The Reader’s Share: Christine Brooke-Rose and the Persistence of Objects

PART I: ANOTHER TURN

Christine brooke-rose’s 1964 novel Out begins with two winter flies lying motionless on the knee of its protagonist who wonders what framing the flies in a microscope might reveal: “A microscope might perhaps reveal animal ecstasy in its innumerable eyes, but only to the human mind behind the microscope.”¹ That revelation, he immediately thinks, would be his alone, although it would come at a cost: it would “interrupt the flies.”² Almost immediately, this scene of observation is itself interrupted when someone, likely his wife, disturbs him and brandishes a flyswatter—“the winter flies you have to kill,” he thinks.³ While all of this is happening, the flies remain undisturbed by both the “pale policing [blue] eye” and the “bright red plastic” flyswatter hovering above them.⁴ The narrator does not kill the flies, however. He does not even interrupt them. Instead, he simply watches: “The Winter Flies lie quite still, dead to their present framing in a circle of dark red plastic, dead to the removal of the red plastic frame around the light of awareness on them.”⁵ When the scene is repeated a few pages later the protagonist is substituted in the frame for the fly, but instead of being the object framed in red, he is the object who gazes out from the red frame. “The kitchen door is framed by the bedroom door. At the end of the short dark passage, almost cubic in its brevity, the kitchen through the open door seems luminous, apparently framed in red.”⁶ Just as the flyswatter frames the flies under the policing eye of the narrator, the narrator, framed by the doors (which frame each other), observes the “blue and pale” expanse of the winter sky, its description echoing the blue eye.⁷ In these first few pages, then, a series of recurring images—of the frame and of the “policing” eye—repeat and connect the narrator to the fly.

The effect of this substitution is a structural shift where the observer becomes the observed. In that shift, the phenomenological and epistemological questions raised by the narrator—what “a microscope might perhaps reveal” and to whose mind—likewise become the questions of those who observe him. They become, in effect, the questions of the reader, who has been watching the scene unfold. More specifically, when the relationship between the observer and the observation is described in uncertain terms about what the microscope “might perhaps reveal” and about how that observation would “interrupt” the thing being observed, the text instantiates a particular interpretive problem about what is revealed to the “human mind” in the act of observation—that is, in the act of reading. Through this and a series of other substitutions and dislocations, Out dilates this scene of copulating flies into a novel that poses a series of related questions about the human mind and knowledge, or systems of meaning, and following from this, the relationship between the reader’s experience of the text and its status as an object—what Brooke-Rose elsewhere calls the “textuality of the text.”

Publishing widely between 1957 and 2002, Brooke-Rose was not only a novelist, but she was also a prolific literary critic and theorist. Where Brooke-Rose the novelist appears to suggest the tension between the ontology of objects and their enclosure within a system of meaning, and consequently on reading as a kind of transgression on the text’s ontological independence, Brooke-Rose the literary theorist was committed precisely to preserving that objectivity. In a widely read article published in 1976, “The Squirm of the True: An Essay in Non-Methodology,” she set out to “free” Henry James’s famously ambiguous The Turn of the Screw from its “many layers of misreadings,” so that it is possible “once again to look at it as a text.”⁸ Above all, she wants to restore “a respect for the textuality of the text” and to move away from the natural-versus- supernatural debates that had dominated scholarship on James...