Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork is a novel that traces the disappearance of a family member in tandem with the disappearance of a buried river that once ran through the city of Paris, the Bièvre. Through French literary history, through the history of labor movements that shook French and European society in the nineteenth century, to the ultra-contemporary cityscape where the river’s traces remain elusive, Robertson constructs a river history that challenges our fixed notions of the ways in which these bodies of water shape the lives of the communities on their banks. I sat down with Lisa Robertson to talk about her pivot from poetry to prose, the vast literary history with which she enters into conversation through the course of the novel, as well as her debt to Edgar Allan Poe. The following is a transcription of our conversation, supplemented by a subsequent email exchange.
You’ve written collections of poetry like XEclogue and Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, and then pivoted to the novel form in 2020 with The Baudelaire Fractal. Now, with Riverwork, you’ve written another novel. Can you talk about the decision to move from poetry to prose and some of the unique challenges that posed?
Although I spent the first thirty years of my publishing life writing books of poetry and essays, I haven’t felt the more recent arrival of the novel as a break or a discontinuity. More and more I feel that poetry is the ground, the field, of all linguistic experience. It’s not a subset or a specialization. I wrote essays as a poet, and now I write novels as a poet. What I mean is that I experience poetry as a very broad spectrum of idiosyncratic inquiry into the possible relationships of linguistic form, both historical and subjective, to social and cultural expressions and conventions. My early books of poetry were explorations of the shapes and limits of classical genre—pastoral, georgic and epic—in their constitution of subjectivity, including gender. My unit of writerly composition then was the book, as it still is. My novels too are units of exploration. Both poem and novel, in different ways, propose spaces for the alterity of linguistic consciousness. For me, language derives from poetry; poetry does not derive from language. Poetry is the first language, in childhood and in the culture. The instrumentalisation of language by means of algorithms is a subset of mathematics and economics, not linguistics. Language as poem, or poem as language, through recitation, formal play, historical transmission, sonic and scriptural innovation, shapely invention, moves intimately and concretely from mouth to mouth, from ear to ear, against the grain of the dominant measures and restrictions. Meaning is constituted and iterated through this movement, which produces its own ground. The novel as a form, relatively recent, given that it has only a two or three hundred year trajectory so far, has been delineated as a discrete genre more through market pressures and definitions than through any particular linguistic necessity. But the novel need not be permanently or definitively confined by its relationship with capital. I think that poetry can free the novel as it evades the algorithm.
More and more I feel that poetry is the ground, the field, of all linguistic experience.
The first chapter’s epigraph is a quote from Roland Barthes, “To say I is to inexorably open a curtain, not so much to reveal…as to inaugurate the ceremony of the imagination.” Who is the “I” of Riverwork? I’m curious about the degree to which this is autobiographical and the degree to which I should suspend that expectation.
I’m interested in the theatre of I-saying, rather than autobiographical veracity. These are different linguistic contracts. I want to expand and diversify experience, rather than represent whatever I’ve lived. In fact, “rather than” is my subject position in writing. I write in spite of, or away from, the institutional and generic protocols of identity. To say I, as Barthes writes, can be an opening towards the other, an erring towards the unknown. In the citation I use as the epigraph to the first chapter, Barthes is discussing Chateaubriand’s memoir of the Baroque abbot Rancé. It’s important to say that this theatrical first person is a Baroque emanation: Chateaubriand, writing in the early nineteenth century, is a belated amateur of Baroque style. The Baroque is the era that broke cosmic symmetry and the geometry of centrism to revel in the aesthetics of multiple or distributed centres. Aesthetics, I always want to remind myself, are expressions of desire, which is not always unified and is often equivocal. Lucy Frost, the I-speaker of Riverwork, is such a distributed or equivocal subject. She’s constituted by her own desires and their failures, and also by unchosen frequencies. The sub-surface geology of Paris, the elided narratives within her family history, her partial and maladroit absorption of the feints or postures of the books she reads— these lend her a mobile style of being. My relationship to Lucy is imaginary, in motion. Saying I is also a form of experiment.
Is it correct to call Riverwork a novel?
Yes. The novel is a very capacious object that can readily contain other forms, other media. It has energetic elasticity. Essays, films, songs, youtube videos, cassette tapes, paintings, dreams, index cards, diaries: all these can jostle together, intertwine, foray and retract, set up wandering patterns of resonance and correspondence, without compromising the narrative premise, as in fact all these media forms interconnect in our daily lives. Style holds it all together. My antecedents in this vein would include Sterne, Carlyle, Barnes, Genet, but also intermedia artists like Daniel Spoerri. I think of narrative in terms of constellation rather than developmental line. It’s in this sense too that the novel is a poem. There’s nothing that’s necessarily outside the poem, because poetry is, at an occult or clandestine level, infinitely capacious.
Are there any other texts that we might imagine this work alongside or in conversation with?
There’s a film that I watched many times during the years I was writing Riverwork, by a German filmmaker named Claudia von Alemann. The film, from 1981, is called Blind Spot in English, and in French, Le voyage à Lyon. It’s about a fictional young German historian who takes the train to Lyon to trace the footsteps of a French nineteenth-century women socialist writer, Flora Tristan, and who is unable to find any documents or any traces of her subject. Instead of doing a standard work of history writing, the character in this film, Elizabeth, walks around the city making sound recordings at sites where Flora Tristan would have spent time in the 1840s. That film really captured me: the combination of fictional narrative and historical documentation—documentary—interested me deeply. Also, its portrayal of research and failures in research as a form of being in the world and as a form of knowing.
A book that I reread every couple of years, which has been formative to me since my mid- to late-twenties, is Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel, Nightwood. Barnes introduced me to English baroque prose as a stylistic precedent. She was reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, and other seventeenth-century British prose writers. Nightwood is still an important book for me. I taught it a couple of times shortly before I started writing this novel, so I had recently revisited it. Also, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, which, coincidentally, Djuna Barnes cites in her book. It’s a book about looking for a vanished philosopher in a fictional city in Germany during the high romantic era of German Idealist philosophy, finding only scraps of his left-behind papers, and trying to piece together an account of this philosopher by means of the remnants left behind, which constitute a philosophy of clothing. Transposed to English the title would be The Tailor Recut. It’s a text I’ve read many, many times. I tend to not read it cover to cover. I will re-read favorite parts, then discover something new: a philosophy of aprons, a sordid description of a chaotic and filthy study. Carlyle’s been a big influence on Riverwork.
What was your physical process like of walking around the city of Paris and gathering data or impressions about the Bièvre? Did you have an approach?
I first learned about the Bièvre much in the way that I narrated through the character of Em, by attempting to follow in the city the paths of Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker. There were a few of those walks that you can more or less trace out in Paris. The sixth walk is one of them. He leaves the city and follows the Bièvre out into the countryside beyond. I had a project many years ago—I would have been about 40, 41, almost twenty-five years ago, something like that—of doing sound recordings. I was working with recording a lot at that point in my practice, and making digital sound works. I had the idea that I would like to follow Rousseau’s promenades. It was in this way that I learned about the Bièvre, which I had never heard of before. I became curious about it. I wouldn’t say I went so far as to do what I’d call research, but I tried to learn a little about the river. Then twenty years passed. Basically, the soundwalk practice I had when I was in my early forties became the novel I wrote when I was in my early sixties.
But most of the actual research for this novel was not ambulatory. I mean, the river is completely gone. You can see nothing of it. There are very few traces of its path, nor of the industrial nature of the neighborhoods that it moved through, with the exception of the Gobelins tapestry workshops, which still exist. That part of the city has been otherwise completely gentrified. So it became more interesting to try to find descriptions of the river in works of literature, written by people who were seeing it, witnessing it, describing it, during the time of its aboveground existence. Rousseau was one of those, but I think I became very captured by the working class, intensely polluted, very lively neighborhood of the early nineteenth century Bièvre, in reading a novel written in 1867 by the Goncourt brothers, Manette Salomon. Their descriptions of the district were amazing—so vivid, they almost stank. I was enthralled. So I started seeking the river in other novels and historical texts, Hugo, Rabelais, Delvau, and that became the matrix of the compositional work.Their descriptions were much more interesting for me than walking through emptied-out, eerily hollow, gentrified neighborhoods. A street facade might curve slightly where the river once curved. That’s it.
It seems to me that there has been a resurgence lately in the discussion of the life of a river. I was wondering if you were familiar with Robert MacFarlane’s Is a River Alive? I was really impressed on page twenty-seven of Riverwork when you weighed in definitively on this question, “Ultimately a river’s alive even when dead.” What sort of life do you imagine a river to have?
That’s a question I feel I should think about for a long time before answering. Obviously, subjectivity or self-aware consciousness is not an attribute I would attach to a river, even if it seems to have volition. I think one way to imagine the life of the river is to consider the multiplicity of lives concentrated in this moving, directional form. Those lives would include plankton, frogs, rats, tanners, fish, poets, waterlilies, laundresses—all the sorts of life attracted to or dependent on moving water. I think that would be one way to imagine the life of a river, as not being unified or individual, but as an interdependent association of different forms of life. Another way to imagine a river’s life would be formally, which is to say, the interrelationship of the directional movement of water, of the current with the earth, with geological fluctuations, planes of soil and subsoil and rock, and so forth, and how the movement of water is continually shifting and transforming geological form—that trace of ongoing change in movement that you see through different seasonal changes as well. There’s retraction in the high summer, and there’s flooding in early spring, and then also exceptional events, like massive floods, which are changing the banks, and, if we imagine the river as a line moving across the land, changing the contour of the land and so altering its own course. So formal fluctuation would be another way to imagine a river’s liveliness. Another way to imagine a river’s life is historically: the kinds of human work that it has supported across time. This is one of the ways I chose to represent the Bièvre, by looking at textile labor and how the river drew to it specific histories of human making. So the river is an historical form which contributed to artisanal and economic livelihoods.
The instrumentalisation of language by means of algorithms is a subset of mathematics and economics, not linguistics.
Some of the most compelling passages of the book are devoted to textile. There’s a passage on Jeanne Dielman’s smock, for example, and the red dress of the lady in Pantagruel, alongside the history of the Bièvre as an historical site of textile production. Can you discuss this novel’s relationship to textile history?
Textile history became central to the research I did in composing the novel for two reasons. A, I’m always already interested in textiles. Garment and textile history has been a big part of my writing since Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture was written in the early 2000s. I simply have a predisposition to be impassioned by textile histories. So with that as a given, when I discovered that this absent river in Paris was the site of centuries of textile production in the city, it became very alive to me, and my curiosity was sharpened absolutely.
Almost all European cities—prior to the long history of colonization of North America, South America, Africa, India—produced textiles. Textiles were a core commodity in early capitalism. Marx starts Capital with a description of the production of linen needed to make one coat. Some of the side effects of textile production are various forms of pollution and labour exploitation. There was a commercial interest in taking that out of European and American cities, and transfering the industry elsewhere, so that its noxious effects would be suffered by distant populations. Textile production got outsourced as colonization developed.
In that sense, the Bièvre River was not at all unusual. There was a textile producing zone or district in almost every European city. In different cities, different fibers came to the foreground. In Bologna and Lyon, it was silk. In the south of France it was cotton printing. The Bièvre River became particularly important during the Baroque era for tapestry production, and an important stage in tapestry production was the dyeing of the woolen yarns and fibers before weaving. The Bièvre became known for the special dyeing properties of its water. Tracing that political economy, and that artisanal history, opened up a different vision of urban life to me.
And, yes, smocks! I’m so fascinated by the defunct garments of labour. Every trade had its smock—archivists, cleaners, grocers, butchers and carpenters protected their day garments with this outer layer, which became over time a signifier for their work. It was in part because laundering was expensive and clothes were valuable commodities to be protected. Writers too wore smocks—I found descriptions of Violette Leduc’s house smock. We might wonder what a writer’s smock protects her from. There’s a sartorial language there, with its own unconscious, quite apart from the shifting values of fashion.
I’m very fascinated by the figure of the archivist. How did you envision her role in the novel? Is she some sort of literary prototype, like a trickster?
I like that word “trickster.” That never came to mind to me as I was writing, but I do see her as being comic. Her exaggerated rhetoric and her preposterous statements and non-sequitors give a levity or humour to the narrative. She’s very elderly—in her 90s. She never leaves her apartment. She’s attended to by Lucy, who is her cleaning person, and by Kémi, who is her nurse. She’s inside the apartment being supported by care workers, essentially. So, she’s apart from the world. Her perspectives are not necessarily contemporary. But my interest in her character was not exactly historical. The great aunt, Em, is the character who brings in historical dimensions. Em researched the Bièvre and the laundresses. The Archivist is more mythical, as you sugggest. She has a kind of knowledge based on long, long experience of living. But what she says also can’t always be believed because she is interested in playing with her interlocutors or testing them in various ways.
There are some really fascinating epigraphs to each of the twenty-nine chapters. How did you go about choosing the quotes that would serve as the epigraph to each chapter?
They came in fairly late in the composition process. I was thinking of eighteenth-century novels, particularly Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, where each chapter is headed off by a bulky description of what the narrative is about to tell you. And that description is often a little bit exaggerated, or biased, and is humorous. So, at first, I imagined some sort of subtextual buffer beginning of each chapter, and I thought it would consist of vignettes of what was to follow. But it never really worked for me. I didn’t hit on a convincing tone. Then the idea of the quotations occurred to me. It became a place where I could activate a lot of the background reading I’d been doing, but that I couldn’t directly discuss within the narrative. Quite a lot of that reading consisted of somewhat obscure material that people don’t necessarily read these days. So the epigraphs became a way to bring various historical texts into the present. I could pop in a quote by Carlyle on the history of aprons, say, or Barthes on Chateaubriand, or Hazlitt on style, then when elsewhere in the book I mention Carlyle or Chateaubriand or Hazlitt, the epigraph anchors the reference and adds dimension. Together, they function as a kind of archive, in and of themselves. It became a pleasure for me to find the good and energetic fit. I was changing them around until the last minute. It was like a collage work, which also referenced the research and annotation methods of Em, in her unfinished life as a scholar.
We might wonder what a writer’s smock protects her from.
In Riverwork, Lucy has a Blue Edgar Allan Poe book that was central to her Aunt Em’s intellectual awakening. What is your relationship with Edgar Allan Poe, what is Lucy’s relationship with Poe, and how do you think we should read that reference throughout the book?
I’d say there are two main vectors to my relationship with Poe. One is through Baudelaire, because I’d spent years reading him in order to write The Baudelaire Fractal. Baudelaire had a sensation while translating Poe that he himself had been the writer of Poe’s texts. That description by Baudelaire gave me a lot of permission in writing The Baudelaire Fractal. So, that’s one of the threads of Poe for me— the Baudelaire thread.
The second is Poe as a writer of urbanism and architecture, from the point of view of the uncanny. Look at a text like “The Man of the Crowd”— it’s about a peculiar little personage who spends all of his time rushing around after the floods of people who emerge in the city streets at the time of day when employees are let out of work. He’s following the surges of people like some sort of little urban spirit. For Poe, as for Lucy, cities are haunted, and people do not necessarily control or choose their own relationships to place. I’m not a person who’s spent a lot of time reading all sorts of criticism on Poe. From time to time I pick up the book and read several stories. I enjoy Poe stylistically, and in his work as a critic. His ‘Philosphy of Furniture’ will always delight me. I’ve taught his work in the context of an architecture course on urbanism. So I take limited dives into Poe. But his sense of cities as haunted sites, the family as ultimately unreliable if not noxious, and his description of the domestic interior as a scene of morbid entombment, form a backdrop to the conception of Riverwork.
Riverwork is now available from Coach House Books.
Lisa Robertson is a Canadian writer who lives in France. Her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal (Coach House Books, Toronto, 2020), has been published in French, Swedish and Turkish translations, and was short listed for Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Her work as a poet includes Boat, from 2022, and her annotated translation of Simone Weil’s essay on Troubadour poetry, ‘What the Occitan Inspiration Consists Of,’ in the book Anemones (If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, 2021). She was the recipient of the 2018 C.D. Wright award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
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