Elsewhere: Laura Marcus and autobiography

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Laura Marcus
• John Berger
• Lisa Robertson
• Yves Bonnefoy

Laura Marcus’s first and last books investigated with impressive thoroughness the practice and poetics of autobiography, while an interest in life-writing was a recurrent leitmotif in all her scholarship. In the early autumn of the year we lost Laura, I was preparing to teach two autobiographical fictions of writerly development, John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet, and Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal. Berger’s unusual travel memoir and Robertson’s ‘Baudelairean’ künstlerroman serendipitously became my lenses for thinking about Laura, about the two years we were colleagues at the University of Southampton, our subsequent more etiolated friendship, and about how this dominant interest in retrospective constructions of the self in time informed her study of modernism.¹ Berger and Robertson both circumvent genre expectations by creating highly original artifices whose style and strangeness exemplify their art: Berger imagines meeting revenants in public spaces in major European cities, the abiding spirits of mentors who once helped him learn how to inhabit the world as an artist; Robertson bases her portrait of the poet as a young woman around a strange waking dream of having incorporated into herself the entire Baudelaire authorship. Robertson proclaims in her opening paragraphs a textual avatar: ‘here I become a style of enunciation’.² Throughout the novel she addresses the question that puzzled her younger self, of what this style could be, and how to achieve it. By reflecting on the active fictionality of these memoirs in disguise, I want to honour Laura Marcus’s life and career.³

Virginia Woolf was a crucial literary guide for Marcus’s research, leading to a book on Woolf, a number of essays dedicated to Woolf, and many discussions in passing of the fiction, essays, letters, and diaries. Laura selected A Sketch of the Past as one of five salient memoirs of childhood she could recommend to the perhaps less literary readers of the Wall Street Journal. Woolf begins this unpublished memoir with the apologetic idea that she is only doodling her own memories of childhood as a break from the onerous duty of composing a biography of Roger Fry (‘I am sick of writing Roger’s life’) offloading responsibility for undertaking such a self-absorbed project onto others, blaming both Fry and her own sister Vanessa, who had admonished her that mortality might ambush the procrastinator: ‘if I did not start writing my memoirs I should soon be too old’.⁴ Laura interestingly describes Woolf's state of mind as she enters the autobiographical space as suffused with the desire to re-enter a remembered world of literature. ‘In it, Woolf set out to recapture the feelings that accompanied the experiences of her Victorian childhood and beyond’ and to show that her father Leslie Stephen’s ‘world of books was one in which Woolf would also live’. This close connection between autobiography and reading was important to Laura, not least because she shared Philippe Lejeune’s view that autobiography can itself be considered as a mode of reading.⁵

Laura was fascinated by emergent aesthetics, whether in the entirely new art of film, or the minor opportunistic genre of railway fiction, or in the longstanding creative informe workshop of autobiography from which so many literary forms precipitate. She understood autobiography as a method of reading into uncertainties of the social world without dispelling them. Everyone who met Laura was deeply impressed by her extraordinary ability to read the room, to observe and listen to others, to elicit their interests and motives. I remember her ability to insert a catchphrase (‘ready edibles’ found its way into my discourse), or a brief bolstering narrative into a group conversation, and to direct our attention to wider networks of friends, professionals, writers, and others. Marcus brought this exceptional ability to imagine the dynamics of relationships to The Tenth Muse, her outstanding study of the nascence of early film in networks of friends, writers, and artists. This attention to specific histories of intersubjectivity led her to avoid overarching theories of autobiography. Even when facing the need to categorise one or another example, she always deftly retained the singularity of these works, fascinated by life-writing’s interminable uncertainties, whether the moment of apologetic address to the reader, the awkward fit with well-recognised genres, or tensions with the opposition to the very idea of self-expression current in much literary theory. She drew our attention to moments when the aesthetic presuppositions of autobiography were exposed. When she wrote Autobiographical Discourses she was in the vanguard of her field; since then auto/biography has become ‘both a method and a text’ in the field of sociology, while historians, as Enzo Traverso explains, have increasingly reached into autobiographical research too.⁶ It hardly needs adding that in this period literary studies have become far more open to life-writing as an additional method of analysis.

Aesthetics, whether emergent or canonical, was under a cloud at the time Laura began her career, attacked on all sides either as irredeemably conservative, ideological, at best too narrowly conceived to encompass the varieties of art and writing, or simply irrelevant to critical analysis.⁷ She realised that scattered through the many reviews and overviews contemporaneous with early film were the traces of a struggle to re-articulate existing concepts and attempts to find new formulations aiming to create a more durable aesthetics of film. Julian Murphet comments in a recent tribute to Laura’s contribution to film studies, that the arrival of sound that transformed the art of cinema, was ‘an event that elicited from her the most ingenious methodological braiding of film studies, psychoanalysis, feminism, theories of modernity, and empirical archival excavation, in all the storied literature on this topic’.⁸ Laura interprets the rapid overturning of the existing art like this: ‘The silent film, it was frequently suggested in writings from the first part of the century, had become a mature art, and audiences had evolved as highly attuned interpreters of its particular, visual modes of representation, when the coming of sound end-stopped this history and threw the film back into a clumsy, stumbling, and this time noisy, infancy’.⁹ These are forms whose natality, in Hannah Arendt’s terms, are not yet layered over with future growth.¹⁰ An emergent art is in the process of fixing itself, though unlike a photograph, different possibilities flicker on the edge of the future, genres that may or may not come to fruition. Hence her focus on autobiographical discourses rather than autobiography, and her focus on the discourses of early film rather than direct examination of the films themselves.

This emergent plasticity of autobiography is everywhere evident in this mode, not least in the tendency of autobiographers to find beginnings difficult, often requiring apologies and disavowals. Christine Brooke-Rose begins her memoir Remake with a seemingly weak excuse: ‘The old lady’s publisher has asked for an autobiography. But the absorbing present creates interference, as well as the old lady’s lifelong prejudice against biographical criticism, called laundry-lists by Pound’.¹¹ Blame everything on Michael Schmidt her Carcanet publisher. Eventually she will manage to outmanoeuvre the modernist poets’ resistance to life-writing by reverting to the tactics she learned over many years as a novelist, while thinly fictionalising herself, her family, and her lovers, so thinly that anyone who knows the circumstances of her life will recognise the protagonist Tess is Christine herself, and wonder why she needed this scrim of fiction. She is driven to write by the realisation that ‘Tess doesn’t begin to exist until the war and even that is effaced for years by the Official Secrets Act’.¹² A history of the discovery of selfhood is also found in Robertson’s novel set in Paris where the protagonist has no friends or family, lives a solitary life away from writers’ networks, and relies for company on those who employ her as a housekeeper or childminder, and young men who become temporary lovers. I call her evidently autobiographical narrative a novel, because she issues authorial warnings against treating her work as having fact-checked reliability: on an otherwise blank preliminary page she tells readers: ‘These things happened, but not as described’. Post-publication she explains to an audience at Emily Carr University in 2019, that The Baudelaire Fractal ‘is not a memoir’.¹³ Robertson is not alone in such unease about the project of life-writing. Henry James makes it known that he has only begun his own autobiography, A Small Boy and Others, because in trying to write a tribute to his brother William he has found that he can’t do so without talking about himself: ‘I struggle under the drawback, innate and inbred, of seeing the whole content of memory and affection in each enacted and recovered moment’.¹⁴ This is the writer for whom ‘Really, universally, relations stop nowhere’.¹⁵ In Here is Where We Meet, Berger imagines his own mother warning against writing his memoirs. Talking to her ghost he begins to reminisce in the fashion of James, asking his mother: ‘Can you guess what the most fabulous object in my childhood was?’ Instead of answering him, she replies vehemently, ‘You sound like somebody writing an autobiography. Don’t!’¹⁶

Berger's clever use of obtrusively fictional artifice in his memoir helps me think about Laura's attention to fantasy in autobiography, notably in Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction. Laura took such pedagogic projects seriously. This is more than an introduction, more of an invitation to others to construct future research projects in the field. She ranges impressively widely, from Cellini to Knausgaard, Grass to Kraus, Malcolm X to Hilary Mantel, tacitly reminding readers of the nebular scope of this literary form. To achieve maximum inclusion, she assigns most writers just one or two exemplary quotations to set alongside the history and analysis, with the effect that the book approaches the status of a commonplace book of aphoristic insights intimating compositional desiderata for potential memoirists. She quotes Edwin Muir recalling a storied childhood on Orkney where ‘there was no great distinction between the ordinary and the fabulous’.¹⁷ Maybe such epistemological mists mattered less there than in more crowded landscapes. Hilary Mantel finds a much harsher version of the same difficulty of distinguishing the ordinary and the fabulous during a childhood spent among shadowy illusions projected by a marital situation that cannot be openly articulated: ‘When you were a child you had to create yourself from whatever was to hand … disinformation, or half a tale, and much of the time you probably put the wrong construction on what you picked up’.¹⁸ During the time Laura and I worked alongside each other at Southampton, I remember we taught Maxine Hong Kingston’s wonderful reinvention of the autobiography, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood Among Ghosts. Laura quotes a powerful admission from Kingston: ‘To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are Chinese, the language of impossible stories’.¹⁹ Both Berger and Robertson traffic in impossible stories too. At times reading Autobiography: A Very Short Introduction Laura’s choice of representative quotation startles. Why, I wonder, is she drawn to this unnerving comment by Julian Bell: ‘Self-portraiture is a singular, in-turned art. Something eerie lurks in its fingering of the edge between seer and seen’?²⁰ And then I think about how Berger and Robertson run their creative fingers along similar dangerous edges to test their sharpness. ‘A sentence could be a blade’ writes Robertson (158).

Laura often framed literary critical textual analysis in psychoanalytic terms, and believed that ‘psychoanalysis was, in crucial ways, dependent on autobiographical acts’.²¹ It is characteristic of her lifelong preoccupation with psychoanalysis that she can discern psychoanalytic precursors in unlikely places. She cites a typically robust observation from Benjamin Franklin’s memoir: ‘We cannot actually live our life over again, in a (preferably revised) ‘second edition’, but we can, using autobiography, bring it back through recollection, made durable by putting it down in writing’.²² In an extensive introduction to a collection of essays on Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (which she thought was effectively his own autobiography) she cites Shoshana Felman saying dreams are ‘susceptible of telling us about our own autobiography another story than the one we knew or had believed to be our own’.²³ The ‘second edition’ may result from finding metalanguages (or artifices) to dispel Muir's fog of fable, as is suggested in a key quotation from a memoir to which Laura introduced me, Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman: ‘This book is about lives lived out on the borderlands, lives for which the central interpretative devices of the culture don’t quite work’.²⁴ Berger and Robertson are engaged in exactly this task of trying to construct new interpretative devices for the contemporary condition. In the 1980s we were all attempting to articulate the failings of those stale and ideological interpretative devices, to explain their deterministic origins in capitalism, patriarchal frameworks, colonial legacies, and the tropes by which language held us captive. Laura looked to prose and film, to modernism’s script for the postmodern era, perceiving self-construction at work; I was under the spell of poetry, mainly poetry that questioned the dominant confessional lyric mode that Charles Bernstein dismissed as ‘official verse culture’, while I remained curious about the enduring validity of a self-reflexive autobiographical lineage of Beat and Black Mountain writers.²⁵ I thought I could discern ways that some poets in the UK and Canada were already reaching beyond that American impasse to reconcile self-expression and linguistically innovative verse. Since the 1980s Lisa Robertson has become one of the most original of these poetic innovators.

Laura’s discussions of autobiography helped me understand a turbulence in the poetry world generated by irreconcilable ideas of the validity of self-expression. While Marcus was immersed in tracing wider and wider circles of influence from modernist autobiography, I became enmeshed in the arguments about autobiography in poetry. It was almost impossible not to take sides. Pound’s dislike of poetic dirty laundry had not deterred the development of what has remained the dominant form of poetry for around seventy years, the personal poem, the confessional poem as several critics controversially designated it. For many years I have listening to impassioned arguments for and against voice, personal history, and expressive display in poetry. One poetry movement even came to call itself ‘Language Poetry’ (or preferably ‘Language Writing’) in order to emphasise its avoidance of the drama of the voiced self and commitment to the composition of ‘unspeakable’ poems. Poets divided themselves according to whether they broadly expected poetry to be confessional, first person, narrative expressions of an authentic self, or on the other hand to be an exploratory art of language as writing, discourse, phonetic play, proceduralism and more.

In a collection of essays by memoiristic poets, After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography, certain questions return again and again: is such poetry confessional, how does it weigh accuracy against prosody, and why is it so popular? That last concern is sometimes addressed simply as proclivity (‘As a reader, I’ve always been drawn to poems where the first-person speaker is indistinguishable from the poet, because these poems give access, on an elemental level, to intimate experience’),²⁶ and sometimes as a matter of the expansion of creative writing pedagogy

it has remained the staple of what comes near to being poetry’s mass audience – the earnest beginners, in small cities, on college campuses of all kinds and sizes, for whom poetry is a way of setting their lives in order.²⁷

For many of these poets an ethics of veracity is imperative. Ted Kooser condemns blatant fabrication of life stories:

A poet writes with touching sadness about the suicide of a brother, and we pity her until we chance to learn from some other source that she has no brother … Is the country so in need of new confessional poems that it is necessary to construct them around events that never happened?²⁸

Andrew Hudgins simply calls such poetic inventions ‘lies’, however much a poem might appear to require artifice. Louise Glück is critical of the risks of unearned sensationalism: ‘dark truth has become unnervingly popular’.²⁹ Charles Altieri makes a case that much of this expressive poetry relies far too heavily on narrative description for its authenticity, calling it ‘scenic poetry’.³⁰ In the background were the new theories of language and subjectivity emerging from post-structuralism, the idea that the self is an artefact of writing, that the ego is an empty space (I say in the background, because even the most avant-garde poets did not see themselves as the literary wing of the post-structuralist advance). British poets tended to be less partisan. The poet Allen Fisher warned that poetry ‘has been driven too far from sites of “civic production”’.³¹ Sites of civic production would be a good way to describe the urban situatedness the writings of Lisa Robertson, as is so evident in her essays in Soft Architecture, particularly the Seven Walks (in Vancouver) that search out a new urban flâneur’s poetics.³²

Lisa Robertson is part of a generation of poets younger than the majority of those in After Confession, who have affinities with others who have learned from both traditions, the confessionally-inclined and the anti-voice poets, to write in what one anthology calls a ‘hybrid’ manner, part autobiographical, part language writing.³³ Many of her poems are long form structures based around sentences, often given a line each. This passage from her poem ‘The Present’ in which ‘philosophy is collapsing before our eyes’, is characteristic of this emphasis. Many of the themes of The Baudelaire Fractal are here in embryo:

It's autumn

Which might be tent-scented or plank-scented

Their lands and goods, their budgets and gastronomy quicken

You want to enter into the humility of limitations

Coupled with exquisite excess

You walk in the green park at twilight

You read Lucretius to take yourself towards death, through streets and markets

In a discontinuous laboratory towards foreignness

You bring his prosody into your mouth

When you hear the sound of paper³⁴

In her collection of essays Nilling, she offers further context. ‘Language, the historical mode of collective relationship, is also the aptitude by which humans innovate one another as subjects’. This line of thinking, derived significantly from Èmile Benveniste and Hannah Arendt, leads her to speculatively suggest that it might be possible to ‘propose a prosody of the citizen, where the term ‘prosody’ describes the historical and bodily movement of language amongst subjects’.³⁵ These principles inform her novel.

The Baudelaire Fractal begins with a strange daydream that gives the book its title.

I simply discovered within myself late one morning in middle age the authorship of all of Baudelaire’s work. I can scarcely communicate the shock of the realization. … I either received it entire, as one slips into a jacket and assumes a differently accented gestural life, or I uncovered it within myself, which is to say inwardly I fell upon it. I felt it as both purely external and self-identical. (135)

Robertson reports in interviews and conversation that she had exactly this hallucination one day in a hotel room during a visit to the University of East Anglia. In the memoir, the revelation is relocated to Vancouver, appropriately the city where Robertson spent formative years learning her craft, a key figure in the Kootenay school of writers.

What happened was this: I smashed up against a violent and completely formed recognition that entered through my sleepy hands. The poems were my poems. The words as I read them were words I knew deeply because they were my own, the way my skin was physiologically my own. I’d muttered these words as I walked. (137)

It’s part annunciation, part ratification of her achieved poethood, the completion of her long apprenticeship, and part absurdity, deliberately so. The self-evident absurdity of this revelation is a necessary corrective to any sort of triumphalism, a reminder that the aim of becoming a poet just like the male lyricists of her time was always going to be a distraction, the task was to become a ‘girl’ poet. The dream is artifice exposed, an explosive manifestation of the powers of artifice with which a poet colludes.

The Baudelaire Fractal is a counter-narrative version of the mythical journey of the young quester from the provinces to the centre of empire. Paris stands for the centre, and Toronto for the outer provinces, in what is always a highly self-conscious adoption of this trope. To Paris: it’s a journey that so many artists and poets had made before. Sami Rosenstock becomes Tristan Tzara, Jackie Derrida becomes Jacques Derrida. Unlike the men, this young Canadian outsider Robertson has no money, is working class, and barely understands any of the books she diligently struggles to read. In this telling, she has only a notebook, a holdall, and a determination to become a poet, aware from the start that this very identity, the role of poet, is apparently open only to men, whereas a woman, or ‘girl’ as men called women, and as Robertson retrospectively names herself, are objects of desiring lyric address. How to transform ‘girl’ to poet? By acting the role of girl in order to elicit the underlying conceptual framework from its camouflage? In Paris young Robertson researches her own girlhood as a sexual category by undertaking brief affairs with young men, in the course of which she encounters pleasures and dangers, is nearly asphyxiated, asked if she would like to be pimped and prostituted, and assaulted on a dark street. Think of the threat behind Baudelaire’s fond imprecations to his lovers, ‘monstre’, ‘femme impure’, ‘affreuse’, ‘en cruatés féconde’, – Robertson needs to reclaim these dimensions of ‘girlhood’ from the poets, even the greatest of French writers.³⁶ Fortunately other sexual experiences are nourishing. The memoir does not however structure itself around these encounters unless they contribute to a stadial development of consciousness, that proceeds through several recognitions, about male desire, abjection, style, and language as it manifests in the sentence.

She reaches the point where it would appear that to be a poet she must ‘destroy something … leave a trail of stains behind me’. (107) One of the leitmotifs of the memoir is the stain of menstrual blood left behind accidentally, embarrassingly, and then defiantly, on a restaurant chair-seat a stain that appears to outline a map of Parisian arrondissements. Robertson is probably also recalling the more anodyne association of desire and staining in William Carlos Williams’s lines from ‘Love Song’ about the ‘honey-thick stain’ of love that ‘spoils the colors of the world’: ‘I lie here thinking of you: – / the stain of love / is upon the world! / Yellow, yellow, yellow / it eats into the leaves’. Here, says Robertson, is my own stain in return.

Throughout the memoir Robertson talks about self-fashioning in a deceptively literal manner, as a form of dressing up or down, of wearing clothes, often vintage, time-travelling jackets, that enable her to alter her sense of self, in a more thoroughgoing manner than simply as a disguise. In a culminating scene at the Tate Gallery in London, she visits ‘The Pack’, a Joseph Beuys installation that presents a Volkswagen van out of which twenty-four linked sledges spill, suggestive of abstract huskies, each carrying a roll of felt and a block of fat. Robertson is wearing a flea market coat as she talks to her friend.

As we rehearsed our reservations about Beuys’s shamanistic proclivities, barely conscious of my gesture, I reached for the pink silk pouf to clean my glasses. From the breast pocket of the Baudelairean jacket, following the small flourish of the pink square, escaped a small stream of moths.

Although Robertson feels mortified at the time, the felt-eating insects allegorically express a deep-seated resistance to the aesthetic authority that Beuys embodies. This is comic criticism. Robertson’s discourse of becoming relies on tropes of clothing and city. As she tries to understand the Baudelaire authorship revelation she experiences it as the enveloping of fabric:

Like heavy silk, the inner world draped, folded, pooled, spilled over to embellish or seduce the outer world, which in turn frayed, abraded, tore, revealing the structure of the division as contingent, and so erotic. I was already becoming the city … .. 123.

The memoir could have concluded with the penultimate chapter ‘Drunk’, the episode of the Baudelairean frock coat moth nest, at the end of which she abandons this symbolic garment forever. Such jackets she imagines often continue to circulate in the ‘rag cosmos’, although perhaps this ‘jacket is now livid dust’. (177) A further final chapter, ‘Cake’, awaits us however. Its title is a warning; it alludes to a local farmer encountered on her walk who is surreptitiously feeding his dog pieces of cake, because the animal ‘had become heartsick’ and this is all it would eat. Heartsickness governs this final chapter. It begins with seeming confidence, a precise date and even a precise time as prelude to a self-description of the poet discovering a tick on her neck as she is writing, and when she impales it with her nib a black liquid oozes out as if it were black bile, the humour of melancholy. A chain of associations is released, leading eventually back to Aby Warburg’s interest in melancholia, hinting at a heartsick, depressive mood threatening to settle over the wrap of the autobiography. The scene concludes: ‘outside the solstice sky is just darkening. The occasional liquid trill of the season’s last nightingales deepens the evening. I hear my neighbours’ shutters close’. (183) Abruptly Robertson disavows what she has just written: evening was a fiction, she was not writing, and presumably those lyrical Keatsian nightingales were mere poetic invention. ‘This is all wrong’ she continues, explaining that the incident with the tick happened in the morning. She is reminding the reader of that warning at the start, that this it is artifice that projects the autobiography. In her final sentences, Robertson combines three images that comprise a threat: ‘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’. (194) The flâneur (or should it as some claim be flâneuse?) persists.

Berger by contrast with Robertson does not present an explicit temporal narrative of his development as a writer. Instead the remembered dead who helped him become this author keep dropping by in Berger’s memoir, recalling the taste of fruit, relishing their fading memories of the sensations of bodily existence, and appearing in markets and hotels and roads. It needs to be said emphatically that it is odd to stage an encounter with the ghost of your mother in a Lisbon square, or with the ghost of the mentor who introduced you to modern literature in a Warsaw farmer’s market, or with the intangible figure of an artist who taught you to link observation with drawing in a ritzy Madrid hotel lobby. Why doesn’t he revert to the settings where he knew these people in his youth? I would speculate that Berger wants to emphasise the presentness of his dead, and just as importantly, to demonstrate that they have a place in the social milieus he currently inhabits. Robert Pippin paraphrases Hegel’s account of practical reason, or ethics, ‘as a kind of interchange of attempts at justification among persons each of whose actions affects what others would otherwise be able to do, and all this for a community at a time’.³⁷ Berger has expanded the category of persons to include those in his life who are no longer alive themselves. Berger definitely wants to avoid suggesting that these revenant figures who shaped the adult artist and writer were drawing out and sculpting the singular individual John Berger who is writing this fiction. These strange encounters could loosely be conceived as allegorical representations of the condition of interdependence on others across a lifetime and a geography. Earlier I called the figure of his mother a ghost. This is not precise enough. Although she talks openly about being a tourist from the land of the dead, and appears and disappears with their facility for garbing themselves with the invisible, there is nothing eerie, crepuscular, haunting, or inhuman about her, despite the ontological uncertainty of her existence.

In a section of Berger’s book devoted to a visit to see the prehistoric paintings on the walls of the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche, he finds in his response to the handprints, the lions and ibexes emerging from the contours of the rock, another discourse to represent the dead.

For nomads the notion of past and future is subservient to the experience of elsewhere. Something that has gone, or is awaited, is hidden elsewhere in another place … Everything hides. What has vanished has gone into hiding. An absence – as after the departure of the dead – is felt as a loss but not as an abandonment. The dead are hiding elsewhere. (141)

Laura takes up similar ideas during a discussion in The Tenth Muse of the aesthetics of absence in early film. In a fascinating discussion of one of H.D.’s essays in Close Up, Laura discusses how H.D. conceives the moment of transition from the outdoors to the cinema interior, and then quotes this wonderful passage:

I felt all my preparation of the extravagantly contrasting out of doors gay little street, was almost an ironical intention, someone, something ‘intended’ that I should grasp this, that some mind should receive this series of uncanny and almost psychic sensations in order to transmute them elsewhere; in order to translate them.³⁸

Woolf too, according to Laura, is sensitive to this sense of an elsewhere, notably in Jacob’s Room, where Laura perceives ‘an issue at the heart of much of Woolf’s writing; that of the relationship between presence and absence, and the exploration of ‘the thing that exists when we aren’t there’, an issue … at the heart of filmic ontology’ (this hidden ‘thing’ is mentioned in Woolf’s diary shortly after completing To The Lighthouse). Laura goes on to quote an entry from Woolf’s diary recording an ambiguous comment made by Leonard about Jacob’s Room: ‘the people are ghosts’.³⁹ Berger’s mingling of live and ghostly figures similarly has the effect of warping the ontology of both.

I find emergent aesthetics in Berger and Robertson. Both are deeply interested in the unfinished aesthetic processes of their chosen forms, notably in their explicit attention to issues of style (their interpretations of what constitutes style differ greatly), as they scan the horizons between memoir and their own literary art form. Laura recognises the significance of style as early as Autobiographical Discourses, noting that some theorists of autobiography claim ‘the problems of external verification can be overcome through the operations of internal truth as consistency or personal style’.⁴⁰ Late in his series of encounters with figures from the past Berger encounters the shadow of a former lover driving across Europe:

the two of us believed that style was indispensable for living with a little hope … Style is tenuous … It comes from within. … Style is about an invisible promise. This is why it requires and encourages a talent for endurance and an ease with time. (168)

Style is mostly the invisible promise that Berger offers us. By contrast, style flaunts itself in The Baudelaire Fractal, in gestures, in garments, and in writing:

Sentences had surfaces; I wanted them to begin to undo themselves, to careen into the impossible … .The sentence: subjectivity followed by a pause. Subjectivity: whatever desires or hates. Now the pronoun could be limitlessly potent instead of retrospectively descriptive … What would a girl’s anger be? How would each speaking girl transform her pronoun? (158–9)

This interest in rescuing the pronoun from its oppressive machinations is why Robertson can say, crucially, against easy assumptions about her affinities as a writer of what could be considered experimental poetry: ‘I was no avant-gardist; I had no interest in abolishing grammar’. (158) When Berger gives us naturalistic scenes of different cities, London, Lisbon, Geneva, Warsaw, and locales into which he inserts his ‘fictional’ representations of people who played a formative role in his life, laminating the actual and the fictional in such a way that we are compelled to see the dissonance between them, he is tacitly showing us the style, the brushstrokes of the author, the technique of lifelike rendition of a place and the composition of characters. Robertson works with sentences that can be realist or fantastic, aphoristic or convoluted, sentences that can be as startling out of place as Berger’s visitations from his dead, and she too rigorously locates her narratives of memory in specific cities, mostly Paris.

Robertson loves cities: ‘The nervous fluid of a city is similar to a grammar or an electric current’. (11) But then in an unexpected swerve, having elliptically explained that she became ‘the she-dandy … found in the margins of used paperbacks’ she asks herself the question, ‘What do I love?’ and answers not as we might imagine with an urban cynosure, but with the enigmatic comment, ‘I love the elsewhere of moving clouds’. (11) Later she recurs to this thought:

Weren’t all of my desires originated by an elsewhere? Isn’t this the structural experience of modern life? Such is the Baudelairean proposition. The intoxication of newness is a muted repetition. And we will lose sight of this elsewhere, and then we will re-embellish it in the form of a personal myth. (137–8)

What does it mean that the flâneur loves this uneasy nominalisation, this elsewhere? I find a partial answer in a memoir by Yves Bonnefoy, that may even have been a contributory inspiration for Robertson. It is not just Bonnefoy’s obsessive search for what he terms to himself the wonderful ‘ailleurs’, an elusive location that haunted him as a young poet, that helps illuminate Robertson’s mission, it is also the very idea of an autobiography of one’s creative imagination as a repetitive wandering amongst art and landscape. Bonnefoy’s landscapes are as imaginary as the Baudelaire story in Paris.

In The Arrière-pays, Bonnefoy recounts a history of self-discovery, an entire short memoir of his search for an elsewhere that beckons from every crossroads, and from the corners of many Renaissance paintings, opening out from the self-fashioning dynamics of this enticing otherworld ideal. His reflections on the longing for the untranslatable ‘arrière-pays’, which is not quite the back country that Gary Snyder celebrates in his poetry, nor the hinterland, nor the back of beyond, though that comes almost as close as the translator Stephen Romer’s apt choice of ‘elsewhere’ to translate ‘cet ailleurs insituable’, its deceptions and potentials, help clarify this sense of a secular otherworld that enskies both memoirs.⁴¹ Bonnefoy begins by explaining that he became haunted by this non-place just over the horizon of being, this elsewhere, because he felt it was a place auratic with utopian colours, yet grounded somehow in our world.

This nation, or place of absolutes, is not so detached from our common condition that we should, in imagining it, surround it with walls of pure ozone. We lack so little here that the beings from over there have nothing to distinguish them from us, I suppose, except the unemphatic strangeness of a simple gesture, or of a remark that my friends, in commerce with them, never thought to question.⁴²

Bonnefoy is ‘haunted by everything that gives credence to the existence of this place’, a possession that sends him on a quest dangerous for his poetry and even his sanity.

It is true, our lands are beautiful, I can imagine no other, I am at peace with my language, my distant god has only slightly withdrawn, his epiphany resides in the simple: and yet, supposing that the true life is over there, in that elsewhere I cannot situate then what is here starts to look like a desert.⁴³ (35)

After travels in Europe, searches for an elusive revelation apparently concealed in early Italian art, Bonnefoy reluctantly withdraws his attentions from the elsewhere. He realises that he had given primacy to ‘the beauty of a work over lived experience’. And

such a choice, by delivering words up to themselves, and creating a language out of them, created a universe that granted everything to the poet; except that such a universe, cut off from the changes of each day, from time, and from other people, would lead to nothing, in fact, but solitude. (116)

Bonnefoy’s autobiography of his youthful imaginary lies in the background of Robertson, not least in its warning that poems must be open fields, and words be held fast in the immediate, respect their referents. Robertson takes her readers on an intensely inward journey through various elsewheres receding exceptionally far inside the spaces of the problematic pronouns that housed her younger unwilling self, the not-yet-poet.

Bonnefoy’s mode of autobiography helps me think about why Robertson’s book is different from a memoir with which it shares similar foundations, a recent account of the tortuous steps needed for a woman to become a writer in the 1980s, Rebecca Solnit’s, Recollections of My Non-Existence, whose title would not be out of place as a subtitle for Robertson’s fictional memoir. Where Robertson offers a highly original reimagining of the possibilities of autobiography, in part by presenting it as a historical phenomenology of the consciousness of the young female poet, Solnit concentrates on a precise materialist mapping of recent literary and personal history. They both struggle with the impossible paradoxes of male desire entwining itself around the stages of recognition needed to become a writer. Solnit tells a revealing story of being commissioned to write a book for City Lights:

during those first few years I was very often in the editorial offices … Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who floated around there regularly, has never spoken a word to me, including under circumstances where speaking to me would be the normal thing to do.⁴⁴

From this and many other difficult experiences with the male gatekeepers of the literary world she draws this conclusion:

And so there I was where so many young women were, trying to locate ourselves somewhere between being disdained or shut out for being unattractive and being menaced or resented for being attractive … My body was a lonely house. I was not always home … It’s … no wonder women were so praised for being thin, for taking up as little room as possible, for hovering on the brink of vanishing.⁴⁵

Solnit summarises neatly processes that Robertson finds immensely intricate psychological dynamics. Solnit usefully says:

Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.⁴⁶

Robertson’s starting point is the language of pronouns. As she passes through a series of incremental insights, her stadial narrative tends to self-deconstruct, to refuse to harden into a framework, as different states of being conflict with their differently habitable pronouns, ‘I’ and ‘her’ and ‘she’.

When I recognize afresh the courage it takes for any girl to not disappear to herself, I am still shocked. Could the image of my own self-disappearance open a possible world? … I wanted the image to be kinetic and tactile, an undulant elsewhere, not the predetermined fixture of a gaze, not the token of a bordered exchange.

*

As may be all too obvious, by talking about Berger’s ghosts and Robertson’s telepathic connection to Baudelaire, this essay does not escape an unwillingness similar to Bonnefoy’s to accept the perishing of all that we care for. Laura’s choice of the quotation from Ben Franklin might serve as an epigraph to these sketched reflections. Although it did not help me directly think about Laura, nor about my own interest in why much contemporary poetry became heavily autobiographical and provoked such hostility amongst the more radical writers, Berger’s memoir did something else important. Because it squarely faces the difficult question of how we might actively remember those dead who helped us become who we are, it helped me think about Laura Marcus’s absence. Berger wants us to recognise that our commonplace ideas about the dead, whether those we know only from their legacies, or those we knew as bright stars, can be misleading, that rather than think of the dead as having departed forever, they are better imagined as our recurrent interlocutors, requiring deference, argument, and above all placement in the cities of our imaginary. Both he and Robertson, like Bonnefoy, are adept at exploring the after-images of the elsewhere.

As I said at the beginning, Robertson’s fictional memoir was much the most assistive optics for remembering Laura. Even her final research project on rhythm is evoked in Robertson’s wish for her self-image to be

rhythmic, in the way that Benveniste spoke about rhythm; not a measure, not a temporal phenomena of Nature, but ‘the form in the instant that it is assumed by what is moving, mobile and fluid, the form of what does not have organic consistency’. (93)⁴⁷

Robertson could have continued this quotation with a trope of Benveniste’s that aligns with her own interest in tailoring: ‘it fits the pattern of a fluid element, of a letter arbitrarily shaped, of a robe which one arranges at will, of a particular state of character or mood. It is the form as improvised, momentary, changeable’.⁴⁸ This fluid form will not be an achieved idea, an internalised concept of the woman poet, it will be an individuality in process. In thinking of the poetic self as a rhythm, Robertson is drawing on a history behind Benveniste that also interested Laura in the final decade of her career. Her unfinished book on rhythm was due to appear as my essay went to press.⁴⁹ Marcus could be summarising one of Robertson’s core beliefs when she says (summarising the implications of Henri Lefebvre’s ‘rhythmanalysis’): ‘In the broader experiential and phenomenological fields, we live within rhythms whose measure we have barely begun to understand’.⁵⁰ Marcus demonstrates that for many of these promulgators of the new theory of rhythm, it was prosody in both poetry and in prose that best exemplified ‘rhythm as a universal phenomenon’, explaining why we find ‘rhythmic patterns pre-existing, in the creative process, the words that would come to clothe them’.⁵¹

In that autumn of 2021 I couldn’t help noticing several coincidences between the story Robertson tells and memories of Laura at Southampton. Coevality is one convergence. Robertson’s protagonist Hazel Brown arrives in France in 1984 hoping to figure out how a young woman can become a poet not interpellated by the masculine pronouns of lyric. In this same year, Laura and I arrived as new lecturers in the Department of English at Southampton. I would feel a continuing sigh of relief for the permanence of my new appointment after years of temporary positions that had begun to feel like a permanent nomadic condition of academic life in Thatcher’s Britain, while I could see that Laura as a temporary lecturer, in her first academic post, experienced the pressure felt by all interim faculty to perform as well as possible just in case another permanent post does turn up. And this points to a more significant convergence of Robertson’s novel and this history, because with hindsight I am now more aware of the gender optics, that I the male academic had the secure job, where Laura was in an uncertain position, placing our friendship always in slight tension with this precondition. Robertson’s account of the young woman poet’s precarity, the need for external and ‘internal attack on the feminine constraint’, (108) strikes home. As also does a minor topical detail. Robertson recalls her younger self sitting in a café with her jacket sleeves ‘rolled’; I have an abiding memory of Laura often wearing jackets with the sleeves rolled back looking very stylish in this subtle sartorial violation of the male jacket’s properness, asserting a feminist independence of male sartorial norms. Robertson loves finding ‘Baudelairean jackets’ in the flea markets, and wearing them with style, before sending them back into the ‘rag cosmos’:

Yet in the city I was discovering, the collage of fantasy, pigment, quotation, and architecture that I walked through daily in my outfits and my obsessions, I came to notice small-scale transpositions, tiny openings within the texture of the present, where choices toward a freed thinking could be possible. (122)

Small-scale perhaps, but these transpositions led Robertson to her current position as a leading poet, whose deeply intelligent engagements with troubadour poetry, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Aby Warburg, Émile Benveniste, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Charles Baudelaire, have made her a central figure for a new generation of poets. Many hard-won transpositions must also have been integral to Laura’s life as early precarity transformed into a highly successful academic career.

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.