The Baudelaire Fractal

by Lisa Robertson

  I’m thinking of Delacroix’s little watercolour picture of an unmade bed as a diagram of this marbling effect. The tousled dull white glowing fabric of the depicted bedsheets, which, by the complexity and soft crispness of their rendered folds, appeared to be a heavy linen, or even, like the darned and mended noble country sheets one still finds in village sales, hemp, not recently laundered, held deep tarnished silvery folds and creases formed by the weight and movement of absent bodies. The flung-open coverings spoke of haste or at least carefreeness in rising, but no particular imprint, nothing that could be interpreted as a discrete sign, could be discerned in the fluent image. Even the little blue triangle of revealed mattress ticking, and beside, in joyous vibration, the vertical saffron-coloured bar of turned-back blanket – these hues anchored the composition in a vibration of carnal pleasure, not the fixity of a meaning. A horizontal bed plank and an aura or lip of smudgy shadow bordered this crumpled world. What I saw when I looked was a cosmology of tacit urgency that was also restful, milk-white into oyster towards lead, and that insistently yet carelessly extended beyond the bed frame, the tableau. The sense of languor and intimacy that emanated from the image was at once irresistible and completely impersonal. This intensely figured picture – for the folds were figural, if inhuman – did not require me to be anything other than a body with its timely weight and innate detail of proprioceptive awareness. No identity was necessary. I felt a restful stimulation, an alert calm readiness, and for the duration of my gaze on the picture’s surface, nothing having to do with identity and its psychic and social constraints and fixations. (Searching now for the word identity in my miniature Johnson’s dictionary, I don’t find it – the 1832 text leaps from igneous to jeweller.) The image was a threshold.

  I have said that the suit was knock-off Thierry Mugler, but when I bought it from a cheap boutique on the boulevard Saint-Michel I did not know of Thierry Mugler, and would not have recognized his signature cut, though it now seems so distinctive to the 1980s, bringing to mind photographs of the youthful Paloma Picasso, with her strong shoulders and angular allure. What drew me to the cluttered window where the suit had been dressing a dated mannequin was the piquant sense of the garment citing an earlier era, a stylized 1940s perhaps. This cut was familiar to me because of my informal studies in tailoring, recollections of old black-and-white snapshots of my grandmother and her sister arm-in-arm in the streets of Toronto, and also the postcards of Colette that I accumulated as placeholders in books and sometimes pinned up as modest decorations, as I have mentioned. Mugler had been citing an era forty years past, a time long enough to carry an exotic frisson, just as Deborah Turbeville, one of the compelling fashion photographers of the same period, whose images I admired in the fashion magazines that I browsed at kiosks and occasionally purchased, created a peculiar ambiance of suspended timelessness precisely by combining what might have seemed irreconcilable temporal citations: her moody photographs had a Victorian daydreamt sensibility, where the tall, full-hipped models in their contemplative groupings seemed to bring Miss Havisham’s wardrobe into the ruined bathhouses and abandoned country houses of the recent past. Here the 1970s cited the 1930s, which in turn referred to a mildly anarchic bluestocking nineteenth century. The clothes were those of intellectual governesses or defrocked nuns. Just where were the crumbling bathhouses? They seemed locationless. They were unlike the scrupulously orderly public showers near the Pont-Sainte-Marie, where I would go on Wednesdays, meeting girlfriends, sharing our shampoo across the tiled cabin partitions, discussing philosophy in the steam, and where one could quietly tip the attendant in order to be permitted to clandestinely tint one’s hair behind the closed door of the cabin. Turbeville’s images posed silent women in ring-road landscapes, in abandoned ruins, among these the enticing ideological ruin of femininity, which had itself become a tableau vivant. The formally grouped models seemed to haunt their settings more than inhabit them. Were they not like Epicurean gods, caring nothing for this human mess, off in their separate realm of autonomous pleasure? These ruined bathhouses were psychic theatres for the illusion and disillusion of a dream of the feminine. If the models were to speak, they would repeat in monotones the words of Benjamin: ‘There is no new style’ or ‘Even the most intimate idioms of the feminine are antithetical’ or ‘Truth is the death of intention.’ Latent, passive, melancholy, framed by an architectural fantasy, Turbeville’s female figures, both apparitional and absent, in the gently ahistorical commotion of their sartorial vocabulary, translated social mythology to artifice; they lovingly coaxed open the temporality of gender to erotically redistribute the image of femininity as a new baroque allegory. I understood this world. Confronted by the horror of gendered history, they prefer the architecture of myth, as I preferred my succession of dusty rooms. In the frisson of this redistribution, an ambivalent desire multiplies, plant-like, admitting bombast, distortion, awkwardness and incompetence into the mythic description. The women are monads.

  The lack of authenticity of the green faux-Mugler suit, its obvious citational status, even the cheapness of its viscose fabric, which tended to stiffen and bunch up a little in the rain, requiring careful ironing to roughly restore its line: none of this offended me at all, contrary to the almost religious attitude regarding origin and authenticity that I still then fiercely cherished in all other domains of my experience, aesthetic or otherwise. The knock-off was a document and I was its historiographer, which is to say that in wearing the green faux–Thierry Mugler I became the historian of the present. The makers and distributers of knock-offs were close readers; they discerned the silhouette and the proportion defining the present almost as it was happening, just a demi-breath later, but before it became cliché. They sifted through a great many cuts and images even as they were being produced, clinically extracted and reassembled the essential lines and traits, dolman sleeve or drop shoulder or empire waist or elongated collar, to synthesize an ideal of a moment as it was passing. There are some poets of the knock-off and I refuse to scorn them. But Mugler himself was a poet of the silhouette, which is what made his garments so available for appropriation. He drew or rather projected an ideally androgynous stance upon a newly imagined city. His garments could change the meaning of a walk; they were a university of the walk. They gave the walker her setting and they gave the city the folds it had only dreamt previously. In the knock-off Mugler suit, through the medium of my stance, I witnessed time imitating time and I liked it. Oh, I more than witnessed it. I wore mimetic time into the streets; I became its experimental body.

  What I called sensibility in Turbeville’s images, her soft-focus renditions of purloined novelistic scenes, the ‘painterly’ palettes, the self-sufficiency of the awkwardly posed mannequins, who seem to be collectively waiting for an impossibly distant event, intent on the expressive composition of their bodies with one another and with architecture, I might also call rhetoric, and this term could apply also to the seldom-addressed question of the social experience of wearing knock-offs. Whoever wears the knock-off cares very little about the reproduction of value, at least not in relation to the standard economies. Instead she knowingly inhabits a style of persuasion for the moment of its potency only. She puts her money elsewhere, if she has any. Rather than constructing a theory of fashion, she extracts an essence, a mythology of the instant, and applies it to her walk, her stance. The knock-off is tacky and won’t last and it doesn’t matter – it addresses streets and rooms in passing, like a mood or a crush. Gestural rather than narrative, it won’t enter the archive. Wearing the knock-off, you have the full sensation of participating in your moment, like going on a supercondensed Grand Tour in 1759 without the inconvenient expense. It’s an immersive form of research. This rhetorical gift, a form of illustrious sentiment, a livid vernacular, which is the knock-off’s gesture towards the present, lifts and turns the body’s experience of time, just enough to feel a psychosomatic rush. I liked to wear my green suit out walking, I liked to wear it to cafés a
fter a long morning of sex, and I liked to wear it to parties. I liked to feel my gait a little transformed by it, I liked to feel modern, and in the theatre of the street, I enjoyed strangers’ appreciative glances. I let my silk scarf ripple.

  I recall one of those parties in a large and elegant Haussmannian flat on the Right Bank. I was buzzed into a tableau vivant of the fashionable and young intelligentsia. I had not been invited, but some of my companions knew the host, a chic young American girl who had come to do graduate work with Julia Kristeva. Who was Julia Kristeva? There was a special pause and hush around the uttering of her name, so I gathered that she was important. She had not been mentioned in Structuralism and Since, the red-and-cream paperback by John Sturrock, the one that told me all that I then knew about the Parisian intellectuals of the time. I had ordered it after reading a review in the TLS, and I still have that copy, especially foxed on the chapter dedicated to Foucault, on the front flyleaf the faint pencilled-in price of 72 francs. Since Sturrock hadn’t mentioned them, I had heard nothing of the French Feminists until arriving at this party. The American girl, who I supposed to be a sort of heiress, by the grandeur of her apartment and the generosity of her bar, was bright and proud of her intellectual domain and she moved fluently like a seasoned hostess. I saw a lot of agnès b. at that brief and glorious moment, at the early cusp of spandex, when some intellectual girls liked to look like nineteenth-century parti-coloured acrobats. People were from Columbia and NYU and dressed down. I did not understand dressing down. In 1985 I thought Columbia was a country. I ought to have been more curious, but after kissing a girlish boy in the bathroom while teasing them with my vintage rhinestones, there was nothing left for me to do there. At this party, the mood of knowingness and understatement, as generalized as a decor, did not interest me much. I slipped back into my green jacket and I fled.

  It was early October, a mild and clear night, and I walked towards the Pont Neuf with a feeling of exuberant release. What did I care about Columbia. The bridge was entirely swathed in a pale, softly glistening textile. I thought of Baudelaire’s description of face powder in the chapter of The Painter of Modern Life that praises cosmetics – he said it created an abstract unity, like the tights of a dancer, transforming the wearer’s flesh into art. The bridge was now art perhaps, thanks to its unifying covering; also, though, in a delicious inversion of the Baudelairean proportion, the bridge had, beneath the soft textile, become flesh, imbued with mysterious and occult passion. It was the subject of a wrapping project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and until that night I had only seen it from a distance, a kind of illustration of itself. The neoclassical pleating of its exquisitely cut cream-coloured bridge garment reflected softly in the dark river, and the tall lamps, veiled in the same textile, cast a mysterious light into the social night. Small groups of people discussing and laughing together approached the enticing monument, and we were welcomed by the genial bridge attendants, all of them dressed in well-fitted aviator-style jump suits of the same glowing cloth. It was a kind of synthetic from the future, with qualities both ancient and extraterrestrial. Very Issey Miyake, I’d now say, although at that time Issey Miyake had not yet begun to experiment with pleating. Swathed in its buttery pleats, the bridge had become an extravagant neoclassical breeze-cooled nightclub for anybody. Its flesh was collective. Each of the semicircular bays along the two sides hosted a small party. In these bays, the masonry was quite sumptuously and surprisingly padded or cushioned beneath the fabric, encouraging lingering, so people lounged and drank wine and talked and kissed. A familiar architecture had become a festival of pleasure. In the presence of the textile medium, newness entered a fresh constellation with the ancient. Near the Quai du Louvre on the Right Bank, the entire Samaritaine department store was also competently swathed, not in the creamy synthetic toile, but in a glittering iridescent plastic sheeting, in a pleasantly irritating promotional echo of art. On the Left Bank in the windows of the posh antique shops and galleries on rue de Seine, rare Venetian grotto chairs and gilded putti and candelabra were displayed in the vitrines, similarly wrapped in neutral cloth. Paris loved this. Why not, I thought. I was happy to enter the convivial night. The folds of the bridge fabric in the padded bays were as soiled and crumpled as Delacroix’s unmade bed.

  Though I liked his philosophy of tailoring very much, I did not set out to compose the work of Baudelaire. In truth I’d barely read him. I entertained no particular literary nostalgia towards his canonical image, and I knew very little about his life. Between me and the Baudelaire concept there was no articulated relationship of influence, imitation, worship, or even rebuttal. When I think about the conditions of this involuntary transmission, although I don’t believe that conditions are necessarily causes, I now see that I’d been nudged a little by the presence in my life of the worn yellow volume, and by the mostly passive absorption of a received mythology, as well as by the slightly more principled reading of a predictable cluster of critical texts, the ones more or less mandatory in my intellectual generation. Everyone reads an excerpt of The Painter of Modern Life alongside their Walter Benjamin and then moves on. Everyone reads three poems from Le Spleen de Paris. From time to time in my work I would use Baudelaire to explain a form: the relationship of the prose poem to the modern city and mass media, for example, as if any text could be tidily extruded from its social and economic setting. This was the kind of historical simplification that we called context. Maybe these incidental, dispassionate contacts with the Baudelaire material exerted subtle pressures whose import I didn’t at first recognize, involved as I was with what seemed like more contemporary problems, such as the performativity of gender, or the politics of complicity. But I believe that there was no active sequence of cause and effect, no organic arc of development that could explain the transmission. I simply discovered within myself late one morning in middle age the authorship of all of Baudelaire’s work. I can scarcely communicate the shock of the realization.

  What then of this authorship, this boisterous covenant? I either received it entire, as one slips into a jacket and assumes its differently accented gestural life, or I uncovered it within myself, which is to say inwardly I fell upon it. I felt it as both purely external and self-identical. Perhaps these two things are not very different from one another. Life is apparitional. Fashion, as I have said, had initiated me into the untimeliness within the timely; after a period of forgetting, garments transcribe garments, unfurling a secretive negation within apparent semblance. We feel this slight vibration as the new. The art of psychoanalysis has demonstrated that a pure repetition of priorness will erupt in the present, so that the past and the present, for the potent duration of such an iconoclastic event, become self-identical, at the same time as everything will always not be the same, not being identical. Identity itself shelters or produces an Epicurean swerve. Repetition exceeds its appearance. I neither trust nor distrust the authorial repetition that I experienced; it has in me the status of a clinamen, beyond the mechanics of causation, which I can merely accommodate, however awkwardly. The stain of my awkward gender, my simultaneous embrace and refusal of girlishness, the untimely revelation of the Baudelairean authorship as purely girl, these burst forward as a turbulence in my experience of time, leaving me rawly susceptible perhaps. The girl within the Baudelairean body of work will undo it by repeating it within herself, as indeed she repeats girlhood, misshapen. She’s always and only untimely, apparitional, forbidden, monstrous, a stain on authority. Her sensation is multiple, an intoxication of number. Only by the grace of this bulky untimeliness can the work resist all appropriation, reignite its innate obscenity, as the girl ignites her own obscenity as a form of freedom. But consider that the girl’s obscenity does not always pertain to the recognizably sexualized categories. The terrain of the stain might be a wilful austerity, her withdrawal from the obvious rituals of corporal availability, in favour of the temporary privacy of a previously unintuited intellectual hospitality. I do think it was a kind of an
achronistic hospitality that permitted the work’s transmission, both my own acutely conditioned feminine hospitality, and the different but equivalent femininity of the Baudelairean oeuvre. This doubling dissolved borders. Desire flowered cognitively. Incomparably allegorical dahlia, recaptured tulip! The Baudelairean girl repeats her monstrosity for the benefit of a time to come. She will break open beauty and she will break open literature.

  I’ll explain again. Waking early one morning in a Vancouver hotel room in the spring of 2016, I picked up the copy of Baudelaire that I’d been up late reading the night before. It was a wide bed; I’d simply left the book splayed open on the other pillow and fallen asleep beside it as some might sleep with a cat curled close. I’d slept only lightly. I was preparing to teach a seminar on the prose poem, connecting Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen to Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker and the Essays of Montaigne. I felt nervous about these intermittent teaching tasks and so I defensively overprepared; now those hurried studies haunted my sleep. Still in bed, barely awake, I clicked on the lamp, reached for the outdated dark blue Modern Library edition that had replaced the old paperback I’d lost. The translations were mawkish. The worn cloth cover felt comfortable and familiar. I read at random one sentence, a cry posing as a query: