There is a formal and tonal synesthesia inflecting Baudelaire’s spiralling poetic line. The poems trace a turbulence that continued outwards, fractal, from the complex curvature of compositional time — a table in a room by a river — towards future contacts, future refrains, in infinitely productive tangents of temporal plasticity. A verse becomes a poem in prose; a youthful tenderness intertwines with and partly traduces future political despair. This turbulence reinvents itself in any reader as she leans into the embracing poem.
Although admittedly taken out of context, the above is a fair sampling of the writing in The Baudelaire Fractal — a book that would have never registered on my radar if it hadn’t been shortlisted for the 2020 Governor General’s Literary Award — and while I found this a dense and challenging work of (presumed) autofiction, the details that author Lisa Robertson included were so far removed from my own knowledge base that I spent quite a bit of interesting time looking into such diverse topics as the life of Charles Baudelaire and his longtime mistress Jeanne Duval, the fashion design of Issey Miyake, the paintings of Émile Deroy; from a more or less simple premise, the details fractalize outwards, providing interwoven commentary on art, gender, freedom, and self-creation. I had no idea what this was about going in, feel like I have only a marginally better idea what it was about at this point, but I have no regrets about my strained efforts to parse what Robertson was getting at, and enjoyed the related research quite a bit. This seems like an outlier on the GG shortlist; it will be interesting to see how it fares.
Though I liked his philosophy of tailoring very much, I did not set out to compose the work of Baudelaire. In truth I’d barely read him.
The publisher’s blurb begins, One morning, the poet Hazel Brown wakes up in a strange hotel room to find that she's written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. And while that is sort of metaphorically true, the blurb seems to promise a kind of plot-rich metaphysical romp that simply never occurs. Rather, The Baudelaire Fractal is a memoirish rumination on literary theory by a middle-aged poet who looks back on her formative years, and recognising that her experiences living at the poverty line in a string of chilly Parisian garrets echoed the formative experiences of Baudelaire a century earlier, this Hazel Brown concludes that the same experiences will light the same fire, will forge the same art (complicated only by gender in this case). The mature Hazel fondly revisits the diaries of her younger self — the Vancouver girl who eschewed education for experience; who knew that freedom could only be found in Paris, experiencing desire and art and poverty, attempting to capture things exactly as they were in her writing — and while Hazel can see the great distance between her two selves, it seems to me that Robertson finds the greatest meaning in such distances: hotel rooms are not homes; knock-off fashion is not couture; the cool trail of a lover’s silver necklace is not the warmth of that lover’s kiss across the length of one’s body; and yet — it is in the space between the two (rather than in the things themselves) that meaning/art/life is found. Or maybe I was just trying way too hard to find a conventional novel in an unconventional project.
I just want to add a few more passages to give a sense of things. Hazel writes about having seen Émile Deroy’s La Mendiante Rousse in the Louvre, adds that Baudeliare wrote a poem about the same young woman (To a Red-Haired Beggar Girl) — as did several other poets in their circle — and explains that she hadn’t actually been a beggar but a professional chanteuse: Street singers had served important social and political functions in Paris, but after Napoleon III enlisted Georges-Eugène Haussmann to raze and rebuild the city, the banks would take over the streets, silencing such singers with registration and censorship laws. In this passage about the unnamed subject of the portrait and poems, Robertson initially had me totally intrigued:
To remember that we’re just clay, we’re pigment, as we’re being it, this is the great immodesty of art. I had a fundamental greediness for this immodesty. It radiated an attractive muteness, just beyond my cognitive limits. Materiality is too mild and limited a term for it. How to describe the sensation?
But from the next sentence, Robertson’s writing spirals everything out beyond my grasp:
Sometimes you shiver or shudder slightly, the instant before entering a room. Your approach has animated a spiritual obscurity. This bodily hesitation is a tradition of entering the negation of names, and it colours the way I perceive all transition. Your body can sometimes deter its own representation; this breach indicates an interiorized covenant or restraint. It’s called the feminine. It’s a historical condition. The movement of perception or description, which are so closely intertwined as to be indiscernible, is not between nominal categories or aesthetic concepts. The girl is not a concept. Her idea has no core or centre; it takes place on the sills, in the non-enunciation of her name. This feminine namelessness seeps outwards with undisciplined grandeur. The girl’s identity is not pointlike, so it can’t be erased. It’s a proliferating tissue of refusals. Unoriginal, it trails behind me, it darts before me, like my own shadow, or a torn garment. I say unoriginal because once she was named. The removal of her name is an historical choice, so ubiquitous that it seems natural. There is no nameless girl. There is no girl outside language. The girl is not an animal who goes aesthetically into the ground, as many of the philosophers would have it. The girl is an alarm. Her lust is always articulate. If her song goes unrecognized it’s because its frame’s been suppressed; her song is enunciation’s ruin. It is a discontinuous distribution, without institution. Always the tumult of her face is saying something to her world. Prodigal, undisciplined, with an aptitude for melancholy and autonomous fidelity: nameless girl with your torn skirt, there’s nothing left for you but to destroy art.
Quite a lot of The Baudelaire Fractal reads like that, and if it has you nodding your head along in pleasured comprehension, then I reckon you’d appreciate this read even more than I did. I will happily acknowledge that there were many passages like the following that stopped me dead with their beauty:
I would have liked my sentences to devour time. They’d be fat with it. In what sense is anger ornamental? When it permits a girl to pleasurably appear to herself. There was never a room that could hold my anger and so I went to the infinity of the phrase. Obviously it wasn’t simple like that. Anger was my complicated grace.
The sexuality of sentences: Reader, I weep in it.
Lisa Robertson is a celebrated poet and this is her first novel: she has no duty to stick to acknowledged forms in either poetry or prose, but this reader couldn’t quite follow her out to the ends of her recursive fractal geometries. But once again, I did enjoy being stretched until I snapped and the experience off the page (the poems, paintings, fashion, and history) enriched the whole. I’m going to round down to three stars simply because I fear rounding up to four will make me look like a poseur who wants to pretend I understood more of this than I did. I understand completely why so many readers have given this five stars.
I honestly could have found excerpts on just about any page that I liked (and understood, lol), so here's one more passage:
My dirty rooms and my slightly dirty hair — for in 1985 I went to the public showers only weekly when I could not clandestinely bathe at my place of work — the musty or stale scent of my vintage woollen coat, which I covered over with the bittersweet religiosity of Youth-Dew perfume, these were marks of honour. The kind of writing I wanted to be would never smell like a literature of clean laundry, swept floors, and bars of white soap. My pens would burst in my bedsheets. My hair would perennially carry the sour odour of sleep. I believed that the poem must stink. Even reading the diary now I seem to detect the long sillage of acrid barks and herbs unctuously covered by vanilla, so that I am unsure whether years ago some amber drops of the viscous liquid actually penetrated the paper or whether my imagination produces this perfume as an insistent and elaborately feminine base note of reading.
And I want to include, also, one of Robertson's poems to give a sense of her celebrated work and to acknowledge that I don't really "get" this either.
I have tried to say
that, although Love is not judgement
analysis too is a style
of affect
since the scale that rends me vulnerable
has cut, from abundance, doubt
(not that identity shunts
civic ratio or consequence) Sure —
I would prefer to respond to only
the established charms (and forget inconvenience)
but her hair was also a kind of honey
or instrument.
All that is beautiful, from which I choose
even artifice, which I hold above nature
won’t salve these stuttered accoutrements
