interview with christine brooke-rose

An Interview with Christine Brooke-RoseAuthor(s): David Hayman, Keith Cohen, Christine Brooke-RoseSource: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Winter, 1976), pp. 1-23Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207554Accessed: 29/10/2010 08:15

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AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE* AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE* AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE* AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE* AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE* AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE* AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE*

Conducted by David Hayman and Keith Cohen

Christine Brooke-Rose is a British novelist who lives and works in Paris. Her writing career, the early part of which includes works she no longer wishes to stand by, took a sharp turn toward experi- mentation with the publication of Out in 1964 by the Michael Joseph press of London. Since then, with Such (1966) and Between (1968), her novels have continued to press the con- ventions of fiction and of language to their limits.

Bilingual from early childhood, Ms. Brooke-Rose demonstrates a keen sensitivity to both the peculiar nuances of the English language and the often perversely flattening effect of its cliches and jargons. Her wit is nowhere more evident than in dialogue, perhaps most spectacularly in Such, when a man of cosmic proportions who is undergoing an interstellar operation converses with a "girl-spy" out to help him. One is tempted to say that all of Ms. Brooke-Rose's characters, like those of Henry James, speak alike-but then, the goal in the creation of such odd beings is certainly not typicality or verisimilitude but rather a choice and somewhat bitter melange of high irony and comic cunning.

Her special gift is the ability to pinpoint and explore those aspects of narrative language that are generally taken for granted by other novelists. Her fictions abound, for example, with the dubious assertiveness of negative statements, as when, in Between,

*The interview was conducted on November 17, 1974, at Madison, Wisconsin. Questions asked by David Hayman will be indicated as Q. and those

by Keith Cohen as Q.* The Spring issue of Tri-Quarterly will contain a section edited by David Hayman on writers "In the Wake of the Wake," which will include an extract from Christine Brooke-Rose's latest novel, Thru, as well as an interview with the French novelist Maurice Roche.





































CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE I XVII, CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE I XVII, CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE I XVII, CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE I XVII, CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE I XVII, CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE I XVII, CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE I XVII,

"No one comes offering anything not ordered." Positive assertion is, in fact, a rarity in this work. For every proposition, there exists an alternate possibility. A sort of multiple-choice structure seems to lie not far below the surface, so that "at any minute now some bright or elderly sour no young and buxom chambermaid in black and white. ... Or a smooth floor-steward in white" will place something beside "the green or perhaps blue washbasin...."

The phantasmagoric opening of Between, like a jet age version of the Proustian bedroom and place-name catalogues, seems built around a series of simple substitution exercises, like those one encounters in the audiovisual method of language-learning. Somewhat in the manner of Robbe-Grillet's shifting perspectives and deceptive dissolves, a curtain over an oval airline window acts as pivot in the change of scenery by becoming a hotel room curtain; a bathroom door doubles for both airplane and hotel scenes.

Ms. Brooke-Rose's fascination for the odd surprises that language can hold is not, of course, an accident. Though insisting that she's only an "amateur," she is thoroughly immersed in both structural and generative linguistics, the theories of which she implements in her courses at the Universite de Paris VIII, Vincennes. Ms. Brooke-Rose, one of the few foreign professors to have received tenure in the tightly knit French university system, stands out in the Anglo-American Department at Vincennes for the rigor with which she deals with modern American fiction.

What is extraordinary about Christine Brooke-Rose in this regard is that she was interested in linguistics long before it lit up the Anglo-American literary scene and even before it became fashionable in France. In 1958 she published A Grammar of Metaphor (London: Secker and Warburg), which has since become a widely known source book and standard reference work, pro- viding a modern view of traditional rhetoric. More recently, she has turned to Ezra Pound, for whose poetry she has a long-standing passion. A ZBC of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), commissioned as an introductory guide for students, turns out to be a most exhilarating, funny, relevant, and intelligent rediscovery of the Cantos in a manner that eschews the systematic "Life-and- Works" approach. It provides instead a nonchronological, nonthematic reading of the poetry and centers around basic theoretical problems that are at once peculiar to this poetry in their specific form and eminently applicable to modern poetry in general.

























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Educated at Oxford, one time book-reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, and now annual summer guest at the Pound castle in Italy, Christine Brooke-Rose is a woman of rare experience, penetrating intelligence, and disarming frankness. It should not be surprising that the most outstanding characteristic of her work is its mixture of discourses: scientific, legal, medical jargons, advertising lingo, conferencese, English, French, German, Spanish, Romanian, Russian, etc.-all these have their appointed yet oddly nondelimited place in her novels. Nor should it be surprising that her latest work, Thru, published this year by Hamish Hamilton, goes further into idiolect by integrating the writings of French theoreticians like Barthes, Greimas, and Kristeva into the very texture of the novel. What is surprising is that her novels have yet to find an American publisher. Thru, a text that, as she explains, progressively destroys itself as it is read, may well spark a long-deserved recognition, within all the English-speaking world, of Christine Brooke-Rose's unique and rewarding talent.

Q. It seems to me that every one of your books begins with a metaphor and that essentially what you are doing is working the metaphor out into a kind of poetic vision, an anti-narrative vision. Does it mean anything to you, that kind of a statement?

A. I'm interested that it strikes you this way. I worked on that, as you know, in A Grammar of Metaphor, and I saw that in fact language is capable of far more subtle ways of metaphoric expression than the stock grammatical ways. You can do a lot with subliminal structures and repetition, the way Pound does. You use the same phrase in a new context and embedded in that new context it acquires a completely different meaning. What I like doing, what interests me particularly, is the fusion of different discourses.

Q. By which you mean?

A. In Out for instance, because it reverses the color problem, there is a great deal of chemical imagery; not only the chemistry of color, but the chemistry of the human body, and sickness comes into it. The whites are sick, useless, unreliable. They're dying of this mysterious radiation disease. But I don't just use chemistry simply as such; it becomes metaphoric in some way. And then in Such, I did the same with astrophysics. So of course it's part of the theme, if one can talk about a theme, but in addition I use scientific laws literally. Let's take a very simple one,

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say, weight consists of the attraction between two bodies. If you transfer that into a sexual context it becomes a metaphor. Though you are in fact using it literally, you see. And then I go on with that in Thru, where the science in question becomes linguistics. So the whole thing is much more self-reflexive, in that I will take a law of linguistics and use it in exactly the same way as I use a law of astrophysics in Such. But there is a whole game of mirrors going on in Thru. The first sentence is "Through the driving mirror," with this idea of looking forward but actually looking back....

Q. This could be even more exciting actually than the earlier images because you are in a sense working not only with two systems, two distinct codes, but with two codes that interrelate.

A. Yes, it's what Jakobson calls the metalinguistic function, inter- playing here with the message, or poetic function, as well as with the phatic function. But the referential function is really reduced to zero except when on purpose I create something realistic and then destroy it. It's a text that is really constructing itself and then destroying itself as it goes along. Well, a lot of people are writing fiction about the writing of fiction, but this is not about the writing of fiction (except that it's about the construction of a text, if you like), it's about the fictionality of fiction: the fact that these characters are just letters on a page. So I have two main characters. It's never clear who speaks, you know, Barthes's great question "qui parle," and I play a lot with that. It's never clear if she is inventing him or he is inventing her or she is inventing him inventing her. It could go on forever like the mirrors. But they don't exist. In fact their names are anagrams of one another. And everything is constantly destroyed; so whenever I slide into a realistic scene, say a love scene or something like that, something happens later to destroy it, to show that these are just words on a page.

Q. Now this is very different from what Robbe-Grillet is doing in his latest fiction. In fact what he is doing is destroying content, while here you're destroying the very texture of linguistic experience, the allusive texture, in a sense.

A. Yes, all right, I see what you mean. The allusive texture, that's a good phrase, but I'm not destroying the text by destroying what's just happened. I'm creating a new text.

Q. You're playing with the habits of your reader who is willing






































to accept any statement as being the preamble to another statement of the same sort.

A. Yes, I'm playing with the reader's habit of trusting the reliable narrator; in fact everything is unreliable in this text. At one point it seems that students in a class of creative writing are writing this text, and then other students come in and invade the class and all that is destroyed. So I have all sorts of ways of destroying what I have just created, and the whole thing disintegrates in the end, with everybody mentioned in the novel, or merely alluded to-all these people, the characters, however minor in the novel, just maybe a first name or an allusion to Wallace Stevens or Derrida or the Princesse de Cleves or Homer, or anyone. They are all listed in alphabetical order and given (by the students) degrees of presence-a very facile pun on the word "degree." You see what I mean by untranslatable, this wouldn't go into French, you couldn't have licence; one would have to do something else with it. Genette talks about the degrees of presence of the narrator. So all these people are awarded degrees of presence; they get gamma minuses and beta pluses and so on which are totally arbitrary, though I couldn't very well give someone like Derrida a delta minus. Every- thing is really destroyed in the end. The text just disintegrates.

Originally it was called Thru because I wanted to go on with what I was doing in Out, Such and Between. As it went along I realized it was very different, and I wanted to mark this difference so I called it Texttermination, which I loved. I thought it was a wonderful title. It expressed exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately after I handed it in, my publisher wrote to me and said, "Do you know that William Burroughs has brought out," or "is bringing out," I forget, "a novel called Textterminator."' So I couldn't use that and I went back to Thru and in fact it works quite well, because to go back to your point about the metaphor, it's true that my titles are metaphorical, in that sense, although they're prepositions, or just small link words. There is this idea in Between of a simultaneous translator being between languages, between ideas, between cities. She's never in one place, going from congress to congress and so on. And the idea of Thru is also polysemic, as the French would say. There are a lot of ideas in the "through": of course "through the mirror," and "I'm through," or "the novel is through." You can take it in all sorts of senses, which apply to the text, so it still works. I would rather have called it Text-

lAn error since Burroughs' book is called Exterminator.

























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termination, but in the end I am quite happy with Thru. It keeps the series of monosyllabic titles.

Q.* I wanted to go back to a couple of things you've said. First of all, the idea that in Thru you're now showing the generation and then the destruction of the text. Isn't there a sense in which already in Between you're doing a kind of self-generating text? And I would think of it more in terms of metonymy than in terms of metaphor. That is, you use a phrase and embed it in a context, and then the phrase returns and is only meaningful as already read in that context. So that you have a series of organ stops in a sense, which have these chords connected with them but you only use the one note. Is that the same thing you're doing in Thru, or is it a special thing in Between?

A. No, I think I do it here too. It's rather difficult to answer such a specific question, because I haven't seen the manuscript now for over a year. It's been with the publisher so long because of printing problems. So I don't remember that kind of thing, but I'm not all that happy about this fashionable distinction between metonymy and metaphor. I know that Jakobson started it, the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic. But I find that in effect even in Jakobson, what Jakobson does is to show what he calls the subliminal structures, which are metaphoric. If you have anything that is a repetition, a rhyme or a parallel structure, this of course is metonymic, and of course it's syntagmatic, but it can create a metaphor, which is not immediately visible as you read it.

Curiously enough this was Riffaterre's attack on Jakobson, saying that Jakobson was seeing structures in these poems he analyzes, which are simply not visible. That he's seeing a lot of significance in parallel grammatical structures, for instance, whereas Riffaterre insists that there are certain structures that are non- significant in a poem, and moreover not part of the poetic function if the reader just can't see them. I've countered Riffaterre in an essay on Jakobson, trying to apply it to Pound's "Usura Canto" where I take up this whole question. I show that, first of all, Jakobson's whole point is that these structures are subliminal, and that if you're going to start arguing about what does the reader see or who is allowed to see what, there is no end to it. In that case Riffaterre's own type of analysis is ruled out of court, since he sees a lot of things that other people haven't seen before. The stand is illogical.

Second, I quote Barthes who actually posed that very
































question in Communications 11, on "Le vraisemblable" where he takes description, traditional description: "Is it significant, or is it just there for the effect of the real?" He attacks the traditional idea that there is nonsignificance in the text. He doesn't really answer it there, but in S/Z, he does. He says, "Tout signifie," everything signifies. Therefore-sorry, this is a long way around to answer your question-I don't really like this metonymy/metaphor distinction, because I think that metonymy is itself a metaphor. You can see that in Aristotle, the examples he gives. His distinction is illogical, as I show in my book on metaphor. Anything in fact is a metaphor, any replacement is a metaphor, any way of looking at something on a different level is metaphoric. Maybe that is a rather wide use of the term metaphor.

Q. Well you have the example of the sign on the Greek truck, to back you up; it is moving from thing to thing, or place to place.

A. Yes, precisely. When you see a Greek truck with the word "metaphor," which of course means transport, and it strikes you in one way, this, too, is the fusion of discourses. This is why I'm obliged to use different languages-this is what I do in Between. You see a word like lecheria in Spanish-I think that does actually come in Between-it means "milkshop" in Spanish, but of course you read it in English as "lechery." And Pound was onto this ages ago, saying it can't be all in one language. This is why he puts these languages into the Cantos because something would come off in Italian, and not come off in English. He actually plays on this sometimes.

Q.* I also wanted to ask a question about mixture of discourses, because in Between I had the sense that the verisimilitude of this mixture of discourses is accounted for by the consciousness of the heroine. And that in a sense, because she is a simultaneous translator, you get this color of advertising, a color of philosophy, a color of modern science, a color of conferences-because that's her job. Is that job deceptive, really? Is it more the mixture of discourses that's at the root of the generation of the text?

A. I think probably in Between it's all filtered through one justifying consciousness, but in Thru I really tried to get away from that. There is no consciousness that the reader is aware of. There is no narrator except in the sense that someone is writing the text, me, the implied author, or call it who you will. But I































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shift the whole time. It's never clear what consciousness this is going through. At one point there is a conversation between Jacques le Fataliste and his master, and it seems that it is the master who is writing this novel. And the whole thing just goes haywire all the time, so that there is no consciousness that these various discourses are being filtered through.

Q. Now, what is the reader doing in this kind of a context? What is his role? Robbe-Grillet talks about the reader having to make the text. You seem to be doing something very similar in obliging the reader to create shapes.

A. I think that now this is accepted; that is, since the nouveau roman, the reader cannot just be passive-he has to rewrite the text as part of his reading or as the French call it, lecture/ecriture. I don't think I'm doing anything new there. I want the reader to participate, which does mean of course that I'm not writing what Barthes calls the "readable text," as opposed to the "writable text." Or I think now that S/Z has come out in English they've translated that "readerly" and "writerly." And in fact the word "readable" has almost acquired a pejorative sense in English. It's readable, i.e., it's bad. It is this idea of never allowing the stock response to materialize in fact. The moment the reader feels secure, you just make him think again. And this is what reading is, surely.

Q. Now in traditional writing, against which, of course, all this is a rebellion, the reader is sure. He's cued in. He knows his decorum; he follows that decorum. There's delight in seeing things fulfilled. Unless it's a farcical context in which the delight is in seeing things broken. Now, you're not writing farce. You're writing occasionally humorously, but you are not writing farcically.

A. What do you mean occasionally?

Q. Well, frequently.

A. Always.

Q. Okay. Good. I didn't want to push you there.

A. One thing I have against the French school is, on the whole-I don't want to mention any names-but on the whole there is very little humor.







A. Always.









A. Always.









A. Always.









A. Always.









A. Always.









A. Always.




Q. Shall we mention names? Q. Shall we mention names? Q. Shall we mention names? Q. Shall we mention names? Q. Shall we mention names? Q. Shall we mention names? Q. Shall we mention names?

A. No. I can't get by without humor. I mean the whole idea of transgression. Let's put it this way: to mention Barthes again, any action will lead to an expectation; there is no departure without an arrival, in very simple terms. Any transgression of that is what he calls a "scandal." Now, I'm trying to do this the whole time, almost within a sentence. In Between, I have sentences which, say, will go on syntactically in a correct manner, but by the end of the sentence you are elsewhere in place or time. Now this is not the correct "proairetique," as Barthes calls his code of action: the action leading to another action. And of course in very minor ways it's transgressed all the time. You cannot describe every action, as he points out. "The lady laughs." Well, somewhere she has to stop laughing, but the author is going to skip that, he's not going to say every end of every action. So this is, in fairly easy terms, this idea of the safety, the security of the reader, what he expects. Every narrator arouses an expectation. So you can't destroy that altogether, otherwise there is no narrative. But in fact there is very little narrative in present-day novels-you know, the jettisoning of plot, and so on, but you still arouse an expectation. It may be a poetic expectation.

Q.* The arousing of this kind of expectation is essentially the mechanism of humor according to Freud, humor based on an expectation which is not fulfilled, and the releasing of it is in laughter. And I think it's interesting that Barthes calls it scandal, which essentially throws it into a code of law. We Anglo-Saxons prefer to think of it in Freudian terms as a tension which is created in the mind, and which must be economically dealt with through laughter. And it seems to me that is very much what you're doing. That kind of calling out for, arousing, an expectation and the reaction being laughter.

A. Yes, you see, in a way, it all goes back, in the end, to the fundamental disbelief in words, which we all suffer from with propaganda, publicity, and so on. And words very often simply make me laugh. You have just mentioned "we Anglo-Saxons." I can't hear that word without thinking of what the French go on about: les francophones-and I always say les anglo-saxophones- because whatever the word is, I just want to play with it and create something new.



















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Q.* And yet you never read Joyce till 1969.

A. I know, this is incredible. I resisted Joyce for years, I thought he was a sacred cow. Perhaps I was frightened, perhaps I just didn't want to be influenced by him. My great influences-if we can talk of influences, because one absorbs so much-but let's say the big influences for me have been Pound and Beckett.

Q. Could you tell us more about that? How is Pound an influence on you? How would you describe the way he helped shape your career as a writer?

A. It's very difficult because it's so indirect. I mean when I was writing a lot about Pound, mostly anonymously for the Times Literary Supplement, I wasn't known as a Poundian. You see I'm very frightened of cults. I didn't want to join the Pound cult and I expect that was my attitude toward Joyce too. So, I remained anonymous for a long time, but eventually I did write this book on Pound. And I disconnected the two things. There were my novels and there was my criticism. And in fact I am even now split down the middle, teaching and criticism on the one hand, and writing on the other. But of course everything one does is an influence and I think perhaps what excited me most about Pound was not only this idea of craftsmanship, but that he worked a whole lifetime to change the language. As he says, not only a language to use, but a language to think in. And it took him a long time. I've been a slow developer too, so this is partly what interests me in Pound-that it took him so long in a way to reach what he did in the Cantos. But there are a lot of things, like this technique of repetition and echoes that I mentioned, that must have influenced me without my realizing it. Things coming back in a different context with little additions and of course this perfection in the use of languages, this passionate concern with language.

It may be perhaps an old-fashioned idea, that the poets are the preservers of language. I don't know who is going to preserve language now. It's not the poets, because certainly all around us language is just falling to pieces. I don't think the poet has this power anymore, but this passionate concern with language, I've always had it. I studied philology. I'm passionately involved in linguistics now. Language is my material, just as color is the artist's material.

Q. That's an important statement, actually, at least from my






































point of view. So much of our criticism, until very recently, has insisted upon precisely what the material is not, the signified. Here you're doing a double thing, you're thinking like a critic and in a sense writing out of that thought.

A. Yes, probably Thru is the first book where the two streams come together, where the split personality-me as a writer, and me as a critic and someone interested in linguistic analysis and so on-do come together. But, since my attitude is also a humorous one, in the novel I turn it upside down. In a way I poke fun at it, though as a critic I take it seriously. You see the whole attitude is very ambiguous.

Q. But are both attitudes there?

A. Oh, yes.

Q. So you have the serious and the comic interacting.

A. This is, you see, what I like about both Pound and Beckett so much, this high seriousness and humor in both; and I think this is English and not French. The French have always had this very long traditional division: tragedy/comedy-they used to frown on Shake- speare-and you couldn't possibly mix the two. They're getting out of that now, but we have always had it, we've always mixed the two. I think it was Hemingway who said "a solemn writer is always a bloody owl" or something. I couldn't really ever take my writing seriously in that sense. I mean it is fun to me, as well as being serious. I don't feel that I have a tremendous message and that I'm going to change the world through my writing.

Q. Then perhaps, like Lewis Carroll, you're inviting the reader to play the game. Is Lewis Carroll someone who interests you by the way?

A. Yes, very much. With the whole mirror image, of course. By now, with Lacan, it's a sort of banality. In fact, the real theme in Thru is castration, but I don't suppose anyone would see that. Well, they might because sometimes it is made clear. But if you like, it is the whole idea of language as castration. The moment we utter a sentence, we're leaving out a lot. I mean this idea-I don't know how to translate le corps morcele-but this idea that we are just taking bits and pieces of reality, which is what language does automatically. We're doing a decoupage of reality and all the more




A. Oh, yes.








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so when we write a novel or a poem or anything else. The very act of using language is a castration.

Q. In a sense you are creating an event which is a mimesis of the castration which is a non-event because it is verbal.

A. Yes, perhaps you could put it that way. Let's say a mimesis of mimesis. I don't know. I don't want to get on to the question of mimesis because then we'll get on to reality.

Q. Because you aren't. You have rejected the whole referential aspect of the novel.

A. Well, I'm not alone in doing that.

Q.* I'm content with sticking with something you've said earlier about language breaking up or breaking down all around us. Has the fragmented discontinuous universe that Pound presents been influential on you?

A. Oh, certainly. But you see what also interests me about Pound is the contradiction: the fragmentariness and this attempt to make everything cohere through juxtaposition. And he creates metaphors, well that's the ideogram as well, but he creates metaphors by juxtaposing say two separate sentences, one of which might have occurred before. So in any case you get it in a new context, but juxtaposed to that sentence it creates a link, and this has influenced me an enormous amount-what you can do with juxtaposition-and I do that all the time in Thru. Suddenly a sentence will come back, and I just jam it down in the new context and it sparks, you see.

Q. * I understand then what you mean when you say that its origin is metonymic, but in the new context it's a metaphor.

Q. We spoke earlier of Joyce. You obviously could not have been influenced by him, yet there is a curious sense in which you are doing things which Joyce might have done or would have approved of doing. Like, for example, the mixing of languages the way you do, but of course Pound does that too. Sollers is excited because Joyce is mixing languages, creating a kind of international idiom, refusing boundaries, borders. And in a sense you're testifying to the same, well, the polyglot's lust, perhaps, for the perfect expression in many languages, or the perfect language for the many expressions.
























































A. Well, nothing is new under the sun, and of course, I think it was Butor who said we are all influenced by Joyce, even if we've never read him. It wasn't till after I published Between in '68 that I got around to reading Joyce. I went to Helene Cixous' courses in Vincennes and got very excited and I read a lot about him, including your book. I can't say that has been a direct influence at all, but obviously I'm influenced, ideas float. You told me that you have written an article "In the Wake of the Wake," and I think it's true that after someone has done something to the language, poets or writers can no longer write in the old way. This is not a progressist view of literature. I'm against that idea.

Q. Darwinian....

A. Well, you know Auerbach does this in his book on mimesis. He takes passages from Homer right up to Virginia Woolf, and it's a fascinating book, but it is based on an idea that literature progresses and gets better and better. Well, of course that's absurd. That means we couldn't read the Chanson de Roland and we must read Virginia Woolf and that would be rather a pity. So obviously in a sense I was excited and also, let's say my vanity, that side of the author, was sad to find that Joyce had gone way beyond what I was trying to do in many ways, but you see one doesn't really think in these terms. The pleasure is so great. And when I started reading Finnegans Wake I could only just bow down in admiration. And had I read Finnegans Wake or tried to read it at twenty, I just would have made nothing out of it. But coming to him so much later, I really understood because I had been doing, not the same thing, but I had been working on the same problems. I don't think I'm doing the same thing as Joyce, and when I'm compared to Joyce, it always makes me annoyed because I don't feel it's relevant. But I suppose there is influence, however indirect. I wouldn't put him among my direct influences, because I just didn't read him till after I had written my last published novel.

Q. Had you read Mallarme?

A. Oh, yes, very early. I was very interested in Mallarme.

Q. Un coup de des?

A. Very much so. In fact one of my very first publications, which I am quite ashamed of, I think I was twenty, was written in a French review. I was still an undergraduate at Oxford, and I


Q. Darwinian....




Q. Un coup de des?



Q. Darwinian....




Q. Un coup de des?



Q. Darwinian....




Q. Un coup de des?



Q. Darwinian....




Q. Un coup de des?



Q. Darwinian....




Q. Un coup de des?



Q. Darwinian....




Q. Un coup de des?



wrote a very naive thing called "La syntaxe et le symbolisme dans la poesie de Hopkins," and compared what Hopkins was trying to do to language with Mallarme in Un coup de des. I'm sure if I read it today I would find it completely absurd, but I have from the start been interested in this obsession the poet has with language.

Q.* What about Beckett? You mentioned him as a direct influence, and he is still his own man and very different from Joyce. How would you categorize that influence?

A. It's a very different kind of influence, very different from that of Pound. With Pound it is almost a technical influence; with Beckett it is much more, let us say, an attitude-nihilistic, if you like, that is the word that has been stuck on Beckett-but in the end it is the same problem. They just don't seem to have anything in common and yet there is this obstinate humor in the face of despair, which is what I think one reviewer said about my books. And with this I was very pleased. I usually hate these labels and comparisons and so on. But there is this saving grace of humor and of course the flowing syntax, which is something I have tried to develop very much in my novels, unlike Pound, who tends to write in staccato sentences. I will do juxtapositions but within a very long sentence, you see, and then maybe have a short sentence juxtaposed, but I like Beckett's sheer flow. This kind of covering of the universe with a layer of language.

Q. Creating in a sense a universe with a layer of language, isn't he? It is a beautiful contradiction in Beckett that he denies the possibility of any stability and yet creates something so stable as a text.

A. Absolutely, and sometimes he plays with other languages too, though not very much. I don't know if you saw that at the back of Watt there are all the things that he didn't put into the novel and there is a very beautiful sentence where he quotes Goethe, "die Erde hat mich wieder," but he puts "die Merde hat mich wieder." This is the kind of thing I like.

Q. It sounds like Maurice Roche though, doesn't it? It is possible to say, "Oh well, there are echoes of the new novel in your work or your work parallels in certain respects the new novel," but from your description of Thru, I think mostly of someone like Roche, who is perhaps the only one of these people who really has a sense






































of humor and who really also is a polyglot; he is deeply engaged by language and by literary form, and perfectly aware of what he is doing and very careful, a real craftsman, the way he goes to the printer ....

A. Yes, it's interesting that you should mention him because although I was very obviously influenced by the nouveau roman when it came out, especially Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, I don't think they have influenced me really a lot. But when I discovered Maurice Roche and I met him in Paris, it was an eblouissement. And precisely what you don't get in these others, at least not so startlingly, is this linguistic humor and this attitude toward language as a material which is in itself not only pliable and touchable, if you like, graphic, but funny. All the typographic things he uses like signs from the Guide Michelin, and all the other things he does, which he has no difficulty publishing in France.

And you get that in life, you see, all the time. You see two objects next to each other or just something incongruous-say a sailor on a bicycle or something-this strikes me as funny. Or once when I was climbing a Pyrenee and I suddenly saw a Pekinese dog; well obviously some people had come up by car and there was this dog, but it just seemed out of place. And you get this all the time in life, events so concrete in that sense, that you get these weird juxtapositions. Or like when the Nixon pardon was announced on television and I happened to be watching it, and it said CBS special, you know, complete and free pardon, etc. and then, on the local station, "this program is presented to you by X, the deodorant that kills domestic odors." I just collapsed with laughter. I don't know whether the publicity people are aware of this power of language to do exactly the opposite from what it is supposed to do. I'm sure the ad was preprogrammed. Maybe the announcer thought it was funny, but these things happen, the coincidences in life. So that rather than doing what language is supposed to do, that bit of publicity, it does exactly the opposite. You know, one whiff and it's clean, and of course with the Nixon pardon this is exactly what happened.

Q. What was supposed to happen?

A. You see? The expectation again. Now this occurs all the time. In conversations. In dreams. In everything you do. This is the way I live, I live language like that. So that is what gets into my novels. All right, people will say, "How do you expect your reader to
































follow this?" But I'm surprised that readers find this difficult. They all live like this.

Q. Good. Go on. More about the reader. What is happening to your reader? He enters rather a curious kind of state.

A. My reader is what they call the implied reader. Or you, I don't know who threw out this phrase.

Q. It isn't my invention. It's something which of course has been in the air. This is the narrataire of Genette, the virtual reader.

A. I mean, it parallels Booth's implied author, and I think this is something that the critics just will have to get straight, that the implied author is not the author, and the implied reader, the encoded reader if you prefer, is not the individual reader. But on a purely practical level, writing is a very solitary occupation; you do not in fact think of the reader. I know this from long practice, even when I was in literary journalism. Whether I was writing a novel that was going to appear in a year's time, or whether I was writing an article for the Observer. There you are in your little room and you have no contact with anyone. You can tear up, scrub, find a reference book. In a way it's an artificial activity. It's not like talking to people. It's certainly not like teaching, where you are in contact with students and you know at once when you lose them. Teaching is more like being an actor, and this is why turning to teaching was so good for me. It got me out of my ivory tower, if you like. But I know when I'm writing I have no contact with whoever is going to read that book in a year's time. I don't think of that reader. The reader is someone imaginary in my head. Now admittedly, there are times when I have a particular person in mind. I think, oh, he's going to like that sentence or she's going to like this bit. So my implied reader may be a composite of certain friends, but it is not the reader out there who is going to read the book. I think the reader is me, as I write.

Q. That is what I was going to say. I had this discussion with Christopher Middleton, years ago, and I believe what I said to him was "Well, you have an audience. You may not be writing for someone, but you are hearing what you write and you may be writing for yourself. So essentially you are your own reader."

A. Yes, but this has been very much misunderstood, you see, as solipsism, and the writer turned in on himself and narcissism and












































so on. There is an element of narcissism in writing. In fact, it has been called intellectual masturbation. Okay, fine, I accept all that, but it's not as simple as that. It's not just solipsism, there is a reader out there. I suppose it's what Lacan calls l'autre, but maybe also l'Autre. It is a mirror thing. The whole thing about language is a mirror.

Q. But you are shaping. The text shapes a reader.

A. Yes, ideally yes. But it might be a reader, say in five years' time or in a century. I mean, I'm not talking about me now, I'm not talking about my posterity. You know as Oscar Wilde said, "Why should I do anything for posterity, posterity has never done anything for me." So, this isn't me thinking how great I am, but this reader is not a real person. He exists, but he is in my mind.

Q. Okay, but he is shaped by the text, isn't he? He is also in your text.

A. Absolutely. He has to be, if he is reading the text at all. He is bound to be in the text. Any text addresses someone, any message, as Charles C. Pierce said; the sign is addressed to someone and creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a barely developed sign. So any sign, whatever it is, is addressed to someone. So even our furniture, whatever language that we express ourselves through, clothes, or the highway code, or anything, is addressed to someone. The moment you put words on a page or utter a sentence, it's addressed to someone, even if you are talking to yourself. When I'm talking to myself, I say "tu," you know. I talk to myself in French now-that's the terrible thing-and I say, "Ah, qu'est-ce que tu es bete!" And sometimes it's je: "J'ai oublie ma clef," or something like that. So it hovers between tu and je and that is the same person. And I think that the reader is that, it's a je/tu.

Q. Which is beautiful as a French pun by the way. ["I kill."]

A. Oh, I didn't see that. That is beautiful. That's very nice. Thank you.

Q.* A phrase comes to mind that I collected from Between, which says that languages love each other behind their own facade. Can the languages of furniture and road signs and images as well as


















































linguistic or phonological languages somehow love each other as well?

A. That's a difficult question. Yes, I suppose so. If natural languages can-and that's my phrase, a metaphor after all-then by definition any other language can-in semiotic terms: all systems of communication, of which language is only one. The same will apply to all of them. I can imagine, I suppose, the binary languages of the computers making love to each other.

Q. It's a thought for the future.

Q.* Another label that might be thrust upon you, in comparison with Beckett, might have to do with not at all a humorous aspect in the world of despair, but sometimes the frightening experience that I have as a reader of being closed in, not having a way out, a claustrophobic experience as in the interior of an airplane.

A. Are you talking about my books or any book?

Q.* Well, certainly in Beckett and there is an element of that in yours.

A. Yes, I hadn't thought of that. In Between, yes, there are these hotel rooms and the planes, but there is also this constant way out. Into language let's say, all this language of conferences and congresses that just go on and nothing is done at all. People just talk and nobody does anything. Of course, it's a despair but it's also a freedom and after all man is a social animal and we do have to communicate. We can't just stay within our shells. I don't want to get on to this thing of noncommunication, because it's such a banality, but in the end this is the problem, isn't it? What Barthes calls "l'inoperable." But there is this claustrophobic element in Beckett, and yet this extraordinary feeling of space. In How It Is you see this man crawling in the mud. All right, he is sort of imprisoned there but there is tremendous space around him. And similarly, in these planes and so on, after all, the plane is flying and the earth is below and all this is described and there is both. If you like, there is a play between claustrophobia and agoraphobia.

Q.* Yes. What about the use of negation, negative declaration in literary discourse, which seems to me a very particular aspect of literary discourse as opposed to cinematic or any other visual discourse? I find this in Between often when no one comes into


















































the room, no one brings mineral water. Would you comment on that?

Q. Excuse me, is that negation or is that both?

A. Well, it is a negative statement, but it is still a statement.

Q. But it is a statement of someone being there and someone not being there at the same time.

A. Yes, again it is a question of expectation, which has been built up to before. So, the expectation is of someone coming in and no one coming in.

Q. So you have the act and you don't have it. You have the act and you erase it.

Q.* Giving and taking away at the same time.

Q. Yes, which is a constant, a poetic ploy, of course. You have it in all poetry.

A. In fact, now that you mention it, though I didn't realize that it came into Between, I see that I must have unconsciously wanted to pursue this in Thru because I'm finding every possible way that language has of creating something in language, say a character, which is just made up of the words on the page, and then destroying that also with words on the page of something else. You create another event which destroys the previous event. These are statements, it's not just categorically denying. Sometimes, of course, I will also categorically deny, but mostly I do this through action and through sliding into something else and through puns and metaphors and all the other ways that language has of destroying the expected. I don't think you are right in saying that the other arts can't do this, but they have to do it in a different way.

Q. Another code?

A. Well it has to be syntagmatic anyway you see, so that a film, which is syntagmatic, can still bring in an image which will at least partly contradict a previous one. Now painting cannot do this, except-and painters have long been trying to do this-by destroying the whole idea of representation. And painting is always way ahead of literature. But language you see is extraordinary in the sense that it has words for nonexistent things, such as "unicorn"










Q. Another code?











Q. Another code?











Q. Another code?











Q. Another code?











Q. Another code?











Q. Another code?



and so on. And philosophers have played around with this a lot, you know, it has been kicking around a long time.

But words are so strange, unlike color or images and maybe musical tones. They have a history. There is so much contained in a word. You can play with etymology. For instance, this division between form and content that the critics keep going on about, along with the linguists. It's a long, long dispute. But if you take any word describing a genre you will find that it reflects either the "what is being told" or the "how it is being told"; it is either the content or the form, and more often the form. Even the word fable: you'd think this reflects the content, something untrue. Actually it goes back to "fari," to speak. Epic, "epos" used to mean word. Take any word like that, you will always find that actually there are many, many more on the side of form. Poetry means making. Tragedy was originally the goat song, the goat sacrifice, the how, not the what. Then of course it slides into the what. Elegy on the contrary was a what-word, a dirge, but it slides into the how when you talk about the elegiac meter. It becomes a particular meter. But practically all genre-words: tale goes back to "talu," which is a number, the idea of exposing in detail, exposing in the French sense, you know what I mean, telling one detail after the other. You just take any word, even novel-roman means these tales are told in the romance language. Novel is the new, the what, and you get that reflected in say, newspaper which has both. There is the news and there is the paper, the material, and now we talk about a paper, "Have you read the paper today? The only other word that refers to the material itself is film, which is simply the "pellicule." It's the matter.

Q.* It's only in English that that confusion exists.

A. Yes, but cinema refers to the movement. It's the how. You take any word of genre and you always find this duality. You cannot split them.

Q. * Motion picture puts them together.

A. How?

Q.* You have the picture itself and the motion in it.

A. Oh, yes, but picture comes from "pingere," like pigment, the matter. In a text you do have a signified and signifier, I mean you can't get away from that. But to go back to negation, I think






A. How?








A. How?








A. How?








A. How?








A. How?








A. How?




language is particularly suited for this negating function. You're

right, it's probably much more difficult to do in the visual arts, and I would say perhaps almost impossible to do in music.

Q.* I think in the visual arts, it has only been done very recently-I'd say since Robbe-Grillet in the movies. But Lessing already talks about the negating function in poetry.

A. Yes, the only art that is really not syntagmatic is painting or sculpture. It is paradigmatic but static and you can see it all at once or you can see little bits at a time.

Q. What you do with a painting is see it this way-it's static but it becomes syntagmatic on the viewing.

A. Oh, I don't mean it's static as opposed to dynamic; what I meant is it is not one thing after another. You can look at it like that, but it is a whole, which you can also look at all at once. That's obvious. All the other arts are one thing after another, so that if you want to deny something that has gone before, you've got to do it after. And language is obviously particularly suited to that.

Q.* Although, if you say "the maid did not come into the room," you do have affirmation and denial at the same time, and it's simultaneous.

A. Yes, because you are stating "the maid" and you're stating "come" and you're stating "the room" and you're stating "did." In fact it's interesting that you should bring that up, because in the structural analysis I did of Pound's "Usura Canto," I discovered a fascinating play of negative and positive. There are two different types of negative and positive and I had to mark them in different ways in the analysis. One is the grammatical negative and grammatical positive, or non-negative if you like, and the other is the evaluative positive and negative, in other words, pejorative and non-pejorative, or approving. But he plays with these four things in such a way that very often the pejorative is expressed in positive terms in grammar and the approval is expressed in negative terms in grammar. For instance, that whole passage "Pietro Lombardo came not by Usura" and all these artists who came not by Usura. This is Pound approving. These are the historical exceptions, you see. And it's a block in the middle and it's the only one that does this, to mark the exceptions.


















































And then of course you get the approval expressed with the grammatical positive, and the disapproval expressed with the grammatical negative, "With Usura hath no man a house of good stone," but within this very complex game you also get differences in the positioning of the negative. "With Usura hath no man," it's man who is being denied. In other words, Usura: no man. Manhood is impossible with Usura. But elsewhere it will be the verb which is denied. "Wool comes not to market." It's the coming which is denied, and he plays with that all the time, where he puts his negative, whether it's the adjective, or the verb, or the subject, or the object which is being denied. It is apparently a static poem, repetitive and rhetorical, a sort of litany. But underneath it is absolutely dynamic, and this is what I was trying to say at the beginning about subliminal structures. This is apparently a non- metaphorical poem. There are very few metaphors in it; it's apparently just a series of litany-like statements, like an exorcism, if you like, an anti-litany. Alvarez has criticized it for being static. There is no argument in it, he says. Pound is just repeating the same thing. In fact, the subliminal structures are extremely dynamic. There is this tension all the time between different types of language and metaphoric statements being created in the deep structure, as the transformational grammarians would say. The deep structure is metaphoric, but the surface structure is not.

Q. And is this something which you feel that you are doing yourself in say Between or Thru?

A. I think I am, but this is difficult to say because I am so split down the middle as a critic and a writer. I wouldn't be conscious of this as a writer. You see, when I'm writing I go away; I can only write in the summer, and I just forget all this theory. I teach theory. Fine. I can take a poem or novel and show how it functions and what the structures are. But if I'm writing I don't think of this. It becomes a game. On the contrary, I poke fun at it.

Q. Yet, you know what you're doing?

A. I know what I'm doing, in the sense that I will then take these scientific statements and make metaphors out of them, in exactly the same way as I did with astrophysics. Then linguistics becomes something to play with.
































Q.* I noticed in your description of the Pound poem that, besides litany, there's a lot of catalogue in it. Whether you were conscious of it or not when you were writing Between, I also notice a lot of catalogue in it. Somehow the two, the negating statements and the cataloguing, I'm not exactly sure how, but somehow they seem connected. Is that possible?

A. Yes, perhaps. Let's say that this passion for language that I tried to talk about earlier, is probably the nearest I get to religion, to religious feeling, the feeling of the sacred. And the sacred will in fact catalogue reality and give names or even non-names to God and so on. Maybe it sounds blasphemous, but I don't think it is, because after all, you know, God is the Logos and so on. God is and is not. If I have any religion it is that; I mean, this is the material of life.

Q. You are fulfilling Mallarme's prophecy [that art will take the place of religion].

A. I wouldn't dare.




A. I wouldn't dare.




A. I wouldn't dare.




A. I wouldn't dare.




A. I wouldn't dare.




A. I wouldn't dare.




A. I wouldn't dare.


interview with christine brooke-rose

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