Rikki Ducornet is the author of eight novels, three collections of short fiction, a book of essays and five books of poetry, and has been honored twice by the Lannan Foundation. She has received the Bard College Arts and Letters Award and an Academy Award in Literature. She is also an accomplished visual artist, whose work has been exhibited widely. She has illustrated books by Jorge Luis Borges, Forrest Gander, Kate Bernheimer, and Anne Waldman, among others. Her most recent novel, “Netsuke,” published in 2011 by Coffee House Press, is a fast-paced and unsettling portrait of a corrupt psychoanalyst, who uses his power and his personal charisma to seduce his patients. I had the pleasure of speaking with Ms. Ducornet when she came to Mills College as part of the Contemporary Writers Series.
JENNIFER FRANKLIN: Would you characterize any aspect of your process as obsessive? How do these obsessions fuel the process, if, in fact, they do?
I love to write, but the process doesn’t feel obsessive so much as driven by an irresistible energy. I don’t like the idea of being owned by anything, above all my own ‘issues!’ This recent book, Netsuke, was a place to confront and examine obsessive behavior, to articulate and deconstruct it. The book was informed by a particular experience and my desire to understand it—but the examination of abusive authority is nothing new; my own ongoing inquiry into the problem of evil. I’ve written about the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the many forms dogmatic thinking takes within families and societies. Obsession interests me because it speaks to an incapacity to think clearly; obsession rules the mind in other words.
Would you say writing is a way out of that?
A way out, yes: obsessive thinking, irrational thinking is visible on the page. Writing about it is a way of understanding its nature and power.
Netsuke, in particular, has quite an obsessive main character.
Yes. He is totally taken with abusive sexual power. In this way, he is like de Sade who is a central figure in another novel, The Fountains of Neptune. Perhaps the most obsessive of all is the French Nazi in Entering Fire, who is both terrifying and absurd as he has no distance from himself whatsoever! He is totally swept up in an obsessive rage against everyone and everything. He longs for a planet that would be completely flat and inhabited by people with perfectly round heads!
These are people that are ruled by certain ideas, certain goals, maybe?
When the ends justify the means you get into very scary territory!
Where do you think these, let’s call them interests, even passions…
Fascinations.
Fascinations. You were saying that for Netsuke, it was a collection of musings based on personal experience. Where do these musings intersect with real life? Do they interfere with real life?
Well, they are informed by real life. I think for the writer, for the creative artist, the ongoing work is very much at the heart of living deeply, deeply in the moment. Which we all try to do as much as we can—to be fully alive in the wondrous, mutable, mysterious place of the real. In my experience, the book I am writing chooses its own trajectory; writing is a process of revelation. The book makes its demands, the most imperious being to be a lot smarter than I am. So I do a great deal of research as I write and this is exciting; it is enabling—it brings kindling to the book’s fire. When I was finishing my first novel, The Stain, I became so swept up in the book’s energy that I did begin to work obsessively. So I cut back to a maximum of four to five hours a day—else I put my family life and all the rest at risk. It’s an important question you are asking because one must find a balance and not allow one aspect of one’s life to become a sort of mania!
It takes a tremendous amount of discipline.
Initially, it took discipline. But I’m lucky; so many writers need the discipline to work more, not less.
I wanted to talk a little bit, dive into Netsuke, and talk about your psychoanalyst. I want to call him your main character, but it’s difficult to call him your protagonist. Which are you comfortable with?
Either one.
So he describes moments in time, that he calls ‘interstices,’ where he’s superhuman and out of the real, accountable to no moral codes. Is that a fair characterization?
Yes. That’s it exactly. In the interstices, he lives like a god. He’s living a fantasy, it’s his ‘reality,’ but it’s crazy; it’s not sustainable—and he’s hurting people.
It’s a way he’s sort of categorizing.
Exactly. Attempting to put the ‘real’ world into boxes.
He’s compartmentalizing
So his marriage is less and less ‘real’ and his over the top sexual life is taking over; the fantasy of being a god is pushing him and all those around him ever closer to the edge.
I was wondering where you came up with that idea for him. I know that a theme throughout your work is myth and magic and transformation, and I’m wondering how those themes play into this idea. This character becomes his own mega version of himself. What was the genesis of that?
I have known a number of such people, two were psychoanalysts. This overblown ego is a risk for those in the profession. They are fascinated by neurotic people, they see themselves in their patient’s dilemmas, and they are in a position of real power. It’s seductive. They begin to see themselves as very special and unique, and they begin to write their own rules. The patients go along with this because it is seductive to enter into a mythical place. To think you are a ‘chosen’ one…breaking the rules!
Is it always connected to this narcissistic personality, this god time, these moments of super-reality? Or is it something a more balanced person can access for any good reason? Or do you think it’s always a product of someone who’s a bit mad?
I suppose maybe all people have their moments, their narcissistic moments more or less, and if you’re a healthy person you pull out and you think, God’s sakes! What was I thinking?
And recover.
(Laughs) You recover. And you might offer up an apology…But the other aspect of this book is that it’s clear if implied, that the analyst is himself a deeply wounded man. When the book begins he’s already in deep, in dark water; madness is taking hold.
You talk a lot about this idea of the fever dream. When you talk about writing a book, you talk about being yourself in a fever dream. You talk about your characters being in a fever dream. The analyst is in something of a trance state, he puts himself there. Then also the reader gets swept up in the world of the book and is herself entranced by it. So I wanted to talk to you about trance states, and what is special about them, and what is possible? There seems to be this possibility, and maybe that relates to the interstices.
Thank you; I wrote that book in a species of trance—at least it seemed so; it was like entering into a storm. A rupture is about to take place in the lives of the characters; the dark heart of things will be revealed and their world will collapse. I am interested in rupture as a place of dark energy, dark knowledge. For example Almodovar’s film A Bad Education, in which a child is betrayed by a priest. The moment that happens, the film goes black. It’s a stunning and unforgettable moment. Innocence is lost, the Edenic place we see at the film’s start is irretrievably lost, and the filmmaker plunges us into darkness. It’s interesting that you ask about the trance, the fever dream because you have picked up on the nature of this work. All my books are precipitated by a kind of rupture, an extreme shift of focus. They acquire their own energy and weather, and the characters all have imperious voices. They demand to be heard. I think many novelists feel that they are somehow the vehicle for these imperious voices! But I am not speaking about madness! It’s something else. Simply the imagination gathering heat and momentum. We are, after all, wired to tell stories; it’s a function of our species!
I love that idea. It’s almost like a possession.
It is something like a possession! One is the vehicle for the voice, a world unfolds; one must assure that it holds together, is cohesive; that it’s consistent; one needs to do the research and if one is fracturing the facts, one needs to have a good reason. I like to work within the interstices where there is much room for the imagination. Such as Sade in prison writing an imaginary book. But I knew Sade well by the time the book took off, and I knew his world; I knew what his Paris looked like and smelled and sounded like; I knew what sorts of treats his friends brought to him in prison; I knew what he saw from his window; and I also knew the world of the Spanish Inquisition in Mexico—which is the world he was writing about in my book within the book. When one is writing about the horrors of the French Revolution, the Holocaust, the Inquisition, one is following a dark path that needs illumination. When Septimus de Bergerac, the French Nazi in my book Entering Fire, demanded a book of his own, I was living in France and had discovered that France was plagued by antisemitism; there was (and still is; this is an ongoing threat to democracy everywhere as you know) much irrational fear of Africans, Muslims and Gypsies, and all this informed Septimus’ voice. It was both exhilarating to lay such filthy nonsense bare but it was also taxing; the research was taxing, and the knowledge that just a few miles away there had been a concentration camp for itinerants who were sent to the death camps.
So, on the one hand, I was aware of the energy released in the exploration of such darkness and my own deepening understanding of the complex issues involved, and of my own vulnerability—being so close to such harrowing material on a daily basis. In other words, I was on the twinned trajectory you evoke: the upward motion of accumulating knowledge and the book’s own gathering momentum and the downward pull of the horrors of human madness. Writing Netsuke was similar; both books are dark fever dreams. Entering Fire took 18 months of daily writing; Netsuke just three weeks, with a final week of ‘polishing by the moon.’ It could have been a much larger book, but when it was ‘done’ I thought: Here it is. It’s very much its own animal.
You were just talking about research and having a fever dream, or the character choosing you and then finding the research after that. How are you able to link and keep the same voice when you’re going through the books and the research for the story?
It’s a mysterious process. Septimus’ voice was strong; I’d heard it in the streets. To be fully embraced by Sade, I read and reread all those terrifying books and I read his letters. The distinction between Sade’s monster characters—the lethally corrupt noblemen, magistrates, bishops, bankers, etc.—and Sade’s own voice became clear. He was messed up and not a particularly savory character but he was a moral philosopher, perhaps a great one, and he was an 18th-century dandy: witty, elegant, and very funny. He thrived on paradox. We became fully acquainted. Conspirators. When I was writing Netsuke, I counted on the vocabulary I knew—that of contemporary psychoanalysts; I already had a vast amount of reading under my belt, everything from Freud to Alice Miller, passing by Groddeck and Ferenczi, Jung, so the voice came without a hitch. It seems to me the characters’ voices all have a distinctive music and that writing a novel is a bit like writing a symphony. When Lewis Carroll showed up early on in The Jade Cabinet, his voice was already clear and dear to me—I had read and reread him all my life.
Have you thought about lucid dreaming? Because what you’re describing when you talk about your process seems to be like lucid dreaming in the sense that you are in control of it still. You decide you’re going to read everything that the Marquis de Sade wrote, as well as his letters, but then limit yourself to this five hour a day work period and maintain this balance between family and relationships and the work, the art. It seems that you’re very much in control of this dream. That it’s a dream, it’s a dream state, and yet the reigns never leave your hand. Would you say that that’s true?
Yes. The intuitive and pragmatic intelligence are in sync. I think that over time a writer develops this capacity: to write rigorously and imaginatively simultaneously. It’s like developing a special set of muscles. And I do think that if I say something like ‘fever dream’ to describe what the process feels like, it is because the mysterious place within the mind that engenders books is very like the place that engenders dreams—both are rooted in the wellspring of the unconscious. It is essential that the access to this wellspring is unimpeded. In our culture the imagination is seen as subversive, a childish thing, self-indulgent and so on; the dreamy child is given a hard time. But the imagination is the most precious thing we have; it is essential to the fulfillment of our destinies. It is the expression of the life force, the breath of Eros.
