The Deep Zoo

by Rikki Ducornet

Included in Library Journal’s "25 Key Indie Fiction Titles, Fall 2014-Winter 2015"

Within the writer's life, words and things acquire power. For Borges it is the tiger and the color red, for Cortázar a pair of amorous lions, and for an early Egyptian scribe the monarch butterfly that metamorphosed into the Key of Life. Ducornet names these powers The Deep Zoo. Her essays take us from the glorious bestiary of Aloys Zötl to Abu Ghraib, from the tree of life to Sade's Silling Castle, from The Epic of Gilgamesh to virtual reality. Says Ducornet, "To write with the irresistible ink of tigers and the uncaging of our own Deep Zoo, we need to be attentive and fearless—above all very curious—and all at the same time."

"Ducornet’s skill at drawing unexpected connections, and her ability to move between outrage and meditativeness, are gripping to behold."— Star Tribune

"This collection of essays meditates on art, mysticism, and more; it’ll leave a reader with plenty to ponder."— Vol. 1 Brooklyn


"Rikki Ducornet's new collection The Deep Zoo is filled with smart and surprising essays that explore our connections to the world through art."— Largehearted Boy

““The Deep Zoo” acts as a kind of foundational text, a lens to view her work and the other essays through. . . Subversive at heart and acutely perceptive.”— Numero Cinq

"Ducornet moves between these facets of human experience with otherworldly grace, creating surprising parallels and associations. . . The Deep Zoo is a testament to her acrobatic intelligence and unflinching curiosity. Ducornet not only trusts the subconscious, she celebrates and interrogates it."— The Heavy Feather

“What struck me most about this collection, and what I am confident will pull me back to it again, is Ducornet’s obvious passion for life. She is . . .  attentive, fearless, and curious. And for a hundred pages we get to see how it feels to exist like that, what it’s like to think critically and still be open to the world.”— Cleaver Magazine

“Rikki Ducornet is imagination’s emissary to this mundane world.”—Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books on the Park

"This book is like the secret at the heart of the world; I've put other books aside."—Anne Germanacos, author of Tribute

Praise for Rikki Ducornet

"A novelist whose vocabulary sweats with a kind of lyrical heat."— The New York Times

"Linguistically explosive . . . one of the most interesting American writers around."— The Nation

"Ducornet—surrealist, absurdist, pure anarchist at times—is one of our most accomplished writers, adept at seizing on the perfect details and writing with emotion and cool detachment simultaneously."—Jeff Vandermeer

"A unique combination of the practical and fabulous, a woman equally alive to the possibilities of joy and the necessity of political responsibility, a creature—à la Shakespeare's Cleopatra—of 'infinite variety,' Ducornet is a writer of extraordinary power, in whose books 'rigor and imagination' (her watchwords) perform with the grace and daring of high-wire acrobats."—Laura Mullen, BOMB Magazine

"The perversity, decadence, and even the depravity that Ducornet renders here feel explosively fresh because their sources are thought and emotion, not the body, and finally there's some pathos too."— The Boston Globe

"Ducornet's skill at drawing unexpected connections, and her ability to move between outrage and meditativeness, are gripping to behold."—Tobias Carroll, Star Tribune

"This collection of essays meditates on art, mysticism, and more; it'll leave a reader with plenty to ponder."— Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"Rikki Ducornet's new collection The Deep Zoo is filled with smart and surprising essays that explore our connections to the world through art."— Largehearted Boy

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Literature, Literary Criticism, Writing, American, Criticism

165 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2014

About the author

Rikki Ducornet (born Erika DeGre, April 19, 1943 in Canton, New York) is an American postmodernist, writer, poet, and artist.

Ducornet's father was a professor of sociology, and her mother hosted community-interest programs on radio and television. Ducornet grew up on the campus of Bard College in New York, earning a B.A. in Fine Arts from the same institution in 1964. While at Bard she met Robert Coover and Robert Kelly, two authors who shared Ducornet's fascination with metamorphosis and provided early models of how fiction might express this interest. In 1972 she moved to the Loire Valley in France with her then husband, Guy Ducornet. In 1988 she won a Bunting Institute fellowship at Radcliffe. In 1989 she moved back to North America after accepting a teaching position in the English Department at The University of Denver. In 2007, she replaced retired Dr. Ernest Gaines as Writer in Residence at the The University of Louisiana. In 2008, The American Academy of Arts and Letters conferred upon her one of the eight annual Academy Awards presented to writers.

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like to think I'm pretty well-read. I mean, I read A LOT and I'm really picky, probably a bit of a snob, as careful about the things I let into my brain as I am the food I put into my body.

But there is a bottomless chasm . . . no, that's not a very nice image . . . An endless horizon? A galaxy of literary stars? All these influential books and writers I've not only never read, I've NEVER HEARD OF. And when I do learn of someone, I'm all WHY has no one mentioned him/her before? Was I just not listening?

Enter one such author: Rikki Ducornet. Of course, I HAVE heard of Rikki. 1974, Steely Dan. The pop culture plea for a young woman not to lose touch with the guy who wants to take her driving along Slow Hand Row. Yep, that Rikki.

This Rikki. She lives not far from me now. Although I've known that girl in the song for forty years, I knew nothing about the woman, the writer, until I read The Deep Zoo, a collection of essays on the nature of aesthetics and the power of art in our writing. Reading more about the writer, I learn she has deliberately walked out of step with contemporary culture, writing novels, essays, short stories and poems and creating works of visual art that weave together themes of fabulism, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, erotica, political protest, and environmental advocacy.

I enjoyed this slim volume of essays, even if I didn't understand much of it. It's full of gorgeous thoughts about playful minds and primal energies, about the importance bringing the ancient world alive in our modern philosophies, about engendering a "thoughtful lightness" (Calvino) in our lives, our art. There are beautiful quotes by Borges, Calvino, Bachelard, Ovid, as well as references to heaps of writers I've never heard of: lots of French surrealists.

I dog-eared so many pages, wanting to dish up her thoughts and savor them like dark chocolate pudding:

...it is the work of the writer to move beyond the simple definitions or descriptions of things and to bring a dream to life through the alchemy of language.

The process of writing a book ...reveals to the writer what is hidden within her: writing is a reading of the self and of the world. It is a process of knowledge.

"The alchemy of language." I love that. And this revelation of the hidden within the writer—it's precisely what I'm struggling with in my current novel: to give myself the necessary time to explore this process of knowledge.

Imagine with me a book that, like a seed held in the reader's hands, under her gaze effloresces. A book that contains not only other books, a library, the world's library—a pleasure already ours—but a book that, like a living organism, evolves in unique and unexpected ways. That, like the chrysalis, explodes on the scene in new and dynamic forms with each reading. It is thought that whales sing their world into visibility and so: meaning, stereoptically. Let us acknowledge how their songs extend and enliven our own. Imagine me with a book like that . . . A book that as it surfaces, respires . . .

I KNOW, RIGHT?! I totally want to read that book. I want to write that book. I want to BE that book.

In the elegant essay, Water and Dreams, Ducornet states that her first four novels are informed by the natural elements of Earth, Fire, Water and Air, and then she goes on to explore the element of water in her writing. I am reminded of Lidia Yuknavitch's gobsmackingly powerful memoir, The Chronology of Water in which she talks about the tiny Japanese sculptures known as Netsuke; Rikki Ducornet wrote a novel entitled Netsuke. My first published story, set in Japan, features Netsuke . . . and I feel this connective tissue of literary minds gracing me with courage to continue striving for the ecstatic and the true.

I think of a novel as an unfolding landscape, an entire country waiting to be deciphered. I have always leaned into new places, tugged along by curiosity and an expanding waking dream. How I travel is how I write my books. It is enough to have a dream for a guide, an intuition, an element. Writing is a species of practical magic."

Just as aside, the essay War's Body is everything I've ever wanted to say about 9/11.

There's a lot here that went WHOOSH, right over my head. I made heads, but not tails, of her treatise on William Gass's novel Omensetter's Luck or her examination of the gnostical universes portrayed in the movie Lost Highway, but I loved floating on the river of Ducornet's words.

We are keepers, you and I, of a special gift: if the creative impulse is to remain vital and resurgent, "The book we write tomorrow must be as if there had been none before, new and outrageous as the morning sun," (Ernst Block) Says Borges, "You raise your eyes and look."

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

I generally like Ducornet (in the cases of The Stain and Netsuke, I like her a lot), but reading her dense, conscientious, wide-drawing, and extremely intelligent essays here seems like a rare case where a great novelist has actually produced non-fiction that appeals to me more than her fiction. At least in the visceral reaction of first reading. I expect, though, that these necessary thoughts on writing, imagination, politics, and the anthropocene will open up and shade my readings of her fiction moving forwards. This was a library copy, but I really need one of my own to hang onto and re-trace all of Ducornet's beautifully swarming interconnections at leisure. There is so much of the world embraced, and even occultly realigned, by these slim 107 pages.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

True. Gass this is not. But no one is. And too I've been reading enough Ducornet to begin to trace out some perhaps fundamental disagreements with her. Not political, because in that sphere she's pretty spot on (see for instance her "On Returning from Chiapas" in The Future of Fiction (almost sends chills)). But perhaps something more what we'd vaguely call 'metaphysical'. And here it's a matter of her frequent invocation of gnosticism. But one does get the feeling that Rikki's own feelings towards gnosticism is at least a small tiny bit ambivalent. At any rate, what one loves about Rikki, despite any possible disagreements, is her brilliant illumination of the imagination.

And it's imagination which this world needs.

I image myself stepping up on a soapbox here and hoping that what I'd be about to rant would get a vigorous nod from The Lady herself. Well it may. But this soapboxing on imagination would fancy itself addressed to Young People. You know that The Future belongs to Young People. We old foggies are getting out of the way. Let me just indulge a bit in this soapboxing addressed to Our Young People Today ;; and especially and above all you Young People who are talented, intelligent, creative, and imaginative. Above all imaginative.

A very short proposition for you talented, etc, Young People. Do not consider a career in the arts, in literature, in music. We already have manymany talented, intelligent, creative, imaginative folks doing art and lit and music and etc. Do not consider a life in science or technology. We already have manymany talented, intelligent, creative, imaginative folks in the sciences and in technology. Do not consider pursuing an MBA ; for the MBA is the lair of Dogma, dogma which would make even an Aquinas blush. Rather, should you find yourself a talented, intelligent, creative, imaginative Young Person, please to consider a career in politics or economics. Here is where we most direly need Imagination. It is here, in politics and economics, where it is most needed that the talent, intelligence, creativity, and imagination resting latently in the arts and lit and music and science and technology be allowed to flow freely. What we need is a live imagination in our politics and in our economy so that those other realms of creation can get the $$$$ they need, the dignity and respect they deserve, to thrive and do some human good. And really just to build that understructure which might make this world tolerable would require a level, degree, and quantity of imagination such as we don't even begin to possess today. [if on top of being talented, intelligent, creative, and imaginative, you should find yourself also exceptionally moral, you may perhaps be up to battle the dragons of the MBA world and actually begin to transform our business practices into something with a human end]

*end soapbox*

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

For those seeking a Gass-deep collection of long lingering literary essays, the short-form probing of Rikki Ducornet will not suffice—however, Rikki’s Deep Zoo is thought-provoking selection of miniatures, bright with her usual preoccupations—Islam and Arabic languages, Gaston Bachelard, Lewis Carroll, the Cabinet of Curiosities, Marquis de Sade, et al. Her titular piece on the creative process reveals her own belief in the magic or transgressive aspect of writing (no Gass-long syntax analyses here), using mini-quotes in a commendable effort to describe something that reaches beyond words. There are three tributes to artists (Margie McDonald, Linda Okazaki, Anne Hirondelle), including several pages of examples of their art (taking up a fair percentage of a 107-page book). ‘Books of Natural and Unnatural Nature’ is a brilliant exploration of Rikki’s interest in the natural world and the arcane, and her iconoclastic interests have their manifesto in ‘The Practice of Obscurity’. Elsewhere, there are wanderings through Herzog and Lispector (‘Houses on Fire’), a minuscule look at her Elements Quartet ‘Water and Dreams’, a 9/11 response (‘War’s Body’), 120 Days of Sodom (‘Silling’), William Gass (‘A Cup and a River’), David Lynch (‘Witchcraft by a Picture). The charming ‘Memoir in the Form of the Manifesto’ and ‘Candles of Ink’ are the closest things in here to straight autobio. A pleasing collection for RD enthusiasts, and like The Monstrous and the Marvellous, leaves our stomachs crying out for more.

[Joshua]

Maybe not exactly what I was looking for here - I sort of expect my writers to be obsessed with Literature, but I guess I shouldn't be either surprised or disappointed when they are obsessed with so much more. A lot about alphabets, creatures and their "potencies." If anything these collected pieces show that the unique elements that flow through Ducornet's fiction (the passion for natural history and collection, Egyptology, art objects, etc) are much more than passing fancies dropped into her books to conjure atmosphere - they are seriously consuming pursuits of life in its many obscured forms.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dive into the wondrous and forever curious mind of Rikki Ducornet. Poetic essays on art, on imagination, on inspiration, on life.

[Allegra Hyde · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It is the work of the writer to move beyond the simple definitions or descriptions of things,” states Rikki Ducornet in her new essay collection The Deep Zoo. To her, the unmapped world is of greater interest, as it presents an opportunity “to bring a dream to life through the alchemy of language; to move from the street—the place of received ideas—into the forest.”

Ducornet writes by her own charges: there is alchemy aplenty in The Deep Zoo. The collection comprises fifteen short essays, each of which offers up a roiling stew of subjects: from Werner Herzog’s film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser to Gaston Bachelard’s architectural poetics; Egyptian mythology to American politics; scientific principles to the author’s childhood memories. Ducornet moves between these facets of human experience with otherworldly grace, creating surprising parallels and associations. For instance, after describing the aromatic topography of Wan-Ming’s palace in China (“One found one’s way by smelling distinctly fragrant things that filled large basins set out in each room … The children never tired of inventing and navigating new itinerates blindfolded”) she moves into speculative metaphysics (“hyperanimation and virtual reality … that evoke and subvert known physical bodies”). The result is a kind of kaleidoscopic reading, one that mimics the natural movements of human consciousness. What we are given as readers—as guests in Ducornet’s own Deep Zoo—is an invitation to witness her mind at work: a chance to walk through a menagerie of insights.

[ For my full review of Ducornet's THE DEEP ZOO, visit: https://heavyfeatherreview.com/2015/0... ]

[Patrik Sampler · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excerpt from The Deep Zoo:

"We are told that within the decade global warming will slap us silly, and that within forty years or so, one third of all living things will have perished irretrievably. A criminal lack of imagination is making of our fragile world a flatland. We are told that flat, like fear, is good for us, somehow suitable; fear and boredom fit us better, like those mass-produced and outgassing polyesters that cover the nakedness of our presidents and late-night hosts and bankers with a doleful inevitability. But I will have none of it."

In The Deep Zoo, Rikki Ducornet "celebrates the risks of wildness" and provides an antidote to the bland. This book is bold and meaningful.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have neither the time nor money but possess the inclination to earn an MFA, might I suggest a close study of Rikki Ducornet's The Deep Zoo: "We are keepers, you and I, of a special gift: if the creative impulse is to remain vital and resurgent, "The book we begin tomorrow must be as if there had been none before, new and outrageous as the morning sun." (Ernst Bloch)

[Kallie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ducornet is not my usual cuppa, which is (as the term suggests) so neat, so tidy, while everything in her wild writing is just that . . . yet at the same time, the connections she makes between art and politics and philosophy and behavior and culture and literature and EVERYTHING, are pretty "right-on" as we used to say. According to one admirer, her language is (at times) as much about sound as content. Hmmm. Yes, I should just "stop making sense" all the time, especially when reading a surrealist. For the most part, I'm willing to try to follow her process or just let it wash over me.

[Barrita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice

[Johnathan Cabrera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jonathan Cabrera

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyrical, erudite, expansive, dreamy—Rikki Ducornet, in other words.

[alicia0w3n · Rating 5 out of 5]

joining as a river swimming 🌀

[Kati Heng · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’d love to see the world through Rikki Ducornet’s eyes, if only for a day. If only for an hour. If it’s anything like her newest collection of essays, The Deep Zoo, it’s an entirely magical, kaleidoscopic view.
Even though the essays where written over journals, magazines and years, there’s a constant thread running through them all, the idea of that “deep zoo,” something Ducornet’s sees as the very essential pieces of an artist’s creative output; the themes they get stuck on and contemplate for life. The colors and emotions that stay present when you take away all the outer shapes and images of an artist’s work. The yearning present in a story’s conflict when you erase the circumstances. The mood and tones underlying every song on an artist’s LP.
In Ducornet’s eyes, everyone’s Deep Zoo is different. Based on this book, one can assume her own zoo holds the following: Animals, struggling through the world, dying naturally and beautifully. Ancient gods sharing their gifts, chief among them, Eros, god of love. Fairy tales, passed down through generations not because of their appealing lore, but their unapologetic truths.
Ducornet’s essays move all over the place, always trying to find the Deep Zoos of her subjects. And these folks themselves are fascinating. There are artists Margie McDonald, an experimental sculpture who creates a sea filled with creatures out of wires, aluminum, whatever she gets her hands on, and Linda Okazaki, whose paintings come alive with symbolism of animals as lovers (it should be little surprise that Ducornet herself is a painter, her understanding of art leaping across genres and materials).
There are discussions of literature. Ducornet calls on everyone from Kathryn Davis to Kant to measure the images she sees written on the pages of people such as Omensetter’s Luck, a novel published in the 1960s and lauded as a classic, or Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Obviously, the literature she finds fit to discuss in this collection finds no bounds.
There are looks into film – even the screen not too small or immature a platform for Ducornet’s concerning eye. Lost highway is scrutinized in comparison to Lynch’s other works and in comparison to myths of the Evil Eye.
But best of all are Ducornet’s look into mythology, the legends of Eros and of fairytales, and tied to this, her looks into her own work. Here we see her at her most vulnerable, trying to piece out the themes of her own work that she believes may yet endure, the aspects of her words and her earth she wishes the audience not soon forget.
A piece from one of the essays, “The Practice of Obscurity,” shows exactly the way Ducornet’s mind melts things together: “For if Eve broke the rules, her other intention was to keep a garden. And if the apple is one she bakes into a pie, it is also the one that poisons Snow White and renders her comatose.”
Prepare to be smitten with allusion upon allusion upon illusion.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this collection of fifteen short essays, but probably would have liked it more if I were more familiar with some of the subjects Ducornet is writing about. (I haven't seen any David Lynch films, for example, and while I appreciated the language and images of "Witchcraft by a Picture," I also felt a bit lost.) Some themes and interests surface in several essays: writing and what it is that writers do, seeds and origins and beginnings, dreams, seeing, making, beauty. I like the bits where Ducornet is writing about visual art, like when she's talking about an Egyptian tomb and a painting in it, in "Books of Natural and Unnatural Nature," or when she's writing about Margie McDonald's art (there are pictures of several of McDonald's "Sea 'scape" sculptures in the book, which I appreciated). In another essay, Ducornet writes about a novel she wrote that has water as its guiding element, and these two sentences are enough to make me want to read her fiction: "Saturday and pissing vinegar. The old port has vanished in the rain; port and sky and sea all smeared together like a jam of oysters, pearl-grey and viscous" (43).

[raysilverwoman · Rating 4 out of 5]

It helps considerably to have some familiarity with Ducornet's chosen subjects here (Lispector, Lynch, Borges, and gnosticism, to name a few) but the writing is so magical and so engaging that it rarely matters. If you like the thickest (and best, IMHO) essay of the bunch, "The Practice of Obscurity", you'll love the rest.

[Mills College Library]

814.54 D841d 2015

[Davit · Rating 3 out of 5]

էսսեների կեսը չհավանեցի, չկարդացի, բայց որոնք կարդացի՝ լրիվ սիրահարվելու բաներ էին։ պետք ա գոնե առաջին էսսեն թարգմանեմ։

[Tobias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review TK.