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Luminous in the Dark

Early on, the male narrator discloses to us, "Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me."

It’s hard to tell just how much of a dream, no, a nightmare, this novel is or will become, whether it's a recurrent dream, or whether it is more than that.

The girl, his nameless, ageless obsession, the object of his pursuit, is brittle, fragile, shy, elusive, "her skin moonwhite, her face a moonstone, luminous in the dark...her hair was astonishing, silver-white, an albino’s, sparkling like moonlight, like moonlit Venetian glass..."

She is not exactly the type to ground him: "I treated her like a glass girl; at times she seemed hardly real." She thinks of herself as a "foredoomed child-victim, terrified and betrayed: ‘I always know you’ll torment me...treat me like some sort of slave.� "

So begins an almost Hegelian Master/Slave relationship in which their destiny seems to be a fight to the death.

As if that’s not bad enough, a post-apocalyptic Ice Age is fast approaching, the product of a collective death-wish, a fatal self-destructive impulse: "Instead of my world, there would soon be only ice, snow, stillness, death; no more violence, no war, [no] victims; nothing but frozen silence, absence of life."

The narrator seeks the resumption of a relationship with the girl ("She was like a part of me, I could not live without her"), in what few days of existence are left.

Not only does the ice pose a threat, but the relationship becomes triangular (something I don’t recall Hegel mentioning): there is a rival, the Warden, a bully, an authoritarian Other, who declares "I shall take her back then."

The girl has no say in the matter. She barely differentiates between the suitors: "...they were in league together, or perhaps they were the same person. Both of them persecuted her, she did not understand why..."

She is defenceless, she accepts it as her fate, just as humanity must fatalistically accept that its time on earth is about to come to an end. Initially, the narrator detects a masculine bond with the Warden and cannot stand to be alienated from him.

However, ultimately, he realises that "There was no bond...except in my imagination... Identification was nothing but an illusion."

Even the girl seems to have "corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no wish to explore. It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another."

Perhaps love might have been a way out, but she has never desired love, at least not love of the narrator.

Besides, love is impossible in these circumstances. Relationships splinter with the ice. No two seem to be able to become one. Let alone three.

Still, it’s the girl we empathise with. Or is it? Are there three characters? Or two? Or just one in a dream? And whose dream is it?

As Anais Nin says, Anna Kavan is one of the few authors who has proven able to enter the world of "the divided self with skill and clarity."

"Ice" approaches death with the momentum of an adventure story (for some reason, I recalled "White Eagles over Serbia"). However, it remains metaphysical at heart.

Perhaps the inevitable embrace of death reinforces Hegel’s words about the Master and the Slave: "Through death, the certainty has been established that each has risked his life, and that each has cast a disdainful eye towards death, both in himself and in the other."

While the novel is hardly optimistic ("I knew there was no escape from the ice"), it does manage to stare down death with a modicum of disdain.

The challenge for the rest of us is to find an other and to demonstrate as much tenderness as possible before the ice comes.




"Self Portrait" by Anna Kavan

[From an Exhibition accompanying Victoria Walker's Presentation "Anna Kavan and the Politics of Madness" as part of the Exhibition "Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors" at the Freud Museum from 10 October 2013 - 2 February 2014]

There is a podcast of Victoria's Presentation here:






"Untitled 29" by Anna Kavan


SOUNDTRACK:

Fever Ray - "If I Had A Heart"



This Mortal Coil - "A Heart of Glass"



Lisa Gerrard - "Come Tenderness"



Carta - "Kavan"



Wiki: San Francisco post-rock band Carta entitled their song "Kavan" on their album "The Glass Bottom Boat" after Anna Kavan. The song was subsequently released as a remix by The Declining Winter on their album "Haunt the Upper Hallways".