RIKKI DUCORNET

Novermber 8, 2005

Rikki Ducornet is the author of seven novels including The Fan Maker's Inquisition, an L.A. Times Book of the Year, and The Jade Cabinet, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. She has illustrated books by Robert Coover and Jorge Luis Borges. Her lithographs, drawings and paintings have been exhibited widely, including the Museo de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Museau National de Cestro Coimbra, Portugal, the Fine Arts museums of West Berlin, Ixelles, Brno and Lille, and in the Biblioteque Nationale. In 1993 she received the Lannan Literary Award in Fiction. She teaches at the University of Denver.

Introduction

In an interview with Dalkey Archive Press, Rikki Ducornet reflects that she perceives "fiction as a species of magic" in which "words [can] engender worlds." For those of you who have had the good fortune to read her work—and I know many of you here certainly have—this ought to come as very little surprise: after all, the world of fable, of myth, of dreamscape and memory, form the unruly firmament, the perilous bedrock, of the many landscapes she has designed for us in which the imagination—its extraordinary stutters and turns, its complex leaps and recoils—often finds itself under examination.

In these fictions, forgetfulness is as significant as memory, and even might be said to be its most exemplary state, if one turns to her novel, The Fountains of Neptune, for instance in which her narrator, Nicholas (a coma patient) must reconstruct his life after sleeping through two world wars "as if I had been cursed" as he remarks "by an evil fairy, pricked by an enchanted spinning wheel; an impenetrable briar had gripped my mind. The Doctor put it this way: she said I had taken a bite of the poison apple. She chose that apple deliberately. Knowledge—as much as its denial—had precipitated me headfirst into the land of Nod." Indeed, the world of the fable is not separate from this business which we too severely call "reality." Instead, fables offer a language for the realities that are often concealed from us, or which we conceal from ourselves: they showcase our unwieldy passions, the desires that, as Ducornet has said, "tug us along, worry…and dagger us… [and] light our path!" In other words, it is uniquely in fable—particularly the kind of keenly irreverent fables that Ducornet tells—that we can better understand what it means to not just be creatures who use language, but creatures who inhabit, who are, language. As her narrator in the story "The Word Desire" (in the collection of fictions by the same name) reflects after seeing her lover gaze with desire at another woman:

"It was as if that afternoon she had stepped over a threshold. Thereafter she thinks: he and I share the same mystery. Except she believes this: she believes that she is the one who keeps this particular mystery hidden. She believes that he has forgotten about the other woman, that the other woman has been replaced over and over again by other chance encounters, other faces igniting the world like suns. And he believes that each time he embraces her, her own body eclipses the others, or—better still—exemplifies the others. So that her intimate life with him is a fusion of memory and desire and will: the will to be unique, to be uniquely his, to live each unique instant fully—and the will to be desire, to be the infinite faces of desire, to be one word and that word is "desire."

Our desire for language—for a language that precisely describes the many states of desire—finds infinite modulations in Ducornet’s perceptive and thorny fictions perhaps because she delicately positions the world of the imagination on this same "threshold" for us: examines its dangerous and resonant array of artifacts—the winks and nods, the fans and broken clocks, the cracked mirrors and hasty glances—but, more than this, the logic that gives them meaning. Indeed, as Ducornet reflects: "I am taken…with the idea of fiction as an infinite process of mind and fascinated with the idea of mind as a process of fiction." If fiction has a role it is just this: to articulate the wending mind itself: to give voice to its hidden gestures and unknown idioms, to the magical sphere of its own language.