A Relation between Theory and Machinic Imagination

This is Brooke-Rose's last book. Reviewers routinely remark on the differences between it and her earlier, more experimental novels. What matters, I think, is what it reveals about the psychology of the narrators in the other books: their forms of attention and their preferred subjects. Those traits are hers aside from her concerns with linguistics or the postmodern novel (as in "Thru"), and also aside from the chosen subjects and narratives of those earlier books.

Brooke-Rose's narrator (at first implicitly, later more carelessly and openly, the author herself) is full of the concerns that can be found in other books written during the authors' last years. She complains, as Gaddis, Howard Brodkey, and many others have, about the specifics of her medical condition, her burning feet, her fluctuating blood pressure, her strategies for keeping her balance. Not all of this is specific to this book: she has often had an intense preoccupation with the observable and describable quirks of the body and its appearances. The confusing double reflection that sometimes appears in a car's rear-view mirror, which recurs throughout the novel "Thru," is an example: it's a minute, exacting physical description of a particular part of the body (eyes and eyebrows).

This sort of attention seems empirically exacting, and I think she wants it taken that way; but it is better described as compulsively machinic: it's closer to an autistic presentation than a realist novelist's delight in detail. She thinks of the body as a sort of machine, susceptible to exacting perspectival and formal description: our bodies are humorous, quirky things, comprised of detachable parts and pieces, each of which needs to be put into precise prose. There is little, in Brooke-Rose, of the body's gestalt, of the body's motion or its elegance: it's a construction of pieces, an ultimately unpleasant, tenuously constructed machine.

The narrator (author) like to report on conversations and encounters from a certain distance, as if the author and narrator wasn't fully present. When she's fully present -- when the texture and objects of conversation return -- it's often a matter of facts and figures. She is interested in verifiable information, reports, summaries, things that she can use to solve questions she has, or things that fill in details she hadn't known. Other than that she's skeptical of friends and their motives and uses, and in general she keeps away from people in different ways, sometimes by simply cutting them off.

I'm trying, in the compass of a few paragraphs, to sketch a picture of Brooke-Rose the author, as well as her narrators: like her other novels, "Life, End of" is dry because it is skeptical of human contact; scientific because it fears everything inexact, including emotions; and cold or unpersuaded when it comes to the body. She thrives on theories, texts, references, links, lists, catalogs, inquiries, problems and solutions, puzzles. She loves dissecting, listing, analyzing, diagramming, parsing. (This is especially clear in "Thru," which revels in, and supposedly critiques, some French poststructuralist theory.) That personality drives her work, and gives it both its power and its obstinate love of fragmentation.

Nathan "N.R." Gaddis's review on Goodreads has the following lines, riffing on Brooke-Rose's repeated use of "T.F.," meaning True Friend, and "O.P.," which might mean Other People, or Opinionated People:

"Opinion People with their talking over and on top of. Who’s crotchety here? You probably know all the crotchety old men with all their crotchety old books, their last books. I know that Gaddis guy did one. Collapsing and decaying. It comes. Just let me tell you, 'Life, End of' has its rights but more it has its obligation upon you, True Friend, Reader. Sympathy, empathy? Gelassenheit, better."

Gelassenheit, usually translated "releasement," is one of the late Heidegger's invented words. It means, roughly, the capacity to let people and things exist in their mode of being. Personally, I don't find much of Heidegger's nearly mystical, abstract acceptance in 'Life, End of': I find anger and dissatisfaction, tempered by physical and mental inability. There is, often, a lack of both sympathy and empathy, but it's because the narrator's at the end of her tether, not because she finds a way to accept what is.

Aged writer struggles to accept and cope with debilitating illness. Much of the focus is on loss of independence and shifting nature of interpersonal relationships relative to the infirmity. The practicalities of living disabled on one's own (with some help) are woven together with philosophical and social commentary on old age and disability. Metafictional meanderings take flight, as microscope zooms in and out from character to writer. Bursting with CB-R's beloved word play, including a bonanza of puns and neologisms, this is a short book, but rich in content and imagery. ( )

'Decybernisation? Degenetisation? But no, the correct euphemism now is post-, new and therefore better: post-human for instance, heard the other day. But that will at once be confused with posthumous, as of course it should be, human becoming humus.' - 64

Christine Brooke-Rose is either author or narrator or character or all three of this here book at the end of a line of books at the end of a line of years of her life. And odd it is that I have chosen it to be the beginning of my journey with her, but cest-la-vie, and I happily amble into what-did-I-expect: which is something quite difficult. From reputation.

But it's not. It's meditative and playful, but not really difficult, that is, after my eyes adjusted to her very particularly homegrown vocabulary of not-always-explained looping words: O.P.s, pillars of fire, T.F.s, Polly, etc. But then also it seemed very familiar, the made-up words, the blurring of fiction and autobiography, the looking back at a life, put me very much in mind of Helene Cixous's [b:book|17028457|Double Oblivion of the Ourang-Outang|Hélène Cixous|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1356002739s/17028457.jpg|23344907] which I recently fell in love with.

Then again, any comparison to [a:HC|88674|Hélène Cixous|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1216968096p2/88674.jpg] would not be fair, as I am quite smitten with her (interestingly, HC has a blurb for CBR's [b:Omnibus|438040|The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus Four Novels Out, Such, Between, Thru|Christine Brooke-Rose|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328841644s/438040.jpg|426901] at the end of this book).

The other thing it put me in mind of was Beckett, his characters who sit in a state of vegetative decay, unable to move, with their minds slowly rotting away at obsessive thoughts. Here, though, is a critical difference. The author/narrator/character still has a young brain, it's only the body that's decayed. There is none of Beckett's bleak minimalism either. In a way, her version is more real, and thus maybe more scary.

All these streaking snippets of facts occur only because of long familiarity, long love of language and its bones and flesh, and how it grows from Primitive Human to Old High Human to Middle High Human to Modern Low Inhuman. - 13

In this confined state, she thinks about the impotence of [r]age (and the consequences of annulment), the looping images in the media, the political situation around the world, globalization, her friends, her past apartments, languages, narrative conventions, and of course her physical condition. She also imagines faces on the rocks that sit outside her window, and hallucinates old dwelling-places, as would probably happen if you stay in the same place for too long.

Writing that out, it seems like a hodge-podge of topics, but it all fit in surprisingly well. She has a way of coming back to themes over again and expanding on them, and going deeper into them. I like her voice and I like her intellect, so I will definitely read more of her books in the future. ( )