Crossover Literature and Abjection: Geraldine McCaughreanʹs The White Darkness

This article provides a close reading of Geraldine McCaughreanʹs award-winning novel, The White Darkness. It argues that this is a key text in the increasing debate about `crossoverʹ literature. Whereas, traditionally, adolescent books were seen to offer compensatory fantasies to the adolescent reader, McCaughreanʹs text goes beyond this, exploring adolescence in deeper terms: not simply as an age-defined period but as a time when the traditional coordinates of the self are thrown into crisis, or become destabilized (as an `open psychic structureʹ, as Kristeva puts it). Adopting such a psychoanalytical approach, it is argued, we can begin to understand this bookʹs appeal (and others like it) to adolescent and adult alike; that is, it stages a shift from an imaginary identification with a stable self to a more realistic, albeit less secure recognition of the flimsiness of identity. The white wastes of Antarctica provide the perfect backdrop for this confrontation with the ungraspable Real.