The Baudelaire Fractal
Page 14
‘My soul sets out on a long voyage,’ said Baudelaire.
‘We embody it always as a god, immemorial, elusive and solitary,’ said Benveniste of the sea in Baudelaire’s poems.
The name, the water, refuse possession. The pronoun refuses possession, and so does the singer. Jeanne Duval, she refuses possession.
The image is not large, but it is proportionately wide – about an arm span, I think. Inside an ornately carved gilt frame a woman half-reclines on a long dark green velvet sofa. Behind her, the top third of the painting is occupied by a transparent white curtain falling in loose folds. The curtain’s scalloped lower edge is decorated with floral or botanical embroidery swiftly rendered in curling white brush strokes. Her right hand, fine, strong and alive, rests lightly on the curtain where the filmy fabric is blowing over the back of the sofa, a little lip of strong light caught on the top of her relaxed thumb. She is wearing a black bracelet, perhaps a ribbon tying a cameo or medallion to her wrist, and this simple ornament punctuates her gesture. The rendering is loose and certain. Her left hand, resting on her lap, where it is obscured by the fabric of her white dress, holds a partially closed green-black fan. This dress, buoyant, splendid, creamy, and cool, floats diagonally downwards towards the lower right corner, alive with brushwork. Surely it is a hoop skirt. Almost certainly it is cotton, less transparent than the background curtain, vertically striped with opaque bands, like a damask that throws off violet light. Also, the skirt is an architectural cloud. In the world of this skirt, chalky warm white is irregularly striated and hatched with cool blue-grey, lilac, glimmers of ochre, smears of putty and soot. Beneath the pigment, the suggestion of the shadow of an extended leg. This skirt lifts around her slight body like a frothy element that attaches to the earth only at her high waist. The element of the skirt drifts buoyantly to the southeast. In the close foreground towards the west, her ankles, white-hosed and casually crossed, one foot shod in a low black slipper with a black bow, the other hidden by the hem of her voluminous dress. The perspective places her small face in the shadowed distance. Her brows and eyes are dark suggestions, quickly drawn and deeply expressive. Her black hair is arranged to fall behind her ears, revealing pendant carnelians or rubies. Her mouth is firmly set and her jaw strong. She withdraws from the gaze; she doesn’t offer herself to an interpretation. Her autonomy is the very core of beauty. The concentrated intensity of her distant and withdrawn face is a rhetorical counterpoint to the skirt’s expansive, forward-tumbling froth. I recognize the future girl in her refusal, her gravitas. She is irreducible to the visible, and she is irreducible to the invisible. She is relaxed in her displeasure. She is totally modern. I’ll never know her and she doesn’t care. This is Jeanne Duval. She’s a philosopher. She was painted by Manet in 1862, a year after Baudelaire had dedicated to her a copy of the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal: ‘Homage à ma très chère Féline.’ Now I meet her image in Paris, on June 13, 2019. The linden trees are in flower. I’m fifty-seven years old. I’m thinking about the immense, silent legend of any girl’s life. She’s leaning back, observing.
IMAGES
(in order of appearance)
Claude Lorrain, Odysseus Returns Chryseis to Her Father, 1644
Claude Lorrain, Seaport, Effect of Mist, 1646
Steve Lacy, Monk’s Dream, 2000
Jean-Luc Godard, Bande à part, 1964
Gustave Courbet, Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, 1848
Émile Deroy, Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, 1844
Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life, 1848–1855
Jean-Antoine Watteau, Pilgrimage to Cythera, 1717
Vincente Minnelli, An American in Paris, 1951
Eugène Delacroix, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, Saint Michael Slaying the Demon, Heliodorus Driven from the Temple (Eglise Saint-Sulpice), 1854–1861
Émile Deroy, La petite mendiante rousse, 1843
Edward Steichen, Colette, 1935
August Sander, Secretary at West German Radio in Cologne, 1931
Philippe Halsman, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1967
Agnès Varda, Vagabond, 1985
Eugène Delacroix, The Unmade Bed, 1828
Knock-off Thierry Mugler teal-green viscose skirt suit, 1985
Deborah Turbeville, Bath House series, 1975
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, The Pont Neuf Wrapped, 1985
John Cassavetes, Love Streams, 1984
Baudelairean jacket, black wool and velvet, uncertain provenance
T. Eaton Company, slim tailored black jacket, cotton and viscose, 1982
Ann Demeulemeester, tailored black wide-lapelled jacket, wool crepe, 1994
Comme des Garçons, black bolero jacket, wool and nylon, 2001
Comme des Garçons, black wool gabardine jacket with knitted sleeves, 1993
Limi Feu, black gabardine double-breasted jacket with tar edging, post-2007 (year uncertain)
Joseph Beuys, The Pack, 1969
Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514
Édouard Manet, Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining, 1862
TEXTS
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, Paris anecdote
Théodore de Banville, Mes souvenirs
Charles Baudelaire, Correspondance, tome I, II, ed. Claude Pichois
Œuvres complètes I, II, ed. Claude Pichois
The Poems in Prose (tr. Francis Scarfe)
His Prose and Poetry, ed. T. R. Smith (tr. Arthur Symons, Joseph T. Shipley, F. P. Sturm, W. J. Robinson, Richard Herne Shepherd)
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (tr. Howard Eiland, Kevin McLaughlin)
The Origin of German Tragic Drama (tr. John Osborne)
Émile Benveniste, ‘The Notion of “Rhythm” in its Linguistic Expression’ (tr. Mary Elizabeth Meek)
Baudelaire
John Berger, ‘Caravaggio, or the One Shelter’
Michèle Bernstein, ‘In Praise of Pinot-Gallizio’ (tr. John Shepley)
Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity (tr. Patrick Camiller)
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’
Champfleury, Le réalisme
Gustave Courbet, ‘The Realist Manifesto’ (tr. Linda Nochlin)
Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ (tr. Ken Knabb)
Gilles Deleuze, The Fold (tr. Tom Conley)
Difference and Repetition (tr. Paul Patton)
Therese Dolan, ‘Manet’s The Street Singer and the poets’
Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journal (tr. Robert Baldick)
Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’
Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Hotel Lobby’ (tr. Thomas Y. Levin)
Julia Kristeva, ‘Émile Benveniste: un linguiste qui ne dit ni ne cache, mais signifie’
Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Le tombeau de Charles Baudelaire’
Karl Marx, Capital (tr. Ben Fowkes)
Mira Mattar (Twitter conversation)
Nadar, Charles Baudelaire intime: le poète vierge
Charles Olson, Selected Writings
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual (tr. David Bellos)
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Philosophy of Furnishing’
Marcel Proust, Sur la lecture
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education (tr. Allan Bloom) Reveries of the Solitary Walker (tr. Peter France)
Severo Sarduy, Barroco
Enid Starkie, Baudelaire
Stendhal, Memoirs of an Egotist (tr. David Ellis)
William Carlos Williams, ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’
(Citations from all French-language texts not otherwise attributed have been translated by Lisa Robertson.)
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My gratitude to Jean-Philippe Antoine, Julie Joosten, Kathy Slade, and sabrina soyer, who generously read drafts, responded, and encouraged me in this writing, and also to my editor for the press, Jason McBride. Alana Wilcox has been more than my editor; she trusted a bare sketch of an idea two years ago, and helped it become this book, with her judicious balance of wit, care, and firmness. It is a pleasure for me to be indebted to her. Thanks also to the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, in New York, who by giving me the C. D. Wright Award for Poetry in 2018 supported a full-time year of writing, as well as the furnace that warmed the activity.
Some chapters were first cast as responses to invitations: Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh asked me to participate in the 2016 colloquium How to Drift, at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow; I presented ‘Port’ as my contribution. ‘Windows’ was my lecture for the 2016 art-writing conference Never the Same, at the Contemporary Calgary, at the invitation of Lisa Baldissera and Joanne Bristol; Frances Loeffler at the Oakville Gallery commissioned the chapter ‘Anywhere Out of the World’ for a monograph accompanying an exhibition of the work of the painter Allison Katz, published by JRP Editions. ‘Drunk’ was commissioned by Jazmine Linklater, Nell Osborne, and Hilary White of the Manchester poetry collective No Matter, for their spring 2019 reading series. The story of the melancholic tick was a response to an invitation by Tiziana La Melia for the commissioned series Out of Focus.
Our beloved dog Rosa (2004–2019) was my daily companion in this writing. She died under the linden tree in late August in Nalliers, as I completed my final draft. She’s in this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet and art writer who lives in rural France. Born in Toronto, she began writing, publishing, and collaborating with a vibrant community of poets and artists in Vancouver in the early nineties, and she has continued those activities for thirty years. In 2018, the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts in New York awarded her the inaugural C. D. Wright Award for Poetry.
BOOKS BY LISA ROBERTSON
POETRY
3 Summers
Cinema of the Present
R’s Boat
Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip
The Men: A Lyric Book
The Weather
Debbie: An Epic
XEclogue
PROSE
Nilling: Prose
Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture
Revolution: A Reader (with Matthew Stadler)
Typeset in Arno and Larish Neue.
Printed at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda, and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Seen through the press by Alana Wilcox
Edited for the press by Jason McBride
Cover design by Information Office
Cover art and photograph by Lisa Robertson
Designed by Crystal Sikma
Coach House Books
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