Christine Brooke‐Rose interviewed by David Seed

Understanding Narrative

“…. Wilde was attacked for immorality, but he had cagily left Dorian's sin unspeci fied, while clearly implying involvements with both sexes" (6). It comes as no great surprise that the most significant changes made in the adaptation of Wilde's novella to the screen involve the foregrounding of heterosexual desire as the motor force of the film.…”

“…To the extent that middle-class members of such groups inclined to oppositionality (something first seen in the phenomenon of "Bohemia"), the narrative genre I call "loiterature" was available to them, initially in the practices of what Daniel Sangsue has called "eccentric narrative," 6 and of what is now generally called "flaneur realism," as a counterdisciplinary vehicle. Against disciplinary closure, loiterature proposes the values of the "writerly"-of differ grammar, rhetoric, and logic).…”

“…As Peter Rabinowitz and Janice Radway have both argued, this kind of reading has been either ignored or condemned by modern criticism, and the pleasures and profit derived from such rapid, "unreflective" but deeply engaged reading-with have been almost universally underrated by critics while being exploited by commer cial authors. 6 It is for some recent critics as if the only way to make reading such works worthwhile is to go to the opposite extreme, what I'll call "reading-against. "…”

“…And as we grow accustomed to thinking and rereading in postmodern terms, the stability of Hammett i s novel increasingly begins to dissolve, as Percy Walton and Kathryn Gail Brock's parodic readings have in their different ways demonstrated. 6 From the arrival of Brigid O'Shaughnessy in Sam Spade's office, it's a novel in which the plot consists not of events, but of continual acts of narrativizing and renarrati vizing about events that may or may not have taken place. Even Lieu tenant Dundy, the character most committed to meaning what he says (21), finds that he has to invent stories ("Nobody saw it, but that's the way it figures" [22]) and deal with the inventions of others: "What do you want us to think the truth is?"…”

“…5 The other side of the debate has been most forcefully articulated recently by Carolyn Abbate. 6 Abbate objects to narrative accounts of most instrumental music in part because they usually fall short with respect to both musical and historical specificity: that is, as the plotline proposed by the critic takes on its own momentum, details of musical construction (especially those that do not advance the cause of the plot) are often ignored; and insofar as the narrative scenarios suggested by critics tend to fall into a few stereotypical patterns, crucial differences between moments in musical style are obliterated. In short, narrative accounts, while perhaps attractive as crutches, lead us away from the piece of music and its cultural particularities.…”