Exploring the Realm of the Unconscious in Anna Kavan’s Sleep Has His House

Abstract

Sleep Has His House, one of Anna Kavan’s most radically experimental novels, appeared in Britain in 1948, in the wake of the Second World War. An objection levied at the novel on its publication was that it bore no relationship to external ‘reality’. However, this article argues that the novel’s focus on the oneiric realm, contrary to what hostile contemporary reviews claimed, does not take place in isolation of larger society. Portraying modernist, surrealist and psychoanalytical influences, the novel is namely concerned with the representation of a nocturnal realm that emphasizes the osmotic relationship between the external world and an individual’s subjectivity. Focusing on the ways in which violent images of war infiltrate the dream world, this article suggests that Sleep Has His House can in fact be understood as reflecting and responding to the pressures of British war-torn society in the mid twentieth century.

Keywords:

• Anna Kavan
• Sleep Has His House
• psychoanalysis
• Ludwig Binswanger
• Carl Jung
• surrealism
• modernism
• Second World War
• experimental literature

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Kavan uses the word ‘subconscious’ in ways which are more or less synonymous with the word ‘unconscious’, to refer to material repressed from, and not directly accessible to, the conscious mind, but capable of influencing emotions and behaviour.

2 Ice won the Science Fiction Book of the Year award in 1967, thus enjoying relative success in the immediate aftermath of its publication. Brian Aldiss, responsible for nominating Ice, later admitted that he selected it ‘less from any firm conviction that it was science fiction … than to draw attention to a splendid piece of writing which might have been overlooked in the face of more noisy claimants for public attention’ (Aldiss 1990: xi).