A Pacific Sojourn: Anna Kavan and the New Zealand Connection, 1941–2

Abstract

This article examines Anna Kavan’s sojourn in New Zealand from February 1941 to November 1942 in the company of the pacifist playwright Ian Hamilton. Living in the most remote of the ex-British colonies reinforced Kavan’s ontological sense of homelessness and wish to disidentify from British society, yet the colony’s anglophone orientation offered familiarity within the strange and alien. The geography, landscapes and communities of its Pacific islands encouraged a reshaping of her imaginative engagement with otherness. Referring to Kavan’s recently published diary, ‘Five Months Further or What I Remember ab[ou]t New Zealand’, the essay argues that the New Zealand ‘experience’ encouraged her use of tropes of the Gothic and uncanny as she grappled with issues of distance, homelessness and disjunctive reality. The discussion focuses on the alternative/parallel world that New Zealand represents in stories published in I Am Lazarus (1945). It identifies experimental techniques associated with Gothic fiction by which Kavan registers the overlapping dualisms of war-torn London and idyllic rural New Zealand, and represents memory through framing devices and defamiliarizing rhetorical tropes as a distancing activity interrupting the present moment: dream sequences, irruptions into and splittings of reality, space and time reversals, doublings of self/other, disjunctive non sequiturs and ghostly mirror imaging.     

Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus

Abstract

Anna Kavan's fictional portrayals of psychiatric breakdown and its treatment provide a unique perspective on the patient's experience of early to mid twentieth-century psychiatry. This article looks in detail at Kavan's time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome during the Second World War, observing how the solider-psychiatric patient becomes a figurehead for her radical politics in her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944), and a prominent protagonist in her stories. Through close reading of her correspondence, her journalism and her wartime stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945), it examines how the intersection of psychological trauma and physiological symptoms characteristic of effort syndrome surfaces in Kavan's writing of this period and in her own psychic responses to the war. It observes the importance of figurative language to her portrayal of war trauma and psychological breakdown, as her characters embody metaphor in their psychosomatic symptoms, and explores a twisted reconception of mind–body dualism prevalent throughout her writing of this period. It goes on to examine how the peculiar interaction of the physical and the psychological extends to the relationship between Kavan's characters and their external environment in her Blitz stories. Against the backdrop of the war-torn city, mind and body engage in ongoing conflict, affect and emotion bleed into her physical landscapes, and everyday objects become animated and hostile towards her protagonists.     

评《安娜·卡列尼娜》中的三个女性形象

《安娜·卡列尼娜》中的三个女性形象安娜、陶丽和吉娣,陶丽主要是作为母亲而存在,吉娣是好妻子的范本,家庭中的天使,而安娜则是一个摆脱了女人三种固有身份的原初状态的女人,她为自己而活然而却终究无法摆脱对男人的内在依附性。三个女人各自散发出了独特的光芒,但她们在不同程度上都受着男权社会形式各异的束缚。这是她们共同的悲哀。     

Intimacy at work: servant and employer relations in Que horas ela volta? (The second mother)

ABSTRACT

This chapter examines servant/employer relationships in Anna Muylaert’s film Que horas ela volta? (The Second Mother, 2015). Written in the first person by someone who locates herself as a white, middle-class Brazilian from humble origins who has lived abroad for nearly 30 years, the chapter focuses on the sense of discomfort caused on her by the film and by Brazilian middle-class reliance on domestic servants, whilst at the same time analysing the role played by intimacy and servitude in the film. In dialogue with Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s definition(s) of “cordialidade” (and with later discussions of it), the chapter examines what “cordialidade” can mean in the context of employers/domestic servants relationships in contemporary Brazil.     

‘Keeping the Ruins Private’: Anna Kavan and Heroin Addiction

Abstract

In 1964, the number of registered heroin addicts in Britain was 753. One of these was Anna Kavan, née Helen Woods. Beginning her writing career under the name Helen Ferguson, she wrote conventionally realist novels that enjoyed modest commercial success. In 1939–40, after a number of serious breakdowns and suicide attempts, and now calling herself Anna Kavan, Woods/Ferguson left a Swiss sanatorium addicted to heroin, which had almost certainly been therapeutically prescribed for sleeping disorders and severe depression. From then until her death in 1968, when she was found collapsed over a box of heroin, Kavan had an intermittent but intense relationship with the drug. This essay examines the ways in which Kavan has been constructed as an ‘addict writer’, both by her biographers and critics, and how this designation has influenced critical readings of her work.     

论安娜·卡列宁娜的悲剧心理

安娜.卡列宁娜是托尔斯泰创造的一个为了追求爱情自由而与整个上流社会抗争并最终以死的悲剧收场的妇女形象。根据安娜所处时代、生活环境、自身特性的心理探讨,可以探究其最终卧轨自杀的悲剧的起源、时代性、自身性以及终结等几个方面的意义。     

The Double Play of Mirrors: Anna Kavan,Autobiography and Self-Portraiture

Abstract

Better known as the author of complex visionary novels of female experience, it is important to note that Anna Kavan was not only a writer, but also an artist, painting throughout her adult life in tandem with her writing. This article considers the nature of the relationship between her literary life and her artistic life, and what her novels tell us about her relationship to the cultivation of her self-image. Famously destroying her personal archive, shirking notable correspondents and recapitulating a mental disquiet across many of her paintings and prose works, it is of little surprise that Kavan’s enigmatic presence often figures more prominently than serious discussion of her literary and artistic achievements. How did this mercurial relationship to identity shape the ways in which Kavan explored her self-image?     

Exploring the Realm of the Unconscious in Anna Kavan’s Sleep Has His House

Abstract

Sleep Has His House, one of Anna Kavan’s most radically experimental novels, appeared in Britain in 1948, in the wake of the Second World War. An objection levied at the novel on its publication was that it bore no relationship to external ‘reality’. However, this article argues that the novel’s focus on the oneiric realm, contrary to what hostile contemporary reviews claimed, does not take place in isolation of larger society. Portraying modernist, surrealist and psychoanalytical influences, the novel is namely concerned with the representation of a nocturnal realm that emphasizes the osmotic relationship between the external world and an individual’s subjectivity. Focusing on the ways in which violent images of war infiltrate the dream world, this article suggests that Sleep Has His House can in fact be understood as reflecting and responding to the pressures of British war-torn society in the mid twentieth century.     

Anna Kavan’s Ice and Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain: Repetition with a Difference

Abstract

While Anna Kavan’s work has been largely ignored by critics, the responses of those who have noticed her have been dominated by two assertions. First, many of those wishing to assert her importance and power have seen her work as sui generis, the result of her isolation from the surrounding literary culture. Second, numerous feminist critics have seen her work as reproducing the worst effects of patriarchal domination. This article, through a reading of Kavan’s final novel, Ice (1967), challenges both of these assessments of Kavan. It suggests that, if we notice and try to account for the similarities between Ice and a novel published two years earlier, Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain (1965), Kavan’s novel can be read as challenging patriarchal domination through a bold and innovative reworking of the reader’s ‘suspension of disbelief’.     

Occupancy rights: dynamic as well as located

ABSTRACT

Anna Stilz’s Territorial Sovereignty (2019) aims to be a revisionist account of territorial rights that puts the value of individual autonomy first, without giving up the value of collective self-determination. In what follows I examine Stilz’s definition of occupancy rights and her emphasis on the moral relevance of what she calls ‘located’ life plans. I suggest that, if it aims at being truly revisionist, her theory should work with a broader definition of occupancy. So long as it doesn’t, these rights will be mainly the preserve of groups of settlers and peoples with predictable patterns of movement. Moreover, insofar as occupancy rights ground collective rights to self-determination, they actually have the potential to trump individual rights to what I call ‘dynamic’ or non-located occupancy. This is worrying, I claim, for at least two reasons. First, rights to dynamic occupancy are arguably as central for respecting individual autonomy as rights to located occupancy. And second, rights to dynamic ocupancy should be seen as key in helping to form the kind of political allegiances required to overcome the most pressing collective action problems that humanity faces.