Entering Fire by Rikki Ducornet

Septimus, jealous of my love for plants, despised them all. He attempted to justify this hatred when he insisted that plants, the whores of the natural world, fornicate with whatever comes their way: the wind, bugs, bats, birds, bees, snails, slimes and even men. In fact, the beauties of Evangelista's Palace were far more promiscuous--if less adventurous--for they copulated with only members of their own species.

My son had a morbid hatred of females, and whores in particular. Whores, like orchids, are the female archetype par excellence, painted, scented, seductive. Beneath their masks, the women of the Palace were fragile, luscious, and unique. But the men who visited them were so blinded by lust they never saw what was there, only what was painted there.

Rikki Ducornet's Entering Fire has two narrators: the first is Lamprias de Bergerac, a Victorian botanist and world traveler who spends most of his life absent from his family in France, exploring the wilds of the Amazonian jungle, where he adopts the free-love ethos of the women at the roadhouse known as Evangelista's Palace, and eventually falls in love with an Indigenous woman named Cucla. Lamprias is a recognizable kind of 19th century adventurer, who approaches all things, places, pants, and pussy (sorry, I couldn't help it) with the same sense of gleeful adventure and abandon. The other narrator is his son, Septimus de Bergerac, whose resentment at being abandoned by his father curdles into a rejection of everything his father stands for. Septimus, in turn, turns toward the savage nationalism and racism that will come to dominate the European landscape in the early 20th century.

It's a bold move to start your book with the words of an anti-Semite. You have to trust your reader--and your publisher, frankly--intimately. The first victim of Septimus' anger is his half-brother, the son of Lamprias and a Chinese woman whom he brings back from his travels named Dust. This son is named, somehow, "True Man," and his beauty and symmetry are an indictment of Septimus' own physical ugliness. Septimus delights gleefully in True Man's ultimate destruction--hanged for a minor crime--but it's the whole kit and caboodle of his father's worldview that he seeks to ultimately destroy. We get to watch as Septimus' Nazis take over Europe, and then collapse; Septimus flees (where else) to the South America that his father had loved, like so many other Nazis. But this turns out to be only a pit-stop on the way to the Catskills in New York, where his father and Cucla have taken up residence, and Septimus--slowly disintegrating thanks to the syphilis he's contracted from the women he despises--sets up a final watch on his father. 

Like with her other (incredible) novel, The Jade Cabinet, Ducornet seems to be really interested in the particular shape and pattern of history. How did the Victorian era, with its interest in open science and exploration, curdle into the inwardness and smallness of fascism and Nazism? (Of course, the seeds of race science were sown beginning with Darwin, someone whom Lamprias much resembles, but the novel, I think, is as loathe to blame Darwin as it is Lamprias.) In doing so, I was really struck by how Ducornet identifies racism as something psychological, even psychosexual or Oedipal, the son striking out at the father who abandoned him, Septimus' dalliance with Jewish prostitutes (whom mostly he wants to, like, kick him in the chest). And Septimus' seizing on whiteness as a way to obviate his own ugliness, both physical and mental, seems to me very shrewd. In fact, I was struck at just how recognizable Septimus' racial resentment is, its essential smallness and pettiness, its need to be made large by associating itself with a larger historical movement, which, of course, is all imaginary:

Time is on the march and Time is on my side. Like fish and bread I am multiplied; the armies of Hitler, upright and invincible, fan out in all directions like the spoke of a wheel. And France--the France of philosophers, Protestants, dissimulators, atheists, heretics, impostors, the spontaneous, the autonomous and the perverse--lies crushed beneath this wheel.

Looking back, I think maybe I have not said enough about Lamprias' half of the book, which is as lovely and free-spirited as Septimus' half is unsettling and difficult. Lamprias, perhaps, is guilty of many things, including abandoning his family (although the racist nastiness of both Septimus and his mother makes it hard to think so), abandoning Dust and True Man to their fate in that horrible household, and doing as he wished. But Lamprias' adventures among the whores and cutthroats of 19th century South America seem to capture something Ducornet really admires about the figure of the Victorian adventurer. Lamprias' tragedy, perhaps, is that he simply lives too long, all the way into the 1950s--long enough to be hauled into an interview by the House Un-American Activities Committee!--and long enough to receive a kind of final bittersweet triumph over his son's revenge

The Jade Cabinet by Rikki Ducornet

Another example: Let's suppose the memory is like a jade cabinet, but a cabinet belonging to an infinitely irresolute collector. Each time we look inside, the jade appears to be the same, yet the mind is forever replacing one chimera for another that resembles it. Let's suppose the memory is a cabinet of chameleons and the mind as unstable as the moon.

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.