DAISY HILDYARD
Daisy Hildyard is a novelist and essayist with a PhD in the history and language of science. Her work is concerned with the dissolving boundaries between all life on Earth, the subject of both her essay, The Second Body (2017) and novel, Emergency (2022), both published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Emergency details the childhood and early adolescence of a young girl in Yorkshire in the 1980s and 1990s from a perspective of a social and ecological world that is both uncontained and uncontainable. Hildyard spoke to TANK about queer excess and plot as an encounter with reality.
Interview by Nell WhittakerPortrait by Caleb Klaces
Nell Whittaker “Emergency” has two meanings: alarm and the act of emerging. How do those two ideas structure the book?
Daisy Hildyard I wanted to bring climate crisis into a reality that has to some extent stood separate from it. Something that feels like normal, non-emergency life is actually part of a story of crisis that has been arising on the planet for decades, if not centuries. I was also playing half-seriously with the idea of a person emerging, a bildungsroman where you have an individual human protagonist and then you explain what happens to him or her: I wanted to tell a story that was the negative of that. I think the story is much more interested in the other beings, people, things, animals, plants and machines that are emerging all around this person, rather than all of those things feeding into the narrative of her individual story. I wanted it to be a story of emergence, but for these other emerging things around her, rather than her personal emergence in the way that a traditional coming-of-age story usually is.
NW How much do you agree with the idea that the novel represents a “new pastoralism”?
DH I definitely have noticed in fiction a tendency to either romanticise contemporary rural life or to make it gothic – maggots and guts – that seems to me slightly overwrought, where there’s not much sense of a place continuous with the contemporary world. And then in wider culture, there’s legitimate anti-farming writing and then a regenerative agriculture narrative that often tends towards the nostalgic. Neither of these trends or traditions is satisfying to me, and so I wanted to write about a place quite calmly, to profile it in certain ways without necessarily starting from the inherited and cultural associations of either Arcadia or Wuthering Heights.
NW Writing from a child’s perspective often emphasises a kind of hyper-impressionability or intense reactiveness, but tonally, there’s a kind of mildness throughout Emergency.
DH There is something very appealing about that quietly perceptive gaze a child can have. I do think of it as a calm book: the narrator is quite a calm child and I’m probably a fairly calm person and writer. I wanted there to be less ego in this story and to allow it to explore other ways of being, so there was a logic in containing that exploration in the past, in a small environment. Maybe it would have been ethically riskier if I was exploring everybody around me in that way.
NW Yet part of the network it describes is the experience of living in the pandemic.
DH There was a plot element that was intrinsic to the book that I needed to locate in the present. I also found it very easy to write the book during the pandemic; there was something about being enclosed and looking at the world that gave me a very intense feeling for the outside world. I don’t think I was alone in feeling that; I think a lot of people noticed things more, and there were these false stories about regeneration, non-humans coming into human spaces. There were sheep in a Welsh town, dolphins in Venice.
NW Goats in Llandudno.
DH Yes, exactly. The pandemic heightened the sense of profusion and liveliness and busyness of the outside world. Proust writes that when he was ill, lying in bed, the world never seemed so beautiful, and that when Noah was in his ark he must have really loved the world outside. I’m not sure I exactly subscribe to that, but there definitely was this sense of something powerful that people experienced in the pandemic that enabled this book to come into being. The book doesn’t take on the pandemic as a subject; it’s a backdrop to or context for the narrator’s focus on something else.
NW The novel doesn’t have one central plot but progresses along several trajectories: illness, through a character’s childhood cancer; ageing, through an elderly neighbour; the progression of industry with the local quarry; and organic growth through the spread of wood anemones. Then these plots are linked with each other, so that through one character, illness and the quarry are connected. What was it like to write that kind of enmeshment?
DH I love traditional novels, and I would love to write that kind of book, but I was also interested in making stories make contact with reality in a different way. Maybe in your life you hear something about another person and it’s very affecting, but then you forget about it. Years later, you hear something else about that person, and that changes you again. That’s one experience of story that is unlike conventional plot. The connection between industry and illness is something that I’ve read a lot about in non-fiction and the news; I think about Stacy Alaimo writing on transcorporeal reality, or Audre Lorde on breast cancer and the bodies that are exposed to industrial circulations and what happens to those bodies. There’s very obviously a connection there, but it’s not necessarily something that is taken in as plot material, though there are some novels or stories I can think of that do do that. I saw openings, in other narratives, and I tried to produce a different kind of experience.
NW What it achieves is that different types of relation then become equivalent, like the way that class manifests: it’s not information, it’s something that structures and generates experience, and particularly the way it organises the countryside.
DH Everybody knew about it – class – from a young age, even when we couldn’t articulate it: these different ways of defining self and prospects, how life stories were structured by those relations. It’s not the same, but I think there is a parallel with racism, the kind of racism that doesn’t manifest overtly or straightforwardly and yet is everywhere and structures experience for everybody.
NW There’s a sentence in the novel, about how the childish refrain of “You can’t say that!” in response to verbally expressed racism is a way of disavowing the statement, while also sticking around to see what happens next; it is a very sharp rendering of childhood racism. People who are adults now were taught that racism is deliberately treating someone differently because of the way they look, an assumption that has led to the more structural and endemic racism of today. But in Emergency, the combination of witness and analysis means writing from whiteness without trying to get outside of it.
DH I wanted the book to inhabit a world in which there’s not an exit strategy for a white person in relation to societal racism, because that seems true to me.
NW At one point you write that a lapwing is “queering the way the land lay around her”, and then in a passage on flowers, “The movements were violent and hopelessly desirable, obliterating identities across individuals, species, kingdoms, with each exchange, and every swap was queer and excessively necessary.” What is the word “queer” doing here?
DH In a bildungsroman, a young woman might transition into adulthood through a sexual encounter in a girl-boy relationship, and I was thinking about that and about Charles Darwin’s writing on an entangled bank of flowers, in a scene near the end where the narrator’s lying on her back watching flowers being pollinated. The passage is working in a relatively literal way against an assumption of cisgendered, heteronormative sexuality, which is a tiny minority of biological sexuality in the context of all the other ways of being that there are. I’m not a specialist in queer theory but I’m certainly building on the work of other writers and thinkers when I’m using an idea of queering to think about beautiful disruption – the way the exact same space, the same molecules and the same physical world might be rearranged completely differently. Another small, particular ditch in the mud, for a lapwing, is actually a home where you raise your young. When the narrator sees that, she has her experience flipped: where everything was previously oriented around her and her norms, she can suddenly apprehend another world in its fullness. This isn’t a new idea: there’s an early 20th-century concept of environmental experience called Umwelt by Jakob Johann von Uexküll, a biologist who writes about the way a plant growing in the field might be a home if you’re an ant, lunch if you’re a cow, a weed if you’re a farmer, or hair decoration if you’re a teenager. Loosely interpreted, it’s an appealing idea to me: it’s not just as though we experience these things differently, but that they are different, depending on these different encounters.
Daisy Hildyard, Emergency, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022
NW At one point, the protagonist is sitting on top of a fence, the smell of crushed wild garlic is rising up to her and she notices that wood anemones have spread throughout the wood, in a moment of intense sensory apprehension of the world. That reminded me of Tess of the d’Urbervilles when Tess hears Angel playing a harp and she pushes through an overgrown garden, smearing herself with cuckoo spit and sap from crushed stems. It’s a deeply sexual experience in both instances. How does emergent sexuality figure in the book?
DH In the 19th-century novel an experience like that is usually in service to heteronormative sex – it’s an image of that – whereas now, these many other forms of desire or sexuality are more available as experiences in their own right. And as you may be suggesting, that’s the case even within an identity that does not align itself with alternative sexualities. There are so many different ways of experiencing desire or of being invaded by another being; I’m interested in that extended scope. There’s always this experience of excess, joy, liveliness and suffering that is more than should be filed away under any evolutionary explanation, I think.
NW In Emergency, you also direct that sense of excess towards non-organic elements. There’s a passage where the protagonist is describing in detail an empty Pot Noodle in the woods. In Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology, they write that there’s an ecological element in consumerism because it encourages relating to things that aren’t human, for aesthetic reasons. That’s at work in the novel where the non-organic is also treated as something that’s deliberately and meaningfully there.
DH There has to be a baseline: what happens to a person matters more than what happens to a Pot Noodle. But also, it’s just so clear, increasingly, that these hard boundaries between – very obviously race and gender – but also humans and other species, and life and non-life, are wrongheaded. Not being able to see so much of the world and not being able to accept so much of the world creates problems for “us”: people who think of themselves as human in a particular cultural individualist tradition, lived in opposition to other species, non-beings and beings that are excluded from experience. The Pot Noodle bit, I’m not sure how that’s going to go down. ◉