Jade Cabinet

Tetralogy of Elements #4

by Rikki Ducornet

Made speechless by her eccentric father, the beautiful Etheria is traded for a piece of precious jade. Memory, her sister, tells her story, that of a childhood enlivened by Lewis Carroll and an orangutan named Dr. Johnson and envenomed by the pernicious courtship of Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria's own Dragon of Industry. The novel travels from Oxford to Egypt where one million ibis mummies wait to be transformed into fertilizer, where Baconfield the architect will cause a pyramid to collapse, and where a scorned and bloated hunger artist who speaks in tongues will plot a bloody revenge. The fourth element in a tetralogy of novels - Earth (The Stain), Fire (Entering Fire), Water (The Fountains of Neptune) and Air - The Jade Cabinet is both a riveting novel and a reflection on the nature of memory and desire, language and power. Following the novel is an afterword, "Waking to Eden, " in which Ducornet reflects on the sources for her writing and on the quartet of novels completed by The Jade Cabinet.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature, 20th Century, American, The United States Of America, Female Authors

158 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1993

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story resembles some magic tale by Charles Perrault… A villainous husband… Bluebeard… The archetype of male tyranny…
The element of air… Memory is as volatile as air…

Memory, wrote Mr. Beattie, presents us with thoughts of what is past accompanied with a persuasion that they were once real. The ambiguity so delighted my father that with my mother’s permission I was named Memory – a curious coincidence considering this memoir which has seized the lion’s part of my relic years. I write from the new century about the old, my purpose to reanimate planets that have long ceased to spin.

Her father is an ultimate oddball… An eccentric scholar dreaming to discover a protolanguage… The language Adam and Eve spoke… She has a sister… Her sister has a husband… The sister’s husband has a jade cabinet…

The cabinet was Ming and of sober elegance, and the jade of such rare perfection that as he fingered them our father trembled.

The tale is about the narrator’s sister and her husband…

Etheria’s beauty at seventeen was such that Angus Sphery feared, above all else, that his daughter, a creature of air and light, might, by an imprudent elopement, confront the squalor of the world. By this time he knew Radulph Tubbs’s adoration was sincere; this, Tubbs’s maturity and wealth, convinced Father that he was the ideal husband.

However, married to the greedy and dumb utter extrovert, residing in the huge mansion named New Age, the sister felt as if in captivity…

Yet, the New Age contained keys to the only world that really mattered to her: that of the imagination. These keys, as you have seen, were the garden and the jade cabinet. When the jade bestiary was set down on the carpet on an imaginary journey, it was as if Etheria had left the house. She was following Marco Polo’s routes from Venice to Samarkand, Karakoum to Baghdad.

Loathing is growing in the wife’s heart… One day she disappears… She escapes…

She dreamed of air, of vanishing in thin air; she dreamed of evapourating. She dreamed of levitating, of growing wings, of transforming herself into a cobweb, an angel, a volatile gas. The more she dreamed of air, the lighter she became and the clearer did she perceive the irrelevant phantasmagoria which was her married life.

If the world within and the world without collide,  one must change one’s way of living.

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘For in the beginning was the Word!’

Language is the thing that binds us; language is how we assess and express the world, a heavy weight for something as weightless and fluid as air. Rikki Ducornet’s breathlessly brilliant The Jade Cabinet—the fourth novel in Ducornet’s tetralogy of elements, this one representing air—assesses language as both a unifying force and the power of its silence as well as the role language plays in memory. This is the story of two aptly named sisters with the younger, Memory, recounting the life of the air-like Etheria. Driven mute by her father’s insistence on keeping her innocent of speech in his quest for the Edenic Original Speech, Etheria moves through the world with sheer beauty and weightless grace after a childhood of wonderment among her fathers academic investigations. Raised in a fantastical house full of study into language and Darwin-like interests in the animal kingdom, and her friendship with Charles Dodgson (better known to readers by his pen name Lewis Carroll¹), Etheria grows as a wonderful expression of the arts. She is pursued by the earthly and weighted Radulph Tubbs, whose vile attempts at possession cause her to flee from his world and adopt an air-like state of existence where magic reigns supreme and not even language can touch her, while Tubbs faces the opposite effects akin to a crushing gravity. The Jade Cabinet is storytelling at its finest, bringing to life all the mystery and adventure of far-off places and cruel villains that give vibrancy and power to childrens fiction through perfectly polished and pristine prose that also affords all the insight and intellectual investigation of high Literature.

‘She dreamed of air, of vanishing in thin air; she dreamed of evaporating. She dreamed of levitating, of growing wings, of transforming herself into a cobweb, an angel, a volatile gas.’

The element of Air takes precedence over The Jade Cabinet, manifesting itself in many forms and figures. From Etheria herself to memory and language, which Ducornet brandishes in perfect order. It is nearly shocking to learn that the novel was published in 1993 as the language feels authentic to the Victorian Age in which it is set and each sentence is as polished and perfect as the eloquently cut jade figures in Tubb’s cabinet. Like air, the story flows and pours in all directions, unrestrainable or containable by linear narrative devices.

[T]his morning it seems to me that the story webs and nets about. It is a fabric, not a simple thread. My father used to say: “The memory is an anthill. How it swarms!”

Ducornet takes a very modern approach of multilayered narrative to a Victorian style novel, blending Memory’s own views as well as the memoirs of the pompous and tortured Radulph Tubbs to take the reader on an epic voyage across continents and decades. The effect is simply breathtaking.
Language also lies at the root of everything in the novel. Characters obsess over the universal language of existence, or build their own alphabet systems. Language is the manner in which the story is told, becoming an appendage of memory to pantomime the tale.

Memory is always changing, like air, swarming us from all sides and never constant.

Let’s suppose memories are like those special things; each star, each rain of meteors, each eclipse is like the last and yet it isn’t because the mind, you see, is never in the same place twice. Like stars and eclipses are simultaneously a rule and an exception.

So through this changing of memory, always hoping to stay constant and true, Memory attempts to deliver her story in a sprawling manner. A great many unique and engaging characters spiral across the map of memory, many coming to tragic ends, all in a quest to elucidate the mystery of Etheria who is as elusive as air and as ethereal as her name might suggest.

Ducornet excels at creating villains in this piece, and no character is more interesting than Radulph Tubbs, Queen Victoria’s ‘Dragon of Industry’. This cigar smoking businessman, a man burdened by his own gravity and affixed to the world puffing out clouds of smoke much like his factories, is a reflection of all the evils of industry and the rational mindedness that refuses to see beyond what is tangible and conquerable. He is disgusted by art and the abstract (‘freak shows are proof that all artists are freaks and art an aberration.’) and believes only in order and industry. He is a man who prefers smokestacks to sunrises and give photo albums of his factories as a romantic gift. He rules through his wealth, and his jade cabinet works on many levels to examine this. It is with his jade that he buys Etheria and because of his jade that he loses her. For him it is how he can take the world and put in away under his control, for Etheria the jade figures are playthings.

Men like Radulph Tubbs who believe only in what can be seen, or touched, or eaten, are not the exception but the rule. Whereas the things that truly matter cannot be carried about in the pocket and fingered.

When the scene changes to Egypt is when we see Ducornet at her most playful. Tubbs and his associate Baconfield become like Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter, in a wasteland of nothing but sand, intent on flattening the world, turning relics of history into something they can eat, sterelizing humanity for their own purpose². Creating a world where ‘There were no birds to fly.’ Like Tubbs, Baconfield attempts to order the world in a neat fashion, having idealized self-reliant societies that extinguish any need to look beyond ones own borders. Also, like the father Agnus Sphery, Baconfield obsesses over the mysteries of the universe, but instead of abstract and angelic features he pursues mathematical certainties as the building blocks of existence to the point of madness and beyond. There is a comical irony in their destruction of Egyptian history, turning mummies into fertilizer all in the name of profits to build their own monuments. Many dualities of life come alive in ironic fashion within The Jade Cabinet, from language to silence, air to gravity, a Hunger Artist who becomes ‘preposterously fat’, and freedom or despair.

Ducornet has created a fantastical tale with all the elements of classic Literature. Great tragedy and loss, far off exotic lands full of roaming thieves, madmen becoming God to desert tribes, great monuments falling, death and dramatic escape, and classic villains. Ducornet takes the epic tale a step further, using it as a springboard for philosophical musings and fleshes out her characters, taking villains to their inevitable demise while also stepping within them to humanize and empathize with them. She does a fine work of collecting the memories of a family's sad saga like figures in a cabinet, but ones that can come out and play and bestow an immediacy on all who come in contact with them. Ducornet is a master of storytelling and prose, and this is a book that gripped my heart and mind for days, being addictively readable and enjoyable and sending me out with a head full of wonderment for those moments between reads. Comical and clever, deep and daring, Ducornet is an author that should hopefully find her way onto the bookshelves of every home.
5/5

There are those who say that the memory is like a collector’s cabinet where souvenirs are tucked away as moths or tiny shells intact. But I think not. As I write this it occurs to me that for each performance of the mind our souvenirs reconstruct themselves. The memory is like an act of magic.

¹ The inclusion of Carroll/Dodgson lends an intoxicating atmosphere and grounding for the novel. Ducornet brings a biographical element of Dodgson that addresses points such as his penchant for associating himself with young girls and photographing them in the nude (always with parent approval and with the parents present) with a delicate and unjudgemental manner. Furthermore, the addition of Carroll helps bring to life the childlike elements of wonderment and adventure to the book, making use of his Walrus and the Carpenter story.

² One cannot help but imagine Tubbs as the Walrus from the classic Disney animated version of Alice in Wonderland, particularly as he has grown quite fat and brandishes a cigar at all times.

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

She dreamed of air, of vanishing in thin air; she dreamed of evaporating. She dreamed of levitating, of growing wings, of transforming herself into a cobweb, an angel, a volatile gas.

Rikki Ducornet rounds off her elemental quadrilogy with a poetic meditation on air, in the process shuffling and re-dealing some of the most important themes and figures from her previous three novels. Here our heroine is Etheria, mute and innocent, married off to a Victorian industrialist for the price of a jade figurine; the action moves from Oxford to Egypt and involves mummified ibis, theories of Adamic language, disappearing acts, graverobbery, Lewis Carroll, an anorexic ‘Hungerkünstler’, a couple of murders, and the non-consensual application of a jade dildo. Only Rikki Ducornet….

The quartet has been about language, about fiction, about storytelling, about memory, and most of all about men and women and sexuality. Every book has given us new illustrations of maleness and femaleness and set them interacting in different ways, her focus not on realist character sketches but rather on bold, almost cartoonish emblems of her themes (one character here is described in terms of his ‘caricatural virility’). She is particularly interested in investigating the muddy slope that leads from male sexual desire to misogyny.

It is absolutely representative of Ducornet's distinctive worldview that the Reverend Charles Dodgson – treated by most modern writers as a problematic figure – appears here as the paragon of benign and sensitive manhood. There is nothing at all ironic about the narrator's apologia for Dodgson's nude photographic sessions with her and her sister, aged three and nine:

I feel it is fitting that I say here what an utter delight it was to run about in Dodgson's cosy rooms unfettered by buttons and braces; to try on all manner of odd tatters, to sit, enlaced by Etheria or plaiting the cloud of her hair before an imaginary seascape while Dodgson told stories about the trials and tribulations of shellfish and sea turtles…

Men who love women (and girls), no matter how much they may sexualise them, are OK as far as Ducornet is concerned; it is hating women that constitutes the ultimate evil in her works. (It is anyway questionable whether anyone could sexualise women more than Ducornet does herself.) That misogyny has been personified in every book of this tetralogy thanks to a series of monstrous male figureheads – the Exorcist, Septimus de Bergerac, Toujours-Là, and now finally – toujours là indeed – the character of Radulph Tubbs.

If Etheria is airy and sylphlike, Tubbs is grossly corporeal – ‘all greed and gravy’, ‘his fingers perpetually redolent of Stilton’. As always with Ducornet, his unpleasant qualities are intimately linked to his gynophobia: ‘he hated and feared the world's feminine aspect – that is to say, anything folded, concealed, creased.’ (Vocabulary like this, and the web of connections it sets up, is very important in Ducornet's writing. In this novel, for instance, the keyword is volatilized, a rare synonym for ‘evaporated’, which is used three or four times.)

The paradox of Ducornet is that her writing is both wonderfully subtle and at the same time almost Manichaean in its vision: her women are either lunar, sexual creatures or (the nuns of The Stain, for instance) dessicated spinsters, while men are either gentle heroes or, more often, monsters. In one striking phrase near the end, she equates ‘sexual determinism’ with ‘mortal combat’.

Men were the chimeras of all our nightmares, the horned snakes haunting our most secret pools; each and every virile male a potential Frog Prince, Vampire, Saviour.

(‘Except, I must add, for Dodgson.’) Inasmuch as this book consummates the themes she has been exploring, there is, perhaps, a glimmer of hope in the climax: there is tragedy in store for our ethereal heroine, but Tubbs, alone among Ducornet's male ogres, shows some signs of remorse and reformation at the end. So perhaps she does see some remote possibility for the sexes to coexist peacefully after all.

Though I didn't give more than four to any one book, the Tetralogy of Elements is certainly a five-star achievement as a whole. It seems to have been written in a vacuum from other current dialogues about sexuality, social politics and even literary theory; it's completely its own world, slinky, tricksy, sexy, provocative, violent, fantastic, wonderful. Truly elemental. And written from some creative place of joy: I felt that there was pleasure in every sentence.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ducornet is blessed with a bedazzling flair for magical language, and in this delicious novel (the fourth instalment in a quartet themed around the elements, this being ‘air’), she wields her wand with consummate charm and panache. Etheria—a silent and unpossessable siren—is wedded to the brutish pragmatist Tubbs, who swaps his emeralds for her maidenhead, which he takes by force in a handsome cab one unhandsome afternoon. His bride, whose spirit abounds with childish magic, breaks free, and disappears forever, leaving Tubbs despondent at the hands of the Hungerkünstler—a vicious witch who usurps the narrator’s father and pyramid-loving boffin Baconfield. Lewis Carroll is somewhere in the mix too, snapping underage girls in his charming dotage. Ducornet writes fluttery fables in seductive Nabokovian prose, dripping with descriptive pearls and gems. This short novel enchants.

[Forrest · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the interest of full disclosure, I know Rikki. I've helped publish her work a couple of times and have an irregular correspondence with her. Just sent her a letter (handwritten, of course) a few weeks ago, in fact.

Knowing Rikki and reading The Jade Cabinet again after having been away from it for so many years, I am struck, most of all, by the sheer restraint she shows in presenting this devastating, yet beautiful novel. It's a clear case of the power of editing and craftsmanship at work. Her pen is under strict control here, concentrating the power of whimsey and, indeed, some degree of madness into a self-restrained, almost ethereal (pardon the pun - one of the main characters is named "Etheria") critical examination of male dominance, the Victorian social paradigm, and the favoritism of technic over magic.

This is a character-driven novel, first and foremost. What I love about Rikki's work here is that none of the characters are presented as "either/or". Radulph Tubbs, a notably brutal man with few redeeming qualities, almost none, in fact, becomes, in his older years, a bit sympathetic. But not too sympathetic. More just plain pathetic. But the narrator (who, in a surprising twist, ultimately . . . well, I don't want to give away the surprise) feels a pity that borders on admiration for Tubbs' inner world, even though his actions in the physical world are violently misogynistic and crassly materialistic. Baconfield, the architect, who is hired by Tubbs, is a staunch industrialist, bent on bringing sterile order to everything, but later, through a series of misfortunes, becomes a mad mystic. Angus Sphery, father to both Memory (the narrator) and her sister Etheria, is a loving, whimsical father and a friend of Charles Dodgson (yes, that Charles Dodgson) who also abandoned his first daughter and ultimately ended up in Bedlam asylum. Sphery's wife, Margaret, likewise, lost her sanity, but for altogether different reasons.

Yes, it's that sort of novel. Full of frivolity, madness, and (mostly) tragedy.

And at the center of it all is Etheria, the mute daughter of Angus Sphery, who is essentially sold off to Radulph Tubbs for the price of The Jade Cabinet, a Wunderkammer, of sorts, filled exclusively with figurines carved from jade. One of these figures, which I will not reveal here, becomes the pivotal tool (I use that word reluctantly, but it works on several levels), the wrench in the works, as they say, that leads to the vanishment of the lovely, innocent Etheria and the subsequent emergence of the one true monster of the novel, the Hungerkünstler. No, not that Hungerkünstler, but one of the same mien.

Unlike many character-driven novels, however, The Jade Cabinet is fully-engaging throughout, with something for everyone (or "something for everyone to hate" as my friend Stepan Chapman used to say). The magic realism borders, at times, on that ill-defined subgenre known as "The Weird". The writing itself has a strong focus on not only the language itself, but the role of language as it affects the inner worlds of each character. Ultimately, I suppose, the work is about language and memory, though it never beats the reader over the head with a philosophical stick. It is subtle. And this is really the greatest compliment I can give to it: it breathes softly, with occasional rushes of wind, but it's underpinnings are mere whispers that overwhelm, if one is paying attention. It demands such attention, but not in a bombastic way; rather, it engages like a soft mountain breeze through the trees, simultaneously caressing the ears and overwhelming them. It is an elemental force: the force of the air.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some thoughts upon finishing The Jade Cabinet:

It is her precise fluid prose, each line infused with the exacting measure of poetry, riddled by thought, that raises this gem to a world sparkled within its self containment. The inner and outer battle of life tied to the earth through the relentless pull of gravity or the life of ethereal thought, creative imagination, sifted through the delicacy of this pearl-stranded language.

Is this how the words, the book’s structure arrived to her or was it painstakingly crafted?

Ducornet presides as the master of ambiance and tone. Her world is encapsulated in its uniqueness. Her descriptions are the words of mist and dew.

If you have not traveled to Ducornet’s land it is as highly recommended as spending days lifted to a foreign country only to find it filled with greater mystery, larger than the expectations of dreams. She remains the one writer I know I can never fully capture in words. It is as though trying to close these drops of dew in the palm of my hand. When reopened they have melted. It is only then that I am sure I have reached her isle of curving fog.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full five stars no doubt. More Ducornet, please! Much more fun than reading Hegel, I promise.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Tetralogy of Elements

This is the fourth novel in Rikki Ducornet’s tetralogy of elements. Not only is it the best of the four, it’s also one of the best works of Post-Modernist fiction that I’ve read.

The story alone is the work of a master craftsperson, but more than that, the novel is a study in the nature and purpose of storytelling.

As soon as I put it down, I resolved that it was a book I could return to every year in the future. Instead, I more or less re-read it after I finished it the first time, because I wasn’t yet ready to pick up another book (even if my next read was going to be a biography of Lewis Carroll, who features in Ducornet’s novel).

Subtlety and Splendour

At one point, Ducornet says of a magic act performed by her heroine, Etheria (in the guise of the magician, Zephyra), something that can be equally applied to her novel:

“The whole evolved so swiftly, with such subtlety and splendour, that her audience was dazzled.”

Earlier, she says:

“Etheria illumined everything she touched.”

Collectively, then, this is a subtle and splendid novel that will leave any reader illuminated, dazzled, and touched.

A Story Recalled by Memory

The story is narrated by Memory (Etheria's sister who is six years younger) with help from journals from her sister’s husband, Radulph Tubbs.

She pretends to be a literary ingenue, but she definitely assembles her materials with the elegance of a mosaic or a tapestry:

“I beg my reader’s indulgence; I am no writer, yet intend to tell my story as best I can, to be as ‘linear’ as possible. Yet this morning it seems to me that the story webs and nets about. It is a fabric, not a simple thread. My father used to say: ‘The memory is an anthill. How it swarms!”

“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.”

“These are my scribbles, insensate atoms. The only way I can bring my volatile thoughts together.”

The style of the novel is that of the nineteenth century Victorian era, though, in fact, Memory is writing her account much later, in the next century, when she is in her sixties:

“I write from the new century about the old, my purpose to reanimate planets that have long ceased to spin.”



Language, Imagination and Memory

Memory’s name reflects her father’s interest in the nature of language, the imagination and memory.

The novel begins with a quotation from James Beattie which could describe the nature of storytelling or narrative:

“Memory presents us with thoughts of what is past accompanied with a persuasion that they were once real.”

Certainly, this is the perception of the reader. We read realist fiction “as if” it was real, even though this is an illusion.

The girls' father, Angus Sphery, is fascinated by language:

“If I could discover the origins of language...I would know the origins of mankind. Mankind...and his myths! Simultaneously! The roots of the imagination and...all its fruits! The sciences, yes, and the arts. Because...Language is Imagination! Language is Memory! And the brain...the brain is like a giant hive...it hums! It hums the music of the spheres!”

Metaphorically, Etheria is Imagination, and Memory is her own namesake.

Substantiality and Volatility

In contrast, Etheria believes her husband has the imagination of an oyster. He says of himself:

“I am no ‘rosebud,’ simply: I am a man of taste, yes, and of a substance cemented by rational thinking, not by ‘beautiful feelings’ or idealisations, fairy castles of the mind. I, unlike some I know, believe in the so-called external world. (But tell me, is there another? If so - show it to me!).”

Tubbs believes in the substance of red bricks, he is a builder, an owner, a manufacturer, a materialist, whereas Etheria is preoccupied with the world of the imagination, which is intrinsically insubstantial, the stuff of the mind, if not exactly idealism. Tubbs has a debate with Etheria's father when he asks for her hand in marriage:

Tubbs: “[If Beauty was blessedly absent,] we’d still have substantiality.”

Father: “No doubt, but we would not have Etheria.”

Conjuring the World of Things

The world of the imagination is one of language and words.

Etheria's father believes that the Divine Original Language “was so powerful as to conjure the world of things.”:

“All of Adam and Eve’s needs were seen to by this language of languages which was also a species of magic.”

Thus, Ducornet’s novel is built on a continuum of language, words, things, memory, imagination and magic.

In contrast to her husband, the only world that mattered to Etheria was the world of the imagination, the keys to which were the garden and the jade cabinet in their home.

Rationality Wedded to Creation

The relationship between Radulph and Etheria is a conflict between the substance of rationality, stone and bricks, and the volatility of the imagination, creativity and the air. It’s one which oppresses Etheria, and she must escape, inevitably, by vanishing into thin air.

This duality is not just an aspect of the cosmos, but part of what gender relations have become in bourgeois society. Etheria’s imagination is the vehicle by which she might eventually escape the oppression of marriage. It is the key to her transformation and liberation. As Ducornet says in an interview:

”I’m not talking of “cosmical” powers but worldly ones. I’m talking about the constant tension or struggle I perceive—well, it is ‘palpable’—between forces of enslavement and obscuration, and forces of liberation and illumination.”

Return to Eden

Etheria's father was convinced that there was a “clear relationship that existed all over the world between an object and its name,...[and that] the Egyptian hieroglyphs that once covered the pyramids from top to bottom were the keys to an objective reality which was that of Eden prior to the Fall. These figures are of such magical potency that it suffices to trace one with the finger and utter the secret name of Isis for the thing signified to spring into being. Unfortunately the secret name of Isis is lost.”

Just as her father wants to find the origin of language, Etheria’s personal journey is a return to (the Garden of) Eden, to the beginning of words and things.

Rigor and Imagination Toward Understanding

Ducornet’s writing style is not overtly anti-intellectual or chaotic. In fact, it’s highly structured and disciplined. She’s determined to document the life of the imagination, without erring on the side of dry logic or purple opacity. In the same interview, she reveals:

“Perhaps for me writing stories is a way of engaging in the infinite, the mutable, the “evocative” world which is the world of the imagination.

“I love the sensual world, I love the body, and I love the physical, natural world.

“The Jade Cabinet was precipitated by a phrase of Kafka’s that’s always intrigued me: “All language is but poor translation.” In other words, if we could speak the language of languages, the language of Eden, we would have the power to conjure the world of things: a tower of Babel, cabbages and kings.

“What I am attempting to describe here is the process toward understanding, and if I speak of rigor and imagination so much it’s because I think we cannot function as free beings, as ‘imagining’ beings, unless we have the courage to perceive the world and to name what we see, to choose clarity over opacity.”

Ducornet's clarity differentiates this volume of the tetralogy from much of what calls itself Post-Modernism, especially when it tends towards the profligacy of the Mega-Novel. Ducornet achieved remarkable artistic and imaginative clarity here in just 154 pages (not counting the Afterword). There should be more of it (if you know what I mean!).


SOUNDTRACK:



David Bowie - "Sorrow"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRVgK...

Lou Reed - "Vanishing Act"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaouE...

"It must be nice to disappear
To have a vanishing act
To always be looking forward
And never looking back..."

Robyn Hitchcock - "Airscape"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGVOx...

Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3 - "Airscape"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAfPL...



June 3, 2017

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

From Rikki Ducornet's afterword titled "Waking to Eden": "I like to imagine that Adam's tongue, his palate and his lips were always on fire, that the air he breathed was kindled to incandescence each time he cried out in sorrow or delight. If fiction can be said to have a function, it is to release that primary fury of which language, even now, is miraculously capable--from the dry mud of daily use. So that furred, spotted and striped, it may--as it did in Eden--scrawl under every tree as revelation."

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like the idea of John Barth meets Angela Carter (why wouldn't you?) or stupendous prose, definitely have a look. But certainly, Ducornet's sumptuous, luminous, at times esoteric prose is an acquired taste.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this book a lot. I'm not sure if it's really a five star book, but it's a strong four and a half. For a short and relatively simple seeming book there is a lot of stuff going on. A nice mixture of a kind of magical realism and 19th century historical persons, along with some social commentary's and subtly dealing with the failures of memory. It's the last topic that really made this book work for me, the story I found to be enchanting and the voice of the narrator was great, but it was with incongruities started popping up, very small things that with a lesser writer I might think were just mistakes, but here they seemed to be pointing to something, but in a way that wasn't smashing the reader in the face with what the author was trying to say. Kind of like after 1500 pages or whatever of Proust, when all of a sudden Marcel says that he can't remember what someone did because it happened so long ago and how can someone possibly remember all those details and then goes right on with his endless rememberences of things past. In Proust, what does this mean to the reader? What are we to make of ALL of those details, those 30 page descriptions of the shadow on a wall, is it all unreliable? Does it matter? Should the reader feel cheated? If not what should the reader think of this kind of revelation. In here the failures of memory are more subtle, Ducornet doesn't make you see them, rather it's up to your own memory to catch them, and maybe question yourself about if what you remember was what really happened.

I'm going on and on about memory, and that's probably really boring. But this book isn't boring, and maybe you'll enjoy it too, whomever you may be.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ducornet does a thing. This thing is hers, absolutely. What would be precious or whimsy in any other hand becomes, somehow, the most sublime slicette off the Ur-magination. She’s unabashedly feminine in her writing, yet unmistakably feminist. She’s a gnostic witch that digs the Pentateuch as rewritten by Lewis Carroll. She’s a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll? (Scratch that; more chanson de Brel meets “The Song of Songs.”)

When she’s at her best, as she is here, her kink-fucked world accelerates to fantastic proportions, but never too far from the corporeality of dread Terra.

Like I said, she does a thing.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lightness, imagination, and ethereality juxtaposed against the harsh concrete realities of the burgeoning industrial revolution in England, embodied in a voiceless girl destined to disappearance into thin air and her narrow-sighted industrialist husband, his ilk leading the world towards modernity and world conflagration in the early next century. With the real protagonist and center here shorn of words and vanished, we're left mostly to follow and hear out its more annoying and somewhat less fascinating characters, though this seems well part of a Ducornet tendency to hear out crank theorists and knowledgeless know-it-alls, though this has a certain thematic fit about it.

Strange, I seem to be less seduced by Ducornet's writing than I feel I should, though I did like this. Something about The Stain was more mysterious and urgent, though I'd be hard put to say what exactly.

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enchanted yet again by one of Ms Ducornet's ethereal tales, comprised of dreamlike strands of prose poetic and imaginative, I reached the end of her tetralogy of elements. Her stories, this one included, occupy a rare space, a time and place not quite our own, part fable, part fact, a realm just beyond our grasp, constructed from nothingness by the magic of her unique voice.

Perfectly matched then is the author's prose to this tale of language itself, of language lost and language sought, and of a speechless young woman in search of the conjuring Word of vanishment.

Another wonderful tale from Rikki Ducornet.

[Ben Winch]

What does it mean to abandon a book – to leave it half-finished? I do it a lot. In some cases it’s the final kiss-off, a judgement, a verdict. In this case I suspect not. Though I gave my copy (a hardcover Dalkey first edition) to a bookseller friend before travelling six months ago, I may live to regret it. But it sat there so long, that expensive volume, once I’d reached its second section (millionaire Tubbs in Egypt – a baffling flight of fancy), that I rebelled finally against the admonishment of its existence. Still it persists in my mind with unexpected vigour: a vivid if abstruse cartoon of Poe-like dark luminescence. Ducornet can write, absolutely no question, and her themes – obscure as they may seem to me – appear to arise naturally and with requisite force from deep places. I’d say I felt the book lost its way when the narrator’s sister exited, but that’s not quite the case: the book went another way. Not that I had preconceptions. (How could I, of a story this strange?) But its tension slackened, for me, to where I couldn’t walk along it. Throughout, its craft was admirable, its surface polished. I liked – a lot – the narrator’s diligent citing of sources, and Ducornet’s care in tying the narrative to them. These things matter. Why did I give the book away? Call it a crisis of faith. Had it been a cheap paperback I might have held onto it. But the thing seemed valuable, and wasted on me; I sent it out to the world to find the love it deserved. And Rikki Ducornet? One to watch, decidedly. This is not a kiss-off.

[Δημήτριος Καραγιάννης · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a story that grips the reader tightly and transports him or her to several planes of land and thought, despite the fact that it begins and ends on a rural mansion of Britain. Both humorous and tragic, this book has found the sensitive thread between reality and the perception of it. It flourishes several intriguing characters, each dedicated to his or her goal and personal quirks and whims, and the writer just carries on, writing page after page, expanding each thought into reality, no matter how outlandish or scaling out of proportion the narrative may grow.

[Bob Schnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Jade Cabinet" by Rikki Ducornet represents "air" in her tetralogy of elemental novels.
I'm not sure I would have figured that out, but it is a good story nonetheless. The characters are all obsessed. One is in search of the original language of Adam & Eve. Another loves clean, sterile landscapes. There's an architect fixated on pyramids, and so on. Not much good comes from their interactions with each other.

What really set this book apart for me is the author's use of language. The story is set in the mid 1800's and words normally associated with Jonathan Swift and Edward Lear leap out. Lewis Carroll is actually part of the story and I often felt like I was falling down a rabbit hole. I'll be interested in checking out the other books in the series.

[Dfordoom · Rating 4 out of 5]

With The Jade Cabinet in 1994 Rikki Ducornet established herself as one of the principal literary heirs of the late Angela Carter. This is a strange story of a girl deliberately deprived of the power of speech, a girl who is later traded by her father for a jade objet d’art. It owes something to Dickens and something to Lewis Carroll (who appears in the book). The book deals with language and power, and with memory. It’s a work of magic realism somewhat in the style of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. Ducornet, though, isn’t quite in Carter’s league.

[Kit · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the oddest books I’ve ever read. Set in Oxford, England, it has an engaging cast of unimaginable characters, and a premise that is difficult to believe, but somehow it works. I had the impression of always being two steps behind the author, struggling to keep up with each new plot development, shrouded in literary and scientific allusions I didn’t always understand. At 158 pages, you could justify reading it twice, with the intent that it would be more understandable the second time through.

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

it was indeed okay. the language was a joy to read, but storywise I feel like it didn't actually have an ending. not all stories do, I guess.

[Chris Via]

La parfaite Ducornet !

[Nell Beaudry McLachlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ducornet's writing has an incredible sense of pacing, frequently both ponderous and breathless, dragging the reader under without their ever noticing. The prose has an intensely dreamy quality to it, as do the characters, although even those who exist mostly ephemerally (like Etheria) are grounded in incredible emotion that would suffer from hollowness in the hands of a less skilled writer.

[A L]

This part of the tetralogy addresses art and capitalism most directly.

[Jackson ZR · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a strange great book. the prose is a cool admixture of poetry, philosophy and parlor game.

helpful to recall that Ducornet understood this book as a meditation on the element air, which here is like ... the meeting place of the imaginal and the real? the invisible-physical? it is formless and partakes of dream, but it acts upon the material world, bridging the gap...

air is also the prinicple of universal vanishment—that all things which come into the world must volatilise (cool new word) into obscurity, memory—and of course this mocks the pretend stability of heavy things: factories, tombs, sepulchers of stone.

and air is the locus of memory, perception, and language. by speech humans manipulate air to serve our earthbound purposes. but silence is the true language of air—the language of God.

anyway, the narrative unfolds against a backdrop of unchecked high-Victorian industry and empire, a cultural situation embodied by the bloated, obsessive textile tycoon Radulph Tubbs, who kinda reminded me of some of Vonnegut's cartoonish ubermensches. noxious exhaust pours out of the smokestacks of his factory ziggurats and a grey pall hangs over the British isles. but as he broods over the disappearance of his young wife Etheria, the megalith of his ego is grated and chafed all the way down to a fine sand until all that's left is an empty plain of windswept dunes. (Ozymandias, anyone??) by this process Ducornet offers him a kind of spiritual redemption, which I think is the point—not even Tubbs' great villainy is immune to the principle of dissolution.

actually many characters in the book sort of dissolve over the course of the plot, becoming essentially disembodied until (it might be said) only the heaviest remain: an interesting contrivance, but i would have liked to have spent a bit more time with a corporeal Etheria—certainly the heartcenter of the book if not quite its protagonist—before she volatilised into abstraction.

3.9 stars

[David Ranney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Also, it occurs to me that an unhappy man is always a misreporter. Surely the same may be said for a woman. As a girl I admit to having on occasion luxuriated in thoughts of love, looking for meanings effectual in the eyes of strangers. But this is innocence, for the darker realities had been hidden from me. Yet they were on the edge of my consciousness (had not my father, Angus Sphery, collected the private parts of butterflies?) and lapped at my dreams like a lake at the shore. I admit to a vague sentiment of sumptuousness which, despite their violence and vulgarity, Radulph's memoirs awaken. Even now the man is a mischief-maker! (Although when one considers how things turned out, I needn't justify myself.) Still––how can I admit to such feelings, knowing what I know? Thank Heaven I have Christ as my guide and inspiration, for although I am now over sixty, the abyss appears to have the very same attractions as when I was a lass of fourteen! To think that I have, and not so very long ago, dreamed of the hot breath of that murderer beside my cheek; I have actually dreamed of his hands. Then again, perhaps the explanation is mere loneliness? I must get out more. I live too much in the mind and this house boils of phantoms of all ages.

[Serena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Memory, wrote Mr. Beattie, presents us with thoughts of what is past accompanied with a persuasion that they were once real.
---
There are those who say that the memory is like a collector's cabinet where souvenirs are tucked away as moths or tiny shells intact. But I think not. As I write this it occurs to me that for each performance of the mind our souvenirs reconstruct themselves. The memory is like an act of magic.
--
Let's suppose memories are like those special things; each star, each rain of meteors, each eclipse is like the last and yet it isn't because the mind, you see, is never in the same place twice. Like stars and eclipses, memories are simultaneously a rule and an exception.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Out of control murderous industrialist, Lewis Carroll, a dangerous Hunger Artist, mummies used as fuel, and mysterious disappearance are some of the elements is this tale of destruction, insanity, and of course beauty. Lewis Carroll is given a quite sympathetic portrayal.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Memory, I think, is an act of magic. In other words, we transform the outer world of facts: rabbits, hats, silk scarves, and painted trunks into those things we wish to keep, for whatever reason. And what I give to you is magic too: from out of fragments of fur, I give you a living rabbit. I hold him by the ears. His eyes are pink, his nose is wet, he struggles - then lies limp with fear. You see him, yet he is not there: he is an illusion. Look: I drop him back into my hat and with a smart clap of thunder, the hat collapses into a thin, flat disc. A delicious aroma of baking fills the air..."

"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 full of chameleons and the mind as unstable as the moon..."

I could quote her incantaceous, witchy prose all day, but you should really just read it for yourself. Loved this.

[Andreas Jacobsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Victorian England a beautiful & featherlike young girl - Etheria - is forced into marriage with an older man, as a result of her wistful father's obsession with primordial language. The girl is traded for a collection of jade sculptures that her father believes to be key in unlocking "the original tongue of mankind".

So the girl becomes trapped with an industrialist villain, who very unlike Etheria, sees no beauty in nature, only in possessing it & twisting it to his means.
His feelings towards Etheria are much the same, and as a result her innocence is ruptured by his ferocious appetite, causing the girl to flee.

As with the other entries in Ducornets 'Tetralogy of Elements', the language is playful, inventive & rich with metaphors.

The element of this installment is 'Air' - and so the text reverberates with gusts & gales, chills & currents, breezes & birdsong.

There are fairytale-like qualities to the writing & story, although some scenes will make it quite clear that this is very much a book for adults.

Another delightful book from Ducornet, albeit not quite at the level of the superior predecessor 'Fountains of Neptune'.

[Ed Scherrer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Her comparisons to Calvino and Barthelme are well-founded. A beautiful and intelligent imagination is at play in this novel. Her style is pure pleasure.

I laughed when the 19th century English industrialist, who goes to Egypt to turn thousands of ibis mummies into fertilizer, finds himself lost in the pitch-black catacombs for days, only to stumble into a room filled with enormous jars that he assumes are the eggs of a giant and vengeful bird. Upon his escape, he takes a sour puff on a traditional pipe packed with powdered dung of a hippopotamus. Lovely writing.