ABÉCÉDAIRE by Sharon Kivland
Review by Helen King
At the end of Sharon Kivland’s ABÉCÉDAIRE—not a novel, memoir, or historical textbook, but a document which stalks the boundaries of all three—is a two-page section titled HOW THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN. After the slow dazzle that this uncategorisable, almost overwhelmingly rich work reveals itself to be, the stark explainer with which it closes offers a welcome optic through which to peer back into the kaleidoscope. By doing so, we learn that ABÉCÉDAIRE was composed under certain self-imposed creative imperatives (‘strict internalised constraints without which I am unable to function’): over the course of ‘almost exactly’ one year, Kivland wrote on five days of every week, in individual 50-minute sessions designed to ape the duration of the psychoanalytic hour.
Kivland—an acclaimed artist, author, and academic who is affiliated with London’s Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research—has, through extensive previous writings on and around Sigmund Freud, woven complex explorations of the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and artistic practice (her own and others).
ABÉCÉDAIRE extends this exploration, not only in the mechanical constraints adopted for its composition, but also in the structuring principle which shapes it. For this, Kivland tells us, she followed Freud’s model for free association, quoting his instruction to clients undergoing analysis: ‘act as though [...] you were a traveller sitting next to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage the changing views which you see outside’. It’s a useful analogy for ABÉCÉDAIRE—a book consisting of a multitude of ‘changing views’: fleeting glimpses into individual lives and scenes wrangled up from history, literature, pop culture, and occasionally Kivland’s personal milieu.
Densely populated, in its 257 one-page chapters (sparsely interspersed with an array of black & white images—photographs, posters, adverts, botanical diagrams, other ephemera), ABÉCÉDAIRE casts a detached, dispassionate gaze at a host of figures—mostly women, mostly with names beginning with the letter A, only referred to by their first name and surname initial-:‘Anna, Anne, Ann, all those women who are not my sisters, who are my sisters’. It is Anna Freud (Anna F.)—the daughter of Sigmund, with whom she had a strangely close, deeply complicated relationship—who comes into view most often, and gradually emerges as the centrifugal force of the book; the accumulated details of her life propelling the sparking catherine wheel of associations which eventually link figure to figure, story to story, chapter to chapter.
Through the plain records offered up—of correspondences between father and daughter, between the father and his peers—a sense of the troubling dynamics of the relationship is floated to the surface: hints of Freud’s proprietary impulses towards his youngest child (always ‘His Anna’); evidence of the many uncomfortable interventions he made into into her personal, romantic life, her sexuality: ‘It was then that Freud’s incomprehension toward the sexual orientation of his daughter began, and he made allusion to her ‘bad habits’. She wrote that she herself did not want these to overcome her. Freud called her his ‘only’ daughter.’ A looming, inextricable influence on Anna F.’s own lifelong career in psychoanalytic research and practice, ‘she had the strange feeling that her father was present [...] in every house, in every room’.
A deep theme of Kivland’s book is a focus on the ways in which women’s stories (in every sense of the word) have been sublimated, appropriated, and ventriloquised by the dominant discourses which structure individual experience. Noisy with the sound of men talking about, studying, exchanging, trading—and (re)naming—women, ABÉCÉDAIRE roves a vast historical panorama (traversing greek mythology, criminal history, horticulture, literary theory, psychopathology, and much, much more); scavenging information and tracing connections between women and their lived experiences; their representations, their relationships, their illnesses, their myriad silences and utterances.
So it is that in this tapestry, there are threads that link Athene—goddess of wisdom, handicraft, and weaving, born from Zeus’ forehead—permanently perched in statuette form on the desk of Anna F.’s father, to Anna P(avlova), the ballerina who danced in ecstatic frenzy, and was also turned into a statue in Hoffman’s Bacchanale Russe. Ann Q(uin), the brilliant, underrated author of Berg and others (one of ABÉCÉDAIRE’s many pleasures is the recognition of unexpected, welcome constituents), whose 1973 suicide in Brighton was watched by ‘a man, Albert Fox, [who saw] a woman walking into the sea’, rears up like a ghost in the early chapters. Later, there’s an echo of her in another writer, another A—Anna K(avan), who wrote Asylum Piece, inhabits many of these pages, and also annihilated herself: ‘there was enough heroin in her flat when her body was found there in 1968 to kill the entire street. They said she killed herself; it was heart failure, for hearts do fail, give out, give up, break’.
‘Anna O.’ was the name given to Bertha Pappenheim, a woman flung into history under a pseudonym chosen by Freud (and his colleague Josef Breuer), due to the curious pathology with which she presented—they diagnosed ‘hysteria’, she became a famous subject of theirs—‘a volcano lived in her, but love did not come to her; she lived like the plants, in the cellar, without light, she wrote, and thought of death as a friendly face’. Jacques Lacan’s well known case study ‘Aimee’—whose treatment after her assault charge of 1931 was the subject of the psychoanalyst’s doctoral thesis—‘was in reality, in her real life, in her own life, Marguerite Pantaine, a thirty-eight year old railway clerk’. The complaint of Marguerite’s mother, that Lacan had ‘stolen’ her daughter’s life story and ‘turned it into a thesis... she who had been observed, ransacked, fabricated, travestied, and made into a myth for the benefit of psychiatry’ is a filament that pulses with the same charge as the account of the Papin sisters, the French maids convicted of the murder of their employer’s wife and daughter in 1933. Their story was a fascination for the prominent French intellectuals of the time; analysed, reinterpreted, and fictionalised on stage and on screen by many (including Lacan). In Jean Genet’s Les Bonnes, ‘Leá and Christine became Solange and Claire, and in that transformation into actresses by one man, they played at murdering Madame while she was out.’ At stake here is the content of women’s real lives —their own real lives—unransacked, unhijacked.
The author herself—the elusive ‘I’ among the multitude—makes an early appearance, a black and white photo of her and her father counterpointing one of Anna F. and hers, only to recede into the margins as the text unfurls, returning just occasionally in parenthesised, often self-effacing asides: ‘[I must keep to my rule of not speaking about myself. Ever].’ Of her cast, Kivland writes: ‘I ran my hand along the shelves of my library or unearthed years of notebooks to extract them. None of them are me. The words are not my own; the words haunt me and inhabit me. I invented nothing.’
She may claim to have invented nothing—for certainly there is a commitment here to a deliberate, taxonomical tone describing factual, already documented information (wryly acknowledged by Kivland in the end section: ‘I believe the term used now is ‘modern neutral’). Moreover much of the actual content included is lifted directly from sources—lines from poetry or literature assimilated into the text, biographical and historical data drawn from articles, letters, anecdotal reports, and either paraphrased or replicated verbatim. But the cumulative effect, the way the material is allowed to connect, intertwine, and refer back to itself, means that ABÉCÉDAIRE arrives at a kind of rich palimpsest, both crowded and haunted, abundantly inventive. And, while it’s true that its sheer scope (the number and range of its subjects, its intellectualism, its density) represents an ask of the casual reader—who might find herself initially overwhelmed or intimidated, or repeatedly and compulsively impelled (as I was) to break away from the text to conduct additional research, tracking down the figures and stories which populate it—in this case, there’s nothing wrong with an ask. ABÉCÉDAIRE rewards when met on its own terms: an immersion in the landscape rushing past, an attention to the crazy detail that both differentiates and connects it; an awareness at all times of the window which frames your view.