Ice

Sunday 10 March 2024

thoughts

Summary & notes for the book Ice by Anna Kavan. Originally published in 1967 by Peter Owen Publishers.

On Authors

Much is made, in reviews of Ice, of the comparison between Anna Kavan and J.G. Ballard.1 Ice, like Ballard's Crash, is commonly interpreted as a ‘distillation of its creators' distinctive world view [...] animated by a corruption of sexual desire’2 – both seek to explore the chauvinist fetishization of modernity itself, its capacity for exploitation, ruthlessness and apocalypticism; both begin and end in cars.

As with Ballard's Empire of the Sun, Kavan's lifestory encourages a particularly didactic reading of Ice, the role of ‘the girl’ – abused, pathologised, (self-)identified only as a victim – is, of course, a prism through which is reflected the author's real-life experiences: her father's suicide, her heroin addiction, her own mental illness, her time spent at sanatoriums, her death. However these ‘authors’ – as Foucault reminds us – are not so much the arbiters of a ‘true’ reading of their works as protagonists within a more general literary discourse.3 In The Death of the Author Barthes writes that “[to] give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”4

Ultimately, what Crash's comparison with Ice highlights is a reflexive concern with the relationship between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds. In his break from rigid SF, Ballard said that he was rejecting ‘outer space’ for “inner space”5, and in Ice we likewise see the narrator slip unwillingly between alternate narratives, real-and-unreal versions of the same apocalyptic story, perhaps even autobiography and fiction.

Footnotes

  1. Ballard, who both cited her as a key reference in his own work and whose testimonial – "Few novelists match the intensity of her vision" – adorns the backcover of Penguin's latest edition) ↩

  2. Michaud, Jon (2017) A Haunting Story of Sexual Assault and Climate Catastrophe, Decades Ahead of Its Time [link] ↩

  3. Foucault, Michel (1969) What is an Author? [link] ↩

  4. Barthes, Roland (1977) Image-Music-Text [link] ↩

  5. Amis, Martin (2009) From outer space to inner space [link] ↩