Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal, 2020
The debut novel by acclaimed poet Lisa Robertson, in which a poet realizes she's written the works of Baudelaire.
One morning, Hazel Brown awakes in a badly decorated hotel room to find that she’s written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. In her bemusement the hotel becomes every cheap room she ever stayed in during her youthful perambulations in 1980s Paris. This is the legend of a she-dandy’s life.
Part magical realism, part feminist ars poetica, part history of tailoring, part bibliophilic anthem, part love affair with nineteenth-century painting, The Baudelaire Fractal is poet and art writer Lisa Robertson’s first novel.
"A difficult work of ideas, by turns enlightening and arcane, part autobiographical narrative, part literary theory, Robertson’s debut novel, for those interested in possibilities of fiction, is not to be missed."—Publishers Weekly
"Robertson’s work offers a philosophical defence of the girl, a celebration of the menopausal dandy, a speculative release from the constraints of gender, and a portrait of reading as drifting." – Andrea Brady, London Review of Books
"As far as I’m concerned, it’s already a classic." —Anne Boyer
"Robertson, with feminist wit, a dash of kink, and a generous brain, has written an urtext that tenders there can be, in fact, or in fiction, no such thing. Hers is a boon for readers and writers, now and in the future." - Jennifer Krasinski, Bookforum
"And perhaps that's what Robertson, with this demanding, erudite, and quite remarkable novel, is telling us is required to return those who have been expunged from the pages of literature: time and effort."—Stephen Finucan, Quill & Quire
"An intense if abstract portrait of the poet as a young woman in search of a kind of language that might lead to liberation."—The Kirkus Reviews
"It’s brilliant, strange, and unlike anything I’ve read before."—Rebecca Hussey, BOOKRIOT
"Things happen in the novel but none so much as the sentences themselves, they are the events; each sentence invites mediation, pause, excitement."—Allison Grimaldi Donahue, BOMB Magazine
"A new Lisa Robertson book is both a public event and a private kind of bacchanal." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"Often reading a novel, even a good novel, feels like falling into a well-worn groove. There can be comfort in that. This is a different thing entirely. Ironic for a book that works by repetition: The Baudelaire Fractal is a novel you haven’t read before." - The Globe and Mail
"Robertson, one of Canada’s best and most innovative authors, thus cleaves close to Baudelaire’s own dictum: "Always be a poet, even in prose." - Winnipeg Free Press
"The Baudelaire Fractal is a book readers—certainly this reader—will continue returning to for its hypnotic narrative architecture, its portrayal of female ambition and courage, and its inner flint of artistic permission." - The Puritan
"The fabric of “The Baudelaire Fractal”—and it is most definitely a fabric, not just text but textile—is no less yours because it was thrifted. Learn to live in it. You won’t regret it, despite the lingering scent of shed self." - Newfound
"The overall effect is an augmented complexity, unrelated to progress, expansion or growth, in our understanding of artistic lineage, history and subjectivity itself." - MAP Magazine
"The Baudelaire Fractal doesn’t resemble a novel in most of its traditional senses, though the classification doesn’t really matter. Robertson bends the form to her will, and the result is captivating even as it tends towards abstraction." - Entropy Magazine
"A semi-autobiographical novel that blends elements of fiction, poetry, and cultural criticism, The Baudelaire Fractal explores what it means to be an author and a figure of authority, as well as how the Western literary canon and preconceptions about gender can limit who is recognized as a writer by society at large." - PRISM International
"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." - Music & Literature
"I want to spend many hours tracing the rapture of this book, as well as its seductions." - Spam Zine
"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'." - Cleveland Review of Books
"Above all, however, this book is governed by a poetic. The more you pursue it, the more you will find it to be unreadable, which is to say inexhaustible." - The Capilano Review
I was a girl. I entered literature like an assassin, leaking, fucking, wanting, drinking. In her first novel Lisa Robertson writes: I had to destroy art in order to speak my monstrous life.
There is no way for a girl to speak without speaking her politics. Unbothered by irritating institutional knowledge and with no aspirations towards anything that might be termed a literary society, narrator Hazel Brown’s authorship/being is a challenge to intellectual history, to the canon, and to the possible. Fractals cannot be measured in traditional ways. A girl is always minor, but the soft action of her fingers in the text, will become philosophy, will become poetry, in a passive but total infiltration.— Isabella Streffen
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.
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”).
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
https://www.musicandliterature.org/reviews/2020/6/21/lisa-robertsons-the-baudelaire-fractal
The author has said publicly that The Baudelaire Fractal is not a memoir.[1] The epigraph reads: “These things happened, but not as described.” Nonetheless, on the inside front cover, her young self gazes at us in an old-style mirror-bound selfie. The author has hazel eyes and brown hair. The narrator is named Hazel Brown but has grey eyes.
On the back cover, the book announces itself as “Lisa Robertson’s first novel.” My initial reading was experimental. I wanted to test the hypothesis that this book is a novel. One characteristic of a novel is that you can read it in a single sitting. That’s part of the pleasure, not being able to put it down, as we repeatedly say. It would not have displeased me to find that it is not a novel. However, I did manage to read it in one sitting. The outcome was not simply the result of a wish to succeed at the task. I know this because of the pleasure the reading provided, the story pulling me along beneath the complex spiral of the plot, which is fractal, a constant returning of the same. But this forced approach to Lisa Robertson’s latest book also robbed me of a pleasure. I missed entirely the volupté of slow reading, the depth that the surface entwines in its texture, the kind of reading anatomized here and there in her earlier book Nilling (“I do will myself to submit to the difficulty of a text…”).
Upon this first reading, a couple of things became apparent to me. First of all, the book’s continuity with earlier works, as the furtherance of a body of work, an oeuvre. For example, with the opening heroic address, “I, Hazel Brown…” (I was there, I read, I invaded cities, I brought back treasures), I fell immediately back into the epic space of Debbie, and the overall “heroization” of the present that occurs there—that which constitutes modernity for Baudelaire (héroïsation is the word Foucault uses,[2] citing “De l’héroisme de la vie moderne,” especially the passage on the black funereal garb of the contemporary hero). It also, at times, brings forward the prosed automatism of Seven Walks (“We were equally maligned and arrogant, performing our tired doggeries against a sky inlaid with phrases”), and the occasional écritsurlart issued by The Office for Soft Architecture. Or the dreamlike aphorisms of Cinema of the Present (“For you, rhetoric and erotics are irreparably aligned and give support to a needed life”).
Secondly, looking at Nilling again, I realized that The Baudelaire Fractal could also be read as a series of essays. Reading it a second time, I found myself retitling the sections with topical headings, so I could try each one out as an essay: Painting, Rooms, Sex, Bleeding, Tailoring, and so on. But the topics are multiple within each section, and they refract back and forth across sections, so that in the end they elude that kind of labelling. It would have been smarter on my part to concentrate on the titles as they are given, allowing them their slippage, and then to read each section with the title hovering over my attention: “Windows,” “Anywhere Out of the World,” “Vocations,” “Twilight,” “Drunk”…
It also became clear that the apparent central conceit of the novel—the assumption of the Baudelairean authorship, the protagonist awakening in a hotel room to find herself the author of everything Baudelaire ever wrote, as promised on the back cover—was not fulfilled in the way that a novel typically delivers on its publicity. During my second reading, I made the following note regarding this event:
It happens, it is mentioned from time to time, but it is not the plot. It is a figure of reading. It is the topic of the section called “Which is Real?”
My third reading, engaging in a third hypothesis, re-examined the extent of Baudelaire’s presence in the text, testing the ways in which it may have eluded me, like the purloined letter. As it turned out, of course, there was no failed promise at all—Baudelaire is a constant presence in the book, which can’t be read fully without this subtle knowledge, like the author’s own subtle knowledge of her responsibility for his works. But I was right to note that it’s not the plot, not the letter, but rather the envelope.
The novel has three times. The narrator, Hazel Brown, a solitary, sits, in the present, beneath a linden tree eating plums, writing herself, writing to us, in a kind of calmed disquiet, a disquiet about the project of literature that differs from her youthful unknowing only by the addition of this element of calm resignation (“of all stupid art the poem is the most stupid”). Young Hazel Brown, the eventual hero of the narration, newly embarked on the dream of literature, appears to stand centre stage where the main events occur. However, if we consider that she is entirely an object of description, the centre rests with her supposed older self. In an intermediate time, in the middle of the way of this life, as Dante puts it, this authorship is circumscribed by the arrival of the Angel Baudelaire (un ange du mal), not a tutelary guide like Virgil for Dante, but a figure of the prison house of literature whose male wardens her work subverts from the inside, authorship becoming augmentation by way of an etymology that she hints may be illegitimate (it can be found in Benveniste). She says:
To augment would be my work—to add the life of a girl without subtracting anything else from the composition, and then to watch the centre dissolve.
The assumption of the Baudelairean authorship resembles Baudelaire’s becoming-Poe, as he himself describes it:
The first time that I opened one of his books, I saw, with fear and ravishment, not only subjects dreamed of by me, but sentences thought by me and written by him twenty years before.
Baudelaire is, famously, a “feminine man.” In the poem “Sed non satiata” in the “Jeanne Duval Cycle,” he says that he can’t become Proserpina to hold her furious, and by implication masculine, desire at bay. He fears becoming woman. Michel Butor uses the term dévirilisation when describing the effect of the placement of Baudelaire’s financial affairs under judicial counsel—“He was no longer a man, but only a child or a woman. His majority was taken from him…Under his masculine apparel, he was a lesbian.” This is one source of his misogyny. The assumption of his authorship by a woman is a marvelous subversion, even a subversion of his abjection, which according to The Baudelaire Fractal “was defined by the poet’s self-recognition in the grotesque mirror of the social abjection of women.” It’s not a recuperation of women’s writing within the house of literature, but rather an act of property theft or repossession. The project was announced long ago in the words of Debbie’s calling card:
Baudelaire, or his authorship, arrives, appropriately, in the first section of the book, where the arrival is simply described, almost uneventful, mundane as epiphanies go. Thereafter, he wanders into and through each of the sections in repetitions of the same. From the simple address to the reader (Lecteur, mon semblable) to the recovery of Jeanne Duval—the “Giantess” as Baudelaire called her, among other mythical epithets—a counter-version of the story that’s so often been told of her role in his ruination. From the thematic of dandyism, an ethic and a poetic, the opposite of the flâneur, according to Foucault, citing Baudelaire:
…this man…has a purpose more elevated than that of a pure flaneur, a more extensive purpose, and one other than the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. He is after something that we may call modernity. For him it’s a matter of drawing from fashion that which it contains of the poetic within the historic.
“My outfits and their compositions,” we’re told, “were experiments in syntax and diction.” (The hilarious tale of the moth-infested 19th century frock coat, bought at a flea market, is a self-mocking of this “dandiacal woman” concept). To a series of loving, careful descriptions of paintings, in the manner of Baudelaire’s Salons: Courbet’s and Deroy’s early portraits of Baudelaire; Courbet’s allegorical tableau “The Artist’s Studio”; Deroy’s “La petite mendiante rousse”; Dürer’s “Melencolia”; Manet’s portrait of Jeanne Duval; Delacroix’s epic biblical depictions in Saint Sulpice and his watercolour of an unmade bed.
In a subsequent reading, the omnipresence of Baudelaire could easily slip back into the distance, like the unobtrusive interweaving of a minor theme. I could regain the innocence of my first, idle summertime reading and read it once again as the amusing comic novel it sometimes appears to be. Or I could read it more thoroughly in terms of the proper noun it applies to itself: fractal. In such a reading the comedy would be darker, involving a repetition of the same in which the same is not readily identified, until its accumulation culminates in disgust. (“Yet I am completely disgusted with literature. That’s why this is erotic comedy”). Above all, however, this book is governed by a poetic. The more you pursue it, the more you will find it to be unreadable, which is to say inexhaustible. This is the principle of poetry, that it slows reading down, so much so that the reading can never be completed. - Ted Byrne
https://thecapilanoreview.com/i-am-baudelaire-on-lisa-robertsons-the-baudelaire-fractal/
“These things happened, but not as described.” So begins The Baudelaire Fractal, the vertiginous debut novel by poet, translator, essayist, and most genteel of insurgents Lisa Robertson. Like her previous books, her latest is a work of buoyant loveliness and muscular erudition, a lush thicket of thoughts that here enrich the ease and breeziness of personal narrative with the chewier textures of history, criticism, and literary theory. “Writing unfolds like a game called ‘I,’” declares the novel’s diaphanous narrator, behind whom Robertson herself lurks, and to whom she gives the name—the I color—Hazel Brown. Lovingly sported by Robertson like a bespoke jacket, Hazel Brown is a chronicler of memory and personhood, a composite held together by language, refusal, desire, pleasure, and other of life’s tensile threads.
From the middle of the French countryside, in the middle of her life, she composes the book in our hands as she pores over the diaries she kept during her lusty, voracious twenties, when she eked out a living in Paris, wishing and working to become a writer. What is this subject called girl? How does she come to fill the role of author? And who is this who under cover of the pronouns the world has imposed on her? Across these and other questions of self-possession, Robertson’s writing folds, continuously, crossing timelines so now and then stand face to face. Between them is a fertile playing space in which Robertson thinks roundly on subjects such as authorship and inheritance and the imposition of the oddball, unshakable conditions called feminine, called poet, called I.
Near the beginning of the book, Hazel Brown, now a poet in her fifties, recalls the time she was visiting Vancouver to deliver a lecture and was suddenly struck by an insight: “Alone in the hotel I awoke to the bodily recognition that I had become the author of the complete works of Baudelaire.” Not merely the magnum opuses—the poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) and essays such as “Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne” (1863), which praised those who, in his estimation, captured and freed the spirit of the age—but “even the unwritten texts, 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.” Hoping to illuminate the means by which this strange transmission has come to her, she tries on various verbs to see if they fit—received, found, seized, infected—and while each word opens a possibility for understanding, none has the answer. Alas. “My task now,” she concludes, “is to fully serve this delusion.” And with that, Baudelaire becomes Hazel Brown’s . . . forefodder? I-dandy? Ergo ego? And she becomes his . . . inherit-her? After-thought? Write-hand woman? Poor puns aside (note: all my own), part of the delight of this book is wrestling with how exactly to apprehend and define this Escher-like interiority that Robertson and Hazel Brown cohabit—kind of—with him.
In the years before a woman becomes a writer, the rooms are never her own, and that can be a very fine thing. Decades before receiving the Baudelairian authorship, when she first moved to Paris as a young woman, Hazel Brown stayed in cheap hotels, admiring the neutrality of spaces designed for everyone and no one: “No judgment, no need, no contract, no seduction: just the free promiscuity of a disrobed mind.” She thereafter sublets teensy, humble apartments, living alongside the unremarkable belongings of people she doesn’t know—an actress (a role-player), a graphologist (a handwriting analyst). She spends her days reading in the park, filling her head with the words of others, of people she also doesn’t know, and picking up boys to kiss and fuck. She is equally enamored of sex and sentences; each, sensual and electrifying, grazes her body, at once possessing it and proving its otherness. She takes menial jobs: one at the summer house of a convalescing widow, for whom she performs all manner of household duties; later, she’s hired to mind the daughter of a wealthy couple, shuttling her from school back to their apartment, where Hazel Brown does the ironing and dusting, playing proxy for the wife and mother who recently returned to work.
“I have said that I’ve felt that it is the room that writes,” Hazel Brown recalls, “that I simply lend it my pronoun.” (Elsewhere, she muses that tables and jackets and pen nibs write too.) So many things may produce a text, so what of Charles Baudelaire? If she is the author of his oeuvre, then it stands to reason that his hands—notoriously delicate and impeccably kept, as she notes—move hers across the page as well. Throughout the novel, Robertson weaves in biographical passages about the poet: his bourgeois upbringing, and the comforts from which he never fully divested himself; the adoration and devotion he showered on his mother; the rage and loathing his stepfather, Colonel Aupick, received from him with equal force. Given limited draw from the family coffers, Baudelaire—preferring luxury to the time-honored penury of a poet’s life—lived well beyond his means, ducking debt collectors by abandoning rented room after rented room in the middle of the night, until his death in 1867 at the age of forty-six. Our narrator also meditates on the fate of Jeanne Duval, an actress of African and French heritage with whom Baudelaire was passionately in love, spending twenty-one years with her, and about whom relatively little is known.
Robertson/Brown is not flatly enamored of Baudelaire (readers may get weary and need to drop a ball once in a while when juggling a three-in-one writer-mind): “In truth I’d barely read him,” she confesses. Not to mention that a nineteenth-century Frenchman can be a downright embarrassing entanglement for a twenty-first-century woman, what with his outmoded ideas regarding gender and race: she-beast, Black Venus, witch, nymph, and angel being some of the things he called Duval. But where he falls short as subject, he is caught and recovered by Robertson as form and idea, and as a quality of attention to the world. For all but one of her novel’s chapters, she takes the title and a thin narrative filament from the prose poems in Baudelaire’s posthumously published Le Spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen, 1869) and spins her own story. By way of example, from Baudelaire’s “Windows”: “But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?” For Robertson’s chapter titled “Windows,” she refracts this idea into a scene in which she remembers a boy she would spy on through the window of an apartment in the building adjacent to her hotel, “his serious typewriter mirroring my own, the image of the studious youth seated at his writing composed itself in my self-image.” As le poète maudit penned in his famous letter to the writer Arsène Houssaye about this collection: “I send you a little work of which no one can say, without doing it an injustice, that it has neither head nor tail, since, on the contrary, everything in it is both head and tail, alternately and reciprocally.” He likens it to an autotomic serpent: “Chop it into numerous pieces and you will see that each one can get along alone.” Little did he understand that the pieces would one day be propagated by a she-poet (as Robertson says) to grow new beasts altogether.
Kinship is another word Robertson/Brown uses to describe her synaptic relation to Baudelaire; later, she posits that it was an innate sense of hospitality, which women are generally taught to have, that left her open to welcoming this authorship. One of the most enjoyable side effects of reading The Baudelaire Fractal is how Robertson’s socking it to Harold Bloom’s fraught “poet in a poet” model—no anxiety of influence here!—bends a reader’s ear toward the voices of still more writers and artists and thinkers whose presence also produced these pages in one way or another. And she, as a reader, theirs. Some she calls out by name: Poe, Perec, Lorrain, Godard, Nietzsche, Barthes, Berger, Olson, Bonnard, Benveniste. Regarding Baudelaire’s feebly theatrical suicide attempt while at a cabaret, Hazel Brown sighs, “Oh Baudelaire, you’re pathetic, I love you,” her exhale sharing a certain air with the final line of poet Frank O’Hara’s paean to Lana Turner: “oh Lana Turner we love you get up.” In the penultimate sentence of the novel—“I’m thinking about the immense, silent legend of any girl’s life”—hear the echo of an unfinished thought that Walter Benjamin jotted down, published in his luminous study The Writer of Modern Life, a radical rethinking of Baudelaire’s output, which in turn rewrote the poet’s place in literary history: “The significance of the life legend Baudelaire imagined for himself.” Robertson, with feminist wit, a dash of kink, and a generous brain, has written an urtext that tenders there can be, in fact, or in fiction, no such thing. Hers is a boon for readers and writers, now and in the future. - Jennifer Krasinski
A 25-frames-per-second look at the kinetic, cinematic self by a master poet.
A quorum of crows will be your witness.And if you discover you were bought?
You note the smell of rain, bread, and exhaust mixed with tiredness.
And if you yourself are incompatible with your view of the world?
And what is the subject but a stitching?
Once again you are the one who promotes artifice.
At 2 am on Friday, you burn with a maudlin premonition.
And rankings and rankings and badges and repetitions.
What if the cinema of the present were a Möbius strip of language, a montage of statements and questions sutured together and gradually accumulating colour? Would the seams afford a new sensibility around the pronoun ‘you’? Would the precise words of philosophy, fashion, books, architecture and history animate a new vision, gestural and oblique? Is the kinetic pronoun cinema?
These and other questions are answered in the new long poem from acclaimed poet and essayist Lisa Robertson. The book is available with four different back covers, designed by artists Hadley+Maxwell.
'Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully.'
—The New York Times
n this non-linear, self-referential book-length poem, Canadian-born poet and essayist Robertson (Magenta Soul Whip), who currently lives in France, asks, amid a host of queries and interrogations, “What do you believe about form?” From the beginning one must be prepared to “move into the distributive texture of an experimental protocol,” an initially disorienting procession of questions, observations, and images advanced by Robertson. The work’s use of non sequitur is reminiscent of David Markson, as is its invitation to readers to draw their own connections between the poem’s major themes—description, memory, prosody, alienation, and gender, among others. Robertson’s lines, in alternating roman and italic text, flow unceasingly, without overt indications of breaks or stoppages, perhaps providing a response to her question, “How else do you construct a pause in cognition?” Many lines throughout the work are repeated once later in the poem, though never at any regular interval and always with the text style transposed. This shuffling exposes the banality of déjà vu, how shifting the context changes the nature of expression. Or, as Robertson writes, using the language of epigenetics, “You are a position effect.” Is her poem, then, a kind of internal dialogue? Perhaps, and, if this is the case, it underlines her question, “what is the subject but a stitching?” Addressing the self’s perpetual conflict over which desires take prominence (“There’s no logic to what organisms demand”), Robertson even wonders, “To whom do you speak?”One can with more certainty call Robertson’s poem a magnificent testament to the eroticism of thought, one where “the enjoyable gland also dribbles its politics.” The specific gland to which she is referring remains obscure, but that’s partly the point: she’s hinting at the sexual while keeping the door open to an exploration of the physical body more generally. In this way, her primary concerns find their expression in tones and textures that are quintessentially Robertsonian and reveal how desire is intimately entwined with the self’s coming into being. “The way you practice emergence,” she declares, “is through longing.” So, if the irrationality of tension within the self demands a synthesis, then, “[y]our new skin would be prosodic—that is, both esoteric and practical.” Amid all this “brutality of description”—which, for Robertson, “is the traversal of this infinitely futile yet fundamental and continuous space called the present”—the “cinema of the present” becomes that ever-passing surface of time, the sheen of a moment in the description of that moment: “By means of description, a whole profound mass of time became your milieu.” A social environment thus enlarged serves one of Robertson’s explicit goals, that “Feminism wants to expand the sensorium.”This book—which will feature four different back covers designed by artists Hadley + Maxwell, emphasizing its status as an objet d’art—defies review, instead demanding engagement, conversation, and multiple rereads. It may not be a great place to start for newcomers to Robertson’s work, but fans or those who simply relish getting lost in a sea of thought will discover almost infinite depths: “If you speak in this imaginary structure, it’s because other choices felt limiting.”- Alex Crowley
Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, Clear Cut Press, 2003
read it at Google Books
www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Robertson.php
Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2006) is a rich set of poetic essays, détourned manifestos, and prose poems that eludes generic classification. Occasional Work examines the ability of urban architecture to extend beyond the spatial boundaries that separate subjects from their surrounding environments. Robertson expresses this transgression of limits through three main tropes: fabric, translucency, and delirium. She uses these tropes to describe the tenor of urbanity and to explore history, memory, and various aesthetic traditions. Robertson demonstrates that this convergence is analogous to the layers of memory that cityscapes deconstruct, excavate, and build upon ad infinitum. - Geoffrey Hlibchuk
The nominal author of these twenty short prose works, the Office for Soft Architecture, is really the poet Lisa Robertson, a Vancouver-based experimentalist whose previous writings have proven that difficult—even near-impenetrable—verse can wink, and dazzle, and charm. (Especially recommended: Debbie: An Epic.) Robertson’s Office writes prose about, or around, or prompted by social history, urban geography, and visual art, especially but not only in Vancouver. Her fascinations generate Occasional Work (catalog essays for galleries, commissioned journal articles, reactions to special events) and Walks (urban stroll-pieces, dérives, pages from a Rough Guide in a dream). Thirteen of the former, seven of the latter, assemble in this palm-sized, vivaciously illustrated paperback, whose pictures include cute postcards, Eugene Atget photographs, and even a paint-tint test. - Stephen Burt
The cold warriors of minimalia would do well to tip their streamlined caps to flâneur and poet Lisa Robertson in her latest incarnation as the Office for Soft Architecture. Her pocket-sized, minutely printed, two-hundred-seventy-four paged, pink Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture not only puts forth a clever, confounding, detailed, and resonant theory of sensing and being in the world, but her writing style, at once gorgeous, flexing, decorated, febrile, special, insistent, and indulgent, successfully dislodges contemporary prose poetry from its well-ironed surreal-ish topos by a return to Decadent audacity and lushness.
For those of us who have not been keeping up with the well-designed lifestyle journals or the catalogues accompanying Vancouver gallery shows of the last decade, this book may seem to have sprung fully formed from the head of the mysterious Office. In fact, the book is multiple, a collection in several senses of the word: a concatenation of pieces which have appeared in the above-mentioned artworld and design publications; a colloquy of subjects as diverse as fountains, suburbs, blackberries, scaffolds, second-hand chain stores, and the industrial ruins around Vancouver; a cross-section of genres such as manifestos, proposals, introductions, site studies, microhistories, and the sui generis ‘walks’; and even, conceptually speaking, a committee of authors, for while all the pieces appear to have been penned by Robertson, the speakers are plural, referred to by the title the Office for Soft Architecture as well as by the pronoun ‘we.’
This tactic recalls the strategically effaced speakers of the essays of Virginia Woolf (and, indeed, reference is made to the feminist dimension of the plural), yet also enacts a Modernist brio, with the ‘we’-syntax implying that the experiences of the Office are universal. In “Soft Architecture: A Manifesto,” an early childhood memory of falling asleep tangled in sheets is presented as the kernel of all subsequent aesthetic experience:
[ . . . ]That way we slowly wore through the thinning cloth. Our feet would get tangled in the fretted gap.
We walked through the soft arcade. We became an architect.Here, Robertson-the-poet is working hand-in-glove with Robertson-the-theorist (and perhaps these multiple selves are the inseparable officemates). The concept of ‘soft architecture’ is introduced via an inextricability of literal and figurative meaning, revealed and concealed logic. The anecdote of the child falling asleep evokes a missing term, the ‘threshold’ of sleep, which is coincident with the holes worn in the sheets by the child’s feet. The child creates and moves through double thresholds, through the “soft arcade,” which metaphorically stands for consciousness only after it has literally referred to the sensation of the entanglement in the sheets. “We became an architect” elides both registers and moves the elision out of the anecdotal instance and into subsequence. When she declares, a few paragraphs later, that “Memory’s architecture is neither palatial nor theatrical but soft,” her meaning is parseable: Memory is soft because it is experienced as sensation, the membrane of consciousness. Grasping this requires a recollection of one’s readerly progress through the examples, through the idea-architecture of the essay. The reader has walked through the soft arcade, has become its architect.
Not only are all humans potential architects, but this role extends to all animate and inanimate organizers of space. In “The Fountain Transcript,” the fountains of corporate plazas refer to a pre-corporate rhetoric of simplicity and happiness and thus “flood the grid with its countertext.” In “Site Report: New Brighton Park,” a history of the uses of a former municipal pleasure garden, now an unclaimed industrial zone, concludes
The
spatio-economic system of Lot 26 functions as a mutating lens: never a
settlement, always already a zone of leisured flows and their minor
intensifications, a zone of racialization and morphogenesis. On the calm
surface of the swimming pool in winter, a village of geese[ . . . ]Soft
Architects believe that this site demonstrates the best possible use of
an urban origin: Change its name repeatedly. Burn it down. From the
rubble confect a prosthetic pleasureground; with fluent obliviousness,
picnic there.Here the geese seem to serve as the latest Soft Architects of the site, and it is unclear whether the final directive to “picnic” anthropomorphizes the geese—referring to their already anthropomorphized “village”—or calls upon us humans to copy the geese, animalizing us. The boundary is, suitably, blurry.
Transition from literal image to metaphorical figure and back again is a consistent tool of the Office. In a description of the suburbs, “The suburb is memory fattening to russet then paling to flush when it bursts before dropping as whiteness on parked cars.” Here the final image of bird shit is laced so subtly into the sentence that its literality emerges as unexpectedly as if it had graced the chagrined reader’s own windshield or shoulder. Equally beguiling is the conclusion of “The Fountain Transcript,” wherein the Office describes its intention to further its research into the fountains of Vancouver:
We
have set out to sketch the terrain of a future analysis[ . . . ] We do
expect that each of these economies will find its antithesis in a
fountain somewhere, that inquiry will erupt from its own methodological
grid like syllables from our teeth and lips. We expect to be deliriously
misinterpreted. We fountain, always astonished by the political
physiology of laughter.Here the chain of likenesses blurs—fountains—into a delightful multiplicity of laughing countenances. Fountains, like ‘surprise’ architects, disturb the “methodological grid” of inquiry; disrupted inquiry becomes fountain-shaped, springing off in new directions. At the same time, the sprays of water from a fountain look like language springing from a mouth, and also like laughter; the Office’s body and mouth thus become the sites of both fountains and fountain inquiry—”We fountain.”
Robertson’s facility with metaphor and image, abstraction and literality, forms the ground of her theory, rewriting the perceived world as a plane of utter, and fantastic, plausibility. By selecting topics willingly overlooked by aestheticists, such as chain clothing stores and tract housing, and by awarding aesthetic agency to such non-human species as blackberries, she articulates the world along a new grammar. Yet the Office for Soft Architecture has many mansions, and Robertson’s strengths as a poet extend to description, catalogue, epigram, and lyric euphony itself. These techniques are used and simultaneously theorized. A rippingly bizarre example comes when the Office for Soft Architecture writes an “Introduction to the Weather” for Lisa Robertson’s own poetry collection, The Weather. Here is the Office on that most mundane and conventional of topics, weather (described elsewhere as “boredom utopic”):
[ . . . ]The day is our house. Words are fleshy ducts. Description decorates. As for us, we like a touch of kitsch in each room to juice up or pinken the clean lines of the possible. This décor receives futurity as its own ludic production; this weather is the vestibule to something fountaining newly and crucially and yet indiscernibly beyond. [ . . . ] The weather is a stretchy, elaborate, delicate trapeze, an abstract and intact conveyance to the genuine future, which is also now.
Passages like this—and the book is constructed almost entirely of them—dazzle us into perceiving the world by their lights. This description of weather’s qualities is both far-fetched and indisputable. Weather as a metonym of dailiness must be an idea about days, and thus about the future. With equal agility, but in list form, Roberston convinces us elsewhere that scaffolding—yes, the kind found at construction sites—is the definitive site of modern experience:
[ . . . ]All the ceremonies of transition take place on such a makeshift planking: judgements, executions, banquets and symposia, entertainments and recitals, markets and bazaars, funerals, births and weddings and illicit fuckings are rehearsed and performed to their witnesses on this transient stage, which is sometimes decorated with drapes or swags or flags or garlands, sometimes padded for the comfort of the performing body, sometimes left bare as if to state the plain facts of life. The scaffold is a pause, an inflection of passage. It accommodates us in a shivering.
Here Robertson makes use of a looping referent, in which the category of the catalogue twice shifts; the reader must race to keep up. Since our experience is one of speed, it surprises us to learn that the scaffold is “a pause.” Our cognitive motion is thus suddenly stopped up at this pause, and in coming to such a sudden stop we feel the scaffolding sway with our momentum—”It accommodates us in a shivering.” This passage puts its reader at risk of falling, while holding us in its conceptual crux.
When Robertson’s focus is large, it is thrilling, but when it is small, it is amazing. I admire her swashbuckling mode, but also the quiet recombinant energies that end a two-page list in her “Manifesto.” This passage apparently refers to subterranean, and thus subliminal, Vancouver:
[ . . . ]softness and speed, echoes, spores, tropes, fonts; not identity but incident and the accumulation of air miles; unmarked solitude absorbing time, bloating to become an environment, indexical euphorias, the unraveling of laughter; a brief history of escalators; memory manifest, brindled, loosening; a crumpling of automotive glass; the pornographic, the wrapped; Helvetica’s black dust: All doctrine is foreign to us. [ . . . ]
It is delightful to watch all these consonants leap back and forth in the stream of vowels. The initial overtness of “echoes, spores, tropes, fonts” goes underground to resurface in surprising moments, as when the nymph “Helvetica” is seemingly born from the syllabic orgy of “history,” “escalators,” “manifest,” and “brindled.”
That “All doctrine is foreign to us” is a confounding assertion to discover in the context of a manifesto. Anti-doctrinal doctrines are at least as old as Dada, and Robertson is careful to undercut many of her boldest assertions with a nod to marginality or ultimate failure or impermanence. Given her interest in the marginal, the decayed, the effaced, the ignored, the underground, the overlooked, the discarded, and the ruined, this merely seems all the more perversely orthodox, and makes the largeness of her statements all the more thrilling: “The work of the S[oft]A[rchitects], simultaneously strong and weak, makes new descriptions on the warp of former events.” “From random documents of uncertain provenance, unstable value, and unraveling morphology,” she writes, “we produce new time.” Robertson’s finely stitched poetry and poetics mount to an addictive maximalism. - Joyelle McSweeney
A poet disguised as an architect. A fictional office of architects. Nothing could entice me more. In her book, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture
, Lisa Robertson offers us lyrical research, architectured syntax and ambulatory prose—often described as rococo.Since its publication in 2003, this book has not left my sight. Its blurring of genres and disciplines permits me to do the same. Its playful perspectives on our conceptualization of the material world (and vice versa) appeal to me as a writer and as an reader of the city.
Throughout thirteen commissioned texts and seven “walks,” the Office for Soft Architecture (OSA) commingles the theoretically rich with unique case studies. In discussing everything from fountains to shacks to scaffolding to thrift stores to horticulture, the OSA sources everybody from Benjamin to Bachelard to Ruskin to Foucault to Koolhaus.
In the text, “Spatial Synthetics: a theory,”originally published in Mix magazine, the OSA writes, “We want an intelligence that’s tall and silver, oblique and black, purring and amplifying its décor; a thin thing, a long thing, a hundred videos, a boutique.” The Office desires for our interior worlds—our mental constructs—to be understood aesthetically. That our perspectives, our intelligences have surfaces.
In “Doubt and the History of Scaffolding,” the OSA writes, “We could say scaffolding is a furniture insofar as it supports the desires of our bodies. … Like furniture it is a projection of our bodies, making us bigger, more limber, more elegant and serious.” A synthesis between architectural space and inhabitant is consistently sought by The Office. The boundaries between interior and exterior are folded delicately back and forth along carefully exposed perforations, and then torn to reveal the theoretical thing and the thing as theory.
OSA allows for misreading, uncertainty, and quizzical pauses through the deftness of its syntax. And it is the shifty syntax which evokes the larger theme, as I see it, of the text: revel in the parallaxes of subjectivity and know that the extent of your delight will determine your experience of the phenomenal world. That architectures are rhetorics for us to read. That reading is a playful act of imagination and critique.
[Now available from Coach House Books, truly perfect bookmakers. However, I do want to mention the original publisher, now defunct, Clear Cut Press. Their books were printed in Tokyo by TOPPAN in a standard Japanese format with colorful dust jackets and built-in bookmarks. http://www.toppan.co.jp/english/ Designer, Tae Won Yu, is known for his playful and delicate album designs for many indie rock and pop groups. http://www.taewonyu.com/ An art object in itself, I do recommend seeking out the Clear Cut edition.] -
I adore little books. Small, compact, unobtrusive, inviting, humble. They fit in your back pocket, in your breast pocket, and weigh easily in one hand. Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture is one such book; I, however, foolishly mistook this texts’ humble size for levity.
If architecture is the language of concrete and steel, then Soft Architecture needs a vocabulary of flesh, air, fabric and colour. It’s about civic surface and natural history. It’s about social space and clothing and urban geography and visual art, and some intersection of all these.
This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson, the ambulatory Office for Soft Architecture. There are essays on Vancouver fountains, the syntax of the suburban home, Value Village, the joy of synthetics, sca×olding and the persistence of the Himalayan blackberry. There are also seven Walks, tours of Vancouver sites – poetic dioramas, really, and more material than cement could ever be.
Soft Architecture exists at the crossroads of poetry, theory, urban geography and cultural criticism, some place where the quotidian and the metaphysical marry and invert. The most intriguing book you’ll encounter this year.
‘We say, on almost every page and with utmost reverence, Holy shit. … Ever since, we have wanted to think like Robertson, write like her, maybe even be her.’ – The Village Voice, listing it as a top pick of 2004
‘She plucks a subject (object) from the quotidian and banal in order to move through it, uncovering layers of the historical, the lyrical, and the political. The result feels somehow psychedelic.’ – The Stranger
Seven Walks
If urban space is often perceived in terms of grey tones and hard surfaces, then the Office for Soft Architecture insists upon the city as yielding, expressive and immanent. The Office’s ambulatory path through the urban fabric examines civic textures and surfaces, colours and form to produce a reading of space that revealingly insists on the social value of the ornamental, the transient and the weak.
The book titled Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture collects essays on shacks, Vancouver fountains, suburban childhood, Value Village, the history of scaffolding and the persistence of the Himalayan blackberry. There are also seven walks through sites inflected by Vancouver
neighbourhoods, but which finally remain more psychogeographic than specific; narrative walks that meandre through the overlooked and the banal, the quotidian and the extraordinary alike.
Through these perambulations, the Office for Soft Architecture asks us to reimagine the city as potential, creating a speculative space for an alternative thinking about the city and its political subjects. Recorded by the Office for Soft Architecture for this exhibition, these texts exist at the crossroads of poetry, theory, urban geography and cultural criticism.
The Office for Soft Architecture is an ongoing project by Lisa Robertson, a Canadian poet and essayist. Robertson maintains the Office to construct propositions and reports for “the advancement of a natural history of civic surface.” She is the author of six books of poetry, and her prose has appeared in many magazines, catalogues and monographs in Canada, the USA and Europe.
Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip
Lisa Robertson writes poems that mine the past — its ideas, its personages, its syntax — to construct a lexicon of the future. Her poems both court and cuckold subjectivity by unmasking its fundament of sex and hesitancy, the coil of doubt in its certitude. Reading her laments and utopias, we realize that language — whiplike — casts ahead of itself a fortuitous form. The form brims here pleasurably with dogs, movie stars, broths, painting's detritus, Latin and pillage. Erudite and startling, the poems in Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turn vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.
'Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.' – The Village Voice
'Here as in six earlier glittering books, Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy ... Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt ... Though she wields ... language expertly, even beautifully, she also shows an almost pagan delight in embodiment.' – New York Times
'Robertson is one of our most crisply intelligent writers, and the poems and prose pieces in Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip ... continually knock readers off their conventional responses, asking that they follow the curlicues of thought-in-motion the writing displays.' – Canadian Literature
'Magenta Soul Whip manages to exist in a universe of its own making, in which Baudelaire and Lucretius both make appearances, as do Jesus Christ and the adulteress he saved from stoning, a conversational dog, and contemporary Canadian visual artist Lucy Hogg. The book teaches us how to read it as it unfolds for us page by page.' – Jerry Magazine
'[Robertson's] preoccupations are as much lyrical and communicative ... as they are intellectual.' – Quill and Quire
Spatial Synthetics — A Theory
from the Office for Soft Architecture
A city is a flat massive thing already. We're out at the end of a lane looking south with normal eyes. Here is what we already know: the flesh is lovely and we abhor the prudery of monuments. But a pavilion is good. We believe a synthetic pavilion is really very good. Access would be no problem since we really enjoy our minds. Everything is something. The popular isn't pre-existent. It's not etiquette. We try to remember that we are always becoming popular. Spatial synthetics irreparably exceed their own structure. For example: Looking west, looking west, looking east by northeast, looking northwest, looking northeast, looking west, loading wool, looking west, looking north, looking east, looking west, looking north, looking northeast, looking northeast, looking west, looking west, looking west, tracks are oldest, looking south, looking north, looking north, looking east, looking west, looking west by southwest; thus, space. And not by means other than the gestural. Pretty eyes. Winds. |
| Now the entire aim of our speculative cognition amplifies the
synthetic principle. Everything glimmers, delights, fades, goes. We
drift through the cognition with exceptional grace. Attached as we are
to the senses, we manifest the sheer porousness of boutiques. The
boutiques are categories. We have plenty of time. The problem is not how
to stop the flow of items and surfaces in order to stabilize space, but
how to articulate the politics of their passage. Every culture is the
terrible gush of its splendid outward forms. Although some of us love its common and at times accidental beauty, we're truly exhausted by identity. Then we sink to the ground and demand to be entertained. We want to design new love for you because we are hungry for imprudent, sensational, immodest, revolutionary public gorgeousness. We need dignity and texture and fountains. What is the structure of freedom? It is entirely synthetic. The most pleasing object of all would be erotic hope. What could be more beautiful than to compile it with our minds, converting complicity to synthesis. A synthetics of space improvises unthought shape. Suppose we no longer call it identity. Spatial synthetics cease to enumerate how we have failed. Enough dialectical stuttering. We propose a theoretical device which amplifies the cognition of thresholds. It would add to the body the vertiginously unthinkable. That is, a pavilion. |
Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose, Book Thug, 2012
Nilling: Prose is a sequence of 6 loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading.
I have tried to make a sketch or a model in several dimensions of the potency of Arendt's idea of invisibility, the necessary inconspicuousness of thinking and reading, and the ambivalently joyous and knotted agency to be found there. Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And then the strictures of the text assert again themselves. I want to claim for this inconspicuousness a transformational agency that runs counter to the teleology of readerly intention. Syllables might call to gods who do and don't exist. That is, they appear in the text's absences and densities as a motile graphic and phonemic force that abnegates its own necessity. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading's supple snare, I feel love.
"It represents a possible future. It offers a deep respect for the present. It honours me with doubt."
- Sina Queyras via lemonhound.blogspot.com
"I felt myself hypnotically inducted into the whirling galaxy of this book, one of whose foci, indeed, is the mechanism (although that is too cold a word) - the miracle, really - of reading"
- Nada Gordon, via her blog ululate.blogspot.ca
- Lisa Robertson. The Weather. New Star Books. April 2001.
- Lisa Robertson. XEclogue. New Star Books. November 1999.
- Lisa Robertson. Rousseau’s Boat. Nomados Literary Publishers. 2004.
It was Jessica Grim the American poetAre you aware that Jessica Grim and Violette Leduc are both real people? I was not, at least until I came across Leduc’s 1964 memoir, La Bâtarde (The Lady Bastard), on the cover of which a pair of female profiles look ready to kiss. I just liked the sound of those names, “Jessica Grim,” “Violette Leduc”; one character arrives with a strange haircut and opinions, the author she recommends could wear boots that cover the thighs. It’s a Nabokovian limb you potentially like your poet to venture out on: a commonplace the site of an unexpected evocation.
who first advised me to read Violette Leduc
We’ll leave aside for a moment the fact that Jessica Grim is an American poet who, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, has published several books and also works as a librarian, and that Violette Leduc (1907‑1972), besides authoring an autobiography, composed some nine novels and was a friend of Simone de Beauvoir’s: Lisa Robertson’s oeuvre is dense, sonically resonant verse and combinations of verse and lyric prose, and often the result of collaboration or travel—with other artists and across countries, centuries, and literatures, both high and low. The list of her publications gives a clue to her pursuits, which are simultaneously pastoral and modernist: The Apothecary (1991), The Badge (1994), The Descent (1996), Debbie: An Epic (1997), XEclogue (1999), The Weather (2001), Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003), Rousseau’s Boat (2004), The Men: A Lyric Book (2006). What follows here treats three of these collections—The Weather, XEclogue, and Rousseau’s Boat—which show to great effect Robertson’s prized dilemma: how to stage obsolescence successfully, such that its strangeness, anachronism, and even its sometime illegibility, can be read intact. For whatever is obsolete is free for the taking. Which is to say, many abandoned styles have something (beauty) yet to offer; we need their insolvent otherness.
As I have explained, I am an innocent. I believed that Jessica Grim and Violette Leduc were aliases, just as I believed in the legitimacy of an “Office for Soft Architecture,” who had sent, folded into my copy of The Weather, a sky-blue flyer printed with a quantity of text presumably referring to that book. The flyer began promisingly: “We think of the design and construction of these weather descriptions as important decorative work.” But the text veered quickly into a territory I knew to be emphatically foreign to any authority worth its salt, with a nod in my direction, “What shall our new ornaments be? How should we adorn mortality now?” And, the author(s) insisted, now plaintive, “This is a serious political question.” The envoi finally convinced me of its impracticality as blurb:
Dear Reader—a lady speaking to humans from the motion of her own mind is always multiple. Enough of the least. We want to be believed.Who were the authors of the flyer, this “Office for Soft Architecture”? None other than Robertson herself, writing to the reader from the pages of the book (Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture) which would follow The Weather.
But, to begin at the beginning of The Weather, even if Robertson is an author devoted to taking herself out of order, the book is divided into seven ‘days’ of the week, each section containing one long prose section and a shorter, more traditionally lineated poem. “Sunday” ‘s prose presents phrases commencing, “Here…,” with resultant residual anaphora as guide to their overall meaning: “Here is a church. Here is deep loam upon chalk. Here is a hill. Here is a house.” “Sunday” has, as its grander half, the strange untitled poem to which I first made reference:
It was Jessica Grim the American poetHere the poem ends, at a comma. It is a factual, even banal, report on the fortunes of one literary person’s room—and the entrance into it of news, of memories, and of the weather—and, then again, this is pure fiction, each thing an instance of contrived metonymy. Robertson’s is a realism of epistemological concerns: even “[l]urid conditions are facts.” “I,” reader, no longer hold metaphor and perception apart; “I” compare, “I” fail to perceive discretely, “I … speed” impetuously into a fantasy in which reading has become, by virtue of this extraordinary capacity for association, a physical event. Most surprisingly, “This is no different….” “Clothes swish through the air”: the phrases borne toward the reader are a carousel of styles, and the shuffling of these costumes, the “shush[ing]” and “fan[ning]” of their physical manifestation as pulpy pages of a novel, “quench[es].” Yes, the “outspread world is / comparable to a large theatre,” but its materiality has become analogous only “to rending paper, and the noise it makes,” just as mortality is a detail, “pollen / smearing the windowsill.” Here everything returns to the book, carried as if by an irresistible wind. Who knows where this weather originates; Chaucer invented a House of Fame to explain it.
who first advised me to read Violette Leduc.
Lurid conditions are facts. This is no different
from daily protests and cashbars.
I now unknowingly speed towards
which of all acts, words, conditions—
I am troubled that I do not know.
When I feel depressed in broad daylight
depressed by the disappearance of names, the pollen
smearing the windowsill, I picture
the bending pages of La Bâtarde
and I think of wind. The outspread world is
comparable to a large theatre
or to rending paper, and the noise it makes when it flaps
is riotous. Clothes swish through the air, rubbing
my ears. Promptly I am quenched. I’m talking
about a cheap paperback which fans and
slips to the floor with a shush. Skirt stretched
taut between new knees, head turned back, I
hold down a branch,
“I think of wind,” writes Robertson, portraying herself in a janissary pose at the climax of her long stanza—legs open and “head turned back”—she makes way for whatever’s arriving. Which is to say, a lot of reading went into the composition of The Weather. Robertson writes in her appendix that the book resulted from “an intense yet eccentric research in the rhetorical structure of English meteorological description.” Sources include BBC forecasts, and a number of rare, weather-related tracts: “Mr. Well’s Essay on Dew, Luke Howard’s Essay on the Modification of Clouds, Thomas Forster’s Researches About Atmospheric Phenomena,” among many others. By way of these tracts, weather returns to the séance prop closet in The Weather, less phenomenon than diction—which diction is needed (a grant or two probably had to be written to give Robertson time enough to hunt it down) to describe a gorgeous and fleeting consciousness, one unharnessed by memory and receptive only to marks made by the immediate. This is the obvious consciousness of the long prose poems, but it is also the finely balanced syntax of their lineated partners and of a final poem, “Porchverse.” The stanzas of “Porchverse” are spare and beautifully broken and talk about transformation—how things “go”—as in this fine report on the necessity of stillness in a speaker who wishes to bear witness to flight:
Then refused so lucidly as whenRobertson’s 1999 collection, XEclogue, was already hot on this theme. And, indeed, hotter, as Virgil’s shepherd Corydon observes in the second Eclogue,
I saw a dog
run a doe
to sea.
torva leaena lupum sequitur, lupus ipse capellam,Lion eats wolf eats goat eats flowering clover: we consume and are in turn consumed. Where The Weather sidesteps this chase and takes a position of third party observer, XEclogue takes enthusiastic part, in ten chapters each titled Eclogue. Robertson introduces her work here with the following excuse, “I needed a genre for the times that I go phantom.” By “go phantom,” Robertson means an inability to find herself reflected in the world around her, social or otherwise. This inability is often called Liberty, according to Robertson, and its symptoms include “illusions of historical innocence” and weird attempts to recognize oneself in “proud trees” and “the proud sky” (Robertson is less interested in flags and eagles). But Robertson has discovered that she has “an ancestress,” a woman of the landed class who is both dead and moving rapidly through the psychic woods, and who can offer advice about how to escape the numbing tropes of Nation and Nature:
florentem cytisum sequitur lasciva capella,
Ontology is the luxury of the landed. Let’s pretend you “had” a land. Then you “lost” it. Now fondly describe it. That is pastoral. Consider your homeland, like all utopias, obsolete. Your pining rhetoric points to obsolescence. The garden gate shuts firmly. Yet Liberty must remain throned in her posh gazebo. What can the poor Lady do? Beauty, Pride, Envy, the Bounteous Land, the Romance of Citizenship: these mawkish paradigms flesh out the nation, fard its empty gaze. What if, for your new suit, you chose to parade obsolescence?
Political correctness has turned out not to be an entirely excellent exit-strategy for the twentieth century.
XEclogue is a discussion of this departure, among others. The book forms a basis for the work Robertson executes in her later collections, but it is also millennium-appropriate: full of richer language, speculation about the body politic, and contrived scenarios designed to help the reader entertain a more glamorous notion of self than “the Romance of Citizenship” normally affords.
XEclogue concerns a tripartite dramatis personae: a worried individual named Nancy, the brave and multifarious Lady M, and a gaggle of sex objects known as the Roaring Boys. What results is a series of letters, dialogues, complaints, and stage directions, which lead to the eventual reformation of Nancy, who initially proclaims: “I need to assume my dream of justice really does exist.” Just as Virgil simultaneously mourned alongside farmers who had lost their farmsteads to soldiers and poked fun at them in the Eclogues, Robertson shows she thinks psychology is a predicament and an opportunity. In this description of one of the Roaring Boys, it is difficult to tell when she is talking about the way he thinks and when she is referring to his looks:
Roaring Boy #1 is skinny and pure as the bitter white heel of a petal. Spent lupins could describe his sense of mind as a great dusky silky mass. Yet a feeling of being followed had taken his will away. In an age of repudiation he would exclude sullen indolence and reveal his lace. […] When he closes his eyes he asks: Shall I be sold up? Am I to become a beggar? Shall I take to flight? He is skinny and pure as a calling.
In passages like these, Robertson revitalizes prose and raises the question, if so much is possible in language, must it refer to a world at all? Robertson’s reply is that language must at least refer back to itself and, then, pointedly. She shares the literary conversation which nourished XEclogue at the book’s conclusion: eighteenth century “poet, traveler, and political critic,” Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Frank O’Hara, Virgil, anonymous fourth century ad Latin songs of the Pervigilium Veneris, Rousseau’s Social Contract, the Slits, the Raincoats, Patti Smith, Young Marble Giants, the Au Pairs, L7, Marguerite de Navarre, and many, many (it appears) others.
In spite of this careful acknowledgment of authorship, 2004’s Rousseau’s Boat finds Robertson toying with the remarkable notion that much of what makes the experience of writing powerful is her own lack of authority:
Here/ freedom has no referent. It is like/ an emotion. This is for/ them then. This is a passive narrative. I feel/ it could be useful. I’m forty-one. It/ gets more detailed. I feel an amazement.
The book is a short one. Its back cover bears a quote attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in which that thinker describes the way in which the perception of moving water can replace thought: “I felt in myself so pleasurably and effortlessly the sensation of existing….” It’s also a pleasure to hear the poet mention her age, “I’m forty-one.” And then, the astonishing way she bears this statement out: “It / gets more detailed. I feel an amazement.” Robertson displays a talent for the sweeter side of generalization, for unknowingness. The two large poems in the book, “Face” and “Utopia,” are full of hauntingly general language, which is no oxymoron. The poems repeat lines, and much of their power stems from the subtle accrual of sense produced by freely appearing refrains. Thus the reader becomes a subject born along in Rousseau’s boat (these languid poems), batted by lines which softly suggest the fact of mortality.
The effect of the downflowing patter of shade on the wall
was liquid, so the wall became a slow fountain in afternoon.
Our fears opened inwards.
Must it be the future?
Yes, the future, which is a sewing motion.
And Robertson keeps coming up with dates (“It was the spring of my thirty-fifth year,” she writes, or “It was 1993”) which are proof of the simple effect of sadness that precision can give. For the facts are outside the poem, and the poem itself travels away from standard referentiality, teaching thought to refer to itself:
This is one part of the history of a girl’s mind.
The unimaginably moist wind changed the scale of the morning,
Say the mind is not a point of origin, but a skin carrying
sensation into the midst of objects.
Now it branches and forks and coalesces.
In the centre, the fire pit and log seat, a frieze of salal and
foxglove, little cadmium berries.
At the periphery of the overgrown clearing, the skeleton of a
reading chair decaying beneath plastic.
Lisa Robertson knows where she is headed, but this is not the only reason that she is a trustworthy writer. Her work results from a reading practice in which words continue to disturb the poet, who is always just beginning to accept that there is more justice in literature than outside it. - Lucy Ives
the ideal. Streaky cloudy at the top of the sky.
place. Everything is illuminated; we prove inexhaustibility. Far into the night
an infinite sweetness; beyond can be our model.
take a verity to paradise.
to harden me or garnish. I
think of this stricture--rain
language, building--as a corset: an
outer ideal mould, I feel
the ideal moulding me the ideal
is now my surface just so very
perfect I know where to buy it and I
take it off. I take it off.
Should it come as a surprise that Britain's most profitable television export is not costume drama but weatherporn? Weatherporn. An atmospheric condition dallies with some lives and we drink its lusty spectacle from the screen. Description pries up, frees itself, briefly phatic, expresses a gestural plenitude, framed by but untied to the sociality of objects. This loosening is diction as rhythm. It crosses borders. The weather becomes a flickering social prosody. As it abstracts into rhythm it becomes commodified, universal. Really. It was a fireball, right through the front door, and out the back.
It's real. It's mythic. It's wild. It's a vernacular. It's didactic. It's boredom. It's ceaseless. It's a delusional space.
Stacy Doris says "In terms of geographies and nationalities, the best bet for poetry is delusional space. . . Any poetry that doesn't somehow begin in a realm of wild fantasy is not worth the writing." This weather's the wild fantasy. It seizes us. Together our faces tilt upwards. A wild dream of parity must have its own weather and that weather will always have as its structure an incommensurability. If each forecast is a fiction I prefer to add to that fiction alternate delusions-- a delusionary politics that describes current conditions as it poses futurities. I mean it.
Here is want I want to say. Sincerity has a rhetorical history. The history of the description of weather parallels the history of sincerity as a rhetorical value. The delimitation or purification of diction is common to both. Part of this delimitation is idiomatic; part derives from a tradition of quotation, of genre. When Virgil described the weather prognosticatons in The Georgics, he quoted Lucretius and Aratus' Diosemia, which in turn referred to Hesiod's Works and Days. James Thomson, in The Seasons, quoted Virgil, both structurally and substantially. John Clare learned an ideology of directly observed description from Thomson, as did Wordworth. Etcetera. But parallel to the literary and idiomatic geneology of the atmosphere, was the standardization of scientific rhetoric, the language of natural philosophy and early meteorology.
Here is a small history of that sincerity. In 1667 Thomas Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society, included in his account of the principal body of the new sciences a substantial manifesto on style. "The Purity of speech, and greatness of Empire have, in all Countries, still met together" he says, calling for "a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness: bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness, as they can: and perferring the language of Artisans, countrymen and merchants, before that, of wits, and scholars." The purification of English diction was integral to the institutionalization of scientific discourse, but also to the normalization of national conduct, distinguishing English, and the English, from the rhetorical eloquence, the corrupt and feminine arts of pleasure and ornament that Sprat sees spread throughout neighbouring latinate languages and nations. He describes "The general constitution of the Minds of the English": "They have commonly an unaffected sincerity; that they love to deliver their minds with a sound simplicity. . . a universal modesty posseses them." For Sprat, sincerity, reason and plain speech are natural to the English people by blood, and by weather:
"By position of our climate, the air, the influence of the heaven, the composition of the English
blood, as well as the embraces of the ocean, seem to join with the labours of the Royal Society, to
render our country a land of Experimental Knowledge. And it is a good sign that Nature
will reveal more of its secrets to the English than to others because it has already furnished them
with a genius so well proportioned for the receiving and retaining its mysteries."
So climate is blood. The stylistic sign of sincerity, apart from the plain diction of common people, showed itself in a rhetorical economy: the experimental philospher must maintain "A constant Resolution to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style; to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men delivered so many Things, almost in an equal number of Words." Nor was this economy merely metaphorical. One of the pragmatic purposes of the Royal Society was the improvement of manufacture; experimental philosophers were to propose better use of the new materials originating in America and elsewhere. Says Spratt "it has been the constant error of men's labours in all Ages, that they have still directed them to improve those of Pleasure, more than those of profit. . .what prodigious expense has been thrown away about the fashions of clothes? But how little endeavours have there been, to invent new materials for clothing, or to perfect those we have?" English inventiveness, plainess, reason, and sincerity made an efficient structure for the economical administration of manufacture, trade, and colonies. A formal Academy would not prove necessary. The 18th century blossoming of the sciences extended through all aspects of the political economy of the nation and its colonies, the new scientific rhetoric proving the ground for the radical nationalist literatures of the late 18th century. The public for the purified diction of Wordworth and Coleridge was already established in the late 17th century. Sincerity is a market, a decisive method, a nationalist politics, and an ethnic signifier. Lyrical Ballads are ethnic weather. They wear a blue bonnet. They read the weather signs for bombers.
The best parts of manifestoes are their lapses and practical failures. Wordsworth, in the Second Preface to Lyrical Ballads says "The language of these rustic men has been adopted. . .because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because. . . being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions." Wordsworth was applying the Royal Society's notion of plain speech to poetry. The transposition of the rhetoric of sincerity from prose style to poetry wasn't entirely elided; Wordsworth stressed that good poetry and good prose have a common diction. He claimed as well that all knowledge, including the sciences, belongs in poetry. He wasn't the first to make this claim; he was reiterating an important theme in literary criticism. In the 18th century Thomas Aikens and Joseph Trapp wrote and lectured on the advisability of bringing the discourses of the new natural sciences into poetry. For these critics, the natural sciences would supply poetry with newness, variability and change-- the concern was pointed towards content. For Aikens and Trapp, the traditional form of the georgic would provide a structural ground on which descriptions of specifically english nature could unfold. The new style of descriptive rhetoric in the sciences didn't immediately replace poetic diction, but it did supplement the poem's content, previously a non-contentious iteration of classical formulations and phraseologies, with new values of authenticity and regional truth and specificity. In constituting this separation between content and form, Aiken and Trapp attributed to the poet a new agency, the potential of subjective choice. No longer genre-driven, the composition of poetry now included in its compass the possibility that content was a matter of individual choice, and the measure of the poem was no longer tradition, but authenticity. Wordsworth extended the trope from content to diction-- now the lexical choices and phrase formations enacted by the poet reflected the poets own subjective status rather than the learned apprehension of a tradition-based rhetorical economy. But Coleridge later pointed out how Wordsworth's poetry consistently exceeds its own claims for a pure diction, and accompanying proprieties of sentiment and structure, and that the poetry's value lies in the particular textures of Wordsworths transgressions of his own theory. Early 19 century scientific description also overflows its own rhetorical programme and stylistic norm. I've been monitering this overflow, specifically within the meteorological literature pertaining to clouds.
Clouds presented a specific formal difficulty to description and nomenclature-- if, as Sprat advised, the relation between objects and words should be equivalent, economical, the cloud challenged the propriety of this equivalence since its appearance as a thing was so ephemeral. In fact for a long time a cloud was not a thing. Clouds couldn't be seen for the sky. Robert Hooke, who reported to the Royal Society on A Method for Making a History of the Weather, proposed a lexicon for the sky. "But as for the faces of the sky, they are so many, that many of them want proper names. . . Let Clear signify a very clear sky. . . Checquered a clear sky with many great white round clouds. . .Hazy, a sky that looks whitish. . . Thicke, a sky more whitened. . . Overcast, when the vapours so whiten and thicken the air that the sun cannot break through" and so on, through the terms Hairy, Watered, Waved, and Lowring. The trouble with Hookes proposed diction was that it could not perceive clouds structurally, but looked at the sky as a face, a single figure to which the meteorologist could apply an interpretive phenomenology. The struggle was to see a cloud as particular, so that it could be enumerated, measured and described.
Then in 1796 Luke Howard invented clouds. A young Quaker man who was a chemist by trade and training, he belonged to a society of amature natural philosphers who would weekly meet to make reports on their observations. In a biographical letter to Goethe, he said of himself "My pretensions as a man of science are . . . but slender: being born, however, with observant faculties, I began even here to make use of them, as well as I could without a guide." His observations of clouds occured on his daily walks between his home and his chemical laboratory and were presented to the society, published in Tilloch's philosophical magazine, and later in the book Essay on the Modifications of Clouds. The names cumulus, cirrus and stratus resulted from his observations.
This is what dignified Howards observations: he was able to invent a structural typology which could account for change. The face of the sky was revisioned as "certain distinct modifications." The basic three cloud types corresponded to zones or depths of the sky as well as to structural types-- cirrus, to the high, fibrous wisps, Cumulus to the conical heaps of the middle ground, and stratus to the horizontal sheets of mist which hug the earth. Clouds were translated from figurations, to-- not quite objects, but objective modifications. Weather became a system. These distinctions have become so very normalized that I think we can't really understand the absolute novelty of understanding clouds in terms of structural typology. After Howard, clouds were seen for the first time. Howard's nomenclature provided a lens. It entered the public knowledge quite quickly-- and the importance of his system can be somewhat gauged by its immediate use, not only by other meteorologists, but within the literary and visual arts. After Howard, Shelley, Coleridge and Goethe wrote cloud poems. Goethe gave the cloud treatise to the German, and Danish, romantic painters. In Modern Painters, Ruskin wrote long treatises on the perspectival representation of clouds. Constable completely reassessed his representation of skies, spending a full year doing little other than outdoor cloud studies, often 3 or more in an hour, with meteorological notations scrawled on the backs. People spend their lives researching and annotating these influences. I won't. What I want to notice here, though, is how the propriety and economy of Howard's system was almost immediately bloated with a descriptive and identificatory excess, which nevertheless managed to respect his proposed typology and structure.
After Howard, individual meteorologists gravitated towards specializations in the accounts of specific cloud types-- with some this is a stated objective, with others, a discernable inflation in descriptive balance. Rev Leonard Blomefield, for example, spent 30 years in Cambridgeshire observing the stratus formation. . . His accounts are not so much remarkable for the cloud descriptions in themselves, as they are for his strangely methodical obsession with low and creeping mists. Rev. Blomefield identified with fog. He observed its formation on a large grass meadow in front of his vicarage, and when as he described "circumstances were likely to favour the formation of fogs and creeping mists," he would place, at the far end of the field, a chair and a small table supplied with thermometres, hygrometer and notebook (kept always ready in the vicarage for this use). He would sit in the meadow and observe, taking account of all that occured relating to the fogs and creeping mists, from their first appearance to their dissappearance, if they did not continue all night. He explained, in his characteristically precise yet underdetermined manner "The way in which stratus gradually spreads itself sheetlike over a meadow, or at other times extends in lines and bands from one meadow to another, is very striking." He was inspired in these observations by his colleague Mr Wells, who wrote the "Essay on Dew". Wells also observed his chosen phenomena almost every night of his adult life. He described his method-- "Upon one serene and still night I placed fresh parcels of wool upon grass every hour, and by weighing each of them found that they had attracted dew." And so on. I can't help but read into these accounts a marvelous identificatory excess-- an identification which aligns itself with a method, in all its excessiveness, and which subsequently bleeds into a rhetorical economy of description.
Thomas Ignatius Forster, writing immediately after Howard, focussed at length on the Cirrus formation. His attempts to precisely describe the cirrus cloud reflect the need to extend descriptive grammar towards a rhythmically paratactic prolixity, when the object of description itself is in a state of constant transformation. Cirrus is the most formally variable of the modifications, and in traditional weather lore tends to be referred to using various animal and plant analogies-- Mare's tail, Mackeral back, the sea tree. Forster's cirrus description, rather than carrying out Sprat's economy of a word for each thing, refers to folkloric likeness, proceeding by a figurative logic of analogy and accretion, interleaved with a discordantly geometrical diction. Here is one sentence of his cirrus: "Comoid tufts, like bushes of hair, or sometimes like erected feathers; angular flexure; streaks; recticular intersections of them. . .which look like nets thrown over the firmament; forms of arrows; stars with long fibrous tails, cyphen shaped curves, and lines with pendulous or with erect fringes, ornament the sky; still different appearances of stars and waves again appear, as these clouds change to cirrocumulus or cirrostratus, which modifications also seem to form and subside spontaneously, in different planes, and with the varied and dissimilar appearances of flocks at rest, fleeces of wool, or myriads of small specks; of long tapering columns like the tail of the great manis, or of mackeral back skies, or of striae, like the grains of wood." Forster's cloud-sentence proceeds by a series of phrasal modifications, miming the process of transmutation in the clouds themselves, even discernably within the real time of those observed fluctuations. In this instance sincerity accrues by ornament, expansion, its rhetoric stretched to the point of contusion, within the authenticating timeframe of the plein air descriptive sketch.
This book of Forsters was in the personal library of the East Anglian John Constable, a painter with a lifelong engagement with the representation of weather conditions within landscape. In 1820, shortly after the second edition of the Forster book, and the publication of Howards Climate of London, which included his theory of cloud modification and nomenclature, Constable began a two year detailed study of clouds. He produced a huge body of oil sketches on paper, executed out doors, representing cloud types in relation to larger weather patterns. This sketches, sometimes produced in 15 minute intervals throughout a series of days, serve as a sort of real time filmic meteorological sequence. On the back of each, Constable scrawled a notation of accompanying weather conditions-- for example "Sept. 10, 1821 Eleven o'clock sultry with warm gentle rain falling large heavy clouds a heavy downpour and thunder". Then, half an hour later-- "Noon, Gentle wind at west. Very sultry after a heavy shower with thunder. Accumulated thunder clouds passing slowly away to the south east. Very Bright and Hot. All the foliage sparkling." But similarily to the way these small scale sky sketches served as reference for the later representation of skies in his fullsize canvases, the brief weather annotations sometimes extended to full length descriptions with stylistic parallels to the prolix meteorological literature he perferred:
"It may, perhaps give some idea of one of these bright and silver days in spring, when at noon large
garish clouds surcharged with hail or sleet sweep with their broad shadows the fields, woods, and
hills; and by their depths enhance the value of the vivid greens and yellows so peculiar to the
season. The natural history, if the expression may be used, of the skies, which are so particularily
marked in the hail squalls at this time of year is this: The clouds accumulate in very large masses, and
from their loftiness seem to move but slowly; immediately upon these large clouds appear numerous
opaque patches, which are only small clouds passing rapidly before them, and consisting of
isolated portions detached probably from the larger cloud. These, floating much nearer the earth
may perhaps fall in with a stronger current of wind, which as well as thir comparitive lightness
causes them to move with greater rapidity; hence they are called by wind-millers and sailors,
messangers, and always portend bad weather. They float midway in what may be termed the lanes of
the clouds; and from being so situated are almost uniformly in shadow, receiving a reflected
light only, from the clear blue sky imediately above them. In passing over the bright of the large
clouds, they appear as darks; but in passing the shadowed parts, they assume a grey, a pale, or
lurid hue."
This is a note written for the painting Spring. It is remarkable, to me, for its nuanced description of movement, the specific movements of clouds and light, coming from a painter whose primary medium could only be static, planar representation. Constables concern was to find a method of representing skies and weather as temporal phenomena, as metred fluctuation. His life long project was a natural history of the skies. Observational methodologies of natural history, and the descriptive rhetoric of modifications, were translated to a chiarascuro rendering of cause and effect. Constable's was a pictured prosody of weather.
What these natural histories of the sky share, in spite of stylistic modifications and developements in the rhetoric of descriptive sincerity-- and the dogmas and transgressions of that rhetoric--, is a participation in a broad cultural project, the enlightement project, to collectively describe and test the parametres of Truth. Even in the early Wordsworth, the methodological project, the experiments in diction and address, the romance of the perceiving subject, are aligned with a sceptical conservatism concerned with the description and promotion of static, enduring values. We see, in the history of clouds, the shift from description as ontological figuration, to description as notation of situational modification and change-- the delimitation or formalization of cloud nomenclature permitted perception to begin to annotate patterns of temporality, rather than properties of objects. Clouds, in a sense were invented at the point when sincerity ceased being a rhetoric, as in Sprat, and submerged itself in the cultural ontology of Romanticism.
Yet in the small, named, quantified world of the description, temporal improprieties can be observed. Like a little weather demonstrating formal inexhaustibility, the empirical description is the site of its own transgression. So it is sincere, and it is a model of uninterpretability.
What I want to do is to infiltrate sincerity-- not to dissolve it in sceptical critique, but to lift it from its maudlin imprisonment, return to it the rhetorical play of idiom, of scale, enjoy its identificatory intensities and climates as conditions or modifications that pass over the face. I am a spy.
The history of meteorology shows that the idea of "the weather" has consistantly been appropriated to a dominant status quo. In the enclopediac empire of taxonomies weather gained a scientific nomenclature. In the culture of warfare, forcasting was absorbed into governmental budgets. In the incipience of the nation state, as governments gained economic interests in aviation and agribusiness, the weather became a department of government. At the same time weather's everyday rhetorical status as commonplace, as phatic utterance, assured that the sociology of weather appears as nature.
Part of what I want to ask of the rhetoric of weather, is what other ideologies may it absorb? May I cause the weather to absorb the wrong ideologies? The issue is not to defamiliarize the language of weather, but to appropriate its naturalizing function to a history, an utterance, which is delusional insofar as it is gendered. A wild dream of parity must have its own weather and that weather will always have as its structure an inexhaustible incommensurability.
I'm interested in sincerity. Its usually invoked as a stoical value, a holy humanness. Moral and national weight attends it. I'm interested in studying sincerity because I want and don't want it. I mean, I want to be believed. But I also want to write through spaces that are utterly delusional. I need to be able to delude myself, for as long as it takes, as long as it takes to translate an emotion, a grievance, a politics, an intoxication, to a site, an outside. Sincerity says that identity is moral. I need it to be a tent, not a cave, a rhetoric, not a value. There's also the fact that my sex is a problem within sincerity. I want to move on. I want a viable climate. I'll make it in description.
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