Torrents of Magpies, Spheres of Hope

Shut in a closet lit only by a high air vent through which a sunbeam enters at a certain hour, the narrator of The Plotinus has no place to lie down. This nameless “incarcerate,” barely covered in a sack and provided with an occasional pair of socks, endures conditions of abjection and torment that recall those of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib. Hoping that someone out there might decipher his “desperate rappings,” he taps out his story in code on the air vent (he “knuckles” it). Flashes of stoical humor bring him close to the protagonist of Kafka’s “The Burrow,” or to Winnie in her pile of sand in Beckett’s Happy Days and Hamm and Clov in Endgame; his voice, formal and restrained, is a rueful witness to the inhumanity of the future that is upon us.

The Plotinus is a novella, Rikki Ducornet’s fifteenth work of fiction, if collections of short stories are included. Published last year—the year she turned eighty—it is a succinct parable of lockdown and turns that recent worldwide experience into a far more ominous metaphor for state repression generally. Confinement, isolation, misanthropy, power, and parental neglect are perennial themes in her work, and she is often caustic in her attacks on propriety, conventions, and authority. “Unsparing” is a term of high praise in her lexicon. In an epigraph to an entry on “Imagination” in The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism (2019), she quotes André Breton: “Beloved imagination, what I like most in you is your unsparing quality.”

Before Ducornet began publishing as a writer, she was an artist: she illustrated Robert Coover’s Spanking the Maid and an edition of Borges’s fable “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” about an encyclopedia that gradually begins to usurp reality. Her first novel, The Stain, came out in 1984 to critical excitement, and over the four decades since, her baroque wordsmithery and wild, libertine flights of fancy—in children’s stories, essays, tales, and poetry as well as novels—have inspired a cultish following. Revealingly, she dedicated the 1995 paperback edition of The Stain “to the memory of Angela Carter: once a shared place.”

Ducornet was born Erica DeGré in 1943. Her father was a Cuban sociologist who taught at Bard, her mother a Russian Jewish broadcaster; Ducornet seems to have adored him and rejected her. Ducornet’s fiction exudes deep affection for father figures, but mothers fare less well. For example, in Gazelle (2003), one of several touching portraits of awakening sexuality, the thirteen-year-old Lizzie discovers that her mother, a “wantoning” blonde siren, is casually betraying her and her father with a family friend.

Brought up partly in Cuba and Cairo and then on the campus of Bard, Ducornet married a French artist, Guy Ducornet, lived in the Loire Valley for a decade or more, and became closely associated with postwar Surrealism; she also spent time in Algeria and traveled widely but is now based back in the US, in Washington state. All these settings appear, vigorously and richly reimagined, in her stories and essays. The titles alone convey her sensuous aesthetics, her commitment to Eros and Beauty, her connoisseurship and belief in the power of play: The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition, The Jade Cabinet, Netsuke, The Deep Zoo, The Word “Desire”…

In The Plotinus, the narrator is being punished for going out for a walk in the local woods, “such as they were,” and taking a “knobby stick” with him. The footpath is no longer there, and perhaps he needs the stick to help him beat down the brambles—but no such practical reason is given, and the knobby stick takes on connotations of nature, wildness, and fleshly pleasures, of forbidden self-expression. An exodus from this world has taken place, we learn, and outer space is being colonized. One of the narrator’s kindred spirits, a prankster called Gazali, used to hoard old magazines that were filled with alluring advertisements for real estate opportunities on Mars; the friends pored over them, shopped at Fred’s (the last grocery store left), hung out together. But Gazali played one trick too many—writing on a flyer that “THE POOR WILL INHERIT THE EARTH. (Such as it is.)”—and was arrested, never to be heard from again. Our narrator remains among the relegated and will not be given permission to become Martian.

In this terminal state of the Anthropocene, a violent political “Clampdown” has imposed new restrictions, and the stick, not the walk, is the ultimate transgression. The narrator will never return to his old life. Wistfully, he remembers how he used to live in one of the last surviving houses near the woods with “Beauty”—both an allegory and a woman:

Although it is shameful without end to be thus reduced, I once (and not so long ago, either) was the one Beauty acknowledged in the world with a look, yes: she looked upon me and smiled.

The Plotinus of the title is a robot who, when it (always “it”) caught our narrator at his illicit pleasures out with the stick, arrested him, in “blinding light, ear pain impossible to articulate.” The Plotinus becomes his chief jailer, terrifying but also ridiculous, like the worst tyrants around, past and present:

The size of a bus erect on its hind wheels, rolling our way, informing us that a time of unprecedented ferocity was upon us, that irrelevance was forever silenced, that our purposeless and insignificant bodies would never again clog the system; that lovers would no longer gaze into one another’s eyes… that the era of the Plotinus had begun.

The robot is not a lone agent but a multiple. After the first crashes into another in the corridor outside the narrator’s “closet,” it is replaced by “the Novel Plotinus” and is not expected to return because in this regime, spare parts are not to be had. The prisoner begins to imagine his cell is part of a labyrinthine complex of other cells; he loses all sense of time and fears he has perhaps been banished to Saturn.

This novella isn’t Ducornet’s first foray into sci-fi. Trafik: A Novel in Warp Drive (2021) narrates, in a spirited cosmo-futurist lexicon, an expedition to extract rare earth elements from distant stars; in their spaceship, called the Wobble, two AI operatives—one the superior, gynomorphized Quiver (addressed affectionately as Quiv), the other her factotum, Mic (for Michelangelo)—eventually turn rogue and escape to Trafik, where there are libraries and parks. On this planet, which resembles ours—at its best—Quiv meets her phantom object of desire, a redhead whom she has seen in her cyber dreams during her time in the Wobble:

Another instant and they are entwined, nymphs converging in a sudden turquoise cocoon woven of stardust, mica, and moss—one couple among a multitude suspended from the ceiling. In such ways is love attained on Trafik—that place not above or behind but between; a place where love gains access in the lee of immeasurable life.

Warping her vision of our discontents through gleeful sci-fi improvisations, Ducornet recalls earlier prophetic, dystopian fabulations by Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing (in her Canopus in Argos quintet), Margaret Atwood (deadly serious in The Handmaid’s Tale, spoofed in The Blind Assassin), and China Miéville (especially his visionary The City and the City).

There is no story in the sense of a dynamic plot in The Plotinus. Instead, an arc of feeling traces the transformation of the narrator from despairing to loving. At the start of his imprisonment, he has decided that, given the utter reduction of his humanity, he will practice an extreme form of ascesis to “fossilize in place,” to “become a thing that knows nothing beyond what it is.” But one day a hornet flies in through the air vent, and when she stings him (the insect is a she—it is never in doubt), she might as well be the winged godling Eros himself. Her advent revivifies him; he no longer wants to fossilize.

The narrator gives the hornet the name Smaragdos, which he previously conferred on a rock-hard bread roll provided for his breakfast—he surmised it must be a fossil until it dissolved in water and made “a pleasant broth.” The word means “emerald,” and much is made of the hornet’s charms: her frimousse (French for “dear little face”), her dazzling compound eyes “of blue apothecary bottle glass,” and her “saffron-complexioned” beauty, all seen in intense close-up, marvelously magnified. She is a manifestation of splendor in the material universe—as is the bread-roll fossil.

Ducornet has chosen as her life-giver a creature both feared and reviled. Unlike Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, her protagonist would like to find, on waking, that he has become a bug like Smaragdos, who takes her place in the fabulous bestiary, “the deep zoo” that opens a portal beyond visible phenomena to metaphysical wonders.¹ “My beloved’s eyes are like candles of camphor,” says the smitten narrator, playing a variation on the Song of Songs.

Ducornet admires the French social theorist Roger Caillois, who, with Georges Bataille, founded the Collège de sociologie in Paris in 1937 to explore the sacred in society in all its manifestations. Caillois wrote significant studies of games and play, the wonders of rocks, and mimicry in plants and insects. Although he broke with Breton (as so many did), he has deeply influenced Ducornet’s strain of Surrealist mystical materialism. Her narrator is restored to life by the hornet: “For what seemed like a sojourn in paradise, I felt her little feet, all six of them, mapping my face’s every aspect.”

In Phosphor in Dreamland (1995)—Ducornet’s most sumptuous novel, set on an imaginary island, Birdland, mostly in the seventeenth century—a poet named Phosphor is recording the local flora and fauna with his marvelous, proleptic invention, a plate glass camera. Birdland recalls the scenery of Cuba, and the narrative mourns the island’s violation by colonial powers (church as well as state), exploding with episodes of ecological and political violence as well as epistemological rapine. In one appalling scene, the last lôplôp, the totem bird of the island, is savagely killed. This sly homage to Max Ernst, whose alter ego was “Loplop, the Bird Superior,” affirms the novelist’s self-image as a follower of Surrealism, and in The Plotinus she remains loyal to the movement’s prankish irony: the fable is punctuated with fanciful flourishes (socks that evaporate in the morning, a gift of a seedling in an invisible bottle).

The literary constellation with which Ducornet aligns herself ranges far back: to Jonathan Swift, a pervasive presence in Phosphor; to William Blake and his praise of “the lineaments of Gratified Desire”; and to D.A.F. de Sade, another Surrealist luminary, about whom she contributed a thoughtful entry in the Encyclopedia of Surrealism, arguing that the notorious Marquis not only denounced marriage as authorized sex abuse but prophetically anticipated the carceral state. (Carter took a similarly provocative line in her 1978 study The Sadeian Woman.) This pantheon of precursors is above all working in a speculative, hypothetical vein; they are critical fabulists who explore the potential of “as if,” the terrain grammarians characterize as the “irrealis” mood. Chiefly expressed in the subjunctive and conditional, irrealis commands the spheres of wishing, hoping, and dreading; it is the home of fantasy and fairy tale, the ever-growing habitat of representations in the virtual world, of figments generated by AI as well as of phenomena experienced in dreams. By this definition, Ducornet is a masterly irrealist who summons other worlds, both delightful and terrible.

In many ways her fiction also belongs in the Latin American tradition of lo real maravilloso (“the marvelous real”). The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier originated the phrase, turning Breton’s quest for le merveilleux in the direction of Caillois’s passions, toward wonders that are not phantasmic but empirically discoverable.² The baroque brutality of Carpentier’s historical fictions, such as The Kingdom of This World (1949) and The Lost Steps (1953), reverberates in Phosphor in Dreamland. Yet a certain streak of mischief slants Ducornet’s narratives toward satire: In The Plotinus are we meant to laugh at the incarcerate’s love of the hornet? Stylistically as well, it is hard to know if Ducornet is in earnest or tapping her nose in knowing skepticism. She shifts between astringent honesty, madcap fantasy, parodic sci-fi, surreal absurdism, metaphysical absorption, and rapturous lyric, and she often strikes strange chromatic chords in her word choices. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes used the phrase “ironic sorcery” to describe the work of Leonora Carrington, the English-born artist-writer who made her home in Mexico. Ironic sorcery: it could also apply to Ducornet’s brand of fantastic imagination.

The marvelous can be caught in the butterfly net of language, as in the forms of lists and taxonomies, inventories and registers. It is Italo Calvino above all who hovers, a benign daemon of inspiration, over Ducornet’s oeuvre. Not a fully subscribed Surrealist but a ludic Oulipian, Calvino can also be placed in the lineage of the marvelous Latin American real: he was born in Cuba to a father who was an agronomist and a mother who was a distinguished botanist, and he began his studies in agriculture before realizing he was a writer. At times Ducornet sounds very like the Calvino of Invisible Cities, as in this exchange from Trafik:

“What’s that pretty galaxy just a stone’s throw away?” Quiver asks….

“Elictpic,” says Mic, quick as ever. “We are fast approaching its hottest star, Meander. Meander is made of meat, Blasterite, black marbles, and Bitumen. Its two planets are Linger Longer and Glass Ceiling.”

A Surrealist commitment to dream knowledge also firmly underpins Ducornet’s fiction: the protagonist of her novel The Fountains of Neptune (1989) is known as the Sandman, and he has been in a coma for half a century. When he at last wakes, he begins building an alternative world according to his dreams, a new Eden he calls d’Elir (from delirium). In Phosphor the chief scientist, Señor Fantasma, is archiving the dreams of the islanders while, to his despair, his own daughter cannot dream at all. She is finally released when Phosphor marries her: in keeping with a recurrent Ducornet motif (and a profoundly Surrealist tenet), Eros awakens her inner life, in much the same way the hornet reinvigorates The Plotinus’s narrator; they are both transformed—set free—by desire.

Reading Ducornet made me abruptly aware of how the prevailing anhedonia has wiped from my memory the celebration of the body that revolutionized attitudes to sex in my youth—which was contemporary with Ducornet’s. Her writing is often shocking to read now, for she has remained loyal to the emancipatory idealism of the last century and pays little attention, it seems, to sensitivities about diverse bodies, child sexuality, voluptuary Orientalism, and sensory excess. In a fiery essay from 2009, “The Practice of Obscurity,” collected in The Deep Zoo (2015), Ducornet declares that she sees writing fiction as a sacred mission to resist the crushing of imagination by forces of authority and the state. This does not mean she hasn’t thought about the consequences of Sixties hedonism, but she isn’t allowing censoriousness to turn down the music and doesn’t let us forget about desire—and love.

The terrain of libido in extremis inspires her most alarming and least comedic novel, Netsuke (2011), a spare, tightly wound cautionary tale in which Ducornet enters the mind of a serial abuser. In the opening scene the protagonist, a psychoanalyst out running in the woods one morning, rapes a fellow runner. Dramatically and coolly, with a thriller writer’s control, Ducornet explores his repeated and compulsive seduction of his patients, which he justifies to himself on the principle that fucking is a remedy for repression. This terrifying morality tale can be read as the author renouncing the libidinous understanding of liberty and, in a kind of response to Lolita, examining male privilege and the casual assumption of supremacy.

The Plotinus also shows her restraining some of her earlier exuberance, but she’s unswerving in her belief in the necessity of freedom for literature to confront all of experience. Her highly wrought, rhythmic, tumultuous prose pulses with the confidence of an earlier, less self-critical and self-doubting era, when the erotic could surge unfettered through a narrative as a herald of individual fulfillment. She often writes like a jazz trumpeter, moving in bursts of improvisation—cascades of words wrap the reader in wall-to-wall sound. (It may be relevant that her son, Jean-Yves Ducornet, is a musician.) When the narrator dreams, he reports,

I saw mountains of parrots exploding like rockets, tantrums of eagles, estuaries of lions, blue torrents of magpies, a ruin of wrens; I saw the river of death rising to the Moon, entire alphabets shattering like glass.

This could be Breton himself, or Paul Éluard, another of Ducornet’s acknowledged inspirations. Lexical delirium, a riot of assonance, the list does not exactly make pictures in the mind (estuaries of lions?), but it does fine as music on the page. Splitting sound from sense is, like nonsense, a stimulus to pleasure. It also allows for revelation through verbal conjuring effects—for transvaluing a hornet’s scariness through lyric sensuousness.

In interviews and articles Ducornet has stressed that “rigor and imagination” are the two poles of her approach to writing. Those “entire alphabets shattering” also give a clue to the character of her work: she splits the word as sign from the word as music. Brightfellow (2016), her most personal and touching novel, gives probably the closest rendering of her own childhood experiences, projected onto the male persona of the protagonist. He is given his name, Brightfellow, by the little girl next door, whom he idolizes and desires with a child’s unconditional adoration. She is called Asthma.

If there is a semantic reason for this, I missed it. The word is pretty, feminine-sounding, appealing—only if you sever it from its usual meaning. This arbitrary wit turns now and then into Carrollian jabberwocky: in Trafik, the Wobble enters “the lesser-known ring of the Brighter Erg Compaction, where once the great Rimsy Grimes had vanished.” Ducornet’s flouting of language’s denotational function, her penchant for verbal games, combined with the jumps and jolts of her tone, can, however, distance the reader from the characters whom she often evokes with great tenderness.

But why call the horrific agent of repression and violence in her bleak new fable “Plotinus,” the same name as the Hellenistic interpreter of Plato, a thinker identified mostly with difficulty, ambiguity, and otherworldliness? Maybe the name casts a sly aspersion on the misanthropic, antimaterialist strain in Neoplatonism—but then I began to catch acoustic echoes, of platypus, platitude, policeman, politeness, or even POTUS and politics. Maybe I am overdetermining, but in a recent interview Ducornet referred to Pol Pot, the Cambodian revolutionary who established a regime of terror in his country, as a generic figure of all the enemies she is confronting:

May the Pol Pot persons of all genders and denominations take heed: to create a fictional world with rigor and passion…is to commit an act of empathy.

At the close of The Plotinus the gorgeous hornet has joined a swarm and is helping build a hive high in a corner of the narrator’s cell. He longs to become small enough to enter it, “perhaps even renting an apartment…. Then could I live comfortably among the hornets.” It is significant that whereas the Sandman in The Fountains of Neptune is constructing his ideal, personal Eden from his private dreams, the narrator of The Plotinus finds an insects’ hive “the most wondrous thing I have ever seen”: architectural wonders dictated by the subjective unconscious have been supplanted by a hornets’ hanging nest, that triumph of impersonal construction, of form matching function. “The world is a translation of the divine,” Ducornet proclaims in the title essay of The Deep Zoo, “and its manifestation.” While dreams were once the preeminent source of the freedoms she writes about, in the time of AI and the post-human, she is turning away from oneiric knowing, self-contemplation, and solipsism to find the marvelous manifest in a wasps’ nest, affirming the life force in nature’s artifacts, no matter how chillingly powerful the forces are that seek to snuff it.