Ives, Lucy. An Image of My Name Enters America. Grayolf, Minneapolis, 1924. NF; 3/26.
These essays reveal for me another side of Ms. Ives. Her short story Cosmogeny was a favourite of mine although I wasn’t as excited about one of her novels. But here the ideologic intrigue is no longer pitched at our intuition but is out front, and the artistic panache that impressed me is elsewhere as she puts her obscure and complex essay hat on. My review goes on a bit…
There are five essays. The first is Of Unicorns superficially mainly concerned with My Little Ponies. The theme is for me mostly buried, but the Ponies represent an aesthetic and ironically a first-order feminist foot-in-the-door (to which Lucy Ives is more than entitled in my opinion):
What is this thing we do? Is there a history of domesticity? For, of course, there was. It was a history of possession: a story of belonging and belongings; discomfort and comfort; hidden or ignored labor; institutions; stuffs.
The book title essay, next, An Image of My Name Enters America is striking in several ways. First Ives describes a university essay she wrote the topic of which was “vivid”. She isn’t thrilled with it, but reconsidering it puts her onto several strings of thought.
The philosophy of science question “Is there an insubstantial mind?” Ives answers with a resounding yes, quoting Henri Bergson (late 19th and early 20th century French philosopher):
(W)e may have believed that our body is an unchanging container, a storehouse for a variety of images of the past, but, in fact, our body is not of a different order from the images that occur to us as memories. According to Bergson, the body is an image, too. According to Bergson, when we inhabit the present, we are always creating an image. We are an image.
This feels Platonic – although Bergson was a friend of pragmatist William James – but also seems to line up with consciousness neurologist Antonio Damasio’s understanding of humans:
…the core you is only born as the story is told, within the story itself. You exist as a mental being when primordial stories are being told, and only then; as long as primordial stories are being told, and only then. You are the music while the music lasts.”
Getting back to her undergraduate essay on “vivid” Ives turns, after exploring examples of her name going back much further, to the World War I Armenian genocide atrocities. Her description of a group of young women burned alive was “vivid” enough to trouble me for days:
They were huddling, terrified, crying, crossing themselves, in the middle of men all yelling. Their big loose dresses were sopping. Kerosene, you could smell it. The men were prancing, feeling them, poking at them to dance— then pouf! They were alight, the women, dark wicks to great orange flames, whooping and shrieking.
This is one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever read.
Earliness or Romance, the third essay, is about Ives’s understanding of romantic love. I don’t know whether she remarried but her first marriage was a failure and she presents romantic love as not all it’s cracked up to be.
Quoting English psychoanalyst Adam Phillips: “Love is giving something you haven’t got to someone who doesn’t exist.” Ives comments Love is an error and it is an error we can’t help committing.
The problem is that, although the membrane that separates the world of commerce—in which anything is interchangeable with anything else by means of the medium of cold hard cash—from the sensitive surfaces of our bodies is tissue thin and actually nonexistent, everyone goes around acting like it’s this impenetrable barrier.
Ives feels anger about a high school friend who was heavily into sex. Albertine can be very unkind, but the one thing Albertine is not is wrong. Albertine is a cold genius, a perfect mind. It’s why I fall in love with her, although I don’t know this, at the time. Anyway, soon enough it’s over. We stop speaking once we are in college. She’s a corporate lawyer now. She works in debt restructuring.
Lucy Ives needed and benefited from psychotherapy. Whether for this reason or not she subscribes to the idea that loved (or not) as infants and children we go looking as adults for the same kind of thing. To undergo treatment, then, is a bit like stopping where one is on the path of life and turning to face something that one has for so long kept at one’s back. It’s the thing you think is going to kill you. That thing. That unspeakable thing. That one thing that lacks contingency and seems fated and is therefore “yours.” In a way, you’re not wrong. In the past, it could have killed you, when you were small and vulnerable, but it cannot harm you anymore.
We have already … made emotional closeness “an explicit task.” We’ve been doing this explicit task since we were children and, for this reason, are also always loving as we did formerly, cruelly optimistic that it will turn out differently this time.
And finally in case we’ve missed the point: being intentional in relation to romantic love wouldn’t simply mean deciding when and with whom to do it. It might mean deciding not to do it at all.
The fourth essay The End involves poststructuralism which seems to have taken over university literature departments when Lucy Ives was there. Personally I’m convinced this approah to artistic literature hides the joy of it by seeing it as political. But what do I know? Ives is taken with a professor in one of her courses, Barbara Johnston (“the most intelligent human I have ever met”). But Ives enters a dreadful time in her life at 19 while studying. She experienced “recriminations, despair, crippling self-loathing, paranoia, insomnia, auditory hallucinations, the belief that I might in fact be dead.”
I wonder whether this personal misery kept her from completely falling for the structuralist/post-structuralist flavour of decades? She’s ironic when she says:
I missed the moment when human culture was laid bare by a group of philosopher-critics who borrowed from anthropology and linguistics, among other disciplines, to devise reading strategies that allowed them to interpret any form of discourse, knowledge, or information as a constructed narrative.
Following Dr Johnston’s thinking while herself emotionally miserable Ives says:
Like many critics of a post-structuralist persuasion, Johnson showed how what is apparently open and clear may be attached to something hidden… (she) brilliantly centered in her criticism, is that by experimentally anthropomorphizing, and not personifying, the text, one may call into question facile certainties regarding what a person is.
I couldn’t understand this. “anthropomorphizing, and not personifying”? At least it looks like Johnson’s ideology is leading to “question(ing) facile uncertainties”, I guess like the world is exactly as it appears and women and minorities need to remain second-class citizens. Maybe the difference between anthropomorphizing and personifying lets a reader both enjoy and politicize beautiful writing. I’m not surprised that this flies way over my head, and I imagine the majority of structuralist and post-structuralist-minded people unlike Dr Johnson just switch their appreciation over to the political side.To me there’s an abandonment in that approach of the real purpose of beautiful things: their enjoyment.
Anyway dear Lucy Ives winds this essay up with “In the end, it is not theory but language itself that is my great philosophical love, a version of myself, a temporary and artificial self I adopted when I lost the self I previously took to be my own.”
(If you are still reading this congratulations and thanks.)
We’ve reached the last essay The Three-Body Problem which is about childbirth of all things – Lucy Ives had a boy when she was 40. She tried to have the baby at home but ended up transferred to the hospital. Everything was fine in the end.
Robin and I had our children during the Rights of the Pregnant Parent era where birth was trying to become more human-centred. The trouble of course is that left to nature some babies either die during or are born damaged by the birth process, and that can sometimes be avoided by modern obstetric intervention. In hospital there’s a lot of technology watching the baby’s heart rate and when it looks dangerous an obstetrician usually jumps in with a caesarean section, an operation that often needs to be done quickly without much explanation.
Ives’s description of her labour and delivery is graphic and fearlessly descriptive of the psychological changes she experienced. Although she believes that information about medical interventions is “withheld”, my long-ago experience of obstetrics was that we didn’t spend enough time explaining that an infrequent life-saving operation could have to happen and that could make a natural normal birth impossible. If a normal birth does happens all the physical and psychological events are and should be the business of the mother, the family, and the baby. How to decide between full disclosure of something unlikely but necessary to rescue the baby, seriously frightening the poor labouring lady, and just making the decision and explaining it (or not) after it’s over.
Lucy Ives finishes up with, “It was, as I have just written, no more than actual, a function of the body in time. In the space of my mind’s eye, alive, staring at this fact, I gasped in awe.”
I’ll finish this up with surprise and yes awe at this writer’s academic and artistic smarts. I’m grateful for her fearless revelations even though there were some of them I didn’t understand.
Scores are question marks on this one.
