Coach House Books
Lisa Robertson’s new novel might be reduced to a lexicon of the author’s preferred words, a constellation. Some words that hang in this space include—desire, baroque, form, artificial, ornament, hag, promiscuous, garment, material, style, resistance, dandy, eros, archive, gregarious. There is a constellation of writers whom she explores and thinks with and through too—Chateaubriand, Baudelaire, Leduc, Rousseau, Arendt, Stein, Carlyle, Poe. An eccentric dandy pantheon. And then again, like a star or a black hole pulling both lexicon and pantheon toward it, there is a city, Paris.
Readers of Robertson’s previous novel, The Baudelaire Fractal (2020), will recognize almost all of these elements. Indeed, Riverwork might be read as a variation on The Baudelaire Fractal. It fictionalizes many of the same parts of Robertson’s personal and artistic history: her young womanhood in Paris, her erotic and intellectual development in the top floor garrets, park benches, and libraries of the city, parts of her time in the Toronto poetry scene, and elements of her more recent life in France. The books share several themes—a theory of urban form and surface, an autodidact philosophy of garments, femme space, and the female body, a materialist poetics, the critical possibilities of the decorative, and the wan, dust-veneered and remaindered object as a productive site for what Toby Christian has called, with reference to his own writing, a “fugitive poetics.”
However, in the former novel the protagonist has become a poet. She gives readings, writes books, and in this sense more closely follows Robertson’s own trajectory. Riverwork manages the material from a more melancholic perspective. The central character here, Lucy Frost, whose surname points to the paralysis of her self-formation, had promise, but ends up cleaning the houses of more successful literati, often former friends, while doing clandestine night research into the notes her disappeared great-aunt made about the River Bièvre. Once an important Parisian waterway for trade and industry, for fabric making and dyeing, the river is now covered over, apparently dried up—but perhaps a ghost flow remains, a figure for the radical archive and the aging body. Sometimes for good and sometimes for ill, writes Robertson, “there is no stability in embodiment.”
Like Lucy’s aunt, the river has been forgotten, buried, but Lucy seeks out its lost denizens, from Dante, who she claims began writing Inferno (1308–21) next to the Bièvre while a student in Paris, to the women who worked here, dyeing fabrics with pigment and with piss to fix it, to the communards whose tortured bodies were thrown into the already-toxic waters to fester. And those anti-communards, the Goncourt Brothers, whom she surmises were inspired by the impressionists to write here en plein air.
This is a book about failure, or about what is still possible within a world completely itemized and exploited, and what it means to be possessed of a body that is no longer visible, but which desires, endlessly, nonetheless. That seeks to become its own version of glamor. What that body desires is the corpus of this book: to unstitch the hems of concepts, and to find there and reveal an erotics of reading that brings one into contact with the desirous bodies of others, living and dead. Desirous of sex, knowledge, aesthetics and revolution. It’s an appealing proposition.
In a moving passage, Lucy outlines the narrowing of her lifeworld under what we’ve all been taught to call neoliberalism, and the attendant collapse in possibilities for bohemia: “The sadistic dismantlement of the imagined world was catching up with us then, although its forceful destruction can be perceived only in retrospect. Adrift in the flotsam of various disasters, failure felt entirely personal—unremarkable and sad, having to do with a private weakness, a tragic flaw. But each of us dreamers received the portion meted out to us by the political economy, not Fortuna . . . The independent press, and next academia, was eviscerated by the free market dogma entirely malignant to the collective circulation of thought.” Lucy and her cohort of “dreamers” “could not coexist with the fantasy of the present as it was then being imposed.”
We all live in this diminished context now. This is a book that mourns and rages, but which also claims for itself the right to undiminished pleasure, a pleasure that manifests in every linguistic arabesque and extravagantly curlicued sentence. The book, Robertson writes, “is a garment that can hold complex time together without pandering for conclusion.” Riverwork wallows in the “theatrical substantiality of writing.” It picks up on underground frequencies and recovers a baroque linguistic inheritance long out of fashion, but now suddenly invigorating to encounter. In a recent interview, Robertson explained her attraction to the Baroque: “The Baroque is the era that broke cosmic symmetry and the geometry of centrism to revel in the aesthetics of multiple or distributed centres. Aesthetics, I always want to remind myself, are expressions of desire, which is not always unified and is often equivocal.” Desire breaks the bounds of polite decorum. This is a book, as it tells us at one point, that still views the material codex as an old technology, one that nonetheless maintains or holds open the possibility of producing a “new sensing.”
