The Baudelaire Fractal

by Lisa Robertson

  The season was now mid-winter. Preoccupied as I was with painting, when I crossed the river during my dissolute walks, I didn’t pass by the Louvre without entering. By preference I went late in the day. Unlike the chilly maid’s room, it was warm in the museum, and I relished the quietness of the galleries – for a scant few, just those of the currently agreed-upon masterpieces, were typically frequented. The wide upholstered benches, the subtle camaraderie of the uniformed attendants, the mysterious, enticing glimpses afforded by the elegant enfilade of room into room, the dull glow of the heavy gilt frames, the thrum of building systems, the lesser rhythm of the underdetermined and precise descriptive labels that I loved to list in my notebook: all this initiated me into a drifting euphoria. It was rather like the solipsistic pleasure of very slowly skimming a book in late afternoon without truly reading, enjoying the pleasure of turning the pages and moving the eyes across print, revelling in its mute materiality without bothering about the intricacies of meaning. I could read Latin this way; for a long time it was the way I read French. Painting, too, was an opaque language. Here the idea of elsewhere achieved a charged materiality. What some people experienced in crowds, amongst strange faces, on boulevards or in department stores – and this is what Poe had written of, the calm yet inquisitive interest in everything, without differentiation – seized me in these long galleries of paintings. Many I glimpsed only in passing, if I were searching out a single gallery or era and became a little lost in the sprawling wings of the long building. But even the inattentive, hurried passage could present an unsought but essential encounter, in the way that a single, unknown face can urgently address one with its depths of attractive strangeness, when passing in a crowd. This elsewhere of faces, of paintings, of pages, seems to break open time, which is the punctum I searched for among the surfaces. I mean there’s an unbeckoned flash of limitlessness that can open for an instant within the propriety of the human face, or the painted tableau, within the stain. This is different than the often-promoted shock of newness. The intimacy of this limitlessness floods the discretion of the present, the way long familiarity, with a lover’s face, for example, or with a city or a room, can transform the well-known features in their beloved relations into a landscape that opens to all possible sentiments and their extremes, this in a momentary shimmering. The same sudden inflection can happen in a painting. A minor mark or shadow on a loved surface all at once becomes the key to a completely altered understanding of an image. The contours of that otherness describe a passage not towards fixity or any kind of firm, locatable meaning, but towards all the potentials of admixture, the sensual forgetting of the name, all of the previously unrealizable futures that can flicker in a glance.

  It was early evening now, not long from closing, the time when the museum attendants, dressed in their tailored black suits, grouping themselves first in pairs, then gradually in more numbered clusters, speaking quietly amongst themselves, moving still slowly but with a gathering purposefulness, begin to usher we lingerers towards the distant exit. I adored this transition. My pace quickened slightly, almost matching theirs, yet pointedly loitering a little, before this image and that, with a minor disobedience that they too seemed to enjoy and even encourage with their glances. I felt a vibration of excitement. Soon I would stroll from the cushioned silence of the museum into the cool busy evening, I would pause outside of several warmly lit cafés without entering, scanning for a small empty table, I would continue to the Latin Quarter without choosing any café at all, the river beneath the bridge would darken, splendid. I felt like De Quincey, seeking some northwest passage through the knotty alleys of London, suddenly finding himself on a narrow footpath through a man’s kitchen. The motion of time in this intermediate zone called evening filled me with humming expectation and ripe perplexities. I wanted to both slow and expand the moment as I walked through the long galleries with their seductive antechambers, now swiftly, now haltingly, as if searching for a landmark.

  It was at such a moment of quickening that I was seized by the resistant glance of a small, shadowed portrait. Sulky, guarded, her pursed red lips seemingly chapped or bitten, her light, slightly rosy skin absorbing some of the mauvish-blue yet warm oyster-grey shadows of evening – in her I recognized my own complexion – the girl wore a large-collared brown velvet jacket like a precocious prince. She had unbuttoned it at her throat to show a loosely knotted carmine-and-white scarf, which rhymed with her skin and the thick auburn ringlets that grazed her velvet shoulders. Yet these garments were suggested rather than depicted, the white scarf just a scribble of bright writing, the velvet a warm deepening of shadow, a burnished darkness. Murky lamplight haloed her – azure chartreuse gold – showing the centre part of her darkish hair glowing pink in chiaroscuro. Such tenderness glimmered through that parting. Her face still had the soft androgyny of the very young. Her gaze was a statement of refusal. I leaned in to read the title. It was a portrait by Émile Deroy, close friend of the young Baudelaire, the likeness of an unnamed street singer much fawned over in their bohemian circle. The museum label called her La Petite Mendiante Rousse. The image hung at the far edge of a gallery filled with Théodore Géricault’s lurid fighting horses, and various dramatized abductions and struggles by Eugène Delacroix. All the violence and perturbation of those paintings was met by the intensity of the brushwork in the girl’s face and suggested garments. The surface of Deroy’s portrait was in a vivid state of continuous expression.

  Deroy had died at twenty-six, leaving only a few paintings, among them this nameless girl, and the only portrait of Baudelaire in his grandiose moment, just before his ruin in the autumn of 1844. Deroy made the girl’s portrait in ’44 or ’45, and then gave it to Banville, who hung it over his desk until the painter’s death, when he returned it to Deroy’s parents. The two young men had in fact met by means of this portrait, which for several days Banville had admired hanging in a shop window in the Latin Quarter, returning often to gaze at it. Abruptly one afternoon Deroy appeared and, without even introducing himself, insisted on offering the small canvas to the infatuated poet, who would just a little later encounter Baudelaire in the descriptions of their mutual friend Jeanne Duval. That same year Baudelaire dedicated a poem to the portrait’s subject – ‘To a Red-haired Beggar-girl’ – and Banville and Dupont did the same with poems of their own. But she wasn’t a beggar, she wasn’t mendicant, she was a street singer. She frequented the Latin Quarter, where she played in doorways and squares. There was no shame in her calling. Singing was a public art; very often street songs were political and social commentaries, an unofficial form of broadcasting. Very often then the Irish plied it. Maybe she was Irish. It was the era of the potato famine, and many refugees scratched out a living in Paris. In all likelihood this girl was fetishized for her colouring. Red-haired prostitutes were highly valued then; the Goncourt brothers, in their diaries, delighted in describing the skin tone of red-haired women’s sexes. Oh men. Our red-haired twats and our torn skirts, you must claim them. We sing anyways.

  Perhaps this singer sat for the little circle. They collectively adored her. Perhaps they paid her just a little, but not enough to help, thus her sullenness and remove. Very likely she did not care about their ostentatious ambitions. She had her own songs. Or was there a little of the youthful camaraderie that can briefly bring together people of very different fortunes for a moment of struggle, of refusal? Had she been their friend? Maybe the brown velvet jacket is not even her own; she had borrowed it as the light fell and coolness came. In Banville’s poem he imagines that she wears a then-outmoded kind of jacket called a casaquin, favoured by players of the commedia dell’arte, a tightly fitted seventeenth-century style, cut away at the bosom, flaring out from the nipped-in waist. She is said by Banville and Nadar in their memoirs to have played the guitar and sung in cafés, accompanied by a blonde girlfriend. These two were assumed to be lovers, which was a part of their erotic attraction. The Baudelaire circle – Nadar, Banville, Privat d’
Anglemont, Pierre Dupont – relished these singing lesbians with their torn dresses, through which freckled skin would flash. Each of them described the red-haired singer, her skin, her garments, and her poverty, each used her as a mannequin for his sartorial fantasies. None of them named her. Baudelaire obsessed over the girl’s tattered clothing. The ripped cloth was as luxurious as lace.

  Pale girl with red hair

  Whose torn dress

  Reveals poorness

  And beauty

  To me, puny poet

  Your young body, slight

  Covered in freckles

  Is the calling of sweetness

  Formally the poem invoked the baroque poet Pierre de Ronsard, who had also written poems of this genre, the genre of the adulation of feminine poverty. Isn’t all poverty feminine? They are tender men and they want to help, they say. Yet Baudelaire’s poem was also ignited by an odd identification. He too, ‘puny poet,’ was now penniless. He could not have the girl because now that he shared her poverty, he couldn’t buy even the cheap little trinkets he thought she wanted. He had no control of his future either. Now both street singer and poet were marked as outsiders. In the year of the composition of the poem to the red-haired girl, Baudelaire had half-seriously attempted suicide, stabbing himself in the heart with a little dagger at a cabaret, I repeat, stabbing himself in the heart with a little gold dagger at a cabaret, the dagger echoed in the poem by the glinting golden one he wished for the poor singer to tuck in her garter like a seductive jewel. Oh Baudelaire, you’re pathetic, I love you. ‘Go then,’ he writes,

  With no other ornament

  Perfume, pearl, adamance

  Than your slender nudity

  O my beauty

  She sticks her lip out and doesn’t budge. The short life of Baudelaire, in its dizzying, troubled decline, was defined by the poet’s self-recognition in the grotesque mirror of the social abjection of women. Whatever the red-haired singer thought of this, the men’s aesthetic use of her person as a masque, will now be expressed by her resistant, unnamed glance.

  The prophetically dandiacal girl in her brown velvet jacket painted by Émile Deroy in 1845, the portrait of the nameless, adamant street singer, is the figure of a magnificent impulse. Her turbulent face demands: how does a girl become what she is – with no knowledge, but all of her visceral autonomy? In her gaze I coincide with my own tradition. It is made of multiple times, like bodies. And yet those bodies are now mostly nameless. In the shelter of this namelessness I have built various possible worlds – as many as I need. The girl made it possible to speak of myself.

  I confess that the uncertainty that I felt at first has returned to me now in its full intensity. This cottage with its linden tree shelters a slow reckoning. First, I knew nothing, then I believed anything, now I doubt everything. Therefore I can invent. I thought that solitude was a necessary armour. I thought that freedom was a choice one made, a choice towards sentences and pleasure. I never once thought about fate. Now I know less. Now I think about anger. How does it work? Liver? Heart? Brain? I think that the evasive part of language is the materia medica of freedom.

  To remember we’re just clay, we’re pigment, as we’re being it, this is the great immodesty of art. I had a fundamental greediness for this immodesty. It radiated an attractive muteness, just beyond my cognitive limits. Materiality is too mild and limited a term for it. How to describe the sensation? Sometimes you shiver or shudder slightly, the instant before entering a room. Your approach has animated a spiritual obscurity. This bodily hesitation is a tradition, the tradition of entering the negation of names, and it colours the way I perceive all transition. Your body can sometimes deter its own representation; this breach indicates an interiorized covenant or constraint. It’s called the feminine. It’s a historical condition. The movement of perception or description, which are so closely intertwined as to be indiscernible, is not between nominal categories or aesthetic concepts. The girl is not a concept. Her idea has no core or centre; it takes place on the sills, in the non-enunciation of her name. This feminine namelessness seeps outwards with undisciplined grandeur. The girl’s identity is not pointlike, so it can’t be erased. It’s a proliferating tissue of refusals. Unoriginal, it trails behind me, it darts before me, like my own shadow, or a torn garment. I say unoriginal because once she was named. The removal of her name is an historical choice, so ubiquitous that it seems natural. There is no nameless girl. There is no girl outside language. The girl is not an animal who goes aesthetically into the ground, as many of the philosophers would have it. The girl is an alarm. Her lust is always articulate. If her song goes unrecognized it’s because its frame’s been suppressed; her song is enunciation’s ruin. It is a discontinuous distribution, without institution. Always the tumult of her face is saying something to her world. Prodigal, undisciplined, with an aptitude for melancholy and autonomous fidelity: nameless girl with your torn skirt, there’s nothing left for you but to destroy art.

  That is what Baudelaire wrote of young girls in his intimate journals: The girl, frightful, monstrous, assassin of art. The girl, what she is in reality. A little lush and a little slut; the greatest imbecility joined with the greatest depravation. I read this and then I reread it; I recoiled, predictably disgusted. Already this sort of cruelty had become familiar in my reading. Very often a text contains its own police; the she-reader is simply shut out, among various others, none of us the men of the declared inside. I read this excision everywhere. I read it in philosophy especially but also in poetry, in criticism, in history. The female is identified, then transformed to her predestined use, which is nameless. Any reader pertaining to the feminized category receives a gut punch. Would you care to be prostituted? Since I first began to read, the punch had been one part of reading. I felt it personally, that is to say, physically. Sometimes I braced myself and continued, bristling with cautious defensiveness. Sometimes I weakened and cried, ashamed even of my weakness. I believed it was my task to harden myself and persist. But gradually now the Baudelairean rant against the girl began to work differently in me. This slut insinuated attractive possibilities. What if this was not a punch but a perverse invitation? The lush imbecile beckoned me in. She begged me to become something. I paused, then I became that monster. I even expanded her grotesque domain, following the useful suggestion of Michèle Bernstein that it has become time to ‘unleash inflation everywhere.’ I followed instructions. I was obedient. The aptitude for identification had been trained into me, I was made for it. My cathexes were the standard ones, and they were thorough. I was a girl. I entered literature like an assassin, leaking, fucking, wanting, drinking.

  I did want to make art, but I, Hazel Brown, decided to make art by destroying it. The desire to write, to trace these monstrous figures on the ground of unprecedented longing – what is it but destruction? It produces nothing. Everything I was raised to be, all the docility instilled in me, the little punishments and constraints of girlhood, the intense violence and violations of adolescence, the roughly incised, undying shame of female maturity and fungibility, everything about my past and my ordained place in the world, which I tried to escape by constructing an autonomous world within the shoddy, inadequate confines of my room, my diary, my knowledge, all these things continued to live in me in the form of grave spiritual contradiction. I say contradiction, when what I mean is sickness. To write was to destroy something. I saw it everywhere. My girlfriends had scarred wrists and wept loudly and publicly. I would leave a trail of stains behind me, I would ooze out stains on my lovers’ sheets, I would bleed through fabulous dresses, my thighs would be streaked. I would glance backwards looking for traces. I too wept copiously. The poets I read passionately wrote themselves into death, booze, disappearance. I too would drink. What else was there to do? The ancient refrain of weeping and drinking, the popular refrain of the negation of the desiring girl, it had to be violently seized, just the way my body had been seized, from behind, anonymously in the street at night
, and flung against a wall. I had to destroy art in order to speak my monstrous life.

  I believe this. I believed it then. How could I make it work? What were the terms of the violence I could own? The anonymity, the fungibility, this was a kind of cover, I thought, although now I doubt the tidiness of this inverted logic. Can disappearance create appearance? The anonymous girl was nobody, she was depraved and abject and so she could begin, I thought. There wasn’t a way to dissuade her since she was invisible. But what was to begin? With all of her predecessors erased, how can she recognize her tradition? To begin was an internal attack on the feminine constraint. I decided that to begin was my calling. I was bad at it, which would be my foundation. Repeatedly I prevented myself from submitting to the minute internal transition, that mystic and terrorized transition between muteness and expression. How could I invent my self-education? I know a young person who learned to write before learning to read, said Rousseau, discussing the education of the girl, who began to write with the needle before writing with the quill. Of all the letters, she first wanted only to make O’s. She incessantly made big and little O’s, O’s of all sizes, O’s inside one another, and always drawn backwards … In retrospect, I read in Rousseau an inadvertent formula for the solution I had stumbled upon more arduously, in piecemeal increments, through the many rooms, the many inhabitations and seductions, through the fucks that were mistakes. Reader, you must turn your depraved anonymity into a decor, O’s within O’s within O’s, and within this baroque device, this carapace, exuded stitch by stitch, the drama of your moral self-invention will advance. I would discover the ornament of excess; there I would be schooled.