Anna Kavan’s “Ice”

Anna Kavan (1901-1968) was a British writer and artist. She began publishing novels under her married name Helen Ferguson in 1929, and in 1940 began publishing under the name Anna Kavan (one of her own fictional characters). Her writing was often innovative and experimental, influenced by her severe depression and long-term heroin addiction. Other significant writers including Brian Aldiss, J.G.Ballard, Doris Lessing, Anaïs Nin and Jean Rhys have admired Anna Kavan's distinctive style, and she continues to inspire readers, writers and artists today.

Anna Kavan died of heart failure on 5 December 1968; 2018 marks the 50th Anniversary of her death.

Website of the Anna Kavan Society

           

At the start of the eighties I read the novel ‘Ice’, and her stories collected in ‘Asylum Piece’ and ‘Julia and the bazooka’.  In 2012  I read her novel ‘A scarcity of love’. Last year ‘Sleep has his house’. Somewher in between I read 'Let me alone', published under the name Helen Ferguson. 

I am re-reading ‘Ice’ these days.

Anna Kavan’s “Ice” is a book like the moon is the moon. There’s only one. It’s cold and white, and it stares back, both defiant and impassive, static and frantically on the move, marked by phases, out of reach. It may even seem to be following you. It is a book that hides, and glints, like “the girl” who is at the center of its stark, fable-like tableau of catastrophe, pursuit and repetition-compulsion. The tale might seem simple: a desperate love triangle played out in a world jarred into ecocatastrophe by political and scientific crimes. The narrator, whose resolute search for the girl might appear at first benign or even heroic, nonetheless slowly converges with the personality and motives of the sadistic, controlling “warden,” who is the book’s antagonist and the narrator’s double. Though “Ice” is always lucid and direct, nothing in it is simple, and it gathers to itself the properties of both a labyrinth and a mirror.

Kavan’s commitment to subjectivity was absolute, but in this, her greatest novel, she manages it by disassociation. If “the girl” is in some way a figure of Kavan’s own vulnerability, she’s also a cipher, barely glimpsed, and as exasperating as she is pitiable. It’s been suggested that the “ice” in “Ice” translates to a junkie’s relationship to her drug, yet the book is hardly reducible to this or any other form of allegory. Heroin may be integral to the book, hiding everywhere in plain sight and yet somehow also beside the point. The drama of damage and endurance in “Ice” plays out in an arena of dire necessity and, somehow simultaneously, anomic, dispassionate curiosity.

What makes this not only possible, but also riveting and unforgettable, is Kavan’s meticulous, compacted style. The book has the velocity of a thriller yet the causal slippages associated with high modernist writing like Beckett’s or Kafka’s. The whole presentation is dreamlike, yet even that surface is riven by dream sequences, and by anomalous ruptures in point-of-view and narrative momentum. At times this gives the reader the sensation that “Ice” works like a collage or mash-up; perhaps William Burroughs has been given a go at it with his scissors and paste pot. By the end, however, one feels at the mercy of an absolutely precise and merciless prose machine, one simply uninterested in producing the illusion of cause and effect. In the place of what’s called “plot,” Kavan offers up a recursive system, an index of reaction points as unsettling and neatly tailored as a sheaf of Rorschach blots. The book’s nearest cousins, it seems to me, are “Crash,” Ballard’s most narratively discontinuous and imagistic book, or cinematic contemporaries like Alain Resnais’s “Last Year at Marienbad.” It’ll stick around, as those have, and it may even cut deeper. Like the moon, but with sharp edges.

Jonathan Lethem on the Cool Disturbances of Anna Kavan’s ‘Ice’. 

The New York Times, October 27, 2017.

                                                              

The story of “Ice” is reported by a nameless narrator who claims to be a former soldier and explorer. We soon realize that he is entirely unreliable, and perhaps mentally unstable. “Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me,” he confesses early on. He takes medication for headaches and insomnia; it produces “horrible dreams” that are “not confined to sleep only.” The book has a febrile, hallucinatory disregard for conventional storytelling, and a habit of blurring the lines between the literal and the metaphorical. Not one character is named; with a single exception, none of the settings are identified beyond the barest details.

The plot, such as it is, follows the narrator’s obsessive pursuit of a young woman. (She’s twenty-one at the novel’s outset, but he refers to her as “the girl” throughout.) Her character is never fully developed: she remains a mostly empty vessel for the narrator’s desire—a “glass girl” of “albino paleness” with “glittering hair.” Meanwhile, walls of ice are closing in on the habitable world, creating mayhem. “The situation was alarming, the atmosphere tense, the emergency imminent.”

The narrator must also contend with a rival, a powerful warlord, known as the warden, who is the head of an insurgency that is somehow involved in the global chaos. (The politics of the apocalypse are vague.) The girl is claimed first by one of these men and then the other. As the novel progresses, there are intimations that the warden and the narrator are no more than two halves of the same myopic, macho whole: “Between the two of us she was reduced to nothing; her only function might have been to link us together.” What both men seem to want most of all is the right to claim dominance over her. There are several difficult scenes of sexual assault. “Will-less, she submitted to him, even to the extent of making small, compliant movements fitting her body to his,” one of these scenes concludes. “She was dazed, she hardly knew what was happening, her normal state of consciousness interrupted, lost, the nature of her surrender not understood.”

The reason for the disorienting vagueness of so much of “Ice” becomes clear only in retrospect. It is a work of traumatized sexual surrealism, and its true setting is its author’s haunted imagination.

The novel’s title refers not only to the environmental catastrophe of the encroaching walls of ice but also to the emotional numbness of the victimized girl whom the warden and the narrator are vying to possess. The abuse of the girl and the abuse of the environment stem from the same driving male impulse for control and dominance. Indeed, the world and the girl are often described in similar terms. “The defenseless earth could only lie waiting for its destruction,” the narrator writes, echoing an earlier passage about the girl: “There was nothing she could do, no one to whom she could appeal. Abandoned, helpless, she could only wait for the end.”

At the conclusion of the novel, as he is about to take possession of the girl, during the world’s final apocalyptic hours, the narrator tells us, “I was pleased with my achievement and with myself. I did not think about the killing involved. If I had acted differently I should never have got here.” He adds, “In any case, the hour of death had only been anticipated slightly, every living creature would soon perish. The whole world was turning toward death.” A half century after its first appearance, Kavan’s fever dream of a novel is beginning to seem all too real.

A Haunting Story of Sexual Assault and Climate Catastrophe, Decades Ahead of Its Time. By Jon Michaud.

The New Yorker, November 30, 2017

                                                          

Anna Kavan’s Ice begins: “I was lost, it was already dusk, I had been driving for hours and was practically out of petrol. The idea of being stranded on these lonely hills in the dark appalled me, so I was glad to see a signpost, and coast down to a garage.”

World-blocking is not merely the mode of Ice, but, on some level, its subject. The world of Ice is strange and strangely familiar, to us as to the characters. “Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me,” the narrator confesses. Yet for all the unreality of the world he is a part of: “The place seemed vaguely familiar, a distortion of something I half remembered.”

Elsewhere, he admits:

I got only intermittent glimpses of my surroundings, which seemed vaguely familiar, and yet distorted, unreal. […] In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.

Thus, the novel can be seen as an exploration of the relationship between inner and outer worlds, a look at how mental landscapes interact with and affect physical landscapes. As Lethem puts it, “as in Kafka, Poe and Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, the essential disturbance resides in an inextricable interplay between inner and outer worlds.”

The key difference between “world-building” and “world-blocking” is the degree to which the reader is privy to some supposedly objective reality. The reality of most conventionally world-built novels is entirely in focus — too much so, perhaps. There is no mystery. Everything is named, described, understood. The reader walks on a paved path.

World-blocking keeps the reader in ambiguity, mystery, doubt, along with the characters. The inner space of character determines their perception of the world’s outer space. This is, indeed, how we really experience the world — not through omniscient knowledge, but through confounding fissures. The over-explanation of a world is an oversimplification of the world, for much of what we experience in life is unexplained, if not inexplicable.

To us, as to the narrator of Ice, reality has always been something of an unknown quality. We feel lost, as the narrator does in the novel’s first sentence — but then he finds a signpost, just enough to situate him somewhere, and the same goes for us. The novel conceals, then reveals, illuminates, then obscures. We are given just enough protruding rocks to cross the stream of text.

 Ice’s unnamed narrator describes the landscape as giving “the impression of having stepped out of everyday life, into a field of strangeness where no known laws operated.” These fields of strangeness, strange as they are, are the realm of human experience.

At one point, the unnamed narrator is visited by a being seemingly of another world. The being tells him of “the hallucination of space-time.” We learn that this being has “access to superior knowledge, to some ultimate truth.” The being invites the narrator to “his privileged world […] of boundless potential.” What keeps the narrator from following this being’s siren call to another world is that he is “irrevocably involved with events and persons upon this planet.” In Ice, superior knowledge separates one from the world.

There is a description in Ice that reminds us of the problems of classic world-building: “The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour.” Some of the more famous built worlds do indeed feel as though their characters are trapped, but the world of Ice, for all its coldness, ironically feels full of life and psychological complexity.

Kavan and her fellow world-blockers aren’t interested in “trees as trees,” but in the shapes of trees, what we as subjects see in them, and what we project onto them:

Quickly looking up at the window, she saw only white weaving meshes of snow, shutting out the world. The known world excluded, reality blotted out, she was alone with threatening nightmare shapes of trees or phantoms, tall as firs growing in snow.

 “A Field of Strangeness”: Anna Kavan’s “Ice” and the Merits of World-Blocking. By Tyler Malone. 

Los Angeles Review of Books, December 19, 2017

More on Kavan : 

The radical re-visioning of Anna Kavan. Sybil Baker on ‘Let me alone’

The Critical Flame, January-February 2018.

Lee Weinstein: Fiction, Heroin, and Kavan

The New York Review of Science Fiction, February, 2018