Author Lisa Robertson’s writing engages in a shrewd, at times caustic, examination of history and culture.Jean-Philippe Antoine/Supplied
The past is alive with lessons if you are able to hear them, whether as voices of those who came before or treasures that hint at a life that could have been. In Riverwork (Coach House Books) – a new novel by Canadian writer and translator Lisa Robertson – a woman opens herself to such possibilities courtesy of an unconventional inheritance.
Robertson’s protagonist, Lucy Frost, is a woman working as a house-cleaner in Paris. Lucy feels aimless, and dreams of a higher calling when she inherits her deceased great-aunt Em’s fragmentary journal entries, written a century earlier.
“I’m often motivated by topics and details that seem to be left out of the official narratives,” Robertson explains in the course of several e-mail exchanges. “One of those absences has been the labour of women, particularly working-class women. They are barely present in the big books of history and literature, although they hold up the world. I’m interested in what women keep, what we take, what we do in secret, what we pass on, and how we do that.”
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The Frost family squandered their riches on bad business investments back home in Canada, forcing Em to abandon her academic pursuits at the Sorbonne and to return home; over several generations, this reversal of fortune in turn diminished Lucy’s vocational prospects, but having access to the library of her employer (an archivist by trade) allows her to cross-reference Em’s descriptions with the source texts that inspired them.
Em’s expansive paper record of half-translated novels and desultory musings is a passport for Lucy to travel to another world – one where the mind is free to roam the strange lands of classical literature and philology. Lucy begins to see her own social situation mirrored in Em’s, who writes about the “social and aesthetic abundance entirely lacking in her birthplace, where her ambitions were impeded by a litany of family restrictions.” (The Frosts looked down on Em’s literary interests as pretentious and unpragmatic).
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And while Lucy feels the loss of these familial legacies, both financial and academic, she is able to catch glimpses of them through Em’s “perambulatory” notes, which in turn orient readers to the intellectualism of 19th and early 20th century Paris, and the great thinkers who held court within those eras.
Robertson, who is based in France, believes that wandering and diversion characterize much of French writing, easily combining into a series of “minor perceptions, hunches, and intuitions.”
“Walking as a bodily activity,” Robertson says, “maybe due to its rhythmic regularity, encourages a wandering mind, sudden realizations, unforeseen resurfacings of older thoughts and experiences – the walk remixes time, but non-intentionally. Which is what memory does.”
Through Lucy’s exploration of the Bièvre river (a recurring focal point in Em’s writings), and its centrality in the lives of working class women washing laundry in its waters, she begins to understand how her family’s financial ruin led to Em’s forsaking of a hard-fought intellectual life. Soon, Lucy begins to understand her stifled life as the ill-fortune of women the world over.
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“My narrator is a cleaning person, and has a rich intellectual life on her own terms,” Robertson says. “For Lucy, reading has profoundly sensual dimensions. Women workers and women readers are often moving against the grain of the official versions of economic and intellectual production, in the margins of organizing institutions. Sometimes the things we find interesting are the overlooked, seemingly meaningless things.”
Robertson’s writing engages in a shrewd, at times caustic, examination of history and culture, and produces linkages between labour and capital, gender and class, and leisure and industry. Many texts from Robertson’s backlist – including First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant, The Governor General’s Literary Award-nominated The Baudelaire Fractal, and Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, a book of poetry – embody both a dissenting approach to the status quo and a mistrust for hierarchical socio-political systems that have long been the stock in trade of the cultural critic.
“For me, any book – either one I’m reading or one I’m writing – exists in a constellation of other voices and texts,” Robertson says, describing how meaning can only be produced when disparate ideas are brought into proximity with each other.
“In Riverwork, I wanted to make this conversation explicit, and draw fragments and voices of writers I experience as interlocutors into my own composing. I approach these other writers and artists as a reader, rather than as a literary historian or critic, because that’s what I am – an obsessive reader. Reading incites me to write.” Through Em’s writings and Lucy’s musings, Robertson playfully brings to bear the full influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions and Reveries of the Solitary Walker, poet John Clare’s The Journey from Essex, and the situationist writer Michèle Bernstein’s All the King’s Horses.
But locating one’s work within an older tradition sometimes carries cosmetic theoretical dangers, such as the charge that classical literature does not speak to modern life, or that the past’s eclipsing hold of the present may make society blind to the problems of the future. Robertson takes an enlightened position on such questions, citing the unceasing relevance of any work produced within its own time.
“The fact that some of the texts I’m influenced by are in the past is incidental to me, since the present is composed from so many layers,” she says. Robertson merges the insight of 1970s feminist filmmakers, post-World War II philosophy, and 19th century social commentators. “I like to put Chateaubriand on a level with Chantal Akerman for example, or William Hazlitt with Hannah Arendt, to see what sort of energy the collision will produce, and what I can make of it. Because I’m reading all of it in the present, it becomes the present.”