Inkslinger On writing, on books, and on book arts

Rikki Ducornet (The World Within: The Tin House Interviews)

Gargoyle Magazine, Cover by Rikki Ducornet

It all boils down to this: does she present to the Dickmare or not?  She fears the lot of them, those perpetually inflated Dickmares, their uncanny magnetism matched only by their startling lack of symmetry.  Yet she has been summoned.  A thing as unprecendented as it is provoking.

And she has awakened with a curious rash.  It circles her body like a cummerbund.  A rash as florid as those coral gardens so appreciated by lovers of bijouterie.  A rash having surged directly -- or so she supposes -- from her husband's anomalous -- or so she hopes -- behavior....

-- Rikki Ducornet, "The Dickmare," Tin House 33: Fantastic Women

Santa heard my wish.

On Friday, The World Within: The Tin House Interviews showed up on my doorstep.  I'm a fan of diving in these days, ignoring prefaces, plunging for a good conversation.  In the table of contents, a name leaped out at me: Rikki Ducornet, an internationally exhibited artist and a prolific writer.  Her novels and books of short stories and essays include The Stain, Phosphor in Dreamland, The Jade Cabinet, The Monstrous and the Marvelous, The Butcher's Tales, and The Fan-Maker's Inquisition.

Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker's Inquisition

I read the bulk of Ducornet's oeuvre while living in Paris in 2000.  I had brought along my thick edition of Surrealist Women: An International Anthology and made a weekly pilgrimage to the American Library near the Eiffel Tower to grab a few "surrealist" authors to read, including the more well-known authors like Breton and Leonora Carrington.  I had studied the visual art of the classic Surrealist period, but art history classes are notorious for leaving literature up to the student.  I was determined to get a handle on it.  Why?  Because Surrealist work is outlandish, shocking, perverse, and just darn fun.

Rikki Ducornet figured in the anthology.  I read the selections and walked from the Marais to the library.  Later that fall, Rikki Ducornet read at the American Library.  I believe she read from The Fan-Maker's Inquisition, which had just come out in paperback.  My poet-friend Jen and I sat in the first row and then took full advantage of the meet-and-greet session over wine.  That's when I asked her about being a Surrealist writer.  She looked at me strangely -- she'd never considered it.  I said she was in Surrealist Women.  She laughed warmly.  She hadn't even known she'd been included.  With her jewelry, kohl-rimmed eyes, and colorful shawl, she looked just like Remedios Varo.

The Fan-Maker's Inquisition was one of my favorite reads of 2000.  It is also the principle subject of Tin House's 1999 interview with Ducornet, contained in The World Within.  It demonstrates how the Tin House interviews are different from The Paris Review interviews; Tin House's are more topical.  Since The Fan-Maker's Inquisition is largely about the Marquis de Sade and positions his literary heritage as positive in comparison to the religious and political and other persecutions done on "principle" (which in my mind makes Ducornet more of a Surrealist than any particular aspect of her prose or art), the interview discusses sex, sexuality, pleasure, and pain at length.

One moment of the interview in particular struck me as resonant beyond the discussion of The Fan-Maker's Inquisition.  It concerns the role of letters in research and in fiction.  I've been a fan of epistolary literature since stumbling upon Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons in college (for which I thank both John Malkovich and the Boucher hanging in the University of Notre Dame museum).  Using letters in fiction, however, is hard to do well.  Too often the letters are merely vehicles for information, including the information of how much a character misses and loves someone.  They lack fantasy, even the fantasy of love.  Here, then, is a lesson from Ducornet:

Rachel Resnick: In Fan-Maker, you also present Dade as full of longing, tenderness even.  Was that invented?

RD: It's true.  He had tender friendships.  He actually had a very tender relationship with his wife and, at the end of his life, with a much younger woman.  One has to make the distinctions between life and books.  Which is why I went to the letters.  The way I see it, the letters are the voice of the man.  The books are the voice of the writer.

RR: Would that apply to you as well?  Your books are the voice of the writer, and distinct from you as the woman?

RD: The woman/writer writers the books; the books belong to her characters.

RR: I know Gaston Bachelard was a big influence on you.  Bachelard talks about letter writing being necessarily an act of love.  And also an act of reverie.  Did that come into play?

RD: It's interesting that you mention Bachelard.  I often do have people writing letters to each other in my books.  Because indeed the letter is a space where one dreams the Other.  The letter is the living reverie of the Other.  Which is why letters are so important.

RR: But when [Bishop] Landa [, a character who wipes out the Mayan culture,] dreams the Other, it's nightmarish, and dangerous.

RD: That's right.  Because he can only imagine the Other as enemy.  Whereas Sade is imagining his friend.