SOURCE: Sapio Garbero, Maria del. “The Fictionality of Fiction: Christine Brooke-Rose's Sense of Absence.” In British Postmodern Fiction, edited by Theo D'haen and Hans Bertens, pp. 89-99. Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1993.

In the following essay, Sapio Garbero discusses the concept of absence in Brooke-Rose's novels in terms of the problematic relationship between text and reality. Sapio Garbero asserts that Brooke-Rose utilizes the central theme of absence in her novels in an “anti-metaphysical quest” to critique dominant notions of identity and male-centered language.

[Thru] is a text that is really constructing itself and then destroying itself as it goes along. Well, a lot of people are writing fiction about the writing of fiction, but this is not about the writing of fiction (except that it's about the construction of a text, if you like), it's about the fictionality of fiction: the fact that these characters are just letters on a...