Water Ways

Tears come. “Unable to go further,” Lucy Frost gives in to the emotion and the weeping. Having reached an emotional and intellectual impasse, the amateur historian is exhausted and “bitterly disappointed” in herself. Her subject — her great-aunt Em’s archive of unfinished writing — evades her. “I came too late to this work, and too tired,” she concedes, mourning her inability to bring the material to life, to fulfill the bold promise that she made to herself so many months earlier: “I would do the research and write her book.”

Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork ends where it begins — in lateness. “I arrived by word of mouth,” read the opening lines. “I was serious and skint, and my morals were lax. I was late. I refused to know my place.” What follows is a series of false starts and attempts to transcribe and make sense of a mess of notes. Before her disappearance, Em had spent decades producing and gathering fragments on the Bièvre — a lost tributary of the Seine — and on other pieces of Paris’s alluvial, literary, and labour past. These come to Lucy in a small suitcase that overflows with “grimy notebooks, curling snapshots, postmarked envelopes.” There is other matter, too, from sheets of carbon paper to more intimate shreds, including “an unlabelled miscellaneous strip of red woollen cloth, a lock of grey hair tightly tied with blue thread, a long splinter of dark wood, a clipped-off cream satin garment label reading Schiaparelli in red woven script.”

Lucy left Canada for Paris forty years earlier, at twenty-three, “in search of poetry and an idea of the erotic.” But her youthful participation in drunken writerly endeavours and soirées didn’t yield “the coveted creamy book” of her dreams. Nevertheless, she stayed in France and floated between jobs aimlessly, each less literary than the last. “Quite untrained for the deathmarch of late capital,” she says of herself. “I had nothing else in view. I became a cleaner for the professoriate.”

The American poet and playwright Kenneth Koch once wrote that “our subject is all around us like a mail-order winter that we carelessly sent in a request for when it seemed it would always be spring.” We meet Lucy as she arrives at such a season of clarity. Her true subject has just revealed itself. At sixty-three, and perhaps for the first time, she finds herself with a vocation. She’s distraught, disorganized, monastic, and, much like her missing relative, prone to literary meandering. But she is serious about her undertaking: “Belated, insomniac, and underemployed, a reader and a weeper, a scoffer and a scrawler, a cleaner, a fibber, and a sipper, a doubter, a haunter of shame, I am a hag, yes; I am a riverologist.”

There is a sense of humour in the twin feelings of futility and certainty that motivate Lucy: “The feeling of being the first reader of a book, although common, is illusory, and this is one part of the erotics of reading.” To afford her small apartment in the Eleventh Arrondissement, she does housekeeping for a retired intellectual, the Archivist, whose cat, Catastrophe, looms in the margins. The elderly woman is in the throes of her own unending project of sorting through a lifetime of letters. Donning a floral smock, Lucy dusts piles of books, irons linens, and listens to the nonagenarian opine while haphazardly sifting through files. Lucy never loses sight of her own stake in that which is arcane, even “fundamentally non-ambitious.” At home, she tends to the relics of another woman — her aunt — and studies texts that might prove useful to her.

Central to these secondary readings are the memoirs of François-René de Chateaubriand. Em began her research with a few notes, which she jotted down “in 1927 or ’28, still a student.” She had arrived in France to study Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Chateaubriand (who was already passé) at the Sorbonne. Those two itinerant figures led her, on the page and through the streets of her new city, to the Bièvre, which had once been a major outlet for waste water from both laundry boats and dyeing factories, the latter of which dumped toxic chemicals. It “infamously stunk” throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The laundresses were “seen as disease conveyors, contaminators.” These scapegoated women — their songs, labour, and politics — became Em’s new research focus. “Unconfined by a given architecture,” their piecemeal history represented direction within the “sprawling archive of female dissent.” Two decades after the polluted waterway was buried, in 1912, it was nowhere visible, though “it could be faintly heard at certain sewer grates.”

After a few years abroad, Em’s family money dried up. She returned to the prairies and became a schoolteacher. But her preoccupation with those writers, the “disappeared river,” and all the women’s work that had poured into it endured. To begin to understand her enigmatic aunt, Lucy immerses herself in Chateaubriand’s writings, which draw on Rousseau’s Confessions.

To read Robertson is to witness a ventriloquism act. In her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal, a poet discovers that she has authored the complete works of Charles Baudelaire. Her poetry collection Rousseau’s Boat has been republished and rewritten periodically since its first publication in 2004, most recently as Boat. Robertson intricately folds her many influences into every aspect of her work, sometimes in the form of their exact words. Riverwork is no exception. The laundresses of old speak through Em, while bygone fashions, opinions, objects, and memories speak through the Archivist. In epigraphs atop each chapter — from Edward Said, Ivan Illich, Walter Benjamin, and more — other writers speak through Robertson. And in one brief but significant passage, Chateaubriand speaks through Lucy. “Sometimes the Archivist would ask me to recount a story as I worked,” she explains. “How irritating.”

Irritated or not, Lucy sits across from her employer: “Each morning, during my breakfast, I began, I habitually read ten pages from the memoirs of Chateaubriand.” Slow reading gives her “the sensation of personally containing the duration of the book,” which allows her to retell that day’s pages from memory. Unsurprisingly, they include mimetic rhetorical flourishes. In one, twenty-one-year-old Chateaubriand, lonely and in Paris for the first time, is transfixed by the autobiography of François de Bassompierre. The seventeenth-century diplomat describes one of his escapades with a young laundress. The erotic experience is not Bassompierre’s alone — it is also Chateaubriand’s. “It was natural, even obvious, for him to be amorously kindled in 1788 by this girl on the little bridge in 1600,” Lucy says. “She is alive in his book.”

Riverwork collapses time and individual experience. We are drowning, it seems to suggest, in torrents of information, memories, absences, desires, tears. We will all, always, drown in history: “Women disappear.” “Entire languages and cultures violently disappear.” “Things disappear. People disappear.” Art does not buoy or save us; it is too late for that. Art is what awakens us to our drowning. It is no surprise, then, that toward the end of Robertson’s masterful story, our sleepless narrator makes her way to the Louvre. Lucy stands before Nicolas Poussin’s last painting, The Deluge, “receiving its downward force.”