Remake

by Christine Brooke-Rose

What happens when you try to find not only meaning but pattern and form in seventy years of a life? It's not a simple process of chronological remembering. It entails a Remake, to capture not facts but the contents of those facts, the feelings of a war-time child, the textures of her clothing, the tastes and smells, the tones and the touch of her mother, the felt absence of her father, and the gradual transformation into womanhood. The facts are simple: birth in Geneva; bilingual childhood in Brussels, then London and Liverpool; work in Intelligence at the Bletchley Park decoding centre during the war; marriage; Oxford; London; literary journalism; the emergence of the novelist. But what do facts add up to? Remake is an autobiographical novel with a difference. It uses life material to compose a third-person fiction, transformed in an experiment whose tensions are those of memory - distorting and partial - checked by a rigorous and sceptical language which probes and finds form underlying the wayward impulses and passions of the subject. Remake is a fascinating and original book by one of our finest modern novelists.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

172 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1996

About the author

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels. Born in Geneva and educated at Somerville College, Oxford and University College, London, she taught at the University of Paris, Vincennes, from 1968 to 1988 and lived for many years in the south of France.

She was married three times: to Rodney Bax, whom she met at Bletchley Park; to the poet Jerzy Pietrkiewicz; and briefly to Claude Brooke. She shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for Such (1966).

She was also known as a translator from French, in particular of works by Robbe-Grillet.

NYT obituary.

Reviews

[Scribble Orca · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Bifografy is always part fiction, John* continues. First in the singulative birth, then in the iterative background, then in the singulative splits. Inchoherent inchoative, incognitially punctuated. A situation, an event, another situation. Hero meets donor, is tested, receives a magical auxiliary, brains for instance, is translocated to fight this or that dragon and returns incognition to perform another impossible task like emptying a river with a sieve, for recognition, then the whole cycle can start again and does, the recognition of desire being the desire of recognition (Lack-on**). Pretty redundant, eh?

Pretty how?

Redundant.

Yes. A joke. Sorry. But girls in fairy-tales are never hereoes, girls must be either Cinderellas or marry the prince, girls are a statue, a tower-prisoner, a block of ice, a pillar of salt, a deep sleep until a man comes along...Neither men nor mentors can endure otherness...Mentors are sometimes tormentors...sometimes mentowers...the last of the mentors, never like one of the toppled but a tower of strength not a tour de force."

Christine Brooke-Rose was asked to write an autobiography by Carcanet and her first reaction was an unequivocal Non, pas du tout. Serendipity chanced along in the form of an idea as a means to deflect dreaded writer's block (bounded by numerical symmetry - she had produced three sets of four works of fiction, and one set of four works of non-fiction) and she decided that an autobiography constituted neither fish nor fowl, but was a completely different species. Happily for us, since she wrote down her entirely life, read what she had written (nothing more than remem-oration, her own label), and tossed it. Almost. Given her unique predilections for novel constraints, she unmade and remade the narrative, demolishing not just eye-nowns (the exception is the sadly schmerzig Chapter Three in which she partly removes her rule, because the chapter is based on a diary, and because intense personal emotion is key and contrasted), but all personal pronouns and possessive adjectives. The result is the (written in by now familiar present tense - but not in the sense of omnitime/place but with the active gerund thus privileging a) the abolition of gender, power and possession, and b) the time of discourse - the historical mode is implied but not articulated) delightfully light-hearted and arch commentary-at-a-distance, viewed through lenses of various incarnations (and the memories of the memories of the mechant loop infinitively applied), which provides eloquent insights into the events, influences and persons of significance in her life. No thin disguise of facts exists here, and Remake combines and highlights the theoretical and ethical concerns that threaded through and shaped Christine Brooke-Rose' life, suggesting an identity as playful and exuberant as the woman behind it.

"Remake produced someone or other I felt happy with. Identity, in other words, is a fiction, made of language, and like all good fictions open-ended, and slightly unreal."

Although Life, End of is available as an e-book, it's a much more poignant consideration of her life, and does not automatically make the most empathic entry into her oeuvre. The second autobiographical work makes use of earlier material, but is much focussed on pain - the pain of old age, the pain of decreptitude, the pain of loss, the pain of memories no longer kept distant by other distraction; it's not a meditation on what might have been, but what was, revealing a slight bitterness not present in Remake, but all the more anguished for its context (hence my musical meview). As a first glimpse into Christine Brook-Rose, Remake is wholly accessible, witty, and inventive.

*Chomsky's John. Not only John (iteratively) represents fragments of memory regarding self and memory, but comes to represent each of the mentors figuring in Christine Brooke-Rose' life from childhood onwards. Regardez Such jostling Js ThruOut (Between?) the bifografical narrative.

**German for varnish. Or Lacan. Or laconic. Take your pick.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remake is a canny künstlerroman written with CB-R’s usual pronounsense and experimental élan. Narrated by the Old Lady from her retirement, and filtered through various text-twitterers named John, CB-R is Tess in this tale, and the action scopes largely on her childhood and wartime experiences, speeding through her flourishing as an academic and novelist, honing on the hardships. Apart from the moving third chapter PRO-NOUNS about her mother-the-nun’s death in a convent, the story uses a third-person detachment, and compacts the facts of her life into no-nonsense punny précis. Any re-imagining of her life is a fiction, a remake, so CB-R becomes by proxy a character in her own fiction. Wry amusement and caustic wit is the pervading tone, along with a sharp unsentimental eye for the emotional bumps in her life (dumped suitors, escaped husbands), but the overall effect of the book is to make a fiction, forge a narrative from the chaos, to impose a shape on the unshapeable data of her life. In her own words:

Memory is necessarily self-centred. For other people are fogs, alter ego et galore. Memory does not reconstruct points of view, only personal reactions, and all portrayal is betrayal. Only art reconstructs points of view, artificially, the novel, the film, the play, the staged confrontational interview. In memory all the parts are played by actors called John, in self-confrontation. And memory can invent memories.
Memory can quantum along from notion to notion. The meeting of particles are events and vice versa. The void before the Big Bang is a nil mass not a nothingness, the void has a structure, and gets transformed. But memory is not an accelerator of particles either.
Nor is memory a digging, a fishing, a lucky dip or a pinball machine, or a sundial showing only the light hours.
Memory is more like intercepting and decrypting, thousands of messages missed, or captured but not decrypted, and even the captured and decrypted now burnt or not released. Memory intercepts the messages of a mysterious invented enemy unseen, giant knight or flaming dragon, the intercepter a speck in time facing the immensity of confrontable selves. (p172)

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A proper review to come hopefully tomorrow. But, for now, I will simply say this is a masterpiece - not just in the construction of its many marvellous sentences, but in the rigorous honesty and self-criticism with which she remakes her past.

"Facts are meaningless, unless reconstructed by experience. Reconned. [...] Or remakes of old records, putting in the cracks of verisimilitude. Isn’t life a story? No. A story is arranged. Life is a file. A lot of files, mostly erased, the diskette to be copied erasing the diskette receiving the copy. "

"The old lady can barely admit, let alone reconstruct, the retarded mental and physical age of Tess at sixteen, the ignorance, the innocence, the non-connecting of things, the permanent being elsewhere, not the elsewhere of religion or art or grand designs, but a haze, a fog. "


"Memory can quantum along from notion to notion. The meetings of particles are events and vice versa. [...] But memory is not an accelerator of particles either. Nor is memory a digging, a fishing, a lucky dip or a pinball machine, or a sundial showing only the light hours. Memory is more like intercepting and decrypting, thousands of messages missed, or captured but not decrypted, and even the captured and decrypted now burnt or not released. Memory intercepts the messages of a mysterious invented enemy unseen, giant king or flaming dragon, the intercepter a speck in time facing the immensity of confrontable selves"

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Top 5 CB-R status cemented. If you're looking for CB-Rs worth your time, do NOT skip this one. Astonishing accomplishment.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 70 year old woman, a fiction though some biographical facts are in line with CBR, looks back on life through a fictional character named Tess, written by Christine Brooke-Rose and read by a reader, both who also are fictional accounts. In this, "Bifografy" it is made clear that any biography must be a fiction comprised of fictional pieces glued and mortared together to create a convincing whole but in the end a betrayal. The subject, as with any friend or otherwise we claim to know must be a betrayal since there is no way to know them. We witness their public behaviors and crafted, conscious or otherwise, personas but have little encounter with the reality of the complexities of their selves and if we do it is run through the sieve of our own distortions of memories and prejudices in part constructed to balance our own personas reflected through that of others. Remake is then a remake of CBR's life by CBR?

Tess from an early age is abandoned by her father and emotionally abandoned by her mother, who like Tess is often, mostly elsewhere. Early on Tess learned well how to deal with the uninteresting world from this vantage point by acquiescing, or abandoning herself, owned by everyone and no one, when having to be here rather than elsewhere. It didn't matter. It didn't make sense. Her address, zip code was elsewhere. Here she felt protected and did not cower in any fear of being "swallowed up".

Married once but the distant relationship ended in divorce. Over many years she worked during WWI in the WAAF, where secret German information was decoded helping the war effort greatly, when inner politics did not get in the way, and secretiveness was held as the highest necessity for survival. Her success at this job, where she was eventually promoted to the rank of officer, was fueled by a lack of fuel. Due to being withdrawn and elsewhere the war made little sense to her and carried less interest. Much could be said for the workings of the world and the trivial values misinformed. There was no advantage in working for the drama of the war or individual prestige. In the world of elsewhere, where Tess carried no Pronoun of self, it provided no intrigue or reward. She did her job as it was presented to her.

The "Old woman" narrator carries not even a name. In an Ouilipian sense this no Pronoun demands of CBR-she demands of herself- to have to deepen her thought of, and creative implementation of, her writing. Further, the Pronoun acts as a substitution a simulation, discarding, avoiding the reality of the many selves of the subject blotted out by the Pronoun, selves in profusions of conflict with each other. The Pronoun promotes the looking away from the complexities of an object, a person, a self, reducing it to something easily digestible with no need to search any deeper than the sheerness of the immediate veneer. Although language may be a set of symbols removed by a step from the reality of what it attempts to symbolize, the removal of the Pronoun may also create a structure to explore what is and what is not fictional about ourselves to ourselves as well as an invitation of investigation of what lies beyond language itself.

A five star book losing a star due to; pairing together the decimation of her marriage with news of the war-funny and crafty at first but soon to become old-and the great length of the work spent on the years in WAAF and its many details. It could be argued that the time spent here underscored the development of Tess, The Old Woman, CBR (?) as someone whose character was infiltrated daily by the necessary skills of decoding what was between lines and words, patterns unseen at first but never-the-less there, and the explicit need and value of secrecy.

Though there are signs of a gaining sense of independence in affairs participated in during her 22 year unmarried relationship with Janek, his greater dependence on her, his insecurities, it is not until she ends the relationship and takes off on her own that she separates into who she is with flourishing enjoyment. She has already written what would not be accepted in novel form, breaking past the comfort of not having to think deeply, explore, accept a shorthand proclamation, and would now continue to do so. Commercial interests, fame, had no locations in elsewhere. Their assertion of false values lit no lights or entrenched any unquestioned interests.

What I hoped for, waited for with building suspense generated by yours truly, was what motivated this unique individual form of writing? What was its genesis, its goals? The inner battles it rose from? The Pronoun-less inner struggles in its myriad variations it incurred. Was it how the words came to her and she was the clerk writing down the decoding of a messaged manuscript? Possibly it was no more than this was who she became and the vagueness of secrecy was not only her idiom but who she was and could be, Tess's origins augmented, or possibly more poignant, CBR's adamant refusal to be steered away from the search for a substantial reality well beyond the treats of accepted conventions. While the novels remained out of the public eye her many other publications of criticism and theory earned her well established teaching positions and a financially secure life and position in the academic world of the times. However, poor little me wanted to know more about this interesting style of writing novels, the writer of such novels while she was writing them placing meaning beyond the rewards dangled before her.. So little was said. It created not only a hunger for more depth in this area but for me it created an imbalance in the book. However, maybe in her secretive way she has gone into all this in another book. If anyone knows about such please let me know.

Now it is time for me to return to the lifetime pursuit of decoding myself. Without knowing myself how am I to know anyone else? Do anything else of a genuine nature? Remake has fueled this and thus provided more than I might have hoped for. It is a book that left me sweated, soaked, drained of self complacency despite the aesthetic pleasures of its writerly skills. It provoked thought and what may lay beyond thought. Perhaps she should have pushed harder for publication to further spread access to her profound thinking, to push against the publishing industry of her time rather than acquiescing to consumerism's wreckage and the unquestioned, unexplored domination of white men's rule underlying their insecurities and fears of women's talents, strengths.Then, there would have been less time for thinking, for writing. Maybe I want too much from heroes.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 5 out of 5]

CBR's novelistic autobiography of 1996, recreating her life as "Theresa Blair-Hayley", and brekign off to debate directorial points with "John", an authorial device engaged in debate with "the old lady" who is constructing Tess' life.

The first surprise is to realise that all those potted biographies that go "born in Geneva, educated at Oxford" conceal a background of genteel poverty, of only just being on the border of the respectable set. Mummy had to take her 2 girls back to living in Britain in 1936 after Daddy died and they weren't expecting to get any education past 16: first she had 2 years doing office jobs in Liverpool, then joining up in the WAAF, getting sent to Bletchley Park because of her knowledge of German. The 2 chapters set in "BP", which include the disappointment of her misguided 1st marriage, are superb (the affair with an American lawyer is referred back to again in "Life, End Of" ten years later). CBR/Tess is one of the many thousands of ex-service men and women to benefit from the new government's generosity with university grants, making possible an education she never even thought of in 1939.

There's a great deal of material that turns up in the novels here as well: Serena's sister Stella is clearly Tess' sister "Joanne", though the relationship is more bitter here than in "The Middlemen". Alfred Hayley of "The Dear Deceit" is simply reused as Daddy in the remake, and we are told that the male narrator of that book was the voice of her 1st, wartime husband.

I can't remember where I read it, but a chapter was cut from this book for publication due to legal problems; I presume that was the one describing her 3rd marriage, which isn't mentioned in the final edit at all. This is a great journey through the 20th century, and a story of broadening consciousness, a quiet person slowly finding ways in to the world as the expected roles are broken down around her. It has meditations on memory and the fine detail of how it all happened in Britain over the past 100 years.

[David]

A playful autobiogranovel from one of the 20th-century's best experimental writers. I especially love the inevitable final sentence, something which has been said about remakes of all kinds pretty much ever since we've had a second version of any narrative. As with any Brooke-Rose novel, this one is overtly aware of and calls attention to its own processes, which is part of the fun.

[Antonomasia]

Margaret Drabble, in her introduction to the British edition of Thoughts of Sorts by Georges Perec, has this to say about CBR, who was a friend of hers. I thought the increasing number of CBR fans on GR might be interested.
(The text is Drabble's but I'm happy for someone to paste my transcription to a more appropriate thread if they like.)

Geneva-born Christine Brooke-Rose (b.1923) was certainly highly conscious of the [OuLiPo] group's presence; she is bilingual, lived and taught for many years in Paris, and has written novels that deploy a variety of semantic devices. More significantly, when planning to write a memoir, she felt compelled to find an alienating persona. She told me this, as I recall, in 1991, when we were visiting Bletchley Park together, that home of codes and crossword puzzle addicts, where she had worked during the war with Angus Wilson. She said she found it impossible to write, simply, in the first person. She eventually solved this by referring to herself in Remake (1996) as 'the old lady', as well as employing other concealments and replacements and pseudonyms. Bletchley Park, of course, instilled into its workforce a habit of official secrecy that went very deep. Although the war occupies only a section of her memoir, mental disciplines acquired during it affected her thereafter. I remember at the time being puzzled by her inhibition, and have much more sympathy with it now. Deviousness is forced upon us. In Life, End of, published in 2006, she describes the growing afflictions of old age: she is no longer the 'old lady', she has become one of the 'O.P' - the Other People, the Old People - and her last line is a heroic pun in French: 'les jeux de maux sont faits' [maux: misfortunes - rather than mots:words].