Description

An edited transcript of this interview appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1998, Volume 18, Number 3, maintained online by the Dalkey Archive Press. Sinda Gregory asks what books Ducornet read as a child. The author says Alice in Wonderland, books on archaeology, and others. Her father was a social philosopher and a Cuban and her grandmother told stories about Havana. She found Max Ernst and Alfred Jarry, “and a whole world opened up to me” and she “oved Cocteau as a very young child. She married artist Guy Ducornet, also interested in surrealism. Her first show was in Algeria because her husband was involved in the Caisse Centrale de Coopération Économique there. Gregory asks about the influence of fairy tales, and Ducornet says she grew up in a “world imbued with magic” at Bard College. The author wanted to explore the concept of “the ogress." The author says that racist speech inspired her to write about “the fire of the Holocaust.” Ducornet talks about Septimus, how she does not “plan scenes,” and about how one character “metamorphoses” into others. She finally began to feel Jewish while in France, and felt “physically threatened.” McCaffery and Ducornet discuss Lewis Carroll, and the current recovered memory controversy. They talk about the epigraph to The Stain, a gnostic prayer. Next, McCaffery asks about Ducornet’s references to food and eating, and she says she loves food as part of the natural world. She is fascinated by the figure of Kali. McCaffery and Ducornet discuss themes and she says a book is dedicated to her father, who was a war-gamer. She discusses her belief that “freedom is meaningless without responsibility.” The last side starts with Gregory talking about how Ducornet is “unattached to linearity.” McCaffery asks if Ducornet wants to mention other authors. She responds with a list that begins with remarks about William Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck, all “major in the library of marvels.” McCaffery names Jose Donoso, and Ducornet says she met him. McCaffery asks about “the new book,” and they discuss (Phosphor in Dreamland, 1995).