‘THE IMMENSITY OF CONFRONTABLE SELVES’: THE ‘SPLIT SUBJECT’ AND MULTIPLE IDENTITIES IN THE EXPERIMENTAL NOVELS OF CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE STEPHANIE JONES ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY 01/03/2016 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to extend my deepest thanks to my supervisor Professor Tim Woods, who has shown constant, unwavering support for the project, and read it multiple times with uncommon care. I would also like to thank Professor Peter Barry whose comments on my written work and presentations have always inspired much considered thought. I am extremely grateful to Dr. Luke Thurston for his translation of the letters between Hélène Cixous and Christine Brooke-Rose from the French. I am also greatly indebted to Dr. Will Slocombe whose bravery in teaching Brooke-Rose’s fiction should be held directly responsible for the inspiration for this project. I should also like to extend my thanks to my fellow colleagues in the English and Creative Writing department at Aberystwyth University. I am also deeply indebted to the Harry Ransom Centre of Research, the location of the Christine Brooke-Rose archive, and the John Rylands Library that holds the Carcanet archive, and all the staff that work in both institutions. Their guidance in the archives and support for the project has been deeply valued. Special thanks go to Michael Schmidt OBE for allowing me to access the Carcanet archive and Jean Michel Rabaté and Ali Smith for their encouragement throughout my studies of Christine Brooke-Rose, and their contributions to the project. For my family LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS These abbreviations will appear embedded within the text in parentheses, with page numbers. Full references can be found in the bibliography. BROOKE-ROSE’S WORK AGOM – A Grammar of Metaphor (1958) Out – Out (1964) Such – Such (1966) Between – Between (1968) Go – Go When You See the Green Man Walking (1970) A ZBC – A ZBC of Ezra Pound (1971) Thru – Thru (1975) RotU – A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981) Amal – Amalgamemnon (1984) Xor – Xorandor (1986) Verb – Verbivore (1990) Text – Textermination (1991) STT – Stories, Theories and Things (1991) Remake – Remake (1996) Next – Next (1998) Subscript – Subscript (1999) IA – Invisible Author (2002) LEO – Life, End Of (2006) REGULARLY CITED CRITICS Birch – Sarah Birch, Christine Brooke Rose and Contemporary Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) Canepari-Labib – Michela Canepari-Labib, Word Worlds: Language, Identity and Reality in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002) White – Glyn White, Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in Prose Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) Lawrence – Karen Lawrence, Techniques for Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose (Ohio, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2010) Bartha – Noemi Alice Bartha, Christine Brooke-Rose: The Chameleonic Text Between Self- Reflexivity and Narrative Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 INFLUENCES AND INSPIRATIONS 16 BLETCHLEY PARK 18 POST-WAR BRITAIN: 1945 - 21 EZRA POUND AND THE PENCHANT FOR DIFFICULTY 33 BECKETT AND THE SCHIZOPHRENIC TEXT 37 TEXTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS: BECKETT CONT. ALAIN, ROBBE-GRILLET AND NATHALIE SARRAUTE 46 CHAPTER 2 ‘STEPPING ALONGSIDE MYSELF’: STRUCTURE AND REFLECTIONS OF THE ‘OTHER SELF’ 56 THRU (1975): THE PROCESS 59 TEXTERMINATION (1991): THE PROCESS REVISITED 86 CHAPTER 3 TOWARDS A FEMALE LANGUAGE: THE LANGUAGE OF ‘THE OTHER’ 95 THE HISTORICAL FEMALE EXPERIMENTER OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 97 BETWEEN (1968) AND SUBSCRIPT (1999): TRANSLATION, IMITATION LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 103 AMALGAMEMNON (1984): PROPHESY AND POSSESSION 117 NEXT (1998) AND THE DISPOSSESSED ‘OTHER’ 132 CHAPTER 4 ANXIETY AND THREAT OF THE ‘OTHER’: OUT (1964) AND THE ‘INTERCOM QUARTET’ 140 THE THREAT OF WAR IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 141 BROOKE-ROSE’S SCIENCE FICTION: THE FEAR OF THE ‘OTHER’ 145 INVADING MEDIA: THE BATTLE FOR SURVIVAL AND THE FEAR OF EXTINCTION 163 THE ‘DISSOLUTION OF CHARACTER’: MIRA ENKETEI 169 CHAPTER 5 SELF-CONFRONTATION: BROOKE-ROSE’S FINAL CHAPTER 180 CB-R: THE CRITIC 188 THE ‘AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL’: REMAKE (1996) 196 A MEMOIR: LIFE, END OF (2006) 204 AFTERWORD: THE CONSPICUOUS ABSENCE OF CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE 216 APPENDICES 235 BIBLIOGRAPHY 236 1 INTRODUCTION Christine Brooke-Rose ‘Once upon a time there is a little girl born in French, of an English father and a Swiss mother born of an American father and Anglo-Swiss mother […] That’s the first split.’ (Remake, p. 10) Christine Brooke-Rose was an extraordinary woman. There are a number of remarkable periods in her life including working at Bletchley Park during the Second World War as well as working at the experimental university, Paris VIII at Vincennes during the socio- political tumult of 1968. Her dual nationality as a French and British citizen, her bilingualism, and her split residence between England and France positioned her at a rare vantage point to be able to comment upon these strange and significant moments in the twentieth century from multiple perspectives. Taking her biographical experiences into account, it is no surprise that the theme of multiple identities and ‘split selves’ figured prominently in Christine Brooke-Rose’s life and work. The skeletal biographical details of her life have been fairly well documented in the years since her death. However, before 2012, the reader had only been able to find the somewhat clinical, but informative gobbets of information about the author’s life regurgitated in such companion texts as World Authors 1950-1970 (1975), The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009) and Encyclopaedia of British Writers, 19th and 20th Centuries (2009). With the distribution of multiple obituaries in a number of major broadsheet newspapers, and the publication of a few important and considered academic studies of her writing over the past twenty years (Birch, 1994; Canepari-Labib, 2002; Lawrence, 2010; Bartha, 2014), certain dark, neglected corners of her life and work have been illuminated, presenting her as a significant and valuable exponent of twentieth-century literature. When reading these texts that summarise Brooke-Rose’s life and work, the reader is struck by one particular point that all the pieces seem to have in common: the alienation of the author from Britain and British literary culture during her life. In the course of this thesis, I will argue that this alienation is directly due to her perpetually ‘split’ or ‘doubled’ existence as a polyglot, a dual national, and her career as both creative writer and critic who published exclusively in England and America in English, 2 despite living abroad in France. This study will focus on these concepts of ‘splitting’ and ‘alienation’ in the work of Brooke-Rose, rigorously interrogating the themes of isolation, difference and ‘otherness’ in her writing. It will discuss how Brooke-Rose’s preoccupation with alienation manifests itself in her works in different ways, and how at times, the subject of ‘otherness’ is reversed, transforming the ‘self’ into the ‘other’. Her writing consistently focuses upon the narrativization of the self as a ‘spilt subject’, thereby generating self-aware and paradoxical texts. I will argue that this focus upon the ‘split subject’ is Brooke-Rose’s way of commenting upon the human condition post-World War II, where the individual and ‘the self’ exist in a fragmentary state, in many versions or forms, rather than as one unified whole. Existing criticism has noted of Brooke-Rose’s preoccupation with the search for identity (Bartha, 2014) and her use of multiple narrators and discourses (Birch, 1991; Canepari Labib, 2002; Lawrence, 2010). However, this study’s central contention is that Brooke-Rose is not searching for a unified identity, seeking to create a whole out of the fragments of the self, but rather, that her novels describe her own identity as being split and fragmented, which in turn comments upon the state of the nation post-Second World War. As an author and critic, Brooke-Rose harboured a ‘deep prejudice’ (IA, p. 53) against the inclusion of autobiographical or biographical information in both fiction and analyses. While both Sarah Birch and Karen Lawrence do touch on some of Brooke-Rose’s biographical details in order to contextualise their own studies, the general trend of criticism of her work tends to distance the author from the text. While this seems apt, considering Brooke-Rose’s interests in structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory, I believe that it is this division that has led to her works being seen as isolated and peripheral pieces that have little or no relation to British experimental literature of the twentieth century. This assertion is largely due to her inheritance and emulation of techniques from American and Irish modernist writers as well as the French experiments epitomised by the nouveau roman. I regard Brooke-Rose’s personal experiences as fundamental to her focus upon the ‘split subject’, and this study will review periods from her biographical life in detail, in an effort to explain the sense of alienation and foreignness within her work. Moreover, I will argue that Brooke-Rose’s preoccupation with the ‘split subject’ and the alienation of the ‘other self’, positions her as directly engaging with British and Irish literature of the twentieth century, specifically the writers of modernism. 3 Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva in 1923, the second daughter to an American-Swiss mother, Evelyn Blanche Brooke, and a British father, Alfred Northbrook Rose. She learned English, French and German simultaneously during her childhood, and moved often between Switzerland and Brussels where she received her early schooling until the age of thirteen, when the family relocated to Folkestone in Kent. She stayed here until 1940 when she and her mother moved to Liverpool, where she found employment in the offices above Lloyds Bank. This employment was only temporary as Brooke-Rose quickly joined-up to the war effort, becoming an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in 1941.