Fantastic Metropolis

Endnotes

1. Jack Lindsay, The Origins of Alchemy in Graeco-Roman Egypt (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 1-67. The origins of alchemy in India and China and the relationship between those practices and western traditions continue to be topics of debate.
2. Rikki Ducornet, “Alphabets and Emperors, Reflections on Kafka and Borges,” in The Monstrous and the Marvelous, (San Francisco: City Lights, 1999): 43-51.
3. Rikki Ducornet, The Stain (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984; New York Grove, 1984; rev. ed., Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995).
4. Rikki Ducornet, Entering Fire (London: Chatto & Windus, 1986; San Francisco: City Lights, 1986).
5. Rikki Ducornet, The Fountains of Neptune (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989; Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1992).
6. Rikki Ducornet, The Jade Cabinet (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1993).
7. Rikki Ducornet, Phosphor in Dreamland (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995).
8. This essay has been enriched by conversations with Ducornet and the author on June 8 and July 27, 2000.
9. One exception is Aristide Marquis, mentioned first in Entering Fire, where he dies in 1943 (156). In The Fountains of Neptune, he dies at Verdun (128). Ducornet liked the name and repeated it without intending to create a discrepancy.
10. Geoff Hancock, “An Interview with Rikki,” The Canadian Fiction Magazine, 44 (1982): 13-32; Sinda Gregory, “Finding a Language; Introducing Rikki Ducornet,” and Sinda Gregory and Larry McCaffery, “At the Heart of Things Darkness and Wild Beauty: An Interview with Rikki Ducornet,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 18 (Fall 1998): 110-125; 126-144. This issue is devoted to Ducornet and contains additional essays on her work as cited below.
11. Rikki Ducornet, “Waking to Eden,” in The Monstrous and the Marvelous, 1-5.
12. Gregory and McCaffery, 127; J.H. Matthews, “Rikki Ducornet’s Non-Nonsense Almost-Fairy Tales,” Symposium, 42 (Winter 1989): 312-327. Stories from From the Star Chamber (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1974) and The Butcher’s Tales (Toronto: Aya Press, 1980) have been republished in a full collection entitled The Complete Butcher’s Tales (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994). She has also published several volumes of poetry, the most recent is The Cult of Seizure (Erin, Ontario, The Porcupine’s Quill, 1989).
13. Ducornet, “Returning from Chiapas: A Revery in Many Voices,” in The Monstrous and the Marvelous, 33-41.
14. Ducornet, cited in Hancock, 24.
15. Exhibitions include: Czechoslovakia, 1966; Museum of Fine Arts in West Berlin, 1969 and 1972; Museum of Lille, 1973; Museum of Ixelles in Belgium, 1974; International Surrealist Exhibition, Chicago, 1977; the National Museum of Castro Coimbra, Portugal; the National Museum of Fine Art in Mexico, 1979; Centre Culturel Française (Sweden), 1982; and Centre Culturel Mexicain (Paris), 1984.
16. Ducornet, “Mapping Paris,” in The Monstrous and the Marvelous,” 65-68.
17. La Mandragore Magique (Paris: H. Daragon, 1912), 1-33.
18. This lithograph was created around the same time that Ducornet illustrated Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Scarborough, Ontario: The Porcupine’s Quill, 1983), although it was not part of the original series of drawings.
19. Ducornet, “The Impossible Genus,” in The Monstrous and the Marvelous, 27-31.
20. Ducornet, “Waking to Eden,” 3.
21. Ducornet, cited in Hancock, 20.
22. Ducornet, cited in Hancock, 17.
23. Ducornet, cited Hancock, 20.
24. Ducornet, conversations with the author and Hancock, 25-26.
25. M. E. Warlick, “The Occultation of Surrealism” in Max Ernst and Alchemy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 61-104.
26. Ducornet, cited in Hancock, 23.
27. Ducornet, “A Dream” in The Monstrous and the Marvelous, 111-112. The story was originally published in 1991, and reprinted in The Complete Butcher’s Tales, 3-10.
28. Ducornet, “A Dream,” 112.
29. See also Ducornet, The Word “Desire,” (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), and Warren Motte, “Desiring Words, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction 18 (Fall 1998): 223-228.
30. Ducornet, Phosphor, 47.
31. Ducornet, cited by Hancock, 25.
32. Concerning language and linguistic themes in her work see Gregory, “Finding a Language,” 111-113; and Allen Guttmann, “Rikki Ducornet’s Tetrology of Elements: An Appreciation,” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction 18 (Fall 1998): 184-195.
33. Gregory and McCaffery, 132.
34. Her research into the cloning process included conversations with orchidologists Vacherot, Lecoufle and Pierre Fradin.
35. Gregory and McCaffery, 133.
36. This description recalls engravings in the Mutus Liber, a splendid late seventeenth century alchemical text illustrating without words a male and a female alchemist sharing in the work equally.
37. See also Richard Martin, “The Tantalizing Prize: Telling the Telling of The Fountains of Neptune,” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction 18 (Fall 1998): 196-204.
38. Gnostic themes throughout her work are worthy of a separate essay. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 18 (Fall 1998) includes Ducornet’s essay on this fearsome feminine archetype in literature. See “The Death Cunt of Deep Dell,” 146-152 and related “Excerpts from Five Novels,” 156-178. Also on gender see Giovanna Covi, “Gender Derision, Gender Corrosion, and Sexual Differences in Rikki Ducornet’s Materialist Eden,” in the same volume, 205-216.
39. Ducornet, Optical Pleasure,” in The Monstrous and the Marvelous,” 53-60.
40. Although created outside the tetralogy, this novel continues their alchemical themes, Ducornet, conversations with the author. See also Lynne Diamond-Nigh, “??Phosphor in Dreamland??,” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction 18 (Fall 1998): 217-222.
41. Scattered throughout are references to Alicia Ombos’ A Swift and a Phosphorous Eye, a scholarly (but fictional) study of Jonathan Swift’s voyages of discovery. Ducornet’s analysis of Swift, particularly his terror of the archetypal feminine, is expanded in her “Optical Terror,” in The Monstrous and the Marvelous, 7-25.
42. Rikki Ducornet, The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1999).
43. Here, and elsewhere, Ducornet has been influenced by Alice Miller’s theories concerning the effects of a brutal and repressive childhood on the development of the adult personality, Gregory and McCaffery, 136-137.
44. Penelope Rosemont, Surrealist Women (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999), xxxix-xl, 226-9, 306.

“Rikki Ducornet: An Alchemy of Dreams and Desire” was originally printed in Cauda Pavonis ns. 20.2 (Fall, 2001): 24-34.