THE
BAUDELAIRE
FRACTAL
LISA ROBERTSON
COACH HOUSE BOOKS, TORONTO
copyright © Lisa Robertson, 2020
first edition
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: The Baudelaire fractal / Lisa Robertson.
Names: Robertson, Lisa, 1961- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190142235 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190142251 | ISBN 9781552453902 (softcover) |
ISBN 9781770566033 (PDF) | ISBN 9781770566026 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8585.O3217 B38 2020 | DDC C813/.54— dc23
The Baudelaire Fractal is available as an ebook: ISBN 978 1 77056 603 3 (PDF); ISBN 978 1 77056 602 6 (EPUB)
Purchase of the print version of this book entitles you to a free digital copy. To claim your ebook of this title, please email [email protected] with proof of purchase. (Coach House Books reserves the right to terminate the free digital download offer at any time.)
‘I have insupportable nervous troubles, exactly like women.’
– Baudelaire, in a letter to his mother
‘In this domain, as in Sartor Resartus, it is the masked, the disguised, or the costumed which turns out to be the truth of the uncovered.’
– Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
These things happened, but not as described.
Raised from babydom into doubt, I’m as feminine as Rousseau. I, Hazel Brown, eldest daughter of a disappearing class, penniless neophyte stunned by the glamour of literature, tradeless, clueless, yet with considerable moral stamina and luck, left my family at seventeen to seek a way to live. It was the month of June in 1979. I was looking for Beauty. I didn’t exactly care about art, I simply wanted not to be bored and to experience grace. So I thought I would write. No other future seemed preferable. Let me be clear: I did not want to admire life, I did not want to skim it; I wanted to swim in it. I judged that to do this, I had to leave, and to write. I wanted to speak the beautiful language of my time, but without paying.
I myself was not beautiful. Moody, angular, both dark and pale, of bad posture, for I was perpetually thrust forward as if rushing into time, awkward whilst being observed, a half-broken tooth in my reluctant smile, uncertain in manners, premature frown lines between my grey-green eyes, all of this magnified by an urgency with no recognizable context: comedic in short, in the mode of a physical comedy.
Prodigal, undisciplined, with an aptitude for melancholy, I left houses, cities, lovers, schools, hotels, and countries. I left with haste, or I left languidly. Also I was asked to leave. I left languages and jobs. Leaving made a velocity. I left garments, books, notebooks, and several good companions. Sometimes I left ideas.
After the leaving, then what? I suppose I would drift. I had no money and no particular plan. Cities exist; hotels exist; painting exists. Tailoring also, it exists, as anger exists, mascara exists, and melancholy, and coffee. I liked sentences and I liked thread. Reading surely and excessively exists; also, convivially, perfume and punctuation. I had a fantasy and my diary. I had my desire, with its audacity, its elasticity, and its amplitude. I carried a powder-blue manual Smith Corona typewriter in a homemade tapestry bag. I was eager, sloppy, vague. I wore odd garments. I carried no letter of introduction, and I knew no one. I was only a girl bookworm. I wasn’t to stay. None of this troubled me much.
The nervous fluid of a city is similar to a grammar or an electric current. Loving and loathing, we circulate. I myself did not exist before bathing in this medium. Here I become a style of enunciation, a strategic misunderstanding, a linguistic funnel, a wedge in language. Here I thought I’d destroy my origin, or I did destroy it, by becoming the she-dandy I found in the margins of used paperbacks. What do I love? I love the elsewhere of moving clouds.
Reading unfolds like a game called ‘I,’ in public gardens in good weather, in a series of worn-down hotel rooms, in museums in winter, where ‘I’ is the composite figure who is going to write but hasn’t yet. If I am not alone in these rooms, if I could be known, it would be by the skinny red-haired street singer, the secretary of Cologne in her ironical cast-off dress, the hard-shod horsegirls neighing in the dark apartment, by similarly hybrid she-strangers and foreigners, any girl with the combined rage of lassitude and complicity. They are blazons. Cool threads of anger bind me to them. We cease to be human. We’re neutral, desituated clouds. There is nothing left to fear. This realization is a vocation.
My name is Hazel Brown.
I awake in a hotel room. I hear gulls, the clinking and rocking of boats. I turn in the wide bed. The tightness and stiffness of the sheets feels pleasantly confining. In the first stirrings of thinking I discover within myself a strangeness – not a dislocation or a dissociation, but a freshening shimmer of sensual clarity shot through with strands of unmoored refusal and scorn. Beneath that, a slowly vibrating warp of erotic sadness. I abandon myself to this novel sensation. I open my eyes. Reader, I become him. Was that what I felt? No, I did not become him; I became what he wrote.
Do you sometimes at earliest waking observe yourself struggling towards a pronoun? Do you fleetingly, as if from a great distance, strain to recall who it is that breathes and turns? Do you ever wish to quit the daily comedy of transforming into the I-speaker without abandoning the wilderness of sensing? The sensation isn’t morbid; it is ultimately disinterested. For me it’s a familiar moment, boring and persistent and disappointing. Again one arrives at the threshold of this particular, straitening I. With a tiny wincing flourish one enters the wearisome contract, sets foot to planks. Daily the humiliation is almost forgotten, until it blooms again with the next waking. It is an embarrassing perception best stoically flicked aside, left unreported. With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume.
Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another’s style of consciousness inflects one’s own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It’s why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover’s apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was