The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Word "Desire" by Rikki Ducornet
Steve Tomasula

Rikki Ducornet. The Word “Desire.” Henry Holt, 1997. 193 pp. $22.00.

As with The Fountains of Neptune and her other acclaimed novels, Rikki Ducornet’s new story collection is a crystal-work of poetic dimensions. The twelve stories contained here are so organically shaped that they seem to be made of molecules, not words. They range across North Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas at different historical periods and with an ambition no less than to limn “desire” as “a sacred text that has been copied out again and again by a fallible scribe.”
In fact, each story might be thought of as an unveiling of desire’s multifarious nature. In “Rosevine” the scribe is in the form of a boy, the desire a pristine world suggested by seashells. “The Chess Set of Ivory” undercuts the Osiris myth by allowing its teller to walk in on his own wife dancing nude with another man. Desire as destroyer/animator; core mythology; water, earth, light—especially light, the elemental imagery that is Ducornet’s signature—forces discussion of the book into an antiquated vocabulary.
Reading it, we feel, like the Mexican priest in “The Foxed Mirror,” that we are looking at ourselves/desire through a dark mirror. The Freudian dichotomy of sex and death that informs “The Neurosis of Containment” becomes simply a modernist formulation of something eternal, something people have always copied out in their idiosyncratic hand. The penultimate story, “Opium,” centers on a dying pope fed on breast milk and gold. It ends with a collage of violence wrought by the word desire when conceived as a noun: holy wars, murder; a historical sweep that could be the book’s epiphany. But a final, extremely personal story serves as a coda that, like The Divine Comedy, harmonizes the desire of the self with the desire that moves history, indeed all humanity. A sublime achievement. [Steve Tomasula]