The ethics of attention in Christine Brooke-Rose's Out

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Bernstein, Sarah; Cotton, Jess, ed. (2024) The ethics of attention in Christine Brooke-Rose's Out. In: Literature and Institutions of Welfare. Essays and Studies, 77 . Boydell & Brewer, Martlesham, pp. 119-135. ISBN 9781805434825

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Abstract

This essay focuses on the forms of attention in Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1964 novel Out, using Sontag’s notion of silent art and its affordances for thinking about the work of care. Out takes place in a future society that has just undergone a politically transformative event in which the present system of white supremacy has been upended and replaced by a Black ruling class. In this world, many members of this ‘Colourless’(i.e. formerly white) underclass are afflicted by the effects of a ‘malady’ related to the effects of radiation. The novel’s unnamed protagonist, through whose consciousness much of the text is organised, is an unemployed ‘ex-Ukayan’ Colourless man; he is married to Lilly, who works at the ‘Big House’ under the direction of its proprietor, Mrs Mgulu. Over the course of the novel, the protagonist moves from their shack to the Labour Exchange, and subsequently to the Big House, where Mrs Mgulu eventually finds him some menial work. These scenes of home and work are the focal points of the narrative, which proceeds by a logic of repetition and recursion rather than by linear plotting.

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