1
Although different languages often come into play in her
novels, they are definitely written in English, and were
all published in Britain.
2
In particular, the urge to find new tools for her
investigation was precipitated by a serious illness she
suffered from in 1962, which she believed would prove
fatal and which deeply influenced her approach to reality
and to her work as a writer.
3
References to Out, Between and Thru will be to the
Omnibus edition (1986).
4
This translates into Latin as 'in cetus', and should be
read as an allusion to Orwell's essay "Inside the Whale"
(1940), in which he claims that the totalitarian age the
world was witnessing had silenced writing. The writer,
then, is reduced to silence, just like Cassandra
(imprisoned by victorious Agamemnon, who inspired the
title of Brooke-Rose's novel) and Brooke-Rose's character
herself (as a woman in a patriarchal
society).
5
The French version of this phrase was introduced by
Barthes in S/Z (Barthes: 1970, in Oeuvres
Complètes vol. II, Paris, seuil, 1994, 558),
where he enlarged on an idea which he had already
anticipated in "La mort de l'auteur" (1968), namely the
impossibility, in "writing" and the writerly text, of
answering the question "Who speaks?"
In order to be plural and in order to let language speak,
the text should eliminate all indications of origin and
authorship because, as Barthes states, "The more the
origin is nowhere to be found, the more the text is
plural" (Barthes: 1970, in Oeuvres
Complètes vol. II, 582).
7
For
example, in the diagram on page 579 the two eyes of the
person reflected in the mirror become four and this
second pair of eyes is reflected as if located near the
hairline.
8
By
textual analysis I obviously mean not only to the
analysis of the content of a text, but also of its more
formal, linguistic and grammatical aspects, as these are
clearly the elements which make of "a" text "that"
particular text.
9
This
was for example the case with many theories of reading
which granted the reader - previously marginalised in
favour of either the author (before the New Criticism) or
the text (in the New Criticism) - a primary position in
the interpretative process. As Culler claimed in 1983, in
fact, many of the difficulties and discontinuities of
texts such as the nouveaux romans published by
Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute during the 1950s and 1960s,
became amenable when the reader was allowed to become the
protagonist of the reading process.