A chilling slow-burn of hybrid horrors in five wide-ranging
essays by Lucy Ives.
An Image of My Name Enters America, by Lucy Ives,
Graywolf Press, 301 pages, $20
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In the five interconnected essays that comprise An Image of My Name Enters America, Lucy Ives revisits past passions and preoccupations. These include period rooms at the Metropolitan Museum, the work of the late literary critic Barbara Johnson, Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past sci-fi trilogy, and the 1954 musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The author, who has written three novels and several books that combine poetry and prose, weaves heavily annotated explorations of literary theory, film, and philosophy together with autobiographical vignettes and meditations on ancestral history, romantic love, pregnancy, labor, and language. But for all the footnotes, this is not a book of scholarship or cultural criticism. It’s horror story, albeit a hybrid one. The horrors are in the past and the present. They are personal, familial, and global. Often, they aren’t even named. This is a haunted book.
The terrors are slow to reveal themselves, lingering behind elegant, measured prose. Early on, Ives recalls visiting a midwife while pregnant with her son. Sitting with her partner, the author wonders about the fetus’s experience, whether it might be subject to vertigo, whether it has the capacity for memory. She writes, “My mind was buoyant but obtuse, optimistic yet unconcerned with details, for example, interstate exits, accurate dates and proper nouns.” We have all the time in the world, that syntax said to me—not just for a subject and a predicate but also a subordinate clause, even a transitional phrase. We have time for a plosive sequence like “buoyant but obtuse.” We have time for a breezy list of human constructs for place and time. We have time to reflect on the workings of a highly erudite and discursive mind—a kind reprieve from our gauntlet of stimuli, the relentless fire hose of feeds, memes, and takes.
That sentence appears in an essay titled “Of Unicorns,” which is exactly what it claims to be, and that clarity lured me further me into a false calm, as we left the midwife’s office and veered into Ives’s own early memories, specifically, her obsession with My Little Pony, the Hasbro toy, and its myth-world of Ponyland. This recollection soon diverged into histories of unicorn imagery, from the Bundahišn (the Zoroastrian book of creation) to the so-called Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters, as well as an exploration of the figure of the scapegoat in culture. Along the way, Ives returns to her early yearning for a type of perfection promised by the glossy horses of her childhood, “a peculiar visual liquidity, a smooth taste or malleable sound, an image I could shape and feel.”
Language is the book’s through line, as Ives’s desire for perfection evolves into a hunger to be a writer who can “manipulate words such that they would have no drag, no physical resistance. That they might be all energy, all light, all vector.” And yet darkness lurks. The first hint comes in a flashback to a childhood visit to the Cloisters, where Ives discovers that the unicorn depicted on the tapestry is “composed not of moonbeams and sparkles but of quivering rosy flesh.” She realizes this because the creature is being stabbed, a grisly scene far from the plastic realm of Ponyland.
The horror is made clear in the titular piece, in which Ives revisits her fascination with the Met’s period rooms. On one level, this is a reexamination of a freshman-comp essay the author wrote about “vividness” in relation to a sonnet about the Armenian genocide. It’s also an excavation of her own family’s unspoken background, specifically, her grandfather’s flight as a child from what was then Urmia, today the largest city in Iran’s Western Azerbajian province, to escape the Assyrian genocide. A chilling slow-burn of archival research and mass murder, the piece includes excerpts of poems that describe the atrocities committed by the Ottoman forces and the horrific suffering of the Assyrian people, in sickening detail.
Silence and omission loom large in families. These are habits that get passed down like genetic code or trauma. They are also reliable tactics for ratcheting up narrative suspense and dread. However, while the book attempts to witness or articulate what past generations have concealed, at times, it deploys omission and deflection to an alienating degree. Halfway through the essay, Ives mentions that her mother was a curator at the Met, the institution that houses the period rooms that so enthralled her. Is there more to understand here? Impossible to say, since Ives doesn’t elaborate. Several pages later, Ives reflects on the fact that she didn’t learn of her grandfather’s flight from Assyria until she was thirty-four. “There are so many things we could not talk about,” she writes of her family, and then pivots to an alarming childhood memory in which her father threw the family cat against a wall, and then pivots away again. Ives doesn’t situate the moment in any context or provide an internal response, resorting instead to a curt, forensic accounting of the assault: her age (four), the day (Saturday), where the cat hit the wall (seven feet up), how the cat sounded (loud). We are told—reassured?—that the cat lived to be twenty-four.
By triangulating autobiography with history and cultural criticism, Ives avoids the unseemly trauma-dump of a straight-up confessional memoir. However, by inserting dislocated glimpses of abuse and violence into heady discussions of philosophy and literary theory, she verges into something like trauma-peekaboo. Ives is more direct when the violence is coming from inside her own brain. “The End,” an essay structured in an abecedarian form, recounts an excruciating period in her twenties when her early desire for perfection in language had mutated into an obsession with words and a corrosive mental anguish. She experienced panic attacks, paranoia, auditory hallucinations, and “the belief that I might in fact be dead,” all symptoms of depersonalization-derealization disorder, according to DSM-V. It was a time when Ives was convinced that “nothing exists except language,” an agonizing irony in that the thing she most loved—words—were part of her unraveling. It is a truly harrowing account of the psyche devouring itself, and it’s a virtuosic piece of writing. That Ives is able to put this into words is its own magic trick, the psyche reconstituting itself—a high-wire act of the mind.
Liz Brown is the author of Twilight Man: Love and Ruin in the Shadows of Hollywood and the Clark Empire. Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, frieze, London Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Book Review, Slate, and elsewhere.