The Plotinus

by Rikki Ducornet

Upon setting out for a morning walk with his knobby stick in hand, a young man is arrested by a robot called the Plotinus and abandoned in a cell where one beam of sunlight beckons through an air duct. Rapping his knuckles against the vent to relay his tale of woe in code, he recalls his lost love and their group’s forbidden activities; his readings in philosophy and the sciences; and sweet memories of freedom’s small pleasures. As the captive confronts his increasingly dire circumstances with rigorous optimism, the appearance of fantastical visitors and miraculous objects in his cell further blurs the line between hallucination and dystopian reality. Told with uncanny warmth and intellectual brio, The Plotinus is Rikki Ducornet’s most unforgettable story yet.

Genres: Fiction, Novella, Dystopia, Science Fiction, Adult, American, Literary Fiction

88 pages, Paperback

Published July 11, 2023

About the author

Rikki Ducornet (born Erika DeGre, April 19, 1943 in Canton, New York) is an American postmodernist, writer, poet, and artist.

Ducornet's father was a professor of sociology, and her mother hosted community-interest programs on radio and television. Ducornet grew up on the campus of Bard College in New York, earning a B.A. in Fine Arts from the same institution in 1964. While at Bard she met Robert Coover and Robert Kelly, two authors who shared Ducornet's fascination with metamorphosis and provided early models of how fiction might express this interest. In 1972 she moved to the Loire Valley in France with her then husband, Guy Ducornet. In 1988 she won a Bunting Institute fellowship at Radcliffe. In 1989 she moved back to North America after accepting a teaching position in the English Department at The University of Denver. In 2007, she replaced retired Dr. Ernest Gaines as Writer in Residence at the The University of Louisiana. In 2008, The American Academy of Arts and Letters conferred upon her one of the eight annual Academy Awards presented to writers.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The great psychedelic trip… The Plotinus… The mad dystopia… The dystopian madness… No need to draw a borderline…

There is a hum within my head as within a hive bereft of its queen. An angry hum. The companion of my solitude, it provides a white noise of a kind; it is like a broom. My anger is rooted in my losses.

The narrator is busted by a robot and put into a solitary cell, incommunicado… He befriends a hornet that came through an air vent… To him there is nothing left but remembrance of the past and visions…

At the time of my arrest, Fred’s was the only grocery left in the universe. Even then the place was more like a museum than a grocery. For example, it had cans of sardines that had fossilized, and a slice of Egyptian cheese over seven thousand years old.

The Plotinus is some type of an advanced robot… Robots and their stooges are now the new masters of the world…   

I recalled – as I do often – the last afternoon we spent together in his one room stacked with books and magazines – and heard a shattering coming from the street. Running to the window, we saw an absurd and altogether terrifying Plotinus, the size of a bus erect on its hind wheels, rolling our way, informing us that a time of unprecedented ferocity was upon us, that irrelevance was forever silenced, that our purposeless and insignificant bodies would never again clog the system; that lovers would no longer gaze into one another’s eyes; that the children of men would not be seen at play on the sidewalks, that the world would shine like polished steel; that the era of the Plotinus had begun.

Don’t be afraid, whatever happens, hornets will save mankind.

[Nathanimal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m really digging Ducornet’s recent writing, which describes a kind of trans- or post-human existence where all distinction between humanity and artificial life-forms is erased. Life, natural and built, is all considered together in a great protean welter of imagery. A bumptious police robot goes on rampages, clanking and hissing through narrow corridors. An entity called The Vector has priestly longings. In a world that is all artifice, either everything is alien or nothing is, and of course this is literary fiction, so it IS all artifice and none of it is. Ducornet’s strength, beyond her poetically baroque imagination, is her ability to locate the heart within the fantasia.

This one is quite dreamy. Text and images are rendered in the bluish tint of a Joseph Cornell film. There are cyanotype nature prints throughout, which have no direct relation to the story, but seem to emphasize the end of nature, the antiquated print process giving the nature imagery a feeling of being fossilized. And this is all in keeping with a world where the narrator’s knobby walking stick has been vaporized by a robocop, where one only sees the sunlight through the metal slats of an air vent, and the narrator's only real experience with other natural life forms is with the hornets that have colonized his cell and which look like armored robots themselves. His intimacy with his hornet-love, Smaragdos, is of course very alien but, for lack of any other intimacy, very genuine and reaching. I hope it works out for them. In the post-human future you’ll take what you can get, I guess.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best reminder on the market about the dangers of taking a walk with your ‘knobby stick.’

Just a lovely, lithe proto-eulogizing of the human species. Maaaah—fuck ‘em.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

While on a walk, he was grabbed off the footpath, arrested and locked in a cell. He hopes to be kindly treated by his jailer Plotinus, but this was rarely so. The slightly more caring Vector, however, often brought him treats. He spends his lonely days tapping on the vents until a hornet appears and stings him.

“Told him that her sting….is like the ringing of a bell…a feeling I have not felt for many months or longer; years, perhaps. Her sting's reverberations flood a body with light; they illumine the heart and mind….All I desire, I said to the Vector, is to witness such beauty each day….”

He saves the hornet a piece of honeycomb and then one day, near the vent, she begins to build a hive.

“Isolated and in this way concealed, I have vowed to continue my story as best I can, with the knowledge…that I am finite and reaching my limits. If it is true, as the sages say, that all that is below is the mirror of all that is above, then it could be said that nothing escapes concealment. Just as we cannot see the sacred face-to-face, so the sacred is incapable of seeing (and so recognizing) us. Yet, I persist in my thinking that if the Light is visible to us, then we despite our concealment- are visible to the Light.”

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

The planet is ruined. The wealthy colonize Mars. Those left behind on Earth (such as it is) are tyrannized by an oppressive regime whose enforcer is the titular Plotinus: A violent rolling robot, like Rosey from The Jetsons with heavy artillery and a despotic temper.

Our unnamed narrator is a prisoner, pummeled by The Plotinus and thrown into solitary confinement for venturing out one day with his knobby stick. He taps the words we are reading in morse code on a vent in his cell: remembrances of his love Beauty and the world as it once was. His rhythms become a kind of epicurean ode, and the tiny happenings or hallucinations that take place within his cell serve to bolster his fortitude in the face of an otherwise hopeless situation.

The Plotinus (Coffee House Press, 2023) is another admirably imaginative offering by author and artist Rikki Ducornet. According to Ducornet's bio, her work is animated by an interest in nature, Eros, tyranny, and the transcendent capacities of the creative imagination. The above summary should tell you something about the acrobatics of which that imagination is capable. What impresses is the way in which The Plotinus pulls off its quirks without descending into preciousness, and how its rather whimsical plot can engender in its reader sincere feelings of transcendence and hope...

Read the full review at Blathering Struldbrugs.

[endrju · Rating 2 out of 5]

Spooky October #4

Yeah, Ducornet is definitely not for me. I sort of feel cheated with these short hermetic texts because they do not offer enough of leverage to enter the world but give just enough to want to keep reading on. The patience does not pay off though, at least not in my case.

[Joshua]

Beautiful

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rikki Ducornet's The Plotinus is a marvelously imaginative tale of an imprisoned yet ironically still undeniably irrepressible narrator, whose existential liminality is "such stuff as dreams are made on."

[Ella Barrett-McGuinness · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not really into the post-human future.

[Nannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Plotinus is the first of Coffee House Press's NVLA series, which consists of novellas that "challenge and broaden the outer edges of storytelling." I knew, going in, that I would probably be very confused reading this, and I was right! I didn't even enjoy it for the first half, and I even considered DNF'ing it, but then somehow I got the hang of it—the story or the writing style or both—and the whole thing became so profound.

Content warnings:
- homophobia
- (what I guess could be read as, but I don't honestly think is) bestiality

Representation:
- I think this is inspired by Egypt?

On the surface, the book is about a young man who's arrested for going outside with his "knobby stick" by a robot called the plotinus and thrown into a cell where, as he awaits death, he tells his story in code by knocking on the air vent. As he grows more gaunt and malnourished, he discovers true beauty and almost religious-like ecstasy in the sight of the hornets who build a nest in the upper corner of his cell.

The story seems to take place in the far future, when robots have successfully staged their uprising over humanity and the less wealthy humans that haven't colonized Mars are either trapped in their houses or left to die in prisons. But things are left very open, very vague and I think personal interpretations go a long way.

By the end, I already found this to be very moving and deep. It's kind of the prime example of "show, don't tell." But then I realized that the title never tripped my note app's spellcheck, which got me curious. I searched "plotinus" and went down an enormous rabbit hole upon learning that there was a lot more to this story than I first thought. It stands on its own (and I was going to rate it five stars as it was!), but the additional background knowledge took everything to a completely new level.

"Plotinus" was actually a Greek philosopher from Roman Egypt (204-270 CE) who is thought of today as the founder of Neoplatonism, philosophy very influential during late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. His three fundamental principles include the One, the Intellect, and the Soul.

The One is a supreme, transcendent one, "prior to all existents," and Plotinus identifies this One with the principal of "Beauty" (Beauty being the narrator's lover in the novella as well as something associated with the hornet he's fascinated by). Plotinus also compares the One to light and the sun, and compares the Soul to the moon, whose light is merely a reflection of the sun. I wish I still had the book from the library, so that I could read it again paying much closer attention to the way the narrator remarks on the sunlight and moonlight that seeps into his cell from his one window. I think so many elements of this tiny novella could produce a number of essays of equal or longer pages (like Eros and sensuality/sexuality). This author is so intelligent, it boggles my mind!

But I'm not done, because the rabbit hole I went down that night was very, very deep.

Plotinus also wrote about true human happiness, which is beyond anything physical: "the human who has achieved happiness will not be bothered by sickness, discomfort, etc., as his focus is on the greatest things." He describes this as "henosis", unity with the One, and a state of tabula rasa. Looking back at the novella, this is very similar to what the narrator feels at the very ending when he looks upon the hornets.

This isn't a very long read (honestly, reading about the historical Plotinus will take longer), but the experience is incredibly meaningful. There's so many layers and ways to enjoy this story, I have no idea how Rikki Ducornet was able to craft this. I have to read what else she's written!

[LindaJ^ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update: I have not re-read but some reviews have brought it back to mind so I am now giving it a rating of 4 stars.

 
I cannot rate this book because while my Kindle says I finished it, I have no recollection of the book other than the cover looking familiar! Usually reading the book description or a review will bring a book back in toto, allowing a review, even if months have passed. Not so this time. The only thing that I think I remember is the hornets nest. It is short, so perhaps I'll give it a second read sometime.

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rikki Ducornet's new book is mired in the poetics of a lost and desolate soul, who vents his optimism by taking recourse to a single beam of sunlight coming inside his cell through an air vent. This is a masterpiece of descriptive prose, devoid of dialogues, but always dealing with the circumstances of the narrator through the lens of a weathered and well-rounded individual, always dealing with his dire circumstances with boundless optimism and a vision of freedom's small pleasures. His circumstances forbid him from interacting with any human form except for the occasional appearance of the robot, Plotinus, who had imprisoned him while setting out for a walk one morning with his knobby stick in hand, and also the caretaker Vector, who sometimes morphs into a beautiful and alluring female form, the Vectoress. Besides thinking of her and all the fantastical objects and visions that he has access to through the air vent- his only connection with the external world the narrator has little else to do except reminisce about his past life and his lost love. That this brief work is a bizarrely dystopian sort of fantasy is implicated by the first few pages which is no less a phantasmagoria when a robot imprisons you out of the blue for some offense that is in no way explicit throughout the novella.

This evening as I knuckle the vent I gaze at the nest all too aware that despite the fact that I had witnessed its construction from the beginning, still my understanding is an imperfect equivalent of realities within, for such realities are inaccessible (I have no ladder). At any moment now it will be inhabited, and I cannot help but entertain the childish fantasy of making myself so small as to enter the hive’s diminutive portal, perhaps even renting an apartment, one with a view of a public park, an orchard or a garden. Then could I live comfortably among the hornets, become acquainted with their ways, their expectations, and, as do they, subsist on stolen honey—a thought that has me salivating like a dog. As I convey these thoughts, a full Moon rises, and I cannot help but notice how the nest attracts the lunar light; it shimmers! If the nest is in the pathway of both the lunar and the solar rays, so then it is in the pathways of the stars, of the entire universe!

If the nest is saturated with light, then must it radiate light and so knowledge of a kind. With time I will within my mind see all that unfolds within the hive. (Or so I would like to think. I realize that there will be no way for me to assure that my assumptions are not simply phantasms.)
…

It is my conviction that the nest has a celestial dignity. If this is so, so it is for all things tangible and intangible.

Of all the fantastical objects that he was witness to there was this hornet, amber-complexioned and cerulean-eyed, that engages his attention more so than others. He becomes a close observer of her every movement and finally, when she builds a nest, he feels like being one with the family of the hornets- to experience life as they do. From halfway of the novel onwards, the vision of the narrator becomes increasingly hallucinatory as he dreams and has visions of the outside world mired in the dystopian reality of his situation.

[Andy Weston · Rating 5 out of 5]

Agitated and pressed for time, I grabbed the knobby stick - now long gone - that had for a time provided access to the woods (such as they were) and ran into the street unprepared for the inevitable encounter (such a dope!) with the Plotinus. A shriek later and my knobby stick was reduced to dust along with my shoes and socks, my coveralls - these losses accompanied by a blinding light, ear pain impossible to articulate, and my arrest.

So begins this tremendous short and powerful novel from Ducornet.
The narrator, just an ordinary guy, of this splendidly absurd tale has been imprisoned for the crime of being outside and in possession of a “knobby stick” whose imperfections arouse the suspicion of the militia programmed robot Plotinus. He is apprehended and thrown into a closet whose only light comes from a vent high above the door. Though attended by the Plotinus (bringing him stale food and issuing pointless regulations), he has another regular visitor, the seemingly naive Vector, who, “cloaked in his Ginza and treading air,” has called into wonder over the narrator’s own apparent unorthodoxy and his mission to become “a thing that knows nothing beyond what it is”.

The Plotinus, the Vector, and a hornet named Smaragdos, also in the cell, represent the vain pomposity of humankind. There’s a lot more in the 88 pages than there initially seems.

In the closet, the narrator is locked away from his true self, his story is hidden, or silenced. It comes as no surprise therefore, to hear that Ducornet’s art and poetry has recently been exhibited by Amnesty International, and focuses on the refugee crisis.

The novel takes place in a future that sees our planet as ruined, with the wealthy having moved to Mars.

The poor will inherit the earth. (Such as it is).

a protest banner proclaims.

Incarcerated indefinitely and seemingly without hope, the narrator does find a way to tell his story though, and incredibly it is with humour and ambition.
This is an incredible piece of writing in which the desperation and optimism bounce off each other in such a way that it will stick in the mind for a long time.

Here’s a clip as the narrator, faced with yet another unappetising item of food, yearns after..

Fred’s most famous sandwich..
The Trideck’s framework is pickles and Swiss, mango, and a subtle allusion to butter. Expect an encounter with grilled meats, rice vinegar, lettuce, lime, fish sauce, followed by a brazen intrusion of hummus, felafel, and lamb sausage. Coleslaw, mayo, and fried oysters command the centre; egg salad and sliced tomato announce the finish. The bread that holds it is riddled with lunar hollow sand depths all pooled with tahini.

[Lola · Rating 5 out of 5]

📚 Seorang pemuda ditangkap oleh sebuah robot bernama Plotinus saat sedang berjalan pagi. Dia dibuang ke dlm sel kecil dgn hanya satu sinar matahari yg masuk melalui lubang udara. 

Dlm selnya, dia mengenang cinta yg hilang, kegiatan terlarang yg pernah dilakukan kelompoknya, serta pemikirannya tentang filsafat & ilmu pengetahuan. 

Meski terjebak dlm situasi yg sulit, pemuda ini tetap optimis. Namun, saat dia mulai melihat pengunjung² aneh & benda² ajaib muncul di dlm selnya, dia bingung: 

”Apakah semua itu nyata atau hanya halusinasi?”

🕵️‍♀️ Novel ini menampilkan kekhawatiran terhadap kontrol & penindasan oleh penguasa yg sering kali ditemukan dlm masyarakat modern 😒 Robot Plotinus & penahanan tanpa alasan yg jelas menggambarkan situasi di mana kekuasaan dpt menekan kebebasan rakyat 😒

Selain itu, novel ini jg bisa dilihat sbg kritik terhadap masyarakat yg semakin kehilangan sisi kemanusiaannya 😔 Dalam kondisi ini, mengingatkan pada bagaimana teknologi & kekuasaan dpt digunakan utk mengontrol diri kita sendiri 😔

Meskipun tokoh utama berada dlm situasi yg sgt terbatas, tp dia tetap berjuang utk menemukan kebebasan dlm pikirannya & terus berharap 💪

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Rikki keeps releasing short experimental, post-Consumerist dystopian novellas, steeped in imagery that evokes nostalgic aesthetics, I will keep rating them 5 stars. A nice accompaniment to Trafik. Highly recommended, though this one is a bit weird. Imagine a person imprisoned in a monotone cell, reading bars of light through a vent and knocking at it as a form of muted communication to unseen spirits, haunted by a wasp, amid ill-defined beings like the Vectoress and the Plotinus, judged, crazed, self-destructive, but suffused with a rapturous aura of resplendence amid incomprehension, chaos in cahoots with creativity.

[Jay Sandover · Rating 5 out of 5]

This sleek novella was published last month by Coffee House Press as part of their new NVLA series. The tag line for the series is an artistic playground where authors challenge and broaden the outer edges of storytelling. This novella is one of the first two in the series, and it is a superb start.

Read the rest on my blog here

[Sean Carroll · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange! Looping, fractured story, hints at a far greater world beyond the protagonist's cell, and an unreliable narrator. With surreal elements and underlying themes about the human condition, very interesting and would be interested in reading a third book by this author even if it wasn't my favorite (I have also read Trafik by Ducornet).

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first Ducornet is unlike anything I've ever read, and I love that. It's my kind of weird with the added bonus of her beautiful poetic prose: flowery, to be sure, but not purple, with an emphasis on winged insects and both the macro and microcosms in all their stupifying splendor as only our Lord, "The Unmoved Mover" could create.

[TheManInThePlanet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange little novella about an unnamed narrator in some kind of barren cell in a vague dystopia far off in the future. Alien language and melancholy tone throughout, although the narrator remains romantic and upbeat despite their utter calamity.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange narrative from a strange narrator, with beautiful hornets and unclear connections.

[Zach Werbalowsky]

read this in a fever dream so I can't rate it since I don't know what happened but I liked the prose

[Marvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wonder what I just read.

[Dan Cassino · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange, beautiful little book that unfolds slowly. A surreal, weird [complementary] sci-fi meditation on beauty.

[Nathaniel Raymond]

Beautiful and bizarre story. An odd parable, very much enjoyed it.

[nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a beautiful little book that ultimately made me happy

[Oscreads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange book!

[Conor McGarvey · Rating 4 out of 5]

need to get my hands on a trideck sandwich from fred’s

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review to follow

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

THANK YOU NATHANIMAL FOR THE EXCELLENT RECOMMENDATION.