There is, often, a lack of both sympathy and empathy, but it's because the narrator's at the end of her tether, not because she finds a way to accept what is. show less
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
"Does [anyone] want my miserable corpuscles?" — Christine Brooke-RoseScientific Anti-Realism?
The language of science is always in danger — in time — of becoming the language of science fiction. Fixation on Drosophila, the waxen eyelid, and the appearance of organ section on gross pathology are remnants of an antiquated nosology without clinical significance. Discussing a case of Acute Myeloid Leukemia, what CBR presents as engaging-with-the-facts-of-the-matter is, in fact, a show more metastasis of useless/excess writing (The "Cell" becomes, by a similar process, the "Corpuscle" of bad 1960's science fiction.) When we are writing that organs are, "packed with myeloid cells, mainly polymorphonuclears and immature cells such as myeloblasts, promyelocytes, myelocytes and metamyelocytes," (64) (this phrase appears three times with minor variations) we are covertly science language metastasized into techno-babble. (It's sufficient merely to be "packed with myeloblasts," everything else is excess.) In the essay Illusions in Anti-Realism (1991), CBR considers, and later rejects, the term "anti-realism" as a descriptor of what we continue to call "post-modern" writing (thinking, Ishmael Reed, Doctorow, Coover, Pynchon). Such a phrase might be put to better use describing works such at this, for which it's infinitely more important that we grasp the author's references to Ibsen (Master Builder) than to the "reality" of the so-called de-centered disease process. show less
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- 29
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- 7
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- 712
- Popularity
- #35,610
- Rating
- 3.6
- Reviews
- 22
- ISBNs
- 47
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