Rikki Ducornet
An Alchemy of Dreams and Desire
Phosphor In Dreamland
Following the tetralogy, Ducornet’s fifth novel, Phosphor in Dreamland, is concerned with light, the quintessence. [40] Its main character Phosphor arrives as a luminescent infant, so intrigued by the sun that his first word is why? (11). Born with a club-foot and crossed-eyed, Phosphor was abandoned on the doorstep of a melancholy scholar Fogginius—a quack healer and purveyor of ridiculous cures, who infuriates everyone within earshot with the most incessant and meaningless conversation. Fogginius is also an ornithologist and taxidermist. His hovel is stacked with the skins of dead animals. They live on the beautiful oval island of Birdland, a microcosm that Fogginius is futilely trying to quantify, although by the late sixteenth century, it is a paradise already lost. [41]
Many of the island’s animals are extinct, possibly even the mysterious Lôplôp, a magical bird with a haunting voice, which has not been seen in decades. This bird is a tribute to Max Ernst and his Loplop, a large anthropomorphic bird painted by the artist to represent his alter ego. Birdland’s Lôplôp had been hunted to near extinction by the island’s aboriginal inhabitants. They too were brutally murdered by a Spanish conquistador whose grandson, Señor Fango Fantasma, is the island’s current overlord. The novel is narrated by a scholar who is reconstructing the island’s history through clues found in its Museum of Natural History. Again the present and the past mirror each other. The narrator falls in love with Polly, a mysterious curator of natural history. Her illustrations (Ducornet’s, in fact) are reproduced, providing a glimpse of the island and its aboriginal treasures, including a black obsidian nature goddess named Amu-ma-mu.
Like so many tyrannical stepparents in these novels, Fogginius punishes the boy often, but when he locks Phosphor in a dark trunk, the inquisitive child discovers light coming through the key hole. Looking through with one eye he is able to focus his vision. This phenomena delights him and it precipitates his re-invention the camera obscura, his invention of the camera and the beginning of his life-long fascination with photography. In a further attempt to correct his doubled vision, Phosphor perfects another machine, the ocularscope, the world’s first stereoscopic camera, with which he takes three-dimensional photographs. He develops his trade in an alchemical laboratory filled with glasses vessels, retorts and a pressure cooker made of two conquistadors’ metal helmets soldered together (30-31). As opposed to the zoological massacres caused by Fogginius’s collecting, Phosphors’s photographs capture Birdland without killing anything. In his greed to control the entire island, Señor Fantasma employs Phosphor to record and thus capture its wonders. They set out on a journey to fix the volatile Birdland and its present inhabitants on silverized plates of glass.
Phosphor’s experiments mark again the recurring theme of photography in these novels as an alchemical tool and as the preserver of memory. In The Stain, the Exorcist wants to photograph all the world’s earth and its putrefaction. In The Fountains of Neptune, Nini’s father, like Eugène Atget, captures the last fleeting signs of his watery world and his photograph of Odille is Nini’s only tangible link to his mother’s memory. Also in that novel, like the foolish alchemical “Puffer,” Bottlenose dies futilely in a quest for gold and treasure that ends at the feet of a camera’s tripod. Charles Dodgson photographs the airy freedom of young girls dressed as winged angels. Phosphor’s three-dimensional photographs celebrate erotic sexual love. If the world is to be fixed and brought to light, then the evolution of this process is an alchemical one, “an attempt to seize and fix a universe in constant flux” (43), and it develops throughout all the elements from the quantifying of base matter to the alchemical fusion of lovers.
The novel’s female characters, Extravaganza and Cosima, rise above their fathers’ repression and learn to assert themselves. In contrast, the base, leaden characters die unenlightened. The criminal Yahoo Clay, a creature of the earth and “damned with rage” (27), never rises above unrefined primal matter. He becomes sick after drinking an elixir, because purifying alchemical processes don’t work unless the recipient is ready for transformation. He tortures insects and bludgeons to death the last remaining Lôplôp. Fogginius collapses as a pile of ashes, having been held together only by his incessant conversation.
Because of his love for Extravaganza, Phosphor begins to poetry. His first attempts are rather pedantic rhymes, but as his love grows, his poetry improves. Phosphor’s mature poems are sensually-charged descriptions of his desire and their love making. “Guided by love, informed by desire, the vision incandesces and the poems catch fire” (140). He finds himself through his love for her, like the alchemical couple who embrace in the vessel. If alchemy is an attempt to recreate the world and to discover in the microcosm the secrets of macrocosmic creation, then capturing the world through photography, poetry or the writing of a novel is an alchemical task, for “love offers the only intimation of eternity” (51).
