Rikki Ducornet
An Alchemy of Dreams and Desire
The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition
The suppression of eroticism, the destruction of nature, and the brutal erasure of native cultures are themes to which Ducornet returns in her most recent novel, The Fan Maker’s Inquisition. [42] In the midst of the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, Gabrielle, a beautiful young fan maker, is being interrogated by the Comité de Surveillance. Her crime is continuing to make objects of beauty—exquisite fans with pierced ivory panaches, silk taffeta faces and painted erotic scenes, revealed and concealed with a snap of the wrist. An incriminating manuscript has also been discovered that links Gabrielle to the Marquis de Sade, now incarcerated and stripped of all his former luxuries.
He and Gabrielle met in happier days when her fans were renowned throughout Paris for their inventiveness and seductive power. Their friendship survives his arrest and she brings him paper, pens and chocolate, drink of the Mayan kings, to ease his despondency and to nourish his soul and body. Prison is a term for the alchemical vessel and imprisonment recurs as a theme throughout the novel. To keep his mind vital, they decide to write together the story of archbishop Landa, the Spanish conquistador who slaughtered the aboriginal inhabitants of the Yucatán and systematically destroyed their language, art and culture. As a child, Sade had been abused by his Jesuit teacher (37), and his imagination was enflamed by their engravings of tortures on the inhabitants of the New World. [43] Both worlds are caught in the vice grip of violence. Still, flashes of artistic and natural beauty sparkle though the rivers of blood.
This tale is combustible, like one of Gabrille’s fans treated with “a volatile poison like sulphur” that ignites with a tear (32). Throughout, the stage of Nigredo is evoked along with its putrefaction—“a stench of sulphur” (65), human bones, burning books, putrefying “bodies black with flies” (79) and a fish so decayed that it eventually collapses. Languishing in his cell, Sade questions the purpose of so much human suffering:
SOLVITE CORPOREA ET coagulate spiritum
IF, AS SOME think, Nature needs to coagulate, corrupt, and dissolve in order to renew Herself, than shall I, having rotted away, be born again? Will I, after so much suffering, and with the help of a sound digestion and the philosophical fire, become perfect? Or simply more corrupt? You see: Suffering makes the spirit mean. It impoverishes the heart (119-120).
The operations suggested here are those of separation and dissolution. Sade is consumed by fear of turning opaque, into mud. “I am in a chronic state of eclipse. If I could, I would choose to be… water-clear! Chemically pure: lucent, refractive, prismatic” (120). He wonders if his own dark visions have infected the world and caused the endless bloodletting at the guillotine that he observes through his prison window (16). Still, he can muster a sardonic gloss on one of the most famous axioms of Hermes Trismegistus: “’WHAT IS BELOW is like what is above, and what is above is like what is below,’ Except tighter” (178).
There is little hope in this bleak world. Sexual coupling is fleeting, captured only in memory, quick as the flashing erotic scenes on a collapsing fan. Gabrielle’s lover, Olympe de Gouges, is a self-educated playwright. She is also in prison, arrested for the crime of loving a woman, for asserting women’s rights and for supporting the abolishment of slavery. Even in the Yucatán, the Maya mapmaker Kukum is imprisoned and separated from his wife, a primeval Adam and Eve barred from Paradise. Despite these separations, the male and female characters work together, like the alchemical couple in the Mutus Liber, to create (and to hide and preserve in the Yucatán) a precious book. This collaboration between the sexes is reinforced by the novel’s structure. Like a two-sided fan, correspondences and reversals of themes unfold in the book between the sixteenth century Yucatán and late eighteenth century France.
