AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Marie louise von franz smiling8/4/2023 The hail soon turned to snow, diminishing visibility. It was so long since I had experienced winter in the north that I failed to recognize the phenomenon. A handful of small white stones hit the windscreen, making me jump. The sky was black, blacker untended hedges towering against it and when the headlights occasionally showed roadside buildings, these too were always black, apparently uninhabited and more or less in ruins. As he is driving his car on his way to visit the girl and her husband, looking at the dark, desolate surroundings, the narrative establishes his problematic vision which both foreshadows and sheds light on his later perception of the girl: From those very first words the focal character and first-person narrator appears as a voice that may be unable to come to terms with the world around him, and increasingly so: “It had got quite dark by now, and I was soon more hopelessly lost than ever” (5). She is a palimpsest character whose body, especially her hair, becomes the concrete expression of those multiple echoing voices, gives shape to them.ģ The novel opens on a tense, dark atmosphere: “I was lost, it was already dusk” (5). But the girl is a construction within the boundaries of the narrative too, and she is mostly that: her identity, function and characterization are the expression of intra and extra-diegetic voices that interweave and superimpose. Of course any fictitious character might be defined as a construction: a creation of the author as well as an expression of the narrator’s voice. In fact, she is a multi-layered construction. Forster’s categories, it could be said that she is both round and flat: she is “constructed round a single idea or quality” 1 (an attractive elusive girl), yet she keeps changing in this unsettling story. The really flat cha (.)Ģ The object of the quest, the girl, seems both inaccessible and unreal. 1 “In their purest form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality.The text thus displays the double paradox of an endless chase in a frozen, end-of-the-world context. The rest of the novel stages constant action yet it does not have a plot as such: it is an account of the narrator’s obsessive hunt for the girl, who is in turn dead or alive, a fugitive, a guest or a prisoner in a rapid succession of scenes. At the beginning of the second chapter the girl vanishes: she leaves home and no one knows where she is. She is an albino, referred to as “the girl” throughout the novel. The narrator is still attracted by the woman of the couple who used to be his lover before she left him. Yet the novel opens on a scene in which the narrator is driving his car to visit “friends in the country” (6), a married couple. Snow and ice are gradually covering the surface of the Earth, which makes movement and travelling difficult. It takes place in an unsteady world threatened by impending disasters and destruction: a global war is being waged while the world has entered a “new ice age” (131). 1 Anna Kavan’s last novel Ice is a disturbing, eerie story.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |