Burning Love

“A fan is like the thighs of a woman: It opens and closes. A good fan opens with a flick of the wrist. It produces its own weather--a breeze not so strong as to muss the hair.” With just such a flick of the wrist, Rikki Ducornet opens her latest novel, “The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition.” But this simple introduction to craft, given by an 18th century Parisian fan-maker on trial before the Comite of the French Revolution, is just the first draft of a gloriously perfumed novel. For as it unfolds, “The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition” proves to be one of the most vigorous celebrations of the imagination, written by an artisan of uncommon talent.

Gabrielle, the fan-maker in question, has been accused of crimes against the revolution by Restif de la Bretonne (the historical antagonist of the infamous Marquis de Sade and author of a rebuttal, titled “Anti-Justine,” to Sade’s best-known novel). These crimes range from carrying on a lesbian relationship with the illiterate playwright Olympe de Gouges to carrying on a literary relationship with the 60-year-old Marquis himself.

Gabrielle is the proprietress of a fan-making establishment, the Red Swan, which specializes “in eccentricities, in artificial magic--such as anamorphic erotica--and imaginary landscapes. . . . [T]here is no other atelier in Paris where you may buy a fan painted with the heraldic jaguar of the New World, which appears to the initiated in narcotic dreams.” And there is no other atelier that the Marquis can entrust with a commission involving a spaniel and several women cavorting au naturel around his maypole.

Now, however, with Robespierre in power, the Marquis is imprisoned within sight and sound of the guillotine. From prison he writes to Gabrielle, each letter displaying a different Frankish facet of Sade’s taste and origins.

There is the hungry Sade raised on a diet of Gargantua, dreaming Rabelaisian lists of sausages of the imagination, from Frankfurtenwurste to boudin blanc and “sausage made from calf’s mesentery.” There is the heretical Sade fantasizing a blasphemous feast: “A pope, massaged by thirty sturdy choirboys for six months and rubbed down daily with salt, fed on soup made of milk, thyme, honey, and buttered toast, is roasted in the classic manner stuffed with a hachis de cardinal and served with the truffled liver of a Jesuit and a souffle d’abbesse. The whole generously peppered and garnished with capers.” And there are the political Sade, the satirical Sade, the student of Gulliver: “The world is brimming with plaster replicas, and the point is to smash them to bits, to create an upheaval so acute it cannot be anticipated or resisted. I am after Vertigo--I am wanting a world in which the Forbidden Fruit is ascendant and rises just as the Old Laws fall--yes! Even the Law of Gravity.”

In an age when it was a long, long way from Brumaire to Thermidor, there is certainly no Politically Correct Sade. Although “The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition” might encourage some unfamiliar readers to brave the unique garden of earthly horrors of Sade’s “Justine,” Ducornet makes no attempt to re-porcelain the chamber pot. The flagellations and flatulations that are the meat and potatoes of Sodom color the Marquis’ revolutionary message: “Sade had dared take the imagination’s darkest path,” Gabrielle tells the Comite. “I thought that if I could follow that path with my own mind, I would come to understand the forces that rage about us, the terror that, even in times of peace, is always a possibility.”

For Ducornet, as for her heroine, the real enemy is not “imagination’s darkest path” but those who would kill imagination itself. And sure enough, the focus of the Comite’s inquisition appears to be more literary than pornographic, a relic from an earlier inquisition.

*

The Comite, during her inquisition, displays fragments of a novel that Gabrielle and the Marquis composed in partnership. It tells of the exploits of the historical Bishop Landa sent by the Spanish crown as Inquisitor to the Yucatan in 1562, on a mission to empty the native jungles of gold and fill the native souls with Christianity. In the course of his mission, Gabrielle and the Marquis write, Landa stopped at nothing in his zeal to convert the heathens and exorcise their devils. His chief antagonist in his drama of proselytization was the scribe of the village of Mani, a man named Kukum, whose maps were marked with sacred wells and planted fields and cities real and imagined--a precursor, Jorge Luis Borges himself might have said, to Borges himself. There is a powerful magic to Kukum’s writings and his gods, “the demons Chak, Ek Chuah, Ix Chel, Itzamna. Above all, Itzamna--Lizard House--he who invented writing. He is their favorite, and when Landa has their hellish books stacked together with kindling and set on fire, the pagans shriek as though their bodies are being torn with hot pincers.”

Neither the burning of the books nor the torture of Kukum himself, an ecclesiastical act no less horrible than the tortures of “Justine,” can free Landa from the horrors that Sade and Gabrielle visit upon him in their imagination. Sade’s pen, Gabrielle tells the Comite in defense, is “as brutal as the world burning around us. Sade offers a mirror. I dare you to have the courage to gaze into it.” But Sade’s pen cannot free her from the guillotine. “The idea of the Creator,” the Comite tells Gabrielle with only a soupcon of irony, “has, since the Revolution, undergone a certain beneficial evolution. . . . But our understanding of Him, intact, is treated here with what can only be called perversity, a . . . perverse impiety.”

But the real coup of the novel comes in the second half, once the fan-maker’s inquisition is over. The voice now belongs to Sade, alone with the few letters of Gabrielle’s he has preserved in captivity. And in that magnificent voice, he mourns the loss of his fan-maker. “Whose letters,” he weeps, “perfumed with a maddening mix of varnish, rosewater, and rabbit-skin glue will enable me to overcome my nightly terrors?”

He is no longer Sade the libertine, Sade the revolutionary, Sade the sadist but Sade the solitary. He conjures up the image of his companion in words in the same way that their most beautiful creation, the Yucatan widow of Kukum, the scribe of Mani, in the “deepest of caves far beneath Mani . . . burns incense to her husband’s special gods: Itzamna--the god of writing--and old, old Pawahtun. And she burns incense to the god of corn. For are not books like bread? Do they not nourish our spirits just as corn feeds our bodies?”

Two hundred years after the Revolution, 100 years after the birth of Borges, despite the scars that deists and dictators have left on the body of literature, despite the wars that Comites and PTAs still wage on the imagination, Ducornet is one of the votaresses who keeps the flame alive by imagining new fires. Although her poetry and stories and novels (including the National Book Critics Circle Award-nominated “The Jade Cabinet”) are treasured by a vocal choir of devotees, this sexy, smart and narcotic book ought to create yet another corps of fans.