This is not a film review. The point of this essay is to trash the movie to explain how it could have (should have!) been better. So consider that your spoiler warning, combined with my opinion that this movie isn’t really worth watching in its current form anyway.

Right. So the movie is told from the point of view of David. So that first part, where he runs through an empty Times Square, turns out to be a dream. Once he’s really woken up, refreshed from having just fucked his casual friend Cameron Diaz four times, he starts his day with a tennis game against buddy Brian Shelby (Jason Lee), and then to the publishing empire where he has to deal with a disapproving Board of Directors. Subtext: life is fun — but it’s hard, too.

Then there’s the plot they showed in the trailers. He has a birthday party, but didn’t invite poor Cameron. Brian brings Sofia to the party as his date and she catches David’s eye. And he hers. David shows Sofia his toys, like his Monet (his mother loved the “Vanilla Sky”) and then takes Sofia home and is amazed by her lack of “guile.” The lack of guile is apparently manifested in her childlike personality — she’s like a sexy fourteen year old who doesn’t speak English all that well: Is this every man’s fantasy? It’s David’s.

Having spent a chaste night talking with Sofia, David leaves to find Cameron waiting for him. She offers him a lift, and possibly more, and he avails himself. Cameron then goes into a jealous, suicidal rage and smashes the car into a wall.

Turns out she’s killed herself, and thoroughly disfigured half of David’s face, and injuring his arm. He becomes a recluse, and when he finally decides to go out again, it’s to meet Sofia at a dance club. She brings Brian. After getting too drunk, David watches his friends leave, and chasing after them, sees them embrace (she was originally Brian’s date, after all).

This part of the story is told in flashbacks as a psychologist (Kurt Russell) questions David in a holding cell. Apparently David has been charged with a murder.

The rest of the movie goes back and forth between the present/future and the past and David’s face goes from disfigured to normal and back again. Stranger still, Cameron Diaz is presented as Julie the crazy “fuck buddy” and then as Sofia, the imbecile ballet dancer. Which one of them has a mole on her breast? Does David actually tie her up? cut her up? smother her? And whom did he kill? And what’s going on?

What’s going on is that David is fantasizing. A company called Life Extensions (LE) has developed a system to cryogenically freeze people. Apparently David signed up with L.E. for their special Lucid Dream program that allows his subconscious to create an incoherent flashback ridden movie. No wait, that’s not the intention, but something has gone wrong with David’s program. How can this be? Where did the dream begin? A helpful L.E. tech support tells David that soon after the debacle at the night club, he managed to buy out his board of directors and remake his father’s company, but then committed suicide (you know he’s telling the truth because he has an English accent; no dumb ’spic he).

The tech points out other elements of the dream: the image of David and Sofia on the street in New York was a subconscious visual “quote” from a Bob Dylan album cover, the laughing Sofia is just like that poster of Jules et Jim in David’s apartment, the sky happens to be Vanilla, and the person he is convicted of killing is himself. Whoa. But what actually happened after my death?, asks David. Well, the tech continues, we recovered your body, your buddy Brian held a three day memorial to you and Sofia came by. She came in long enough to hear two tracks of music being played simultaneously (David had suggested this on their first [and only] night together), smiled and left. Apparently, the tech says, she was as touched by your encounter as you were.

Finally, given a choice between rebooting the dream program and waking up, David chooses wakefulness. A voice calls to him: “Open your eyes!”

That’s what we’re given. There are some fine supporting performances by Jason Lee and Cameron Diaz, and Tom Cruise does all right with a what is basically a shallow and boring and corrupt character. But the movie falls far short of its potential.

Cameron Crowe, the writer and director of this re-make of “Abre los ojos” (Open Your Eyes) seems to have forgotten that this is a science fiction/psychological thriller disguised as a romance and not an actual romance. Just when things could have gotten interesting, he drops the ball.

I have no problem with the structure and storytelling, but the theme seems to have been lost. The movie is not about love at first sight. It’s not about loving an ugly man. It’s about fantasy and dreaming. And it could have been a great movie about fantasy and dreaming if Crowe had pushed it some more.

David is an incredibly shallow man who gets anything he wants because he’s young, rich and good-looking. And his fantasies are just as good looking — and just as shallow. The reference to the Bob Dylan photo was excellent, but there should have been more. It would have been a dicey proposition to fill a half hour of screen time with visual quotes if it was obvious to the audience, but Crowe is smart enough that he could have done it (and just think what sort of repeat business and DVD sales he could have racked up for that sequence alone). He could have found the set of “Cheers” and filmed the bar scene from an angle never shown on TV — and then, in the reveal, pulled back to see the cheesy lack of imagination. Have had Brian, Sofia and David physically mimic a scene from “Jules et Jim” but given them different dialogue and a different context. Re-make the magazine stand scene from “Singles” and made all the magazines flicker with the problem posed to David at his last day at work: yellow or white logo? Show the mole on the breast of a Playboy pin-up David found when he was thirteen.

At the risk of seeming too insularly pop culture, this sequence could have been the cinematic equivalent of Picasso channeling Goya and Braque and Leger and Velasquez. And if done well, it would have kicked Gus Van Sant’s “Psycho” in the ass.

The reveal sequence would have been more surprising, more disconcerting and more subversive than “The Sixth Sense.” The audience would be forced to consider: how did I miss that! and, no wonder it looked so familiar! and (worst of all) wouldmy “lucid dream” consist of images I’ve seen on television? Do I have the capacity to invent an architectural form? Do my sexual fantasies consist of wanting to star in someone else’s pornographic stories? The impact would be simultaneously tragic and comical — and provocative. Perhaps our visions are limited and we need to read more, see more movies, open our eyes to other people’s imaginations in order to expand our own.

The other important change would have to be ruining Sofia. Cameron Diaz is gorgeous and sexy and available and David doesn’t want her because he knows her too well. Sofia is the opposite, an unknown that David is free to project his fantasies and desires onto. As a ballet dancer, though, there’s a good chance that she’s actually bulimic and promiscuous. And as much as director Crowe tries to sell her to us as perfect (it is David’s point of view, after all), there’s little reciprocal good will towards David. We’re expected to like him because he’s Tom Cruise. Unfortunately, we don’t. It would have been great if there were more scenes of Sofia with David’s friend Brian:

Sofia
He thinks everything is his for the taking!
Brian
But not you?
Sofia
Love is not something that you take, it is something that you give.
They kiss passionately.
Then at the memorial service, the strange music is playing — only David and Sofia knew about this, did he specify this in his funeral arrangements? The thought of his desperate fixation is so pathetic it makes Sofia cry. Shaking her head — what did he think we meant after only a few hours together? Brian nods in understanding — my buddy David invested a lot of his fantasy life on those few hours.

Open your eyes, Mr. Crowe. This is not a love story, it’s a story of infatuation. The infatuation that allowed Cameron Diaz’s character to imagine a relationship and then destroy it. The infatuation that gave David a reason to re-enter public life with an imperfect face. It’s a story about our love of fantasy and the limits of that fantasy in bringing true happiness.

There is an odd significance beginning to make itself felt and I must stay open to it. I must understand it when it has finished unfolding itself to me. I see that now, and that I must put together each incident to form a whole. I must not look at things separately. (121)

The narrator of Emshwiller’s “Peninsula” is apparently talking to herself, but these words might also be an admonition as to what reading this story — and perhaps all of the author’s fiction — necessarily entails. “Peninsula” dates from before 1974, the year of publication of Joy in Our Cause, in which it was reprinted. The significance that is “unfolding itself” to the narrator, though heavily dependent on the connections she needs to “form a whole” and however strongly it insists that no one incident be taken in isolation from that whole, is not of the cosmic, Pynchonesque variety endemic to literature contemporaneous with “Peninsula.” This “odd significance,” while arguably more mysterious if intro-cosmic than the significance one seeks in Pynchon, is strikingly domestic (though certainly not domesticated). “Peninsula” teases us with a mystery that the narrator finally chooses to avoid elucidating. At narrative’s end she tells us she “is beginning to see the pattern” and that she is “a part of it.”(127) She leaves it to the reader to see what she has begun to see. She has learned that “it is more interesting to try to understand this slowly revealed pattern” than to think about the hand lying on the Persian rug in her living room and “whatever obligations I may have toward it.”(127)

The narrator privileges one pattern, in other words, over another which would explain the significance of the hand lying on the rug and the reason that her father, mother, brother, daughters, and maid deserted her. She gives us fragments with which to assemble a story of how she came to be alone, but while she tells us that we “must not look at things separately,” the whole to be formed from these fragments is not what a reader could call “plot” precisely because the pattern of connections the narrator is beginning to see, rather than the pattern of connections that readers can use to construct a plot, is “more interesting to. . . . understand”.

Although the narrator withholds data points and connections that would allow us to solve the mystery of the hand on the rug — that would, in fact, enable us not to take it in isolation from the pattern in which it could be seen as part of the whole, she lavishly provides the materials for discerning other patterns. The very first thing she tells us is her preference for one kind of connection over another:

Do you realize we are all connected by telephone wires? I do not mean that our voices go through the wires to each other, though, of course, that is true, but that we are physically connected by the wires we talk through. We are actually physically wired to every house with a telephone as though there were a roadway set out for wingless birds. Except for the underground wires in some cities, a bird could walk from a house in New York to one in California, so, when we speak to someone, no matter how far away, we are wired, literally, ear to ear. We are connected, we are touching through wires, across whatever difference.(117)

The narrator muses at length on the comfort her awareness of this “connection” grants her; she returns to this (now dated) image repeatedly throughout the narrative. This “connection” she celebrates is the material concretization of what is ultimately only an impersonal abstraction. She loves that the connection of wires provides a line for birds to walk and sit on and acrobats — girls holding pink parasols, boys white poles — to dance on; they are for escape, travel, and art, not a direct means of communication. This distinction is underscored when she admits that she would like to “get away from the telephones altogether.”(118) “Actual telephone conversations can sometimes be quite distressing,” she says.(118) When she describes the obscene calls she receives, we must acknowledge that the direct, person-to-person (albeit disembodied) connection of an isolated woman contacted by someone from the world outside can take the form of an intrusion into her most personal, private space. The technology of wires enabling “physical” connection, on the contrary, demands nothing of her personally but is simply there, confirming her connection to the rest of the world — and underscoring her assertion that the house she lives in is on a peninsula, not an island (as her husband had always insisted): and by implication that she — as the Jefferson Airplane joked in response to John Donne’s line of verse around the time of this story’s publication — is (metaphorically speaking) a peninsula, not an island. Ultimately, the technology of wires provides her with an escape route off what may in some mysterious, figurative sense be an island after all.

The narrator poses a list of questions she claims not to know the answers to. Where has her family gone? How had she failed them? Did she marry too young? Did they have an accident that “wiped them all out silently and quickly,” or did someone come at midnight and murder them? Or did they, perhaps, murder her? This last question she particularly likes.

Yes, they have left me half dead here, all of them driving away over the gravel that sounded like ice as they left. They have murdered me with their backs turned, taking away even the little black dog that was mine, taking away the setter that was his, and the hound, and the two myna birds, and every small bit of life except these wild birds that sit so blackly upon the wires and that have never belonged to anyone.(118-119)

The narrator has clear and vivid memories of the many places she made love with her husband. And yet she asks

How old was that brother of mine, I wonder, twelve or sixteen? . . . Sometimes it seemed I saw him in a mirror and he was my other, my male, self, my face atop his bony body, the real me, and never had I been so lovable as in him as he walked barefoot in the woods or came inside the house bringing the smell of the woods with him.(122)

The reader wishing to construct a plotted story might consider any number of conventions: the Gothic heroine abandoned in a large house on an island (or peninsula) after some mysterious calamity that oddly spared her; the insane woman with a persecution complex; the ghost of a murdered woman haunting an isolated deserted mansion. But the tone of the narration cannot support them and what the narrator tells us of her current existence and actions contradicts the scripts of all the conventions we can call to mind. A ghost, for instance, does not put the dead mouse she finds on the kitchen floor into the garbage and then take a “cold chicken leg and a hard-boiled egg from the refrigerator for [her] breakfast.”(123) And later she tells us outright that “they” haven’t murdered her and she hasn’t cut them up and hid them in the cellar; and for some reason we cannot believe she is lying (except, perhaps, by omission).

And yet we must ask, is the narrator lying and if so, to whom? Who exactly is the narrator’s addressee? Sometimes the addressee seems to be herself. And yet her first sentence begins “Do you realize”(117) and her tone is one of constantly explaining and exhorting and expounding. Perhaps most significant, the narrator’s list of questions not only serves to pique the reader’s desire to learn the backstory rather than providing the means for piecing it together, but also insidiously brings the reader to identify with the narrator — making us suspect the narrator of being disingenuous. She presents herself as a quaintly old-fashioned girl, one who may have married a very rich man “too young,” who “brought my family with me when I married. . . . I was daughter, sister, wife and mother all in one and even to this very ornamental house I was an additional ornament.”(120) She describes herself “languish[ing] by the garden doors in green brocade”(120), “waiting up and down the hallway in a little feathered hat”(120). She has “dancing shoes” and recalls that she “used to dance balanced on [her] toes”(119). What could such a traditional, conjugally, and familially-cherished woman have possibly had to do with the hand on her rug? By offering competing explanations she seems to be saying that she, like the reader, doesn’t know anything, either. She and we share the same quest for answers.

As for the “friendly, perhaps beloved hand” on the rug — “It was like a person whom one cannot remember the name of or exactly where one is used to seeing them, a person met completely out of the usual context.”(126) All that she will confidently assert about the hand is that “it was certainly not his”(126) and that “the hand belongs distinctly with the mouse. I must not let myself think of it alone.”(127) The hand “tells a wordless story, answers all questions if one wished to consider it, to face it.”(127) But she “will not face that hand” because “I’m sure it tells too much.”(126-127)

The narrator suggests that there are two possible patterns to be discerned. One of them is the “pattern of whiteness and twoness, of strange phone calls, lights upon police cars and white, hard-boiled eggs.”(127) The other pattern holds the dead little mouse and the hand on the rug. I’d like to propose a third pattern, one the narrator does not seem to notice. By calling the story “Peninsula,” the author draws attention to the narrator’s statement that “If there ever was a difference between us, that was certainly the only one, whether this was an island or not, for he could seem as young as I was.”(121) According to the narrator’s description of herself and her husband, they held sharply (and traditionally) gendered roles. Cars come and go freely from the mainland to their home; the narrator knows that she can leave the peninsula by the road — or even by a line of stepping stones crossing the “little river.”(121) The second element of my proposed pattern is the image of the telephone wires connecting every house in the country, the image with which the author begins (and ends) the story. The third element is her brother’s resemblance to her, he being her other, “male” self: “Never had I been so lovable as in him as he walked barefoot in the woods”(122). The fourth element is the enigmatic smile her husband once observed on her face after they made love in a grassy hollow and which she herself cannot “fathom” whenever she happens to look in a mirror or into a nocturnally reflective window:

such an isolated me, a me who wears a strange smile. . . . Did he know? Had he guessed something then, and if he were here now could he tell me what he really thought of that smile so that I, too, might get some idea of what it was about? Yet it does seem to me that I used to know what was in my head at those times.(124-125)
The last element in my pattern is the item held by the narrator when in the last sentence of the story she ventures out onto the telephone wire. The narrator genders the item when she fantasizes the boy and girl acrobats earlier in the story, such that the girls hold pink parasols, the boys white poles. The narrator puts on her dancing shoes and carries a white pole (actually a white piece of molding). Before venturing out, she imagines walking out on the wire, “miraculously stepping over the crucifixion, Christ hanging there below [her], each upper wire at the ends of the crosspiece coming from a palm of his hand and the lower wire piercing his side.”(127) Her Christ “looks like one of those acrobat boys that walk the wires at night.”(128) “I feel young,” she says. “I am young and I am beautiful.”(128)

Stories aren’t always like jigsaw puzzles containing a full complement of pieces or like an algebra problem requiring one to solve for X. But when I put together all the pieces I’ve selected for making a pattern, the story I find myself constructing is one the narrator has not suggested. In this story the hand is a red herring, perhaps an image hallucinated or dreamt by the narrator or a magic-realist symbol. The narrator’s husband and parents are dead. Her brother has long since moved away. Her daughters are grown up. One day she wakes up and finds herself all alone on the fist-shaped peninsula and immerses herself in memories of time long past. Perhaps she does run through the woods for the sheer joy of movement, or perhaps she only fantasizes doing so. She receives two obscene phone calls and finds a small brown mouse dead in her kitchen. Does her sense of her brother as her “male self” — her “real self” — have anything to do with her choosing a white pole over a pink parasol or with the strangeness of her smile? Shortly before she ventures onto the wire, she hears the phone ringing somewhere below. Deliberately she chooses the abstract network of wires over connection to another human being (who may well be her obscene phone caller). Does she fantasize stepping over the crucifixion because she is preparing herself for death? (Significantly, she imagines the wires piercing Christ’s side and passing through the palms of his hands.) Or do the telephone wires represent an abstraction like art, which she chooses over whatever the obscene phone and hand calls represent? And is that why she chooses the white pole and imagines herself androgynously merged with her brother?

Likely no amount of puzzling over these pieces will give me clear answers. My story may well be wrong, since it requires my excluding the hand as an extraneous detail. It’s possible that a few weeks from now I’ll come up with an entirely different interpretation. And yet I haven’t felt a moment of frustration in all the times I’ve read “Peninsula” or lain daydreaming about it in the bathtub. The story’s fluidity of style allows its ten pages to run so quickly through one’s reading self’s fingers, like the slipperiest of silk, that the story can be read again and again and again without exhaustion, one of those rare pleasures that neither satisfies nor palls.

One’s pleasure in a story need not depend upon narrative certainty. What matters is the reader’s intuition of a powerful underlying logic binding the story’s images and data points. “Peninsula” accomplishes the nearly impossible: giving the reader a mystery that will always remain deliciously intriguing without ineptly or spitefully thwarting the reader. Fingering the story’s fabric, handling its images and details and assembling them into a meaningful whole is what reading fiction is all about.

©2001 L. Timmel DuChamp. All rights reserved. Please do not print without permission.

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 therewere 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,” and reviews praising it typically avoid acknowledging its stylistic innovation by referring to her prose descriptions as “dreams so carefully notated as paintings by Dali 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 world”(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 realreal, 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.

Enclosed is a brief summation of major points on the latest batch of submissions to the magazine. The summation here is brief as you should have the completed report by this time (Editor’s Note: the report itself, while I don’t doubt it’s existence, has yet to make an appearance). As this is being sent telegramatically I shall keep it short.

Perpetual Motion – Dora Knez
Great story, but we advise you to hold onto it as yet. We have contacted agents, lawyers, booking agencies, manufacturers and Head Waiters in all the Best hotels, anyone and everyone who might be in any way connected to such a high profile artist as Malfi. None of them could supply an address, most seemed not to have heard of him. I fear we may have created a ‘buzz’ around him however, so care should now be taken with anyone claiming to be him.

Similarly with the lizards. We found extensive references to them in scientific literature but no interplanetary ships are ever mentioned. This is being researched more deeply. There are companies named Boeing and Pratt & Whitney (much to our surprise) and also Rolls-Royce. However with the latter company the final owner of the name (either BMW or Volkswagen) is still in doubt and we advise leaving it to the motoring magazines. We personally know Douglas and despite his being an artist he has stated thast he has never produced anything entitled DC-8 or DC-10. We put Seigfried to work on the title. So far he has managed to procure a grant, a university laboratory, a research team and a wife. He has yet to make headway on the title.

Hollywood’s Masterpiece: James Dean – Joe Bills
We spent a long time looking at the photo of the cute boy through the barbed wire. While there was a lot of stuff in the article and most of it seemed true it distracts from the picture. Cut it in half and enlarge the picture. My god, those cheekbones. Publish, he’ll be a star.

My Friend, Eustace – Gavin J. Grant
This was easy: we called all your friends. None answered to the name Eustace. One became threatening. You can’t publish this, we’d have to
resign.

The Grand Gesture – Tim Emswiler
Aaron Copeland wrote a Third Symphony, ok. ”Fanfare for the Common Man,” ok. But here’s the thing–there’s a part of it, about a minute and a half worth of the second movement that I simply can’t remember. I can remember the gist of it, but not the specific notes. There’s something about this story that makes my teeth itch. Bicycles, the oddly named Slinky’s and Frisbees all exist. After heavy research we have yet to locate a dentist named Floss. Hold this story until dental work is complete (partial bill included).

watch tissue – David Findlay
Again, this presented difficulties. We found a David Findlay living in Stoke-on-Trent, England, who, for a small annual consideration in perpetua (see attached contract and bill) agreed to participate in an experiential re-enacting of this poem. Between that and the problem with my Grandmother and the parrots, we
advise against this one.

Illumination – Sareen Grant
It appears that Motley Crue once played a show at the Cavern Club, Liverpool, dressed as tyre men, little yellow birds, or shepherds. Or maybe all three. We have found a cheese press (included as Appendix 14(ii) with the report). In a random sampling of 1000 UK adults (air ticket charges included below) we did not find anyone who took their hat off to it. Therefore pass.

The Money Tree – Nalo Hopkinson
This author certainly exists, our cabin, sorry, tea-boy saw her on Blue Peter. All that Anglified spelling needs to be changed, and prawns are shrimp in the US. We again used David Findlay to research whether the mind has an eye or not. Mr. Findlay declared he would bloody well see us in court. While his vision seems a little different from ours, it does appear to work, therefore this phrase passes muster. Our team that went in search of Jackson’s gold has yet to return, but in the meantime we have confirmed the presence of a Water Table under both the Caribbean and Toronto. Opinion: Hold this one until the team reports back.

Blind Faith – Stuart Davies
Forget it. Welsh rugby? Even with a coach from New Zealand they don’t stand a chance. Also, God’s existence has yet to be proven, neither is it known whose side It would be on. This is the kind of poetry that even Welsh Radio would refuse to read.

Academia – Euan Reilly
We pondered this for a long time. All of us have spent many years in the revered halls and this poem differs so greatly from our experience. Then we realised the author must be a cleaner. Ok.

Art of Passion – Gaston
The questions addressed (and undressed) here were great. Young Meadows had to be quietly taken aside after she attempted contemplation of them with Mr. Spender of Accounts. We anticipate many such problems and therefore advise passing on this. As you will therefore not require the manuscript we have kept it.

Survivor’s Ball, or The Donner Party – Kelly Link
Another difficult one. The Donner Party attempted to cross the US but failed to find any of the major highways or truck stops. They took the American ethos of consumption too far and ate each other. This thing about them being in New Zealand is claptrap. The geographical features mentioned do exist but we found neither any town named Serenity nor any jasper for sale. We felt it was all some kind of fantasy of the author’s. On rejecting it you might suggest Mr. Link submit it to a suitably fantastic magazine such as The Wall Street Journal, Exchange & Mart &c.
That concludes the summation of the report, which I hope was rendered redundant by your receiving the original in the mail. The third box was mailed a few days after the others, so it may be late. I hope these statements of facts and facts checked help with your publication decisions and reduce future legal costs. The Defence Fund, as I need hardly remind you, is still reeling after the H. Belloc affair. Please let me know when the next batch of submissions to be checked,

Ever your servant,

I. McIttup

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