A Non-Euclidean Novel: Christine Brooke-Rose’s Such and the Space-Age Sixties

Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel Such (1966) derives techniques from the nouveau roman, and combines them with theories of physics to produce an experimental text in line with contemporary scientific understanding. The term “experimental” used to describe the text is significant, considering the British post-war technocratic context. Brooke-Rose herself theorizes the nouveau roman in scientific terms when introducing it to her British audience. She combines the image of the spiral drawn from astrophysics and DNA with continental theories of subjectivity as her central structural metaphor for the interaction of individual consciousness and society. Her phantasmagorical imagery represents an attempt to subjectivize contemporary empirical understanding of physics and to make of it a heroic narrative journey.