Thru

by Christine Brooke-Rose

Genres: Novels

164 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

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]

How literary critics make ridiculously pompous arses of themselves:

"To start with, the book is persistently about narrative [duh!], and the more embracing topics on linguistics and literary theory [tsk tsk], all approached with characteristically French emphases [bloody Frogs, at it again]. It is crammed [really, I like my theory like weak tea] with allusions to "texts," [funny that], "semiotics," [should it be obscuriotics?] Chomsky [who?], Tristram Shandy [dratted digressions!], I Promessi Sposi [hyper messy suppose I? What is this? Desperanto spelling?], and phrases like "narrative matrix" [double duh!] and "linearity of the text"; Frank Kermode himself secures a mention [not half jealous are we?]. Part of its material is none other than French academic talk about all those matters [and that's just so passe], and the figure of Christine Brooke-Rose in her actual French academic function [as opposed to her imagined one?]--as a teacher at Vincennes [invited, no less, by Hélène Cixous]--is constantly before us [lucky dude!]. This identity is established yet more firmly by the Frenchly chic photograph of the writer on the cover, her foulard arranged to display "Saint Laurent" in the V of her dress [no sexist or xenophobic commentary there, by gov?!?!]. The trouble here is partly the [Verbi]voraciousness of "semiotics" itself...I also doubt if it is appropriate to speak of this work as a "narrative" except by courtesy [demonstrably lacking]."

Michael "sour grapes" Mason, Times Literary Supplement July 1975. So much for English wit and appreciation for the ironic.

In contrast, Sylvere Monod, writing in Etudes anglaises, 1976, noting the text was not without its challenges, concluded:

"Thru is a novel of great riches. A deployment of intelligence, humour, and culture as offered here by Christine Brooke-Rose is a pleasure. Her book can be defined variously: to borrow some of its marvellous expressions, it is possible to see beyond the "syntagmatrics" to a "textasy" and especially "a grammar of narrative." An astounding and alluring work."

[Gregsamsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

There should be placards saying: Danger. You are now entering the Metalinguistic Zone.
All access forbidden except for Prepared Consumers with special permits from the Authorities.
M-phatically.

The above is a quote from this novel-about- itself, and that last word is a pun on one of Roman Jakobson's function categories in his Structuralist theory of communication: Phatic. These are the utterances whose functions have little relationship to their own content, such as when you say something like "Whassup?" to make contact, initiate dialog, rather than literally ask any question. Of course there are people who haven't clued into this convention so when you ask them "Hey how are you?" in a phatic sense, expecting the conventional verbal hand to be shook with "Fine and you?" instead you get a comprehensive account of their health/financial/familial/whatever problems. Jakobson, as far as I know, never fully handled this phenomenon, which points to a larger problem with Structuralist categories and so-called "special cases" but for which there is no reason to explore further since Jacques Derrida has already lived, done that, and died. Consider this paragraph on the PHATIC as my just sayin' howdy.

You know how some people think that a review should tell you what a book is actually about?

You know, like the characters, setting, and plot (CSP)? Please tell those people about this review because it totally is one.

You know how, especially at night, you can look into a rear-view mirror and see a ghost reflection above the mainmirror one? This book opens (setting!) with one such focus on extra eyes in the mirror and how the upper ghost-pair peers from a forehead just below the hairline.

You know: LIKE THE EYES OF THE MIND (or, perhaps, a disjointed or illusory point-of-view)

You know how you can see something a million times and not have your aestheic membranes thumped one tiny bit and then you read about something like that and all the other times suddenly seem retroactively vibrated? Naturally it doesn't happen as quickly as that query, nor nearly as present-ly, but in more of a backseat echo sine-wave kinda way, as is what occurs when this good lookin', smart, and totally built dude named Marco (or maybe Stavro, or probably Armel--names undergo Nabokovian acronymic mischief) is driving along, tapping his toe to the typical kind of stuff that flies through your brain when you're driving home a piece of undergraduate tail (Veronica? Or Larissa?), nailing her place in the literal seating chart of a classroom audience to benefit later from the mental plus you're gonna add lecture-wise and which always seems so suave while driving that nothing could mar it (but its own performance). Meanwhile she shares erotic dreams starring an obese magician.

You know how university first-years, er, freshmen can be, even when they aren't -men? There's no reason you necessarily should, and I often bristle and/or hate it when writers make such presumptions, but I'm all lumpen like that, and I only mention it because suchlike presumptions are wholly/part of what we get of character and setting and plot (CSP) in THRU, and this review will stick like Dabur brand Rose-Syrup to character, setting, and plot (CSP). Meaning:

you know, there shall be no attempts to upstage CBR's "SYN TAG MA TRICKS" (actual quote) with my own, nor any amateur aping of her style and oh damn there I go talking about things that aren't CSP. My apologies. Won't happen again.

You know dude feels he's in over his head in two ways: thinking above his settled viewpoints while fielding classroom questions charged with potential new opinions, he wants to strive further than he should reach in public but (structured) public striving is what he's employed for so there is a THRUness shoot that pins his ability to utter. He might disprove his previous proofs upon which rests his academic cred. He is institutionally forbidden to be inspired.

You know already that in lieu of inspiration he inspires undergrads to illicit intimacy not counting on the fact that they, also, are complex subjectivities, despite the measures they take in class to appear otherwise. Such mind-wandering flashbacks juice up otherwise unendurable faculty meetings, gatherings so tedious that right in your face you deserve an utterly Aristotelian breakdown of all categories of Classical Oratory. BAM. A whole page. It is with no bragadoccio or even amplificatio that I claim to know a tad about Classical Oratory, never having learned much Classical Greek or Latin, just a little sample of everything from inventio to refutatio and most of the in- betweentios. One part of me was like cool while eleven more democratic of a dozen were like o come on.

You know that PLOTWISE it can't for no reason seem like a horribly Old School thing to rock among prof types who teach sections such as "The Semiology of Mass Media" and "The Novel as Intentional Object" and you may be one of those people who thought that last one means an object someone meant to make, and then again you might not be. CBR is coy about where her sympathies lie (and lie, I think, they do) but there is one instance that's reason to fear they are a touch reactionary. Since it is fiction one is ever on shifty ground regarding an author's beliefs. Occasionally satirists have their objects of satire "accidentally" reveal themselves as ventriloquist dummies who should only speak the dummy spiel but ineptly opine an accident, here at a faculty meeting, so I'll let you be the judge as to whether this is clumsy multi-leveled multi-cultural ironic leftism during the fractious faculty meeting, or something else; this defense, after a minority member has attempted to speak: "...let him finish for heaven's sake permit the disaffected elements to exercise such an inordinate influence in relation to their numbers."

Inordinate?

You know, that one word is a burr in the general spirit of the sentence, so does a clear-eyed reader register complicated irony or just note a common mis-step among parodists who accidentally place their own terms in targeted mouths?

You know what? After reading around on them innernets, one can fairly claim that this novel contains far more writing about itself than is to be found elsewhere. I'm reading it as the fourth part of Omnibus and was surprised (delighted?) to find that few people speak of it in terms describing it as opposed to terms by which people used it as an opportunity to write about themselves or their pet projects. But hey, why not? I wanna do it too: I was this old library copy's very first reader of thru; proof: several of the pages' edges at the bottom had not been cut. They were fused, one page to the next. I had to break into Folioville using a RAZOR, one I normally reserve for scoring the tops of my baked goods so that they can puff and flower without being prematurely restricted by a hardening crust. I know by now you're thinking I must have abandoned my idea of sticking to CSP but this is a lie spread by people who think mastery of a text is proven with random quotes from, or random blather imitating, such. You are not in such hands here, dahling. I'm your obedient chauffeur directing your gaze to the leftward window framing hi-rise modernist Scrabblesque skyline acrostics, yeah, right over there. No, higher.



        Please
      dOn't
      use
        that
        Mirror,
        O
        darling,
      we
      are
        nearly there, and
        i'm
        still
        trying to
      park



You know that optical illusion illustration that is either two heads in profile facing one another, or an urn, depending on what you view as the negative space? Fancy folk describe this sort of two-things-at-once image as having "plurisignificance" (which sounds like a parodist's neologism) and this is the function of the acrostics that occasionally break up the action (such as it is), along with words arranged in hoops and loops that mirror/echo the book's initial image: reflections of eyes and headlights in a rear-view mirror. These typographic antics fuse voices working at cross purposes and open the book up into a multi-vocal chattering crowd. Its members: faculty at a uni department meeting dramatizing the late-60s-early-70s campus turmoil and theory vs. traditionalism fights (and side-fights about fucking around with students); creative writing pupils with questions and comments and real-or-imagined professorial retorts; student-authored texts and professorial handwritten marginal comments whose triteness strives to match that which they critique; subjects in pain-tinged flashbacks, mostly sexual, through which a professor/student carnal exercise in impropriety undergoes all sorts of strange mutations, whereby one lover is replaced with another as if "lover" were a constant role-function and its resident subjects easily switched out ("...within the grammar of that narrative the roles can be interchanged and textasy multiplied").

You know some personal axe-grinding is going on as we follow one paternalist prof through his student affairs until one such tutored liason graduates and does some professing herself. The nature of their relationship threatens to flip but the narrator can't seem to decide on the outcome. I should say narratorS, because by now the story is being structured by plurisignificant others: students in a creative writing class ("What are you talking about Ali this is the text we are creating it verbally we are the text we do not exist either we are a pack of lies dreamt up by the unreliable narrator in love with the zeroist author in love with himself but absent in the nature of things, an etherised unauthorised other"). They are collaborating on a novel, probably this novel, each oscillating between these two poles as they author one another: 1) inscribing themselves in the narrative thru imposition of their own opinions and agendas, and 2) effacing themselves in an attempt to free the narrative voice from tradition's prescribed spot. Since two of the characters in the story are or may be the class professor, this is either an attempt to take the trope of the unreliable narrator much further into outright obliteration, or just an example of supremely injudicious pedagogy.

You know it is likely the former as CBR sprinkles the proceedings with references to and paraphrasure from a fleet of high-lit ships and their 60s/70s theory barnacles, in one case that most Shandian of ships, Tristam itself:

"So that today we shall try to work out a typology of digressive utterance by a narrator like Tristam Shandy who inscribes himself into his text as subject struggling with various levels of his own discourse."

You know--if you pay attention to signposts like the above quote--what is going to happen even if you can't tell what's going on ("modern novels can be so disorientating despite the fact that through this chaotic freedom in the network of possibilities we fill the air with noises, twiddle along the timetable from left to right and back, from one disembodied voice to another"), or even if you might read the above quote and go "despite?!"

I know you are probably tired of every paragraph beginning with "you know," especially in a review of a book which challenges that assumption on every page. During this surgical removal of a novel's normal organs (narrator, subject, temporality, structure) the only anesthetic is the occasional passage thru which the book comments on itself in ways ranging from the playfully poetic ("Go forth and multiply the voices until you reach the undeicidable [sic!] even in some psychoasthmatic [sick?] amateur castrate who cannot therefore sing the part") to the purely polemic ("There's no more private property in writing, the author is dead, the spokesman, the porte-parole, the tale-bearer, off with his head").

So then what is left? What of CSP? The book's emptying of character, setting, and plot's usual contents while leaving their function-places intact puts them at the surface level of the book itself. The main character is textuality; the way any other author molds, dresses, psychologizes, and puts a hairstyle on a protagonist before s/he undergoes "development," CBR does with/to the very words on the page as a thing.

The setting is hostile: it is the novel and all its conventions. There is a sub-setting, or a faux-setting, or her feint-setting, which is a university literature program (naturally), but this is merely the shadow of the novel (in novelty, novelness) which is where the whole thing is set. This novel's setting is itself.

Plot? While fragmentary realist flashes do momentarily strobe on seemingly-real characters doing seemingly-real things, the placeholder props of protagonist, antagonist, and even (or especially) narrator are so systematically deconstructed that it is this process itself which must suffice if we are to say this book has a plot, which I do. There is an overarching development where we see a very put-upon textuality struggle against reader expectations, wildly rebelling at first, but later acquiescing to a peaceful new order once the narrator/tyrant has been vanquished, or at least subsumed, by our hero, textuality.

A valiant experiment; about as successful as it could be, all things given, and many many things not.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

The final novel of the quartet is her most typographically ambitious work, bearing all manner of acrostic and spirally puzzles, many inscrutable to those not immersed up to their eyeballs in literary theory, but some crackable. Susan Birch from Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction sums it up:

“With Thru Brooke-Rose turns from the discourses of culture in the wide sense of the term to the discourse of ‘high’ culture. While Between explores the discursive role of women from a semiotic perspective and isolates characteristically female forms of language-use which hold the potential for critical examination of our contemporary cultural ‘mythologies,’ the object-discourses on which tactics used in Between are evident in this novel, but transposed on to the self-reflexive plane of metafiction they become magnified, hence more overt. Thru subverts the literary theory which has as its premiss that every narrative contains a meaning and that this meaning can be accounted for in terms of a universal ‘elementary structure of signification’ which posits woman as an object of exchange between men. The novel does to structuralist theories of meaning what [Luce] Irigaray does to Freud’s theory of feminine sexuality: it mimics them, draws out their implications, and ultimately demonstrates their limitations, using the structures they propose as metaphors for personal relations.” (p89)

[Whitaker · Rating 2 out of 5]

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950
Jackson Pollock

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5 - I'm admittedly missing a lot from this. Will brush up on what Birch had to say so I can piece a few more things together.

Easily the most challenging book I've read since the Wake.

[Jim Elkins]

When graphics and typography don't match the theme

The review is on my "Writing with Images" site.