The Lives and Language of Lucy Ives

D. W. White

Review Essay

A consideration of Lucy Ives’ An Image of My Name Enters America (Graywolf Press). Purchase the novel directly from the publisher here.

Read an interview between Lucy and the L’Esprit editors here.

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If in life we are surrounded by death, so too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

How do I relate or compare what goes on in my mind to the phenomena of the world?

Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

As I’ve said, I was at least two people then.

Lucy Ives, An Image of My Name Enters America

To begin, a caveat.

This is not really a review of Lucy Ives’ new book. Or, if it was, it was so only in thought, and never in fact. Which, as we shall see, leaves a bit of a gap. Because if this were a review of Lucy Ives’ new book, An Image of My Name Enters America, out this month from Graywolf Press, we would have all manner of bloody business to attend. Enumerations of arguments. Weighing of good and bad. Discussions of “plots.” A coherent thesis. But none of that is interesting, and, more to the point, none of that would begin to approach the beating, shrieking heart of Ives’ essay collection, five autotheoretical perorations that sail tightly along the original coastline of the French essayer and only occasionally stop for provisions. That is to say, the pieces that constitute this book do not face outward but in; they are a gesture and not a package, a survived experience and not a reading of the minutes; they are to a conventional collection of feel-good soft-shell introspection what living in Death Valley is to walking across a freshly mowed lawn to grab the Sunday paper. That is to say, this book cannot be reviewed, only relived. That is to say, read it.

But alright, quickly: what is this book about? Ives’ essays are true works of autotheory,¹ in that they deftly intertwine (think the caduceus) sections of personal narrative (fragmented only in that they are not bound to a linear completeness) with deeply researched and intelligent considerations of various topics in literature, theory, culture, history, and unicorns. Because she is such a good writer, this works really well.² Indeed, Lucy Ives is probably the most talented, and must be the most interesting, American writer working in the public eye right now. Along with Rachel Cusk, Ives seems to be doing more fearlessly new things in myriad forms than anyone else hanging around the English language; these two are simply refusing to slow down, to acquiesce, to pause for breath.³ Her masterpiece Life Is Everywhere is a terrific, unyielding, relentless novel, eminently readable while positively bleeding out a Modernist refusal of the convention from within the convention. (Cavell: “it is internal to a convention that it be open to change in convention, in the convening of those subject to it, in whose behavior it lives).⁴ An Image of My Name Enters America follows this Bastille-storming of a novel with a new constitution of the essay collection, a re-writing of the rules and re-consideration of the facts. In it, Ives reaches back to Montaigne in finding the boundaries of an essay, to Socrates in finding the boundaries of thought, and grounds it all in the type of poetic storytelling that, as Wittgenstein understood (but could not replicate), makes anyone care about it. Ives understands this. It is the telling of the thing, the way in which it makes itself manifest, that matters. It is, in other words, the language.

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Let us have a little more Cavell: “It is because certain human beings crave the conservation of their art that they seek to discover how, under altered circumstances, paintings and pieces of music can still be made, and hence revolutionize their art beyond the recognition of many”.⁵ Cavell sort of slides around up against a definition of Modernism in his discussion of Wittgenstein and convention. Woolf is with them, with her sly questioning, too: “Surely a definition of life is too arbitrary and requires to be expanded?”; “Is life like this? Must novels be like this?”⁶ This could work as a way of thinking about Modernism, or the Modernist impulse, which is perhaps less a skepticism of convention than a transmutation of it—descent with modification.⁷ For Ives, the way in which she is the most revolutionary, novelistically, is her incorporation of found writings—poems, stories, novels, electricity bills. In her fiction these pieces render the lived experiences of her characters in a way that is at once entirely in keeping with the corticated, rhapsodic legacy of Modernist heterodiegetic narration and totally new. An Image of My Name Enters America picks up this method, brilliantly as Ives works through her own, earlier writings—often from college, often on topics she would rather not revisit—to find that most elusive character, Lucy Ives:

I need to pause, because even as I keep attempting to go forward with this account, I find myself unconsciously sucked back into the PDF of my freshman essay. I behave as I normally do, seeking distraction while writing, bopping around among various applications, then, dazed, I come to, my eyes in that old document, even though I hadn’t meant to put them there.

The more I read it, knowing what I know now, the more I feel strangely calm, or perhaps a better term is sympathetic. I feel sympathy toward myself. It feels less humiliating to me now than tragic, this writing…

Again, what a strange girl I am. I want to travel back in time and help her.

In the title essay, grappling with family, genocide, marriage, and the weight of history embedded within a name, we are accomplices on an archeological uncovering. Of language, belief, obsession. Ives writes of the dissolution of her first marriage, and her struggles to recollect that time—“I was surprised at my former self, who seemed to have been in some significant sense split in two”—while learning about the roots of her last name and reading back a collegiate essay on Vividness which itself incorporates the Assyrian Genocide. This search for her past self, and the efforts Ives makes to try and understand this person, is less the topic than the lifecycle of the collection. C’est-à-dire, it is not so much what these essays say but what they are that compels.

It would be interesting, as a book, if these five pieces talked about things in a way we could relate to, say, Wittgenstein’s disquiet over private language, and the manner in which that might lead us to an intersection between the extra-linguistic thought lying at the very center of consciousness and the fundamentally human attempt to express oneself to others. It would be a far more important and profound book to dothis, on the page, such that the essays explore and also constitute an enumeration of the canyon between what is felt and what is said, such that a rope may be thrown across. Fortunately, Ives has written in strands.

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Two quotes:

“A reader would see a picture. It would be as if it had not come from words at all, that picture. It would be clear, crisp, piercing, permanent, upright, still.” —Lucy Ives, An Image of My Name Enters America, pp. 50.

And⁸

“A picture held us captive. And we couldn’t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §115.

Ives—the Harvard undergraduate seeking apocalypse along the coast, the mid-30s writer transcribing a crumbling marriage, the current essayist en train d’essayer and tasked with making sense of it all—shares a certain awareness with the later Wittgenstein in his growing frustration with his philosophical system.⁹ This awareness—which iterates for the latter as a question about what philosophy can or should be doing and, for the former, as a question about the boundaries and perils of remembering—is about language, the certainty that they’ll never quite be able to say what they mean alongside the conviction that they must try.

These are fraught words. Interpersonal communication—the transformation of what is happening within to something apprehensible without—is foundational to the entire project of being a human. It’s what we evolved to do, what God in his jealous wrath vitiated in his deconstruction of Babel, what Wittgenstein’s eternally wandering, madwoman mistress has lost in David Markson’s inter-apocalyptic novel. What causes the difficulty? There’s something lost in expression, a filtering, a winnowing down from the enormity of what one wishes to say as elocution is neared—it’s simply not possible to elucidate everything in the mind; the majority of it exists beyond language. Often, as Ives is acutely aware, in memory. It is this friction that provides the collection’s inexhaustible energy, pushing like Camus’ resolute Sisyphus again and again towards a goal toujours au-delà.

Ives’ solution is a Modernist one: grounding her work’s ontology aesthetically, rather than mimetically. (Here too we find the roots of her background as a poet). It is in the enactment, not the discussion, that An Image of My Name Enters America truly communicates its meaning. The artistry of the book writ large—the prosody, the scope, the depth, the intellectual rigor, the vision—makes manifest the quest Ives wishes to relate, her voyage through memory, history, language, and the self.

This is nowhere so clear as in her re-visitations to those old writings, on Vividness especially, which “does not arise from one’s having grasped a given description. It is not due to clear writing alone. It isn’t about passive consumption or perfect one-to-one reproduction on the part of the reader. It is not a synonym for ornate. Vividness, perhaps strangely, is not just or exclusively a visual quality, a thing on a screen, although most of us use our eyes to read”. Instead, Ives seems to be saying, it’s a feeling, a knowledge, an idea, something at once extra-linguistic and anxious to be discussed. “I despise myself less for having written it,” she says, later on that page, of this freshman essay, before reproducing much of it for her reader. This is enactment, working on a deeper valence than a simple mimetic approach —which might be either the reprinted essay itself or the text around it, but surely misses the larger urgency of the entire collection’s context—would achieve.

“I keep trying to figure out why it matters, if it matters, that I tell this story,” Ives says, later in the book’s eponymous essay, while discussing the Assyrian Genocide, and the roots of her surname. Her answer to these questions—not only of why but of how, both the importance and the possibility—lies in narrative. This is strongly felt in “The Three-Body Problem” a kaleidoscopic piece orbiting Ives’ pregnancy. Narrative, it seems, is the ultimate account of language:

I worked with a homebirth midwife, and I did give birth, although not at home. There are multiple ways this story could be told, but mostly I think it is a story about storytelling itself, learning another language for a thing that defies narrative, that appears only fitfully in most histories of the world.

It is language, language all the way down, language until the bitter end. But beyond that end, within that chthonic abyss, lies narrative, lies the way in which language has been used, was being used all along—apocalypse; a word, as Ives explores, possessing a true etymology deep in revelation. This revealing, this understanding, is the best defense against the madness of the world, and the certainty that it will someday end. Ives attacks the void of life with everything, and all, she has: narrative.

Her ability to unite the disparate strands of these essays into a story of powerful, propulsive significance speaks both to their deep emanation from her own life and her artistic gifts. “In the middle of my life’s journey,” she writes, turning narrative around towards itself, “I came to myself in a dark wood where the right way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh, and impenetrable that wood was. Indeed, thinking of it recreates the fear.” Indeed, thinking of it recreates the fear. The exculpation of this fear is both topic and technique of this remarkable collection.

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The strongest section¹⁰, narratively, of Ives’ book may be her trip to California, or the end of the world. This comes in “The End,” an essay exploring, or rather moving at its somewhat manic leisure through: structuralism¹¹ and poststructuralism, delusion and dissociation, irony, Ives’ own collegiate experience vis-à-vis language and the inability to move from it into reality, and the apocalypse, among others. It is, like the rest of the work in this collection, mostly immune to summary. However it is shot through with death: the death of expression, of the world, of oneself, of existence. It is also about how to live with this death, to call it life, to change the sign and thereby to signify. Throughout Ives finds again and again her past, one lost and then found again through language:

Part of what you do, then, when you write in this way is to mourn the person you used to be. That person seems so distant now. That person was alive. You aren’t. What’s imperative is that you generate a reality of a kind through exercises with language. Everything else is wrecked. There is no chance for you. You’re already dead. You can’t have a life. But if you can manage to write in a good way, what may be a sort of a true way, a simple, clear way, then that articulation may survive. You can give it the life you no longer have, and it may, in turn, pull some remnant of your self through. I repeat, you are dead. No one can reach you. And here is what is terrifying: you know you are dead, that this is fact, but you appear to be living still. 

Throughout, Ives’ technique is a process of uncovering, of revelation, of excavating the past, less perhaps to learn than to know, those past manifestations of the self never seeming as far away as one might wish. The story she tells—both now and then, now about then—is the genesis of her collection’s aesthetic ontology as it transmutes through the writings, and stories, of her former selves. And therein lies the brilliance. As T. S. Eliot says, writing in the years leading up to The Waste Land, “The form gave impetus to the content.” Where the former accelerates into the latter is found the most internally coherent art—Modernism’s great achievement.

No less so for Ives, via her favorite move, embedded and embodied. There’s compelling resonance in An Image of My Name Enters America’s use of these found writings to the manner by which, in her novels, they serve as an igniting, weakening maneuver towards verisimilitude and a complex rendering of, there, her characters and here, herself. One is reminded of H.D.’s Eurydice: 

At least I have the flowers of myself,

and my thoughts, no god

can take that;

I have the fervour of myself for a presence

and my own spirit for light;

and my spirit with its loss

knows this;

though small against the black,

small against the formless rocks,

hell must break before I am lost;

before I am lost,

hell must open like a red rose

for the dead to pass.¹²

before I am lost, / hell must open like a red rose / for the dead to pass. Ives refuses to stay lost, perhaps the bravest act in a book replete with bravery.

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.

Perhaps there’s nothing more to say, yet I feel ambivalent, because on the one hand, my love of language is what allowed me to survive several decades of mental instability and illness, and, on the other, my love of language seems to have delayed my recognition that I needed help— but perhaps it’s wrong to blame language for this. I think it is wrong— or, at the very least, ineffective— to blame language.

This ambivalence captures a deeper one in the projects of literary art: that inherent impossibility, known from the beginning, taken as the beginning, to capture truth in language. This tension suffuses An Image of My Name Enters America and sends it off towards a sort of truth that, somehow, speaks. ‘But I find if I really want to say “The world does exist”, the impulse to those words is not expressed by those words. I want a gesture (perhaps poetry, or religion)’ Cavell says.¹³ For Ives, the world exists, as does its end. That it endures is a mark of the life held by narrative, and the way it can go, careful and poetic, about reality:

I believe all but exclusively in language, in the qualities and potencies of letters, of marks I can draw, of these visual- conceptual- musical chimeras. Nothing exists except language, a mark of fundamental absence. I don’t believe that I can share, which is to say, communicate, anything with anyone but am determined to leave behind me a trail of the linguistic objects I, a stranger, have touched, the little blue or black indentations I have carved into white with a ballpoint pen. For years, years that begin in 1999, I hold my breath.

Ives writes here, in “The End,” of her teenaged self, searching for the world. How to reconcile with it, given the shattering fact of existence. The solution, perhaps, has not changed, for her or for any of us. Nothing exists except language, which is both everything and not nearly enough.

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Notes

1. A “genre” we quite rather enjoy here at L’Esprit. ↩︎
2. How’s that for super eloquent review-type-speak? ↩︎
3. 2024 has now seen Ives’ radical essay collection follow Cusk’s sublime Parade. It was great fun to see a quick reference to Kudos in “The Three-Body Problem,” here. Along with Cusk, Ives is also my favorite living writer, for whatever that may mean to anyone. ↩︎
4. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, Oxford UP, Revised Edition, 1999. 120. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 121. ↩︎
6. “Is Fiction an Art?”; “Modern Fiction”. ↩︎
7. In this way Modernism is alive and well, and not confined to the 1920s and 1930s in literature, etc. This concept is something distinct from the High Modernist grammar-insouciance on the one hand, and postmodernism (which on this account is more or less a twist on a Modernist recipe) on the other. It is the defying consumption of a certain type of art—to devour the world, so that it may be born. ↩︎
8. “And is everywhere in the world. It may be the only word with undeniable ontology.” From “The End.” ↩︎
9. The connection here is mine, not anything explicit in the book. I do not know of Ives’ opinions about Wittgenstein. The point, like this essay and indeed all criticism, is pure supposition. ↩︎
10. Or, whatever, let’s not do the whole battered-objectivity thing today. A particularly cool and compelling and unsettling part. ↩︎
11. Ives proffers an immensely satisfying definition of this wily term (one that, like Modernist, I find has been spoken much too often of having died): “methods of research and argument that take as their starting point the notion that all human understanding is ultimately beholden to language.” ↩︎
12. From the Poetry Foundation. ↩︎
13. Cavell, 33. ↩︎

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D. W. White writes consciousness-forward fiction and criticism. He serves as Founding Editor of L’Esprit Literary Review, Prose Editor for West Trade Review, and Executive Editor and Director of Prose for Iron Oak Editions. His writing appears in 3:AM, The Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches workshop along with classes on Modernism, Rachel Cusk, and the Self.

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An Image of My Name Enters America

Lucy Ives

Greywolf Press

October 15, 2024

$20

336pp

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