Subscript

by Christine Brooke-Rose

We are inside a pre-biotic chemical reaction some 4,500 million years ago, as it suddenly forms a membrane and becomes a prokaryot cell. Then a eukaryot cell. Then a multicellular organism. That's for the first chapter, and from the cell's viewpoint." "Christine Brooke-Rose blends her well-developed narratorless technique with a drastic extension of a very ancient convention, that of lending words to creatures that have none, indeed have no consciousness, to move steadily through evolution to the earliest human species, ending some 3,000 years before agriculture and some 8,000 years before the earliest writing appeared.

The novel begins thus:

"Zing! discharging through the glowsalties the pungent ammonia earthfarts in slithery clay and all the rest to make simple sweeties and sharpies and other stuffs. Dust out of vast crashes and currents now calmer as the crust thickens and all cools a bit.
Over many many forevers.
Waiting. Absorbing. Growing. Churning. Splitting.
Over and over."

Genres: British Literature

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

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

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

We may be, as some have argued since the days of the Greeks, a "language-animal". It is not just our "Being" which is at stake, but our declaration of that Being. We must speak ourselves in-to and out-ward. And yet…and yet... Is there a Code, a non-linguistic conversation that began far earlier than Man, that began in the first self-splitting cell? Is there a world of messages murmuring deep in blood and bone? We are our gene's expression after all, and our genes express millennia.

CBRs last book is, fittingly, an attempt to trace this tale, to write the journey from cell to homo-sapiens. It is, of course, impossible to use English words "truthfully" here, but there is what Herzog has called "ecstatic truth", and that can be, at the very least, gestured towards. She is, as we might expect, concerned with the female side of this journey, as she appears to side with those who see language as a fundamentally feminine process, one which contains ambiguities, echoes, birth. She may be right, though I see this as more an indication of our cultural legacy than the genetic.

CBR heavily researched this book, and discussed and revised it at length, its reach and its ambition is astounding. It is unique though, at times in the later sections, it did remind me of some strange cross between the Cosmicomics of Calvino and the Clan of the Cave Bear by Auel, with all of CBR's linguistic concerns thrown into the mix.

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Pre-review review found (after much searching online - for why are there no reviews anywhere of this wonderful book?) by Elizabeth Powers of Drew University, which I liked enough to decided to quote for all of you:

"It is always wise to have a look at the jacket blurb before climbing into a novel by Christine Brooke-Rose (b. 1926). Though this newest work by the prolific creator of experimental fiction has a linear narration, so to speak, a reader may wonder where it is heading. In Brooke-Rose's The Dear Deceit (1960), the narration went backward, from protagonist's funeral to early life. Subscript works forward, from incipient human life about 4,500 million years ago, as a cell fought its way to formation and unity out of a chemical reaction, to the likewise incipient attempts at agriculture fifty thousand short years ago. Got that?

Actually, this may be Brooke-Rose's most engaging work, despite its un-Aristotelian time scale. Every stage of development is accompanied by what can only be called an esthetic or a spiritual gain. Even in the initial membrane, efficiency reigns, but also ethics: despite "grumble grumble" about replication, despite protests ("Why change?"), the unit works together, to mutual advantage. The new cell doesn't sink into self-absorbed contentment with its achievement, for more and more cells force neighborliness on it and incite the march to complexity, with its constant creation and destruction.

It takes four billion years for the evolved organism to break from its "rootish attachment" at the bottom of the sea floor and, with new appendages, emerge from the water: "And the surface is astonishing. At first eyeful just above water, the body held up by the new swimflaps." And so it goes, in time-lapse evolution, as seas recede, landmasses rearrange themselves, ice ages come and go (in nineteen short chapters!). After another 115 million years, flatter faces with forward-facing eyes bring the world into sharper relief. In the next "warmturn" (forty-five million years later), the pronoun we is heard for the first time: "we can look into each other's eyes, and exchange meanings and deep appreciation of each other's beauty and being." Claws become nails, and, besides the pleasure of nitpicking, closeness keeps the tribe together in tenderness and "many frisky huglinks." And many, many "double double fingerfuls of coldandwarmturns" later, the Sturgeon Clan is debating whether the Other (Neanderthal) is human.

The process is orchestrated by "the code," seemingly a teleological principle. The organism "remembers" its origins (as in Plato's myth of the soul?) and is aware of its restlessness and developing difference from other creatures. The narrative voice is constantly worrying the question of origins, whether in the baby language with which the novel opens or in the fully formed speech of hunter-gatherers that stops short of self-conscious expression. (There is no first-person singular pronoun in this novel.) Yet, as the distance from origins increases, intelligence ("great head effort") replaces instinct. In Brooke-Rose's telling, as soon as humans become recognizably human, they start messing up the ecological balance. The final 40,000 years of the story also owe much to the insights of contemporary sexual politics. Subscript is nonetheless an impressive addition to Brooke-Rose's challenging oeuvre. "

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Squiggly lines on thin tree-fabric. One by one they form imprints on the eye-holes, sending tingling sensations through the headgear. And soon the fabric turns, and a whole sea of squiggles is waiting, long lines of a story locked in these cryptic symbols.

There is a story locked in our DNA, too, and Christine Brooke-Rose slowly unspools this thread, starting at the very dawn of life on earth. Stripped of any scientific vocabulary, the birth of single- and multi-celled organisms is stark in its physicality. Sweetie acid strands and salties and sharpies all suspended in the soft hot bubbly. As the splitting and replicating and gobbling progresses, "the code" takes on increasing significance but remains shrouded in mystery. Is it dictating evolution? Does it hold the memories of past ancestors? Brooke-Rose plays with these concepts, at times intimating that creatures are consciously aware of their own evolution, or look to the code for answers to the ecological crises that arise. Over time the code fades into obsolescence as clan stories are passed on through looks, sounds, words, language.

Christine Brooke-Rose is limited by the structure of her text, which cuts up millions of years into ten-page time-slices. As a result, disparate technological developments are grouped together into a single lifetime, stretching the limits of what is conceivably possible. It was very difficult for me to suspend my disbelief at these moments. When the first controlled use of fire and the early development of language were lumped together, the sceptic in me awoke. When the domestication of animals and the development of agriculture occurred simultaneously and with lightning speed, this sceptic's eyes were bugging out and I tried with all sincerity to quash all my knowledge of prehistoric archaeology. Perhaps my own background in anthropology did me a disservice, as the text did not mesh well with the theoretical apparatus lodged in my brain. Subscript is, of course, a work of fiction, so my niggling with points of chronology might be altogether beside the point of what Brooke-Rose is attempting with this innovative novel. So much of prehistory will forever remain a canvas for speculation, whether scientific or literary, that I would be wrong to fault Brooke-Rose for her freeform inventiveness.

The sentence structure itself evolves over the course of the text, mimicking the creatures' growing grasp of communication and language. Some of the earlier chapters suffered from these limitations, as pages upon pages of simple physical description can grow monotonous after a while. But the dearth of vocabulary also allows Christine Brooke-Rose to come up with some wonderfully evocative expressions, such as "the earth's skyroof", "fingernail distances" and "sexwant". Animals swim in the air and the sea growls and answers are wholly dark.

Any book that can successfully take the reader from inhabiting the earliest organism, a "centreless stickful of stuff", to contemplating questions as complex as the evolution of gender roles in early human societies is a grand achievement. Way more people need to read this author, and I'll be digging into the rest of her oeuvre in due course.

[Martin Koerner · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book so ambitious and audacious that it should by rights be unreadable or, at least, a real trawl but, in the hands of a genius (for although this is, thus far, the only book by CB-R that I've read, a genius I have decided she most surely is) Subscript, a story of evolution, or of the development of the idea of self, or language, a story of gender inequality, and of gathering humility from the past, is a beautifully written, hilarious novel of wonder and joy. A book which infected all my thoughts during and for a long while after reading it, and which I suspect will continue to do so. I have now ordered all her books to read as I fear she is becoming my favourite author. Read this book.

[David]

An insanely difficult book. As usual with CB-R, worth the effort. 2nd reading Not so insanely difficult. Not sure why I found it so complex the first time around. This time, especially, I enjoyed the wry references to aspects of human nature that do not seem to have changed in aeons--our capacity for shouting each other down instead of listening and general male undervaluing of anything female except breeding to name a couple.

[Geoffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book simultaneously 1) unlike anything the author had previously written; 2) unlike anything ELSE I'm aware of; and 3) really brilliant. And she published this at the age of seventy-six! Christine Brooke-Rose, I salute you.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the current average rating for this book, so 4.33/5 it is.

Some stretches of sensational prose and an incredibly gifted imagination. This staggeringly original and ambitious work is largely successful and a quick, fun read.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the ambition of the book and I may come back to it and like it more when I don't feel as ill as I have this week. For the moment, I have to admit this is my least favourite CBR novel, and I found a lot of it pretty tedious and unengaging. I wonder if it was her attempt at a crossover hit with the bestseller fantasy-history market, but I've never felt the slightest desire to read that stuff.

There are two big problems with the execution of this project. Although CBR undoubtedly did a lot of research to get the most up-to-date speculations about how the history of the world worked out, her development of them in fiction goes far away from anything mainstream. The big problem is with her notion of "the code", which seems to start out as the genome physically realised in DNA, but rapidly evolves (in this fiction) into something nearer to the Jungian collective unconscious, but then later it might even be nearer to the innate development schedule posited by the "intelligent design" movement, who were advertising themselves at the time this book was written, though aren't cited. Or perhaps there is extended argument for panpsychism within this book, something nearer to the cosmic metaphysics of Olaf Stapledon's fiction, and the same flimsiness of character and plot. But the latter does at least contain fantastical imagery, whereas CBR's narrative is tied to the solid Earth.

The second big problem is the style and the narrative voice. What is the consciousness narrating this story? Since it is never tied to any primitive level of grammar, why does the vocabulary use childish substitutes for words like "day"? The narrator does not observe (or ponder the philosophical mysteries of) how concepts of colour or subjectivity arise in the material world, when they presumably could not have been available at the primitive stages. When early human culture commences we do hear a snarky comment on stories being told by the successful tribes rather than the failures, but generally the models of development and progress here are just the terribly simplistic fables of the 17th century, which no modern psychologists or anthropologists could take seriously. Arthur C.Clarke was more convincing by just positing an alien monolith as the magic source of knowledge.

I can't help thinking this ought to have been more like a great synthesis of all CBR's experiments, to find the differing modes for the great varieties of consciousness. The early cells shoukld be as frgamentary as "Thru" and as distorted as "Out" or "Such", gradually coming in to focus. But maybe I'll be better disposed to it if I reread it more carefully in a few years time.