Overlapping Traumas: Revisiting Trauma in Post-Apocalyptic World of Anna Kavan's Ice

Abstract

This article offers a critical exploration of Anna Kavan's Ice which includes a literary representation of trauma and its correlation with the concept of post-apocalypse. Establishing a preliminary dialogue between post-apocalyptic and trauma narratives, it investigates the individual and post-apocalyptic trauma both separately and holistically through a single text. The abandonment trauma and the traumatic glacial apocalypse create an interrelated discourse of post- apocalyptic trauma that encompasses changes on the protagonist of the novel and collectivities. Following Hobbesian discussion of social contract together with Golding's Lord of the Flies, apocalyptic trauma and its symptoms are traced as disturbing demonstration of humanity's primitive urges in the absence of social, religious, political, and moral orders. The analysis of the protagonist's unrelenting quest and obsessive psychology through Lacanian concept objet a allows the discussion to diversify to address the individual trauma. Instead of casting Kavan's novel as purely trauma narrative or post-apocalyptic account, this article reads her novel in a focused attentiveness to analyse different types of trauma and their merge with each other.