Anna Kavan's Ecologies of Trauma: Who Are You? and Ice

Trauma is inherently ecological, even if it attempts to obscure its roots. In my readings, I have found trauma theory to be lacking a radical sensitivity to the kind of ecological signifiers that are employed in narrative depictions of trauma. In light of this gap, this article stages ecocritical language as a richly layered conceptual domain for expressing trauma. Entangling these fields presents an alternative analysis of Anna Kavan's later novels, Who Are You? (1963) and Ice (1967), while concomitantly arguing for an (eco)trauma methodology that parses trauma's meshed codes. While both ecocriticism and trauma theory are well-established fields, the critical approaches that they advocate rarely coincide. Nevertheless, I tend to agree with Barry Stampfl, who argues that the "unspeakable" nature of trauma demands "new conceptual moorings."¹ This echoes Roger Luckhurst, who emphasises the value in "aesthetic experimentation … because it defies the habituation of trauma into numbing and domesticating cultural conventions."² As Luckhurst observes, narrative trauma has its ghosts, its "disfiguration of narrative coherence," and its flashbacks as typical strategies that refer to a traumatic event, yet I maintain that there is potential for such conventions to be enriched by ecocritical thought.³ It is also important to find terms that move beyond anthropocentric semiotics so that we can find a way to express traumatic interactions across species, environments, material structures, and psychological states. I propose a vocabulary that draws on ecocriticism to guide the analysis of trauma: entanglement, immersion, contamination, and freeze. These tools offer access into an untapped source of (eco)trauma relations in Kavan's texts.

There are myriad implications that stem from discourse surrounding a trauma aesthetic, including the problematic abstraction of actual suffering.⁴ It is therefore important to note that I encounter Kavan's abstraction of suffering as a means of transforming our understanding of the representation of trauma in literature, rather than attempting to conflate different experiential paradigms. Trauma is inherently interdisciplinary, entangling "representation, the past, the self, the political and suffering," as is suggested by Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone.⁵ Here, though, I would go further to indicate that an ecological framework encompasses all of those critical themes and more. Exposing the continuum that exists between human and nonhuman entities in literary narratives foregrounds trauma's plurality.⁶ This complicates the conventional notion that trauma narratives are spoken in "a language that defies, even as it claims, understanding," to borrow Cathy Caruth's influential phrasing.⁷ The vibrant ecologies at the heart of literary trauma lead us toward thinking more holistically about the implications that abound from shifting the narrative.

Kavan's novels are indispensable for such a project. Kavan, née Helen Woods, published numerous novels in her lifetime. Her experimentations with pain, desire, subconscious structures, dream worlds, perception, and madness offer a rich ground for thinking about trauma and its figurative modes, although they contrasted with the more prominent postwar realism of her time. At the time of publication, these texts resisted the canon, and they have only recently garnered more extensive critical attention. Her frustration with what she considered to be a fairly stagnant literary field compelled her to "represent subjective experience in innovative ways," according to Hannah Van Hove, an approach that later typified aspects of her style.⁸ In Who Are You?, the tropical setting enacts, facilitates, and intensifies the trauma of marital abuse and sexual violence. In Ice, sexual violence and war materialize within a frozen setting where reality begins to disintegrate. Both of Kavan's texts exemplify the importance in viewing trauma as a dispersive state inclusive of nonhuman substances, forces, and beings; Kavan jolts the reader into considering the ecological multiplicities beneath the surface of human violence and tragedy.

Who Are You?: Beastly Matter

In Who Are You?, trauma emerges as a state of being that is inscribed within, and ascribed to, natural phenomena. The novel depicts the marital relationship between a violent man, Mr Dog Head, and his much younger wife, and is set in a tropical landscape, which Victoria Walker suggests is...