Amalgamemnon

by Christine Brooke-Rose

A woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history delivers a passionate, witty, and word-mad monologue in this inventive novel, which was called "brilliant" (The Listener), "dazzling" (The Guardian), "elegant, rueful and witty" (The Observer) upon its original publication in England in 1984.

History and literature seem to be losing ground to the brave new world of electronic media and technology, and battle lines are being drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and the third world, women and men. Narrator Mira Enketei erases those boundaries in her punning monologue, blurring the texts of Herodotus with the callers to a talk-radio program, and blending contemporary history with ancient: fairy-tale and literal/invented people (the kidnappers of capitalism, a girl-warrior from Somalia, a pop singer, a political writer), connected by an elaborate mock-genealogy stretching back to the Greek gods, move in and out of each other's stories. The narrator sometimes sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesize but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy. Brooke-Rose amalgamates ancient literature with modern crises to produce a powerful novel about the future of culture.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, Novels, 20th Century, Womens, Literature, Literary Fiction

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

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

[Lynne King · Rating 5 out of 5]

FINAL REVIEW

I've been to the stars and back in this galactic pun-packed exquisite work. I've even sat on a moon beam and talked with the gods...

This is my favourite book of all time. It combines aspects of the works of Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Umberto Eco and Anais Nin - my four favourite authors.

How can one even attempt to write a review on this book? I'll try...So here goes.

“The Flight of the Mind” (the title of Virginia Woolf’s first volume of Letters) immediately sprang to mind in parallel with Indiana Jones’ leap into faith when I entered the pun-punching, far reaching, profound and yet far-reaching world of Christine Brooke Rose (CBR).

I also never thought the day would unexpectedly and surprisingly creep up on me when I would find an author, a unique author at that, who could surpass Oscar Wilde in wit.

The writing is exquisite with puns and neologisms studding the book. With the help of my faithful Chambers Dictionary, the Greek Myths by Robert Graves and my books on astronomy, I’ve slipped into the water and slowly trodden water carefully and deliciously swum into CBR’s world.

I’ve been jettisoned around the universe both in my mind and in my conception on life and have seen a new unexpected side to existence on our planet. The CBR experience has brought the culmination of my somewhat eclectic reading to an all resounding clash of the titans. My innermost thoughts and values have been flattened as I’ve grappled both with myself and with the prose, and it can be very frustrating at times I can assure you with this remarkable individual and how did she cope with this feat of artistry? The simplest, and yet in contradiction, trick in the world - that of a monologue. But then again is this a monologue or is it a soliloquy? The review on the book states the former but I wonder if it is the latter. Surely CBR is talking to herself but for us, the reader to hear? Never mind. Someone I vaguely recall stated somewhere that the most well-known soliloquy in the English language appears in Act III, Scene 1 of Hamlet:

“To be, or not to be, — that is the question.” I go along with that.

But if this is a monologue, it is one with a difference by “a woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history” and she is on a mission through time in every conceivable aspect.

Now there are monologues and there are monologues but due to this book I’ve finally started to read properly. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a book addict and I’ve been reading for years but there’s reading for pleasure and reading for learning but I’ve only now discovered the ultimate, that of finally seeing and reading and as a consequence knowing who I am. I’ve discovered myself and what a shock that has been to me. I tingle and I feel embarrassed and coy. To come across a work that I've had to analyse, be it the neologisms that abound and resound throughout.

This is a very smart lady. She doesn’t give purely reading pleasure; she whacks it at you and can shock and make you smile at the same time. Such artistry and for two weeks I’ve been on a spellbinding odyssey of ancient/modern times and thoughts of a future world, in trying to unravel both CBR’s complex and yet boomerang writing style and yet there is such profound depth in beauty in her conception of life. Through her I’ve lived with the mythical Greek gods, I’ve been to places pre-birth and have rediscovered trinitarianism; I’ve cried and writhed in trying to come to grips with some of the spectacular unimaginable and unfathomable prose; I’ve been lost in the labyrinth and the Minotaur has been aware of my presence, and chased me and then the ultimate, the scales have fallen from my eyes. I can see and appreciate, through CBR, who I am, what I am. I’ve searched the stars and planets with my telescope both in the early hours of the morning and the evening, apart from being stopped by the clouds deciding to take over.

I’ve met the narrator Mira Enketei “who sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesy but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy". I’ve been brought back to terra firma with a whack and a romp in the guise of Mr Jolly. Now I’m in my comfort zone here and I don’t like it and I’m rebelling living in this “coin perdu”. This individual lives in the land of maize and honey. rusticana, cows, cows and more cows and of course sheep, how could I forget them? I fall over them on my daily jaunts as they escape and run madly along the country lanes. Perhaps they know the abattoir is just around the corner and want to escape that inevitability. Mr Jolly is the normalizing individual but is he? Has CBR purely decided to add a French dash of salt and pepper and the ever pervading AOC piment d’Espelette from the Pays Basque and thrown a spanner in the works? Put susceptible individuals like me off the scent?

Concepts of cybernetics spring to mind and the frightening future and possible loss of books. Soon the physical aspects of sex will disappear and everything will be done with the press of the button. Imagine losing the joy of anticipation, the chase, and then the awaited and yet thoroughly expected climax of the catch. I’m in full flight now and had better return to stability, to earth.

So in conclusion, this 1984 experimental novella is metafiction at its best and I’ve given you purely a taster from this book. It’s up to you the reader to see if you are up to reading this remarkable woman’s work. This is not a book for the faint-hearted. One thing I do know is that this is a true reference book. I can pick it up whenever I want and know that I’ll always love it.

I’ve been on a galactic, interpersonal and all-embracing magical journey. I have absolutely lived this book and all I can say is my, my...ad infinitum. This is the first time in my life that I have ever seen a writing style such as this: such soul, artistry and insight. This is a tour de force with all the flights of fancy of the author and all about our language and what a splendid time I’ve had. You don’t need a plot here with such language.

My grateful appreciation goes to Scribble. Perhaps indirectly she’s trying to unscramble my already cluttered mind? Here I am at 7 a.m. in the morning in France, sitting out on the terrace with the lights on; and after I finish writing these words, I look at the stars through the telescope and smile. And yes, I do indeed have “a smile in the mind’s eye”.

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

A dirge of phonics, swelter of ideas, precisions, concisions, visions, a paced poetics of polished sound barely contained. Christine Brooke-Rose's, Mira Enketei is placed as the librarian within her own mind. The shelves filled with volumes, their cross references continuously at hand. Her intellect is teeming. We are not invited to gather within, we are taken into this sumptuous feast without question or intent. It is easy to listen to the brilliance of her words as they dance and play with one another in punned steps of elegance and a chrysalis unfolding of deep planes of meaning. Mythology, history, literature is folded and unfolded in the plaits of her existence, in a world of her becoming, yet where she has now become redundant.

To be laid-off as a professor, as will her colleagues, teaching the dead languages of literature, history and philosophy, she is looking into a future rapidly being replaced by the eager minds of high technology.

Her only tool which she has refined with studious exploration of thought is her intellect; a dimension missing in others, Her choice is to acknowledge she has not provided it in sufficient quantity to others or it has not been received in this emerging world of computer terminals and data now invisible, passing overhead through the currents of air, servants of the lord of information to be gathered and stored. She has no interest or abilities to reside in this new world but to spend her days in the antiquity of past genius is to relegate herself as a lone refugee. The new world, its electronic flashes, passes her by as a relic to someday be exhumed as a lost antiquity which at some historic point might have provided use, purpose. An interesting corner of life but one not open to a woman of her time. As Cassandra she has been given the gift of prophecy and at the same time is cursed where no one else will see or believe these prophetic renderings so clear to her. The renderings are inclusive of the banalities of life; political, economic, struggles of power, relationships.

She, as Renata Adler, though using very different styles, find themselves forced by external social pressures to live the banalities they are commenting on. As Greek Mythology and her life nears one, she sacrifices herself for the thinned plane of survival, to speak the quiet tear born babble of Cassandra in her mind while accepting an overweight man who stepped into her life.This is a man who has firmly occupied for himself a limited dimension which avails itself to the majority of others scurrying to seek the comfort of security, drafting proclamations of status, honor, while crafting trophies of achievement within these limited plains and spaces. He is unaware of missing life's fullest dimension, seeing himself as the key for Mira to be included, acknowledged in his world.

As Cassandra she is not only not heard but is silenced for being a woman, a woman in a man's world. She can see but he cannot, this world is in danger of being planed so spare that its slow spin is toward meaninglessness and a vanishing. His life is wedged between the daily rifts of economic barter and the strident male marches towards unquestioned production, influence and recognition. It is coming- to- him as it was ordained at birth by gender. Her protestations were cuddled into declamations of her further comittment to their relationship, as well as the feeble world of a woman's words. Soft, cute, he squelched the very way she spoke-through her varied depths of intellect-poking another accusation, one more Reaganite, "There you go again."

Reading Christine Brooke-Rose is to partake in the richest of intellects, while reaching the breadths of what can be known and what we need to keep striving towards. It has the ability to put a male reader, this male reader, somewhat closer to the mind, experience, of women born with an inheritance of underling, their judges and juries all men, and listened to the scope of their highly intelligent thought as proof of their inferiority. Not being,who they are supposed to be, their ability to counter the disinformation is used as further proof against them. A slick wave of the magic hand over the emptied hat and those struck dumb laugh at the poorer sex who are stuck with the powers of speech, metaphor, poetics. Nothing there to increase the production of goods, to stabilize the concrete world of objects, to rant resources into the invisibility of oblivion. This is a man's spectrum. It is all coming to them unquestioned. Life was to be lived in acquisition and production, regaling in the comfort of security, while utilizing the deadly kindliness of the necessary words to keep women in their place, to silence them.

How much better this world might have been, might be, if the voice of Christine Brooke-Rose was not buried but sung through the land. In Amalgamemnon we hear the voice sung, poetic, playful, necessary, lifting us towards, thought, that enlarges our desire for further reaching. This is a book for those who love language, the playfulness, punning, referencing, that adds further depths. It is for the courageous not for those who comfortably think themselves courageous. It is for those who can look ahead open-eyed while carrying with them the golden redundancy of meaning and beauty.

I must thank Scribble Orca, Lynne King, the Buried Book Club for giving me the opportunity for reading this wondrous, provoking book.

Also I must apologize to the fifth star in my ratings. It is left alone to its left, with only darkness and infinity to accompany it when it deserves many partners of a similar shape and sparkle.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

For years, it seemed Christine Brooke-Rose was fated to remain entombed in the mausoleum of avant-garde curiosities, shunned for her unapologetically complex and eggheady works like her 60s/70s tetralogy—some of the most cloistered and labyrinthine experimental novels of the 20thC, spooky by reputation. This was until the year of Our Great Unburier 2013, Lord Visigoth of Motorhead, when up and down the American hypermotorhighways and up hither the Swiss hillocks and declivities, the young powerplayers of the Digital Dream connexecuted a volte-face toward the canon of herself, Lady CB-Rose of Englandshire, including the ascension by Brother MJ of her 1984 Dalkey-pubbed novel Amalgamemnon: an unbelievably rhythmical and deliriously dizzying feat of downright stunning wordplay and humour and punk-rock anti-narrative pyrotechnics par expelliarmus—a synaptic fireworks display of obscure reference and witty surrealism and unhinged plot-less brilliance, etched into the luscious acid-free paper from the tallest saplords of King John O’Brien of The Illinoisome Clan. And lo, it came to pass, that the world did sing their unalloyed ecstasies in abundance at this unEARTHED frolic of the 80s British avant-garde. Hear their melodies as they caress the skies!

[Gregsamsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Now read Amalgamemnon and join the cult."
--MJ Nicholls, to me


DONE AND DONE!

OK imagine that the S.L.A. were classics- and theory-drenched intellectuals on hard groovy free-associational drugs, taking guerrilla action against the $¥£-hegemony's universal divestment from the humanities.

That's the nutshell version; now for my typically interminable version:

There's something a little dishonest-feeling about ringing five loud stars ("amazing") of recommendation for a book whose dense references I might [might!] have understood but a fifth of. Then again, how does an easily-mastered book "amaze"? A MAZE, yes, a Corinthian labyrinthine classical-to-futuristic catacomb of connections between the now NOW and Western Mythology Then, but the gods take a back seat to the ORACLES in this consciousness's semi-stream-of take on ancient-to-now teleological "progress."

One Mira "inkytie" Enketei (Greek: "in the whale," one of many Jonah references) is descended upon by the officious Ethel Thuban to be informed that her position of lit prof, like all humanities professionals, has been deemed "redundant," unnecessary in a world of newly focused values on one singular value: measurable monetary value. A dense screed ensues. Not a jot of thought escapes the summoning of Classical associations so that enigmatic Orion and prophetic Cassandra bear as much on the proceedings as the present's principles. Magically this mythos-madness results not in a sprawling frenetic Hellenic phone book of endless regressions and asides, but a compact pamphlet (144 pages in my edition) of stunning slimness.

How?

Well, most of the clutter of expositional amenities, dialog attributions, contextual framing, sensual settings-of-scene, and all explicit characterization are tossed out in favor of a dense and zesty prose style superthick with economic double-duty terms of pun, portmanteau, neologism, and other rhetorical oracle trickery. The root of mimesis especially gets a workout, inflecting words with its sense of simulation (mimecstatic, mimagree, mimintimacy). For pun-intolerant readers, some passages will provoke major groanage: "Killing the goose that'll lay the golden ages? You'll need a wide margin of terror for that."

Do I hear facepalming?

Losing her job leaves Mira only unpleasant options: she can approach the Employment Computer to be reassigned/reprogrammed into a new societal role, she can say screw it all and go start a pig farm, or she could seek out the security of marriage with one of the dudes groveling at the Computer's cabled feet, at great sacrifice of autonomy and dignity, as he sees even her prodigious intellect as an amusing curiosity, just one more enviable gleaming facet of his new trophy.

He gives her condescending pet names that recall rhetorical tropes, for example: "Anna Crusis" (anacrusis: the extra words at the beginning of a poem that do not fit into the meter of the rest), "Anna Coluthon" (anacoluthon, a sudden shift from one syntactical pattern to what the hell? another one) but he's stuck in the rut of a complacent now while Mira is the prophetess with the mostness. The circularity of prophecy is a theme in Amalgamemnon, a book lurking with oracles through which CBR asserts her own oracularity; keep in mind that this was published in 1984:

"Soon the economic system will crumble, and political economists will fly in from all over the world and poke into its smoky entrails and utter soothing prognostications and we'll all go on as if."

"Soon I shall be as redundant as to between desire and the infinitive and as embarrassing to the new society, unlike the seemingly wasteful ones and zeros in the sixteen or thirty-two or sixty-four bits behind the lightning languages of digital neotutors, with each his load of essential information in databanks and beautifully random memories."

"The situation in Libya after the coodaytah will apparently remain shrouded in mystery until radio-communication can be re-established and we'll all go on as if."

"No she'll say she'll never be on the side of the terrorists but she'll see the genealogy of events as a constantly widening spiral of repression--terrorism--repression--terrorism and she'll know for a fact that this will always start with repression."

"Soon we shall have simulating machines for opinions, arguments, loves, hates, imaginings."

"...that your argument must inevitably and each time lead to that of the terrorists, which will always be the daytaunt: arrest me, kill me, detain me without trial and you'll be no better than me. That will be the real dilemma of freedom from now on, and all the more so for the escalation of their methods, out of their very success, to state level."

"The so-called rich countries will go on making vast loans to those of the third world--At superhigh interests, which will increase with every debt consolidation, each time to be carefully rescheduled and pre-meditated, risking, for mounting profits, the world's whole banking system which in its collapse would plunge the people of all nations but especially the poor into the deepest misery. Will those always be your moral imperatives?"

All of this (and more!) firmly verifies the words of another GoodReadster, Jonathan: "CBR has serious Cassandra skills."

Ah Cassandra, Orion, Andromeda. While the Greeks are emphasized, the allusionism does not dead-end back there, but the whole is leavened with present-consciousness bleed-through of voices from radio call-in show blather and sports chatter; government spokesperson "daytaunt;" an address before the UN General Assembly; the family tree of a computer-based virtual family (The SIMS!) including one wooden branch slyly taking on the lady's last name; The Standard Fairy Tale elements and actors whose Olde Timey actions start in the future tense and its questors are the radio hosts mentioned above; the obliged prattle of a family get-together; Imperialism-is-heroic Hollywood-optimism war scene romantics; and general pop ephemera, all of it unfortunately (imho) general rather than early 80's UK specific, so no Christine the Strawberry Girl. No Christine, Banana-split Lady.

Among all the above it would be easy to pass over the letters, but it is from these epistolary passages (realistically short, for a change) that flash refractions of the world these words are written within, and it is in those occasional spaces that the glimmer of personal pathos blinks and signals among the thick clouds of learnedness.

But unlike so many reference-happy Ivory Tower obscurantists, her Greco-Onan indulgences aren't all worshipful of the West's supposed originary gushing font. [Ever notice how many Greek Classic book covers feature a fountain?] She will read some Greek beads, as with the Prometheus/Pandora double-standard:

"Why should scientific curiosity be heroic in men and silly and mean in women? Your legends won't tempt me, even to be negated."

OH SNAP!

Nor is she above serrating off some spurs of niggling Nietzschean nonsense:

"If woman be the warrior's rest* should man be the warrior of her rest?"
--*Thus shat Zarathustra.

Meanwhile back at the pig farm, piglets are given names of states--as in the United ones of America--while the place serves as HQ for some radically seditious goings-on and a subversive cell's in-fighting threatens to spring the clockwork of a political kidnapping. I shouldn't tell you how that thriller sub-plot ends up. wistful, poignant, as if...

OK remember how Mr. Law and Order and Harmony APOLLO gifted Cassandra with eyes into the future and when she still wouldn't put out he spit in her mouth (rude!), delivering the curse that mooted the gift by making her unbelieved by everybody? She later ends up as a concubine to AGAMEMNON, who here serves as an amalgamation of the many indignities heaped upon her gender. Mira/Cassandra/CBR thusly harbor(s) some feelings regarding Law and Order and Harmony and they ain't lovey-dovey. They are bitter, caustic, and spitefully funny.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I imagine what fun it must be to be a stray thought in the beautiful mind of Christine Brooke-Rose. You know that sooner or later that net is going to snag you - and when it does you will be polished, preened and placed next to others like you in a cascading moment of cacophonous creation. All strays welcome here. CBR will give you a good home.

I was blown away by Textermination - so much so that I fear that I may have read this book too close to that work of genius. All of CBR's writing prowess is on display in this novel, but somewhere past mid point things began to unravel a bit for me. This is not a reflection on the work, merely me as a weak reader.

Even if you find that her experimental fiction isn't for you, reading her books to come across fabulous neologisms like beaurocrastinate is worth the trip.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

She Doesn't Exist Anymore

Inside the whale of a modern Western State, narratrix Mira Eketei imagines different personae or manifestations of herself, different characters, living at different times, past, present and future.

One predicts she will be made redundant from her academic position, so much of the novel projects the future, even if it doesn't look forward to it.

Just as time pushes the present into the past eternally, the future that Mira tensely anticipates (forever in the future/subjunctive mood) obliterates the past.

Our focus is so much about what is just around the corner in front of us, that we have begun to ignore both the present and the past.

We live in heightened anticipation, always trying to get a purchase on the future. We need capital to consume, only we don't save in the present to spend in the future. We spend in the present and the future out of borrowed capital that we intend to repay in the future future.

As a result, the present is little more than a constant barrage of possible futures and acquisitions that we grasp as if we were drinking water directly from a fire hydrant.

Talk back radio and current affairs television (and now the web) are our primary sources of information, well, pseudo-information...it doesn't have to be true, it hasn't happened yet. (Newspapers traditionally sell more in the lead-up to a Budget, when it is all speculation, than they do after the Budget has been delivered, when everything is known.)

With so much focus on the future and its technological infrastructure, there is no time left for the past. History is outdated, outmoded, irrelevant, useless, obsolete, as are its practitioners.

Equally, if we survive and thrive on technologically-infused dreams of the future, there is no present or future role for those who create visions of the past (usually in past tense, though intended to inform the present): writers, poets, musicians, film-makers, even more or less so, critics.

So Mira, in all her guises, visualises, fantasises, creates, alone, in her own mind, in not just a room of her own, but a home of her own, well, perhaps a pig farm in the country.

Brooke-Rose uses the term "redundant" to describe not just the extinguishment of employment status, but the du- or multi-plication of functionality, ostensibly in case of failure, the capacity to replace and be replaced. In the future, nothing is irreplacable. Especially characters. And each new character brings their own plot.

From these ingredients, Brooke-Rose concocts a rich, visionary, almost dystopian, soup. She juggles an enormous number of narrative, stylistic and theoretical balls in the air, without ever hesitating or dropping any.

Few, if any, authors have understood our present (her future, as it turned out), let alone our future, more insightfully than her.

Like Pynchon and DeLillo, she writes in a style designed especially for now. Sadly, she doesn't exist anymore, except in her writings and our minds. Her books remain a gift from the past to the present. She has given us a present, our present.



VERSE:

Authority Demolishes Stately Family Home

Those who would control the future
Must make the past redundant and
History irrelevant to the stories
That we strive hard to tell today.


"I Will Sing Tales of Love and Legend"

Tonight, we’ll make love beneath
Constellations flush with stars,
All named for Gods and Goddesses,
Nebulous and magnificent,
Cassiopeia, Orion, Andromeda.
You, my substitute lover, Agamemnon,
And I, Cassandra, your little Sandy,
Alias Mira Enketei, also known as ME.
Like matter and anti-matter,
We’ll make contact and explode.
Dialectical materialism,
Aspiring to the happy status of
Delectable metarealism,
In a novel made up by
The author, Christine Brooke-Rose,
Perhaps unheeded and unhinged.

Tomorrow, I’ll be the first person to be
Redundant, while the past will cease
To be apart, merged with the present, then
Annulled by the future, as if foreseen.
I will disappear beneath you,
Obedient Slave to your Master,
Two Hegelian moral imps,
Conditionally amalgamated
In relentless disputation
And antagonistic direlogue.
Man might believe he is salvation,
But still denies the worth of woman.
Hence, no female should conceal the fact
That love can be a big mixtake in
The revillusionary madlanes
Of her telematic memory.





SOUNDTRACK:

Annette Peacock - "My Momma Never Taught Me How to Cook"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUcE9...

"I say, Hey, man! My destiny is not to serve. I'm a woman. My destiny is to create."

Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3 - "She Doesn't Exist"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDEWo...

Magazine - "Vigilance"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyEfMH...

"I'm in love with everything that's been left unsaid."

Magazine - "Sweetheart Contract"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IGxG...

Magazine - "You Never Knew Me"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agy6k...

"I don't want to turn around
And find I'd got it wrong
Or that I should have been laughing all along
You're what keeps me alive
You're what's destroying me
Do you want the truth or
Do you want your sanity?"

Luxuria - "Redneck"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffcPW...

"I am a major prophet
I'm heaven and hell bent strong
I am the height of a sign
Wide of the mark
Deep as the Amazon
Feel my wild sadness blowing down
Feel my wild sadness blowing
All the way down
I stand before you
In full possession of the facts
I make no use of effects
No use for clever counterbalancing acts
I've broken every bone of meaning
In this body and this soul
I've bought knowledge
At the cost of a complete
Loss of self-control"

Wire - "Mannequin"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEJSe...

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

"I shall soon be quite redundant at last despite of all, as redundant as you after queue and as totally predictable, information-content zero." --Great First Lines, Zettel #2a45


But what do we need them for? teachers of DEAD languages, of history of philosophy of.... LITTerature??! Sweep them away. We are in a New Age!

Who reads Herodotus? You mean I have to know who Agamemnon is in order to read your book? That’s just a bit much isn’t it? And “Cassandra”? No one talks about Cassandra today.

Isn’t it just a bunch of cynical job=protection she’s writing here? What, she thinks she’s Joyce, keeping scholars busy for a hundred years? Looking out for nothing but their own behinds. What we need today are JOB=skills and ancient dead greeks don’t come into the picture. Maybe only JJ James&sons had a bigger ejo than Ms CBR. I mean, the characters are all flat two dimensional not=round rather ..... well they do get all jumbled up don’t they, kind of amalgamated. I couldn’t tell.

You can really tell just by reading this book that CBR thinks her job is no longer relevant and she thinks she should receive special rights because who reads books any more and who reads books in order to read other books -- nomans that’s who! You should be able to just pick up any old book and read it just like it is. But nooooo! she thinks courses on greek literature, courses on the wake and on herodotus and courses in “gender studies” and “culture studies” and “xyz studies”.... but it’s really all just about her ejo you can tell, her ejo and job security, that’s all. I mean, what the hell does “Enketei” even mean?

And jokes about Hegel’s cow? how am I even supposed to “get” that and then marx this and marx that. You’d think she’s against the way the world is moving.

Half the time I didn’t even know what was going on. What we need today more than ever are books that tell us about our world today like a newspaper and books with plots and characters for their plots and we can fill up all those plots in the cemetery with people like this that write books just for their own ejos and make the rest of us feel stupid and what education really means is how to get a job and we don’t need to know Latin for that we certainly know that what good is it doing paying all these people to teach philosophy because we are all philosophers because we all have our own opinions and I don’t need anyone telling me what to think you’d think we wouldn’t need books like this one here making us feel stupid because when it comes right down to it it’s all just a matter of taste like licking a cherry=stem and I know what I like but I may not know much who’s to say that someone’s better than me just because and things like this that I hear being said I wanna know who failed who who made who, ya’know? hmyes iSaid hmyes iWill hmyes

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brooke-Rose is a real find for me. The playfulness with words is Joycean and funny and not so impenetrable as to have lost its meaning.

I'll be searching for her other novels

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Swing low, Iscariot, enter the judas lens and speak to an issue with a tissue of lies. Allegiances will be lifted, greetings will be declared closed till the next balance shit, turning the other cheek to cheek till the next unloading of yellow terror from the underbellies of monsters in the sky disguised as ideologies.

Likely a two star experience, though I laughed aloud frequently. I tend to imagine I would've raved about this in my 20s. Funny how matters evolve, or mold. The successions of time lie at the core of this novel. An academic is sacked as the humaniities are being replaced with technocratic endeavors better suited to a suited world. This is her screed. Please approach with caution.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I need to re-read this. Scarily prescient, CBR has serious Cassandra skills, and full of extraordinary language-play. Clearly the work of a genius.

[nethescurial · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally beyond brilliant. I went into this knowing it would be good but just less than twenty or so pages in and I more or less immediately knew I was trawling the thoughts of a word-fevered genius and there was no way Brooke-Rose's hold on me would have loosened its grip even slightly until I reached the end. Cuz holy shit what a rollercoaster of pure fucking adoration for language and, just as potent, the fear of its possible corruption by those who wish to control the narrative and use the inherent power of words against their and our best interests. The whole "let the words wash over you" thing has become a cliche but this really is something you just have to allow yourself to get taken along for; even when the references flew right over my head there was no confusion, it's one of those special books that its best moments just create genuine physical adrenaline in me when I am totally on their wavelength. Brooke-Rose weaves her major themes and concerns into this endlessly spiraling, expanding-in-all-directions pun-drunk monologue with more character and verve than some novelists have in entire bibliographies and it doesn't even come close to overstaying its welcome, it's more or less the perfect length and intensely readable throughout. From here on this book will be one of my go-to counterpoints whenever someone makes the stuffy insistence that avant-garde art cannot be entertaining, a book this in love with language (and freaking funny) couldn't be anything less than a joy to experience.

At what point can a work of art be called oracular? When everything has been said before, and the warnings all ignored every time when our species goes blundering into the next self-imposed extinction event, how untethered does the concept of truth and prophecy become? I hesitate to call anything prophetic but Brooke-Rose comes close... so much of this is so chillingly prescient to the social media world it's almost uncanny, but maybe it's always been this way... in a way the issues of a thousand years ago are the issues of today, and Brooke-Rose sort of capitalizes on this whole idea of this historical ouroboros, especially given how much History is evoked and reconstructed here. After the point that everything has been said, all one can do is just say it all and hope anyone hears. In many ways this feels like a desperate shout to the void, and that's difficult not to resonate with in this generation. The looming specter of climate change also roils over this entire book, contributing to the overall vibe of apocalyptic dread. I just keep discovering so many great new authors in such a quick succession and Brooke-Rose is easily among them, will certainly be obtaining all her work in the following year.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

A massive cross-discipline crosscutting of ideas, ancient history conflated with astronomy, global politics, classic litarature, a sheer love of language, swine husbandry, disappointing dinner-date conversation, and the early-information-age spew of dissociated information that was at the time of writing (1984) poised to overrun all of our lives. Massively impressive, but also massively untethered and rambling by design. Having been reading CBR is a kind of chronological progression lately (excepting her early pre-experimental works) I can see this as the natural development of Such and Between into a state of pure-plotless conceptual-linguistic play, yet those books still seem to have captivated me rather more. This does, like those, have the thrilling quality of just chucking the reader head first into something that will only in time begin to sort itself out in the readers' mental filing system through repetition and interconnection.

[Jim Elkins]

Problems in the Reception of Christine Brooke-Rose, and Why I Won't be Reading More of Her Work
-

The received idea about Brooke Rose is that she struggled for visibility during her lifetime, but is now recognized as one of the most important experimental novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. That idea—repeated in blogs and reviews—comes mainly from critics' awareness of several scholars working in the 1990s, beginning with four women scholars: Susan Hawkins ("Innovation/History/Politics: Reading Christine Brooke-Rose's Amalgamemnon, 1991), Sarah Birch (Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction, 1994), Judy Little (The Experimental Self, 1996), and Karen Lawrence (Techniques of Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose). It's possible the reception, which continues to grow, can be divided into critics who are interested in Brooke-Rose's implementation of postmodern theory, and those who read her work as a record of the world of late-capitalist spectacle and diminishing literacy. I'll call these the first and second readings of her work.

At the extreme, the first would compare her with books like Derrida's Glas, which is an attempt to assemble a book out of what Derrida called "literature" and "philosophy." (See for example Marija Grech, "Re-Visions of the End: Christine Brooke-Rose and the Post-Literary Author(s)," Journal of Modern Literature, 2021.)

The second reading would compare Brook-Rose with other chroniclers of contemporary disaffection and alienation, such as the Don DeLillo of White Noise. (See for example Brian McHale's essay in Utterly Other Discourse, Dalkey, 1995.)

It's tricky to write a novel hoping it will embody a particular theory. Iris Murdoch was convincing on that point and aware of the shortfalls of the "philosophical novel." That doesn't mean there aren't interesting things to be said about how literature engages philosophy, as Lawrence's book shows. But the fascination of watching theory emerge from fiction, or embody itself in fiction, or speak as fiction, or become identical with fiction, doesn't correlate with the pleasures of attending to what is happening in the text. Derrida's Glas has a remarkably distant implied author, and that makes it an exceptionally cold text—a phenomenon that's not immediately connected to the many propositions it implies about coherence, "philosophy," and "literature." At the same time, it can be rewarding to read fiction as a sign of its social context, but it's not the same as reading what the text itself says. DeLillo is full of strange silences and oddly woven transitions that have little to do with how his work looks as a barometer of postmodern alienation.

I would like to propose a different reading of Amalgamemnon. I take my cue from Lawrence's observation that Brooke-Rose "explores opportunities to convert pain, through discipline, into fictional power." Pain—the narrator's, the implied author's, and in the end the reader's—comes in part from the difficult relation between the implied author's interest in theory (the first reading) and in part from the awareness that the narrator's life and values (as a classicist and expert in literature) are being swept away by capitalism, "hitech," "textermination," and general ignorance (the second reading). But most of the pain in Amalgamemnon comes directly from the narrator's horrible relation to her partner.

As Susan Hawkins observes, the the sexual dynamics of the narrator(s) and her partner(s) can be understood as a parody or criticism of "the Western obsesson with binarism and gendered voice" (that would be the first reading, and, in a feminist inflection, the second), but Brooke-Rose "never projects... anything close to a future of sexual equality" (p. 69). To me, that's so much understated that it's nearly evasive. The "sexual discourse" is desperately, hopelessly unhappy.

Early on there's a sex scene that takes place, apparently, during a half-page gap between paragraphs. When the text returns we have this:

"Soon he will come. There will occur mimecstacy even if millions of human cells remain unconvinced and race around all night on their multiplex business, transmitting coded information, most of it lost forever" (p. 15)

"Mimecstacy" is the narrator's acid word for feigned pleasure, in this case faked orgasm. The prefix mim- is attached to many words to indicate that she's pretending. She often "mimagrees" with her partner. The passag continues:

"Soon he will snore, in a stentorian sleep, a foreign body in bed. There will occur the blanket bodily transfer to the livingroom for a night of utterly other discourses that will crackle out of disturbances in the ionosphere into a minicircus of light upon a stage of say Herodotus and generate endless stepping-stones into the dark, the Phoenician kidnapping Io and the Greeks in Colchis carrying off the king's daughter Medea...
Tomorrow at breakfast Willy will pleased as punch bring out as the fruit of deep reflection the non-creativity of women look at music painting sculpture in history and I shall put on my postface and mimagree, unless I put on my preface and go through the routine of certain social factors such as disparagement from birth the lack of expectation not to mention facilities a womb of one's own a womb with a view an enormous womb and he won't like the countertone of it all, unless his eyes will be sexclaiming still what fun, it'll talk if you wind it up, as if disputation were proof of my commitment."

That is astonishingly difficult to read: the hatred builds up from the lack of sexual pleasure to the exile into the livingroom, and from there to the mansplaining at breakfast and her option to pretend to agree, and from there to the sarcastic puns on women's possibilities, on to the possibility that Willy will like what she says if he sees sex in it, and his way of thinking of her as an "it" that's there for "fun."

There are many passages like this. The hatred of the partner and the relationship is poisoned by the necessary castling: she keeps most of her classics learning to herself, but hatred would become self-hatred if she didn't pause occasionally in her "mimagreeing" to put on a hopeless defense. There are some especially vile exercises in self-effacing complicity on pp. 25, 45, and 140. I do not object to reports from a poisoned well of experience. What makes these especially challenging is that, in accord with the book's theme of repetition and redundancy (the narrator has been fired from her job as classicist), they keep coming back. Right at the end of the book there's this:

"Soon he will come. Soon he will sleep and snore, a foreign body in bed. There will occur the blanket bodily transfer to the livingroom for a night of utterly other discourses that will spark out of a minicircus of light upon a page of say Lucretius and generate endless sepping-stones into the dark...
Tomorrow at breakfast he will talk of this and that and then we shall walk down the street to the Job-Centre as usual." (p. 143)

In this final iteration, "this and that" stands for the painful exchange the narrator described in the first iteration. Nothing has changed except the narrator's need to explain that one possibility.

This is excruciating, unlike the apparently rewarding repetitions of November 18 in Solvej Balle's seven-volume On the Calculation of Volume or the harmless whimsy of Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis's "Groundhog Day." It can't be adequately understood as an example of postmodern theorizations of unoriginality and redundancy (the first reading) or feminist protest (the second reading).

For me the limit of reading Brooke-Rose, and the reason I will not be returning to her, is that she is not, in the end, mainly writing theory into fiction (the first reading) or bearing witness to contemporary dysphoria (the second reading). She is repeating, in the way Freud first described it, an unresolved trauma, and we are the witnesses. The authorial voice is in control of the individual passages but not the larger frame. Reading Brook-Rose I feel like a consulting psychiatrist, witnessing an endless display of trauma. It can be compelling, and it is seldom less than deeply affecting, but in the end all I can do is leave.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

This strange and difficult novel is the bitter rant of one Mira Enketei, a professor of literature and history who is about to be laid off. The culrpit, one way or another, is technology: “The programme cuts will one by one proceed apace, which will entail laying off paying off with luck all the teachers of dead languages like literature philosophy history, for who will want to know about ancient passions divine royal middle class or working in words and phrases and structures that will continue to spark out inside the techne that will soon be silenced by high technology?” Thus begins a rather cranky and hard to follow amalgamation of past and present, the modern and the ancient, sometimes back and forth all in one sentence. Heady stuff, very literary, but very hard to clearly see the narrative, such as it is.

However, the author repeatedly demonstrates an almost prophetic vision in her descriptions of the financial shenanigans of the ruling class. Written in 1984, she pointedly observes,

“At superhigh interests, which will increase with every debt consolidation, each time to be carefully rescheduled, and remeditated, risking, for mounting profits, the world's whole banking system which in its collapse would  plunge the people of all nations but especially the poor into deepest misery. Will those always be your moral imperatives? Kindly do not interrupt me, my dear sir. We'll pour in money, much of it will get deflected as usual into the pockets of your rulers and their advisers, not to mention everyone taking his cut all the way down the line. We'll continue to build roads, bridges, barrages, factories, mining enterprises, pipelines, schools, hospitals, and your rulers will continue to choose the showy and useless instead of the designs we'll spend much time and money in studying for your needs and climate, and they'll continue to prefabricate underdevelopment from birth onwards by insisting on retaining native traditions that will be good enough for the vast majority of the poor but not of course for them with their European educations and their palatial villas.”

And as the chaos slowly spreads,

“Meanwhile all the frontier posts will be watched by Extrapol, road blocks will be set up everywhere and all cars searched by international verifiers. Stunned sources close to financial sources will reveal what police sources will refuse to comment, shadow cabinets will shadowbox with ghost writers of sources close to the treasury and spokespersons of secret city sources will persistently deny persistent rumors from the huge headlines and the breastbeatings under which truth will be arraigned as traitor to reality. Then they will launch a great dehauntological campaign. Sociopsychideologists from all over the world will measure the breastbeatings and calculate their agnostications and tell us what to think of it.”

Stunningly prescient, for even though Thatcher was in office when this was written, and the savings and loan scandal was percolating up in the US, the author clearly had a line on where it was all going to end up.

The author’s vision was not limited to politics, however. The powerful displacement of technology was already on the her radar, years before the internet became a cultural force:

“Soon prophecies will come out of input as Garbage In, and we shall all become oracular computers, Draculas sucking endless information from the napetrough of a wavelength, murders holdups wars natural catastrophes coodaytahs space-launches daytaunts cultural items and sportspersons sailing around the world on an analogue. ... The sibyl will be sibling to the electronic game that will teach kids to count on nothing write on silicon and read off. Listen, I promise that the Persian booty will be divided amongst the troops, each man receiving his due. But I Pausanias as commanding general will if victorious have a right to ten of everything, women, horses, camels, gold pieces and other objects.”

So why does she finish this comment on the coming electronic life with a reference to Thucydides? Hard to say, and that’s the problem with the book: the author’s frequent references are mostly opaque. Still interesting, though, and a remarkable meditation on a world on the brink of vast change.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel was written in 1983 but is more relevant today than any current fiction I can think of. Written in the allusive, punning style that CBR used in her many "experimental" novels, it represents the consciousness of a female humanities academic facing the possibility of redundancy in a world of rising technobabble and political confusion. Europe ("will we make it?") is stalling on the path to unity, the world economy is weakening, the developing world is in chaos from Syria to Somalia, and terrorism is a rising, anti-western force. Our narrator merges her anxieties with the storehouse of mythology and language available, and recasts herself in various forms of Cassandra to the "Amalgememnon" who shifts between various manifestations of male power and complacency. The text crackles with contempt against misogyny in its various guises, and the awareness that even educated women have been inculcated with assumptions of inferiority and marginality. There are stories here, but they jerk around and metamorphosise without warning. Stories about terrorists who kidnap some important political figure; about the narrator's feuds with angry students and useless lovers; about secretive figures emerging out of the battlezones of Ethiopia and heading westward. The phrase "war on terror" *nearly* appears, but "hauntological" is definitely here, at least 10 years before Derrida used it. It's quit likely this is the source since CBR was friends with Helene Cixous; that's how she came to be a lecturer at Paris in the 80s. There was an excellent "Bookmark" BBC documentary about her in 1986, which gave a lot of time to "Amalgememnon", and I saw it reshown at a conference on her work. Maybe it will get a wider release if there is enough interest in a DVD about her, similar to the one the BFI put out on B.S.Johnson.

[Cestmoi]

i go into every brooke-rose book expecting to be blown away and she's never disappointed me but this is just a whole nother level. the sheer vitriol and despair, perfectly captured by the narrator's identification with cassandra, not simply ignored in prophecy (which btw a lot of this book is now just a list of things that happened since it was written) but silenced, unable to speak because of the knowledge of how pointless the speech of a woman in academia/academic circles can be. it's frantic, it's worddrunk, it's sad, it's just about as good as a book can get. it is criminal that brooke-rose is relegated to the realm of minor experimental writers of the late 20th century, rather than being hailed as one of the greatest prose stylists to have ever written in english

[Chris Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay I gave up at something like 35%. Should I review something I didn’t finish? Probably not. Should it count towards my reading target this year? Also probably a no. But fuck you, I suffered. One person’s sparkling wordplay is another’s incomprehensible tosh.

[Pierce Morton]

Wow, what a wild ride with a poignant conclusion, moving capture of feminist experience and the all-encompassing effects of capitalism. Full of puns and satire, a book I want to read again, maybe after reading some of the classics, I’m sure a lot went over my head!

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 3 out of 5]

че-т я сломался на ней. изобилие довольно примитивных словоигр как-то раздражает, а нытье о тяжелой женской доле что в античности, что нынче... ну в общем. клепать слова-бумажники - дело нехитрое, но когда их в каждой строке по пять, я бы решил, что это слишком. ну и я не большой поклонник рассуждений о смерти культуры и древней политики

[David]

Brooke-Rose continues her exploration of how a novel means (more so than what it means) and produces, with allusions, puns, genealogies, ads, and more, a playful meditation on how close to termination we all are, not merely to retirement age whether we want to be or not.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply one of the best novels I have ever read. Certainly in the top 3 or 4 post-Finnegans Wake novels of any nation's literature, and that IS the book which seems to usher in this one, yet this one so smart-female-quickminded-farflungimaginative-wondrous that its spare 144 pages makes you just go for the ride and say "oh my oh my oh my oh my."

Many good comments here on goodreads, but one I didn't see (and I apologize if I missed it) is that in this book that pins a very intelligent intellectual woman's mind (and all of culture at the same time) against the global-capitalist-technological universe of which we are in the midst, is that that mind, that of Mira Enketei, our speaker, our cosmonaut, is the equal in speed and interconnectedness of all of that technology. Not the equal, perhaps, but actually superior, even though, as a woman in the universe of this book, she simply is not valued for being such, not allowed for being what she is and what she might be.

Written in 1983, published 1984, this book predicts our trump-lying, chauvinist-idiot-choosing, lie and lap at the feet of global capitalism present, yet also predicts the downfall of this world, though not necessarily to something better. Read Cassandra, read Mira, read Brooke-Rose and be amazed, but also be scared. Be very scared. The truth is here.

[James Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A reread.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, let's start here. I hope you like neologisms. I hope you like puns. If you do not - truthfully, if either of the two bother you - then this is not for you. Really, you might as well just skip it.

Because, here's the thing - I get it. I understand how groan-worthy the thought of puns can be; I understand the conception of neologisms as a shortcut, a detour, an avoidance of actual weighty intellectual ideas and discourses chopped down to bite sized catchphrases.

But not here. Not in the hands of Christine Brooke-Rose - here the puns and neologisms are witty, and funny, and delightful - but, above all, they are intelligent. They are not shorthand maneuvers to evade the deep-diving eloquence necessary to elucidate weighty ideas. They are, instead, the crystallized, compacted forms of the ideas themselves.

That's not say they all work - some fall flat - but never fear, there will be many more along immediately to take your mind off the failures. And it's easy to do so when the successes and the laughs exceed the failures and the groans.

All this is wrapped around a novel that is staring at the encroaching - dehumanizing, de-intellectualizing, dedeveloping - onslaught of technological depersonalization. The fears of terrorism, of environmental change, of teetering, imminent, economic collapse and ruin.

It sounds familiar. I know.

One could call it prescient - it is - but one should also recognize that CBR has managed to capture cyclical, generational, unceasing worries in a way that is relevant and familiar 30 years after this book was written. So it is both capsular and oracular, which is, in itself, stunning.

Oh, and all that being said, it's still not as good as Textermination.

[j · Rating 3 out of 5]

The amazing gag of the story of an English professor being made redundant being something that only someone deeply studied could even possibly begin to fully understand -- and the way it will only, like everything else, become further murky and cryptic through the stamping and stomping of time's unforgiving march towards total annihilation. The novel is never really funny, and its hardly 'fun', and Brooke-Rose's wordplay can be as cloyingly cutesy as her points are elusive. But there's some powerfully abstract imagery in here, and it remains a conceptually remarkable extremity. The passages that detail the asphyxiating destruction of a woman by the stifling domination of her husband -- paralleled with the extinction of Amazonian tongue (because these women are able to learn the language of men, but the men are not equally willing) -- are existentially worrying to a rather enormously effective degree.

[The Droll Prince · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

Everything in this book boils down to its wordplay. Either you connect with CBRs puns or you don’t. I did not. They felt more than a little try hard to me. Although her supporters will cry that she is criminally underrated, there is perhaps the reality that she is accurately rated. There are many academics out there who try to smoke and mirrors their lack of talent for creative writing with an abundance of experiment and critical theory gobbledy-gook. CBR is just another one of those. It is my guess that some variant manuscript lies in the desk of every literature professor would be writer in the world. And that’s ok. Respect to her for shooting her shot. I came looking for literary greatness. But I must look elsewhere.

[mkfs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Says nothing, but in a very clever way. There is endless wordplay on display here, things like saying "figital disputer" instead of digital computer. Not nearly as bad as it sounds, often quite lyrical. In a year, though, I'm going to remember nothing about this novel.

[Geoffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brooke-Rose never ceases to amaze. It's not surprising or even unfair, really, that she's so little-known; this is only for a very specific kind of reader. But it's VERY MUCH for that reader.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exemplary of what Dalkey Archive says to my readership: protean wordlust steeped in lucid black humor.

[Mario Domínguez Parra · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most difficult books I have ever read. Completely worth its difficulty.

[J]

Please save me from my lack of knowledge