Indeterminate Brooke-Rose

Abstract

Christine Brooke-Rose is fascinated by the notion of indeterminacy, and throughout her career draws parallels between the science of uncertainty and the shifts in thinking engendered by quantum theory and the experimental literature of the sixties and seventies. Indeterminacy is an ambiguous term when applied to the literary text. If we call a text indeterminate we might mean that it has contradictory meanings or is open to multiple, equally weighted, possible interpretations, ones which the text itself does nothing to resolve. Here I offer a reading of Brooke-Rose's novel Such (1966) which argues that the novel is less indeterminate than it is about indeterminacy; that it does not so much present ambiguous or contradictory interpretive lines as offer a reflection on what the act of interpretation does, and what it might make happen; that it does not withhold knowledge from the reader so much as make the reader question the ways in which knowledge is itself implicated in the world around us. In the end the novel offers us what amounts to an ethics of indeterminacy, suggesting that we should be wary of all acts of interpretation, and alert to their potential for malignity or invasiveness.

Cambridge, Magdalene College MS Pepys 1661, PP. 245-266: An Edition

“…These features suggest that the text was neither composed in the North, Kent or the West Midlands areas. 24 As for the refl ex of West Germanic *ā, i.e. the so-called "OE ǣ 2 ", only one instance has been observed in the synonoma (‹sed› 59, 62, etc.…”