Lucy Ives and Chris Kraus on Unicorns, Fantasy, and Flaubert

When Chris Kraus got on a Zoom call earlier this month to interview the novelist and now essayist Lucy Ives, she had one urgent question: “How did you develop this mania for research?” Ives, best known for the hit novel Loudermilk and its follow-up, Life Is Everywhere, has now written an essay collection demonstrative of her infinite curiosity and razor-sharp intellect. Titled An Image of My Name Enters America, and out this week with Graywolf Press, it features five braided essays, meandering from subjects like childbirth and My Little Pony to the Assyrian origins of the author’s surname. “I take a lot of risks when I write,” Ives explained. “But I like that challenge of being able to go to the edge of what someone will accept within the piece and then bringing them back in.” Appropriately, her conversation with Kraus below was characterized by a similar spirit of inquiry, as the authors discussed motherhood, fantasy, graphomania, and forging one’s identity in the public libraries of New York City.

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CHRIS KRAUS: Lucy, hi. It’s been a while. When did we talk for your NYU class? Was that a year ago?

LUCY IVES: It seems like that, but I think it was two or maybe even three years ago.

KRAUS: Really?

IVES: Yeah.

KRAUS: Well, I really enjoyed it.

IVES: Well, thank you for coming. A lot of people sent messages afterward saying how special it was for them, and that didn’t happen with the other people who came to speak.

KRAUS: Oh, that’s sweet. Are you in Providence now?

IVES: I don’t actually live in Providence. I live in Vermont. I know, that’s surprising.

KRAUS: That’s one of my dreams.

IVES: Come visit.

KRAUS: We have to talk about that separately, but for now we better circle back and talk about your book, which was amazing. I learned so much by reading it, as everyone who reads it will. These essays, they’re very long and substantial and extremely digressive, and they are driven by your genius for research. And I wanted to ask you about that research. Is that something that goes back to your tweens? How did you develop this mania for research?

IVES: I like that you call it a mania. It definitely is. I guess it started as a kid growing up in New York City and going to libraries at the time. In the 1980s, libraries still had card catalogs, even though people had personal computers. And that was my primary introduction to the archive and these massive analog stores of information. The smell of the cards that people had written on, that there were errors on them, all of that was totally fascinating to me. I guess I just never got over that. When things haven’t been touched for a while or they’re out of public discourse, they become interesting to me. I start to wonder what sort of lives they’ve had in their obsolescence. I love finding out that almost anything that’s been created was also created in the past. Whether it originates from something that happened before or it’s merely a repetition, that doesn’t really matter much to me—it’s just amazing to discover.

KRAUS: What you say about the card catalog is surprising. I imagined that you were a teenager in the early days of the internet and became obsessed. But it’s interesting that you mentioned history because that was my next question. Your research is so exhaustive. There’s a chapter on romantic love where you’re looking at the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. You look at every single aspect of the film, and it’s an enormous gathering of information. Most research is not that comprehensive. How much do you think gets lost in historical memory? Is it ever possible to grasp an accurate image?

IVES: Well, I don’t think you can have an exhaustive image of the past because we can’t even have an exhaustive image of the present.

KRAUS: That’s true. Our perceptions are always very placard.

IVES: Yeah. But we can have a subjective experience of the past that has a certain accuracy because it has to do with surprising ourselves about the present moment. Uncanniness associated with the past goes back to the haunted card catalogs. Surprise and access: that’s what I think I can be accurate about. And I should say that Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a film that I’ve probably watched about 300 times. It’s a terrible, terrible movie, but it also has some of the most incredible dance performances in American film. I think it’s really amazing because it’s supposed to be a historical re-enactment of being in the Oregon territories in the 1850s. But of course, it doesn’t turn out to be about that at all. It’s really just about making a movie in America about a hundred years later. I think it shows us this confluence of different professionalized dance cultures and the studio system. But it’s also a movie about human trafficking. I refer to it as a cursed object at the beginning of the essay because I think it backs you into the mistakes of history and how mythical our sense of romantic love is. Romantic love is something that defines someone’s life trajectory, but only by backing into it and going through all of its horrors. It’s really like a horror film in a certain way, and I’m sure a lot of people will be very angry to hear that. Maybe we should cut that.

KRAUS: Flaubert said once that he wrote the whole novel Sentimental Education in an effort to recapture the feeling he had when he saw a certain color of mustard yellow paint on a windowsill. And I wonder, with all of your archival work, what has been the most powerful lever for you to access the atmosphere and the texture of another period?

IVES: Well, I started writing this book because I remembered something very minor. I think even more minor than mustard yellow. It’s this feeling that I had as a child, as a four or five-year-old, looking at a mirror and wanting the mirror to be a portal to another world. I had completely forgotten this wish, and I remembered it a little while ago before I really started putting these essays together seriously. I wanted to write a book that would use adult techniques of doing historical research, but that would partake in that level of fantasy. And I’m not sure why I wanted to make that juxtaposition.

KRAUS: It’s really funny that you say that because reading the book triggered this childhood memory for me in terms of the structure. A game called “The Penny Walk.” Did you ever do that as a child?

IVES: Oh, what’s that?

KRAUS: You’d take a walk and, at every corner, you’d flip a penny and head would be right and tails would be left. So, you’d be creating your own labyrinth in the walk. Reading the book feels like that, like you’re constructing a labyrinth. Inside, inside, inside. Deeper, deeper, deeper. More, more, more. That’s an incredible process, but I guess that’s always your process. Were you aware of trying to up the stakes in this book and amplify that digressive nature?

IVES: Yes. I do want the book to be a space that feels like it encloses you. You can get lost in it, really exit reality in some way and then come back to it again. A kind of comparative experience of feeling like I was somewhere else and now I’m here again. I don’t want people to forget that they’re in the book, but I want the book itself to feel like this space of fantasy. It’s kind of old-fashioned of me, but I am really interested in dreams. I find them very valuable. Something that’s been important to me as a writer has been to teach myself to dream while I’m awake. To be able to access the parts of my mind that make up these fantasy images that I don’t totally understand the origin of and walk around in it. These are the paradises of literature for me. And so, I’m trying to create a version of that. It’s an experiment, but I also mean it quite seriously. The histories that I’m telling, I have tried to verify them. 

KRAUS: In the second essay in the book, “An Image of My Name Enters America,” which, among other things, is about the Assyrian origins of your surname “Ives,” you actually describe making a list of topics that the essay is going to cover. You write, “It’s that easy to determine what goes into an essay and what doesn’t. The topics are stopping places.” So, in a sense, the drift you allow in your essays is trying to capture the drift of thought, trying to get to a place that’s more physical. How much do you consciously permit that drift? And do you at times censor it?

IVES: A lot of my writing is done by someone else, and I’m not really sure who that is. She’s me, but when I talk about accessing the dream space, it’s more like a descent into a world where there’s a lot of freedom. Things that don’t make sense here in the world make sense there. For me, the whole reason to write is to be able to descend into that world: to hear the sounds, the music playing, the animals talking. Not to get too weird about it, but it is weird. It’s a lesson of free association rather than trying to bring back messages. And honestly, there isn’t a lot of cutting of material that happens from a topic point of view. It’s really about line edits in the revision process. Each of these essays is pretty much what it was in the first draft. I take a lot of risks when I write. But I like that challenge of being able to go to the edge of what someone will accept within the piece and then bringing them back in. The ability to do that comes from some sort of internal, untranslatable language that I can’t really talk about more than through metaphor.

KRAUS: A visual artist whose work I really like a lot, Marwa Abdul-Rahman, has something similar in her process. She describes it as “audio valence.” She makes these big pieces of assemblages that she feels are being dictated to her—and they are, in a very real sense. And it’s funny that you use the word freedom because that was my next question. What is freedom?

IVES: Freedom. I use that word, but as it’s purveyed to us in the US, I think it’s a pretty freighted concept. It’s sort of a load of kryptonite. A lot of the work that I’m doing as a writer is giving myself permission, developing ways of being in conversation with parts of myself or allowing myself to make these kinds of mental movements. Because the title has the word America in it, I’ve thought, “Should I know what freedom is?” But I guess I view that term as a concept that’s been co-opted and turned into a shtick. To use a phrase that the theorist, Lauren Berlant, came up with, I think that there’s a certain cruel optimism associated with freedom that comes to us wholesale as a received idea. A lot of the privileges that we have are contingent upon our usefulness to institutions. So I think we have to be very cautious about a one-size-fits-all approach. This is not what you were asking me about at all, but one of the things that I really long to do with this book is to have people say to themselves, “You know what? There’s a lot of value in rethinking American history and who gets to tell these stories.” I think there’s a lot to be gained politically and socially from that.

KRAUS: The book opens with you talking about having had a child. Your son must be about the same age now that you were when you were looking through the mirror.

IVES: He’s a little bit younger, but he’s just about to get there.

KRAUS: I imagine that a lot of this has to do with the presence of your child.

IVES: Yes. The things that they say about reliving your own life through your child’s development—not that you’re necessarily living through them, but things return to you that you had forgotten. You are able to access parts of yourself that you didn’t have access to before. Having a child and giving birth, it definitely makes you think about narrative in a different way.

KRAUS: Well, we have to talk about unicorns. That’s one of my favorite parts of the book. You go from a description of My Little Pony to The Unicorn Tapestries at The Cloisters. I haunt that room when I’m in New York. I find them unbearably tragic, the unicorn whose whole body has been assaulted by spirits. How do you react to those? Have you always loved unicorns? And what is it that we love when we love unicorns?

IVES: The unicorn, it’s a double thing. On one hand, the unicorn is a representation of purity: a fantasy about innocence and a power that can renew the world. Everything’s destroyed, but the unicorn appears and it touches the polluted water with its horn, and suddenly all the animals can come and drink. But it’s also a kind of representation of our very uncomfortable relationship with nature, specifically with human nature. That’s why it becomes something in the Middle Ages that, in Europe, is captured and imprisoned and has to have its horn sawed off. It’s something that needs to be harnessed. Bound up in that are all the aspects of humanity that are being oppressed at that time. Interestingly, the unicorn often appears in North America in the 16th and 17th centuries along with the so-called discovery of the New World and the colonization of that space. When Europe begins to colonize Africa, the unicorn appears in Africa. Lo and behold, there’s a unicorn north of Mozambique. Where did that come from? It’s somehow present in these moments of exploitation, these moments in which people are trying to convince themselves that there is something of value to be claimed that is human and also not human at the same time. It’s also why the unicorn is so intimately associated with femininity—because it is a figure for the reproductive power of people who have a uterus, of harnessing the ability to do this thing that’s so natural and also extremely unnatural, which is giving birth to more humans. The unicorn is tamed by a virgin because the unicorn is a substitute. It’s a kind of thing that’s training people to participate in a certain gendered regime of labor. So the unicorn is a very important sign, and when you see it, you should pay attention to it because something is happening there. There’s an ideology that’s being developed. The unicorn never appears in unfraught space.

KRAUS: Wow. I think the heart of the book occurs when you describe this period of your own life when you were an undergrad and you experienced extreme disassociation. You took time off. You went from place to place to place with no particular logic. And it’s the opposite of what happens now in your work. The process of association is extremely sophisticated and streamlined in your work and very effective. So that you experienced this complete dissociation is shocking. You checked out of your normal life and what was expected of you. By writing about it, I think you’re saying that there was a value in experiencing that at the time. Is that right?

IVES: I think by writing that essay, I’m wishfully– after the fact– finding value in it. Becoming unsure if one exists is not a great thing as much as it might be romanticized in some ways. Throughout my life, when I’ve been in difficult circumstances, I’ve said to myself, “You know what? I’m going to try to communicate with a future version of myself. I’m going to pick up this imaginary phone or write an imaginary email.” I mean, one way to talk about it with words that we would use now, which didn’t exist at the time in the early 2000s—I was having a mental health crisis. But I did a lot of writing then as a way of trying to communicate with my future self. 

KRAUS: What you’re describing was also kind of graphomania, and that’s terrifying for a writer. Last question, do you think that finding a place of emptiness is essential in order to drift?

IVES: Probably. I think that what’s essential in order to drift is to have a willingness to encounter the strangeness and unevenness of time. Having a willingness to encounter shapes of time that are not directed forward, that are not linear, that are unevenly repetitious, asymmetrical in some way—those are some of the most useful tolerances that a writer can build up. I don’t know if that’s emptiness exactly, but it’s definitely a way of being in dialogue with a kind of presence that doesn’t get a lot of shrift these days. So I’m in favor of that.