The truism that “everything is connected” has been concretized in a burgeoning crowd of creative nonfiction, especially of the braided essay form. If connection is the great theme of our age — itself marked by increased fracturing — it is natural that it should become the hallmark of today’s most thoughtful literature. The approach reflects a growing knowledge, gained the hard way, that if we are hastening the end of our planet it is because it is all of a piece. Then there’s the unsettling awareness that through these ubiquitous miracle machines one person at any moment can access more information than could be absorbed by a million people in a million lifetimes. With An Image of My Name Enters America, novelist, poet, and critic Lucy Ives performs, with matchless finesse, the idea that disparate events are indeed unified on some level.
The five essays comprising the book are not really connected. (LOL, one wants to append.) Ives eschews the overly elaborate structure of certain linked essay collections, which seek to impose an overarching theme on a group of pieces that are each made up of several parts; it’s a gambit that can feel forced and push the prose toward specious poeticism. Instead, her essays are conjoined only by their qualities — not to mention their quality: uniformly rigorous, intellectually demanding, and packed with insight delivered in lean, rousing prose. The author’s polymathic breadth of knowledge —literary theory, cinema, history, apocalypticism, obstetrics — is breathtaking. Daunting, even; this is not breezy work. Notwithstanding frequent passages of personal narrative, including college reminiscences and a dramatic account of giving birth, that start as brief palate cleansers. Then they are quickly pulled back into the mill of meaning, where they are ground exceedingly fine.
Among those quoted — not just name-checked, but discussed — are Bachelard, Woolf, Lacan, Barthes, Freud, Barbara Johnson (“the most intelligent human I have ever met”), Richard Rorty, Edward Said, Lauren Berlant, Marina Warner, and Julia Kristeva. There are 46 pages of endnotes. Not exactly bathroom reading.
The opening essay, “Of Unicorns,” is a perfect illustration of what can happen when someone of omnivorous intellect gets pregnant: as the weirdest state in which a human will ever find herself, it bears extensive interrogation but rarely gets it. Here, Ives plumbs its mysteries (as she does to even more startling effect in the book’s final offering, “The Three-Body Problem”). Pregnancy prompts her to divine the cosmology of My Little Pony, the Hasbro toy that enchanted her in childhood. In so doing, Ives evokes with vividness — “vividness” is the book’s leitmotif, as well as a primary subject in the titular essay — the child’s synaesthetic world, in which colors, tastes, surfaces, and smells are all, well, connected. As magical as her depiction is, however, her literary goals never end with the purely descriptive. “In late twentieth-century Ponyland, there is no god, death, or recorded history … Is not the world of My Little Ponies an image of postindustrial reproduction, in which images beget other images by means invisible to the human eye?”
Not where we may have thought the topic of a plastic figurine marketed to horse-mad little girls was going. But that’s Ives: all quick turns leading to vertiginous views over undreamed-of vistas.
She goes on to reflect on her youthful disappointment at finding that the so-called Unicorn Tapestries in the Metropolitan Museum’s Cloisters (recounted alongside a history of the tapestries’ provenance) do not represent the generic candy-colored world of My Little Pony. Instead of picturing a fantastical happily-ever-after, they are full of gore and dark ambiguity. She comes to realize that the late medieval unicorn, hunted for its horn (“status object, a talisman and drug”), “is an animal, sure, but it is also a technology.” As is the little plastic pony, which sells mythologies about life to impressionable young consumers. The collision between this fantasy and that of the disturbing creatures in the tapestries reveals a vision of limits rather than the limitless world purveyed to the young: in witnessing her Eden defiled, she recalls, “It scares me to think that this is all that being alive could amount to.”
If there is a throughline connecting these five investigations — of what we know and how we know it — it is what underlies all realizations: that what we are told is often a painful lie. It is a matter of self-protection, Ives suggests, that one use all available resources to find the truth. Reading between the lines (if such a thing is even possible given the tightness with which thought is bound to its expression), I was left with the sense that Ives feels any assault on her naïveté so keenly that her response is to transform her mind into a protective shield.
Again and again, her awakening comes on the heels of a demolished innocence. In “Earliness, or Romance,” she writes of her teenage crush on a girl. Ives envied her worldliness — a “cold genius, a perfect mind” — while her friend was envious of Ives’s ability to deploy feminine attractiveness with a guileless purity of which the girl had been robbed. Their friendship crumbles under the weight of forces neither of them understand at the time; this is the kind of hurt that induces Ives to attempt to comprehend, and connect, in terms of vaster systems. “You could say that Albertine and I are grooming each other to survive heterosexuality, but our obsession with each other is more complicated than this, given that it is indeed (and primarily) an obsession with each other — at least, it is from my side.”
This is an essay that also takes up the misogyny of the tradwife archetype, by way of a deep dissection of the 1954 musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; Plato’s Symposium; fairy tales; an ancestor of hers who, as they say, got around; “attachment’s shadow realm,” the notion that romance always represents new possibility at the same time it can only replicate old parental ties. Finally, the intolerability of living between desire and reality, “dwelling here in the wreckage.”
She ends up in a place that, for want of a word, may be called cynical. Again, it seems to me her wide-ranging search for answers to the most essential questions — How and why do we love? Is someone making us do these things that feel “natural”? What the heck is nature, anyway? — is first (but maybe not only) a response to having been hurt. In essaying this anatomy of romance, she writes:
“Its goal, my goal, is to convince you that it could be worth considering the notion that your idea of what is romantic, of what is sexy, compelling, might originate in emotional survival techniques you no longer recall acquiring, because you acquired them before you had full access to language. It is my suggestion that, if we are willing to entertain this story about romance — call it a sort of fairy tale, since it is very much a narrative about rescue and what can be survived — then we might want to simultaneously entertain the notion that romance is not all there is and not the best thing possible.”
Another case in point is the titular essay, which in part concerns the mystery of her family’s origins. (It also concerns the nature of memory and the causes of forgetting; accident; and vividness once more.) Given her reverence for The Word, that which was in the beginning, she undertakes a lengthy etymology of her name. This includes a diversion through an early recollection by Virginia Woolf, one of her literary heroes, of the pioneering modernist’s family house in St. Ives, Cornwall. Ives’s surname is the first crumb on the trail out of the dark woods of family forgetting: it is an Assyrian Christian name, which she finds on a passenger manifest of a ship that in 1921 brought to the United States some of the survivors (that word …) of the Sayfo, the Assyrian genocide. Her enterprise, here and in the book as a whole, is to rip the veils from our eyes — and her own. As violent as the project is, she sacrifices herself first. The reader gets only the blowback. Dark as her subjects are, and almost as menacing as her prose, their initial target is her own tenderness.
With her statement (in “The End,” an essay structured as an abecedarium) that “Language’s most basic operation is, I realize, to cause us to believe that something invented is a given,” she also describes An Image of My Name Enters America. Her invention becomes a given through the sheer force of its argument.
This comes into its fullness in the final essay, a tour de force in which the elements of her sui generis method assemble into an indissoluble whole: historical research, experiential writing, philosophy, literary theory. It is no accident that “The Three-Body Problem,” an essay about the physics of giving birth, appears at the end of the book but is in a way its origin. Ives suggests that for a person who was, pre-pregnancy, ignorant of both anticipating ever giving birth as well as of what it entailed, the eventuality represents death and life at once: the cessation of the non-parent, the arrival of the parent. The act of giving birth cleaves one life into two, even as it tears the body of the mother.
An Image of My Name Enters America is so dense it made my head hurt, so gorgeously enameled it revealed a rare talent. In her ability to fuse the visible to the hidden, Lucy Ives connects it all. I am now convinced that Lucy Ives is the most intelligent human I have ever read.
[Published by Graywolf Press on October 15, 2024, 320 pages, $20.00US/$27.00CAN, paperback]