Читать книгу The Baudelaire Fractal - Lisa Robertson - Страница 11

It was at Paris on the first of November; I had embarked on the tour mandatory in the subtler education of any worthy young man, two centuries previous. But I was a girl in 1984. Always I was to be askew, belated. I arrived by train very early in the morning and the hotels were not yet open in the Latin Quarter. Madonna was on all the kiosk posters. I preferred Gena Rowlands, or Fanny Ardant. The aproned waiter poured the little jug of hot milk into the coffee cup with a flourish, at the table. In the parks and squares the chestnuts were splitting their green cases. The air was sharp and tannic. This was the city I had invented for myself by reading. I had an address scribbled on the last page of my journal: 52 rue Gay-Lussac – Hotel Avenir.

How will I explain the taste and aroma of slightly overripe Mirabelle plums? I am eating a chilled dish of them now beneath the linden as I recollect that first room in Paris. I was a girl because I had not yet decided on my destiny. But I had recognized something about its setting. Now I understand that I was haunted by the problematic ratios of sex and art, of anger and sadness. I’ve never solved them. My researches then lacked consistency and were too literal. I would sit on trains and write in my hardback journal about the mythologization of maternity in relation to the frustrated inner feeling of calling or ambition (intuitively, I’d rather have had a calling than an ambition; ambitious girls were cruelly judged) as I permitted my ankle to brush and linger next the caressing ankle of the sullen boy sitting across from me in the second-class compartment. I would seek cheap city rooms in order to look out from their windows at unfamiliar surface effects and the shade the angles made. Having a soul, I thought, is about looking out. I would look out, and then write again in my diary. I exoticized Old World neglect. I was looking for a neutral place where my ambition might ripen, unhampered by scorn. Such a room could be found in the Hotel Avenir for seventy francs a night, or twelve dollars Canadian, in the currency of the time, which had the satisfying merit of being payable entirely in thick, brassy ten-franc coins.

Steve Lacy’s horn cuts lingeringly across a tannic landscape. I’m listening to Monk’s Dream. The cold sweet plums carry the smallest possible hint of musky leather. The toughened skin gives a little beneath the teeth before it bursts to a boozy exuberance. I’ve reopened the old journals.

Baudelaire said art must be stupid. I know what he means. Art must be as stupid as a plum. As stupid as an ankle.

In that first hotel in Paris, a previously respectable but by then faded establishment near the Luxembourg Gardens and the boulevard Saint-Michel, a place I would later recognize in a documentary photograph of the burnt-out cars near the boulevard in the month of May 1968, the narrow room on the fifth floor was reached by a frail elevator used only by guests, never by the tired hostess. Each morning she would descend the steep staircase entirely obscured by a rumpled mound of used sheets. Mine was the cheapest, smallest room, which in Paris would always be on the top floor. The cotlike bed presented a challenging topography; I would shift my skinny hips to seek the sweet place between the wadded mattress lumps. At the foot of the bed was a narrow table, and above the table a window looked into the dim inner court. Street views were more expensive. This shady window communicated with a facing window of the hotel or apartment house that shared a shaded inner ventilation well used by the concierges to air their mops and rags. In keeping with the hotel’s convention, I call it a court, but with no grandeur. It was more properly speaking a chute, or a more spacious than usual vent. The air of this inner court was sealike.

Through this window, across the humid court, I saw a boy sitting also at his own table, a dark-haired boy in a white shirt turned turquoise by the dim light, bent a little at his typewriter.

Of all stupid art the poem is the most stupid, a nearly imperceptible flick of the mop just beneath the surface of the water, an idle flutter of the hand. Very stupid; outside all good sense and discretion, because the poem must be indiscreet or not at all. It should just trail aimlessly in the hospitable water. Floating on the sea or swimming. It must be the sea, no other water. Waves, but not stormy waves, the slight rocking movement. This floating is like a hotel. Nothing interrupts sensation; the body is supported and welcomed by a gentle neutrality. Especially the sea on an overcast morning of light rain, the encompassing pleasure enveloping the skin, salt water and soft water, I will take a bath, I will write all morning in a hotel, I will lack nothing, the soft coarse sheets wind around me, I float in the possibility of drifting unattended, the freedom of floating, no weight, no companion, just the hospitality of the encompassing element. A slight coolness is enough to bring the attention to the sensation of water on skin, of worn cotton on skin. Or perhaps in a café in the village in summer, the bells ringing, the irregular waves of conversation, occasional scraping of chairs on stone pavement, but mostly floating, in the sea or in a hotel. The superior hospitality of the threadbare hotel, the minimal frisson of slight discomfort, as in cool water, which augments the feeling of the skin, the feeling of being only skin, punctuates the sensation of being in the minimum calmly, as in an element. The elemental hospitality of the inferior hotel, felt in the minimal, even ironical welcome, the absence of any exaggeration or luxury that would leave one in its debt, the muteness and reluctance of the clerk: this is the stupidity I crave.

In the communicating window close across the dim court, adrift also in the hospitable element, not glancing upward from his heavy black book, his serious typewriter mirroring my own, the image of the studious youth seated at his writing composed itself in my self-image. Only this morning, eating plums, consulting that old diary, which by a peculiar fate I have preserved all these decades since, do I rediscover that the first hotel was called the Future. I know that he also looked outwards across the court to notice me sitting at the foot of the bed to work at my own table, frowning over my Penguin Classic, writing in the brown leather-bound and marbled volume, too heavy, too formal, too contrived for my cheap nylon travelling satchel: belated, nineteenth-century. I know this because I received his gaze and returned it. This exchange would slowly ripen in me, tenacious, voluble, through all the travels that were to follow, the movements between and within cities, from hotels to museums and libraries, from table to bath. Eventually, through a clandestine but thorough metamorphosis of my sentiments, the mutual gaze of the inner court at the Hotel Avenir would transmute within me to become the concussive authorship.

Time in water is pliable. The greenish mop scent drifting upwards weedlike, the boatlike creaking of the wooden shutters, the liquidity of the smoke of the Baudelairean boy with his sharp, aquiline nose and close-cropped dark hair across the court in the communicating window, the quivering shadow and refracted light: in fact, the inside court was a sea in the way it combined so many separate things in a subtly swirling, rocking motion to make of them a single encompassing element. The shared gaze through the humid court inaugurated in me a series of concepts I could not at that time fully recognize, with my lazy habits, my vague tendency to drift only on the substance of another’s desire, desire found in the lazily skimmed pages of books, the desire of a boy in gardens or on boulevards or on stairwells or in seminars as I clasped my Penguin Nietzsche, worn soft by incomprehension.

I had received the image of the Baudelairean boy through the medium of the moppish air of the hotel of the future’s inner court. Such is a girl’s destiny, this scant enclosure of fumy potential that later will reveal itself as the elemental core of her life. She will sit at tables eating overripe plums and burning incense, frowning a little, her sleeves rolled – no, her jacket unbuttoned at the top to show the saffron-coloured neckscarf. The narrow grey inner court of the future hotel will have become her sealike matrix.

When Courbet painted the young poet reading at his work table in 1848, the year of the Revolution so acerbically caricatured in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, the year the boy gesticulated with a revolver on a street corner calling for the assassination of his stepfather the Colonel Aupick, the year of his first translation of Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, in his moment of socialism, having just lost his inheritance, was living on rue de Babylone in the 7th arrondissement, perhaps in the room of his mistress, Jeanne Duval. This was one of a long series of rooms, either hotel rooms or borrowed apartments, occupied for varying brief periods from the age of twenty-three, when his family had seized his fortune by court order, then doled it back to him through their notary in direly inadequate monthly increments, until his death at forty-six. After a brief period of luxurious and extreme expenditure – garments for his mistresses and for himself, baroque furnishings and draperies, perfumes, wines, hashish, and antique paintings, most of which later proved to be forgeries – his scandalized bourgeois family had him declared a legal minor by the courts. From this moment until the end of his life, he lost all the legal and financial rights of his majority. He could not own, nor vote, nor marry. The poet spent twenty-three years of his life actively fleeing creditors, working clandestinely, moving on in the night, often assisted by Jeanne Duval. I am astounded that under these extreme conditions he was able to write anything. Here in Courbet’s portrait he seems to be sitting on a carmine-coloured divan and is wearing a matching lap rug. A bare wooden table is pulled close to balance on its lip the open weight of the thick black volume that the young man, pipe in mouth, is reading with intense focus. He is smoking. Two other books are stacked on a ribbon-tied dark green mottled cardboard folder of the kind still available in most French stationers’ shops, and as part of this studious still life, a long feather pen slashes diagonally, palely upwards from the inkwell into the putty-toned shadow. The opaque plume has captured the late slant of light; so has the creamy splayed deckle edge of the open book. Similarly lit is the poet’s delicate left hand, resting at his side, expressive even in its immobility. I recall the Goncourt brothers, in their journals, mentioning glimpsing Baudelaire some ten years later in the Café Riche, a stylish place for publishers and the last regency drunks, as they said. It was shortly after the damning 1857 obscenity trial of Les Fleurs du mal: ‘his shirt open at the neck and his head shaved, just as if he were going to be guillotined. A single affectation: his little hands washed and cared for, the nails kept scrupulously clean, like a woman.’ The two judgments, one against his legal majority and one against his book, determined the form of the poet’s adult life.

His fine hands, one quizzically posed beneath his chin, chin decorated with a little quirky beard, beard worn as a self-amused form of punctuation, the other hand delicately worrying the carved arm of the ornate wooden armchair in which he was seated, also occupy the foreground of the earlier, and only other portrait, by Émile Deroy. This youthful likeness, which his friend Asselineau described as hanging in the poet’s apartment during his early period of luxury at the Hotel Pimodan, followed him through the long itinerancy of rented rooms that Baudelaire struggled to wear lightly in his later years. Deroy had made the painting over three nights, in lamplight, in Baudelaire’s salon, in the company of the poet Théodore de Banville, who later described the scene in his memoirs, the Guadeloupian Creole journalist Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont, and the Lyonais socialist songwriter Pierre Dupont, the five young men, inseparable then, smoking and talking about Delacroix and the tensions between colour and line, verse and girls.

But for now I want to return to the story of Courbet, who was to show his own portrait of Baudelaire in 1855 along with forty other of his own works in a rented hangar-like wooden building, as part of a flamboyantly rebellious exhibition of his own devising called The Pavilion of Realism. Though the artist had previously enjoyed considerable success with his portraits, his monumental painting The Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life was rejected by the jury of the Exposition Universelle. He responded to this rejection with enthusiasm, borrowing money from a collector to fund a temporary exhibition hall of his own. Initially imagined in his correspondence as a circus tent, it stood next to the exhibition hall of the prestigious and well-visited Exposition Universelle. The Pavilion of Realism was a large-scale work of hubristic publicity. Courbet converted the long exterior wall of the building into a billboard advertising his name; you paid a nominal entrance fee, the first time such fees had been charged to exhibition visitors in France, and you also paid to leave your umbrella or walking stick with an attendant, to purchase a souvenir photographic image of the rejected tableau, or to take an exhibition catalogue, within which was printed Courbet’s own text ‘The Manifesto of Realism.’ ‘I simply wanted to draw forth, from a complete acquaintance with tradition, the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality,’ he wrote, defending the painting as a depiction of the present as a synthetic vision of the people he saw and dealt with daily in the city, people of various social classes and fortunes. He had been influenced by Baudelaire who, in his Salon of 1846, had first addressed the topic of the necessary relationship of art to urban modernity. Beauty, Baudelaire wrote in his Salon, was the beauty of the present only, and was necessarily composed of elements both absolute and quotidian, whose association caused the sensation of marvellousness, which is modern. Each age, each milieu, has its own beauty, as it has its fashions, elegance, debaucheries, and vileness. Each age has its own violence and injustice. All of this flickering together is what the new artist must represent. Beauty was only ever modern, in modernity’s costumes, said Baudelaire. It would not be dressed in classical robes and attitudes; the new beauty would be found in the daily life of the city, in its real mixtures and extremes. Already we live amidst beauty but we do not recognize it, he said. In his allegorical studio, Courbet had depicted the poet half-seated on a wooden table in the lower right-hand corner, bent over a large open book whose pages provide one of the few instances of intense light in a painting modelled according to a profound, almost baroque chiaroscuro.

Influenced by his interpretation of Baudelairean realism, Courbet depicted himself in the centre of his crowded studio, painting a scenic landscape at his easel. Behind him, a naked white woman, plump, half-turned from the viewer, holds up some drapery to cover her breast, and watches the painter work. Her pale pink garments lie crumpled at their feet in the foreground, like an oversweet dessert. She is his model, but not for this image. On the left of the artist, in the darkest shadow, is a motley grouping of people from all parts of life: actors, a money lender, a clothier, a lactating Irish peasant woman with infant, musicians, an acrobat, a priest, a Christ figure, a radical, a farmer, and a standing boy, respectfully watching him paint. To Courbet’s right is a second group, his peers: intellectuals, critics, politicians, gallerists and their wives, all of them fashionably clothed – the men in dark suits, the woman closest to us in an opulently embroidered shawl. A child plays with a cat at the feet of the adults; he is drawing his own picture on a large sheet of paper laid flat on the floor. The figures in this modern allegory all float across the thickly painted darkness as if projected in a film. The artist, in the centre, is the hero of his drama or diorama. Baudelaire’s figure is set apart from the others; he is absorbed in his reading, apparently alone.

When I arrived in Paris, my own experience of the life of an artist’s studio was limited to a memory of my grandmother’s paint-scented spare room, in her little postwar house in North Toronto, where she left her easel set up at the foot of the tidily made bed. Her diminutive canvases – ‘oils,’ as she called them – depicted the abandoned farmhouses and ruined barns and silos of Southern Ontario, in her tastefully muted palette of greyed-down greens and silvery taupes. Thus the colonial remnants of Kantian sublimity came to perch on an old lady’s easel in my grandmother’s spare room of a modest bungalow in suburban Toronto in 1971. I adored this room, its scent and mysterious equipment. I learned there that when I stood in front of paintings, I could feel an inner vibration. It entered flatly through the entire surface of my body if I let myself go blank. In my adolescent movements from my grandmother’s guest room to provincial art museums, I came to think of the mute mineral affinity that accompanied my blankness as a psychic life of pigment. In front of paintings, my body had autonomous gifts, useful only to my own inner experience. This pigment-sense didn’t have anything to do with representation or style, yet it was dependent on the proportions and specificities of mixture. I think my feeling for painting is a deferred material telepathy, an elemental magnetism. I was noticing a mineral sympathy of my body’s iron and copper and calcium towards paint. I learned to still myself to make room for this strange reception. In the spare room, I first came to the recognition that I could be changed by these little documents of admixture, through the simple attention of a slowed, non-linguistic perceiving. The change had to do with the deepening sensation of interior space by means of immaterial correspondences. Pigment striates the subject. Mineral affinities act within and across bodies and across times. We are paintings.

It is evident that the image of Baudelaire in Courbet’s studio allegory has been transposed from the earlier portrait: the oblique light, the studious posture, the curve of the stooped shoulder link the two representations. In The Artist’s Studio, the entire crowded and mysterious image, so inclusive in its social cosmology, seems to radiate out and across the canvas from the dark lower-corner figure of Baudelaire bent over his books. One book is open; on another closed volume rests the poet’s nervous hand. The energy inaugurated in the earlier portrait by the placement of that tentative and nervous hand leads us to believe that at any instant Baudelaire will pause in his reading in order to reach for the splendid quill.

When I began to write I trembled with an almost immediately disappointed ambition, but I liked paper and I liked ink. This much has remained constant or at least recurrent. The ambition had to do with a hoped-for intimacy between sentences and sensation. I believed that my future was located in the flagrant interstices of this relation, that an architecture capable of welcoming my essential nudity would reveal itself on the threshold of the page. I had no worldly knowledge and no aspirations towards anything that might be termed a literary society. I did not then suspect that such a society existed in the present; if it did, I was ignorant of any access to it. I needed to write in order to make a site for my body. There would be no other way to uncover my unwieldy desire. I was learning that the social fiasco of sex was not a reliable method. So many bludgeoning projections, such petty incompetence and scorn, so many mythological charades worked to lessen the mere possibility of sensual amplitude. I would never understand sex. I could not be that thing and learn to appear to myself. Sadness always undermined the pleasure. So I decided to understand sentences. There would be detours. My own allegorical studio then contained only my typewriter, the diaries, some books, and the figures I found in them. But I was always beginning to write. On every page of the heavy marbled journal I began, heavy with stupidity. The grand tradition had dissolved and the new one hadn’t yet been made. How girlish his hand. How fresh the feather looked.