Fantastic Metropolis

Cûcla is the ultimate cause of Septimus’ demise. She burns a pile of poison ivy whose smoke fatally inflames his throat and lungs. He sees his death in a dream, another Gnostic and alchemical vision, hurled as a stone of black basalt, as light as a feather.

I see… the Cosmos like a tapestry of Light and Darkness, the heads of angels to the ninth degree, ...all have wings of fire… I see a bottle of black glass. Within, P’pa and his whore embracing white as snow… clouds are gathering, a cyclone approaching, spitting nails and window glass… (151)

Although finally dead like so many of the murderers of Hilter’s Gestapo, Septimus warns his father in a letter from the grave, that he, like all unspeakable evils, will show up again when least expected.

The Fountains of Neptune

The Fountains of Neptune, the third novel in the series, is devoted to water, the element of deep emotions. ^[37] And, because water reflects, the novel is also about reflection and memory. Nini is an orphan adopted by a kindly couple. They live in a seaport village held in fluid suspension, as yet untouched by the horrors of the twentieth century. Central to the story is Nini’s search to know the story of his dead mother, Odille. Like the black swan in Swan Lake, she is beautiful, sexually-charged and dangerous. Nini, like Charlotte in The Stain, understands that his mother’s sexuality was the cause of her downfall. Odille’s story is set in relief against the mythic tales of the Ogress, La Vouivre, and Revelation’s Whore of Babylon, all archetypes of feminine evil, as described in the Gnostic text, The Virtual Abyss (168-170). ^[38] Repressing the dark memories of his infancy, Nini falls into a deep lake diving after his own and his mother’s reflection, an act that also plunges him into a coma for over fifty years. Eventually through a particularly imaginative version of psychoanalysis developed by his analyst, Doctor Venus Kaiserstiege, “the world’s only Freudian hydropothist” (121), he recovers his submerged memories. She calls him her Fröschlein (13), little frog, a reptilian symbol of primal matter.

Nini’s search his mother’s memory and his coma are attempts to re-enter her womb and become the alchemical homunculus. A tiny human fetus hidden in a jar behind the local bar mirrors his desire to become the baby in the vessel, like many other psychoanalytic displacements and replacements in these pages. The alchemical process suggested here is that of Albedo, purification through an inundation of water that clears all the blackness in the vessel. Violence in the past is healed through memory, knowledge, love, and the complete acceptance of his therapist. Nini, once awakened, attempts to “circle the square” (205), an alchemical mystery in which spiritual truth mirrors physical reality.

Of all of Ducornet’s novels, this one most resembles the beautiful composite faces painted by Giuseppe Arcimboldo for the Emperor Rudolph II. Within his alchemical series of the four elements Arcimboldo painted an allegorical portrait of Water using many varieties of fish, studded with pearls and coral which he positioned to form facial features. In the novel, the watery theme is carried by the seaside location and within the healing gardens of the asylum where “water [is] tamed in basins, bathtubs, wells” (12). Wet weather persists throughout the story, permeating the air with pounding rain, fog, slush, drizzle, snow, and creating a “port and sky and sea all smeared together like a jam of oysters, pearl-grey and viscous” (28). Fish and aquatic animals can be found on almost every page, including lobsters, smelts, eels, blue crabs, starfish, dorado, sawfish, walrus, conches, dogfish, catfish, tuna, herring, painted turtles, and flying fish. They slither and dart through the many mariners’ legends told throughout the novel. They are cooked into sumptuous and mouth-watering dishes.

Toujours-Là (always there) is a crusty old barnacle, murderer of a cherished monkey (like the ape in the Baron Munodi’s ceiling), himself a survivor of an abused childhood and often inebriated. He tells many tales, including one of men “who drank toddies of liquid mercury, and who spat lead bullets” (80). He is also an initiator and he holds the secrets of the world—its truth and lies, its good and “evil beyond telling” (100). Eventually it is revealed that the infant Nini saw it all. In the boat he heard his mother’s violent argument her lover; he saw his strangled father’s face submerge beneath the sea. He remembers being pulled from his mother’s arms, watched as Odille and her lover were bludgeoned to death by the townsfolk intent on swift retribution. Later that night, his adoptive mother Rose pried open his fists to find clumps of his mothers black hair. Black and white, the colors of Odille’ hair and body, symbolize again the stages of Nigredo and Albedo. Toujours-Là explains how Odille could love his father’s murderer by returning to the primary tenets of Gnostic dualism, for love and death are closely linked—“Arm in arm, light and darkness dance upon the water” (101).