The Baudelaire Fractal
Lisa Robertson
Coach House, 2020
Review by Margaryta Golovchenko
Sitting in the packed atrium of the MOCA for the launch of The Baudelaire Fractal (Coach House, 2020) as Lisa Robertson discusses history and legacy, I recall the words of artist Carrie Mae Weems from her lecture at the Daniels Faculty the year before. Weems called into question the concept of “true originality,” pointing out that no artist arrives wholly formed, but exists as a link in a long chain of relationality, influence, and dialogue with past artists from a variety of fields. Despite the eight months separating Weems’ lecture and Robertson’s book launch, the two creators are linked by a shared exploration and demythization of the creative process, and in Robertson’s debut novel, these questions acquire new urgency. 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. For all its retrospective pondering, the novel has its roots firmly planted in the present, inviting us to consider how literary and artistic traditions continue to shape us not only as writers and readers but also as individuals, regardless of whether we merely accept them or actively work to rewrite them.
This conversation about authorship and originality should begin with a reminder—from both Robertson and her semi-autobiographical protagonist, Hazel Brown—that not only has the world not forgotten Baudelaire, but the academy continues teaching his work, and “[e]veryone reads an excerpt of The Painter of Modern Life alongside their Walter Benjamin and then moves on.” Likewise, Baudelaire is no stranger to Robertson’s poetry, but rather a kind of poetic citizen that haunts the lines of poems like “Lucy Hogg by Baudelaire,” from Robertson’s 2009 collection Magenta Soul Whip. Baudelaire is Robertson’s lifelong companion, much like the sun is for the speaker in Baudelaire’s iconic poem “The Sun” in The Flowers of Evil: “When, poet-like, he comes to town awhile, / He lends a grace to things that are most vile, / And simply, like a king, he makes the rounds / Of all the hospitals, the palace grounds”. He is the eternally present author who, unlike Roland Barthes’ argument in Death of the Author, will likely never die because of how pervasive the notion of a “Baudelairian body of work” is, and how synonymous this notion has become with a state of being.
It is therefore imperative to note how the book’s plot is only the first layer to The Baudelaire Fractal and is arguably not the main takeaway from the novel. Set predominantly in the 1980s, the story follows Hazel Brown, a poet who one day wakes up with the realization that she is the author of the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. After introducing readers to the premise only a few pages in—“Reader, I become him. Was that what I felt? No, I did not become him; I became what he wrote”—this seemingly central source of tension falls away just as quickly and reappears only in the last third of the book, where we return to the “plot” as we conventionally think of it. The key to appreciating Robertson’s thoughtful decision lies, once again, in the words of Hazel Brown herself, who seems to speak directly to us when she says, “it is more precise to say that all at once, unbidden, I received the Baudelairean authorship, or that I found it within myself. This is obviously very different from being Baudelaire, which was not the case, nor my experience. I had only written his words.” Robertson prioritizes process, whether in a creative or lifestyle sense, over the product and tendency to let it shape individual identity as being a creator or disciple of a writer, of working within or against a certain tradition or school, because for Robertson, process is a form of becoming rather than of being.
The novel’s writing style, particularly its alluring, observant, and often philosophical language so characteristic of Robertson’s poetry, is where we find all the complexities underlying the premise of The Baudelaire Fractal. Hazel’s first-person narration is intertwined with criticism that plays on and appropriates the genre of the bildungsroman and the European tradition of the Grand Tour, frequently slipping into lengthy asides and musings that cross personal and cultural history. The Baudelaire Fractal is more than a reclaiming of women’s right to a coming-of-age narrative or the identity of the flaneuse, although Hazel makes a convincing case for this in the beginning when she tells us she’d “destroy [her] origin, or [she] did destroy it, by becoming the she-dandy [she] found in the margins of used paperbacks.” Rather, Robertson draws our attention to the relationship between language and women without reducing the issue to a matter of presence and presentation, as “[t]here’s no nameless girl. There is no girl outside language. The girl is not an animal who goes aesthetically into the ground, as many of the philosophers would have it. The girl is an alarm. Her lust is always articulate.”
This leads to the second central question in The Baudelaire Fractal—the fluid role of the protagonist—which is complicated further by the hybrid nature of the book and Robertson’s refusal to be confined by the conventional boundaries of genre. Hazel Brown may be the clearly demarcated protagonist from a linear perspective of plot, with Baudelaire staking an equal claim to the role due to “the impure repetition of the Baudelairian authorship within [Hazel].” Yet there are also a few “slippages” in the work, moments where the “I” of Hazel plays into the semi-autobiographical nature of The Baudelaire Fractal, that play into the haunting personal note from Robertson that prefaces the book: “These things happened, but not as described.” Perhaps the strongest, and most complex, case for the role of the protagonist in The Baudelaire Fractal can be made for Jeanne Duval, not least of all for her connection to Baudelaire, cementing my belief that the informal mantra of Robertson’s book is that “all roads lead to and through Baudelaire.” It is Duval, a Haitian-born actress and dancer of mixed French and African ancestry as well as Baudelaire’s lover and muse, who embodies and later resolves Hazel’s conflicting relationship with the Western and male-dominated idea of poetry and authorship. Duval’s “bizarre[ness] to Baudelaire in every sense of the word’s movements and histories” ends up being the source of hopeful closure for Hazel at the very end of the book as she marvels at the way Duval is “relaxed in her displeasure […and] totally modern. I’ll never know her and she doesn’t care.” Duval is the real she-dandy and painter of modern life, a matriarch for Hazel Brown and the lineage of feminist poets to come.
Rather than attempting to quantify The Baudelaire Fractal along the lines of is or is not, I would instead describe it as a literary torrent that demands its reader be dipped into it Achilles-style. The Baudelaire Fractal is more than a literal and linear exploration of authorship—in fact, the novel is in keeping with and a continuation of Robertson’s desire to “veer[ ] away from the ‘book as a unit of composition,’” as Klara du Plessis points out in her recent chapbook, Unfurl. Robertson’s debut addresses the feeling of being subsumed in a work so completely that it consumes the individual and, when the time comes, results in a desire to move on. However, this desire arises not because the work in question is no longer of interest or relevance, but because the self inevitably continues its journey beyond the confining foundations of academia—though not without taking some of its most memorable and problematic fragments of it onwards as souvenirs.
Margaryta Golovchenko is a settler-immigrant, poet, critic, and academic based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty territory, Canada. The author of two poetry chapbooks, she is completing her MA in art history and curatorial studies at York University.