Techniques for Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose (review)

Karen R. Lawrence’s study of the experimental novelist and literary theorist Christine Brooke-Rose argues for a position that has become unpopular in modernist studies: that aesthetic experimentation can function as political critique. Still, Lawrence makes a compelling case that Brooke-Rose, a writer who “has continued the radical evolution of narrative in modernism’s wake,” uses narrative techniques to break decisively with nineteenth-century realism (p. 190). New modes of telling stories are necessary precisely because narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are stories of heightened loss and limitation; Lawrence writes, “Every one of Brooke-Rose’s fictions is a rehearsal for living under the constraints of a new world, one that is as much a matter of shrinking possibilities as it is of a renewed expansion” (p. 5). At the same time, Brooke-Rose’s vision, while responsive to the pain such losses and limitations entail, is neither bleak nor melancholy; rather, “her fiction draws creative vitality and moral inspiration out of the limitations it evokes” (p. 5). In particular, Brooke-Rose makes extensive use of the lipogram, a technical term that literally means “missing a letter,” but which Brooke-Rose expands into a more generalized mode of narrative omission. In Between (1968), for example, Brooke-Rose omits the verb “to be” as a means of registering the narrator’s disoriented sense of personal identity. Similarly, Brooke-Rose omits the verb “to have” from Next (1993) in order to embody at a narrative level the material deprivation of London’s homeless. These narrative omissions, Lawrence argues, register absences as spectral traces: “How absence signifies, technically, ontologically, emotionally is a question Brooke-Rose will raise throughout her oeuvre in different genres and with different techniques of omission” (p. 22). Absence comes to mark cultural loss, specifically the loss involved in what Brooke-Rose views as the “unreal” post-traumatic reality of displacement and abjection associated with World War II in Between, nuclear apocalypse in Out (1964), scientific “post-humanism” in Such (1966), and information technology in the Intercom Quartet: Amalgamemnon (1984), Xorander (1986), Verbivore (1990), and Textermination (1991). Indeed, in a world increasingly constructed through and by “virtual reality,” the human body itself functions as spectral. Brooke-Rose’s work traces this “corpus crysis,” a crisis that she contends forces human beings to confront the possibility of annihilation “of mankind and all his works, his planet and perhaps more. . . . These essential differences [between our century and others] . . . are deeply linked to the sense we have that the real has become unreal.”¹

Lawrence opens her examination of Brooke-Rose’s fiction with a reading of “The Foot” (1970), which functions as an exemplary allegory of narrative spectrality. The narrator is a phantom limb who can maintain his ghostly life only through his hold on the young woman from whom he has been severed; she, in turn, eventually challenges his “phantom authority” by using writing as her prosthesis, “extending the life and limits of the body. . . . the discipline of language counteracts loss” (p. 11). Lawrence then moves to two novels that feature “dead white males,” Out and Such. The first is a dystopic fiction that imagines a radical reversal of color relations and that “links social critique to narrative experiment” (p. 32). The second maps psychic life and human relationships with the language of astrophysics and stages the death of the white male protagonist as simultaneously the death of narrative (pp. 49, 53). Character hence becomes a “verbal fetish disguising the lack beneath” (p. 54).

Dead white males give way to fictions that feature female consciousness, a shift in focus that Lawrence claims energizes Brooke-Rose’s work. In Between, the protagonist is a French-German translator constantly in transit, someone who crosses linguistic and geographical borders, thereby undermining the binary opposition between “home” and foreign land and giving voice to “dislocation, invisibility, and redundancy” (p. 60). Brooke-Rose...