The Baudelaire Fractal

by Lisa Robertson

  Beneath the city was an entirely different city. In Paris traces of baroque or mannerist lineage fluctuated like a network of nerve dendrons beneath the rational plan of Haussmannian capital. Ornate and discontinuous, this sensitive lacework receded into the obscurity of certain park groves, certain hidden inner courts, dusty service stairs, communicated glimmers of its electric substance to me in a diminished but nonetheless transformative repetition of the intensity that had come into full expression in Baudelaire, whose anachronous embrace of the baroque ideal of artifice was punished as obscenity. There could be no aesthetics of ambivalence in Second Empire Paris; capital’s tenure permitted sincerity only. The sincere subject was governable. But beneath the city was another city, a place where monstrosity could find its double. Though here I have noted specifically abject sites overlooked by the fiscal overseers, this other city was even more potently a linguistic city, a gestural city, a city released from certain texts by their readers, as a sillage is the release of an alternate time signature by the perfumed body. No perfume, no syntax, no flower can be definitively policed.

  Banville described with great precision and enthusiastic awe the furnishings of Baudelaire’s Île Saint-Louis apartment, the one he was constrained to leave after his financial collapse. His memoir lingers on the ample divans, sofas, and armchairs, with their glazed cotton slipcovers (a textile then more typically used for women’s petticoats and ecclesiastical undergarments), the glossy crimson-and-black-papered walls and antique damask curtains, so clearly influenced in their choice by Poe, who had recommended in his Philosophy of Furniture ‘glossy paper … with Arabesque devices of the prevalent crimson’ and ‘large low sofas of rosewood and crimson silk.’ We read that, unusually, the apartment had no visible bookshelves, cabinets, or armoires: most of the young poet’s possessions, including his surprisingly small collection of books – around thirty in number, and all finely bound (upon his death, Baudelaire was found to owe even more to his bookbinders than to his tailors) – his rare wines, and his emerald glass goblets, were discreetly stored in deep, hidden cupboards constructed within the remarkable thickness of the walls of the very old building. Such discretion was one facet of dandyism. But what impressed Banville most vividly about the furnishings was Baudelaire’s immense elliptical baroque table, which was used, he said, for both dining and writing, and which Baudelaire always kept clear and uncluttered between uses. Banville attributed to this table’s unusually irregular, whimsical form a sensitive power that inflected the body itself with pleasurable new abilities. ‘Carved from solid walnut, it was one of those furnishings of genius, which we find in the eighteenth century, but which modern cabinet makers are powerless to imitate or reproduce. Indeed, its oval shape was endlessly transformed by inflections, apparently capricious and every-which-way, but to the contrary, the result of profound calculations. Not only did this ceaseless, undulating line seduce by way of its elegant caprice, but the table was contrived so that no matter how one sat at it, the body found itself supported, held softly, with no rigidity.’ Banville said that he believed the table itself was an element in the composition of Les Fleurs du mal.

  In Banville’s account of Baudelaire’s baroque table, the object, with its insinuating, mobile edge, spoke through the soothed human body, which itself received, in its contact with this embracing line, uncommon compositional gifts. This was an erotics of furnishing. The body-table, for the two were joined in their mutuality by this transformative contour, wrote the poems whose serpentine address carved into and effaced the rectitude of the era. This combinatory, animistic formula found related expressions. For the poet, the discovery of the synesthesia of senses multiplied the powerfully resistant intelligence of metaphor: the image will always move just beyond any determining frame, according to an intensely evasive logic of sensual transposition. But there is also a related formal and tonal synesthesia inflecting Baudelaire’s spiralling poetic line. The poems trace a turbulence that continued outwards, fractal, from the complex curvature of compositional time – a table in a room by a river – towards future contacts, future refrains, in infinitely productive tangents of temporal plasticity. A verse becomes a poem in prose; a youthful tenderness intertwines with and partly traduces future political despair. This turbulence reinvents itself in any reader as she leans into the embracing poem.

  In considering the publication of Les Fleurs du mal and its subsequent trial, I believe it was the century that was obscene, not the poems. Baudelaire had composed a darkly fulgent antidote to capital’s moral voraciousness, a homeopathic potion with a complex temporal structure, as the great noses compose noble perfumes based upon a necessary rot. Had the censors recognized the mortal danger to signification exuded by the infinitely proliferating folds and vortices of these flowers? They ravage all groomed certainty. The seductive sweetness of the top note quickly succumbs to what we might consider the narrative components of the scent; this middle trajectory pretends to a functional, developmental sincerity, which it meanwhile viciously parodies. The final temporality is the lingering, superstructural one, a rigorous and beckoning decay deeply impregnating the senses, insinuating its undesignated difference beneath and among the sanitized affects of the grid, the assassin of the very sweetness it had borne darkly forward.

  The emperor and his crony Haussmann had attempted to entirely subject public life to quantification by a totalized power. They invented a terrible ratio: popular spaces, customs, and expressions, once policed, could be transformed to markets. By 1857, the year of the publication and trial of his book, Baudelaire’s birth city had been appropriated to the new scheme. In Haussmannian urbanism, the grid in its various ideological manifestations cut through and replaced the winding entanglements of life and art and desire in the city. Haussmann’s task was to translate Paris to an image of capital; the sites of errant subjectivity must be annexed, censored, owned. The popular, perambulatory trades of the streets were controlled by new systems of registration and censorship. This was a strategic annexation of culture whose purpose was to limit and eventually abolish the ungoverned movement of images, and their makers, across social and aesthetic borders. ‘I detest the clockwork that removes the lines,’ exclaimed Baudelaire in his poem ‘Beauty,’ with an audible sneer at the metric regulations of power. These lines are drawn and written, also traced, inflected, by meandering walkers, carved by baroque makers; they are rhymes, in the poetic technical parlance of his time; they are pre-metric units of human body measure; and they are the demoted lineages of baroque expression. Nothing disappears entirely. These are the lines that compel us to linger near fountains, to kiss strangers, to place an ornate pleasure at the secret core of our language.

  Here I want to return to the physiognomy of inflection, the figure of the table becoming the body becoming the book of flowers. I have said that I’ve felt that it is the room that writes, that I simply lend it my pronoun. For Banville, Baudelaire’s table was a linguistic force that collaborated with the poet’s desire. The edges that separate things are conventional rather than inherent or inevitable. While it may make use of these edges in passing, the work of desire is borderless. Once set in motion by a site or an image, swervelike, the line of recollection simply continues, and in multiple directions, intensities, and temporalities, becoming surface, becoming ornament. I feel it in my body as I write this. The scent of a stairway, the glance of a painting and the eyes and the lips and the loneliness nonetheless. Here’s a city that calls – be glorious fully in this poor minute. There is no unidirectional lust. We lean in and it careens to an elsewhere. It’s both ahead of the body and behind the body, as well as all around it, like a voluminous shawl or scarf. Curves, counter-curves, folds entangle. To be held for an instant, to bring the furling velocity back towards the more limited scale of the speaker, desire seeks a language. The work of memory also enjoys the helpful artifice of a frame, a rhyme, a room, a table, a cartouche, a grammar. Desire and memory: their vertiginous animality is the condition of all
predicates. Where would the dear bare body be without these ornate garments and phrases and ointments that bind us to time and each other? And so I wrote in my diaries to appease my fear of life disappearing, my fear of losing the stunning, grotesque ceaseless mixture of all of it. In continuing, in writing, my memory also twisted backward to transform the perception and interpretation of the image of my passionate concern. Was the boy’s silver necklace an ankh? Were the roses yellow? Images and bodies interlace and resist significance. They’d rather exchange secrets. Meaning is inflected, multiplied, undergoes transformation by means of unchosen frequencies of similarity, projection, sensation, and intense emotion. Desire’s logic is indeed synaesthetic. Biting hair, writing in water, naming god, perfuming the beloved, shaking cloth – the gesture is erased at the instant of its inscription, subsumed by the undulant inflection of an elemental embrace.

  When I wrote sentences in my diary, willing myself to describe rooms, paintings, dreams, garments, encounters, and so to fix them against oblivion – crossing out and starting over, repeating, replacing and slightly altering, fibbing – I discovered that I wanted their edges to shimmer. I wanted the gorgeousness in the tawdry and girlish, but I also wanted the anger. Sentences had surfaces; I wanted them to begin to undo themselves, to careen into the impossible. A sentence could be a blade. My task was to free the sentence from literature. To free it from culture even, since both are owned. At the beginning of my research I tested the potentials of duration in my diary, used the leaves of the bound volume as a laboratory. Never had a girl written anything long enough. If I could open the temporality in sentences, perhaps a transformation could take hold. It was the simplest idea, but had some inadvertent merit, in that it forced me to recognize time as a linguistic material. Therefore time did become my linguistic material. Patience and impatience intertwined in a lacework. Pattern emerged. I was no avant-gardist; I had no interest in abolishing grammar. Rather, I studied it, in a casual way. I wanted to understand subordination. I thought it could be useful. I dallied with additive phrases, internal digressions, parallel constructions, and deferred predicates; I saw that the shape of the sentence could be dangerous. Instead of accommodating and representing the already-known, so limiting identity and collectivity, this shape could instead become a force of inflection. Like the baroque table, like a spiralling scene in a movie by Cassevetes, at the core of a storm a dog becomes a blonde person who speaks soundlessly into the heart.

  Outside my doorstep the rose thrusts up dark purple shoots, three or four inches per day, soundlessly into the heart.

  The sentence: subjectivity followed by a pause. Subjectivity: whatever desires or hates. Now the pronoun could be limitlessly potent instead of retrospectively descriptive; the sentence, rather than receiving the dumb imprint of my always too-limited experience, could hold grammar open to future becoming, or shut it capriciously to evade determination. Now all at once I could recognize my own anger – it wasn’t hot and explosive, but an ice-edged retraction. Often this recognition had evaded me in my life. I had felt that I had no anger until I took hold of that cold blade. I came to feel grammar as an elemental matrix. All possible co-mixture and variability came into being in tandem with the technology of those prismatic constraints. I say to myself in the pimp’s room, Now Try to Have a Fucking Thought About Beauty. What future strangers would recognize themselves in this charged, citational, ‘I’? What would a girl’s anger be? How would each speaking girl transform her pronoun? It’s a fractured citation. Everything that’s ever passed through it has left behind traces of fragrance: coconut, musk, and fear. We speak the words others have spoken, in new settings, and so transform them a little, while the trace of the old speakers also remains active, moving into the potent future. The pronoun is just the most intense point of this timely reinvention. The feeling of having an inner life, animated by a cold-hot point of identification called ‘I,’ is a linguistic collaboration. We speak only through others’ mouths.

  This was frightening, to embrace the unacknowledged intimacy of linguistics, and so I continued the thought. By what profound calculations, as Banville had said of the design of Baudelaire’s table, could the contours of the sentence be transformed, and what would I then become? Yet what I had already, coming to this table, was something easy and useful and fresh, and was given to me by sentences: the cool sensation that my body was already in the middle of thinking, and that this condition, in both its lust and its anger, was average, unremarkable, so free.

  I would have liked my sentences to devour time. They’d be fat with it.

  In what sense is anger ornamental? When it permits a girl to pleasurably appear to herself. There was never a room that could hold my anger and so I went to the infinity of the phrase. Obviously it wasn’t simple like that. Anger was my complicated grace.

  The sexuality of sentences: Reader, I weep in it.

  I had been given an old school copy of Les Fleurs du mal by one of the Huguenot granddaughters. Its mustard-coloured worn paper cover felt like velvet. I was not able to actually read the poems but I very often looked at the printed pages, tracing the distribution of the ragged lines across brittle paper. I began to see the poems in their typographical arrangement on paper as kinds of portraits. They were portraits of poems, much in the way that, between exhibitions, in the temporarily emptied room of a nineteenth-century museum, the indigo or crimson fabric-covered walls will be unevenly faded, revealing the brighter shapes of pictures that had long hung there, as ghosts of previous syntaxes of display and relationship. These absent shapes were now spaces for thinking something new. Whatever newness might be – for now, like a geometer, I think there is very little that is ever new on this earth. What we name invention is mostly recombination. But then the idea of the new burned like a faith within me. After many years of such ruminations and countless moves between cheap rooms, I lost track of the book, whose covers had come loose, leaving the onion-skin paper vulnerable to damage. Still by the time it disappeared I had not actually read it, though I had absorbed it through my hands. My experience of Baudelaire was haptic. The granddaughter had also given me a paperback Littré dictionary, which I continue to keep on my writing table. It is the 1971 10/18 edition from Christian Bourgois and Dominique de Roux, with a glossy purple cover showing a slash of sulphur yellow and a disk of cyan, within which nested the stern photographic portrait of Émile Littré, the theosophist lexicographer. Several children’s names were written shakily and boldly on the first pages of the dictionary, in various colours of ink, accompanied by geometric doodles: Emmanuel, Jean, Caron. Inside, apparently random words were highlighted with yellow bars: exacerber, pondereuse, protectorat, regressive, affecter. It was the code to my future and I could not yet read it, or it was nothing, a chance scattering of various kinds of idiosyncratic marginalia – stars, underlinings, groupings of successive entries linked by soft vertical slashes in pencil. Next to gambade is a small black ink drawing of a crystal.

  A gambade is a caper, a frisk, a prancing. It is also the successful evasion of the payment of a debt, especially by a poet.

  Around the time I lost the worn but unread copy of Les Fleurs du mal, I found a tailored black mid-nineteenth-century gentleman’s jacket at a flea market at Bastille. I suppose it would be called a frock coat, or perhaps a morning jacket. Its fitted sleeves were mounted quite high on the torso, its shoulders were softly rounded in an unfamiliar manner, and slipping it on I felt a freshened awareness of the articulations and expressions of my arms. I longed for a decorative walking stick. From a slightly accented waist its longish skirt flared a bit behind, encouraging a brisk, decorative enunciation of my step; this jacket added a grain of wit to its wearer’s walk, like a mild sartorial drug. It buttoned to the middle of the breastbone, and the largish buttons were covered in velvet, which had frayed at the edges, as had the softly turned, broad and high lapels. I recalled the theory of lapels I had once read without retaining the name of its author: the lapel is a gentleman’
s expression of vulva-envy. The old jacket fit me perfectly. Wearing this garment transmitted to my own body a metamorphosis in corporal gesture; though my physique and posture were more accented than altered, my bodily vocabulary opened to movements and stances generally only intuited now with the help of old photographs, such as those by Nadar or Carjat. The tailoring of the jacket moulded a new gait, a new stance, a gestural etiquette. I say new because it was unique in my proprioceptive grammar, though in reality what I had slipped into was an all-but-vanished ethics of sensation. I felt a lightened precision in my movements, coupled with a pleasurable cast of subtle constraint. I felt the flare of my high lapels. I bought the jacket.

  As I write this I recall the first tailored jacket I ever wore. I was twenty-one and had just vowed to follow this calling to the end. I felt that my vow merited some decorum. I went to a Vancouver department store – Eatons, in 1982 – bought a full-priced diary bound in a William Morris print, and the black jacket, heavily discounted. I have long since lost both. To acquire these items I used a department store credit card that I never paid off, a very useful tool that at various times also procured lingerie, cooking pots, and perfumes. My balance simply disappeared when the store went bankrupt in 1999. This, I suppose, could be called a gambade.