Lisa Robertson
The Baudelaire Fractal
which I always want to call the Fractal Baudelaire
It’s a novel. It’s about subject positions.
p. 85
If I repeat the word girl very often, it’s for those who, like me, prefer the short monosyllable, its percussive force. I wonder if in repeating I might exhaust the designation that fixed me, flood it with lugubrious excess it named, and so convert the diminutive syllable to a terrain of the possible. Maybe this would be grace. Maybe. Would it be grace to aesthetically yield to the mystic obscenity of the word girl? She is allegorical, her body both lost and grotesquely multiple. She is estranged in a ruinous nostalgia for decorated immobility, enclosure, muteness. I want to force the category to produce, monstrously, a subjectivity outside subjection.
It’s about the literature and loitering.
p. 91
In reading I continuously discovered the extent my own incomprehension; it was so varied and complicated that it became my wealth.
The fragment that hooks — if I close to disappeared.
p. 74
If I was a monstrous slut, if I close to disappeared, if I confused aesthetics with the feeling of bodily risk, if I mistook ideology for sensation, anger for bravery, if I belatedly evaded an ambivalent erasure, I was in very good company.
Apparition again.
p. 93
This image would not be a means of appearing to a social given; rather, it would be the self-given permission to not disappear to oneself. When I recognized afresh the courage it takes for any girl to not disappear to herself, I am still shocked. Could the image of my own self-appearance open a possible world?
In short — I was hooked on the grammar of “if I close to disappeared” — sensing an ellipsis and not knowing how quite to reconstruct the fulness. And so the theme of
(in)visibility captured my attention and I found it inflected by a gendered lens.
And so for day 2915
05.12.2014