[In the following review, Seed evaluates Brooke-Rose's overriding concern with the intersection of literature and contemporary literary theory in Stories, Theories, and Things and Textermination.]

Christine Brooke-Rose's latest collection of essays [Stories, Theories, and Things] covers a very broad range of topics mostly connected through the notion of story. Unlike her earlier study A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981) this volume carries a deliberately miscellaneous-sounding title which in effect gives the author priority over any single theoretical topic. This is important because it relates to one of Brooke-Rose's most engaging characteristics as a critic. Although she has taught for twenty years in the very citadel of Gallic theory, Paris VIII, she has avoided many of the pitfalls of continental theorists such as dogmatic generalization and a tendency toward abstraction. The essays gathered here are based on a pair of tacit premises which would run something like this: it is essential to possess an analytical formal awareness of literature, but it is equally essential to test out that awareness on specific works. Stories, Theories, and Things could thus be seen as structured on a series of connections: between general rhetorical principles and specifics, between critic and teacher, between novelist and theorist. A “metastory” introduces the series by commenting on Brooke-Rose's own fiction from Between (1968) onwards and this strategy establishes two themes which recur throughout the book. Firstly literary works are used to test the adequacy of certain theoretical approaches (structuralism, narratology, etc.) which are usually found wanting in some respect. And secondly an impish irony detects a conservatism in supposedly iconoclastic theorists continuing to support a traditional literary canon. The continuing neglect of contemporary experimental writing (of Hélène Cixous's criticism as against her fiction, for instance) becomes a damning indictment of current theorizing.

Every essay bears eloquent testimony to the breadth of Brooke-Rose's reading and her capacity to draw incisive rhetorical distinctions. She insists that a knowledge of rhetoric is essential to critical discussion: “to transgress intelligently one must know the rule.” On the other hand she staves off the self-consciousness diagnosed in writers like Barth by converting it into comedy. So she mocks critical labels (“post post? past post?”) and converts her own writing into spoofs. Or again she might deflate her own solemnity by inserting tactical colloquialisms; so what she calls “palimpsest histories,” i.e., long, quasi-historical novels packed with specialized knowledge, wear that knowledge lightly enough to create a “rattling good story.” Again and again Brooke-Rose pauses to comment on her own style or her own metaphors because the ultimate subject of her essays turns out to be some aspect of rhetoric. These topics can vary in generality from the use of the copula and free indirect discourse, to individual works. Particularly rewarding discussions are given of the instability between the two viewpoints (the narrator's and the young protagonist's) of The Red Badge of Courage; the structure of opposites in The Scarlet Letter which can be represented diagrammatically through the capital A; and the dialectic between hidden and revealed forms of knowledge in Jude the Obscure. Even when a specific work is being examined a general issue is extrapolated, whether it is the nature of translation in relation to the Cantos or Islamic spiritual narrative in relation to The Satanic Verses.

The most controversial area which Brooke-Rose addresses here is that of gender. “A Womb of One's Own?” examines the connections between women's experimental writing and the male avant-garde, then launches into an attack on feminist specificity being based on the unconscious, concluding: “It seems to me that ‘specificity’ in creation is an individual, not a sexual, racial or class phenomenon.” Before too many hackles can rise, however, she directs a different attack at semioticians for possessing a latent nostalgia for stable phallocentric structures; and pursues this tack with a lively meditation on male-centered vocabulary of creativity. Brooke-Rose makes no attempt to duck polemic. On the contrary it gives a leaven to her essays throughout this collection.

In reviewing current discussions of metafiction Brooke-Rose notes an imbalance of attention to the author at the expense of the reader who determines the very existence of characters, and concludes: “the character as created or uncreated by the ‘real’ reader (who corresponds to the ‘real’ author and who can be, like the ‘real’ author, variously surrogated within a fiction), remains to be explored.” This statement opens up the possibility of her latest novel, Textermination, which is a fantasia on the theme of the reader's activities. Characters from prose narratives ranging from antiquity to the present gather at a “convention” in San Francisco, a deliberate pun which sets up a containing situation and which self-consciously signals to the reader that this novel is metafictional in the sense of playing with the processes that constitute narratives. The novel is thus insistently preoccupied with novels and speculates on the sort of attention readers give them. It opens with a series of departures culled from earlier narratives and closes with the characters involved returning to their familiar contexts. The effect resembles that of collage where through lateral shifts characters are placed incongruously together. Out of this incongruity comes the book's humor since rhetorical registers jar (high Victorian against colloquial American) and bizarre combinations form. Emma Woodhouse and Sir Lancelot engage in heavy petting in the back seat of a coach; Goethe registers disapproval of Oedipa Maas's paranoia, and so on. The collage effect is accentuated by Brooke-Rose's many quotations and allusions to earlier works. As in Kathy Acker's novels, this device temporarily appropriates a text just as Brooke-Rose appropriates characters and allows them to articulate their own fates at the hands of readers. Casaubon, for instance, bewails the fact that he is only examined in relation to Dorothea Brooke and never in his own right, a complaint which develops prominent narratorial comments within Middlemarch.

The title of Brooke-Rose's novel, like its recent predecessors, puns on a sense of process which is here related to the very existence of characters. Emma Woodhouse reflects on the reader; another female figure declares that characters exist out of time; and yet another figure, Mira Enketei (i.e., “in the whale”—a possible allusion to Orwell's essay on writers' commitment) insists on their literary nature. At the end of chapter 10 a slightly Beckettian voice says of Mira: “She can't go on. She doesn't exist.” But the voice does. A huge electronic eye has been as it were presiding over the convention hall and this eye here shifts into “I” as the first person takes over the narrative. Whether this voice is unnamed or whether it casts itself as Oedipa Maas, there is not much distinction of idiom between the occurrences, and this composite voice raises many of the issues discussed in Stories, Theories, and Things. But because the issues are raised within dialogues there is always the possibility of an answering voice. And because they occur within the context of a fiction their status becomes as ambiguous as Stephen Dedalus's theorizing in A Portrait of the Artist. A lively and alert spirit of intellectual play informs Textermination which should appeal to any reader seriously interested in the range of novelistic expression.