SOURCE: Caserio, Robert L. “Mobility and Masochism: Christine Brooke-Rose and J. G. Ballard.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 21, nos. 2-3 (winter-spring 1988): 292-310.

In the following essay, Caserio compares Xorandor with J. G. Ballard's Crash in terms of their relation to the science fiction genre, narratology, and postmodernism.

1. on the Road with Hypercrite Lecteur

From Xorandor, the name of Christine Brooke-Rose's latest (1986) novel, we can derive xorandoric, an adjective describing postmodern fiction. For in A Rhetoric of the Unreal, Brooke-Rose says that postmodern fiction—surfiction, metafiction, the novel novel novel—is a wholly ambiguous or wholly indeterminate text, which is what xorandoric denotes. In such a text we find information gaps in both the story and the plot, gaps “prevented from being filled in by two mutually exclusive systems of gap-filling clues” (228). The structural rule for such mutually exclusive systems would combine the co-presence or coherence of items of...