REVIEW: The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson

Can a girl in a thrifted jacket rewrite the patriarchal canon?

After waking up in a hotel room in Vancouver, Hazel Brown has an epiphany: she has written the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. “Even,” she writes, “the unwritten texts, the notes and sketches contemplated and set aside.” She admits that her claim “will seem frivolous, overdetermined, baroque” but it is no less “singular” for her to become the author of all of that than it is for her, “a girl, in 1984,” to become an author herself. The Baudelaire Fractal (Coach House Books, 2020) is, in other words, the story of a young woman and her formation as a writer.

The novel begins in 2016 and moves three decades earlier only to come full circle: from 1984, when the poet first moved to Paris, followed by years back on the west coast of Canada, to when she describes writing the book in a “rented cabin” in rural France.

Brown was born in Toronto during the Bay of Pigs crisis, “the eldest daughter of a disappearing class.” In her twenties, she takes up and moves to Paris where she hooks up with boys in parks and rents rooms in Paris’s Latin Quarter; she reads the TLS on a café terrace and declares that it “could replace university.” She later returns to Vancouver and begins to find her voice as a poet. She drives through industrial neighborhoods late at night returning from a lover’s apartment. In one chapter, she weaves discussions on the fashion of Anne Demeulemeester and Rei Kawakubo with her readings of poststructuralist theory like Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold and an anecdote about the first tailored second-hand jacket she ever wore. In another, she presents a poetics of the word “girl”: “if I repeat the word girl very often, it’s for those who, like me, prefer the short monosyllable, its percussive force… would it be grace,” she writes, “to yield to the mystic obscenity of the word girl?”

As the novel’s title and premise indicate, there are also plenty of anecdotes about Baudelaire. These become an act of reclamation: a young girl taking her voice from within a literary tradition that has privileged male voices. The parts on Baudelaire further yield to his romantic partner, Jeanne Duval (her last name is uncertain), who appears to us in the historical record only through a few documents and portraits. There is a particularly moving passage about a painting of Jeanne by Edouard Manet: “She withdraws from the gaze; she doesn’t offer herself to any interpretation. Her autonomy is the very core of her beauty.” In trying to reclaim Jeanne, Brown also finds a way to represent herself.

The Baudelaire Fractal, in its elegantly eccentric ways, employs the conventions of the novel. Even with its essay-like digressions and poetic turns-of-phrase, it depicts the inner struggles of an individual whose experience of the world is narrated through a series of events and who comes to a realization about their artistic calling. In the Theory of the Novel, the critic Georg Lukas defines the form as distinct from the epic by attempting to represent the world fragmented into individual experiences instead of the collective one found in previous oral traditions. Taken alone, Robertson’s novel does just that: it narrates the life of a woman and her education as a poet. But The Baudelaire Fractal is also part of a larger project, a more collective one, which can be easily missed by readers who are less familiar with her poetry, essays, and, even more so, the community she comes from.

In Brian Eno’s Diary: A Year with Swollen Appendices (1996), the artist and producer coins the term ‘scenius.’ His definition for it is “the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene,” or a “communal form of genius.” Eno came up with the word because he “was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius – the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for the rest of us dummies to follow…” and was “convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new.” Vancouver from the late 1970s through the mid-2000s , in art and writing, had a form of “scenius,” supported by a robust network of government-funded, artist-run centers and writing collectives that was insular, rigorous, but also connected to larger discussions elsewhere. Unlike elite American university programs that have supported experimental writing – such as the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, or Berkley (where Robertson later taught) – the scene in Vancouver was, at the time, academically unaffiliated and consisted of mostly working-class poets like Nancy Shaw, Susan Clarke, Christine Stewart, Ken Davies, Catriona Strang, Jeff Derksen, Peter Culley. The Kootenay School of Writing – a writer-run collective Robertson was a member of throughout the 1990s – began in the 1980s as courses for working people and in the next decade developed headier, theoretically-driven seminars. There were chapbooks and books with Tsunami Editions and New Star, poems in magazines like Raddle Moon, West Coast Line, and The Capilano Review, as well as artist-run centers that cross-pollinated experimental poetry and conceptual art, such as Artspeak and the Or Gallery. Those spaces, supported by an internationally recognized art scene, produced small books with essays commissioned by members of the adjacent poetry community. This network of shoestring budget collectives provided a context for at least two literary and artistic generations in the Vancouver area. Almost no one came from money. Robertson was also part of a feminist reading group of artists, writers, and scholars, such as Mia Totino, Susan Lord, and Miriam Nichol, who called themselves “The Vultures.” All of this made the local poetry scene – which from the outside could have looked like a heady and patrician affair, steeped as it was in theory with a capital T – a rather grassroots one. It was Robertson’s “scenius” – and unique in how it connected to theory, labor politics, and feminism, in a style that refused to conform to conventional working-class aesthetics.

Overlapping with some of Hazel Brown’s biography, after a year in Paris in 1984, Robertson returned to Vancouver and started publishing poetry in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By the early 2000s, two titles in particular – The Weather and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture – made her legendary to a generation of experimental writers from North America and the UK. “We want an intelligence that’s tall and silver,” she writes, “oblique and black, purring and amplifying its décor; a thin thing, a long thing, a hundred videos, a boutique. Because we are both passive and independent, we need to theorize.” Her work – praised by the Village Voice and the Believer – made intellectualism sexy. I still remember reading her chapbook Rousseau’s Boat in 2004, the year it was published, in Dufferin Grove Park, in Toronto. (The previous winter, I had kept tucked in my coat pocket a copy of the Clear Cut Press edition of her Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture.) Lying on that lawn, under a dappled canopy, murmuring Robertson’s lines out loud to myself, the sounds seemed to merge with the fluttering of the leaves. A few years later, a statement in Flaubert’s correspondence brought me back to that afternoon: “The sentences in a book must quiver like the leaves in a forest, all dissimilar in their similarity.”

Even as a poet, Robertson’s preferred unit of composition is the sentence. Her style has a concise syntax, often with baroque diction, creating unexpected juxtapositions in sound and sense. Here’s one stanza from a poem in Rousseau’s Boat:

And if I become unintelligible to myself

Because of having refused to believe

I transcribe a substitution

Like the accidental folds of a scarf.

A second expanded edition, R’s Boat, was published in 2010, and more recently, in 2022, another edition appeared, with a new 60-page section, this time titled Boat (she has joked that the next two decades will see subsequent expansions entitled Oat and finally At). Its content is collaged from Robertson’s own journals, which are archived in the Special Collections at Simon Fraser University. This is poetry about the self or selfhood or subjectivity or ‘subject formation’ – whatever you want to call it – without the tedious narcissism of false earnestness. (Another book, The Cinema of Present, arranged all of her sentence-lines alphabetically, predating Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries by a decade.) Like Annie Ernaux’s The Years, Robertson’s work makes an individual voice feel collective.

And then in 2019, The Baudelaire Fractal appeared, her debut novel. At first, it seemed different because of its fictional nature and single character, neither poetry nor collage, but it is part of the same oeuvre. It is, on the surface, a künstlerroman, but it opens an imaginative space to depict the formation of a feminist poet. In interviews, Robertson often highlights the role Vancouver art and writing communities played in her development, but this aspect remains less legible to wider feminist audiences – often international, millennial, upper-middle class – who have embraced her, unaware of that specific political and geographical context.

Robertson has mentioned one of the reasons she had for writing The Baudelaire Fractal for that very demographic: to provide a literary model for young women. But it is also a product from a particular place, time and scene. Along with internationalist modernists like Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, Mary Butts, and Gertrude Stein, Robertson’s local community of writers contributed to her sensibility. The singular girl of The Baudelaire Fractal is part of a larger community, with class solidarity, that, due to the conventions of the novel, can be read out of context. There are signs, though. Recall, for example, the early description of Brown herself: “the eldest daughter of a disappearing class.” Or the fact that, as a young girl in Paris, she must take numerous menial jobs to make ends meet – this is clearly not someone with a trust fund. There is another scene almost metaphoric in its confrontation of class difference: after an evening of experimental poetry and jubilant discussion, wearing a flea market “Baudelairian jacket,” Brown makes her friends recoil in worry about their “vintage tailoring and old cashmere and beautifully worn carpets” which she had “likely infected” with the moths fluttering out of her thrifted pockets.

As much as Baudelaire Fractal stands as a trenchant feminist critique on the history of the literary canon in which Brown literally appropriates the corpus of Charles Baudelaire, it is also class critique. Brown is not only a woman who creates a life as a poet but also comes from specific economic circumstances – and a place, for that matter – where writers and artists have been historically marginalized. Her strangeness is doubled, even tripled – but, in any case, is one whose possibility, under current economic conditions, is, hélas, disappearing.