An Interview with Christine Brooke-Rose

Author(s): David Hayman, Keith Cohen, Christine Brooke-Rose

Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Winter, 1976), pp. 1-23
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1207554
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AN INTERVIEWWITH CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE*

Conducted by David Hayman and Keith Cohen

Christine Brooke-Rose is a British novelist who lives and works in

Paris. Her writing career, the early part of which includes works
she no longer wishes to stand by, took a sharp turn toward experi-
mentation with the publication of Out in 1964 by the Michael
Joseph press of London. Since then, with Such (1966) and
Between (1968), her novels have continued to press the con-
ventions of fiction and of language to their limits.
Bilingual from early childhood, Ms. Brooke-Rose demonstrates
a keen sensitivity to both the peculiar nuances of the English
language and the often perversely flattening effect of its cliches
and jargons. Her wit is nowhere more evident than in dialogue,
perhaps most spectacularly in Such, when a man of cosmic
proportions who is undergoing an interstellar operation converses
with a "girl-spy" out to help him. One is tempted to say that all
of Ms. Brooke-Rose's characters, like those of Henry James, speak
alike-but then, the goal in the creation of such odd beings is
certainly not typicality or verisimilitude but rather a choice and
somewhat bitter melange of high irony and comic cunning.
Her special gift is the ability to pinpoint and explore those
aspects of narrative language that are generally taken for granted
by other novelists. Her fictions abound, for example, with the
dubious assertiveness of negative statements, as when, in Between,
*The interview was conducted on November 17, 1974, at Madison,
Wisconsin. Questions asked by David Hayman will be indicated as Q. and those
by Keith Cohen as Q.* The Spring issue of Tri-Quarterly will contain a
section edited by David Hayman on writers "In the Wake of the Wake,"
which will include an extract from Christine Brooke-Rose's latest novel, Thru,
as well as an interview with the French novelist Maurice Roche.

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE I XVII,

"No one comes offering anything not ordered." Positive assertion
is, in fact, a rarity in this work. For every proposition, there exists
an alternate possibility. A sort of multiple-choice structure seems
to lie not far below the surface, so that "at any minute now some
bright or elderly sour no young and buxom chambermaid in black
and white. ... Or a smooth floor-steward in white" will place
something beside "the green or perhaps blue washbasin...."
The phantasmagoric opening of Between, like a jet age version
of the Proustian bedroom and place-name catalogues, seems built
around a series of simple substitution exercises, like those one
encounters in the audiovisual method of language-learning.
Somewhat in the manner of Robbe-Grillet's shifting perspectives
and deceptive dissolves, a curtain over an oval airline window acts
as pivot in the change of scenery by becoming a hotel room
curtain; a bathroom door doubles for both airplane and hotel
scenes.
Ms. Brooke-Rose's fascination for the odd surprises that
language can hold is not, of course, an accident. Though insisting
that she's only an "amateur," she is thoroughly immersed in both
structural and generative linguistics, the theories of which she
implements in her courses at the Universite de Paris VIII,
Vincennes. Ms. Brooke-Rose, one of the few foreign professors to
have received tenure in the tightly knit French university system,
stands out in the Anglo-American Department at Vincennes for the
rigor with which she deals with modern American fiction.
What is extraordinary about Christine Brooke-Rose in this
regard is that she was interested in linguistics long before it lit up
the Anglo-American literary scene and even before it became
fashionable in France. In 1958 she published A Grammar of
Metaphor (London: Secker and Warburg), which has since become
a widely known source book and standard reference work, pro-
viding a modern view of traditional rhetoric. More recently, she has
turned to Ezra Pound, for whose poetry she has a long-standing
passion. A ZBC of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1971),
commissioned as an introductory guide for students, turns out to
be a most exhilarating, funny, relevant, and intelligent rediscovery
of the Cantos in a manner that eschews the systematic "Life-and-
Works" approach. It provides instead a nonchronological,
nonthematic reading of the poetry and centers around basic
theoretical problems that are at once peculiar to this poetry in
their specific form and eminently applicable to modern poetry in
general.
2 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
 Educated at Oxford, one time book-reviewer for the Times
Literary Supplement, and now annual summer guest at the Pound
castle in Italy, Christine Brooke-Rose is a woman of rare
experience, penetrating intelligence, and disarming frankness. It
should not be surprising that the most outstanding characteristic of
her work is its mixture of discourses: scientific, legal, medical
jargons, advertising lingo, conferencese, English, French, German,
Spanish, Romanian, Russian, etc.-all these have their appointed
yet oddly nondelimited place in her novels. Nor should it be
surprising that her latest work, Thru, published this year by
Hamish Hamilton, goes further into idiolect by integrating the
writings of French theoreticians like Barthes, Greimas, and Kristeva
into the very texture of the novel. What is surprising is that her
novels have yet to find an American publisher. Thru, a text that,
as she explains, progressively destroys itself as it is read, may well
spark a long-deserved recognition, within all the English-speaking
world, of Christine Brooke-Rose's unique and rewarding talent.
Q. It seems to me that every one of your books begins with a
metaphor and that essentially what you are doing is working the
metaphor out into a kind of poetic vision, an anti-narrativevision.
Does it mean anything to you, that kind of a statement?
A. I'm interested that it strikes you this way. I worked on that,
as you know, in A Grammar of Metaphor, and I saw that in fact
language is capable of far more subtle ways of metaphoric
expression than the stock grammatical ways. You can do a lot with
subliminal structures and repetition, the way Pound does. You use
the same phrase in a new context and embedded in that new
context it acquires a completely different meaning. What I like
doing, what interests me particularly, is the fusion of different
discourses.
Q. By which you mean?
A. In Out for instance, because it reverses the color problem,
there is a great deal of chemical imagery; not only the chemistry
of color, but the chemistry of the human body, and sickness
comes into it. The whites are sick, useless, unreliable. They're
dying of this mysterious radiation disease. But I don't just use
chemistry simply as such; it becomes metaphoric in some way.
And then in Such, I did the same with astrophysics. So of course
it's part of the theme, if one can talk about a theme, but in
addition I use scientific laws literally. Let's take a very simple one,

BROOKE-ROSE I 3
say, weight consists of the attraction between two bodies. If you
transfer that into a sexual context it becomes a metaphor. Though
you are in fact using it literally, you see. And then I go on with
that in Thru, where the science in question becomes linguistics. So
the whole thing is much more self-reflexive, in that I will take a
law of linguistics and use it in exactly the same way as I use a law
of astrophysics in Such. But there is a whole game of mirrors going
on in Thru. The first sentence is "Through the driving mirror,"
with this idea of looking forward but actually looking back....

Q. This could be even more exciting actually than the earlier

images because you are in a sense working not only with two
systems, two distinct codes, but with two codes that interrelate.
A. Yes, it's what Jakobson calls the metalinguistic function, inter-
playing here with the message, or poetic function, as well as with
the phatic function. But the referential function is really reduced
to zero except when on purpose I create something realistic and
then destroy it. It's a text that is really constructing itself and then
destroying itself as it goes along. Well, a lot of people are writing
fiction about the writing of fiction, but this is not about the
writing of fiction (except that it's about the construction of a text,
if you like), it's about the fictionality of fiction: the fact that
these characters are just letters on a page. So I have two main
characters. It's never clear who speaks, you know, Barthes's great
question "qui parle," and I play a lot with that. It's never clear if
she is inventing him or he is inventing her or she is inventing him
inventing her. It could go on forever like the mirrors. But they don't
exist. In fact their names are anagrams of one another. And every-
thing is constantly destroyed; so whenever I slide into a realistic
scene, say a love scene or something like that, something happens
later to destroy it, to show that these are just words on a page.

Q. Now this is very different from what Robbe-Grillet is doing in

his latest fiction. In fact what he is doing is destroying content,
while here you're destroying the very texture of linguistic
experience, the allusive texture, in a sense.
A. Yes, all right, I see what you mean. The allusive texture,
that's a good phrase, but I'm not destroying the text by destroying
what's just happened. I'm creating a new text.

Q. You're playing with the habits of your reader who is willing

4 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
to accept any statement as being the preamble to another state-
ment of the same sort.
A. Yes, I'm playing with the reader's habit of trusting the reliable
narrator; in fact everything is unreliable in this text. At one point
it seems that students in a class of creative writing are writing this
text, and then other students come in and invade the class and all
that is destroyed. So I have all sorts of ways of destroying what I
have just created, and the whole thing disintegrates in the end,
with everybody mentioned in the novel, or merely alluded to-all
these people, the characters, however minor in the novel, just
maybe a first name or an allusion to Wallace Stevens or Derrida or
the Princesse de Cleves or Homer, or anyone. They are all listed in
alphabetical order and given (by the students) degrees of
presence-a very facile pun on the word "degree." You see what I
mean by untranslatable, this wouldn't go into French, you couldn't
have licence; one would have to do something else with it. Genette
talks about the degrees of presence of the narrator. So all these
people are awarded degrees of presence; they get gamma minuses
and beta pluses and so on which are totally arbitrary, though I
couldn't very well give someone like Derrida a delta minus. Every-
thing is really destroyed in the end. The text just disintegrates.
Originally it was called Thru because I wanted to go on with
what I was doing in Out, Such and Between. As it went along I
realized it was very different, and I wanted to mark this difference
so I called it Texttermination, which I loved. I thought it was a
wonderful title. It expressed exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately
after I handed it in, my publisher wrote to me and said, "Do you
know that William Burroughs has brought out," or "is bringing
out," I forget, "a novel called Textterminator."' So I couldn't use
that and I went back to Thru and in fact it works quite well,
because to go back to your point about the metaphor, it's true
that my titles are metaphorical, in that sense, although they're
prepositions, or just small link words. There is this idea in Between
of a simultaneous translator being between languages, between
ideas, between cities. She's never in one place, going from congress
to congress and so on. And the idea of Thru is also polysemic, as
the French would say. There are a lot of ideas in the "through":
of course "through the mirror," and "I'm through," or "the novel
is through." You can take it in all sorts of senses, which apply to
the text, so it still works. I would rather have called it Text-
lAn error since Burroughs' book is called Exterminator.

BROOKE-ROSE 1 5
termination, but in the end I am quite happy with Thru. It keeps
the series of monosyllabic titles.

Q.* I wanted to go back to a couple of things you've said. First of

all, the idea that in Thru you're now showing the generation and
then the destruction of the text. Isn't there a sense in which
already in Between you're doing a kind of self-generating text?
And I would think of it more in terms of metonymy than in terms
of metaphor. That is, you use a phrase and embed it in a context,
and then the phrase returns and is only meaningful as already read
in that context. So that you have a series of organ stops in a sense,
which have these chords connected with them but you only use
the one note. Is that the same thing you're doing in Thru, or is it
a special thing in Between?
A. No, I think I do it here too. It's rather difficult to answer
such a specific question, because I haven't seen the manuscript
now for over a year. It's been with the publisher so long because
of printing problems. So I don't remember that kind of thing, but
I'm not all that happy about this fashionable distinction between
metonymy and metaphor. I know that Jakobson started it, the
syntagmatic and the paradigmatic. But I find that in effect even in
Jakobson, what Jakobson does is to show what he calls the
subliminal structures, which are metaphoric. If you have anything
that is a repetition, a rhyme or a parallel structure, this of course
is metonymic, and of course it's syntagmatic, but it can create a
metaphor, which is not immediately visible as you read it.
Curiously enough this was Riffaterre's attack on Jakobson,
saying that Jakobson was seeing structures in these poems he
analyzes, which are simply not visible. That he's seeing a lot of
significance in parallel grammatical structures, for instance, whereas
Riffaterre insists that there are certain structures that are non-
significant in a poem, and moreover not part of the poetic
function if the reader just can't see them. I've countered Riffaterre
in an essay on Jakobson, trying to apply it to Pound's "Usura
Canto" where I take up this whole question. I show that, first of
all, Jakobson's whole point is that these structures are subliminal,
and that if you're going to start arguing about what does the
reader see or who is allowed to see what, there is no end to it. In
that case Riffaterre's own type of analysis is ruled out of court,
since he sees a lot of things that other people haven't seen before.
The stand is illogical.
Second, I quote Barthes who actually posed that very
6 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
question in Communications 11, on "Le vraisemblable" where he
takes description, traditional description: "Is it significant, or is it
just there for the effect of the real?" He attacks the traditional
idea that there is nonsignificance in the text. He doesn't really
answer it there, but in S/Z, he does. He says, "Tout signifie,"
everything signifies. Therefore-sorry, this is a long way around to
answer your question-I don't really like this metonymy/metaphor
distinction, because I think that metonymy is itself a metaphor.
You can see that in Aristotle, the examples he gives. His
distinction is illogical, as I show in my book on metaphor.
Anything in fact is a metaphor, any replacement is a metaphor,
any way of looking at something on a different level is metaphoric.
Maybe that is a rather wide use of the term metaphor.

Q. Well you have the example of the sign on the Greek truck, to
back you up; it is moving from thing to thing, or place to place.
A. Yes, precisely. When you see a Greek truck with the word
"metaphor," which of course means transport, and it strikes you in
one way, this, too, is the fusion of discourses. This is why I'm
obliged to use different languages-this is what I do in Between.
You see a word like lecheria in Spanish-I think that does actually
come in Between-it means "milkshop" in Spanish, but of course
you read it in English as "lechery." And Pound was onto this ages
ago, saying it can't be all in one language. This is why he puts
these languages into the Cantos because something would come off
in Italian, and not come off in English. He actually plays on this
sometimes.
Q.* I also wanted to ask a question about mixture of discourses,
because in Between I had the sense that the verisimilitude of this
mixture of discourses is accounted for by the consciousness of the
heroine. And that in a sense, because she is a simultaneous trans-
lator, you get this color of advertising, a color of philosophy, a
color of modern science, a color of conferences-because that's her
job. Is that job deceptive, really? Is it more the mixture of
discourses that's at the root of the generation of the text?
A. I think probably in Between it's all filtered through one
justifying consciousness, but in Thru I really tried to get away
from that. There is no consciousness that the reader is aware of.
There is no narrator except in the sense that someone is writing
the text, me, the implied author, or call it who you will. But I

BROOKE-ROSE 1 7
shift the whole time. It's never clear what consciousness this is
going through. At one point there is a conversation between
Jacques le Fataliste and his master, and it seems that it is the
master who is writing this novel. And the whole thing just goes
haywire all the time, so that there is no consciousness that these
various discourses are being filtered through.

Q. Now, what is the reader doing in this kind of a context? What is

his role? Robbe-Grillet talks about the reader having to make the
text. You seem to be doing something very similar in obliging the
reader to create shapes.
A. I think that now this is accepted; that is, since the nouveau
roman, the reader cannot just be passive-he has to rewrite the text
as part of his reading or as the French call it, lecture/ecriture. I
don't think I'm doing anything new there. I want the reader to
participate, which does mean of course that I'm not writing what
Barthes calls the "readable text," as opposed to the "writable
text." Or I think now that S/Z has come out in English they've
translated that "readerly" and "writerly." And in fact the word
"readable" has almost acquired a pejorative sense in English. It's
readable, i.e., it's bad. It is this idea of never allowing the stock
response to materialize in fact. The moment the reader feels
secure, you just make him think again. And this is what reading is,
surely.

Q. Now in traditional writing, against which, of course, all this is

a rebellion, the reader is sure. He's cued in. He knows his decorum;
he follows that decorum. There's delight in seeing things fulfilled.
Unless it's a farcical context in which the delight is in seeing things
broken. Now, you're not writing farce. You're writing occasionally
humorously, but you are not writing farcically.
A. What do you mean occasionally?

Q. Well, frequently.
A. Always.

Q. Okay. Good. I didn't want to push you there.

A. One thing I have against the French school is, on the whole-I
don't want to mention any names-but on the whole there is very
little humor.

8 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
Q. Shall we mention names?

A. No. I can't get by without humor. I mean the whole idea of

transgression. Let's put it this way: to mention Barthes again, any
action will lead to an expectation; there is no departure without
an arrival, in very simple terms. Any transgression of that is what
he calls a "scandal." Now, I'm trying to do this the whole time,
almost within a sentence. In Between, I have sentences which, say,
will go on syntactically in a correct manner, but by the end of the
sentence you are elsewhere in place or time. Now this is not the
correct "proairetique," as Barthes calls his code of action: the
action leading to another action. And of course in very minor ways
it's transgressed all the time. You cannot describe every action, as
he points out. "The lady laughs." Well, somewhere she has to stop
laughing, but the author is going to skip that, he's not going to say
every end of every action. So this is, in fairly easy terms, this idea
of the safety, the security of the reader, what he expects. Every
narrator arouses an expectation. So you can't destroy that
altogether, otherwise there is no narrative. But in fact there is very
little narrative in present-day novels-you know, the jettisoning of
plot, and so on, but you still arouse an expectation. It may be a
poetic expectation.

Q.* The arousing of this kind of expectation is essentially the

mechanism of humor according to Freud, humor based on an
expectation which is not fulfilled, and the releasing of it is in
laughter. And I think it's interesting that Barthes calls it scandal,
which essentially throws it into a code of law. We Anglo-Saxons
prefer to think of it in Freudian terms as a tension which is
created in the mind, and which must be economically dealt with
through laughter. And it seems to me that is very much what
you're doing. That kind of calling out for, arousing, an expectation
and the reaction being laughter.
A. Yes, you see, in a way, it all goes back, in the end, to the
fundamental disbelief in words, which we all suffer from with
propaganda, publicity, and so on. And words very often simply
make me laugh. You have just mentioned "we Anglo-Saxons." I
can't hear that word without thinking of what the French go on
about: les francophones-and I always say les anglo-saxophones-
because whatever the word is, I just want to play with it and
create something new.

BROOKE-ROSE I 9
Q.* And yet you never read Joyce till 1969.
A. I know, this is incredible. I resisted Joyce for years, I thought
he was a sacred cow. Perhaps I was frightened, perhaps I just
didn't want to be influenced by him. My great influences-if we
can talk of influences, because one absorbs so much-but let's say
the big influences for me have been Pound and Beckett.

Q. Could you tell us more about that? How is Pound an

influence on you? How would you describe the way he helped
shape your career as a writer?
A. It's very difficult because it's so indirect. I mean when I was
writing a lot about Pound, mostly anonymously for the Times
Literary Supplement, I wasn't known as a Poundian. You see I'm
very frightened of cults. I didn't want to join the Pound cult and I
expect that was my attitude toward Joyce too. So, I remained
anonymous for a long time, but eventually I did write this book
on Pound. And I disconnected the two things. There were my
novels and there was my criticism. And in fact I am even now split
down the middle, teaching and criticism on the one hand, and
writing on the other. But of course everything one does is an
influence and I think perhaps what excited me most about Pound
was not only this idea of craftsmanship, but that he worked a
whole lifetime to change the language. As he says, not only a
language to use, but a language to think in. And it took him a long
time. I've been a slow developer too, so this is partly what
interests me in Pound-that it took him so long in a way to reach
what he did in the Cantos. But there are a lot of things, like this
technique of repetition and echoes that I mentioned, that must
have influenced me without my realizing it. Things coming back in
a different context with little additions and of course this
perfection in the use of languages, this passionate concern with
language.
It may be perhaps an old-fashioned idea, that the poets are
the preservers of language. I don't know who is going to preserve
language now. It's not the poets, because certainly all around us
language is just falling to pieces. I don't think the poet has this
power anymore, but this passionate concern with language, I've
always had it. I studied philology. I'm passionately involved in
linguistics now. Language is my material, just as color is the artist's
material.
Q. That's an important statement, actually, at least from my

10 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
point of view. So much of our criticism, until very recently, has
insisted upon precisely what the material is not, the signified. Here
you're doing a double thing, you're thinking like a critic and in a
sense writing out of that thought.
A. Yes, probably Thru is the first book where the two streams
come together, where the split personality-me as a writer, and me
as a critic and someone interested in linguistic analysis and so
on-do come together. But, since my attitude is also a humorous
one, in the novel I turn it upside down. In a way I poke fun at it,
though as a critic I take it seriously. You see the whole attitude is
very ambiguous.

Q. But are both attitudes there?

A. Oh, yes.

Q. So you have the serious and the comic interacting.

A. This is, you see, what I like about both Pound and Beckett so
much, this high seriousness and humor in both; and I think this is
English and not French. The French have always had this very long
traditional division: tragedy/comedy-they used to frown on Shake-
speare-and you couldn't possibly mix the two. They're
getting out of that now, but we have always had it, we've always
mixed the two. I think it was Hemingway who said "a solemn
writer is always a bloody owl" or something. I couldn't really ever
take my writing seriously in that sense. I mean it is fun to me, as
well as being serious. I don't feel that I have a tremendous message
and that I'm going to change the world through my writing.

Q. Then perhaps, like Lewis Carroll, you're inviting the reader to

play the game. Is Lewis Carroll someone who interests you by the
way?
A. Yes, very much. With the whole mirror image, of course. By
now, with Lacan, it's a sort of banality. In fact, the real theme in
Thru is castration, but I don't suppose anyone would see that.
Well, they might because sometimes it is made clear. But if you
like, it is the whole idea of language as castration. The moment we
utter a sentence, we're leaving out a lot. I mean this idea-I don't
know how to translate le corps morcele-but this idea that we are
just taking bits and pieces of reality, which is what language does
automatically. We're doing a decoupage of reality and all the more
BROOKE-ROSE I 11
so when we write a novel or a poem or anything else. The very act
of using language is a castration.

Q. In a sense you are creating an event which is a mimesis of the

castration which is a non-event because it is verbal.
A. Yes, perhaps you could put it that way. Let's say a mimesis
of mimesis. I don't know. I don't want to get on to the question
of mimesis because then we'll get on to reality.

Q. Because you aren't. You have rejected the whole referential

aspect of the novel.
A. Well, I'm not alone in doing that.
Q.* I'm content with sticking with something you've said earlier
about language breaking up or breaking down all around us. Has the
fragmented discontinuous universe that Pound presents been
influential on you?
A. Oh, certainly. But you see what also interests me about Pound
is the contradiction: the fragmentariness and this attempt to make
everything cohere through juxtaposition. And he creates
metaphors, well that's the ideogram as well, but he creates
metaphors by juxtaposing say two separate sentences, one of which
might have occurred before. So in any case you get it in a new
context, but juxtaposed to that sentence it creates a link, and this
has influenced me an enormous amount-what you can do with
juxtaposition-and I do that all the time in Thru. Suddenly a
sentence will come back, and I just jam it down in the new
context and it sparks, you see.

Q.* I understand then what you mean when you say that its
origin is metonymic, but in the new context it's a metaphor.
Q. We spoke earlier of Joyce. You obviously could not have been
influenced by him, yet there is a curious sense in which you are
doing things which Joyce might have done or would have approved
of doing. Like, for example, the mixing of languages the way you
do, but of course Pound does that too. Sollers is excited because
Joyce is mixing languages, creating a kind of international idiom,
refusing boundaries, borders. And in a sense you're testifying to
the same, well, the polyglot's lust, perhaps, for the perfect
expression in many languages, or the perfect language for the many
expressions.

12 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
A. Well, nothing is new under the sun, and of course, I think it
was Butor who said we are all influenced by Joyce, even if we've
never read him. It wasn't till after I published Between in '68 that
I got around to reading Joyce. I went to Helene Cixous' courses in
Vincennes and got very excited and I read a lot about him,
including your book. I can't say that has been a direct influence at
all, but obviously I'm influenced, ideas float. You told me that
you have written an article "In the Wake of the Wake," and I
think it's true that after someone has done something to the
language, poets or writers can no longer write in the old way. This
is not a progressist view of literature. I'm against that idea.

Q. Darwinian....
A. Well, you know Auerbach does this in his book on mimesis.
He takes passages from Homer right up to Virginia Woolf, and it's
a fascinating book, but it is based on an idea that literature
progresses and gets better and better. Well, of course that's absurd.
That means we couldn't read the Chanson de Roland and we must
read Virginia Woolf and that would be rather a pity. So obviously
in a sense I was excited and also, let's say my vanity, that side of
the author, was sad to find that Joyce had gone way beyond what
I was trying to do in many ways, but you see one doesn't really
think in these terms. The pleasure is so great. And when I started
reading Finnegans Wake I could only just bow down in admiration.
And had I read Finnegans Wake or tried to read it at twenty, I just
would have made nothing out of it. But coming to him so much
later, I really understood because I had been doing, not the same
thing, but I had been working on the same problems. I don't think
I'm doing the same thing as Joyce, and when I'm compared to
Joyce, it always makes me annoyed because I don't feel it's
relevant. But I suppose there is influence, however indirect. I
wouldn't put him among my direct influences, because I just didn't
read him till after I had written my last published novel.

Q. Had you read Mallarme?

A. Oh, yes, very early. I was very interested in Mallarme.
Q. Un coup de des?
A. Very much so. In fact one of my very first publications,
which I am quite ashamed of, I think I was twenty, was written in
a French review. I was still an undergraduate at Oxford, and I

BROOKE-ROSE I 13
wrote a very naive thing called "La syntaxe et le symbolisme dans
la poesie de Hopkins," and compared what Hopkins was trying to
do to language with Mallarmein Un coup de des. I'm sure if I read
it today I would find it completely absurd, but I have from the
start been interested in this obsession the poet has with language.

Q.* What about Beckett? You mentioned him as a direct in-

fluence, and he is still his own man and very different from Joyce.
How would you categorize that influence?
A. It's a very different kind of influence, very different from that
of Pound. With Pound it is almost a technical influence; with
Beckett it is much more, let us say, an attitude-nihilistic, if
you like, that is the word that has been stuck on Beckett-but in
the end it is the same problem. They just don't seem to have
anything in common and yet there is this obstinate humor in the
face of despair, which is what I think one reviewer said about my
books. And with this I was very pleased. I usually hate these labels
and comparisons and so on. But there is this saving grace of humor
and of course the flowing syntax, which is something I have tried
to develop very much in my novels, unlike Pound, who tends to
write in staccato sentences. I will do juxtapositions but within a
very long sentence, you see, and then maybe have a short sentence
juxtaposed, but I like Beckett's sheer flow. This kind of covering
of the universe with a layer of language.

Q. Creating in a sense a universe with a layer of language, isn't

he? It is a beautiful contradiction in Beckett that he denies the
possibility of any stability and yet creates something so stable as a
text.
A. Absolutely, and sometimes he plays with other languages too,
though not very much. I don't know if you saw that at the back
of Watt there are all the things that he didn't put into the novel
and there is a very beautiful sentence where he quotes Goethe,
"die Erde hat mich wieder," but he puts "die Merde hat mich
wieder." This is the kind of thing I like.

Q. It sounds like Maurice Roche though, doesn't it? It is possible

to say, "Oh well, there are echoes of the new novel in your work
or your work parallels in certain respects the new novel," but from
your description of Thru, I think mostly of someone like Roche,
who is perhaps the only one of these people who really has a sense

14 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
of humor and who really also is a polyglot; he is deeply engaged
by language and by literary form, and perfectly aware of what he
is doing and very careful, a real craftsman, the way he goes to the
printer ....
A. Yes, it's interesting that you should mention him because
although I was very obviously influenced by the nouveau roman
when it came out, especially Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, I don't
think they have influenced me really a lot. But when I discovered
Maurice Roche and I met him in Paris, it was an eblouissement.
And precisely what you don't get in these others, at least not so
startlingly, is this linguistic humor and this attitude toward
language as a material which is in itself not only pliable and
touchable, if you like, graphic, but funny. All the typographic
things he uses like signs from the Guide Michelin, and all the other
things he does, which he has no difficulty publishing in France.
And you get that in life, you see, all the time. You see two
objects next to each other or just something incongruous-say a
sailor on a bicycle or something-this strikes me as funny. Or once
when I was climbing a Pyrenee and I suddenly saw a Pekinese dog;
well obviously some people had come up by car and there was this
dog, but it just seemed out of place. And you get this all the time
in life, events so concrete in that sense, that you get these weird
juxtapositions. Or like when the Nixon pardon was announced on
television and I happened to be watching it, and it said CBS
special, you know, complete and free pardon, etc. and then, on the
local station, "this program is presented to you by X, the
deodorant that kills domestic odors." I just collapsed with
laughter. I don't know whether the publicity people are aware of
this power of language to do exactly the opposite from what it is
supposed to do. I'm sure the ad was preprogrammed. Maybe the
announcer thought it was funny, but these things happen, the
coincidences in life. So that rather than doing what language is
supposed to do, that bit of publicity, it does exactly the opposite.
You know, one whiff and it's clean, and of course with the Nixon
pardon this is exactly what happened.
Q. What was supposed to happen?
A. You see? The expectation again. Now this occurs all the time.
In conversations. In dreams. In everything you do. This is the way
I live, I live language like that. So that is what gets into my novels.
All right, people will say, "How do you expect your reader to

BROOKE-ROSE I 15
follow this?" But I'm surprised that readers find this difficult.
They all live like this.

Q. Good. Go on. More about the reader. What is happening to

your reader? He enters rather a curious kind of state.
A. My reader is what they call the implied reader. Or you, I
don't know who threw out this phrase.

Q. It isn't my invention. It's something which of course has been

in the air. This is the narrataire of Genette, the virtual reader.
A. I mean, it parallels Booth's implied author, and I think this is
something that the critics just will have to get straight, that the
implied author is not the author, and the implied reader, the
encoded reader if you prefer, is not the individual reader. But on a
purely practical level, writing is a very solitary occupation; you do
not in fact think of the reader. I know this from long practice,
even when I was in literary journalism. Whether I was writing a
novel that was going to appear in a year's time, or whether I was
writing an article for the Observer. There you are in your little
room and you have no contact with anyone. You can tear up,
scrub, find a reference book. In a way it's an artificial activity. It's
not like talking to people. It's certainly not like teaching, where
you are in contact with students and you know at once when you
lose them. Teaching is more like being an actor, and this is why
turning to teaching was so good for me. It got me out of my ivory
tower, if you like. But I know when I'm writing I have no contact
with whoever is going to read that book in a year's time. I don't
think of that reader. The reader is someone imaginary in my head.
Now admittedly, there are times when I have a particular person in
mind. I think, oh, he's going to like that sentence or she's going to
like this bit. So my implied reader may be a composite of certain
friends, but it is not the reader out there who is going to read the
book. I think the reader is me, as I write.

Q. That is what I was going to say. I had this discussion with

Christopher Middleton, years ago, and I believe what I said to him
was "Well, you have an audience. You may not be writing for
someone, but you are hearing what you write and you may be
writing for yourself. So essentially you are your own reader."
A. Yes, but this has been very much misunderstood, you see, as
solipsism, and the writer turned in on himself and narcissism and

16 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
so on. There is an element of narcissism in writing. In fact, it has
been called intellectual masturbation. Okay, fine, I accept all that,
but it's not as simple as that. It's not just solipsism, there is a
reader out there. I suppose it's what Lacan calls l'autre, but maybe
also l'Autre. It is a mirror thing. The whole thing about language is
a mirror.

Q. But you are shaping. The text shapes a reader.

A. Yes, ideally yes. But it might be a reader, say in five years'
time or in a century. I mean, I'm not talking about me now, I'm
not talking about my posterity. You know as Oscar Wilde said,
"Why should I do anything for posterity, posterity has never done
anything for me." So, this isn't me thinking how great I am, but
this reader is not a real person. He exists, but he is in my mind.

Q. Okay, but he is shaped by the text, isn't he? He is also in

your text.
A. Absolutely. He has to be, if he is reading the text at all. He is
bound to be in the text. Any text addresses someone, any message,
as Charles C. Pierce said; the sign is addressed to someone
and creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or
perhaps a barely developed sign. So any sign, whatever it is, is
addressed to someone. So even our furniture, whatever language
that we express ourselves through, clothes, or the highway code, or
anything, is addressed to someone. The moment you put words on
a page or utter a sentence, it's addressed to someone, even if you
are talking to yourself. When I'm talking to myself, I say "tu,"
you know. I talk to myself in French now-that's the terrible
thing-and I say, "Ah, qu'est-ce que tu es bete!" And sometimes
it's je: "J'ai oublie ma clef," or something like that. So it hovers
between tu and je and that is the same person. And I think that
the reader is that, it's a je/tu.

Q. Which is beautiful as a French pun by the way. ["I kill."]

A. Oh, I didn't see that. That is beautiful. That's very nice.
Thank you.

Q.* A phrase comes to mind that I collected from Between, which

says that languages love each other behind their own facade. Can
the languages of furniture and road signs and images as well as

BROOKE-ROSE I 17
linguistic or phonological languages somehow love each other as
well?
A. That's a difficult question. Yes, I suppose so. If natural
languages can-and that's my phrase, a metaphor after all-then by
definition any other language can-in semiotic terms: all systems of
communication, of which language is only one. The same will
apply to all of them. I can imagine, I suppose, the binary languages
of the computers making love to each other.

Q. It's a thought for the future.

Q.* Another label that might be thrust upon you, in comparison
with Beckett, might have to do with not at all a humorous aspect
in the world of despair, but sometimes the frightening experience
that I have as a reader of being closed in, not having a way out, a
claustrophobic experience as in the interior of an airplane.
A. Are you talking about my books or any book?

Q.* Well, certainly in Beckett and there is an element of that in

yours.
A. Yes, I hadn't thought of that. In Between, yes, there are these
hotel rooms and the planes, but there is also this constant way
out. Into language let's say, all this language of conferences and
congresses that just go on and nothing is done at all. People just
talk and nobody does anything. Of course, it's a despair but it's
also a freedom and after all man is a social animal and we do have
to communicate. We can't just stay within our shells. I don't want
to get on to this thing of noncommunication, because it's such a
banality, but in the end this is the problem, isn't it? What Barthes
calls "l'inoperable." But there is this claustrophobic element in
Beckett, and yet this extraordinary feeling of space. In How It Is
you see this man crawling in the mud. All right, he is sort of
imprisoned there but there is tremendous space around him. And
similarly, in these planes and so on, after all, the plane is flying
and the earth is below and all this is described and there is both. If
you like, there is a play between claustrophobia and agoraphobia.

Q.* Yes. What about the use of negation, negative declaration in

literary discourse, which seems to me a very particular aspect of
literary discourse as opposed to cinematic or any other visual
discourse? I find this in Between often when no one comes into

18 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
the room, no one brings mineral water. Would you comment on
that?

Q. Excuse me, is that negation or is that both?

A. Well, it is a negative statement, but it is still a statement.

Q. But it is a statement of someone being there and someone not

being there at the same time.
A. Yes, again it is a question of expectation, which has been
built up to before. So, the expectation is of someone coming in
and no one coming in.

Q. So you have the act and you don't have it. You have the act
and you erase it.
Q.* Giving and taking away at the same time.
Q. Yes, which is a constant, a poetic ploy, of course. You have it
in all poetry.
A. In fact, now that you mention it, though I didn't realize that
it came into Between, I see that I must have unconsciously wanted
to pursue this in Thru because I'm finding every possible way that
language has of creating something in language, say a character,
which is just made up of the words on the page, and then
destroying that also with words on the page of something else.
You create another event which destroys the previous event. These
are statements, it's not just categorically denying. Sometimes, of
course, I will also categorically deny, but mostly I do this through
action and through sliding into something else and through puns
and metaphors and all the other ways that language has of destroy-
ing the expected. I don't think you are right in saying that the
other arts can't do this, but they have to do it in a different way.

Q. Another code?
A. Well it has to be syntagmatic anyway you see, so that a film,
which is syntagmatic, can still bring in an image which will at least
partly contradict a previous one. Now painting cannot do this,
except-and painters have long been trying to do this-by destroy-
ing the whole idea of representation. And painting is always way
ahead of literature. But language you see is extraordinary in the
sense that it has words for nonexistent things, such as "unicorn"

BROOKE-ROSE I 19
and so on. And philosophers have played around with this a lot,
you know, it has been kicking around a long time.
But words are so strange, unlike color or images and maybe
musical tones. They have a history. There is so much contained in
a word. You can play with etymology. For instance, this division
between form and content that the critics keep going on about,
along with the linguists. It's a long, long dispute. But if you take
any word describing a genre you will find that it reflects either the
"what is being told" or the "how it is being told"; it is either the
content or the form, and more often the form. Even the word
fable: you'd think this reflects the content, something untrue.
Actually it goes back to "fari," to speak. Epic, "epos" used to
mean word. Take any word like that, you will always find that
actually there are many, many more on the side of form. Poetry
means making. Tragedy was originally the goat song, the goat
sacrifice, the how, not the what. Then of course it slides into the
what. Elegy on the contrary was a what-word, a dirge, but it slides
into the how when you talk about the elegiac meter. It becomes a
particular meter. But practically all genre-words: tale goes back to
"talu," which is a number, the idea of exposing in detail, exposing
in the French sense, you know what I mean, telling one detail
after the other. You just take any word, even novel-roman means
these tales are told in the romance language. Novel is the new, the
what, and you get that reflected in say, newspaper which has both.
There is the news and there is the paper, the material, and now we
talk about a paper, "Have you read the paper today? The only
other word that refers to the material itself is film, which is simply
the "pellicule." It's the matter.

Q.* It's only in English that that confusion exists.

A. Yes, but cinema refers to the movement. It's the how. You
take any word of genre and you always find this duality. You
cannot split them.

Q.* Motion picture puts them together.

A. How?

Q.* You have the picture itself and the motion in it.
A. Oh, yes, but picture comes from "pingere," like pigment, the
matter. In a text you do have a signified and signifier, I mean you
can't get away from that. But to go back to negation, I think

20 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
language is particularly suited for this negating function. You're
right, it's probably much more difficult to do in the visual arts,
and I would say perhaps almost impossible to do in music.

Q.* I think in the visual arts, it has only been done very
recently-I'd say since Robbe-Grillet in the movies. But Lessing
already talks about the negating function in poetry.
A. Yes, the only art that is really not syntagmatic is painting or
sculpture. It is paradigmatic but static and you can see it all at
once or you can see little bits at a time.

Q. What you do with a painting is see it this way-it's static but

it becomes syntagmatic on the viewing.
A. Oh, I don't mean it's static as opposed to dynamic; what I
meant is it is not one thing after another. You can look at it like
that, but it is a whole, which you can also look at all at once.
That's obvious. All the other arts are one thing after another, so
that if you want to deny something that has gone before, you've
got to do it after. And language is obviously particularly suited to
that.

Q.* Although, if you say "the maid did not come into the room,"
you do have affirmation and denial at the same time, and it's simul-
taneous.
A. Yes, because you are stating "the maid" and you're stating
"come" and you're stating "the room" and you're stating "did."
In fact it's interesting that you should bring that up, because in
the structural analysis I did of Pound's "Usura Canto," I dis-
covered a fascinating play of negative and positive. There are two
different types of negative and positive and I had to mark them in
different ways in the analysis. One is the grammatical negative and
grammatical positive, or non-negative if you like, and the other is
the evaluative positive and negative, in other words, pejorative and
non-pejorative, or approving. But he plays with these four things in
such a way that very often the pejorative is expressed in positive
terms in grammar and the approval is expressed in negative terms
in grammar. For instance, that whole passage "Pietro Lombardo
came not by Usura" and all these artists who came not by Usura.
This is Pound approving. These are the historical exceptions, you
see. And it's a block in the middle and it's the only one that does
this, to mark the exceptions.
BROOKE-ROSE I 21
 And then of course you get the approval expressed with the
grammatical positive, and the disapproval expressed with the
grammatical negative, "With Usura hath no man a house of good
stone," but within this very complex game you also get differences
in the positioning of the negative. "With Usura hath no man," it's
man who is being denied. In other words, Usura: no man. Manhood
is impossible with Usura. But elsewhere it will be the verb which is
denied. "Wool comes not to market." It's the coming which is
denied, and he plays with that all the time, where he puts his
negative, whether it's the adjective, or the verb, or the subject, or
the object which is being denied. It is apparently a static poem,
repetitive and rhetorical, a sort of litany. But underneath it is
absolutely dynamic, and this is what I was trying to say at the
beginning about subliminal structures. This is apparently a non-
metaphorical poem. There are very few metaphors in it; it's
apparently just a series of litany-like statements, like an exorcism,
if you like, an anti-litany. Alvarez has criticized it for being static.
There is no argument in it, he says. Pound is just repeating the
same thing. In fact, the subliminal structures are extremely
dynamic. There is this tension all the time between different types
of language and metaphoric statements being created in the deep
structure, as the transformational grammarians would say. The
deep structure is metaphoric, but the surface structure is not.

Q. And is this something which you feel that you are doing
yourself in say Between or Thru?
A. I think I am, but this is difficult to say because I am so split
down the middle as a critic and a writer. I wouldn't be conscious
of this as a writer. You see, when I'm writing I go away; I can
only write in the summer, and I just forget all this theory. I teach
theory. Fine. I can take a poem or novel and show how it
functions and what the structures are. But if I'm writing I don't
think of this. It becomes a game. On the contrary, I poke fun at
it.

Q. Yet, you know what you're doing?

A. I know what I'm doing, in the sense that I will then take
these scientific statements and make metaphors out of them, in
exactly the same way as I did with astrophysics. Then linguistics
becomes something to play with.

22 I CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
Q.* I noticed in your description of the Pound poem that, besides
litany, there's a lot of catalogue in it. Whether you were conscious
of it or not when you were writing Between, I also notice a lot of
catalogue in it. Somehow the two, the negating statements and the
cataloguing, I'm not exactly sure how, but somehow they seem
connected. Is that possible?
A. Yes, perhaps. Let's say that this passion for language that I
tried to talk about earlier, is probably the nearest I get to religion,
to religious feeling, the feeling of the sacred. And the sacred will in
fact catalogue reality and give names or even non-names to God
and so on. Maybe it sounds blasphemous, but I don't think it is,
because after all, you know, God is the Logos and so on. God is
and is not. If I have any religion it is that; I mean, this is the
material of life.

Q. You are fulfilling Mallarme's prophecy [that art will take the
place of religion].
A. I wouldn't dare.

BROOKE-ROSE I 23