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Online Extra
What's the Story?
Reading Anna Kavan's Ice
L.
Timmel Duchamp
Anna Kavan's Ice
is a novel of relentless, evanescent beauty that depicts a world
in which two explicitly linked forms of violence dominate and
inexorably and insanely destroy it. First published in 1967,
on the eve of the second wave of feminism, Ice has never
been regarded as a significant work of proto-feminist literature,
although scholars occasionally include it on lists of sf by
women written before the major works of feminist sf burst onto
the scene in the 1970s. The novel's surrealist form demands
a different sort of reading than that of science fiction driven
by narrative causality, but the text's obsessive insistence
on linking the global political violence of the Cold War with
the threateningly lethal sexual objectification of Woman and
depicting them as two poles of the same suicidal collective
will to destroy life makes Ice an interesting feminist
literary experiment.
The novel offers a story
of compulsive, anal-sadistic pursuit set in a world in which
ice is slowly but inexorably taking over the planet. According
to the narrator, "the defenseless earth could only lie waiting
for its destruction, either by avalanches of ice, or by chain-explosions
which would go on and on, eventually transforming it into a
nebula, its very substance disintegrated" (123). The narrator
attributes this looming annihilation of the world to "the collective
death-wish, the fatal impulse of self-destruction"(123). Of
"the girl," the novel's chief human victim and the object of
pursuit, the narrator remarks that "the disintegration could
be observed. She grew thinner and paler, more transparent, ghostlike.
It was interesting to watch"(113).
The novel's characters are
not personalities but archetypal figures in a pattern that is
repeated synchronically throughout the narrative, points mapping
a relation the narrator presents as inescapable, in which each
figure is constituted by its relation with the other two. The
male narrator claims that "the girl" is "at the centre,
not knowing she was encircled, while we advanced towards her
from different sides, I from one point, he from another, and
then the ice. . ."(137) But it is the pattern that is central
and key; "the girl" is simply a role: "Her part was to suffer;
that was known and accepted"(148). The narrator's role is to
alternate his compulsive pursuit and possession of "the girl"
with the exercise of political violence (whether that of delivering
effective propaganda or fighting as a mercenary in the pay of
the West) while daydreaming about another world, in which gentle
lemurs -- "symbols of life as it could be on earth, if man's
destructiveness, violence, and cruelty were eliminated"
(57) -- sing beautiful songs and the world is "infinitely alive,"
a world the narrator says he must reject because he is "committed
to violence and must keep to [his] pattern"(124). The third
figure in the pattern, "the warden," is the narrator's worst,
most psychologically grandiose self. The warden exercises power
with the same ruthlessness characteristic of the narrator, but
has greater power and control over the world (and "the girl")
than does the narrator. Although the narrator at times regards
the warden as his rival, he more often identifies with him:
It was clear
that he regarded her as his property. I considered that she
belonged to me. Between the two of us she was reduced to nothing;
her only function might have been to link us together. His face
wore the look of extreme arrogance which always repelled me.
Yet I suddenly felt an indescribable affinity with him, a sort
of blood-contact, generating confusion, so that I began to wonder
if there were two of us.(76-77)
"The girl," significantly,
regards the narrator and the warden as virtually indistinguishable.
The narrator describes one of the episodes in which he tries
to get "the girl" to go away with him (away from the warden)
and notes that "the girl" asks why she should. "She sounded
astonished. 'There's no difference -- '"(65)
"The girl" is repeatedly
designated by a few key details. "Her face wore its victim's
look, which was of course psychological, the result of injuries
she had received in childhood; I saw it as the faintest possible
hint of bruising in the extremely delicate, fine, white skin
in the region of eyes and mouth"(16). She is thin and pale
and has silver hair. Kavan felt that she, too, had "suffered
injuries in childhood," had been bullied and "weakened
by the mother who for years had persistently crushed [her will]
into submission"(36). And at the time she wrote this novel,
she was herself thin and pale and had silver hair. This figure
of "the girl" recurs often in Kavan's fiction, though usually
as a character with depth rather than a flat point on a map.
As early as 1946 Kavan suggested in a review she wrote for Horizon
that "love has been degraded from the form-and-beauty fixation
and reduced to the possessive stage"(Callard, 87). In Ice,
however, the narrative places emphasis not on the fact of the
girl's brutalization and suffering, but on the pattern itself,
the pattern that apparently constitutes "the girl." Significantly,
the narrator tells us that "the girl" loathes and fears
the songs of the lemurs that are symbols of a world without
cruelty and violence; the narrative thus recognizes that "the
girl" is constituted by cruelty and violence -- and thus
must also, like the narrator, reject a world in which they have
no place.
This shift in emphasis strikes
me as a breakthrough for Kavan, suggesting that she had ceased
to search the particular individual psychologies of her characters
for the answer to what she had come to see as a pathological
pattern of sexual and social politics. She writes, in a letter
to publisher Peter Owen
[T]he pursuit
is the book. The girl's importance as a victim should
be enough to justify the pursuing. I mean that peculiar attraction
between victim and victimizer, drawing two opposite poles together
until finally they are almost identified with one another. (Callard,
138)
Authors often bestow their
own names on their protagonists. But Anna Kavan's is the only
case I know of an author assuming the name of one of her protagonists.
When she was in her late thirties and had already published
six novels, Helen Ferguson (nee Woods), following a nervous
breakdown and a period of confinement in a clinic, legally changed
her name to Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her third novel,
Let Me Alone (1930), and another novel, Stranger Still
(1935). What would impel a writer to fling off both of the names
bestowed on her at birth and adopt the name she had put to the
characterization of an intelligent, promising proto-feminist
bullied and brutalized and finally transformed into an easily-dominated
victim? The author's deep alienation from her family might well
have lowered her resistance to changing her name, but why choose
that of such a damaged character? Brian Aldiss characterizes
this name-change as "full of masochism and pride"(139).
He and other critics suggest that "Kavan" was attractive
to her because of its proximity to the name "Kafka." I
tend to read the gesture as one of defiant self-creation.
Certainly many of the details
of the life story of the fictional Anna Kavan resemble those
of Helen Ferguson's early life, some of which, as mentioned
above, recur repeatedly in characters resembling the Anna Kavan
character. I find it significant that although a willed change
in her identity did not diminish her obsession with this figure
of damaged victimization, it did coincide with the creation
of a radically altered physical appearance as well as the emergence
of a markedly different literary style.
Gendered assumptions about
writers promote the presumption that when a woman makes use
of autobiographical material in her fiction she is in fact "simply"
-- confessionally -- describing herself. In fact, as both her
biographer D.A. Callard and Aldiss attest, the writer who called
herself Anna Kavan exercised a great deal of agency in her life,
despite her subjection to suicidal bouts of depression, the
chronic pain of a spinal disease, and a forty-year addiction
to heroin. (Contrary to the oft-repeated romantic assertion
that she killed herself with an intentional heroin overdose,
she actually died of heart disease.) In the course of her life
she wrote sixteen novels, innumerable short stories from which
five collections have so far been drawn, was a talented painter
(of "bizarre studies of tormented women"), worked for a
military research unit during World War II, and in 1950 established
and operated an architecture and design firm ("Kavan Properties").
She even had the determination and courage to pay a vanity press
to publish A Scarcity of Love when she could not get
a commercial publisher to buy it. Many fine writers, regardless
of gender, have been driven by a particular obsession in their
work; what matters, in such cases, is the creativity with which
they explore and elaborate on their obsession. The typical stories
told about such work tend to be gendered: when the writers are
men, they are assumed to be masterful and courageous, while
when they are women, they are assumed to be confessional and
not in full artistic control of their material. The case of
Anna Kavan (like many others) gives the lie to this gendered
story.
Kavan's Ice must,
I believe, be read as the work of an author not only in full
control of her imaginative exploration of traumatic life experience,
but also deliberately deploying experimental techniques. And
yet the insistent gendering of the story critics tell about
literary innovation in combination with Kavan's history of depression
and heroin addiction has repeatedly rendered Kavan's departures
from conventional prose styles an accident of her supposedly
abnormal mental status. As Aldiss notes with regret, to date
Anna Kavan is "a cult figure" and not yet recognized as
an author to be read seriously (143). Her novel, Sleep Has
His House (1947), for instance, is a gorgeous piece of surrealist
writing. But it is frequently described as a "memoir,Ó and reviews
praising it typically avoid acknowledging its stylistic innovation
by referring to her prose descriptions as "dreams so carefully
notated as paintings by Dal’ or de Chirico," or as "a fascinating
clinical casebook of her individual obsessions and the effects
of drugs on her imagination." But Sleep Has His House
is fiction, not memoir, and Kavan's brief untitled preface to
it declares that the novel "describes in the night-time language
certain stages in the development of one human being" (np).
Is this not a clear statement of aesthetic and intellectual
purpose? And yet even the blurbs on the back of the book insist
that it is a "childhood memoir," "a testament of remarkable
if feverish beauty" -- surrealistic in its imagery but
by implication not an actual work of surrealism. Rhys
Davies, who introduces one of Kavan's posthumous collections,
suggests that her writing (like her drug addiction) allowed
her "a retreat from the realistic, the tamed, the domestic worldÓ(xi)
-- a curious assertion, considering both how fiercely her fiction
grapples with the trauma of her early life and that in the same
essay he states "She wrote in a mirror. It imprisoned her"
(viii), which implies (as does the continual assumption by critics
that her fiction is really "memoir") that her fiction merely
reproduced her life rather than consciously and with superb
aesthetic control used her life as the material for making art.
Critic and experimental
writer Christine Brooke-Rose cites "the common experience, repeated
many times"
that while
any experiment with the language or the conventions of the novel
is at first automatically overlooked, this applies much more
consistently and durably to a woman experimenter than to a man.
A man experimenter, once he does attract attention, is innovative,
bold, original, and so on, in articles that show a knowledge
of development from precedents; a woman experimenter is just,
well, an experimenter, the term often slightly perjorative,
without further exploration. Indeed, any noticed or imagined
development from precedents is mentioned only for dismissal
as imitation.(4)[1]
On changing her name and
remaking herself after her breakdown, Anna Kavan ceased in 1939
to write in the conventional psychological narrative style that
had characterized the fiction she had been writing since 1921.
As any experienced novelist knows, it is no small matter to
radically alter the style in which one has been writing for
eighteen years, particularly when one's work has been well received.
Following the publication of House of Sleep, Kavan's
short fiction ceased to be found in The New Yorker, and
US publishers declined to publish her novels; obviously the
change in style did not benefit her career as a modestly successful
mid-list novelist. According to Callard, her work fell into
such oblivion that many people assumed she had died. Kavan's
experiments with style proceeded through conscious choice and
likely reflected her sense that she had exhausted the possibilities
of conventional narrative techniques in her constant mining
of the vein of material that most interested her.
Ice, her final novel,
distills the recurring elements of her (perhaps) autobiographical
material and objectifies them with a cold clarity that marks
a departure from her previous work. Kavan herself called it
"a sort of present day fable" (Callard,137). It is often
categorized as science fiction, though Christopher Priest, labeling
it "slipstream," reads it as a "sustained and extended
metaphor for the descent into, and traverse of, the ice-laden
world of the addict."[2] Aldiss admits that although he
considers it a Symbolist work, he proclaimed it the best sf
novel of 1967 in order to draw attention to it. Ice makes
use of science-fiction conventions. (For me, it particularly
evokes the catastrophic "ice-nine" of Vonnegut's Cat's
Cradle, which appeared the year before Kavan began work
on the novel). But reading Ice as straightforward apocalyptic
science fiction requires regarding most of the text as hallucination
and forcing the creation of a diachronous narrative where one
does not actually exist. In Who Are You -- the novel
that immediately preceded Ice -- Kavan's figures of "the
girl," "Mr. Dog-Head" (her husband), and "Suéde
Boots" makes the narrative experiment of putting the characters
through certain situations twice. Ice goes much farther;
its incessant repetition and persistent departure from narrative
causality together produce an inexorable vision of the Cold
War world, creating "a subjective magic containing," as
Jacqueline Johnson says of surrealism, "at once the object and
the subject. . . . As the subject has become more internal,
subjectivity has become more impersonal" (242). In fact,
subjectivity in Ice is chillingly impersonal and objectified
precisely as an effect of eruptions of the unconscious into
the narrative. While Janet Byrne is, I think, correct to read
Ice as "an effort to convey something larger than personal
doom" (11), reading the novel as science fiction misleads
her into characterizing its many eruptions of the unconscious
into the text as the narrator's "hallucinations." In short,
I believe the novel can only be fully appreciated when read
as a work of surrealism.
"Surrealism," Penelope
Rosemont observes, "begins with the recognition that the real
(the real real, one might say, opposed to the fragmented,
one-dimensional pseudo-real upheld by narrow realisms and rationalisms)
includes many diverse elements that are ordinarily repressed
or suppressed. . . . [S]urrealism is an immeasurably expanded
awareness" (xxxiii). Ice, that is to say, uses science
fiction conventions to take a surrealist bead on the Cold War
reality of the 1960s. What it does not do, however, is
tell a diachronous narrative replete with internal historical
continuity, although many readers may be tempted to read it
as though it does. Lyn Hejinian describes the synchronous narrative
continuum as
on a plane
extending over the full expanse of the moment . . . characterized
by an existential density in which present relationships and
differentiations, to the extent that we can take them in, are
the essential activity. The diachronous is characterized by
causality, or one could say narrativity . . . whereas the synchronous
is characterized by parallelism. One notices analogues and coincidences,
resemblances and differences, the simultaneous existence of
variations, contradictions, and the apparently random. (116-117)
On the second page of the
novel, the narrator observes that "Reality had always been something
of an unknown quantity to me"(6). As he drives through
the countryside toward the home of "the girl" and her husband,
he notes that his "vivid recollection" of a previous visit
was "losing its reality, becoming increasingly unconvincing
and indistinct," particularly by comparison with the ruins
of the countryside, "as if the entire district had been laid
waste during my absence" (6). The narrator then relates
the first of many dissociated images that erupt constantly into
the text:
An unearthly
whiteness began to bloom on the hedges. I passed a gap and glanced
through. For a moment, my lights picked out like searchlights
the girl's naked body, slight as a child's, ivory white against
the dead white of the snow, her hair bright as spun glass. She
did not look in my direction. Motionless, she kept her eyes
fixed on the walls moving slowly towards her, a glassy, glittering
circle of solid ice, of which she was the centre. Dazzling flashes
came from the ice-cliffs over her head; below, the outermost
fringes of ice had already reached her, immobilized her, set
hard as concrete over her feet and ankles. (7)
The narrator mentions his
intense pleasure at seeing her suffer and then goes on to describe
his past history with her and her husband, which for a few paragraphs
gives the illusion of being a return to an orderly, historicized
reality. But the details of this supposedly grounding "history,"
as the narrator elaborates it, are in turn marked by an eruption
of sadistic images and events of uncertain reality. A scene
that takes place in summer, well before the onset of the looming
catastrophe, morphs into "the girl's" being harrowed, again,
by ice. By the time the narrator describes his arrival at "the
girl's" house, the text should have made the reader wary
of assuming that the novel's narrative will be neatly comprehensible
as a linear story with clear references to past and present,
albeit interrupted by hallucinatory outbursts.
Kavan's publisher, Peter
Owen, rejected earlier versions of the book (in opposition to
his own readers' recommendations), complaining that "the book
would be better if its internal logic was more clear and its
action more pronounced" (Callard, 137). Kavan replied two
weeks later that she saw the story "as one of those recurring
dreams (hence the repetitive voyages etc.) which at times become
nightmare. This dreamlike atmosphere is the essence of the whole
concept" (137). She writes "I'm not sure what you mean
by its internal logic. As I've said, this is not realistic writing"
(138). Owen here seems to have been conflating "internal logic"
with diachronous, narrative causality, which is what the novel
was actually missing. The synchronous, as Hejinian notes,
is characterized by parallelism, which can include "analogues
and coincidences, resemblances and differences, the simultaneous
existence of variations, contradictions, and the apparently
random" -- and is exactly what we find in Ice. Repetition
of action, vision, image, and scene occurs throughout the novel
without regard to plausibility. The narrative takes no interest
in creating an internal history within which the characters'
experiences and responses can be understood. Moreover, the voice
of the narrator across the entire space of the text carries
no stable identity other than its use of "I," its continual
assertion of compulsion (or not) to hunt and possess "the girl,"
its expressions of either identification or disgust with others'
violence, and its tendency to oscillate between fantasizing
success and heroism on the one hand and failure and despair
on the other. Of the narrator's actual history, we know absolutely
nothing.
Indeed, the narrative's
indifference to its own internal history bore so heavily on
my reading that I was startled when, less than twenty pages
from the end, the narrator "vaguely recalls" an event related
earlier in the narrative. A number of other such references
appear thereafter, right up to the end, which I found even more
jarring in its departure from what I would call the novel's
"internal logic." Kavan offers us an implausible attempt
at a "happy ending" (notwithstanding the narrator's admission
that he and everyone else will soon be dead). Shortly after
having brutalized "the girl" yet one more time, the narrator
"discovers tenderness" (157). "The girl" is suspicious,
but the narrator describes feeding her chocolate and praising
her and marvels at how much pleasure treating her kindly unexpectedly
affords him.
Kavan struggled over a period
of four years to make the book acceptable to Owen. Since Owen's
rejection of it centered on its lack of well-rounded characters
and narrative causality, it seems likely that Kavan did what
she could to pacify his desire for a more conventional "story."
I'd be very interested to see Kavan's earlier versions of the
novel. My guess is that the narrator's "discovery" of tenderness
and the abrupt attempt to imply narrative continuity, which
in my judgment alone prevents the novel from being a masterpiece,
were revisions Kavan made simply to get the book published (or
were perhaps made by Owen himself, after Kavan's death). Happily,
the last sentence of the book shows Kavan having the last word:
The weight
of the gun in my pocket was reassuring. (158)
Notes
[1] I see an interesting
parallel between the cases of Brooke-Rose and Kavan. For decades
now Brooke-Rose has written novels that are "lipograms"
-- usually involving grammatical constraints, an experimental
practice associated with Oulipo. Brooke-Rose published her first
such novels, Out and Such in the early 1960s and
another, Between, in 1968, just a few months before Georges
Perec published his La Disparition. Brooke-Rose has received
little critical recognition, while Perec and the rest of Oulipo
are, of course, celebrated and famous for the boldness of their
experiments. Speaking of Ice, Callard writes "The most
distinguishable literary influence on the book is Robbe-Grillet
and his theories of the nouveau roman. . . . However,
Anna Kavan's writing had tended towards this before the nouveau
roman had appeared on the scene. Her enthusiasm for this
school, the only group of writers to whom she ever expressed
a partiality, was almost certainly because they moved in areas
she had already explored" (141).
[2] To read this novel chiefly
as an extended metaphor about heroin addiction surely impoverishes
it. But Victoria Nelson is also inclined to interpret it in
this way. "One may draw the obvious parallels between the street
name for heroin, the novel's title, and the destruction of the
world represented within it. The world and the woman are the
same entity; the body of the planet is her body; man's sadistic
misuse of both has resulted in their deaths" (162). Critics'
idée fixe with Kavan's well-managed heroin addiction
(which few of her acquaintances ever suspected) have apparently
blinded them to the constant references to Cold War politics
-- which she depicts as indirectly causing the spread of the
ice. Ice as a product of Cold War conflict, which the
narrative depicts as also promoting extreme self-censorship,
such that the threat of total destruction is socially unspeakable,
strikes me as an apt metaphor for a novel about global annihilation
written shortly after the terrifying Cuban Missile Crisis.
Works Cited:
Brian Aldiss, "Kafka's Sister"
in The Detached Retina: Aspects of SF & Fantasy, Liverpool
University Press, 1995, pp.137-144
Janet Byrne, "Moving Toward
Entropy: Anna Kavan's Science Fiction Mentality" Extrapolation
23,1 (1982):5-11
Christine Brooke-Rose, Invisible
Author: Last Essays, Ohio State University Press, Columbus,
Ohio, 2003
D.A. Callard, The Case
of Anna Kavan: A Biography, Peter Owen, London, 1992
Rhys Davies, "Introduction"
in Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories,
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1975, ppvii-xii
Lyn Hejinian, "Two Stein
Talks," in The Language of Inquiry, University of
California Press, Berkeley, 2000, pp.83-130
Jacqueline Johnson, "Taking
a Sight 1951" in Penelope Rosemont, ed. Surrealist Women:
An International Anthology, University of Texas Press, Austin,
1998, pp.238-242
Anna Kavan, Ice,
W.W.Norton & Company, New York, 1985
Anna Kavan, Sleep Has
His House, Michael Kesend Publishing, Ltd., New York, 1981
Victoria Nelson, "Symmes
Hole, or the South Polar Romance," Raritan 17:2
(Fall, 1997): 136-66
Christopher Priest, "Christopher
Priest's Favorite Slipstream Books" Guardian Unlimited
(downloaded August 19, 2003)
Penelope Rosemont, "Introduction:
All My Names Know Your Leap: Surrealist Women and Their Challenge"
in Penelope Rosemont, ed. Surrealist Women: An International
Anthology, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1998, pp.xxix-lvii
L.
Timmel Duchamp
lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her collection, Love's Body,
Dancing in Time, (Aqueduct Press) is on your reading list.
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