The composition of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Thru : An afterlife of May ’68

Abstract

Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1975 novel Thru stands as one of the quintessential texts of postmodernism, both in its incomparable metatextual complexity and its reputation for conceptual excess. This paper traces the turbulent history of the novel’s construction. Fleeing from a collapsing marriage, illness and a dismissive literary establishment, Brooke-Rose left Britain to undertake a lecturing position at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes, a hotbed of post-May ’68 student insurrection. Militantly a-political, Brooke-Rose remained detached from the situation, writing Thru as a satire of poststructuralist theory, until, in 1974, her own position was threatened by political machinations. The resulting disillusionment makes its way into the final text of Thru which, in turn, spells the end of her fiction writing career for nine years. This paper aims to place Thru in its historical context; a context not only resonant in terms of Brooke-Rose’s works, but for postmodernism in general.