In the Overstory by Richard Powers Nina Biddle
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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 Thesis Supervisor: Niall Martin 1 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. 2 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 Bibliography 53 3 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. 4 ‘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 5 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. 6 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.