Riverwork by Lisa Robertson

In a recent conversation about Lisa Robertson’s latest novel, Riverwork, a poet described the work to me as a text fundamentally about dust, about human memory and paper, the things that make us human and that makes the intangible things, such as history, precious. This description is not inaccurate, but it is quite anthropocentric.

At first glance, such a label is similarly not inaccurate. Riverwork follows Lucy Snow, a woman in her 60s who follows in the physical and intellectual footsteps of her aunt Emily, who had lived in Paris and attended the Sorbonne to complete her Master’s but ended up dropping out. Lucy strives to learn more about her aunt by recovering her papers, some on the research she completed but most about the now-buried river Bièvre, the forgotten sibling of the infamous Seine.

Those readers who, like me, had read and enjoyed The Baudelaire Fractal, will once again find the beloved figure of the flaneuse, which Lucy now embodies. Entire chapters function as lengthy asides and contemplations on a variety of historical figures including Rousseau and Chateaubriand, Arendt and Marx, Baudelaire and Benjamin. At one point, Lucy recalls at length how she stole a book by Poe and the sensation she has that she should steal an object because it belongs to her, that is it otherwise misplaced by being present in the world. Her musings on independent publishing and academia, are coloured by a sense of disenchantment not unfamiliar to many in these industries today as she comments on how dogma and neoliberal capitalism have enticed poets and academics into falling in line. Lucy is also presented “a student of the history of the degradation of surfaces,” an observation she makes when she makes the conscious choice to sit on a seat on the metro that bore a pronounced period stain. Likewise, when Lucy is employed by the Archivist, Lucy’s job of fighting dust is framed as being less of a cleaning job and more about combating stagnation, as if Robertson is suggesting that dust may have an agentialness of its own that it imposes onto us.

Given the prominence of the river, as evident by the novel’s title, I found myself mirroring Lucy in my search for it and becoming, like her aunt, “a riverologist.” I latched onto any mention of the Bièvre and wondering what role it plays not only in the lives of Lucy, Emily, and the many unnamed female labourers throughout history, but also how Riverwork might get its reader to seriously consider an aqueous form of kinship. Such an idea likewise crossed Robertson’s mind, as Lucy contemplates how, “[i]n the speculative theory of water, what is greatly diluted is most potent in its effects. […] This theory is widely disputed, even ridiculed, by rationalist doubters, but to me it seems evident that water itself should listen, retain, and resonate.” Similar thinking can be found in the writings of scholar Astrida Neimanis, who, in Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, notes the cyclicality of water and its movement through bodies, which makes “[d]iscrete individualism […] a dry, if convenient, myth.” It is not that water necessarily has agency and can act as a separate entity, but rather that water binds us across space and time, animating bodies in ways that challenges our understandings of boundaries, or as Robertson writes: “There is no private water. All water is public water.”

“There is no private water. All water is public water.”

In her customary diligence, Robertson introduces the reader to the Bièvre properly, “the river water itself be[coming] a debauched character.” The reader is provided with a human-oriented history for the river, of how industrial activity moved from the Seine to the Bièvre in the 16^th century and of François Rabelais’ claim in 1532 that the source of the river was the piss of dogs urinating on the gateposts of a vain lady’s manor. Robertson, whose interest in the material permeates Riverwork, similarly approaches the Bièvre from a material angle. The reader learns of the river’s connection to tanning and parchment making and of the textile industry, which would ultimately cause tension between the male and the female realms of dyeing and laundry, respectively. The connection between female labour and water is one that Robertson explores in-depth, pointing to the material and the social aspects of this history, largely through the labour of laundering and the associations with sex work that accompanied many of the women. At times, the laundresses would even take up the job out of financial need as the tightening of regulations over the centuries sought to severely curtail their freedoms and opportunities. It is for this reason that Lucy proclaims that “[t]he half-concealed river’s heroines were the laundress, the female insurgent, the factory weaver, the domestic servant, precisely the historical types that animate the Paris of my aunt.”

There are lengthy sections of the book in which the river is absent, and the reader is familiarizing themselves with Lucy. At the same time, the river is still present in the form of the general history of Paris that Lucy reads, and which Robertson recalls to the reader. The river is like the fixed background in the landscape painting Robertson paints over the course of the novel through her narrative, such that even when not discussed and even though it is physically buried, the Bièvre is still there. Thus, when the Bièvre comes up around the midway point of the book after a lengthy absence, its appearance is connected to Emily and the contrast between the dammed river and the overflowing bookshops, stalls, and archives, overflowing with their literal papers but also the knowledge held within these objects. Likewise, it is difficult not to see something poetic in Lucy’s recollection of how her aunt, upon returning to Canada, worked as a schoolteacher and moved across the prairies “with her valise of river notes.”

Riverwork is a feminist text, one that explores the connection between water and womanhood through the codification of certain labour as feminine, of certain activities and behaviours as unbecoming or undesirable or dispensable and thus, also, feminine. Riverwork is also a novel in which water is slippery in its physicality, much like the language Robertson adores crafting and moulding until the images she produces are no different from the Barbizon School painters like Théodore Rousseau, Edouard Manet, and Édgar Degas whose work she clearly admires. When Robertson writes that “a river arrives, described by its banks” and that “[i]t is by flooding that a river constructs its form,” she is talking as much about the physical river as she is about our relationship to water. Memories are not just associated with water, through written records or crafted images; they are also carried through water, a medium and a body of its own that exists in a place of in-between. 

Margaryta Golovchenko

Dr. Margaryta Golovchenko is a Ukrainian settler-immigrant, art historian, poet, and critic currently based in Treaty 7/Calgary. Her most recent poetry chapbook is Daughterland (Anstruther Press, 2022). She is also a founding editor of paper bill press.