Queering the World or Worlding the Queer? New Readings of Anna Kavan’s Who Are You?

Abstract

This essay explores world-literary and queer approaches to Anna Kavan’s little discussed 1963 novel Who Are You?. It argues that world-literary scholarship demonstrates the centrality of white colonial masculinity to capitalist modernity, while a queer reading highlights the anxious performativity at the heart of such power. The most distinctive feature of Kavan’s text is its unusual format, whereby the story is told once, in detail, before immediately being retold, in more concise fashion and with some adjustments. What both fields add to the analysis of this formal deviation is a shared concern with the failings of normative order—whether that be the bourgeois, heteropatriarchal family or the capitalist system itself—and, in turn, the relationship of such failure to narrative disjuncture.

Keywords:

• Anna Kavan
• world literature
• queer theory
• normativity
• narrative disjuncture
• patriarchal capitalism

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Sorcha Gunne for helpful initial comments on this piece, to Victoria Walker for judicious editing, and to both Victoria and Leigh Wilson for helpful conversations about Kavan.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 It is worth noting here that the story of Who Are You? is unmistakably a rewrite of the final section of Let Me Alone (1972 [1930]), written under Kavan’s previous name of Helen Ferguson.

2 I will be quoting from the longer version unless otherwise stated. This begins with substantive scene-setting with regards to the girl’s isolation and the couple's dysfunctional relationship. In contrast, chapter 19 omits such information and begins with the entrance of her friend, Suede Boots. It is also written in a plainer style and concludes differently.

3 The importance of this clash is suggested by the fact that, in the first telling of the narrative, the girl’s friendship with Suede Boots is not registered until halfway through (50). In contrast, the revised version in chapter 19 begins with the assertion that ‘Suede Boots drops in for tea as usual’ (98).

4 Sedgwick posits the example of two men seducing the same woman as a way to explore their hidden longing for each other (Sedgwick 1985), while Halberstam highlights the trend of gay individuals serving as rivals for a straight woman’s affections before these are redirected towards a white heterosexual male (Halberstam 2002).

5 Local populations are often described in racialized terms, while the Burmese landscape is dismissed as negation, lack or hell.