"A Game Called ‘I’": On Lisa Robertson’s "The Baudelaire Fractal"

Lisa Robertson | The Baudelaire Fractal | Coach House Books | January 2020 | 160 Pages

By way of beginning our conversation about Lisa Robertson’s latest book, a friend asks, how does it move? Though I struggle to answer her question, I find the issue of movement to be a particularly apt way to consider poet and essayist Robertson’s debut novel, The Baudelaire Fractal. For it is movement rather than fixity that characterizes this restless and unruly text, which evades determination and indulges in the plurality of meaning. 

Robertson is much less interested in fixed meaning than she is in the aesthetics of meaning and meaning-making. Like a dance, the novel is found less in its individual poses (although these are quite spectacular as well) than it is in the evolution of those poses, the temperament with which one surrenders to another, and the feeling of anticipation that such an unfurling provides. 

“It’s a literary mode of comparison,” like Guy Debord’s, as Robertson writes, that uses “not signs as its components, but the transformative potency of transitions…the anticipation of transitions”. The resultant text disavows fixity and stability. It creates, instead, a murky and erotic collective of meaning that twists and writhes in a state of perpetual anticipation of its own consummation. It is a vague and yet fierce desire, which going unmet, sustains the text’s – like its protagonist’s – furor, a perpetual not-yet that sets it ablaze, an endless yearning for elsewhere that keeps it moving. “Reading unfolds like a game called ‘I,’” Robertson writes, “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”.

Hazel Brown, this amorphous “I” of the novel, begs the same question of singularity as she confronts myths of womanhood and authorship. Middle-aged Hazel writes from the countryside about her wayward becoming as woman and writer, a dreamlike time in which she drifts through various European cities, temporary rooms and boys. “I would feel pretty much free,” she writes. “I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone…I doted on nothing”. The distance between Hazel Brown and Lisa Robertson herself is slight. Both florid and intensely cerebral, Hazel blends into this account of her youth a historical and philosophical inquiry into the lives of French artists Turberville, Courbet, Delacroix, and not least of all, Baudelaire and his enigmatic lover, Jeanne Duval.

At the center of this account is Hazel’s apparent attempt to reckon with the coincidence of her authorship with Baudelaire. Hazel sits down to write in order to make sense of one strange morning when she awoke to find that she had authored Baudelaire’s complete works. In stark relief to the singular and fiercely enclosed “I” of the male writer, Hazel becomes a figure of a shared and unbounded form of authorship, for which the “I” is a mere formality, a matter of course. “Sometimes, Hazel confesses, “I feel that it is the room that writes. But it needs the hot nib of my pronoun”. More than explain her predicament, Hazel’s reflections unravel the very concept of authority and the continued effacing of the female artist and writer.

This absurd inciting incident for the novel betrays its wiliness and its eagerness to delight in its suggestive capacity, the freedom, of its own artifice. The novel is at once playful and intellectually acute. It teases sincerity and performs an awareness of itself that verges on uncanny. “To everything I read in the diaries,” Hazel declares, “I now give the name novel, I give the name knock-off. Yet I am completely disgusted by literature. That’s why this is erotic comedy”.

So how does the novel move? I respond to my friend vaguely and then begin to keep a list of possible answers spread across the margins of the books I read at night. Robertson herself, I realize, provides more than a few good descriptions. A Vancouver hotel room moves in “flickering, overlapping, and partial surges”. Its inside courtis “a sea in the way it combine[s] so many separate things in a subtly swirling, rocking motion to make of them a single encompassing element.” The girl’s body: “leaking, bruising, stinking, lusting”. Incidentally each in its way, the hotel room, the girl’s body, describes the text itself, the way it moves in quivering, silvery, and lazy rushes. 

Hazel’s writing is inextricably linked to her body. She writes early on, “I needed to write in order to make a site for my body. There would be no other way to uncover my unwieldy desire”. In the end, it moves like a body, a woman’s body: furtive, clumsy and doubled in its awareness of itself as both actor and image, “I” and “she.” 

Robertson proclaims “the truth of artifice”. For her, style is a form of thinking; it is a philosophy. Her style, like her protagonist, is both ornate and nonchalant, decadent and fickle. In keeping with Robertson’s other work, The Baudelaire Fractal indulges in the formal quality of language and syntax, the word as object, as material. Her’s is a writing that is deeply interested in the performance of writing, the gesture of certain phrases. 

Everything becomes a form of writing, a code. Like the dispersed “I” of the “girl,” writing itself is both absent and multiplex, “lost and grotesquely multiple”. 

Perhaps writing then is indeed a hotel room, a girl’s body. The way one walks into a room (“askew, belated”) and then, unceremoniously, out of it. Dressing, kissing, grooming, these too are forms of writing, of thinking; they are “experiment[s],” as Robertson puts it “in syntax and diction”. 

These experiments are what make The Baudelaire Fractal a particularly disobedient text, not least of all in the way it insists on pleasure and plenitude, mirrored by the exulted nonchalance of Hazel Brown herself, the “breach” that is being a woman at all. Robertson delves into the furthest unreality of a labyrinthine interior, and the decadent aesthetic of literary subjectivity. In doing so, the novel seems to endlessly capture its own attention: it watches itself; it performs for itself. It delights in the glamour of its perverse, flickering moods.

But what seems to underwrite this playful self-fascination is a Gatsby-like hollowness and dissatisfaction. Within the dance of the novel is an emptiness, a profound detachment from self that gives it the permission to revel, to luxuriate in performance. It is equal parts invitation and warning.