Nocturnal Transgressions in The House of Sleep : Anna Kavan's Maternal Registers

Garrity, Jane

doi:10.1353/mfs.0.0915

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 15 publications

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“…Specifically, I draw upon what we know of serious emotional neglect in Kavan's early childhood and the ways in which this slowly works through her work; first in a rather oblique, even subterranean, manner only to emerge more fully after 1940, when, as Garrity notes, Kavan's writing 'abandons narrative, chronology, and characterization intrinsic to realist texts, and substitutes instead alliteration, wordplay, ambiguity, an emphasis on sound and rhythm'. 16 My reading here turns around the knowledge, limited as it is, of maternal abandonment in Kavan's infancy, a knowledge that must be read back from her writing rather than, as Rose suggests, as a fixed point of departure. I will argue that the pervasive atmosphere of lifelessness in her writing is not reducible to narcotic daydreaming but is rather a delayed, complex register of maternal loss that compels the subject into an unproductive sublimation that never reaches catharsis.…”

Section: Elizabeth Bowenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cadaverised girls: the writing of Anna Kavan

Sweeney

2018

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Even as modernist studies have adopted the more historicizing approach of the longer durée, Anna Kavan's work continues to be overlooked as an example of later modernist writing. Beginning her career as Helen Ferguson, she published six realist novels before changing her name in 1939-40 when she began to write in a more expressionistic style, regarded as a direct consequence of her long-term heroin addiction. Providing an introduction to her work as well as a more detailed reading, this article suggests that Kavan's writing is more complex than a simple reflection of narcotic dependency. Using Julia Kristeva's idea of depression and melancholia, the drive to lifelessness in Kavan's work is read here as the internalisation of the 'dead' mother. For the deadened 'girls' in Kavan's fiction, the damaged relationship to the maternal chora is carried around as the unnamed Thing rendering the child guilty, disconsolate and in constant retreat from the symbolic order

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Section: Elizabeth Bowenmentioning

confidence: 99%