Anna Kavan
ICE
Anna Kavan’s
The idea of slipstream literature arose in the United States at the end of the 1980s. It was originally an attempt to identify a certain kind of ambitious science fiction, which lay outside the familiar pulp-magazine tropes of space travel, alien invasions, time travel and so on. Science-fiction writers whose work qualified as slipstream included J.G. Ballard, John Sladek, Thomas M. Disch, some of Philip K. Dick and several others. At the same time, other writers, who were outside the science-fiction genre but whose work could conceivably fit into the wider definition allowed by slipstream, were summoned in support. So Angela Carter, Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami, Jorge Luis Borges and William S. Burroughs were some of the writers invoked in this cause. Another notable inclusion was, of course, Anna Kavan.
The trouble with slipstream, in this early sense, was that its American advocates were in effect trying to create a new marketing category, a niche in the trade into which books that were traditionally difficult to sell might be channelled to find a market.
The ways of the bookselling trade are slow to change, though, and nothing much came of that.
However, there was a real perception behind the label, and the idea of slipstream has taken hold and is still a rewarding way to approach a complex and intriguing writer such as Kavan.
The best way to understand slipstream is to think of it as a state of mind or a particular approach, one that is outside all categorization. It is, in essence, indefinable, but slipstream induces a sense of ‘otherness’ in the audience, like a glimpse into a distorting mirror, perhaps, or a view of familiar sights and objects from an unfamiliar perspective. In general it imparts a sense that reality might not be quite as certain as we think. It is therefore possible to find elements of slipstream outside literature: in music, films, graphic novels, installation art and so on. Slipstream often deals with science, or the effects of science, but not in a mechanical or exact way. Thus it reflects the feelings of many people in the real world, who move in an increasingly science-dependent society without fully understanding how things work. (How many people can describe exactly how a cellphone works, for example? Yet mobile phones are transforming the way we live our ordinary lives.)
In literature, slipstream stands above genres of fiction. In this way, some of science fiction can certainly be recognized as slipstream (but by no means all). So, too, can many examples of magic realism: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s
All these works present the images of the ordinary world through shifting mirrors and distorting lenses, without attempting to explain.
The strangeness of
Someone driving late at night in bad weather calls in at a filling station. He — because of the author’s gender we might assume at first that the narrator is female, but it soon becomes apparent that he is male — talks to the pump attendant. They speak of ominous events: the weather is remarkably cold. The roads are frozen, and the village the driver is heading for is remote and difficult to reach. Much is left undefined. We learn almost nothing about the driver, and we don’t know in which country the scene is set or even the time of year. ‘Never known such cold in this month.’ It seems an unnaturally vague way of chatting about the weather, but for the reader of a novel the strangeness, even awkwardness, of the phrase ‘in this month’ raises an extra uncertainty. Which month are they talking about? Is it early or late winter, when snow might be unusual? Or is it a summer month, when nothing at all like this should happen? We never find out.
In fact, the cryptic quality of the opening paragraph sets the tone for the rest of the novel. There are three principal characters: the narrator, a young woman and a man who is probably her husband. None of them is ever named. The woman’s husband seems to be an official of some kind (he is sometimes described as a warden, although at others he is a painter or a dilettante), while the narrator is a military man, perhaps in an intelligence role for a government.
There follows an extended
Because of the way Kavan describes her nameless characters, and because she is so apparently intent on physical and emotional uncertainty, the reader is frequently left stranded, if only momentarily. Her prose is beautifully measured, sometimes fey, sometimes muscular.
Dreams and memories (or are they flashbacks?) obtrude into the main story, without warning, without explanation or even without being given a rationale within the context of the other events.
Clearly,
Her icing-up world is one of encroachment: the ice creeps towards you, surrounds you, invades you, captures you. Even flight to equatorial regions provides only a temporary relief: the ice inevitably catches up.
Slipstream shifts science (and its effects) into the realm of the unconscious mind, into metaphor, into emotion, into symbols. Slipstream literature is a response to science (and scientific effects), an exercise of human feeling about science, if not an understanding of it. But it is not allegory.
It is tempting, for instance, to take the known fact of Anna Kavan’s years of heroin addiction and suggest that the white ice that engulfs the characters is a literary device, a symbolic representation of the pure-white crystals whose solution she injected daily into her veins. Maybe that comes into it, and maybe that was even in her mind as she wrote, but to work as allegory there has to be an exactness that the reader can grasp. In