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ABSTRACT
This essay pays tribute to Laura Marcus’s work on autobiography, and her interest in emergent aesthetic discourses, by discussing two fictionalised memoirs, John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet, and Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal. One theme is the lure of what Yves Bonnefoy calls ‘cet ailleurs insituable’ or the ‘elsewhere’. In the course of the discussion of autobiographical ruses I also briefly discuss confessional poetry, and Virginia Woolf, with Laura Marcus as interlocutor.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 As Angelos Koutsourakis and Stephanie Donald admit in their introduction to a dossier of essays on Laura Marcus’s contribution to film studies, it is still difficult to decide whether an essay honouring her work should address Marcus the professional researcher, or Laura the colleague and friend. After much switching of names I have decided to use both Laura and Marcus, hoping that recognition of her high professional status is apparent. Angelos Koutsourakis and Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, ‘The Legacy of Laura Marcus in Film Studies: Introduction’, Screen, 64.3 (Autumn, 2023), pp. 325–31.
2 Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal (Toronto: Coach House Press, 2020), p. 11. Henceforth page references in main text.
3 A helpful context for Laura Marcus’s work on life-writing can be found in Rosemarie Bodenheimer, ‘Autobiography Without Borders’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 27.1 (1999) p. 317325.
4 Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed (London: Harper Collins, 1989), p. 72.
5 Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 30.
6 J. M. Parsons and A. Chappell, ‘A Case for Auto/Biography’, in Julie M. Parsons and Anne Chappell (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Auto/Biography (London: Palgrave 2020), p. 4.
7 For defences of the concept of the aesthetic see these very different thinkers who nevertheless agree on the continuing political, poetic, and philosophical relevance of the aesthetic: Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Robert Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Allen Fisher, Imperfect Fit: Aesthetic Function, Facture & Perception in Art and Writing since 1950 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2016).
8 Julian Murphet, ‘The Marcusian Moment: Sound, Film, and the Body of A Woman’, Screen, 64.3 (Autumn 2023) pp. 342–47, 342.
9 Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writings about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 415.
10 ‘If without action and speech, without the articulation of natality, we would be doomed to swing forever in the ever-recurring cycle of becoming, then without the faculty to undo what we have done and to control at least partially the processes we have let loose, we would be the victims of an automatic necessity bearing all the marks of the inexorable laws which, according to the natural sciences before our time, were supposed to constitute the outstanding characteristic of natural processes.’ Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 246.
11 Christine Brooke-Rose, Remake (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1996), p. 6.
12 Ibid., p. 54.
13 Ted Byrne, ‘I am Baudelaire: On Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal’, The Capilano Review (2020). https://thecapilanoreview.com/i-am-baudelaire-on-lisa-robertsons-the-baudelaire-fractal/.
14 Henry James, Autobiography ed. Frederick W. Dupee (London: W. H. Allen, 1956), p. 4.
15 Henry James, Preface, Roderick Hudson (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1907), p. vii.
16 John Berger, Here is Where We Meet (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), p. 19. Further page references in the text.
17 Ibid., p. 62.
18 Ibid., p. 75.
19 Ibid., p. 78.
20 Laura Marcus, Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 91.
21 Ibid., p. 103.
22 Ibid., p. 19.
23 Laura Marcus, Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 43.
24 Ibid., p. 76.
25 Charles Bernstein, ‘The Academy in Peril: William Carlos Williams meets the MLA’, Content’s Dream: Essay 1975–1984 (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1986), pp. 244–51.
26 Joan Aleshire, ‘Staying News: A Defense of the Lyric’, in Kate Sontag and David Graham (eds), After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Saint Paul, MI: Graywolf Press, 2001), p. 15.
27 Alan Williamson, ‘Stories About the Self’, After Confession, 51.
28 Ted Kooser, ‘Lying for the Sake of Making Poems’, After Confession, 160.
29 Louise Glück, ‘The Forbidden’, After Confession, 244.
30 Charles Altieri, Sense and Sensibility etc.
31 Iain Sinclair, Conductors of Chaos (London: Picador, 1996), p. xviii, xx.
32 Lisa Robertson, Soft Architecture note.
33 See the anthology American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, eds. David St. John and Cole Swensen (New York: Norton, 2009).
34 The poem is one of what she calls her ‘indexical readings of the sum of my quotidian notebooks.’ Lisa Robertson, ‘The Present,’ Boat (Toronto: Coach House Press, 2020), p. 101. Note from p.173. An earlier version was published in R’s Boat (2010).
35 Lisa Robertson, ‘Untitled Essay’, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretius, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias (Toronto: Bookthug, 2012), p. 74.
36 These are just a few of many similarly pejorative adjectives in Les Fleurs du Mal.
37 Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 7, 215.
38 Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing About Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 363.
39 Ibid., p. 135.
40 Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 260.
41 Yves Bonnefoy, L’Arrière-pays (Paris: Gallimard, 2003 [1972]), p. 21.
42 Yves Bonnefoy, The Arrière-pays, trans. Stephen Romer (Calcutta, India: Seagull Books, 2012), p. 28.
43 Ibid., p. 35.
44 Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Non-Existence (London: Granta, 2020), p. 166. She too realised that male poets idealised the city as female: ‘In my teens and well into my twenties, I mostly encountered the literature of heterosexual men, where the muse or beloved or the city they explored or the nature they conquered was a woman,’ 106
45 Solnit, Recollections of My Non-Existence, p. 81.
46 Ibid., p. 122.
47 Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 286. [‘désigne la forme dans l'instant qu'elle est assumée par ce qui est mouvant, mobile, fluide, la forme de ce qui n'a pas consistance organique : il convient au pattern d'un élément fluide, à une lettre arbitrairement modelée, à un péplos qu'on arrange à son gré, à la disposition particulière du caractère ou de l'humeur. C'est la forme improvisée, momentanée, modifiable.’]
48 In her essay on language and civic life, Robertson says that ‘the domus is the place of rhythmic protection of the rhythmic body.’ Nilling, 75.
49 At the time of writing, this book had not been published. Her introduction begins with a brief summary: ‘Throughout this study, I examine the ways in which early twentieth-century writers, artists, and theorists, and those who played a central role in establishing literary and artistic movements, drew on concepts of rhythm which were largely established in the second half of the nineteenth century and into that century’s turn.’ Laura Marcus, Rhythmical Subjects: The Measures of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), p. 1.
50 Laura Marcus, ‘Rhythm and the Measures of the Modern’, in Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada and Anne Besnault-Levita (eds), Beyond the Victorian/Modernist Divide: Remapping the Turn-of-the-Century Break in Literature, Culture and the Visual Arts (London: Routledge, 2020), p. 225.
51 Marcus, ‘Rhythm’, pp. 218–19.