| Abstrakt: |
Ice by Anna Kavan, one of the most neglected writers of post-war English fiction, is a phantasmagoric narrative of apocalypse, introducing a dark vision of our planet threatened by devouring blocks of ice. The narrator's obsessive pursuit of "the girl", his object of desire, is wrapped up in dream-like cycles of arrival and departure, and is marked by various forms of displacement metaphorically linked to psychological and mental loss. The central concern of this article is to look beyond the (auto)biographical analogies and generic traits in the novel, and to analyse "the girl", the object of the narrator's quest, as the lost object of desire in Lacanian sense. The apocalyptic setting of ice and freezing cold, I would argue, symbolize masculine violence and the hegemonic urge to capture and immobilize the elusive object of desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
