Communing with the ‘more-than-human’ in The Overstory by Richard Powers

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Communing with the ‘more-than-human’ in The Overstory by Richard Powers

Nina Biddle (12267171) 02/07/2020

MA Thesis Comparative Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam

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Acknowledgements

A big thank you to Niall Martin for introducing me to the Wood Wide Web in class, for helping me orient myself in this new landscape, for the cups of tea in your plant-filled office, and for all the encouraging and helpful advice. Thanks to my friends and family for their constant support and listening ears. Thank you, Hana, for reading my work when I was sick of it; Rory, for letting me use your monitor so I could think bigger; both of you, for getting me through quarantine. Finally, I really owe my thanks to the trees.

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Contents

Seeds 4

Introduction: Roots 7 Chapter 1: Trunk: The Novel 11

1.1 The Wood Wide Web 11

1.2 Words before words 15

1.3 People will only read stories about people 21

1.4 The narrative architecture of trees 27

Chapter 2: Crown: Deep Time 30 2.1 Like oil in water 30

2.2 The giant trunk is teetering 34

2.3 Becoming something else again 39

2.4 Unknowing 45

Conclusion: Decay: An Anti-Ending 48

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Seeds

In the patch of land that separates our house from the neighbours, The Wilderness teems between and around the gates and the lawns and the bricks and mortar. It isn’t a large piece of land but it wraps around the two adjacent sides of our rectangular garden so that when I peak my head out of the Velux window all I can see are the branches and sky.

The Wilderness is a buffer between us and them, muffles the sounds of our childish screams and tantrums. As we get older and braver, we open the gate, mossy and mildewed, and step into The

Wilderness. We pick our way through the stinging nettles, covering our clothes in those sticky weeds and explore. It has the kind of smell that makes your nose itch and your eyes water. Something damp and something pretty.

Charlie pretends to be Stig of the Dump, chasing me over fallen logs and hiding behind sentinel trees. Spencer makes weapons out of sticks and smears mud on his ruddy cheeks. I bury my dead bunnies under a patch of bluebells, reading out a poem as my brothers stand solemnly behind me.

There is an arena in The Wilderness, a circular obstacle course made of trees that slope and lean and link. We spend hours, into days, into years mastering the fine art of monkeying around their connecting arms, tiptoeing along thin branches, hugging trunks for support and swinging epically from the canopy. When family friends join us, we revel in our mastery, challenging them to complete the circuit.

Some nameless, faceless children are playing with us in The Wilderness. Our little bodies hot and clammy, our voices hoarse from shouting. I am near the end of the loop, out of breath and determined, smug that the others are still a way behind, teetering on the higher branches.

I have only one more leap to make, a smooth swing from one branch to another almost two metres away. I’ve completed this move so many times it is muscle memory. All it takes is for the branch I am on to bend and the other to propel me to my upright and final destination. I swing and grab the other branch, and I trust it completely and hang all my bodyweight from it.

A huge crack sounded through the arena as I fell and smacked my body on the surprisingly rocky floor. A thin layer of decaying leaves and mud had not protected my ribs from bruising, and I gasped and spluttered, in shock.

When my nameless, faceless friends carried me bawling and braying back through the gate and to my Mum, who was mewing with the other mothers about something like paints for the new kitchen. They lugged me to her lap.

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‘I’ve broken my back!’ I screamed at her, through body-shaking sobs, snot and tears mixing with the dirt on my face. My Mum rubbed my shuddering shoulders and explained that I had not, in fact, broken my back.

She told me, mysteriously, that I had the ‘wind knocked out of me.’

Now knowing that death and tragedy were not imminent, I began to breath normally, imagining a big gust of wind blowing through the trees until it blew right through me, violently stealing my breath right out from my lungs. I just couldn’t imagine what The Wilderness wanted with my wind.

Forests quickly became a scary place to a child who became so quickly victimised by the wind. I stopped going to the tree with a cavernous space between trunk and falling branches, where I kept a mug and some drawings and a toy for when I wanted to escape the tyranny of my war obsessed brothers. I didn’t even wince as the purple flowering tree that I used for my handmade fairy dresses and hats was torn down in our garden due to rot, or when the bush that I hid behind to secretly eat more than the daily allotted snack of Pringles became sparse, then uprooted, replaced by a more manageable bed of tulips. The forest we walked our dogs in became the ‘Boogy Man Woods,’ when we once saw two men standing behind the trunks of some trees, and I was haunted by a portrait that hung from the bough of a giant oak. I imagined the person in the portrait was trapped inside the tree, and you could hear her screams whenever the wind whistled.

One day our neighbour, the same one who tore down the driveway at ‘breakneck speed’ (another mysterious idiom for me at the time) every day, nailed our gate, our access, shut. I moved out, and my parents removed the nails, only to find more nails a week later. I vaguely remember talks with surveyors, lawyers, a farmer who was maybe the owner, arguments with the neighbours across the border of The Wilderness, as dreams of ownership were tussled over. Grand plans of purchasing the land for a garden extension were passionately debated, mentioned, then forgotten.

The last time I went home, the neighbours had torn up the roots and decay and extended their lawn almost all the way up to our arena. It still stood, but without the surrounding nettles, thicket and chaos, the grand arena of my childhood looked small, the obstacles became trees again.

That year the council built much-needed affordable housing on the football pitches across the road. My Dad put a sign, ‘Brown not Green,’ on the hedge outside our house and my parents wrote impassioned letters against the HS2 rail line that loomed ahead in the distant future, threatening to cut across the Chilterns.

I branched into new homes: a city known for its steel, where you could walk from the centre of town into a heath in under an hour, then a French island with an active volcano, where cryptomeria trees from

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Japan line foggy hairpin roads through a core crinkled by mountains, until I split into Amsterdam and started thinking about The Wilderness again, and it scattered me.

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Roots

The untitled prologue to Richard Power’s eco-novel, The Overstory (2018), is evocatively and thematically rich in imagery, as it ‘drowns’ the reader in ‘meaning’ (4). From Powers’ lyricism sprouts the fractal logic of a tree structure, as the opening line starts with ‘nothing’ then branches into the various themes explored in the novel. The structure of a tree is announced in the contents page and stuck to throughout. The prologue acts as a nutrient-rich seed, constituting a significant source of the essential elements for the developing narrative. Furthermore, the final section in the novel is named ‘Seeds,’ forming a circular structure that returns its reader to the soil. The thematic outline in this passage provides the groundwork and stake that supports the growth of the chapters in this thesis. The first chapter, ‘Trunk,’ will examine the ways in which a novel communicates through content. It will explore the double-nature of the written word and the ways in which narrative and literature emerge as dynamic organisms. This chapter will end where the next chapter will begin, with a discussion on temporality as the node. The second chapter, ‘Crown,’ will examine the ways in which the concept of history can be both a cultural veil and interlocuter between human and nonhuman beings. It will assert that Powers’ application of literary device, read ‘through’ with Walter Benjamin’s messianic time, intervenes in the problematic proposed by Dipesh Chakrabarty on the immiscible chronologies of species history and what we see as human history in the Anthropocene. Within a novelistic universe, it is possible to perceive the cultural amnesia that has clouded a collective past as well as the troubles that thinking in universals can accentuate. The final section of this thesis is a conclusion that becomes an anti-ending when conceptualised as ‘Decay.’

The first chapter of this thesis, ‘Trunk,’ understands The Overstory as a novel that relays the story of the discovery of arboreal communication systems and the shift in ecological thought from the tree to forest or, a sociable eco-system. It does so aesthetically both through imagery and metaphor as form, helping us to see the analogies between trees and narrative architecture. This is also a sensuous experience through the somatic and connotative qualities of language: the hardness and softness of words. The novel therefore encases certain models of communication to disclose how trees speak. Looking to the prologue to help introduce this chapter; the language in the second paragraph is sensuous, a barrage of sensory information in succession; the feeling of ‘hard’ bark pressing against the woman’s back, the ‘scent’ of the pine needles, the natural ‘hum’ of the wood. Finally, ‘[t]he tree is saying things, in words before words’ (4). This phrasal construction, in its

contradiction and abstraction, aligns with the previous simile, ‘as hard as life’ (4). This likening from the material to the metaphysical is omniscient and enlightened and - when broken down and re-evoked at the end of the paragraph - a simple ontological truth emerges from the page. The bark is hard, life is hard, the bark is life. The tree is saying things, in words before words because - before

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simile, before symbolism, before speech, before writing - representation is life. The tree that presses against the back of the woman represents a fact or, a truth, as much as the scent, the hum, or the very words the reader reads. Therefore, hearing trees ‘speak’ involves a conversation that embraces the tacit and imaginative knowledge pointing to the scientific truth.

As ‘Trunk’ will examine more closely, The Overstory works beyond the words themselves to breach the parameters of the written word and the traditional novel form, manipulating typography, intertextuality, myth, and structure. This is introduced early in the prologue. The use of italicisation here is inverted compared to the rest of the novel, to set it in relief against subsequent chapters, yet this also importantly inverts the narration. The italics give omniscience and authority to the voice as this typography is traditionally used for thoughts and internal monologue, peppering the narrative beyond speech or descriptive facets of the text. It is also the font of the epigraphs, which include Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Lovelock and Bill Neidje, as Powers incorporates these voices from the environmental milieu into his work. Later, the narration is in regular font, whilst the italics are

ambiguously used to either denote thought, or to represent the ‘creatures of light’ (a Homeric epithet) that speak to Maidenhair, or to represent communication with the trees or, perhaps to align the narrator in the prologue with the ‘voice’ in these thoughts. To elucidate this further, in the following chapter dedicated to Nicolas Hoel, a ‘voice’ interjects: ‘Old trees are our parents, and our parents’ parents, perchance. If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity…’ (5). Those familiar with Henry David Thoreau can recognise the quote from his journal (October 23, 1855), but for the layperson, new to eco-literature; it seamlessly inserts itself into the narrative as the

narrator, or the trees ‘saying things’ in the prologue, or even Nick’s thoughts. This simple feat of editing - which relies on the familiarity of traditional narrative forms and publication processes - gives agency to the materiality and non-semantic qualities of written communication and intertextuality works like the vast and sharing mycorrhizal network.

In the rest of the novel, the acute directness of the omniscient third-person narrator informing the reader that ‘the tree is saying things’… ‘it says,’ is lost and the communication with trees falls into the realm of gesture, of the imagination and embodied knowledge. By italicising the ‘thoughts’ from trees, delivered to the characters and to the reader in this lyrical form, Powers at once gestures to the material narrative form of a novel, as well as to the internal structure of thought, and how trees think. Powers creates ambiguity by exploring the double-nature of the word, ‘[c]lose your eyes and think of willow. The weeping you see will be wrong. Picture an acacia thorn. Nothing in your thought will be sharp enough’ (3). Language becomes blinding as ‘[y]our kind never sees us whole’ (4). The ambiguity that surrounds these deliverances is therefore a feature of the deliverance of knowledge: scientific knowledge that becomes imaginative knowledge (through ambiguity) that becomes tacit knowledge.

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For the humanities, the latter two forms of knowledge are access points into the first, an opening that is made visible in this novel. This way, we will discover how trees think us, and have been telling stories far beyond the time of printing books.

The myopia discussed in ‘Trunk’ carries through into a discussion on cultural amnesia in the second chapter of this thesis, ‘Crown.’ The opening line of the prologue, ‘[f]irst there was nothing, and then there was everything’ (3), sets up creation ex nihilo, but also alludes to the tree in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938), where the protagonist’s encounter with the tree as radically Other convinces him of human isolation and hence the need to create meaning in exclusively human terms. Here, the encounter is precisely about connection and the discovery of ‘more-than-human’ communication (David Abram). The Big Bang is the juncture between nothing and everything; the starting point for all knowledge of the cosmos and of time. Yet, as Chakrabarty’s analysis on historical tradition reveals, our time, the anthropocentric chronology, starts much later. However, trees as ‘creatures of light’ are products of that moment of cosmogenesis, and as natural producers, embody an economic transition from scarcity (nothing) to abundance (everything), informing us on our own position in the

spatiotemporal tree of life.

The discussion of knowledge (breaching the Kantian barrier) from the first chapter will branch into the next. In this chapter, we approach The Overstory with both a spiritual and pragmatic lens to address the topic of climate crisis and Chakrabarty’s problematic. As Mircea Eliade has noted, it is important to be able to understand that ‘the modern world of science and theory is born of the same impulse to grasp the world more securely in its reality, that drives magical and religious

world-sculptings also’ (28). Considering this, Walter Benjamin’s theological metaphor of messianic time - that he wielded against progressive and emancipatory narratives - reveals itself to be a productive theory with which to turn over The Overstory.

On the topic of world-sculptings, the narrator elucidates on the ‘trouble with people, their root problem’ in the prologue. Using the imagery of the web, where multiple realities overlap, ‘life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next.’ Powers lists the multiple tasks and functions of trees using a list of verbs in the present continuous, ‘creating,’ ‘cycling,’ ‘trading,’ ‘making,’ ‘building,’ ‘feeding,’ ‘curing,’ and ‘sheltering.’ These verbs are very ‘human’ in their function, it is only when they are in pairs with their nouns, such as ‘soil,’ ‘water,’ and ‘atmosphere,’ that the difference is made, broadening the function of trees in their duty of keeping the planet alive. In this paragraph, Powers illustrates the use-value of trees, but also their part within a wider, interconnected ecology. This is further elaborated on in the line, ‘[i]f your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.’ Here, we return to the idea of abundance; Powers refers to an ecology of meanings and thus to an ecology of selves (Kohn).

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Finally, my conclusion, or anti-ending, will be the ‘mortification’ (as Benjamin sees fit for literary criticism) of the analysis, unpacking the corresponding associations of both waste and compost, to allow the analysis to lead into further avenues of research. It will also situate this thesis project firmly within the humanities as an essential and fertile bed of scholarship for tackling climate crisis and imagining futures.

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Trunk: The Novel

Richard Powers enters the realm of multispecies storytelling with The Overstory as a well-established and successful novelist. However, rather than relax into the bindings of the novel, Powers looks at the materiality of the written word through an ecocritical lens, pointing directly to the form in which he is proficient and literate. He does not privilege words as a tool for multispecies storytelling, yet to write the novel he must use them. In this way, the written word figures transparently in The Overstory, made opaque by its embedded narrative tools, drawing the connective lines between fiction and nonfiction, the imaginative and the scientific, the subjective and the objective. Powers uses the written word to manipulate the parameters of the novel form beyond the words themselves, through intertextual and mythical associations as well as through the formal qualities of structure and typography. He uses these tools to move beyond the challenges of the symbolic, and to prise the novel out from the pre-existing and dynamic organic structures upon which its potential for shaping thought is dependent. Thus, storytelling emerges from the ecological processes that precede writing and creativity becomes a quality that belongs to both the human and the, as David Abram calls it, ‘more-than-human’ world.

The Wood Wide Web

Literature is an organism that when traced, is a mycorrhizal root system, linking and

connecting through hidden associations and intertextuality. The written word has a strong presence in The Overstory as a source of connection for the narrative and characters, particularly visible through the text within the text, The Secret Forest. Dr. Patricia Westerford relies on words to write her book, ‘to tell a stranger all she knows’ (274), which falls into the hands of the tree-sitters, Olivia Vandergriff and Nick Hoel, and later to Dorothy and Ray; their copy, inscribed with ‘R. Brinkman’ (534) is found by Adam Appich in the People’s Library in New York; algorithms feed her words to Neelay Mehta in Silicon Valley and an audiobook version is delivered to Douglas Pavlicek in prison. Literature is the locus of narrative connection for Dorothy and Ray; some of their only contact with the other characters is through this chain of reading The Secret Forest, running through the narrative like mycelium, attaching to the root hairs of the character subplots. This mycorrhizal system works to penetrate fiction with the scientific method, to intersperse non-fiction within the fiction. This, as Amitav Ghosh points out in The Great Derangement (2016), is the huge task of the humanities in facing the Anthropocene, in which the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer ‘derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was

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rewriting the destiny of the earth’ (7). As proponents of the ecocritical school of thought have long argued, the art of accessing scientific knowledge, understanding it, and then communicating it to the laypeople falls to the humanities.

In this vein, The Secret Forest becomes interesting as an intertextual narrative device

constructed through quotation and similarity. The Overstory is notably a novel, so The Secret Forest is a fictional non-fiction text, embedded within fiction. The non-fictional layer is reminiscent of Peter Wohlleben’s book, The Hidden Life of Trees (2015), published two years prior to The Overstory; a text that draws on ground-breaking scientific discoveries to demonstrate the similarities between trees and human families. The titles of these books differ only in semantics rather than meaning, and the content repeatedly mirrors Wohlleben’s text. Patricia writes,

[s]omething marvellous is happening underground, something we’re just learning how to see. Mats of mycorrhizal cabling link trees into gigantic, smart communities spread across hundreds of acres. Together, they form vast trading networks of goods, services, and information. …

There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big tree makes may go to feed other organisms. Even different kinds of trees form partnerships. Cut down a birch, and a nearby Douglas-fir may suffer. …

In the great forests of the East, oaks and hickories synchronize their nut production to baffle the animals that feed on them. Word goes out, and the trees of a given species – whether they stand in sun or shade, wet or dry – bear heavily or not at all, together, as a community. …

Forests mend and shape themselves through subterranean synapses. And in shaping themselves, they shape, too, the tens of thousands of other, linked

creatures that form it from within. Maybe it’s useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching underground super-trees (272-273).

This passage from The Secret Forest is quoted as freestanding text, indented on either side and with ellipsis at the end of each paragraph to suggest that more has been left out of the quotation. Powers employs Patricia as a ventriloquist for the language of science, incorporating these voices by

referencing them in as outsiders. Implicating non-fiction in fiction still involves a typographical and conceptual leap. Meanwhile, the content of Patricia’s book mirrors Wohlleben’s rhetoric. Her depiction of trees in ‘partnership’ or in a ‘community’ echoes Wohlleben when he writes, ‘[a] tree is not a forest’

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(4) and ‘[e]very tree, therefore, is valuable to the community…’ (4). Furthermore, he references Dr. Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver as the scientist and

phytosemiotician who ‘discovered that they also warn each other using chemical signals sent through the fungal networks around their root tips’ (10).

In an interview with Emergence Magazine, Powers notes the similarities between his character, Dr. Patricia Westerford, and scientist, Dr. Suzanne Simard; they both encounter adversity and rejection as a result of their seminal but controversial scientific discoveries as well as for being women in the field at a time when women’s voices were largely muted (or put on mute). However, in the interview, Powers devolves this similarity of character to the wider unfolding of the scientific landscape; layered beneath the ground-breaking research lies the sediment of theory that goes back decades before Dr. Simard published any of her research. The prior groundwork theory on airborne communication between trees (hormones and insecticides released to form a vaccine for the whole forest) allowed the roots to take hold for emergent knowledge of mycorrhizal systems and electronic signals that

disseminates and shapes thinking today (Wohlleben/Emergence Magazine). By referencing in and relying upon this layered research as both a narrative tool and as proof of plot, Powers points to the ways in which new knowledge and perspectives struggle to break through into the realms of scientific orthodoxy. It also chimes with the biosemiotician, Wendy Wheeler, when she argues that ‘[p]rogress does not come (nor can it ever) from the discovery of something previously entirely unknown; it comes, rather, from the realisation (often happy or serendipitous) that some things already known (perhaps separated in space or time, but already in some kind of iconic or indexical relationship) can be brought into a new alignment with each other such that new knowledge is the result’ (2008: 136).

However, it is important to note the ways in which this layering of objective, scientific knowledge, building abductively into ‘new’ knowledge, is linguistically handled. Both the ‘real’ research (of Dr. Simard et al. and communicated through Wohlleben) and the fictional research (inspired by the ‘real’ and communicated via Patricia) use humanist terms to relay forestry experience and scientific method. Patricia’s formative theory elucidates on ‘giving’ trees, whilst Wohlleben’s conceptualisation of a forest takes shape as a social network, family or community. Patricia posits that ‘[t]he reading public needs such a phrase to make the miracle a little more vivid, visible. It’s something she learned long ago, from her father: people see better what looks like them. Giving trees is

something any generous person can understand and love’ (276). In a review of The Overstory in the New York Times, Barbara Kingsolver notes that ‘[p]eople will only read stories about people.’ It could be argued that translating the scientific method into these humanist terms reflects the

anthropocentric worldview prevalent in post-industrial western societies. Therefore, language operating in this way follows a traditional propensity to anthropomorphise and in doing so Powers

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(via Patricia as author), closes the gap between human and nonhuman, facilitating recognition by layering up the scientific and objective with the imaginative and subjective.

Peeling back this argument on similarity, one of the normative ways in which gaps are

breached is through figurative devices, such as simile, metaphor, and symbolism. The tool-shed of the romantics, these devices unlock the gate to the ‘enchanted garden’ of interpretation, imagination, and subjective knowledge (Sayre & Lowy). Turning to a passage in the novel, in the italicised text before ‘Crown’; Powers deliberately points to the prolific use of simile, using oxymoronic negation to do so. Homeric similes for the treetops, such as, ‘[t]hey’re like the tip of a Ouija planchette, taking dictation from beyond’ precedes the conjecture that ‘[t]hey are, in fact, like nothing but themselves. They are the crowns of five white spruces laden with cones, bending in the wind as they do every day of their

existence’ (443). The narrator decrees that ‘[l]ikeness is the sole problem of men’ (443). Subverting the Shakespearean Sonnet 18, Shall I Compare thee to a summer’s day, in which comparing a lover to nature does not suffice as simile, for his/her unchanging loveliness surpasses that of summer, which ‘hath all too short a date’; the narrator in The Overstory objects this poetic urge to liken nature to other things, insisting instead to let the trees be ‘nothing but themselves’ (443). In this way, Powers denotes the distance-making function of simile, or simile as cognitive dissonance. While attempting to negotiate associations between two disparate entities, the writer in turn ontologically distances them from one another and the entities themselves. In this way, Powers comments on the human inability to see without likeness and simile, resounding the assertion ‘if your mind were a slightly greener thing’ back in the prologue to ‘Roots’ (4). By implying that humans lack a fundamental aspect of vision to see nature as it is, Powers effectively insinuates that we are blinded by – and constituted – by simile.

Therefore, Powers is not wholeheartedly faithful in his relationship with the written word; a relationship intrinsic to the materiality of his novel and depicted idiosyncratically through the practice of Patricia’s writing. He does not subscribe to the written word’s hold over imagination. There are many instances in The Overstory where words do not suffice, or when they fail the characters. For example, Patricia ‘works to squeeze the nine-thousand-year-saga into ten sentences’ in the ‘clumpy, clumsy finger-paint of words’ (277). Nick experiences ‘a horror inseparable from hope’ (474) when he envisages that ‘somewhere in all these boundless, compounding, swelling canyons of imprinted paper, encoded in the millions of tons of lob lolly pine fibre, there must be a few words of truth, a page, a paragraph that could break the spell of fulfilment and bring back danger, need, and death’ (474). Horror nestles close to hope when he realises his dreams of emancipation from ‘the spell of fulfilment’ through words are just those: dreams. Demonstratively, an isolated Douglas uses text to reveal his take on the truth; this is what gets him, and his fellow scattered activists caught, turning them on one another, imprisoning himself and Adam (521). This uneasy slippage between imprisonment and

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emancipation, the double nature of word, throws into question its potential as a self-reflective world-modelling system.1 _{In prison, serving a sentence for the fire that kills Olivia, ‘[h]is finger moves across} the prison desk, trying to learn this alien script, transcribing it like a monk in a scriptorium. He traces the grain and thinks of all the things this antique, illegible almanac could say, all the things that the remembering wood might tell him, in this place where he is held, with no change of seasons and one fixed weather’ (194). When text fails him, Douglas turns to the ‘remembering wood’ for layers of meaning but finds himself trapped by the confines of literacy. He attempts to make legible and absorb old knowledge from a thing that cannot be read. Imprisonment is sterile and static, a seasonless, changeless place. Later, by way of contrast, Powers describes Dorothy and Ray’s abundant and renascent green haven; ‘[o]ut in the yard, all around the house, the things they’ve planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain’ (209). Here, Powers points to a different mode of representation than the traditional one he uses himself; one so fundamental and mostly invisible that it is called simply, life.

Words before words

This scepticism of symbolic forms of representation is therefore bound to the journey of representation, or meaning making, a journey that began a long time before words. Anthropologist Eduardo Kohn’s first chapter in How Forests Think (2013), draws this line, portending to how humans and nonhumans use signs that are not necessarily symbolic – signs that are not conventional – demonstrating why these signs cannot be fully circumscribed by the symbolic (15). He asserts, ‘life thinks; thoughts are alive’ (16) and so ‘nonhuman life-forms also represent the world’ (8). Kohn claims this more expansive understanding of representation is a difficult pill to swallow as social theory – ‘whether humanist or posthumanist, structuralist or poststructuralist’ – places language at the centre of representation (8). However, ‘[r]epresentation is actually something more than conventional, linguistic, and symbolic’ (Kohn 7). Kohn argues that ‘[l]ife is, through and through, the product of sign processes (9). In this way, ‘semiosis (the creation and interpretation of signs) permeates and

constitutes the living world, and it is through our partially shared semiotic propensities that multi-1 _{Wheeler argues that ‘modelling systems theory’ (first proposed by the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics and} further developed by Seboek) ‘allows us to see that evolutionary change in culture, growing from evolutionary change in nature, implies emergent ‘layers’ or strata of modelled knowledge’ (2008: 147). She continues by positing ‘[w]e can see that cultural evolution consists in the building (or one might say ‘sculpting’) of models of the world as ways of making better sense of experience’ (2008: 147). This is categorised triadically: ‘[t]he form of world-modelling undertaken by all living things has been identified by the term primary world-modelling systems. The form of world-modelling introduced with the human evolution of mimetic, then articulate, language is designated as a secondary world-modelling system. Finally, the production of self-reflective representative forms of knowledge in art, religion, philosophy, politics and so on is termed a tertiary world-modelling system’ (2008: 141)

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species relations are possible, and also analytically comprehensible’ (Kohn 9). Furthermore, Kohn troubles Nature/Culture dichotomies that are based on mastery and control as ‘[t]hanks to this living semiotic dynamic, mean-ing (ie means-ends relations, significance, “aboutness,” telos) is a constitutive feature of the world and not just something we humans impose on it (16). Wheeler also intervenes to declare that ‘nature-culture is not a difference but a continuum. Culture, biosemiotics says, is natural and evolutionary. Culture does not replace nature. It rests upon it and of course, is in dialogue with it; both are part of each other, and both shape each other’ (Wheeler 2015: 53). Moving away from Cartesian dualism or, culture’s dominion over nature; both Kohn and Wheeler thus propose a theory of emergence from nature – for language and thus, culture.

Returning to figurative language and keeping this theory of emergence in mind, Wheeler remarks upon the processes that allow meaning to grow – both biologically and linguistically. Building from Pierce’s triadic semiotics,2 _{where evolutionary categories of Firstness (iconic), Secondness}

(indexical) are developmentally built up into Human Thirdness (symbolic), Wheeler implies that ‘the recognition of similarity (this is like that), of difference in similarity (this is like that and also always points to something else), and of the possibility that signs can point to, and stand for, other things in non-causal (that is merely conventional) ways – thus always contains iconic, indexical and symbolic signs’ (2008: 143). This highlights what the narrator might mean by the comparative adjective ‘greener’ in the prologue, insinuating an evolutionary process, not implying a total lack of green, but needing more. She furthers this theory by illustrating that growth of meaning often works poetically ‘via metaphor (i.e. a similarity pattern of some sort, a mainly iconic sign) and metonymy (i.e. the linking, mainly by indexical signs, of elements into the beginning of a narrative sequence – a sentence, a poetic line, the themes of a plot, a genre etc.’ (Wheeler 2015: 58). Therefore, the various likening and linking processes in literature are inherent to and emergent from even molecular forms of

representation; it is not simply a tool to stimulate imagination and subjective forms of knowledge but is an objective facet of biological meaning-production. It is therefore possible to look at language like an organism, like Jakobson suggests to (quoted in Wheeler 2015: 54).

In The Overstory, Powers taps into language as organism with mycelial intertext of The Secret Forest and manipulating simile, but also by playing with etymology. Notably, he linguistically

undercuts the ‘book’ by looking at instances where language sprouts from nature. Patricia’s father ‘tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language. How book

2 _{Pierce’s articulation of semiotics, ‘unlike the anthropocentric and dyadic Saussurean sign, […] is dynamic and not} confined to humans’ (Wheeler 2016: 63). Wheeler describes it as a semiotics ‘not only of human verbal and non-verbal communication, but also of the communicative nature of all living organisms as they forge (as they have since the earliest bacterial life) meanings in their environments (2008: 140).

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branched up out of beech roots, way back in the parent tongue. How beech bark played host to the earliest Sanskrit letters’ (146). Kohn expands on this evolution of world-modelling; ‘[s]ocial or cultural systems, or even “actor-networks,” are ultimately understood in terms of their languagelike properties. Like words, their “relata” – whether roles, ideas, or “actants” – do not precede the mutually constitutive relationships these have with one another in a system that necessarily comes to exhibit a certain circular closure by virtue of this fact’ (15). Echoing Wheeler’s vision of a dynamic Nature-Culture continuum, Kohn reveals the chain of links between nature, language and culture emerging

organically, and gestures to the ‘circular closure’ that takes shape due to their mutually constitutive relationships.

Here, on the topic of etymology and emergence, it is necessary to interject with Ghosh’s relevant point that ‘[t]he most important element of the word recognition thus lies in its first syllable, which harks back to something prior, an already existing awareness that makes possible the passage from ignorance to knowledge: a moment of recognition occurs when a prior awareness flashes before us, effecting an instant change in our understanding of that which is beheld’ (4-5). In The Overstory, in the italicised prologue to ‘Crown,’ an unnamed man (revealed to be Nick later in the novel) thinks,

I wouldn’t need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity and then this - this, the growing rings of light and water and stone – would take up all of me, and be all the words I need (444).

Once again, answering to the narrator’s demands for a ‘greener’ mind and letting the trees ‘be nothing but themselves’ (4, 443); Powers alerts to simile as blinding and constitutive, but according to this line of thinking, humans do not have to change much, or be anything ‘very different,’ in order to assimilate back into an embodied, experiential realm. Nick recognises a wordless, existing presence, aligning with Ghosh’s note on pre-awareness, as well as to Wheeler’s articulation of the figurative as evolutionary and organic. Furthermore, as Kohn argues, ‘the recognition of representational processes as something unique to, and in a sense even synonymous with, life allows us to situate distinctively human ways of being in the world as both emergent from and in continuity with a broader living semiotic realm’ (15). In this way,

thanks to the way language is nested within broader forms of representation that have their own distinctive properties, we are, in fact, open to the emerging worlds around us. In short, if culture is a ‘complex whole,’ to quote E B Taylor’s (1871) foundational definition (a definition that invokes the ways in which cultural ideas and social facts are mutually

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constituted by virtue of the sociocultural systemic contexts that sustain them), then culture is also an ‘open whole’ (Kohn 15).

In this way, the ability to recognise, or to be pre-aware in linguistic and conceptual terms, reveals the Nature-Culture continuum to be in a state of constant and open evolution, and suggests the relational ties that such a field entails. When reading Kohn’s ideas of culture as an ‘open whole’ alongside the ‘circular closure’ of mutually constitutive relationships, this theorising takes the shape of a tree’s cross-section, the rings continuously expanding outwards, building from the concentric rings within.

Indeed, Powers lures the reader into his novel with imaginative language in order to communicate scientific method and to conceptualise trees as people-like. However, beyond demonstrating the double-nature of words as seductive and imprisoning, Powers gestures to the representation that humans are not tapping into, and therefore the moments of recognition that elude us. Powers alludes to a more subtle form of recognition, one that revolves around the in/visible and the relational. This evocation of recognition chimes with Ghosh’s written account of ‘beholding and being beheld [by]’ the nonhuman, as the metaphorical and literal eye of a tornado passes over him in The Great Derangement. He describes the irreducible mystery beyond the danger and

destruction he had witnessed, ‘something that was not a property of the thing itself but of the manner in which it had intersected with my life’ (Ghosh 15). Importantly, recognition here does not happen through words, ‘more often than not we recognise mutely’ (Ghosh 4). Furthermore, even his

witnessing of the event does not herald recognition; rather the ‘manner in which,’ or the happening, is what triggers his following thought that ‘to recognise is by no means to understand that which meets the eye; comprehension need play no part in a moment of recognition’ (Ghosh 4). In the Overstory, Powers gestures to this ‘kind of awareness,’ he calls it ‘something so different from human intelligence that intelligence thinks it’s nothing,’ alluding to the blindness of human modelled knowledge (67). This recognition therefore goes beyond the deductive and inductive reasoning of a disenchanted world, that which is visible; the moment of recognition has more to do with the happening rather than the observed.

Returning to the anthropocentric tendency that Kingsolver highlights in her review, that ‘[p]eople only read stories about people’; one of the ways that anthropocentrism culturally gains traction is through the patterns of emergence within nonhuman systems that contain the human, which are sometimes perceivable to the human. Powers accesses these patterns as he unfolds his text from mythology; God-filled worlds where mysticism and Michael Polyani’s ‘tacit’ knowledge run riot, ‘the oracle leaves turn the wind audible’ (163). A younger Patricia’s animistic toys ‘can talk’ though they have no need of words, ‘like Patty’ (141). As a line from one of her childhood stories in her dog-eared copy of Ovid, ‘[l]et me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things,’ reverberates

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throughout the novel (147); Patricia and the other characters are described like trees, or ‘other things’, in major life events such as illness, injury, sex, love and death. For example, when Patricia agrees to marry Dennis, ‘[i]t feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach underground’ (181), and when Ray has a stroke, he watches himself ‘turn brown and fall’ (389). Furthermore, Olivia particularly weaves a ‘spell’ over the other characters, like some ‘mythic beast’ (324), and Neelay, paralysed in a wheelchair, creates a ‘god game that has escaped its god’ (517), while his legs are ‘shrivelled to thick twigs’ and his hair flows ‘in thick vines’ (133). Echoing Douglas’ attempts to read the ‘remembering wood,’ Olivia reminds herself of memory as a ‘collaboration in progress’ (404) as ‘[s]he must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions’ (201). In the glow cast by the mysticism present in The Overstory, we can take a look at the myth of Narcissus, who (in Ovid’s version of events) is lured to a pool by Nemesis as punishment for his rejection of a mountain nymph and upon seeing his own reflection in a crystalline pool in a glen, falls deeply in love, as if it were somebody else. Eventually he realises his love is unrequited, unable to be reciprocated, and he turns into a gold and white flower, into another thing. His folly lies in being unable to recognise himself emerging from another context. Narcissus’ recognition, or his passage from ignorance to knowledge is slippery, lubricated by the desire for his own image; when he realises he cannot reach the object of his desire, he is transformed into something else, something natural. Reading through this myth with Ghosh’s account of beholding/being beheld as something more than just visual or comprehensive, renders lucid this fantastical transformation. It resonates with the blindness that accompanies an amorous preoccupation with ‘people’ in Kingsolver’s point but as Ghosh illustrates with his own fable, recognition lies in the happening rather than the observed. Therefore, the growth of meaning moves kinetically within the flowing energies of emergence and transformation, in the becoming.

Reading anthropocentrism in this Greek myth, rather than a Freudian vision of self-absorbed narcissism, is useful for The Overstory, as a similar desire to be able to recognise the self in the realm of nature laces the text. It could be argued that anthropocentrism, placing the human centrally, emerges from the logic of semiosis, as well as the basic human desire - to be able to recognise and be recognisable. Mima Ma renders this desire amongst humans literally visible during her work as a psychotherapist which requires ‘unrelenting human scrutiny’ (501), staring into strangers’ eyes for hours. At first her client, Stephanie, experiences the syndrome scopophobia, the ‘fear of seeing and being seen’ (499). Eventually the fear translates into something organic and tacit; ‘[i]n a patch of sun that falls between them, a green feeling opens to the light’ (502). After a couple of hours with eyes-locked, ‘Stephanie sees. So clear now: She’s an animal, a mere avatar. The other woman too – stuff-imprisoned spirit, deluded into thinking its autonomous. And yet conjoined, linked to each other, a

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pair of local gods who have lived and felt all things’ (504). This moment of seeing and being seen echoes both Nick’s experiential insights into being green, being sun, being a feeling, as well as

Ghosh’s report on the happening. As Patricia writes in The Secret Forest: ‘[t]he bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing’, embodied and relational recognition means becoming a ‘semiotic animal’

(Wheeler 2008: 143) again, part of a mystical world filled with beings, or ‘local gods,’ that organically respond to sun, to ‘green feelings,’ and to each other.

Following this setting up of myth and tacit knowledge in the novel, Patricia is on a seed collecting trip in Brazil when a member of her team calls for her to come and see something in the forest: a ‘one-eyed myopic. In knots and whorls, muscles arise from the smooth bole. It’s a person, a woman, her torso twisted, her arms lifting from her sides in finger branches’ (491). Patricia utters the word, ‘[p]areidolia,’ explaining to her Brazilian peer that it is ‘the adaptation that makes people see people in all things’ (491).3 _{Imaginative, figurative language mingles with scientific theory to describe} Patricia’s vision: ‘[t]he face may have been formed by the chance efflorescence of a canker, with beetles as cosmetic surgeons. But the arms, the hands, the fingers: family resemblance’ (491). Patricia’s worldview has been shaped by mythology and ‘listening’ to the ‘massed symphonic choruses’

‘gathered underground’ (167), to ‘life […] talking to itself’ (158). This magical and embodied engagement with the world prepares her to recognise this tree shaped ‘like the Virgin’ (493) both objectively and subjectively. Furthermore, whether it is between two humans facing one another in a room, or between a human and a human-like tree within a forest, in these instances of recognition in the novel, Powers sheds light on the force of seeing and being seen as a dynamic interaction that can shape thought and forge familial bonds of familiarity.

The ‘irreducible’ mystery of Ghosh’s tornado, or Patricia’s experience of pareidolia, has another word, one that recurs frequently in translations of Freud and Heidegger. They call it uncanny. Discussing the cataclysmic events of climate change, Ghosh notes how ‘no other word 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 these

encounters we recognise something we had turned away from: that is to say the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocuters’ (30). He continues this notion,

[y]et now our gaze seems to be turning again; the uncanny and improbable events that are beating at our doors seem to have stirred a sense of recognition, an

3 _{‘The translator says that’s not a thing in Portuguese’ (491) which is interesting from the perspective of the} nature-culture continuum, culture as a complex and ‘open whole’ emerging from nature, that both Wheeler and Kohn propose. If language is secondary world-modelling system, the fact that certain languages have words for this adaption shapes thought and ways of being in the world.

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awareness that humans were never alone, that we have always been surrounded by

beings of all sorts who share elements of that which we had thought to be most distinctively our own: the capabilities of will, thought, and consciousness. How else do we account for the interest in the nonhuman that has been burgeoning in the humanities over the last decade and over a range of disciplines; how else do we account for the renewed attention to panpsychism and the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead; and for the rise to prominence of object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, the new animism, and so on?

Can the timing of this renewed recognition be mere coincidence, or is the synchronicity an indication that there are entities in the world, like forests, that are fully capable of inserting themselves into our processes of thought? And if that were so, could it not also be said that the earth has itself intervened to revise those habits of thought that are based on the Cartesian dualism that arrogates all intelligence and agency to the human while denying them to every other kind of being? (Ghosh 31).

This reading of the uncanny fortifies Ghosh’s assertion that ‘[t]he knowledge that results from

recognition, then, is not of the same kind as the discovery of something new: it arises from a renewed potentiality that lies within oneself’ (5). It also reaffirms that pre-awareness ‘cannot disclose itself except in the presence of its lost other’ (Ghosh 5). Patricia’s experience of pareidolia, or the uncanny, is a scene in which this disclosure between human and nonhuman is made potential, where science and imagination are each other’s ‘lost other’ and they can both play out equal parts in a story, recognising something as both objective and subjective. As anthropologist, Anna Tsing, writes ‘such stories might be simultaneously true and fabulous. How else can we account for the fact that anything is alive in the mess we have made?’ (viii).

People will only read stories about people

Looping back to the start of this chapter, then, and to intertextuality; the metatext of The Overstory becomes important as a hybrid between science and literature, non-fiction and fiction. Alongside the tentacular text of The Secret Forest and the reverberations of Ovid’s mythology, the novel extends itself through the references to writers and texts spanning the romantic canon, such as War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1867) and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855), and the work of William Blake, W.H. Auden, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir to name but a few (464, 336, 484, 162, 156). The slippage between fact and fiction is made particularly visible by Dorothy and Ray’s

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Their library, housing Walter Scott’s Complete Waverley Novels, a copy of The Age of Intelligent

Machines, Four Great Novels by Jane Austen and Fifty Ideas that Changed the World (260-261), demonstrate the imaginative capabilities of fiction: fallibility, the human condition, ‘stories of free ideas and steeped in local selves’, alongside the role of non-fiction: ‘the grand project of civilisation ascending to its still-obscure destiny’, ‘the rising quality of life, the steady freeing of humanity by invention, the breakout of know-how that will finally save the race’ (260). A binary is established between the realms of fact and fiction in literature, but all are lovingly curated within the same library. Dorothy and Ray’s library of binaries and the realms with which they associate reflects a wider socio-cultural division. Here, it is important to address Powers’ context as a writer; versed and well-regarded in the novel form, but his interests further afield make him difficult to classify as a writer, much like the Brinkman’s library. Formally, Powers first studied physics, and then rhetoric and literature as an undergraduate, earning a master’s degree in 1979 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Paris Review). Powers’ double identity as a scientist and a writer (particularly explicit in his novel, Orfeo, published in 2014) equips him with hybrid vision, to see the tree as an organism that speaks via media which are only visible to those who can apply the scientific method (as read through Ray’s half of the library, or Patricia’s work) but whose ‘language’ requires the perspective that is carried by romantic or mystical aesthetics (made apparent in Dorothy’s book choices and Patricia’s beloved childhood reading). The relationship between the imaginative and the scientific in this text is thus symbiotic, neither can function without the other.

However, this interdisciplinary, synchronous relationship between fiction and non-fiction has not yet found its footing in contemporary literature, especially those written meaning to address the uprooting effect of changes to our world. Ghosh asks ‘[h]ow, then, did the provinces of the

imaginative and the scientific come to be so sharply divided from each other?’ (71). Counter to Kohn and Wheeler’s open view of nature-culture, a tradition of partitioning has taken over, especially when incorporating the non-fictional reality of climate change into literature. Ghosh evokes Bruno Latour and ‘the project of partitioning’ which

is supported always by a related enterprise: one that he describes as “purification,” the purpose of which is to ensure that Nature remains off-limits to culture, the knowledge of which is consigned entirely to the sciences. This entails the marking off and suppression of hybrids – and that, of course, is exactly the story of the branding of science fiction, as a genre separate from the literary mainstream. The line that has been drawn between them exists only for the sake of neatness; because the zeitgeist of late modernity could not tolerate Nature-Culture hybrids (Ghosh 71).

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Ghosh points to the fact that ‘it is a striking fact that when novelists do choose to write about climate change it is almost always outside of fiction’ (8). He points to Arundhati Roy, ‘one of the finest prose stylists of our time’ and ‘passionate and deeply informed about climate change’ but always writes on these subjects through the medium of nonfiction. Another author he pinpoints is Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake (2014) and head of the Dark Mountain Project, ‘a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself’ (quoted in Ghosh 8). Kingsnorth has yet to publish a novel in which climate change plays a major part. In his selection of essays, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist (2017), Kingsnorth has wondered what our writing would look like if we took seriously the notion that ‘that the world is alive and aware’ rather than ‘the world is a machine’ (227). He laments, ‘outside the forests fall, the ice melts, the corals die back, and the extinctions roll on; but we keep writing our love letters to ourselves, oblivious’ (Kingsnorth 229). In this way, the novel has become by and large anthropocentrically concerned. Powers notes a similar anthropocentrism within contemporary literature when Adam ‘tries to read a novel, something about privileged people having trouble getting along with each other in exotic locations. He throws it against the wall. Something has broken in him. His appetite for human self-regard is dead’ (414). This moment in the novel winks at the reader in its ridicule of anthropocentric (and bourgeois) narratives, similarly present in Kingsolver’s assertion; a wink that colludes with the ‘Roots’ section of the novel, which works to seduce the reader with character, largely revolving around human-centred drama and thus functioning according to traditional character plotlines (Emergence Magazine).

Furthermore, in an interview for the RadioWest podcast, Powers speaks with Doug Fabrizio about the state of fiction plot lines, where the traditional conflict in literature was always person against person, person against themselves or person against environment, noting the very recent loss of this final tension in contemporary literature. As literature became more interested in conflict of the individual and self-creation, the nonhuman lost ‘agency, desire, volition.’ In the interview, Powers explains how the disappearance is relatively recent and began in the West when a post-industrial transformation, a growing separation based on qualitative difference, lead to the cultural notion that we can have life on our own terms through mastery and control. This meant humans ‘ceased to take the nonhuman seriously’ or wonder what ‘the rest of life wants.’ Powers marks this expansive point in history as the moment when plots revolving around person against environment conflict disappears from our stories. We stopped telling those stories when we believed we had defeated the nonhuman world (RadioWest). The nonhuman as character became unchartered terrain.

It is therefore worth focusing on the role of character in contemporary canonical literature. To do so, it is important to look at the Cornelian box which brings character and their environments to life: the novel. Kingsnorth notes how the novel is ‘an artefact of Western individualism,’ burgeoning

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‘with the rise of the commercial bourgeoisie, with empire and global trade, with cities and science and reason, with the notion of humans as primary actors in the world’s drama. The same society that gave us the concept of the world as an inanimate backdrop to human activity gave us the novels that catalogued that story’ (228). In this way, contemporary character was the figure through which 19th century fiction negotiated the individual, often through the tussle between nature and nurture, or genetics and environment. The novels that Dorothy reads to Ray all imagine ‘that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive – character – is all that matters in the end’ (477). This sooths Ray, he seeks solace in the nuances of the human condition, rendering forgiveness as the beating pulse of character, helping him deal with his own marital crisis. Dorothy also enjoys novels with a shock factor; ‘those moments when one character, often the most surprising, reaches down inside herself and is better than her nature allows’ (260). The idea raised here conforms to the 19-century enlightenment century supposition of an innate, genetic quality of character that can be subverted by context and action. Therefore, ever since the Enlightenment tore through the West, philosophers have ‘shown us a Nature that is grand and universal but also passive and mechanical. Nature was a backdrop and resource for the moral intentionality of Man, which could tame and master Nature’ (Tsing vii). This extends through the 20th _{century, during which ‘scholarship,} advancing the modern human conceit, conspired against our ability to notice the divergent, layered, and conjoined projects that make up worlds’ (Tsing 22).

However, natural landscape, and the nonhuman creatures alive within it, have not totally disappeared from contemporary bookshelves. Tsing remarks that the task of the nonhuman in literature ‘was left to fabulists, including non-Western and non-civilisational storytellers, to remind us of the lively activities of all beings, human and not human’ (Tsing vii), citing the genre of the gothic as a precursor to science fiction, and writers like Mary Shelly and Ursula K. Le Guin. Patricia hears ‘stories everywhere she collects seeds – in the Philippines, Xinjiang, New Zealand, East Africa, Sri Lanka’ (492) which reflect Ghosh’s argument that there are many human beings who never lost this awareness in their storytelling in the first place, citing as examples, ‘[i]n the Sundarbans, […] the people who live in and around the mangrove forest have never doubted that tigers and many other animals possess intelligence and agency’ and ‘the primatologist Imanishi Kinji who insisted on ‘the unity of all elements on the planet earth – living and non-living’ (64). Furthermore, ‘[i]n the Indian epics – and this is a tradition that remains vibrantly alive to this day – there is a completely matter-of-fact acceptance of the agency of nonhuman beings of many kinds’ which translate into ‘techniques of storytelling’ where ‘nonhumans provide much of the momentum of the epics; they create the resolutions that allow the narrative to move forward’ (Ghosh 64). ‘In the Iliad and the Odyssey too the intervention of gods, animals, and the elements is essential to the machinery of narration. This is true for many other

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narrative traditions as well, Asian, African, Mediterranean, and so on’ (Ghosh 65). Kingsnorth also notes that even within the dominant, recent (and old) fiction in the West, there are iterations of human non-human interaction. For example, he cites DH Lawrence who proclaimed ‘[t]he universe is not a machine after all.’ As a man who never stopped paying attention to it, he writes, ‘it’s alive and kicking’ (quoted in Kingsnorth 233). However, Kingsnorth pushes these instances of multispecies interactions further by asking ‘how could a novel be written in which a living landscape was not just a backdrop, but a character: an actor in the drama, rather than its scenery? Are there novels in which non-human places are sensate? In which the mind of the world is made manifest in the places its human characters walk through?’ (231). As seemingly frustrated as Adam is with stubborn human self-regard, Kingsnorth’s line of questioning opens the door and ushers in The Overstory.

In Powers’ novel, the human characters, with their diverse set of interpersonal tensions and converging plotlines, are not the only elaborated upon individuals. In fact, once Powers has

successfully lured the contemporary reader in with the chit-chat of character, trees begin to figure more centrally. Powers dedicates as much time, if not more, to describe the behaviour and qualities of trees as he does for his human characters. Eventually in the novel, the trees are subsumed into the characters’ identities, as their individual connections with certain trees become their symbolic codenames, (Maidenhair, Mulberry, Dougfir etc.) as their green activism burgeons. As mentioned earlier, in key formative moments in the text, the characters are described as tree-like. Rebecca Hey, author of the first annotated tree anthology, The Spirit in the Woods (or Sylvan Musings) (1855), writes about ‘the individuality of character’ which ‘adds an indescribable charm to sylvan scenery’ (vii). She quotes a ‘tasteful author’ enchanted by the ‘delightful contrast in landscape’; ‘the giant strength of the oak with the flexile elegance of the ash; the stately tranquillity of the elm with the tremulous lightness of the poplar; the bright and vivid foliage of the beech or sycamore with the funeral majesty of the cedar or the yew; all diffusing in form and character as in colour’ (vii). However, despite lyricising the individuality of trees, Hey writes ‘[o]f all the inanimate objects, trees are the most companionable’ (vi), echoing Patricia’s research, as well as Wohlleben when he argues that ‘the biochemical behaviour of individual trees may make sense only when we see them as members of a community’ (158).

Therefore, the trees do not become character in any unitary sense of the word, like literary tradition has dictated, or through any simple personification. Rather they become specified within a relation between individual and species. Beyond this individuality, as Hey admires, the landscape is filled with trees being themselves, but they are also being part of the wider landscape. In his poetic descriptions of the individuality of trees, and by slowly and linguistically allowing his characters’ tree-like qualities, Powers therefore gestures to the possibility of ecological thinking within the novel, of being specific while ‘becoming-with’ ‘other things,’ as Donna Haraway and Ovid would both suggest. This is the

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nexus of the flow of this chapter: how trees being informs and relates to our being in the world in an ‘ecology of selves’ (Kohn).

The role of the human in contemporary novel is not to be totally effaced, Powers relies on the development of modern character. In Dorothy and Ray’s ‘Crown’ years, reading helps foster intimacy after infidelity, a lifeline for a marriage on the precipice of separation, and affords Dorothy some semblance of communication with her husband after a brain haemorrhage leaves him bed bound and almost completely mute. Anna Karenina by Tolstoy (1877) is ‘the greatest mercy’ given to Ray by fiction: ‘proof that the worst the two of them have done to each other is just another tale worth reading together, at the end of the day’ (478). This sentence is at once condemning and forgiving but also notably self-aware, mirroring Dorothy and Ray’s subplot within a larger overarching narrative. Here, the couple’s role in the novel aligns with Franco Moretti’s concept of ‘fillers’ in the modern novel. According to Moretti ‘fillers function very much like the good manners so important to [Jane] Austen: they are both mechanisms designed to keep the ‘narrativity’ of life under control – to give regularity, a ‘style’ to existence’ (quoted in Ghosh 17). It is through this mechanism that worlds are conjured up, through everyday details, which function “as the opposite of narrative’’’ (Moretti quoted in Ghosh 17). Ghosh quotes Moretti proposing ‘[i]t is thus that the novel takes its modern form, through the “relocation of the unheard-of toward the background… while the everyday moves into the foreground”’ therefore ‘through banishing of the improbable’ (Ghosh 17). Ghosh articulates this marked shift, when the nonhuman as agent disappeared from literature, as coalescent to the disappearance of exceptional events, and thus improbability, from fiction. He asks ‘...what does probability have to do with fiction? […] The answer is: Everything. […] Probability and the modern novel are in fact twins’ (16). Echoing Olivia’s dropped career as an actuarial scientist in ‘Roots,’ dealing with ‘the price and probability of uncertain events’ (182); Ghosh asks: ‘[w]hy should the rhetoric of the everyday appear at exactly the time when a regime of statistics, ruled by ideas of probability and improbability, was beginning to give new shapes to society? Why did fillers suddenly become so important?’ (19). In response, he gives Moretti’s answer: “[b]ecause they offer the kind of narrative pleasure compatible with the new regularity of bourgeois life”’ (quoted in Ghosh 19). Yet, this

comforting, patch-work blanket of regularity is becoming harder to square with the rise of unexpected events due to climate catastrophe, which stitch together and rip apart more lives across more scales. Although, the most threadbare will be those lives who do not make the cut as bourgeois: low-income, BIPOC groups and those in the Global South will be most at ‘risk’ (IPCC 2019).

By nodding to the modern novel in this way, through ‘fillers,’ Powers unfolds his narrative from the broader development of cultural imagination, ‘to supersede and incorporate preceding forms’ (Ghosh 77). In this way, ‘the realist novel’s “mimetic ambition”: detailed descriptions of

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everyday life (or “fillers”)’ are central to his experiment of a new form of novel (Ghosh 19). And yet building on the argumentation in this chapter, if thinking tree, in the ecosystem of narrative there are no ‘fillers.’ As Patricia writes in The Secret Forest, ‘[t]here are no individuals in a forest, no separable events’ (273). The Brinkmans carry out a large part of the vital literary function of establishing the novel’s intertextuality, they are part of the humus in which the mycelial network can take root, and one of the subplots which tunnel up through the ‘Trunk,’ branching out into ‘Crown.’ Furthermore, as Ghosh builds off of Max Weber’s arguments, suggesting that the ‘rationalisation of modern life: a process that begins in the economy and in the administration, but eventually pervades the sphere of free time, private life, entertainment, feelings… Or in other words: fillers are an attempt at rationalising the novelistic universe: turning it into a world of few surprises, fewer adventures, and no miracles at all’ (19); I argue that in fact, the everydayness of Dorothy and Ray Brinkman’s stories, in their daily crises as well as kindnesses, reveals the miracle of everyday life, a process that is symbolised through Ray’s torturous attempts to write the word ‘releaf’ (466). Everydayness, the realm of probability, is in fact organically highly improbable. As Powers writes about Patricia’s Virgin tree, ‘[t]he odds are nothing compared to the first two great rolls of the cosmic dice: the one that took inert matter over the crest of life, and the one that led from simple bacteria to compound cells a hundred times larger and more complex. Compared to those first two chasms, the gap between trees and people is nothing at all’ (493). Life is both mystical and disenchanted. As Wheeler writes on a microcosmic level,

‘[c]hance is what happens in the relationship between an unexpected event and an active organismic life capable of seizing it creatively and making meaning out of it’ (reading notes 60). For example, Dorothy and Ray, unable to have a child, plant a seedling through which they imagine their parallel lives as parents. Therefore, in the novel, Powers eschews the mundane in a kaleidoscopic ecology of characters, where every part is important, and magical, in the overall narrative.

The narrative architecture of trees

I have so far demonstrated Powers’ manipulation of intertextuality, language and character in the traditional novel form as being in a kind of ecosystem of narrative. This ecosystem is informed by the way in which trees are becoming in the world. Beyond words, Powers also focuses on the structure and typography of the novel to think tree. Continuing the line of thinking in the previous paragraph, Ghosh writes that ‘if novels were not built upon a scaffolding of exceptional moments, writers would be faced with the Borgesian task of reproducing the world in its entirety. But the modern novel, unlike geology, has never been forced to confront the centrality of the improbable: the concealment of its scaffolding of events continues to be essential to its functioning’ (23). He argues, ‘here, then, is the irony of the “realist” novel: the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a