Ice

"Ice is a science-fictional work describing a young woman pursued by two different men, in the context of a climate apocalypse, with glaciers slowly covering the surface of the earth. This novel offers a feminist interpretation of modernism’s obsession with the relation of subject and object. The woman is relentlessly objectified by the male gaze. Thus the book mediates on the power relations that determine what persons get to express and explore their inner lives. Yet a clue to the deeper dimensions of the novel can be found in the question: Why would Anna Kavan—a woman writer—choose to write a book from the male point-of-view, in which a character who resembles her in many ways, is denied subjectivity, agency, even consciousness, and is turned into a thing? The novel—in identifying the objectified ice-like girl with the civilization-crushing climate catastrophe, suggests the primal power that sometimes inheres in becoming an object. The richness and ambiguity of the novel’s central images and characters—combined with the intensity and concentration of its narrative arc—make this a wonderful, idiosyncratic example of modernism. Perhaps the most important genre instability linking all the novels on my list is the blurring of the line between fiction and autobiography. Celine’s novel is based largely on his own experiences, with the insertion of several spectacularly fictional episodes—episodes which from some perspectives might actually be autobiographical also, in the sense of recording hallucinations the author may have experienced. Anna Kavan’s work has an interesting relation to autobiography. In some sense, she can be said to have remade her actual persona to accord with the novel’s female character, dying her hair platinum blonde. It’s hard to decide which character—the writer Anna Kavan or Ice ’s nameless girl—is the origin of the other, which is the “truth.” Beckett’s work—recent scholarship has discovered—is in some ways an expression of the author’s own experience of intense anxiety—recording and transforming the perceptual and cognitive distortions of the writer’s condition. And my next pick, Ralph Ellison’s dark comic Invisible Man , takes actual events in Ellison’s life—such as his experience in the famous Tuskegee Institute—as the basis for the narrative. I think this movement between reality and fiction speaks in some sense to modernism’s oscillation between two different visions of literature. On the one hand, this writing wants to imitate, to faithfully describe the workings of consciousness. On the other hand, literature wants to flee this world, to turn its back on reality, to see the value of reality only in terms of what it can be made into, and how it can be made unrecognizable."