Excuse my digression, but as I write all this down, it occurs to me that there are as many ways to tell a story as there are ways to remember it.
Memory writes the story of her sister, Etheria, born beautiful, but mute. As children, Memory and Etheria are devotees of Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, and they are two of those chosen children that Dodgson entertains with his fancies of imagination and clever games. Their parents, Angus and Margaret, are the kind of cheerful polymaths that only the Victorian era could produce. But the era, produces, too, a man like Radulph Tubbs, a fantastically wealthy industrialist who is charmed by Etheria's beauty. He charms her with a cabinet full of jade animals--which he himself finds rather appalling--and seduces her into marrying him, but the marriage is an unhappy and violent one. He rapes her with a jade phallus; he pries up the garden with its stone mosaics, the only place in the house where she feels at home. He replaces it with a smooth pyramid of glass, designed by an architect named Prosper Baconfield, who regards the pyramid as a geometrically perfect shape representative of an unforgiving divine principle.
It seems to me that Tubbs represents that part of the Victorian psyche that beckons toward the coming 20th century. He is suspicious of Dodgson/Carroll because he doesn't understand him; he loves no sight better than his own smokestacks, poisoning the air. No wonder he calls his estate "New Age." Memory tells us her theory is that he hates anything that exists according to the feminine principle, anything "folded, concealed, creased." He is unchecked industrialism and the death of sentiment. But strangely, it's his book: once Etheria disappears, she is gone, except for a single tantalizing vision toward the novel's end. It's Tubbs who's left trying to reckon with his own diseased behavior, a reckoning that takes him most of his life. The second half of the book is largely taken up with a trip to Egypt, where Tubbs and Baconfield are invested in a scheme to buy ibis mummies in bulk to grind them into gelatin power. (Unchecked industrialism eats up everything, even the dead.)
He's accompanied by a Hungerkunstler, a "Hunger Artist" who had recently captivated Etheria and Memory's father Angus, who believed that she, in disconnection from the material world, has accessed the fundamental universal language that haunts his dreams. But the Hungerkunstler is the most hungry of them all, a kind of id that presents to Tubbs the consequences of his own rapaciousness. She's also one of the novel's masterstrokes, a character who manages to be both silly and sinister. It's the introduction of the Hungerkunstler who strikes me as the novel really kicking into high gear, and establishing a sense that it could go anything or anywhere. Anyway, in Egypt Baconfield goes mad inside a pyramid, meeting the design of the divine face to face. Tubbs, too, faces down his dream in Egypt, coming to understand that only if he can find Etheria again will he ever find happiness of peace.
The Jade Cabinet is presented as a novel about language. Angus Sphery dreams of finding the immanent ur-language. It's present, perhaps, in Etheria, whose silence resembles in the language of the jade crystals she adores. Both Memory and (perhaps) Etheria grow up to become magicians, those people who claim to be able to turn "magic words" into real rabbits. Memory uses the same metaphor to describe, well, memory: "from out fragments of fur, I give you a living rabbit." Memory is the novel's other great theme; we are told from the beginning that much of the story is reconstructed from the memoirs of a contrite and much diminished Tubbs. But, in my mind, both of those rather well-trod themes sell short how inventive the novel is, how relentless and freewheeling; the pieces feel familiar but the construction is wholly original. Like I said, I actually read The Jade Cabinet as being deeply interested in intellectual history, pinpointing the Victorian era as the moment that the quest for deep knowledge was at last overwhelmed by the inexorable logic of production and consumption.
It's also really funny. I don't know if this lands the same without being in the context of the novel, but I can't remember reading anything recently that made me laugh as hard as this line, spoken by a doctor with whom Tubbs strikes up a friendship on his way back from English:
One morning, Spritzner, misconstruing Tubbs's ill humour, explained with a wag ill-fitted to Tubbs's impatience that his consuming interest in the vagaries and variabilities of the female anatomy had little to do with lechery and owed much to the physician's interest in physiognomy. Their friendship ended dramatically when just as a radiant redhead entered the dining room, Spritzner, his mouth full of toast, sputtered in Tubbs's ear:
'See dat vun? She haf a porple pussy!'
She haf a porple pussy.
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