“I was raised in rural Yorkshire … I still have a deep feeling, which dates from my childhood, that you shouldn’t waste anything, especially words”—the matter-of-fact tone set by this phrase from Daisy Hildyard’s previous Fitzcarraldo-published book, The Second Body, glides, or say, steps into her latest, the novel Emergency. Words aren’t the subject here, but rather what they point at. Language is like glass, meant only for seeing through, for designating what is on the far side. The style recalls earlier modes of signifying: the tree is the tree. Simply that, without complication, complexity, or nuance. It’s an illusion, of course, that the world can be transcribed in words, but the mimetic writing here is convincing enough to persuade that this world is the world. As John Berger might have put it, each lion is Lion, each ox is Ox. Or indeed, in current terms it might be called phenomenological writing: descriptive, attentive, making an experience of engaging directly with the world available to its reader. And as with glass, the effect is of seeing more clearly than with the unframed and unfiltered point of view, than with the bare, the illiterate eye.
Emergency
by Daisy Hildyard
(Fitzcarraldo, April 2022)
From the start, “old enough to be outside and alone,” on the edge of a quarry, watching a kestrel watching a vole, a child’s gaze orients the reader in a world: rural Yorkshire of the 1990s. For this child, occupying endless empty hours with loafing in fields, by fences, in woods, boredom slides into interest and then boredom again as she watches—and vision is the dominant sense—notices, relates, telling a story with a minute attention to and absorption in detail, that, to those of us that grew up in rural Britain in the nineties, is queasily familiar. It’s familiar right down to the hairstyles: “the boys all had shaved heads or curtains; the girls wore high pony-tails like fountains, two strands of hair released at the front,” the “tiny plastic trolls,” Safeways and the cans of Vanilla body spray, Gameboys and urban myths, down to the nothing-to-do-but-loaf.
This world emerges first as a taxonomy, an enumeration of people, animals, things. There’s Clare “silhouetted … in the open doorway”; “a large vole, male, hiding under a clump of dead turf”; “chocolate bar-wrappers from which the decoration and brand name had washed away, leaving only the silver slip with the original colours in the deepest creases”; a dog, “Soldier”, “her underbelly … bald and mottled brown and purple with swollen teats”; an ash tree, “its deadness … irradiated with living”; “an orange ring pull” (“recently I saw this same ring pull in an image of a dead seabird”); Mr. Gray, “one hand [rising] repeatedly to smooth one eyebrow into place”; “a red tipper lorry” trailing “black smoke every time it took a load through the village”; a cow called Ivy; a maimed deer that likes cake. Human, animal, plant, microbe, vehicle, litter—each is imbued with equal attention, creating a clutch of the components that make up the child’s world. Affinities and identifications move beyond similarity to stretch across distinction. Nor are traits that tend to be designated as human here limited to human experience: “All creatures have character.” A stance that might otherwise be derided as anthropomorphism becomes, through the child’s point of view, incorporated into an understanding of kinship, of alikeness and interrelation, between and across species.
In the tradition of the pastoral novel, description, narrative, and incident bring the day-to-day life of a community into being. The quarry falls into disuse, use, then disuse again; the tipper becomes a nest for a thrush; the field behind the house, a housing development; Clare falls ill; the dog, Soldier, dies; a computer arrives at school; childhood slips into adolescence marked by cans of body spray and urban myths. People lose and gain jobs, leave and return. Time trips on, and the impression of a rural community gains vitality. The lone child is not the atomized individual, cause and consequence of eco-crisis, nor is hers the default humanizing viewpoint, but like “some smaller, weaker, shade-loving plant,” her presence wanes as what she sees takes precedence. This subject, “small, indeterminate of gender, slow, and wheezily asthmatic: clearly unthreatening—in fact, barely functioning,” is but an object among others, destabilizing the conventions of anthropocentric narrative. Her tread is light; she is a component part in a network of parts that she is beginning to perceive: “I had access to the wood, the fields, and to other people’s homes as though I was an element of infrastructure, piped water or electrical wiring, running under the ground, between the trees, through and within the houses with a supply of something that the inhabitants, whether through habit or deep dependence, had stopped noticing.”
What comes to the fore in the absence of a dominant central character is a way of seeing. For the child, crucially, has not “stopped noticing”, divulging the central tenet of the book: the reader is being given access to a mode of seeing and a quality of attention that extend beyond our usual capacities, capacities which “whether through habit or deep dependence,” have atrophied. The reader tunes in, then attunes to this child’s perspective. As the child sees, so the reader sees. In her essay “The Skill of Ecological Perception,” perceptual psychologist Laura Sewall has written on humans’ need to develop “skilful ways of seeing,” as one of a variety of means of reintegrating humans into the biosphere and enabling us to recognize our human implication in the environment and its demise. Moreover, through perceptual practices, Sewall suggests, attention might slide into intention, and thence to action. Her essay could be read as the theoretical scaffolding for this book. The emergency figured in the title would speak, then, of the urgency of noticing what it is that emerges, what, through attention, becomes visible. Nor is attention limited to the eyes, but extends to the physical body: “I was standing and waiting for the vole or the kestrel to move and something clicked. It was physical and visual, like a camera finding focus.” Once the reader is embedded in the dense matter of the child’s world, the role of language is like that of a camera, a means of finding focus. And within the near-claustrophobic density, things start to click.
As between kestrel and vole, “My gaze moved up and down, drawing a direct line between them, like a lift between two floors of a building,” lines abound, pages are riven with “beams of light,” “trails of mist,” mushroom filaments, cobwebs “like so many tentacles, tiny hooks at the top, waving back at me from the places where my knee had snagged them.” Objects lose their primacy as, through the child’s attention, the reader too is sensitized to the relations, the lines, between them. And riven is the wrong word—these lines don’t sever, but cement, “Running between all these trees and through spears of the wild grasses there were transparent threads, connecting each one to all the others. When they came into focus they were everywhere.” Indeed, the text begs to be drawn, or even modelled. Between component parts, connections become apparent as if the dense matter, like cotton wool or dry tinder, is being taken in the hands and loosened, pulling apart to reveal an intricate architecture.
For focusing in generates its opposite, panning out: breaking with the conventions of the pastoral, the local calls up the global. The intensity of the child’s attention effects a counterreaction, supplanting the narrative’s groundedness in place and object with repeated instances of ecstatic disorientation. While this “unnatural hyperawareness” could be read simply as a child’s sensibility, it staunchly attests to the novel’s theoretical underpinning, bringing the concept of “scale” into the conversation. These are instances of what eco-critic Timothy Clark calls “derangement of scale,” described in The Second Body as “a sense of confusion that is caused between the immensity of the human’s global existence and the smallness of your own private everyday life.” Crucial to Hildyard’s own ecocritical practice, these scalar relations aren’t conceptual but concrete, “not a product of a diseased mind but of the truth”:
The anemones were poisonous. As I looked down on them I felt myself swept up into the air and into an aeroplane flying over a green prairie interrupted by a deep blue lake—it was the wood and not my mind which took me through these scales, from the pinprick of nectar to the earth’s surface, and gave me the shock of finding myself still on my own two flat feet with the leaves crushing under my feet, the smell of garlic and wet earth rising in a trail behind me.
And so the familiarity that has oriented the reader at a point in time (1990s) and space (Yorkshire) is a ruse. The very closeness of the community likewise reveals its opposite: it is not a closed system, but a point in an interconnected global network. The child spins through space, the same bananas exist both there and in Panama, the quarry belongs to a Canadian engineering company. The effect is of disorientation: the reader, with the narrator, is “released from gravity, an astronaut clutching [their] measuring implements.” In this ecological temporospatiality of “many moments and no chronology, many places and no orientation,” the measuring implements, of course, have become redundant.
What is not redundant, however, is embodied experience. For it is not the world itself that has changed, only the way in which it is perceived. The child-lens through which the reader is looking is now that of a magnifying glass “explod[ing] everything beneath it,” now that of a drop of water, containing “an image of the wood turned upside-down, barred with tiny trees whose leafy light spread like roots along the rounded base.” The defamiliarization is not material but perceptual, and the newly-perceived world is one in which the human is but a point on a scale, a part in a network of interrelated parts, in which differing, sometimes contradictory, timeframes and spatial scales, human and more-than-human, individual and planetary, coexist.
This childworld is thrown into stark relief by the appearance of the stripped-down adult world in the few scant pages in which the narrator’s present tense comes into view. “It’s April and I’m not allowed to leave the house more than once a day, for a short period of physical exercise, but I don’t make use of the official allowance: I haven’t been outside now for sixteen days. I have been instructed to shelter in place.” The adult’s present, her time of writing, is a period of lockdown and isolation due to a “novel virus.” This sets up an enlightening counterpoint, throwing the world we have been immersed in into perspective and thus illuminating the busy vitality of the child’s engagement with her world. This world, in comparison, is bare and far more alone than that of the lone child. From her flat, the narrator studies the urban environment around her. The disintegration of the present moment due to the virus and attendant restrictions—“space no longer feels regular or continuous—it’s broken. The area I look out onto is divided into bordered zones”—aligns with the narrator’s reflections on what “it was easy to be blind to,” what gets “overlooked.” The disintegration is, however, countered by a material reintegration enforced through isolation and enabled through time and patience, through watching. “These days, living in an indoor world, I spend so much time looking at things that all their small details have crept into focus … not only the trademarks on the backs of tins … Not only the shrubs whose names I don’t know … Not only each bud, but each of the tiny green tags inside it, developing, as though grudgingly, at an incremental pace. I wouldn’t usually have the time or patience to watch.” So child and adult’s modes of seeing merge, and then and now converge, just as “particles of plastic from packets I opened when I was a child are circulating, right now, through the bodies of newly hatched birds.”
While Emergency appears to be underpinned by a project similar to that of The Second Body, to render an individual’s global ecological impact—our carbon footprint, our second body—intelligible, the divergences between the two are more illuminating. For all that The Second Body had an aim, to make a concept concrete (“If you are to believe that you are present in the intestines of a Russian seagull then you need to see at least a little of its blood”), Emergency is decidedly nonpurposive. Eco-catastrophe might be a crisis of communication, but here the election of novel over long-form essay to house the text (a switch from white binding to blue in Fitzcarraldo terms), seems to be toying with another question: not, how can climate change be made comprehensible?, but what modes of response do differing literary forms elicit in their reader?
In Emergency, the terms are neither of purpose nor of persuasion. Bereft of plot or narrative arc beyond the thinnest of outlines, the writing attends to what is through a series of lenses that orient, disorient, then reorient. For David Abrams, “The ecological crisis may be the result of a recent and collective perceptual disorder in our species, a unique form of myopia which it now forces us to correct.” Here Hildyard offers a corrective, a model of perceptual reorientation. As such, the text works at a level of suggestion, as a heuristic. And therein it risks being mis-regarded, for the outcome lies not in the text itself, but in the reader’s engagement with it, and in a book that is so intently without emergency, it is “easy to be blind to it.” Only perhaps the disjuncture between urgent title and measured text, limned by references to stubble burning and an urban fire, provide the necessary nudge in the ribs. Pay attention! For the drama of Emergency teeters there, with the reader, and our decision whether or not to engage, to act. In the end it’s up to us. For the call to attend to this world housed within the pages of a book is surely a call to attend to the larger world, a warning to be heeded as flames silently lick the final pages, “pressuring anything living to get out of there.”
Olivia Heal is a creative-critical PhD Researcher at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is currently writing a book about motherhood and the environment. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of journals including The White Review, gorse, and The Stinging Fly. Her translation of an extract of Marius Daniel Popescu’s La Symphonie du loup was anthologized in Best European Fiction 2016 (Dalkey Archive).
Banner image: Kastemärjad ämblikuvõrgud by Ott Rebane, public domain