SLEEP HAS HIS HOUSE by Anna Kavan (BOOK REVIEW)
“It is night; and there is nothing false here. Night is reliable. Night does not dazzle us with treacherous fires. Night keeps a dark enduring silence for us … like sleep, deep sleep. By our own will we came here and tasted sleep before there was any need, because we loved to gaze at the face of night. But not quite at home … even among loved shadows … we can’t forget altogether the splendid sun … we sometimes have to dream of the place we came from.”
Bizarre and divisive even by the standards of the rest of Anna Kavan’s work, Sleep Has His House (1948) almost ended her career when it was released, causing her publisher to drop her. There’s no denying that Sleep Has His House is a deeply strange book. The novel makes few concessions to the reader, like its protagonist spending most of its time in the beautiful, surreal world of dreams and fantasy. However, for all its strangeness and abstruseness, it is possessed of a lyrical, poetic beauty undershot with an air of uncanny menace. With the distance of time it’s possible to look back on it and appreciate its unique hypnagogic beauty.
Sleep Has His House is not a novel of plot. As Kavan explains in the foreword:
“Sleep has his house describes in the night-time language certain stages in the development of one individual human being. No interpretation is needed of this language we have all spoken in childhood and in our dreams; but for the sake of unity a few words before every section indicate the corresponding events of the day.”
The novel is an attempt to capture the language of the night; the language of sleep, dreams and fantasy. As such the conscious waking world is reduced to the status of epigraph, whilst the main narrative of the text is given over to dreams and fantasies. Sleep Has His House tells the story of a girl’s lonely childhood and growth to adolescence and young adulthood, and the girl’s attempts to sublimate a waking world that she neither cares for nor understands to the seductive nocturnal world of fantasy and dream. As she grows up, she experiences the death of her mother, the withdrawal of her father, the alienation of school and work, all of which drive her further into the realms of night and dream.
A more conventional narrative would perhaps shape itself as a warning, becoming a story about the dangers of ignoring the real world for a dream one. But in Sleep Has His House, Kavan surrenders entirely to the dream world, finding the real world sorely lacking. Although it is portrayed as dangerously seductive, when compared to the banal pointlessness of the real world, both the protagonist and Kavan herself find the dream world infinitely more compelling. This links to underlying themes in her previous collections Asylum Piece (194) and I Am Lazarus (1945), in which Kavan’s protagonists, like Philip K. Dick’s, discover that sometimes the only rational response to an irrational world is to go insane, but it is in Sleep Has His House that this theme gets its strongest and most sustained exploration. Kavan goes further than even Dick ever did in her surrender to an alternate world of dream and fantasy that she allows to supplant the waking world entirely. It is this utter surrender that makes the book so powerful and so frightening. Many have linked the novel to Kavan’s lifelong dependency on heroin, a way she chose to cope with her various struggles with mental illness and depression, and certainly one can read it as a story about giving in to an addiction as a way of coping with reality. Yet this reading simplifies what is a deeply strange and unsettling narrative; allows the reader to dismiss the seductive night world of the book in a way which the narrative itself does not.
A more conventional novel might also force links between the life of Kavan’s protagonist in the waking world and the dreamworld she experiences. Certainly there are many intentional parallels. Particularly the dreams act as a space where the protagonist can explore her neuroses around the larger than life figures in her world, in particular her doomed, unhappy mother and her ineffectually authoritative father. Yet the dreams divorce themselves from reality as often as they reflect or ruminate upon them, and it is this ability to escape reality entirely that makes them so enticing. Across the narrative, we move from explorations of the protagonist’s subconscious anxieties to more sustained flights of fancy, filled with echoes of epic narratives, fairy tales, and – as one might expect from Kavan – Kafka-esque nightmares of persecution. The end result is an ever-shifting maze, one in which the reader is as much in danger of getting lost in as the protagonist.
Perhaps part of what makes the novel so alienating is that the protagonist’s main choices, the moments where she demonstrates the most agency and desire, are those in which she chooses to reject the waking world and embrace the dreamworld. That she has very little agency in the dreamworld itself becomes inconsequential, as the character quickly decides that she has no real agency in the waking world either, apart from her choice to reject reality and embrace the world of fantasy and dreams. In its complete and willing surrender to the promise of fantasy, Sleep Has His House forms a direct and uncomfortable challenge to the reader – is reading itself, the act of experiencing and inhabiting imaginary worlds, its own form of rejection of reality and surrender to the night? Kavan offers no easy answers, but by making the reader complicit in her protagonist’s surrender to fantasy, she forces us to engage with this uncomfortable question.
Great review, Jonathan, of a book that was rejected by the literary world, but I really liked its atmosphere.