Fantastic Metropolis

The Jade Cabinet

Air is the element of the fourth novel, The Jade Cabinet, which tells the story of an imaginative Victorian child, Etheria, through the words of her younger sister, Memory. Both girls are educated by their father, Angus Sphery, an entomologist, in the nurturing surroundings of his vast library and natural history collections. His passion is a search for the language of Adam, that primal tongue “so powerful as to conjure the world of things” (10). To maintain Etheria’s angelic speech, he forbids any human language during her infancy and so she remains silent throughout the novel. The theme of air is carried by many references to insects, because so many have wings. Etheria herself is truly ethereal, “a creature of air and light” (41), “light-footed, gay, mercurial—an Ariel!” (65).

The girls also enjoy the frequent company of Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematician who wrote Alice’s Adventures Underground under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll. Dodgson is a photographer, like many characters in Ducornet’s novels. In recent years he has been vilified for taking nude photographs of pre-adolescent girls. The scandal erupted first during his lifetime, causing a cooling of his relationship with Mrs. Liddell, the “real” Alice’s mother, and a suppression of the images by his heirs after his death. But in her extensive research, Ducornet found nothing to indicate that he ever harmed the girls, and in fact all of them, including Alice, remembered him fondly and spoke only of happy memories of his company. Rather than condemning him as a pedophile, Ducornet portrays him as a friend of these young girls and perhaps a bit of a young girl himself, as he often signed his name Louisa Carolina. ^[39] Dodgson contributes much of the delight of the girls’ childhood, making them paper birds that float over steamy tea kettles and telling them magical stories.

The villain is Radulph Tubbs, a rich and unprincipled industrialist whose factories belch poisoned smoke throughout England. Tubbs pollutes and spoils everything he touches. Soon after meeting Etheria as a child, his desire to possess her is spawned. They eventually marry after Tubbs convinces her father to exchange her for a single piece of precious jade. One of Tubbs’ many money-making schemes is to pulverize acres of mummified ibises, the sacred bird of Thoth, the Egyptian god of magic and poetry, into powdered fertilizer. Tubbs destroys nature, first when he smashes the girls’ mother’s pet stick insect and later when he flattens Etheria’s only solace in her new existence—a damp, mossy, insect-infested garden completed with grotto—in order to create a cement parterre. True to her promise, Etheria leaves Tubbs for this act of desecration. Her spirit escapes containment. Etheria “dreamed of making herself lighter. 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” (74). She learns magic tricks from Feather, the butler, who serves as her Ariadne, producing a “gilded rope” (61), her golden thread to lead her out of the labyrinth and away from the minotaur Tubbs. She becomes such a proficient magician that one day she achieves her dream and literally disappears, remaining like the air, invisible.

Memory reconstructs the events of her sister’s tragic marriage using the tattered remains of her sister’s journal and Tubbs’ own memoirs which record his oppression of his wife, his sexual violence and his eventual remorse. As in The Fountains of Neptune, the story begins in the present and then folds back upon itself to recall the past, like the alchemical serpent, Ouroboros, biting his tail to symbolize cyclic renewal. The element air oversees transformations in the vessel, as gases rise and fall, often represented by birds in alchemical engravings. The rhythm of the story focuses partly on evolution of relationships, recalling a central axiom of alchemy, “solve et coagula,” to dissolve and coagulate. Tubb’s blustery hot air evaporates Etheria’s spirit. The larger he becomes the more her presence shrinks. His retribution arrives in the form an anorexic, air-eating, albino circus freak, the Hungerkünstler, named in tribute to Kafka’s short story. She grows to enormous proportions driven by greed and jealousy over her husband’s continued devotion to his former wife. Tubbs shrinks in turn, as if the equilibrium between the partners mirrors alchemical processes in which one substance increases as another decreases within sequential operations, as solids turn to gases and, conversely, the volatile becomes fixed.

Etheria escapes and preserves her freedom, although glimpses and sightings occur from time to time. She might even be the magician, trickster, and escape artist Zephyra, who in the midst of juggling glass spheres is murdered by the Hungerkünstler at the end of the novel. Clearly Etheria’s skills of evasion have served her again, for the body, when examined by Memory, has been replaced by an unknown man. For Tubbs, the narrative has been an alchemical process of self-discovery. Although he never finds Etheria, through his love for her he achieves a glimpse of transcendence.