Natalie Ferris

Major Project: ‘At every step they flinch wince jerk shirk lapse collapse’ – Christine Brooke-Rose, art writing and experiment 


Christine Brooke-Rose, known as one of Britain’s foremost ‘experimental’ writers, has also been one of the most deplorably neglected. Born in January 1923 in Geneva, she was brought up in Brussels speaking English, French and German, securing her a position in her twenties translating decryptions of the Enigma code at Bletchley Park during World War II. Channelling ‘items… out of the air, intercepted, decrypted, translated, transmitted’, it is this straining after potential, what she figures as ‘groping’ after meaning, that inflects all of her literary and typographic practice, and was to prove integral to her beguiling novelistic ‘experiments’. Language is seen as material to be swiped at, pulled apart, prodded at, picked through, shot to its constituent pieces, flayed beyond recognition, then to be reworked into splayed protractions of frenetic syntactical order. Brimming with all the ‘affrodizzyacts’ of misaligned references, deliberate malapropisms and tricksy puns, she exposes the true pleasure of language as not in recognition, but in the delight of discovery.


And the uncertain attempts to classify her work, as ‘resplendently unreadable’ as it may be, betray a continuation of an in-built publishing house literary conservatism. Is it to the art world – in all the interdisciplinarity of the ‘experimental’ – that writing must now turn?