Children's Literature

The Environmental Uncanny

In his 1919 essay "The Uncanny," Freud defines uncanniness as "that class of the frightening which leads us back to what is known of old and long familiar" (20). The fact that uncanny experiences put us in contact with what is not only strange, but strangely familiar, also opens ecology to a Freudian logic. Amitav Ghosh has proposed an "environmental uncanny" that differs from the supernatural uncanny in that it "pertains to nonhuman beings" and in fact has "no human referents at all" (32). "No other word," he suggests, discussing catastrophic climate change, "comes close to expressing the strangeness of what is unfolding around us. For these changes are not merely strange in the sense of being unknown or alien; their uncanniness lies precisely in the fact that in these encounters we recognize something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of non-human interlocutors" (40). The "environmental uncanny" thus evokes the strange yet familiar haunting of our present moment by the deep histories of nonhuman time. The propinquity of the nonhuman interlocutor demands of us recognition, a moment that "occurs when a prior awareness flashes before us, effecting an instant change in our understanding of that which is beheld" but which "cannot appear spontaneously; it cannot disclose itself except in the presence of its lost other" (Ghosh 4–5). It is in sudden "flashes" in relation to the presence of that "lost other" that we [End Page 79] become fully aware of "the uncanny intimacy of our relationship with the nonhuman" (33).

Perhaps the most obvious uncanny intimacy with the nonhuman is our relation with the animal world. Cary Wolfe observes that "human/animal relations" are a "privileged site" for exploring otherness and the centrality of the human subject (1–3). At first glance, How I Live Now offers a fine testing ground for concerns regarding the posthuman possibility of interspecies conversation and entanglement. The novel's setting is a contact zone of human and animal, a locale replete with what Lawrence Buell might call "human and nonhuman webs of interrelation" (138), where one character has only "survived because he listened to animals" (Rosoff 193). On her first arrival at the country estate, Daisy sees "a goat and a couple of dogs… and in the background I saw some cats scooting after a bunch of ducks" (5). Given such interspecies intimacy, there is an almost corporeal telepathy between the animal and the human: "the dogs were upset and behaved strangely, as if the hum and the smell of our skin made them anxious" (48). Her cousins' intimacy with the animal world causes a blurring of the boundary between human and animal, as well as a consequent ontological instability in Daisy's perception of them. She notes of Edmond that "he's exactly like some kind of mutt" (3), with a "little dog-shelter dog kind of tilt of the head" and eyes "the same color as the sky" (4, 6). Piper gives "a happy little squeak like a mouse cheer" and moves "just like the fog on little cat feet" (11–12). Of cousin Isaac, our narrator observes, "At times I thought he was more animal than human" (36); she also notes that "[w]ith nonhumans he was completely different. With a dog or horse or badger or fox every fiber of his being was totally engaged" (37). The way Isaac looks protectively at her "reminded me of [the dog]" (115). Cousin Osbert, less flatteringly, has "a face like a dead pigeon" (33), and the locals make "clucking noises" (42). Daisy comes to regard herself in animal terms too, thinking that others "stared at me like I was something interesting they'd ordered from a zoo" (8). She suspects that her stepmother "liked to poison me slowly till I turned black and swelled up like a pig" (11), and, while wrapped in a blanket—"the black [blankets] were from the black sheep" (9)—comes to think of herself, naturally, as being just that: a black sheep. Daisy's process of maturation can be charted as a movement from seeing herself as "Poor Motherless Lamb" to "fierce and strong like a mother wildebeest" (19, 71). Key moments of adaptation occur when she embraces her own animal nature: at one point she "made a nest [End Page 80] for [herself] by trampling down a little patch in the tall grass" (18); at another, she has the wherewithal to gather "armfuls of long grass to make a nest" (124).

Human-nature entanglement inheres also in the language of Daisy's narration. Cognitive preference determines linguistic choices.⁴ Consequently, we find a metaphorical discussion of "bad apples" and "last straws" and getting "[d]ucks in a row" (81), of others weighing "nothing more than a handful of hay" (119), or of being "dog-tired" (64). Most typically, though, Daisy will deploy simile to establish a likeness between animal and human. The family "piled together on the bed on top of each other like puppies" (61) or can be found "sitting on rocks by the edge like turtles" (63) or "perch(ed) on rocks" (129) like birds. A person might have the river "flow over your skin like a dolphin" (63), or they might feel "like an animal choking to death in a noose" (83), "like a rat in a trap" (69), or "like ants in an anthill" (110). Daisy observes how others "slid off like a sorry snake" or leaned "up against [someone] like a cat" (70, 114); another time, she reports feeling "eyed up like prey" (102). In this environment, feelings fly wildly "like a bird caught in a room" (44).

But pervasive human and nonhuman entanglement, reinforced by a linguistic tendency to establish the likeness of similitude, is complicated in a flash of recognition that "cannot disclose itself except in the presence of its lost other" (Ghosh 5). This occurs when Daisy stumbles upon the scene of a massacre and discovers "[d]ead things everywhere" (140). Of course, this encounter can be seen as an experience of abjection, the subjective horror of confronting the material evidence of a corporeal existence (on this occasion, witnessing rotting corpses) that results, according to Julia Kristeva's influential formulation of the abject, in a breaching of the boundary between self and other. Notably, however, this key moment in Daisy's identity (re)formation is specifically related to the otherness of animals and her own "second thoughts" about their nature. Approaching a skulk of foxes, Daisy's "first thought was that they were beautiful, sleek and well fed and vivid orangey red with sharp little intelligent faces," but it does not occur to her "till second thoughts to wonder why there were so many of them and why they didn't run away" (140). These foxes do not flee because, engrossed in feeding on the dead bodies, they ignore her presence "unless I actually kicked them and then they retreated a few steps still holding on to whatever body part they were biting and looked at me dispassionately and I'm sure they could tell I was afraid" (142, emphasis added). Besides these foxes [End Page 81] "tugging at stinking intestines exposed through holes torn in the flesh" (143), there are birds "pecking at a dead face in front of me, tugging at the skin and using their beaks to pull jagged purple strips of flesh free from the bone" (141), as well as "rats crawling out from inside the dead animals" (143). The odor of decomposition is "putrid and rotting and so foul your stomach tries to vault out through your throat and if your brain has any sense it wants to jump out of your skull and run away as fast as possible so it doesn't ever have to find out what's making that smell" (140–41). The visceral nature of these descriptions and our narrator's meditation on somatic sensation indicate that she is no longer able to see corporeality as linguistically traceable in relation to the animal. Here the animal consumes—is literally deconstructing—the human body, and the foxes' "look" at Daisy, described as "dispassionate," is a glance that is unreadable in human terms. These "beautiful" and "intelligent" creatures seen devouring the human body regard the living Daisy too as little more than potential food. The unsettling experience communicated by this relay of gazes is, if anything, more discomfiting than the abject deconstruction of the boundaries between self and other, life and death. In this case, the confrontation with a "nonhuman interlocuter" serves to affirm the inscrutable otherness of the animal world (Ghosh 40), its fundamental unknowability, an otherness that also has an immediate effect upon the corporeal self, reducing the human to a body solely material. The challenge a moment such as this presents to an anthropocentric humanism is profound.

The earlier intimate connection between animal and human is further violated moments later, this time by our protagonist herself. Finding her beloved pet goat starving and sick, Daisy "covered [him] with a grain sack and shot him in the head" (144). As she leaves this corpse-strewn scene, language proves insufficient to negotiate what has been witnessed. Daisy can only hold her young cousin's hand and "tell her over and over that I loved her through the blood beating in my veins and running down through my hand and into her fingers" (144). Now, the only "telling" adequate for coping with such trauma is through the body itself. For Kristeva, the abject is a "place where meaning collapses" (2) and has the quality of "being opposed to I" (1). But in this scene it is the encounter not with the corpse so much as the "opposed to I" animal interlocutor that leads to the collapse in meaning. In the aftermath of this experience, human corporeality, detached from the mind (the brain having "run away" [140]) and any possibility of conflating adequate representation with language, [End Page 82] is inseparable from an outside "nature" or "environment." The eater has become the eaten; the consumer consumed; the borders between animal and human, inside and outside, rendered porous; and the "dispassionate look" of the hungry foxes serves as a potent reminder of a knowledge we repress, a perhaps necessary disavowal of the primality that is a "prior awareness" (Rosoff 142; Ghosh 4). A recognition of and by the other cannot be captured by systems of representation because it is fundamentally other to them.

A recurring concern of Rosoff's novel, therefore, is the traffic between the body and nature, between human corporeality and the nonhuman environment. In some ways, Daisy, a human given the name of a plant, fits the conception of trans-corporeal subject. The most obvious instance of trans-corporeality is of course the consumption of food, the literal incorporation of plants and animals that become the substance of "the human." As Stacy Alaimo notes of the "trans-corporeal transit" between earth and stomach, "for the most part the model of incorporation emphasizes the outline of the human—food disappears into the human body, which remains solidly bounded" (12–13). But food disappearing into the body is precisely what the anorexic subject cannot stomach. By the time Daisy confesses at the midpoint of the novel that "you might have gleaned from some of the hints dropped so far that food was not my best subject" (98), the reader is more than aware of that unspoken trauma. The hints are substantial. From the outset we observe how she "refused to eat anything" and "liked the feeling of being hungry" (11, 43), which is also "the feeling [she] loved best in the world" (45). Daisy says of her new family that "none of us was short of protein except me" (27) and that "I told them I was too excited to eat anything" (28). She is dismissive of questions about whether "I managed to gain any weight blah blah blah" (32), and, reacting to the remark "You need to eat something because you look too thin," she admits "that old broken record is one I don't need to hear from people" (13). She duly shrugs off peer pressure: "I tried eating a little more so Edmond would stop looking at me that way and after a week or so he even said I looked better by which I'm sure he meant fatter so I cut back some after that" (55). Daisy relishes the fact that her eating disorder "drove everyone stark raving mad and cost my father a fortune in shrinks and also it was something I was good at" and knows it is a "way of making other people feel guilty" (44). If she later conflates hunger and sexual desire as "starving, starving, starving for Edmond" (45), this is a longing acted upon without fear of consequence, with her being "too thin to get my period" (123). [End Page 83]

With the dislocations of wartime, Daisy's willful self-denial is challenged by the food shortages in her environment: "it was the first time in as long as I could remember that hunger wasn't a punishment or a crime or a weapon or a mode of self-destruction" (53). If originally "in deprivation heaven" due to rationing (54), she realizes the danger of becoming "half out of your mind due to a variety of deprivations" and accepts that "[a]ll this time I've been starving" (133, 134). Recognizing that "the more we tried to stop being hungry the more starving we got" and that "as time went on there were a lot more thin people around and I didn't stand out so much" (53, 99), she develops an altered comprehension of her corporeal situation. Observing her younger cousin, she "noticed how skinny Piper was which once upon a time I would have thought was a good thing and now thought was just what happens when you're nine years old and don't have enough food to grow properly" (130). Taking to heart a doctor's remark, "Aren't there enough troubles in the world without this [eating disorder] too?" (59), Daisy gradually gets better. "Somewhere along the line," she confesses, "I'd lost the will not to eat" (159). She notes the irony of getting her "appetite back just when everyone else in the world was learning how to starve" and when "the idea of wanting to be thin in a world full of people dying from lack of food struck me as stupid" (159). If before, the idea of incorporation was problematic—"I tried eating a little bit of bacon today because Edmond particularly asked me to but it tasted like pig and I gagged" (34)—she later admits "the difference was that now I ate what I could" (159). The revived Daisy "could do with a nice piece of toast" or "could have killed for a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich on rye and a Diet Coke" (103, 158).

Susan Bordo reminds us that if anorexia is a "debilitating" and "multidimensional" disorder caused by a confluence of biological and psychological factors (147, 140), it is also a "crystallization of culture" and a direct consequence of cultural representations of and upon the female body (35). To a degree, Daisy's return to health is enabled by escaping "way off in the country" (27), a distancing from the cultural repackaging of food in her forced return to nature. Living on "the tenth floor of an Eighty-sixth street apartment building where the closest you ever got to Agricultural Produce was a corned beef sandwich from Zabar's" (85), she muses later that "except for the deli counters and five or ten thousand other total essentials, supermarkets were pretty much a waste of time" (169). It is non-wasted time spent in the wild searching for "food and all those kinds of things" that restores [End Page 84] her appetite (117). Noting that "I didn't know what to do with a big fat sticky dripping honey comb or a couple of fists full of watercress other than sending them to some factory where they'd be wrapped up in Styrofoam and plastic," Daisy comes to realize that "amazingly they tasted just like honey and watercress without having to do anything to them at all" (169). Becoming self-sufficient involves picking fruit and vegetables, and that new awareness of origin and organic process leads to a different appreciation of the act of consumption: Daisy admits that "beans tasted nice when you got them home and cooked them" (103).⁵

Daisy's healthier relationship with food consumption leads Carroll to claim that in the novel, "a synthesis of human body and place is achieved" (182). But what could be seen as the fulfillment of a romantic back-to-nature narrative is complicated by a traumatic act of consumption that goes askew—the eating of wild mushrooms—and whose aftermath proves as uncannily disconcerting as the confrontation with the foxes. The mushrooms, she says, are "small and brown … and you wouldn't believe how something you found in a field could taste so good" (134), but when ingested, they become the conduit to a psychotropic nightmare. Daisy wakes to find Piper "with a look of naked terror on her face" and "thrashing around like a person having a fit and trying to claw my face" (134). Piper's cries of "STOP STOP" lead Daisy to "smother her to shut her up" (135). Soon, though, Daisy begins to hear the same "throbbing noise" in her own head (135), describing it as "a tape played too fast so the voices were all squeaky and odd like cartoon voices and then I started to pick out individual noises and then I could hear people crying and screaming and by then the voices were so loud and so desperate and it was so horrible that I could only hug my head and beg them to STOP STOP STOP" (135). The only way of coping with noises "screaming louder and louder in my head" when "nothing worked" is to enlist her body against her reeling mind: "all I could do was make a kind of droning noise in my throat to drown them out" (136).

The ingestion of the mushrooms leads to more than a hallucinogenic nightmare. Piper, "panicky and wild like a cornered animal" (136), tells Daisy, "We have to help them. We have to help them, over and over like a desperate tape on a loop" (136). It is the next day, having walked miles distant, that the pair stumble upon the killing field. What the girls hear as an aural hallucination is also the replayed memory of a massacre that has already occurred, an echo of the historical event. Later, we learn that cousin Edmond, who witnessed the massacre, "will [End Page 85] never silence those unspeakable voices … their voices infected him, coursed through his body, poisoned him" (193). The ingestion of the poisonous fungus is therefore not just a traumatic event in itself, but a conduit to other traumatic events, causing a temporal tape to be rewound and to replay dying voices from the past, ghost traces. The incorporation of the vegetable leads to a hallucination that is also a temporal dislocation, a glitch in the fabric of temporality putting time out of joint. Here again, an intimate encounter with the nonhuman—in this case not the witnessing of the animal incorporation of the human but a consequence of the human incorporation of the vegetable—produces uncanny affects, not the least of which is a disruption of temporal linearity into repetitive "loops."

It is this uncanny intimacy of our narrator's "relationship with the nonhuman" in transformative moments evoked by the "presence of a lost other" that culminates in Daisy's later troubled relation with the uncanny garden. Daisy comes to believe that a traumatized Edmond, therapeutically working that garden, has transferred his troubled psyche onto nature: "It was Edmond, I thought. I recognized him in the plants" (181). She recognizes in this stringent formal organization of nature—those "white apple blossoms on branches cut into sharp crucifixes and forced to lie flat against the stone" and "giant tulips… spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers" (181, emphasis added)—her former lover's desire to manage the otherness of nature through human inscription upon it. In her earlier encounters with the environmental uncanny, Daisy was witness to an inscription of plant and animal upon her material body, with consequent effects. Here that process is inverted: a post-traumatic attempt by the body to reinscribe itself on nature.

But as Cathy Caruth observes, traumatic experience is contagious; trauma "is never simply one's own … [and?] history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas" (Unclaimed Experience 24). Caruth refers to "the other within the self that retains the memory of the unwitting traumatic events of one's past… the way in which one's trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another's wound" (Unclaimed Experience 8). Daisy also evidently transfers her trauma onto Edmond. Once "half dead with starvation" (189), he is now "thin, much thinner than I am now" (179), his arms "covered in scars—some new, some healing over, some disappearing into thin white lines …" (180). Edmond [End Page 86] becomes a wounded (cutting and anorexia here fused) and feminized version of his former self.⁶

This transference of embodied trauma from one gendered body to another undercuts the project of the human protagonist's recovery into cohesive subjectivity. It is Edmond who "will never silence those unspeakable voices" and who "didn't know how to turn off the noise, or turn the hate back out onto the world like the rest of us. He turned it on himself" (210, 193). Images of starvation and hunger earlier associated with Daisy's body are now transferred through the conduit of her lover's body to his garden: "The air was suffocating, charged, the hungry plants sucking at the earth with their ferocious appetites. You could almost watch them grow, pressing their fat green tongues up through the black earth. They emerged selfish and starving, gasping for air" (181, emphasis added). In such descriptions, this rigorously ordered garden is a projection of the repressed trauma of Daisy's eating disorder, and if she does not find beauty in the scene but "passion, maybe" or "[r]age" (181), then that rage is her own, a psychological transfer managed by a situated deconstruction of the borders of inside and outside: "And suddenly the thing inside that had kept me focused all these years rose in my throat like vomit. It was as strong as poison and for once I didn't fight it down or try to reshape it as something polite" (183, emphasis added). Daisy adds later, "I know all about those conditions, only this time they're outside of me" (194, emphasis added).

The deconstructive slippage that Daisy charts from the inside to the outside occurs also in a veritable blizzard of whiteness that extends out from the house itself ("I was surrounded by those walls pure white and centuries old" [152, emphasis added]) and from the "grasping whiteness of the garden" (182, emphasis added)—with its flowers "in all shades of white" and "100,000 white roses" (7, 52, emphasis added)—to the cosmos ("the white garden, lit by the cold white light of the stars" [185, emphasis added]). This imagery of whiteness includes the inscription upon the legible body: "Against the whiteness you could see every mark standing out in bright red hieroglyphics telling the story of our journey" (130, emphasis added). A related image of the pellucid body significantly haunting this uncanny novel is that of the ghost, with How I Live Now continuously privileging the ontological disturbance that is hauntology, that provocative Derridean portmanteau of haunting and ontology referring to the return or persistence of events from the cultural or social past, as in the manner of a ghost.⁷ Daisy's progress is from a girl who will claim "I'm generally not big on ghosts" and who believes "in [End Page 87] the spirit world about as not at all as the next person" (91, 90) to someone "convinced I could sense something or I experienced an uncanny and mystical feeling" to become in time "the ghost Piper was so scared of" (162). At times, "in a trance that wasn't quite a dream" (90), Daisy hears "the frail screeching cry of a newborn baby" (90), this ghostly trace connected to her own traumatic birth (resulting in the death of her mother) and to the recurring image of a buried child.

Upon first arriving at her cousins' house, Daisy notices a "stone angel about the size of a child, very worn, with folded wings" that she is told represents a "child who lived in the house hundreds of years ago and is buried in the garden" (7). What are we to make of the buried child in the garden? Certainly, the projection of trauma outward onto a garden space as mechanism of personal recovery is ultimately effected through the simultaneous recovery of the image of this dead child: "The child angel had been cleared of moss and planted all around with snowdrops and white narcissus that poured out an overpowering scent. I thought of the ghost of that long-dead child, watching us, its desiccated bones sunk deep into the ground below" (180). In this image of recovery accrue a constellation of the novel's themes: the uncanniness of an uncontrollable nature (the overtaking moss), the looking back of the nonhuman interlocuter (the sense of a ghost "watching us"), the human need to inscribe meaning and order upon the blankness of nature (snowdrops and white narcissus), and a deep buried trauma (the desiccated bones being suggestive of anorectic outcomes). The haunting significance of the "ghost of that long-dead child" buried years before in this specific garden, and that earlier uncanny sense of temporal looping and return, the hauntological sense of time dislocated and out of joint, can now direct us back to the question of intertextual modeling and the rhizomatic relation of emergent and uncontrolled textual "substrata" to landscape.

Recovery of the Secret Garden

We might now, for example, dispute Carroll's claim that while drawing on particular topoi this novel "does not subscribe to the mythological and fantastic conventions and is not modelled on intertexts" (178). Carroll in fact claims that How I Live Now is evidence of how topoi can be "invoked without the need for direct or conscious intertexts" (178). It may be true that this novel does not present the same "mythic substrata" as the novels of Alan Garner and John Masefield discussed by [End Page 88] Carroll (178), novels whose narratives use geographical landscape to access a very specific English mythic and historical past, but Rosoff's text certainly does engage very significantly with intertexts.

Peter Hunt, writing specifically about children's literature, suggests three categories of intertextuality: texts of quotation that allude to other literary or non-literary works; texts of imitation that "paraphrase, 'translate' and supplant the original and to liberate their readers from an over-invested admiration in great writers of the past"; and genre texts where shared clusters of codes and literary conventions group together in recognizable patterns (132). That the YA genre novel has established conventions is a given, and How I Live Now's fascinating crosshatching of multiple YA genres—the dystopian, the traumatic, the pastoral—is of no little interest. I will return in due course to the significance of How I Live Now being a "text of imitation." For now, we might note the extent to which this novel offers itself as a work of thick intertextual quotation and, as we will see, engages a veritable plethora of precursor texts.

Perhaps this should not surprise us, since intertextuality is such a key component of trauma novels. In Trauma Fiction, Anne Whitehead observes that the impact of trauma "can only adequately be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms, so that temporality and chronology collapse, and narratives are characterized by repetition and indirection" (3); she goes on to say that for trauma fiction to be effective, "it cannot avoid registering the shocking and inassimilable nature of its subject matter in formal terms" (83). For Whitehead, the writer conveys extreme emotional states through identifiable narrative techniques, such as a reliance on subjectivity projected as landscape imagery, silence via omission, and the narrative withholding of the revelation of the key original traumatic event. All these techniques are deployed in How I Live Now. But Whitehead also notes that intertextuality is a key device in trauma fiction because "in stylistic terms, intertextuality allows the novelist to mirror the symptomology of trauma by disrupting temporality or chronology" (84). For Caruth, trauma is defined by the "peculiar, temporal structure, the belatedness, of historical experience," which is "fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time" (Introduction 8). Post-traumatic stress disorder is in essence a disease of time in which the past comes to invade the present as a series of reenactments. For this reason, Caruth notes that "the traumatized… carry an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess." To be [End Page 89] traumatized, then, is "precisely to be possessed by an image or event" (Trauma 4–5). Recognizing that the structure of trauma is a disruption of history or temporality, it is evident why the writer of trauma fiction strategically integrates traces of previous texts as a formal encoding of compulsive repetition.

Daisy's sarcastic remarking upon her own "unpleasantly populated subconscious" could therefore refer equally to the novel she inhabits (17), whose own textual unconscious is deeply populated by literary precursors. So, while she might claim that her adopted family "don't remind you of Little Women even on our best day" (67), there are frequent evocations of other precursor texts. In the United Kingdom, How I Live Now was reviewed as an adult novel, won the Guardian children's fiction prize, and was shortlisted for the (adult) Orange First Novel Prize, which speaks to the sophistication of the narrative voice. Rosoff observed that she "didn't want any of my characters to fall into easy and familiar roles that people would take for granted as acceptable. Daisy is young, angry, and desperate for a connection that will help heal her damaged sense of self" ("Interview"). In evidencing that damaged sense of self and need for connection, Daisy's voice is inevitably reminiscent of Holden Caulfield and Esther Greenwood, earlier traumatized narrators whose sophistication enabled successful crossover novels.⁸ As is true of those precursor narrators, Daisy's ironic remarks, at first indicative of teenage ennui and indifference, signify an unwillingness to engage trauma except by indirection and distancing. Daisy notes of the dirty bombing that "something like seven or seventy thousand people got killed" and that "No matter how much you put on a sad expression and talked about how awful it was that all those people were killed and what about Democracy and the Future Of Our Great Nation the fact that none of us kids said out loud was that WE DIDN'T REALLY CARE" (25, 41). But as was the case with Salinger's and Plath's earlier damaged subjects, whose ironic voices Daisy channels, caring too little is a defensive posture indicative of caring too much.

Karen Lockney observes that Rosoff "sites her novel in recognizable literary territory, yet also subverts some traditional patterns" (312). For Lockney, the formal patterns undermined are nostalgic literary traditions such as "the imagined rural idyll, the country house and garden, the escape from the city" (314). The rural setting, the quaintly ramshackle English country house, and the eccentric family who inhabit it are part of a familiar tradition, echoing the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm and the Mortmains in I Capture the Castle. There is a self-reflexive [End Page 90] postmodern irony in the textualization of this landscape, the family being "cool English kids who just happen to live in huge ancient houses and have goats and dogs and all the rest" (8). The house of "yellowish stone" and "funny corridors that don't seem to lead anywhere" has its own suggestive Gothic evocation (8,9). Indeed, the English siting of the novel is intertextually overdetermined, a locale with "animals posing around the place to make it look even more authentic oldy-worldy" (9), an old world as perhaps imagined by Kenneth Grahame (who had his own Piper at the Gates[head]) or a C.S Lewis landscape in which we might "see a deer or maybe a unicorn trotting home" (14). Like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the novel is in a tradition of evacuee stories,⁹ as well as that of the boy's own adventure/survival story. Daisy and Piper at one point read MacDonald Fraser's Flashman, a parodic subversion of the traditional adventure narrative. As in Coral Island, the characters' main concerns become finding food, constructing a shelter, using compasses, building a fire, and firing a gun, all of which Daisy also must quickly learn to do.

If we were to engage in a deeper search for "mythic substrata," the narrator's fear of being poisoned by a "wicked stepmother" or her suggestion that events are "like Walt Disney on Ecstasy" might take us to fairytale and the revisions thereof (33, 53). David Whitley suggests the possibility of a deep archetypal-structure, cousin Edmond as archetypal green-world lover related to the dying gods and fisher kings of myth. In this context, Daisy's observation that "I felt like I'd belonged to this house for centuries but that could have been wishful thinking" is suggestive (12). For if the house seems strangely familiar to her, it does so also to us. The dislocation of space and time in a novel set in an unspecified but recognizable future somewhere in a nation with its signposts all removed in wartime contributes to the sense of this being a literary space, and the fleeting references to Sandburg ("just like the fog on little cat feet" [12]) and Beckett ("We couldn't go on. We went on" [155]) reinforce a sense that this house, "practically falling down… shaped like an L" (6), might be the decaying canonical house of Literature itself. Daisy's observations that "There no longer was any Real World" and that she inhabits the "world's biggest warehouse of magical misfits" are reminders of the extent to which she occupies a deeply overdetermined intertextual space (46, 80).

But, to return to Hunt's tripartite definition of intertextuality, How I Live Now is also a text of imitation insofar as it also engages very much with a specific precursor bildungsroman, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The [End Page 91] Secret Garden, the children's novel most concerned with the garden as a site of nurturant power and restoration. Rosoff has identified Burnett's novel as a personal favorite of her own childhood. In a 2007 interview with Adrienne Wong, she goes so far as to call The Secret Garden the novel you should "give your child to introduce them to literature." Whitley is surely correct to speculate that Rosoff's novel seeks to develop "the archetype of The Secret Garden in quite remarkable new ways" and that "[t]his therapeutic garden is very different from Burnett's image of recovering an innocent and integrative psychic space through work on nature" (24). This of course speaks to the fact that any narrator of a trauma narrative is concerned with a disintegrative psychic space and susceptible to being subject to the plot of another story. As Whitehead remarks:

If the source text is considerably revised, the novelist can highlight trauma as a mode of departure and suggest the possibility of change or progression. In stylistic terms, intertextuality allows the novelist to mirror the symptomology of trauma by disrupting temporality or chronology, and to repossess the voices of previously silenced characters, enabling them to bear witness to their own exclusion.

(93–94)

How I Live Now is a novel of repossession both of and by The Secret Garden, for to repossess the precursor text is also potentially to elicit a simultaneous ghostly repossession by it. Obviously, the parallels between the novels are extensive. Daisy, like Burnett's main protagonist, Mary Lennox, is uprooted from a distant home and transplanted to an English country house where, traumatized by the death of a mother, her recovery occurs in the context of the relationships she develops within an adoptive family and in relation to the healing powers of the natural world. The earlier Mary is "a self-absorbed child [who] gave her entire thought to herself" (5), is susceptible to "mysterious and frightening sounds" (5) and who "always had a very small appetite" (20). Extended proximity to a Gothic house of curious arches, alcoves, and stone seats and the "high walls…covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses" of a dreamlike garden space leads to her becoming "healthily hungry" (60, 30).

Images from Burnett's novel—like the key image of the bird's nest—proliferate in the revisionary text, latent content made manifest through the textual dream-work. Rosoff uses two cousins—animal-whisperer Isaac and sprite-like Piper—to effect a dreamlike displacement or [End Page 92] de-condensation of the Pan-like Dickon of the earlier novel, "piping to the wild creatures" (Burnett 149). Very specific animal imagery associated with this Pan figure—who brings home his own "motherless lamb" and is seen "with a little red fox trotted by his side" (117)—we have already seen resurface in the later novel too. "Are you a ghost?" asks the Edmond-like Colin, prompting Mary's reply, "Are you one?" (74), as well as her speculation that "sometimes I think you are perhaps [his mother's] ghost made into a boy" (156). If in the original text Mary and Colin function as Gothic doubles—both losing mothers and recovering from a related trauma in a dead mother's garden—this scenario is repeated with Edmond and Daisy, two motherless children establishing a telepathic (and sexual) connection, albeit in The Secret Garden the boy's mother dies in childbirth, while in the revisionary text that trauma is transferred to the girl.

As critics have often remarked, the garden in The Secret Garden represents not just the transforming power of nature but also the dead mother's nurturant body. For one critic "the secret plot" of the original is that the reader "reenacts the usually repressed desire to explore the secret mysteries of the mother's body" (Bixler 301). But, as Whitley observes of How I Live Now, "the natural world provides images of instability and casual suffering, almost as much as it nurtures spiritual growth and renewal" (23). As Daisy will remark, her revisionary narrative will not be that of "the blind girl played by this year's Oscar Hopeful and the crippled boy miraculously walking and everyone going home happy" (30). No one can go home happy when the replotting of this garden ensures that it cannot function in the same healing way as before. Nature is no longer nurturant, for it cannot function as symbol of the mother's body: the garden is now other and unreadable, at best a projection of the physical and psychological trauma of those who work it.

The usefulness of an authorial intertextual strategy is obvious. For one thing, the narrator of the fictional trauma narrative is revealed to be subject to the plot of a precursor narrative, to the extent of compulsively repeating the actions of a narrative figure encountered in the reader's prior experience. If the source text is revised, the novelist can highlight trauma as a mode of departure and suggest the possibility of change. The complaint that Burnett shifts the locus of her own narrative from Mary to the "master" Colin is corrected by the revisionary text; Daisy never loses her narrative authority, and Edmond is silenced. In this regard, the deliberate relation of a literary text to a given pretext can achieve powerful effects through strategic repetition within [End Page 93] trauma fiction by reinforcing formally the surfacing to consciousness of repressed memories as a suggestive textual echoing.

But, like trauma itself, the engagement with source texts also means a writer can become caught in larger cycles of repetition that turn intended effects into unintended unconscious effects. A key assertion of trauma theory, we will recall, is that traumatic experience gets repeated trans-historically through textual acts of remembering. Trauma, acted out as compulsive repetition, can be a contagious, intertextual phenomenon. Roger Luckhurst, observing how trauma can "pierce" or "breach" borders, "putting inside and outside into a strange communication … [opening] passageways between systems that were once discrete," claims it is "worryingly transmissible" (3). If, as Caruth claims, "the repetition at the heart of catastrophe … emerges as the unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind" (Unclaimed Experience 2), we might presume that the performance of the repetition compulsion in trauma fiction will also occur simultaneously at various diegetic and intertextual levels unwittingly, reenacted symptomatically in ways other than those anticipated by the author. Acts of repossession may have unintended ghostly consequence.

Take, for example, the scene with the hallucinogenic mushrooms discussed earlier. There, I observed that a psychotropic nightmare is also the replayed memory of another event, a looping tape of another trauma that has already occurred, a ghostly haunting of the present by a past event. "STOP STOP!!!" Piper shouts, while the "alien voices" become "people crying and screaming" in voices "so loud and desperate" that Daisy can only "beg them to STOP STOP STOP" (135). But this scene is also a significant echoing of the key confrontation scene in The Secret Garden in which Mary confronts Colin indulging in a fit of screaming "hysterics" (101). Distressed by these "sobbing screams," Mary puts "her hands over her ears and [feel] sick and shivering" (101). "He ought to be stopped!" she yells, "Somebody ought to make him stop!" (102). Confronting him directly, Mary screams "You stop! You stop! I hate you." "I can't stop!" he shouts, until she admonishes "If you scream another scream … I'll scream too—and I can scream louder than you can and I'll frighten you!" (103). In moments such as these, the "hysteric" scene of the pretext is uncannily repeated in the revisionary text. The "screaming voices" in this context are another iteration of temporal looping, the echoes of a buried ghostly textual presence. The repetition of an earlier trauma (re?)generates in an act of repossession later uncanny affects. The use of an intertextual strategy [End Page 94] in the writing of a trauma narrative, the deliberate relation of a literary text to given pre-texts in order to reinforce formally the surfacing to consciousness of repressed memories as a suggestive textual echoing, can thus become symptomatic. In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth states that instead of dealing with trauma, "we pass trauma along to the next person … keeping trauma unconscious and always moving" (126). A similar unconscious passing occurs in How I Live Now, with related traumatic events moving within and without the textual structure.

Recovering the Buried Child

Ghosh describes the "environmental uncanny" as a familiar haunting of the present by a deeper history, the recognition of a nonhuman interlocuter causing a moment "when a prior awareness flashes before us, effecting an instant change in our understanding of that which is beheld." Such a flash, we will remember, "cannot disclose itself except in the presence of its lost other" (Ghosh 4–5). My own reading of How I Live Now suggests that there is an analogous relation between the impact of the environmental uncanny upon the reader as subject and the model of dialogic intertextuality formulated by Kristeva, a model which views texts both as sites of linguistic intersection and as psyches exhibiting conscious and unconscious processes.

In "The Adolescent Novel," Kristeva posits an identity formation resembling adolescence that survives into adulthood. For Kristeva this adolescence is not a "developmental stage" so much as an "open psychic structure" (136) that the subject may experience at any stage of life whenever rendered vulnerable and open to that which has been repressed. Further, Kristeva argues that novel writing since Rousseau has been the work of a "perpetual subject-adolescent" with the activities of writing and reading fiction tending to open up the psyche, in a way relocating in writer and reader alike a degree of the adolescent's "state of incompleteness" (139). For Kristeva, the activity of writing adolescence thus permits "an actual inscription of unconscious contents within language" (137), and the novel allows the writing subject to re-elaborate her psychic space by "initiat[ing] a psychic reorganization" (136).¹⁰

While questions regarding the fragility of psychic identity in most critical readings of the YA novel coalesce around the figure of the protagonist, the Kristevan model, contrarily, emphasizes that it is not only the psychic structure of the fictional character that is threatened and affirmed. For if writing is a "semiotic practice that facilitates a renewed [End Page 95] organization of psychic space" (138), and if we consider our contemporary novel of adolescence (the YA novel) to be the adolescent novel (in the Kristevan sense) par excellence, then the YA text might be better read as an "open adolescent structure" (152). A textual field of such radical "incompleteness" is acutely capable, in its analytic engagement with a traumatic subject matter where questions of vulnerability and repression are paramount, of initiating a significant "psychic reorganization" of an author who is relocated in the act of writing into the position of "perpetual subject-adolescent." A novel about trauma—anorexia, war, the plight of the refugee—might also emerge from a writer's incipient anxiety. Rosoff, composing her novel in the run-up to the Iraq war, described her own state of mind at the time as framed by "an atmosphere of paranoia and dread about the future" ("Interview").

The YA trauma novel is perhaps a genre uniquely susceptible to inscriptions of unconscious materials that inhere in the formal apparatus of the text. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud discusses the "compulsion to repeat," in which the traumatized person is "obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of … remembering it as something belonging to the past" (12). It may be that YA trauma fiction,¹¹ tackling trauma as theme and employing narrative strategies suitable for its representation, is also vulnerable to other forms of compulsive repetition, and these incidental "recoveries" may striate the novels, providing, to appropriate Kristeva's term, a more complex "mirror of adolescent passage" (152).

It certainly seems plausible that within How I Live Now the "presence of the lost other" becomes also that of a precursor text that generates its own uncanny affects trans-historically as another iteration of the "recognition of a nonhuman interlocutor" (Ghosh 40). Freud defines the uncanny as "that class of the frightening which leads us back to what is known of old and long familiar" (20). Daisy's assertion that "the garden frightens me" points to the fact that it functions as a dually uncanny space (183), leading back to an overlapping of "known of old and long familiar" entities. This garden serves the post-traumatic recovery of the narrator insofar as it is a formal space within which the deep histories of nonhuman time and the otherness of the inhuman are rendered (albeit problematically) manageable and legible by human hands. At the same time, the "garden" is a textual space to be recovered, where precursor texts can be revised and (literally) replotted. And so, character and author alike become "gardeners of sorts," with sorting an activity requiring the recovery of a long-dead child (a younger, happier Daisy; Burnett's Mary [End Page 96] Lennox; the Meg Rosoff who once devoured The Secret Garden). Within the novel, the protagonist's attempt to inscribe the human upon the inhuman is frequently discomfited by sudden "flashes" of a lost other that reveal the uncanny intimacy of the relationship between human and nonhuman. Similarly, repossession of the "lost other" precursor garden text by the revisionary author also leads to a situated repossession by that other. In both these instances the process of recovery from trauma is undone by the related simultaneous recovery of another, and the rhizomatic sprawl of the vegetable world and the intertext in tandem both subvert authorial control. The uncanniness of our relation to an inhuman other can never be represented in language, and the trauma of such intimate encounters—where landscape, body, and text all function as vessels for carrying that trauma—is ever displaced, ongoing, moving, uncanny, and disconcerting. Small wonder that the return to the buried child in the garden should prove so frightening.