The Baudelaire Fractal
by Lisa Robertson
(Coach House Books, Jan. 2020)
Reviewed by Louis Klee
In a late essay on Machado de Assis’ The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1880), Susan Sontag sketches a tradition of digressive, loquacious prose fiction running from Laurence Sterne to Samuel Beckett—a way of writing in which we repeatedly meet “in different guises the chatty, meandering, compulsively speculative, eccentric narrator: reclusive (by choice or by vocation); prone to futile obsessions and fanciful theories and comically designed efforts of the will; often an autodidact; not quite a crank.” At the end of this catalog, Sontag adds that this narrator is “invariably male,” and there opens a long, and I think striking, aside: “(No woman is likely to get even the conditional sympathy these ragingly self-absorbed narrators claim from us, because of expectations that women be more sympathetic, and sympathizing, than men; a woman with the same degree of mental acuity and emotional separateness would be regarded as simply a monster.)”
As if speaking from between these parentheses, transforming their constraint into a site of liberation, “I, Hazel Brown, eldest daughter of a disappearing class, penniless neophyte stunned by the glamour of literature”—that is, the “she-dandy” narrator Lisa Robertson’s remarkable, sultry, cerebral, and finally original novel The Baudelaire Fractal—defiantly assumes this tradition. “When I recognized afresh the courage it takes for any girl to not disappear to herself, I am still shocked,” Hazel states. “Could the image of my own self-appearance open a possible world?” The answer, as this novel makes vividly apparent, is yes, and yet self-appearance is no easy task. It may be a difficult and radical act. “I had to destroy art,” declares Hazel, “in order to speak my monstrous life.” Monster, according to one tradition, has its etymological roots in the Latin monstrare and French montrer: to show or make apparent. It could be that simply to manifest the she-dandy’s life or “a female thinking” without making concessions to realism—for Hazel, “another name for capital”—is to simultaneously write one’s life and a manifesto, to manifest oneself in a poise of simultaneous luxuriance and insurgency.
On one level, this is a novel set in Paris in 1984, the city where the twenty-three-year-old Hazel comes “to appear to myself, to seek some kind of new language.” Her new language is wrought through the immersions of reading, long mornings of sex, acts of ekphrastic recovery, and a distinctive mode of architectural insight—one developed across Robertson’s oeuvre—exercised on places, garments, textures, and even sillage. These are all consciously part of a dressage or training, a kind of apprenticeship to literature, or, more emphatically still, a “dream of grace.” Yet what makes The Baudelaire Fractal refreshingly distinct from the Künstlerroman is that it neither seeks to conjure the writerly self into being through the book we are reading and nor does it recollect this sentimental education with wistfulness or acerbic irony. Instead, the older Hazel, assuredly a poet, looks back as if knowingly conspiring with and indulging her former self, a “seeking and sensual girl” experimenting in the mythologies available to her. So the novel splits fractal-like, its time something like the time of fashion—not, that is, the fickle assertion of the fleeting now, but what Robertson’s novel calls a system of “irreconcilable citations”: Deborah Turbeville’s 1970s refers, for Hazel, to a 1930s that in turn refers to a “mildly anarchic bluestockings nineteenth century.” So too The Baudelaire Fractal weaves a narrative out of multiple times, places, and selves, transpiring in a cottage under linden trees and hard June rain somewhere in rural France, where Hazel, in her fifties, writes her story backwards, recalling the rooms of Paris where she spent her youth. Her cottage opens out onto Parisian rooms where “everything is the case”: rooms that smother or vibrate with sparseness; rooms where “somebody weeps, somebody fucks, somebody writes a poem, somebody leaves their panties to dry on the window latch. Somebody sleeps late and dreams a novel.” Yet, this succession of anciennes chambres de bonnes doubles in turn through the young Hazel’s fantasies and identifications, her life, like her knock-off viscose Thierry Mugler suit, “an eighties vision of the forties.” And chief among these doublings, as we learn from the outset, is Baudelaire.
Why Baudelaire? In a sense, this is Hazel’s question too. For much of the novel, Baudelaire is her uninsistent counterpoint, a specter that lets her live a life in the subjunctive mood, that does not so much haunt her as invite her into a duplicated space of analogical thinking. As if sharing something as mysterious to her as it is to us, Hazel explains how “late one morning in middle age” she found that she had written the complete works of Baudelaire. “Even the unwritten texts,” she continues, “the notes and sketches contemplated and set aside, and also all of the correspondence, the fizzles and false starts and abandoned verses, the diaristic notes: I wrote them.” As tempting as it may be to claim this as a familiar meta-fictional device, this is no Borgesian thought experiment and has nothing in common with the old woman who reputedly rewrote One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) to find out “who is really mad, the author or me.” More like Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018), whose narrator may or may not be Kathy Acker, The Baudelaire Fractal wears its premise lightly, sprezzatura, though no less seriously or profitably for this reason. This, we might say, is how Robertson wears the genre of the novel too, which is not to say that she simply continues the thinking of her poetry and essayistic prose by other means, for genre itself is in question in her work, the prologue of her XEclogue (1993) opening: “I needed a genre for the times that I go phantom. I needed a genre to rampage Liberty, haunt the foul freedom of silence.” The Baudelaire Fractal, like all of Robertson’s work, thinks with and undoes genre, searching out lodgings for freedom from within these constraints, from the epic and the eclogue to the shipping forecast weather report—and now the novel.
In some ways, Hazel’s description of receiving the authorship of Baudelaire resembles the epiphanic moment of Proust’s involuntary memory, only the remembrance is from someone else’s unconscious, from a life she didn’t live. The “involuntary transmission” at the heart of the novel might seem outlandish at first, like the transmigration of souls, and yet it may just be a particularly vivid description of what can transpire in the act of reading. “Hazel’s discovery,” as Robertson recently put it in an interview with Allison Grimaldi-Donahue,
is based on a strange reading experience I had. I was preparing to teach a class on the prose poem at the University of East Anglia, so I was up late at night rereading Paris Spleen in relation to Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau’s last text. And Montaigne. Early the following morning, I opened my copy of Baudelaire and had the totally uncanny experience that I had written the text I was reading… Much later after I’d begun writing the novel I learned that Baudelaire had that experience himself when he was first reading Poe as a young man… It’s the kind of internal readerly sensation that anybody can have.
To receive the authorship of Baudelaire is to take what Robertson elsewhere calls “reading’s audacity” to its logical conclusion. The minute identifications and resistant doublings in the experience of reading can be, she maintains, “small revolutions and also the potent failure of revolutions.” This is precisely Hazel’s experience, whose abiding image of Baudelaire is as a reader too, especially as he was painted by Gustave Courbet, hunched over a book in “The Painter’s Studio,” with the pentimento of his mistress Jeanne Duval discernible, though perhaps only if you know what to look for, just above his shoulder.
“The Painter’s Studio,” 1855, Gustave Courbet / Public domain
Hazel localizes the instance of transmission in a single sentence, “a cry posing as a query”: “Shall we ever live?” Upheaval. “I smashed up against a violent and completely formed recognition that entered through my sleepy hands. The poems were my poems.” This is a startling way of narrativizing the strange power of reading when we stumble on some deep truth about ourselves casually splayed out in the pages of someone else’s book. It is a vertiginous feeling, at once empowering and disempowering, simultaneously an over-investment, a dispossession, and a sense of gratitude for a gift. It is the reader’s apprehension, again and again, that without losing ourselves to another we might never have known who we are. Or else, like the rhythm of the hospitality to which the novel frequently alludes, reading “unfolds like a game called ‘I’,” in which the stranger overstays their welcome and the host becomes hostage to the guest. The Baudelaire Fractal unfurls from this paradoxical, charged moment, each of its chapters written under a title taken from Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, from the perspective of an older Hazel, who shares with Baudelaire’s dandy “a spiritual reserve, an inner aristocracy—that same reserve he described in ‘Les Veuves’ as the stoical pride of the old woman like ‘an old bachelor… the masculine character of her ways added a mysterious bite to their austerity.’” These words are taken from Robertson’s Proverbs of a She-Dandy (2018), which began as a retort to the Situationists’ description of the university as the “menopause of the mind.” At 4 AM, in a Google Doc, Robertson countered:
Menopause turns females into dandies. Some of our organs become purely self-referential. They have no further potential for family or spectacle or state: they’re outside every economy. So now their meaning is confected in relation to convivial and autonomous pleasure only.
Perhaps this is what makes poignant the efforts of the older Hazel to glean her younger self from old diaries entries: the older Hazel’s appearance is no less at issue, in fact for the menopausal she-dandy “countless clinics are dedicated to preventing her appearance.”
What is perhaps most important about Hazel’s doubling is that it is an “impure repetition.” In fact, the more she dwells on the Baudelaire, the more her investment shifts again into Baudelaire’s mistress Jeanne Duval, who, in Robertson’s words, is the “background of all of Baudelaire’s poems… the erased heart of Les Fleurs du mal… To know Baudelaire, I had to meet Duval.” The impurity of these doublings and repetitions is also at the level of Robertson’s sentences, themselves “darkly fulgent” dialectics of clarity and vagueness. At one point, the young Hazel notes her black Penguin Classics volume of Nietzsche weighing rhythmically in her bag as she mounts a staircase with a young man in a state of oceanic anticipation. When I read Robertson, it is these words of Human, All Too Human that come to mind:
How meter beautifies. Meter lays a gauze over reality; it occasions some artificiality of speech and impurity of thinking; through the shadow that it throws over thought, it sometimes conceals, sometimes emphasizes. As shadow is necessary to beautify, so vagueness is necessary to clarify. Art renders the sight of life bearable by laying over it the gauze of impure thinking.
To read Robertson is much like her description of reading Benveniste’s “The Notion of ‘Rhythm’ in Its Linguistic Expression”: “Each time I attempt to summarise [it], it reconfigures itself just beyond my comprehension,” immersing me “once again to the human abundance of form.” Like the shiver of alluding to secret without it having been disclosed, The Baudelaire Fractal gives us the world as fathomless as it is corporeal, as intricately elusive as it is vivid and immediate. These are many ways of saying the same thing: this writing achieves a sensual abstraction honed across Robertson’s poetic and essayistic work but which, in the genre of the novel, has parallels in Proust and Lispector, where the imagination draws “strength from contact with my sensuality, as my sensuality spread through the domains of my imagination” (Proust), or else muttering De profoundis as the ship ploughs ahead toward a storm with “throngs of warm thoughts sprouted and spread through the frightened body and what mattered about them was they concealed a vital impulse” (Lispector). In visual art, it finds kinship with Pierre Bonnard, in which the shimmering accumulation of paint only seems to make things more weightless, where, like “Nude in the Bathtub,” everything tends toward vivid, colorist abstraction (Bonnard once described, in a passage Hazel cites, “the impression one has on entering a room: one sees everything at the same time nothing”).
“Nude in Bathtub,” c.1940-1946, Pierre Bonnard / Public domain
Part of the ritual of hospitality in the Homeric epic was to allow the stranger to take a bath, which is also the pose that Robertson describes herself in while reading Baudelaire in Proverbs of a She-Dandy: “Here then, in the luxury of my bath, permitting the Baudelairean correspondences between dandy and old woman to drift beyond the margins of his poems and essays, I will activate the figure of menopause as the new dandiacal body.” My temptation reading The Baudelaire Fractal is to be whimsically prescriptive in precisely the way one finds in a satiric passage of Patrick Modiano’s La Place de l’Étoile (1968), a schlemiel’s picaresque on French literature, in which one character composes “A Guide to Reading Certain Writers”:
Edouard Estaunié… should be read in a country house at about five in the afternoon with a glass of Armagnac in hand. When reading O’Rosen or Creed, the reader should wear a formal suit, a club tie and a black silk pocket handkerchief. I would recommend reading René Boylesve in summertime, in Cannes or Monte-Carlo at about eight in the evening wearing an alpaca suite. The novels of Abel Herman require sophistication: they should be read aboard a Panamanian yacht while smoking menthol cigarettes…
Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal should be read disrobed, immersed, in the poise of hospitality—that is, allowing its abstraction to work a rare state of lavish receptivity, equanimity, ataraxy: “No judgement, no need, no contact, no seduction: just the free promiscuity of a disrobed mind.”
If the task of the critic were really to distribute the attention of readers—though no one would own up to it, reviewers often speak as if this were the case, as if attention were a scarce resource and it were up to them to decree what deserves it and what does not—I would say go out and find this novel and leave it at that. But a novel like this will circumvent these ways of talking and thinking, just as its feminist ornaments and baroque allegories aim to subvert familiar realist forms in the thrall of capital. A novel like The Baudelaire Fractal will already, before the act of criticism, be finding readers who are themselves undergoing the kind of enraptured search it depicts. In a sly way, a work like this will endure, as if the codex of the Mishnah had referred to reading when it said “whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.” This is a novel that, though its means are singular, will open and salvage possible worlds—above all, for writers, who perhaps will one day look back at their younger selves with an air of indulgence and find they were reading Lisa Robertson.
Louis Klee is an Australian writer. He grew up in the Australian Capital Territory on Ngunnawal land and is currently at Gonville & Caius College at the University of Cambridge.
Banner image: “Nude in Bathtub,” c.1940-1946, Pierre Bonnard / Public domain