Christine Brooke-Rose and Post-War Literature by Joseph Darlington;

Author:Joseph Darlington;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030759063
Publisher: Springer Nature

The text is riven with references to new technology. These technologies seem to both ground and uproot Mira. Contextually, they have produced the world that demands classics teachers and then makes them redundant. Her career has filled her with voices from the past now uprooted and without function, ghostly. Within the narrative itself, the radio serves to keep Mira company through the night, and yet its words infiltrate her monologue, interpellating her ideas and being interpellated in turn. Her surname, Enketei, is Greek, and yet she chooses to listen to the BBC, a bastion of Britishness, radio that Lewis and Booth describe as “a kind of domestic diplomatic service representing the best of British to the British” (69). We are to presume that Mira, like Brooke-Rose herself, is a product of an interconnected Europe, or even a citizen of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”. Her fluid discourse is a formal reflection of her social condition, uprooted from the world and carried along by its economic and ideological currents. Technology is both her enabler and her nemesis. She struggles to create a coherent narrative, to keep all the levels of her narrative worlds in place, but this is not to be read as a comment upon reality itself, but of a specific reality, and not as a statement about existence itself but about her own experience of uprooted existence. Prophets of the technological future jump out of the flow of images, seeming to gloat over Mira’s obsolescence. “Our awareness will increase almost daily”, says a Dr Nwankwo, “as will the thousands of highly competent experts working on these problems [who can] amalgamate so many complex issues” (77). Orion, a vision from the recent future, promises a machine that can predict what readers will want: “he will be more knowledgeable than I and talk of three-dimensional tabular models that will carry, from node to node, in all directions and along multiple connexions, a given flux of any reaction whatever, each quantifiable” (44–45). The specialness, the rarity, the distinction that Mira Enketei feels as a classics scholar and a writer is instantly abolished by these grinning salesman of the technological future. Language in the form of mass communications is becoming a flood, one that Mira once skimmed along on top of, carried along pleasantly, but is now submerged under, tossed in its turbulent depths.

The relevance of “redundancy” as a term is emphasised here. If poststructuralism inverts our understanding of language, suggesting not that we are language-using creatures but that language is itself primary and speaks through us, then we, as human beings, are made redundant. We are carriers of a language which is, itself, reality. We are merely adjuncts, supplements to the reality of language. So what happens when language becomes aware of its own redundancies, of which it contains many? Technology, and digital media in particular, represents that fateful homecoming: Agamemnon returning to find his palace in chaos and his nearest and dearest planning to destroy him. Humans, in this case Mira, are the kings about to be torn apart by their own kingdoms.

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