From Babel to biosemiotics: Christine Brooke-Rose's Joycean scripts. Issue 8 (3rd August 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Smith, Gabriel
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 36:Issue 8(2022)
• Page Start: 1207
• Page End: 1225
• Publication Date: 2022-08-03
• Subjects: Christine Brooke-Rose -- Joyce -- Babel -- biosemiotics -- mimesis -- between; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2021.1900372
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In one of her least pejorative references to Joyce, Christine Brooke-Rose cites him as an example of a writer who shares with philologists a 'dotty' passion for the history of language. Coming in the middle of her students' guide to Ezra Pound, this claim assigns linguistic sentiments to Joyce that Brooke-Rose would go on to express herself. In an interview nearly five years later, she describes a 'passionate concern with language' that borders on 'the feeling of the sacred': 'I've always had it. I studied philology'. This essay unearths a vein of Joycean philological imaginings in Brooke-Rose's work that seeks to intertwine the textual and the biological, evoking a 'sensuous' script from a mythical prehistory. Focusing on Between (1968), I trace an intricate ambivalence over the relationship between sign and matter that ultimately feeds into Brooke-Rose's attitudes towards poststructuralism, gender, and language as a whole. Hovering between the sacred and the profane, the dotty and the down-to-earth, these imaginings also serve to draw out the latent continuities between the ancient hunt for a motivated script and the contemporary search for semiosis in nature; between Babel and biosemiotics.