In the Overstory by Richard Powers Nina Biddle

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

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.

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

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.

‘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

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.

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

7 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.

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).

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.

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

11 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’

(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

(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

14 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)

15 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).

16 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

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

18 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

19 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.

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 exhaustive, yet divisive library; their polarising tastes for reading clash as their marriage crumbles.

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; well-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).

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

‘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

24 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

25 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

26 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 concealment of the real’ (23). However, Powers works with the novel form to reveal this scaffolding of

27 events as something inherently vegetal in form. The central structure of The Overstory idiosyncratically follows the architecture of a tree, each section named after each component: roots, trunk, crown and seeds. Following this structure points to both the biological and symbolic skeleton of a tree. It hones the readers eye to a specific fragment and in doing so opens them up to a range of symbolic associations. In this way, the very structure of the novel asks the reader to visualise their position in the novel according horticultural classification and then to reflect on the intricacies of language.

Furthermore, this kind of structuring is strict but Powers does not radically alter the structure of an unfurling plot by following it, rather he marks and points to what already exists in literature, a tree-like structuring of story. In this way, Powers’ points to the ways in which organic forms such as trees, trees becoming with their environments, are already structuring, and telling stories.

Looking beyond the titles, and closer at the text, a tree-like structure can be mapped within each separate section, following the fractal logic of the tree itself. As noted previously, in ‘Roots,’ Powers introduces the reader to each character, but in doing so he describes their encounters with trees, some more obvious than others. Blatant encounters and emotional connections are introduced, such as Nick’s chestnut, Mimi’s beloved mulberry tree, the tree that Neelay falls from, Dorothy and

Ray’s anniversary trees, and the banyan that saves Douglas’ life. However, Patricia and Olivia have less distinctive encounters. Patricia is surrounded by trees; it is hard to single out any one encounter as significant over the others. Her father takes her on long trips to study trees; they perform experiments on trees together; she makes fairy castles out of parts of trees; she becomes fascinated with people turning into trees in Greek mythology; her degree and PhD are dedicated to trees. Olivia’s only connection in this section is with a tree lit up by a lamp outside her house. In this way, ‘Roots’ serves to specify the distinct and separate life-paths of each of the characters, as individuals with histories, desires and flaws, with varying degrees of interactions with nature.

In ‘Trunk,’ these life paths converge, many of the characters become activists, they are united in goal. They start to interact, meet each other, become friends, work together, become romantically involved. No longer separated by individually named chapters, fingerprint-whorl stamps of cross- sectioned tree trunks mark a new character, new space, another part of the story, another layer of time, another ring. However, this is not consistent throughout the whole of ‘Trunk’; there are moments when Powers uses typography to change the pace, using space in a way that mirrors the time-warped rings of a tree trunk. The passages on page 408 and page 424 lose their stamps, the characters’ stories follow one another in quick succession, within the same paragraph. It’s possible to visualise this on the trunk’s cross section, when ‘these wild loops in the wood’ start to bunch together, ‘[p]ale rush forward, darker holding back,’ indicating, as Douglas deduces, ‘[w]ide in the good years – sure – and narrow in the bad. But nothing more’ as he can ‘project their histories into the wood’s plane’ (193). The

28 typography thus knots together the layers of temporality and story in the novel, combining them within the uniting structure of the trunk. Thinking visually like this also helps the reader to think about the conjecture of each character, as they come together, shooting from the roots upwards, different beginnings, same destination, the same shared cambium stretching below the surface of the bark. As Neelay watches the time-lapse video of the Hoel chestnut tree, ‘[a]t this speed, he sees the tree’s central aim, the math behind the phloems and xylem, the intermeshed and seething geometries, and that thin layer of living cambium swelling outward’ (543). The ‘Crown’ bifurcates their journeys and seeds eventually scatters them with the ongoing potential of seeding or waiting attached to each one. In ‘Crown,’ the typography loses the stamps, relying on spacing to separate each character storyline. This time, when the updates converge into one passage, like on page 467, where single lines inform the reader on Patricia, Douglas, Nick, Adam and Mimi’s movements in the space of ‘twenty springs’ – ‘no time at all.’ This time it is possible to see a large bough of a branch breaking off into smaller branches, this passage nestled in the crook of each bifurcation.

By way of concluding this chapter and allowing the thoughts on temporality raised here to tick over into the following chapter; Powers makes his stance clear when Dorothy ponders ‘[h]ow life managed to add imagination to all the other tricks in its chemistry set is a mystery Dorothy can’t wrap her head around. But there it is: the ability to see, all at once, in all its concurrent branches, all its many hypotheticals, this thing that bridges past and future, earth and sky’ (587). Within these two sentences

Powers deftly negotiates the socio-cultural partition between the scientific and imaginative, allowing imagination and tacit wisdom to be a fluid entity that works to access and communicate knowledge, for both human and nonhuman life. In doing so, Powers shows life, and evolution, to be magical and creative. Furthermore, recognising the tree as a visible union between past and future, earth and sky, is a conjoined and dynamic enterprise; returning to Patricia’s words in The Secret Forest, ‘[f]orests 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’ (273). Trees, as organic organisms, are already structuring and telling stories, ‘in media of their own invention,’ ‘through their needles, trunks, and roots,’ as their very being ensures their semiotic engagement with the world, recording ‘in their own bodies the history of every crisis they’ve lived through’ (444). This can offer us a pedagogical opportunity if humans can tap back into the ways in which we have emerged from these evolutionary and age-old storytelling processes. As Wheeler writes, ‘the world is a rich book of signs which bears infinite rereading’ (2008: 137) and Neelay finally sees ‘the most perfect piece of self- writing code’ (129). In this way, Powers seems to directly answer Kingsnorth’s request for a novel in which ‘the mind of the world is made manifest in the places its human characters walk through’ (231).

Crown: Deep Time

Building from the ideas raised in the previous chapter, this paper will determine how The Overstory intervenes in the problematic proposed in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’ (2009), negotiating the seeming immiscibility of human history and the deep time of the planet. The post-enlightenment eclipsed view of history – the Viconian-Hobbesian idea that history is the knowledge of civil and political institutions, while nature remained off-limits as God’s work - has been radically overturned by the now widespread consensus in scholarship on anthropogenic warming. As geological agents, and thus a natural condition, it is time to look at our species history. In doing so, the novel appeals ‘to our sense of universals while challenging at the same time our capacity for historical understanding’ (Chakrabarty 201). Bringing global histories of capital in conversation with geological chronologies requires thinking in two registers and pays attention to the trouble of a universal. Responding to the state of emergency caused by ensuing climate crisis and the process of a

‘sixth extinction’; Powers’ novel, using literary devices that engage in messianic time, productively dislocates progressive and emancipatory narratives. Employing Walter Benjamin’s method of ‘redemptive criticism’ to brush history against the grain, reveals our species history to be a series of complex and contingent moments, bracketed by our proximity to nonhuman beings and their survival.

Powers’ novel, as a piece of art, breaches the barrier between the sacred and the secular and in doing so, asserts that the horror at the waste left behind by a ‘storm called progress’ only appears once you have forgotten that nature is profligate and recycles life as energy through cycles of regeneration.

Like oil in water

Playing with cosmogenic narratives, creation ex nihilo, Powers’ novel inserts itself into Chakrabarty’s problematic; assessing the ways in which the Anthropocene appeals to our sense of universals while challenging, collapsing, and expanding our understanding of natural and human histories. In the prologue to ‘Seeds,’

[s]ay the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day.

First there is nothing. […] From dawn to late morning – a million years of branching – nothing more exists than lean and simply cells.

Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town.

[…] Plants make it up on land just before ten. […] Somewhere in the last sixty minutes,

high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals

start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals. […]

Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave

paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself. By midnight, most of the globe is converted to grow crop for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter

(591-592).

This visualisation of creation ex nihilo, often used to describe the way God created everything out of nothing (Genesis 1:1), is used here, beginning from ‘nothing,’ passing into when ‘life grows aware,’ becoming ‘modern man.’ Engaging the allegory of the tree of life as a spatiotemporal framework is significant as it plays into the culturally polarised methods of cosmogenic knowledge and understanding – reason and spirituality. By using an allegory that retains both cosmological and theological connotations, Powers engages in the ways in which evolution has been understood - transforming chaos into order - through the religious and scientific, then representational and socioeconomic organisation of the planet. By denoting this processual ordering of the calendar, showing ‘our’ position ‘high up in the phylogenetic canopy,’ Powers critiques the modern conceit in historical understanding which separated human from nonhuman species (591). Rather than fortify the Enlightenment vision of nature-as-backdrop to human history, Powers negotiates the human as just one of the species, one leaf, within a branching canopy of species. In the same passage he writes, ‘[f]rom one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run’ (591). Using the word species works at connecting humankind to our shared ‘deep history,’ appealing to our sense of universals, as does the use of the image of the tree of life, used as a symbol across many religions and cultures. It also points to the myopia of historical tradition, which Chakrabarty refers to as the Viconian-Hobbesian idea that nature is ‘inscrutable to man’ as it is God’s work, yet this theological allegory has been used as a model and research tool with which to explore and make legible the evolution of life, as described in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859).

In this way, through manipulating creation ex nihilo as an evolutionary process, Powers asks his readers to entertain the idea that everything observable is not actually all there is to know. In this way, Powers draws spirituality and reason into dialogue to examine the myopia of the modern human.

The Overstory also challenges historical tradition by making visible the failure to envision human history as species history when this perception relies on the logic of segmented time.

Contracting the whole of human history into a rapid flash of growth, just ‘four seconds’ - like when the

31 leaves come out seemingly overnight in spring - contrasts with the deep history of the planet, which fills the bulk of the twenty-four hours. These ‘four seconds before midnight’ line up with ‘[t]he period of human history usually associated with what we today think of as the institutions of civilisation – the beginnings of agriculture, the founding of cities, the rise of the religions we know, the invention of writing’ (Chakrabarty 208). Chakrabarty explains this ‘began about ten thousand years ago, as the planet moved from one geological period, the ice age, or the Pleistocene, to the more recent and warmed Holocene’ (208). The problem with a myopic Viconian-Hobbesian vision of human history, as the study of only civil and political institutions, or human experience, therefore fails to see the transition from the millennia of relative stability during the Holocene into the indiscernibility of the Anthropocene. This is understood as the era in which the human species is the geological agent that significantly alters vital ecosystems, impacting the survival of both human and nonhuman species and bringing the planet rapidly closer towards a ‘sixth extinction.’ The knowledge, backed by scientists of climate crisis, that we are a geologic force and therefore a natural condition, goes against all humanist visions of history in which partitions have been enforced between the human and nonhuman calendars. It involves a scaling up of our imagination of the human as subjects of history, where we are not even - as environmental historians began to suggest from the 1970s - just the biological agents we have always been, but geological agents (Chakrabarty 206).

Powers therefore uses literary device to denote this transformative transition period from

(known) Holocene to (unknown) Anthropocene, when ‘the tree of life becomes something else again’

(592). Here, species thinking threatens the Enlightenment themes that shaped historical tradition; as knowledge reaches its limits, the ability to make order out of the approaching chaos is strained. Chakrabarty understands the difficulty of arriving at a ‘secular understanding of why climate change constitutes a crisis for humans’ (213). As geologists and climate scientists work to explain global warming as different from the previous cycles of warming of the planet, anthropogenic in nature, ‘the ensuing crisis for humans is not understandable unless one works out the consequences of that warming’ (213). Chakrabarty clarifies that these consequences are only comprehensible if we think of humans as species, a form of life, and therefore ‘look on human history as part of the history of life on this planet’ (213). Through his use of literary device, an ancient and mystical symbol, Powers achieves this feat. After all, ‘what the warming of the planet threatens is not the geological planet itself but the very conditions, both biological and geological, on which the survival of human life as developed in the Holocene period depends’ (213). As ‘the tree of life becomes something else again’ a transformative process threatens the survival of the human species, that we know for sure (592).

It is important here to interrogate the representation of this transition in this allegory. The flash of growth brushes up close to the midnight hour when ‘most of the globe is converted to grow

32 crop for the care and feeding of one species’ (592). While this refers to the agricultural revolution, it applies obliquely to anything from nature that human beings have used as crop for modern survival, feeding into a critique of capital. New knowledge tells us we have become geological agents ‘historically and collectively […] when we have reached numbers and invented technologies that are on a scale large enough to have an impact on the planet itself’ (Chakrabarty 207). Furthermore, Chakrabarty expounds that while humans only began to acquire this agency since the Industrial

Revolution, through the burning of fossil fuels and other related activities, the process really picked up in the second half of the twentieth century. He purports, ’the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use’ (208). Therefore, the passage highlights the ways in which this change has come about, through the Cartesian machination of the planet and the energy- intensive processes of acquiring capital and freedom, ‘the tree of life becomes something else again’ (592).

By relating the chronologies of global capital and species history to one another in the tree of life, the novel is involved in a conversation where ‘[t]he task of placing, historically, the crisis of climate change, thus requires us to bring together intellectual formations that are somewhat in tension with each other: the planetary and the global; deep and recorded histories; species thinking and critiques of capital’ (Chakrabarty 213). In the same vein, freedom, the pursuit of which has been a motif throughout written accounts of human history in the last 250 years confronts any sense of universal (Chakrabarty 208). Chakrabarty shines a light on the lack of ‘awareness of the geological agency that human beings were acquiring at the same time as and through processes closely linked to their acquisition of freedom’ (208). While philosophers of freedom necessarily negotiated ‘injustice, oppression, inequality, or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans or human-made systems,’ the chronologies of geological time and human histories ‘remained unrelated’ (Chakrabarty 208). The conversation between timelines confronts the problem of a universal head-on, which also has a nasty colonial history of essentialism across both arts and sciences. As Geyer and Bright write, ‘[a]t the end of the twentieth century, we encounter, not a universalising and single modernity but an integrated world of multiple and multiplying modernities’ (quoted in Chakrabarty 213). They continue, ‘[a]s far as world history is concerned, there is no universalising spirit. […] There are, instead, many very specific, very material and pragmatic practices that await critical reflection and historical study’ (quoted in Chakrabarty 214). Chakrabarty backs this assertion by writing that thanks to global connections forged by trade, empires and capitalism, ‘we confront a startling new condition: humanity, which has been the subject of world history for many centuries and civilisations, has now come into the purview of all human beings. This humanity is extremely polarised into rich and poor’ (214). Therefore, the philosophers of difference justifiably warn that it is impossible to ‘form a single homogenous

33 civilisation,’ however much the scientists of the Anthropocene and species thinking requires us to at least entertain the idea of a universal humankind.

Therefore, The Overstory intervenes in the problematic with a wedded approach of spirituality and reason written into its rhetoric, as a piece of art that breaches the Kantian barrier. While universal thinking is slippery, the novel can come close to attaining the lost totality, as a given form, through constructing meaning subjectively4 and can demonstrate the ways in which ‘the relation between Enlightenment themes of freedom and the collapsing of human and geological chronologies seems more complicated and contradictory than a simple binary would allow’ (Chakrabarty 210). As the position of knowledge ‘becomes something else’ in the era of the Anthropocene, ‘we need the

Enlightenment (that is, reason) even more than in the past, as any notion of a ‘way out of our current predicament cannot but refer to the idea of deploying reason in global, collective life’ (Chakrabarty

211, 210). However, as we know, politics is not based on reason alone, and the current crisis generates anxieties around futures that are difficult to visualise (Chakrabarty 211). As Powers notes in an interview with the LA Review,

[n]ow that our omnipotence is crumbling in the face of the whirlwind it has sewn, we are so dazed and out of the habit of taking the nonhuman seriously that we can’t even accept the reality of what is happening. Climate-change denial may be just a manifestation of Fredric

Jameson’s famous observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end

of capitalism.

In this way, the polarisation of spiritual and economic/political organisation of the planet come into direct contact with each other as the indiscernibility of the Anthropocene demands more from us than post-Enlightenment tactics of reason, requiring the full force of human imagination. Powers engages the allegory of the tree of life, a spiritual symbol to encompass this transformative period, to remind the reader of the ‘inscrutability’ of nature that for so long was seen as God’s work, while making it legible for pragmatic purposes. This wedded approach carries into the following discussion of emancipatory narratives.

The giant trunk is teetering

Historical understanding which addresses the human as becoming geological agent, challenges post-Enlightenment themes of knowledge, freedom, and progress in historical tradition.

4 Wolin examines György Lukács ideas alongside younger Benjamin’s theologically motivated view that there exists a crucial distinction between the ‘created totality’ and the ‘formed totality’ as ‘[t]he created totality produces something out of nothing and as such remains the province of God’ (21).

Through this critique, the species history of humans, as staged in the passage in The Overstory, can be put in conversation with global histories of capital and emancipatory narratives. As Patricia laments to her husband Dennis, ‘How is extraction ever going to stop? It can’t even slow down. The only thing we know how to do is grow. Grow harder; grow faster. More than last year. Growth, all the way up to the cliff and over’ (280). The narrative of progress defines historical tradition, often used as a metric with which to polarise most socio-political organisation of humankind. In this way, Benjamin occupies a

‘unique place in the history of modern revolutionary thought’ as the first Marxist to break radically with the ideology of progress and the Enlightenment (and Social Democratic) notion of quantitative, always-the-same transitions in history (Lowy & Sayre 79; Wolin 49). Explicating the exponential arc of progress in his thirteenth thesis in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (or ‘On the Concept of

History,’ first published in 1942), ‘the concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time’ (261).5 However, Messianic time is tied to a ‘state of emergency’ that threatens the continuity of progressive narratives, or capitalism’s incalculable chronos (257). When Powers eschatologically gestures to the symbol of the fall, ‘when the giant trunk starts to teeter,’ he situates the novel in the fragile footing of our current era, in a state of emergency (592). Benjamin’s model of Messianic time can be brought to bear on a consideration of narratives of progress and emancipation in the novel. While originally referring to an emancipatory narrative that confronted economic decline and fascism, ‘now-time’ has only become more pertinent as an analytical method with which to attack climate crisis, where the chronologies of global capital and species history meet. As Chakrabarty writes ‘the geologic now of the Anthropocene has become entangled with the now of human history’ (213).

Carrying this line of argumentation through to another passage in the novel; the literary device of Douglas Pavlicek’s fall symbolises this entanglement, where the converging and compressing temporalities of progression and impending doom bracket the transformative ‘now’ moment of messianic time. The forces of messianic time become visible as Douglas survives a near- death experience, falling from a plane while working as a loadmaster for the Air Force in Vietnam, ‘floating down to earth like a winged seed’ into the saving embrace of a banyan tree (101). Just before

Douglas survives the fall, Powers cinematically flashes back to

miles below and three centuries earlier, a pollen-coated wasp crawled down a hole at the tip of a certain green fig and laid eggs all over the involute garden of flowers hidden inside. Each of the world’s seven hundred and fifty species of Ficus has its own unique wasp tailored

5 This paper uses the edited copy by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn in Illuminations (1969), all page references in text.

to fertilise it. And this one wasp somehow found the precise fig species of her destiny. The

foundress laid her eggs and died. The fruit that she fertilised became her tomb (101).

Powers then traces the fig’s tiny ‘red bean’, ‘eaten by a bulbul’ then ‘dropped from the sky in a dollop of rich shit that landed in the crook of another tree, where the sun and rain nursed the resulting seedling past the million ways of death. It grew; its roots slipped down and encased its host. Decades passed. Centuries. War on the backs of elephants gave way to televised moon landings and hydrogen bombs’ (101). Over time, ‘the fig spread outward into an oval grove of three hundred main trunks and two thousand minor ones’ (101-102). Powers accelerates this process, handling a growth which normally takes hundreds or thousands of years in a couple of short paragraphs, to make it narratively workable within the span of Douglas’ fall. In this instance, The Overstory stages the material dialogue between the millennia of human presence and the natures that precede and outlast us. In this way, it interrupts the logical flow of time and plays into species thinking. By dislocating temporalities in a narrative time-lapse, the forces of old-growth tree versus the rapid fall become visible, situating Douglas in a suspended ‘now’ moment, up in the branches of the fig.

The vignette in the novel can be further activated by being read alongside Benjamin’s means for understanding historical materialism through Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus, or the ‘The Angel of History.’ In this way, the moving parts in Douglas’ fable help to illustrate how the theological metaphor of messianic time becomes politically significant in narratives of capital and emancipation in the time of ‘now.’ For a historical materialist, temporal cessations in capitalism’s incalculable chronos can be caused by the handbrakes of revolution and every generation inherits a ‘weak messianic’ power with which to revolt, wreak political upheaval and redeem humankind. This envisioning of utopia relies on the fact that the Messiah will never arrive in time, therefore rather than wait for a fairer future, messianic thinking encourages focusing on the now. In this way, Benjamin uses the theological metaphor to critique politico-socio organisation and to engage an inherited ‘spirit’ of revolution. The forces that enable the contraction into ‘now,’ or temporal cessations, are expanded on in Benjamin’s interpretation in his ninth thesis of Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus, as a metaphorical Angel of History sits on a pile of ruins as ‘[t]he storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress’ (258).

At one end of the catastrophe-laden continuum of history, there seems to lie the light of redemption, a Paradise, but it is found only in the opposite direction from the course of historical progress. Much like the opposing temporal and natural forces presented by Douglas’ fall, the opposing forces of messianic contraction are illustrated by Benjamin in Klee’s painting as the push of progressive historical tradition forwards clashes with the pull of Paradise in the other direction. In Douglas’ fall, the gravitational pull is ancient history, ‘toward the beginning of time’ (104).

Douglas’ meeting with ancient history, his moment of salvation, is aesthetically handled as belonging both to the realms of spirituality and reason. Alluding to the mystical story of fate which allowed the crown of this banyan to rise up, catching Douglas as he falls towards his fragile mortality, ‘facedown and spread-eagled in the arms of a sacred tree bigger than some villages’ (102), a passing bus full of pilgrims coming to pay devotion to the divine tree disentangle a near-unconscious Douglas from the fig’s branches and tell him ‘Tree saved your life’ (103). Unable to understand, he tumbles into unconsciousness, as he does so he continues his fall ‘deep underground, a long luxurious drop into the kingdom of roots. He plunges beneath the water table, downward toward the beginning of time, into the lair of a fantastic creature whose existence he never imagined’ (104). However, this biblical fall into knowledge, laced with the language of myth, is equalised by the representation of the empirical nature of life negotiating the symbiotic interplay of the multifarious variables and climatic conditions involved in the tree’s successful growth. It is a literal representation of a human owing his life not just to a tree, but to the astronomical relations between the sun and earth, and to the other non-human (and human) beings that worked together to save him. Intertwining the secular and the sacred in this way allows for knowledge, and historical understanding, to encompass both the known and unknown, for fate to be scientifically explained yet to deserve reverence for its contingency and complexity. It relies on and narrowly skims past the classically tragic three-way schema of fate (myth), death (sacrifice) and atonement (redemption). Poignantly, this moment serves as a catalyst for environmental activism, as the following section ‘Trunk’ witnesses Douglas becoming significantly involved in political thought and action in the fight against industrial felling. Furthermore, Douglas’ fall ‘toward the beginning of time’ establishes the kind of redemption that Benjamin encourages through his method of ‘redemptive criticism’ in literary theory. It is reached through sifting through the rubble left behind by the storm of progress, searching for ‘splinters’6 of reconciled life in the waste.

The use of the historical present to narrate the radicalism – and its downfall - demonstrates a Benjaminian horror at the waste of history, but also what he means by ‘redemptive criticism’ in literary theory – ‘to brush history against the grain’ (Wolin 58). Powers uses the historical-present, which as Marx argues, must be the point of departure for analysis as a way of understanding how ‘temporalities conflict and converge for any complex description of that present’ to narrate the influential preamble to the modern environmental movement (Butler 20). Stepping back into the bioregionalism and deep ecology of the Earth First! and Earth Liberation Front (ELF) movements of the eighties, his cluster of characters become involved in notoriously radical environmental groups. The narrative cambium of

‘Trunk’ in The Overstory is politically charged, with most of the characters engaging in activism;

6 This translation is used in the version edited by Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings, Selected Writings (1991- 1999).

Maidenhair and Watchman live in the crown of Mimas to protect the giant redwood from felling;

Mulberry and Doug-fir unite on the ground, chaining themselves to industrial machinery; while Adam studies the cognitive framework and collective consciousness behind activism, ‘the personality factors that make it possible for some individuals to wonder how everyone can be so blind…’ (296); until he, himself, is ‘unblinded’ and assumes his activist identity, Maple. In the environmental movements in the eighties, alongside cries of the slogan, ‘no compromise in defence of mother earth!’ blockaders would regularly stand before bulldozers in the interest of protecting every life form and ecosystem against human exceptionalism’s dominion (Taylor). In The Overstory, the activists’ radicalism is answered to by mottos such as, ‘[l]oggers: the real endangered species. Earth First! We’ll log the other planets later’ (300).

However, for those splinters of ‘Messianic cessation of happening’ – ‘the rare instances of monads, or now-time, into which crystallised images of reconciled life are compressed’ (Wolin 58), Powers novel suggests looking beyond the activism into the negative space. Considered to be ‘green crazies’ (256), the activists commit escalating acts of civil disobedience, met with pepper spray and ensuing violence, while warehouse fires are labelled as acts of terrorism. When Olivia is killed in one of these fires,7 ‘Crown’ then puts the activists back on their separate paths again, branching seemingly away from conflict and each other, the narrative diffusing down these separate branches. The futility of the activism in the novel – Olivia dead, the activists scattered, Mimas felled and Douglas and Adam imprisoned - piles up throughout this fragmented section. The horror Nick describes in the previous chapter when he turns to books for dreams of emancipation becomes self-referential. Until, that is, the moments of crossover, where intersections of the branches conglomerate typographically and temporally in knots in the narrative. In the passage cited in the previous chapter, ‘[t]he hottest year ever measuring comes and goes. Then another. Then ten more […]. Species disappear. […] We are not, one of Adam’s papers proves, wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colourful is waving in our faces’ (467). Condensing time into this node in the narrative once more signals to Chakrabarty’s problematic as Powers reminds his readers of the ‘timelessness’ of nature versus the distraction of human organisation, pointing to humankind’s myopic vision of history. In this way, Powers suggests looking at the wreckage left behind by progressive historical tradition, as through sifting through the rubble, you can find splinters of redeemed life. The novel, as a piece of art, engages with Benjamin’s process, revealing it to be much like the life cycles which regenerate energy on the forest floor, as the next part of this analysis will explore.

7 Beyond the scope of this paper, Bron Taylor’s chapter ‘Radical Environmentalism’ in Dark, Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (2009) includes an interesting discussion on similar/uncanny acts of civil disobedience/violence – especially connected to Patricia’s un/suicide.

Becoming something else again

Here, it is important to tend to the manifestations of ‘weak messianic power’ in the novel. It is made mostly visible through the trickle-down of nature spirituality and philosophy in the novel, but also amongst the characters that negotiate a process of care outside the parameters of political action. For example, the Brinkman’s renascent garden rewilds itself while they turn their attention to their books, letting it flourish untouched. Allowing a deeper analysis that moves beyond this rewilding theory; through Patricia’s character development, it is possible to see spirituality trickle-down into a practice of care, flowing into the pragmatism of her work. In one of the branches of the narrative in

‘Crown,’ Patricia is collecting seeds far and wide for her seed bank, the ‘ark’ (382), a legacy that will extend far beyond her living time on the planet. ‘Who’s going to do the replanting?’; this interjecting thought highlights Patricia’s work as an instance of temporal dislocation, gesturing to a messianic contraction in which the action of collecting seeds teleologically predicts the future action of replanting, as well as the impending doom of disappearing old-growth forests, and Patricia’s own mortality - the giant trunk is teetering (489).

Patricia’s scientific background and innate desire to taxonomically differentiate green, to find order within the chaos, is enlightened by her experience as a seething, knotted, living thing. As she walks through the Amazonian rainforest, ‘[s]hafts of sunlight cut through the vine-covered trunks

(486), descriptively setting the scene: ‘[a]ll is fringe and braid and pleat, scales, and spines. She fights to tell the trees from the lanyard strands of liana, orchid, sheets of moss, bromeliad, sprays of giant fern, mats of algae’ (486). This description echoes Haraway’s description of the tentacular critters that make up her vision of the Chthulucene, ‘fingery beings like humans and raccoons’ as well as ‘fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles.’ And yet later, Patricia’s setting changes as

[i]nside the vault feels like a chapel crossed with a high-tech library. Thousands of canisters, ordered and labelled with dates, species, and locations, lie in indexed drawers of sealed glass and brushed steel, like a real bank’s safe deposit boxes, except twenty degrees below zero.

Standing in the vault, Patricia gets the strangest feeling. She’s in one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth, surrounded by thousands of sleeping seeds, cleaned, dried, winnowed, and X-rayed, all waiting for their DNA to awaken and begin remaking air into wood at the

slightest hint of thaw and water. The seeds are humming. They’re singing something – she’d swear it – just below earshot (486).

In both this passage and the earlier passage describing the dynamism of the Amazonian rainforest, a multiplicity of processes presents itself - the seeds are ‘cleaned, dried, winnowed, and X-rayed’ - and

39 yet the juxtaposition of this clinical vault against the vibrancy of the rainforest is stark. In this homologous scenario, the process of observing chaos switches from one that reveres complexity to one that establishes order. Yet, the vault that holds the scientifically processed ‘sleeping seeds’ as they wait to be resurrected feels like a ‘chapel,’ and Patricia swears she can hear their traces humming and singing. In this passage, the borders between inanimate and animate, the rational and irrational, become taxonomically visible and mystically audible; the subjective lies within the objective lying within the subjective. Patricia’s experience as a forester, her scientific knowledge merges with other implicit knowledge-making processes. The liveliness of the seeds (past as well as future potential) is heard as a kind of choral symphony in a chapel, a kinetic thread of embodied, sensory information that alludes to the spiritual interweaves with the clinical rigor of her scientific work.

Enfolding from these ideas that wed spirituality to pragmatism, and returning to another fragment in the sedimentary chapter, ‘Roots,’ to a time before the seed of an idea for the vault had begun to sprout. Heading northwest in the early eighties to find uncut forest, ‘while there is any left to see’ (168), Patricia stops on a hike to formally address a cedar tree, disturbing the ‘cathedral hush’ of the forest. This is an encounter in which the border between human and nonhuman becomes spiritual as an animistic ‘speech act.’ Patricia’s address resembles a prayer as ‘she lets the gratitude spill out’ (170). On first reading, Patricia’s prayer is secular, there is no singular god to which she speaks, and yet her devotion to the cedar is evident, allowing a pantheistic or nature-based spirituality to emerge from her words. Patricia’s speech can firstly be read like a prayer because of her position established when

[s]he addresses the cedar, using the words of the forest’s first humans. ‘Long Life Maker. I’m here. Down here.’ She feels foolish at first. But each word is a little easier than the next’ (170).

Although she does not speak directly of or to the ‘heavens,’ Patricia establishes the normative rhetoric and spatial hierarchy inherent in Abrahamic practices of prayer, placing the ‘Long Life Maker’ up above and worshipper down below in supplication. She is standing in the understory, and it is easy to imagine her upturned face open to the swaying green canopy above, the celestial subject of her prayer. A manipulation of spatial hierarchy as well as establishing a certain kind of humble speech act, this passage plays with redemption through prayer, subverting another hierarchy in the process. According to Western tradition ‘there is a recognised hierarchy of beings, with of course, the human being in the top - the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation – and the plants at the bottom’ (Kimmerer 9). This assumption regards anthropo-exceptionalism alongside Darwinian evolutionary theory and creation story, but when read in line with Powers’ use of the tree of life allegory, the problem with this entrenched cultural hierarchy becomes visible; a heavy branch that cannot hold its weight - the giant trunk teeters.

The type of reverence and care for the forest visible in this part of the novel trickles-down into

Patricia’s work collecting for a seed bank, intended for the potential future renewal of forests. It also helps to illustrate what Benjamin means by a ‘weak messianic power.’ The ‘cathedral hush’ that Patricia experiences sensually in ‘Roots’ is associatively returned to in ‘Crown,’ felt as the ‘strangest feeling’ in her chapel-like vault; the tentacular complexity of the old-growth forest now suddenly compartmentalised and contracted into a shared space and temporality. While in the Amazon collecting the seeds she viewed ‘[t]he glut of life outside her tent’ and it made her ‘wonder what good it does to save a species without all the epiphytes, fungi, pollinators, and other symbionts that, in the trenches of the day, give a species its real home’ (490). Patricia understands the key flaw in attempting to create order (in the vault) out of chaos (the messy, knotted, seething, living intermesh of critters in the old-growth forests) as it fails to see the complexity, like the relational and climatic processes between species, sun and water that allowed the banyan tree to grow up and catch Douglas in its canopy. Salvation is not as simple as collecting and organising seeds. Yet, in the same breath, ‘what’s the alternative?’ (490). This aligns with Chakrabarty’s views on pragmatism in the Anthropocene, as utterly necessary to tackle climate crisis. However, by thinking of future beings on the planet, future spacetimematterings, rupturing linear time with the hauntology of both ghosts from the past and traces from the future/a faith in the future; Patricia engages in a cycle of a reciprocal relationship with the planet and its terrestrial beings. In this way, despite the scientific architecture that holds them, the sleeping seeds, ‘humming’ within the vault are embalmed with a magical quality. The future potential of renewal sits waiting in every one of the seeds, a fitting symbol for the kind of ‘weak messianic power’ that Benjamin describes each generation as inheriting. However, as Douglas’ fall has demonstrated, the journey to full-grown tree involves a matrix of contingent factors.

In this matrix, the question ‘[w]ho’s going to do the replanting?’ reverberates loudest. It draws indiscernible conclusions in the time of ‘now,’ framed by the conflicting chronologies of progress and crisis. When the reporters ask Patricia why her group, ‘unlike every other NGO seed bank on the planet, isn’t focusing on plants that will be useful to people, come catastrophe. She wants to say: Useful is the catastrophe. Instead, she says, ‘We’re banking trees whose uses haven’t been discovered yet’ (486). This occluded vision of use-value becomes particularly poignant in a discussion of capital when returning to Patty’s prayer.

Thank you for the baskets and boxes. Thank you for the capes and hats and skirts. Thank you for the cradles. The beds. The diapers. Canoes. Paddles, harpoons, and nets. Poles, logs, posts. The rot-proof shakes and shingles. The kindling that will always light.

Each new item is release and relief. Finding no good reason to quit now, she lets the

gratitude spill out. ‘Thank you for the tools. The chests. The decking. The clothes closets. The

panelling. I forget… Thank you,’ she says, following the ancient formula. ‘For all these gifts

that you have given.’ And still not knowing how to stop, she adds, ‘We’re sorry. We didn’t

know how hard it is for you to grow back (170).

The ambient and sensual qualities of the text, evoking the green architecture of a ‘cathedral’ layers with the religious rhetorical texture of the passage. In a mantra of gratitude, she repetitively strings together objects, the teleological list harking back to the prologue and to the useful ‘amputations’ which humans, in their blindness, see over the ‘whole’ (4). The sacred architecture of the cathedral is dismantled into specific, secular objects. The repetitive structure is amplified by the multiple instances of assonance and alliteration, the phrases rise and fall in a cadence that recreates breathy exaltations and ‘[e]ach new item is release and relief’ (170). Patricia seeks solace in gratitude, in thanking the trees for their yield. Each utterance follows the object, into its fragmentation, to the point of granularity and into Charles Baudelaire’s ‘forest of symbols.’ The cedar tree is tree as well as Long Life Maker, baskets, boxes, poles, logs and posts. However, as Patricia’s thought process suggests, the catastrophe is linked to the demand for more useful things.

Here, the chronos of capitalism is interrupted temporally, as the cedar tree, known as a useful and durable commodity, becomes known as a sacred and giving being. Powers visually represents the modern valuation of trees when Nick Hoel paints a mural with a tree whose ‘furrows of bark resolve into a two-foot-wide UPC bar code’ (475). Much of the spirituality and ‘hush’ of the forest is swamped by the clatter of commerce. The vision of the cedar tree as ‘Long Life Maker’ in this prayer evokes a way of being in the world/becoming-with a planetary household that runs counter to the current unsustainable process of industrial capitalistic production. Robin Wall Kimmerer reports an indigenous perspective of the cedar tree which reflects a vision of a being that was the gatekeeper between the living and the dead, ‘ready to give, from cradleboard to coffin, holding people’ (278). She similarly writes about the ‘gift of cedar: paddles, fishing floats, nets, ropes, arrows and harpoons’ (278). In fact, every part of the tree was used, echoing Patty’s teleological list (279). However, Kimmerer asserts that ‘[o]ur lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could ever be bought or sold’ (17). The cedar tree provided the people with all these useful things, but with the vision of these things as gifts, the attitude becomes ‘to take only what is given, to use it well, to be grateful for the gift, and to reciprocate the gift’ (21). Kimmerer decrees, ‘[t]oday, when cedar is mistaken for a commodity in the lumberyard, the idea of gift is almost lost. What can we who recognise the debt possibly give back?’ (280). Patricia attempts to repay this debt, and we see the traces of a sacred relationship to the forest in her work. As Kimmerer writes, ‘[t]o plant trees is an act of faith’ (289). Yoking together the passage in ‘Roots’ to the passage in ‘Crown,’ unsticking the present from its seemingly necessary future (capitalist chronos)

42 establishes continuities with other, subterranean histories and economies. Patricia’s task of collecting seeds for potential resurrection, embalming them in the vault, she engages in a reciprocal and regenerative life cycle.

Banking trees whose uses have not been discovered yet becomes significant. The lack of knowledge, torn from teleological ends, resides in the realm of uncertainty and indiscernible conclusions but is a means to mystical insight. When Patty apologises at the end of the prayer, ‘we didn’t know,’ she apologises not only for mass deforestation of old-growth forests but for a blinkered view. Kimmerer writes, ‘[a]s a scientist I am well aware of how little we do know’ allowing empirical knowledge a degree of humility (30). Elaborating on the impact beyond the material yield, ‘[t]he kindling that will always light,’ widens this vision. The extra detail here focuses on the reliability of the cedar wood, and its world-making capabilities in another fragment of time – homo sapiens became human when they made fire. But as anthropologist Anna Tsing, also points out

‘[f]ire was a tool for early humans not just to cook but also to burn landscape,

encouraging edible bulbs and grasses that attracted animals for hunting. Humans shape multispecies worlds when our living arrangements make room for other species. This is not just a matter of crops, livestock, and pets. Pines, with their associated fungal partners, often flourish in landscapes burned by humans’ (22).

Therefore, ‘humans, pines, and fungi make living arrangements simultaneously for themselves and for others: multispecies worlds’ (22). Once more, it is important to notice the complexity which emerges when one scales up in imagination the history of the human, expanding into species history, like Chakrabarty suggests, and Benjamin when he asks us to ‘brush history against the grain.’ Patricia trails off in ellipsis; the list of valuable, life-giving, world-making crops that trees ‘have given’ to us is never- ending and insurmountable. She finally, gratefully, deems these objects to be ‘gifts.’

It is worth homing in on this translation from crop to ‘gift,’ a translation that is often lost amongst the noise of ceaseless supply-demand chains and the grind of an economic machine fuelled by individualistic consumerism. In both instances, the human is skewing the frame with the persistent question: how do trees serve humans, or me personally? How does this object figure in this story, my world? These days, the definitions of crop/gift are blurred as the lines between need/desire, muddled by patchy context, an oscillating judgement of superfluity and unabashed, all-pervasive advertising. As crop, or gift, it goes without saying that humans pragmatically need trees, whether that be in the form of kindling, wood panelling, or as a carbon sink that could drain away some of our relentless Co2 emissions, as protection for hillside freshwater springs, or the habitats of other species. Furthermore, what does it mean to be grateful to trees, for providing the items that are perceived to be such a

‘given,’ and man-made, that we hardly recognise them as gifts, let alone as crops, or tree-made?

Echoing the prologue, Patricia reads to the traces of her dead husband from her own notebook: ‘[n]o one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees – trees are invisible’ (529). We are reminded once again of our ultimate blindness.

This blindness carries through into critique of the history of global capital. Tsing draws on this idea of amputation, or alienation, and draws an important line between the commodity economy and the environment, which cuts to the heart of

‘…the history of the human concentration of wealth through making both humans and nonhumans into resources for investment. This history has inspired investors to imbue both people and things with alienation, that is, the ability to stand alone, as if the entanglements of living did not matter’ (5).

Later, she remarks: ‘[t]hrough alienation, people and things become mobile assets; they can be removed from their life worlds in distance defying transport to be exchanged with other assets from other life worlds, elsewhere’ (5). Patricia’s objects are these mobile assets; the amputations, when alienated and framed as crop or gifts, become prosthesis, an assortment of glorified peg legs and canes. Later in the novel, Douglas reiterates the use-value of trees, their more diverse and invisible amputations (beyond ‘[b]ooks and such’ or ‘[b]oats’ and ‘[f]urniture’): ‘People have no idea. You know they make shampoo with wood? Shatterproof glass? Toothpaste? […] Show polish. Ice-cream thickener’ (231). As a commodity that is so useful in every iteration, wood becomes one of Timothy Morton’s sticky hyper-objects, distributed so far and wide through space and time, it transcends localisation. By attempting to list and itemise all the possible uses of wood, Patricia attempts to see trees whole, including their world-making capabilities, their complex entanglements, but she cannot possibly list them all. Her rhetoric oscillates across gift/crop. She trails off and ends in an apology, ‘I’m sorry.’ In light of this, Patricia’s apology, ‘[w]e didn’t know how hard it is for you to grow back,’ is feeble in the face of economy-driven deforestation and ensuing ecological destruction, naive with her too-little-too-late excuses. But it is also an honest reflection of the myopic effect of amputating objects from their source; ‘[w]e didn’t know.’ Patricia acknowledges the calamity of ignorance, of a lack of knowledge, and the everlasting damage of exploiting a source that cannot be replenished fast enough. This simple line almost seems to reduce the Anthropocene into a digestible problem of epistemology, tethered to the Kantian barrier. If ‘[w]e didn’t know’, then surely, we can know?

Unknowing

Here we reach the crux of this paper, as the ways in which this knowledge is handled in the text aligns with a postcolonial critique of capital, while also asks of its reader to revere a universal species history in all its complex and contingent chaos. Undeniably, the Anthropocene is tied to the

Industrial Revolution. While Chakrabarty doesn’t make a distinction ‘between capitalism and socialist societies as there was never any principled difference in their use of fossil fuel,’ he explores the ways in which the narrative of capitalism - hence its critique - can work as a framework for interrogating the history of climate change and understanding its consequences (217). Referring to the criticism among the proponents of leftist ideology that follows a model where

all the anthropogenic factors contributing to global warming – the burning of fossil fuel, industrialisation of animal stock, the clearing of the tropical and other forests, and so on – are after all part of a larger story: the unfolding of capitalism in the West and the imperial or quasi-imperial domination by the West of the rest of the world. It is from that recent history

of the West that the elite of China, Japan, India, Russia, and Brazil have drawn inspiration in attempting to develop their own trajectories toward superpower politics and global domination through capitalist economic, technological and military might. If this is broadly true, then does not the talk of species or mankind simply serve to hide the reality of

capitalist production and the logic of imperial – formal, informal, or machinic in a Deleuzian

sense – domination that it fosters? Why should one include the poor of the world – whose carbon footprint is small anyway – by use of such all-inclusive terms as species or mankind

when the blame for the current crisis should be squarely laid at the door of the rich nations in the first place and of the richer classes in the poorer ones? (216).

However, holding in mind the analysis of the collaborative and contingent effort in Douglas’ fall, the ‘weak messianic power’ of Patty’s ‘sleeping seeds’ and the world-making capabilities of the ‘[k]indling that will always light’; when studied closely, species history reveals itself to be a chronology made up of coincidences and historical accidents. Kenneth Pomeranz traces the contingency of progress, as humans shifted from wood to coal and from coal to petroleum and gas, but also the accidental discovery of oil and the automobile industry – ‘we have stumbled into’ the Anthropocene (quoted in Chakrabarty 217). In this way, the very same complexity of processes and ‘fate’ which governed

Douglas’ near-death experience can be applied to our own all-encompassing species history. This doesn’t serve to undermine humankind intelligence or agency or deny the cause-effect relationship between the ‘high-energy-consuming models of society that capitalist industrialisation has created and promoted’ and the crisis of climate change (217). Rather,

the current crisis has brought into view certain other conditions for the existence of life in

the human form that have no intrinsic connection to the logics of capitalist, nationalist, or

socialist identities. They are connected rather to the history of life on this planet, the way different life-forms connect to one-another, and the way the mass extinction of one species could spell danger for another. Without such a history of life, the crisis of climate change has not human ‘meaning’ (217).

In this way, Powers’ novel intervenes in this vision of history where ‘fate’ is at once demystified and revered for its complexity, signalling to an ‘ecology of meanings’ and thus an ‘ecology of selves’

(Kohn).

Therefore, returning to the very first image used in this analysis of the ‘tree of life,’ which used the case of the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago. Chakrabarty writes, ‘[i]t was not just an expression of human inventiveness. It was made possible by certain changes in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a certain stability of climate and a degree of warming of the planet that followed the end of the Ice Age (the Pleistocene era) – things over which human beings had no control’ (217). Furthermore, industrialism – ‘the rabbit hole in Alice’s story’ – slid us ‘into a state of things that forces us to recognise some of the parametric (that is, boundary) conditions for the existence of institutions central to our idea of modernity and the meanings we derive from them’

(Charkarbarty 217). Recognising these parameters requires endless amounts of knowledge, as our human inventiveness is challenged and pressed by a state of emergency. It is understandable, then, why people like Wilson and Crutzon (the scientists who coined the term Anthropocene) return to the language of the Enlightenment which sees knowledge and reason as providing humans not only a way out of the present crisis but a way of protecting our future, perhaps through a Kantian redistribution of resources or even through inventions of Silicon Valley’s making (Chakrabarty 215).8

However, through the corollary vein of this type of knowledge runs the lifeblood of mystic unknowing. Patricia’s ability to hear the seeds ‘humming’ and ‘singing’ signals an embodied presence, a return to her animal body, as Derrida once argued: ‘there is no way to extract “you” from your own animal body – breath, brain, genes, microbiome, vagus nerve, gut feelings, affect’ (quoted in Keller 78). Catherine Keller puts this return to divinanimality in political terms, ‘[o]ur animal kin cannot do our politics for us. But we cannot now do the political without them – which is to say, without admitting their humming, roaring, barking, buzzing input. Is a chaos of the nonhuman, animal, vegetable, mineral, irrupting just where the anthropic exception maintains its lowered boundary?’ (87). Therefore,

8 An interesting avenue for further research would be Neelay Mehta’s role in The Overstory as Silicon Valley golden-boy-turned-environmentalist, and Richard Powers own defection from techno-fix to the Smokies.

46 the ‘humming’ and ‘choral singing’ that Patricia hears signals the polyrhythmic vibrancy of the happening conversations, a participation in the (dis)ordered reciprocal relationships, that make up a territorial cosmology.

By way of conclusion, holding ‘the story of capital, the contingent history of our falling into the Anthropocene,’ in conversation with the idea of species history requires acknowledging that the Anthropocene would not have been possible without industrialisation. But it also asks us to ‘relate to a universal history of life – to universal thought, that is – while retaining what is of obvious value in our postcolonial suspicion of the universal’ (220). As Chakrabarty rationalises,

[w]e may not experience ourselves as a geological agent, but we appear to have become one

at the level of the species. And without that knowledge that defies historical understanding there is no making sense of the current crisis that affects us all. Climate change, refracted through global capital, will no doubt accentuate the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital; some people will no doubt gain temporarily at the expense of others. But the

whole crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism (221).

Thinking in both registers, ‘mixing together immiscible chronologies of capital and species history – stretches the very idea of historical understanding’ (Chakrabarty 220). The Overstory, as a novel can come close to achieving this feat through literary device. It can make things visible – we never see ourselves as species, there is ‘no phenomenology of us as species’ but the novel can contract the messianic into nodes and draw our attention to fragments of time before and around that which we consider to be our time (Chakrabarty 220). As the messianic ‘now’ moment, framed by the looming crisis and the push of progress, encourages a universal by virtue of our shared sense of catastrophe, it is more a ‘negative universal history,’ ‘a global approach to politics without the myth of global identity, for, unlike a Hegelian universal, it cannot subsume particularities’ (222). ‘Now’ time encourages sifting through the waste for splinters of redeemed life, found in the knowledge and reverence of chaos, as well as of our shared borders and parameters for existence and survival. When history expands and contracts in such a way, the failed radicalism in The Overstory, and history itself, becomes less of a failure and more of an iteration of spirit, which trickles down into younger generations’ politics and actions. Each seed holds the potential within it to sprout and regenerate, but with this inheritance comes the heavy price of contingency. Furthermore, Patty’s seed vault distinguishes itself from an act of techno-redemptive secularisation (Eve subduing the wilderness) in its earthy spirituality. But as she says herself, ‘hope and truth do nothing for humans, without use’ (277). As Haraway once wrote about her vision of the Chtulucene, this epoch is ‘neither sacred nor secular; the earthly worlding is thoroughly terran, muddled, and mortal – and at stake now.’

Decay: An Anti-Ending

To conclude this thesis project, the first chapter, ‘Trunk,’ unearthed the ways in which The Overstory arises in the realm of the environmental humanities, demonstrating narrative structure as vegetal in form and literature as mycelium connecting through intertextuality and myth. In doing so,

Powers’ novel works across the socio-cultural partition between the scientific and the imaginative, the ways in which we access and communicate knowledge. He acknowledges the double-nature of the written word as both blinding and illuminating. Conclusively, we discover the planet itself is telling stories of its own invention. Connecting Powers’ use of typography to align multiple chronologies, the following chapter, ‘Crown,’ intervenes in Chakrabarty’s assertion that human histories must be put in conversation with geologic histories to deal with climate crisis. Using Benjamin’s allegory of the ‘Angel of History’ to see the rubble piling up in the wake of a storm called progress; it became productive to sift through history, discovering the complex contingency of our evolution and parametric existence as a species. However, this allegory does not stop there. The trash heap opens semantically into a discussion on waste and laying waste as well as to decay. The wreckage becomes less wasteful and more like a compost heap in which life cycles of regeneration can take place, where energy passes on from each passing second to the next. Decay never means the end; decay, ‘is another phase of life, a redistribution of the type. Decay is another kind of growth’ (Taylor loc. 1274).

It is with this vision of decay that The Overstory leaves its readers in its final pages; ‘[t]he transported pieces of downed wood snake through the standing trees. Satellites high up above this work already take pictures from orbit. The shapes turn into letters complete with tendril flourishes, and the letters spell out a gigantic word legible from space: STILL.’ Later,

[a]lready, this word is greening. Already, the mosses surge over, the beetles and lichen and

fungi turning the logs to soil. Already, seedlings root in the nurse log’s crevices, nourished by the rot. Soon new trunks will form the wood in their growing wood, following the cursive of these decaying mounds. Two centuries more, and these five living letters, too, will fade back into the swirling patterns, the changing rain and air and light. And yet – but still –

they’ll spell out, for a while, the word life has been saying, since the beginning’ (624-625).

Here, Powers incorporates the double-nature vision of word in his imagery of decay; the ability to convey meaning as well as indeterminacy – only legible from the macro perspective of space. The word ‘STILL’ emerges from natural processes, embedded within a dynamic and interconnected system that demonstrates Haraway’s ‘becoming-with.’ It also signals to the deep time of tree time and the transience of our own, written into mortality, ‘already.’ The downed logs, placed in a magical arrangement, can rot and from their humus, grow something meaningful as energy cycles through

48 matter, at the whim of ‘the changing rain and air and light’ (625). However, the semantic capabilities of

‘STILL’ can only gesture to what was always there and will always be here, even without the word itself.

And yet, it is important to return to the concept of waste, as Benjamin’s theory looks at it, as a by-product of the history of progress. Through the previous chapter we gained an insight into the ways in which The Overstory intervenes in Chakrabarty’s problematic in the time of the Anthropocene: the way in which we must square histories of global capital (with critique in tow) with our shared deep history as a species. This raised the question of a universal, and Powers’ rhetoric wedded spirituality and reason to help grapple with the limits to this thinking. However, the primary factors used by

Chakrabarty to critique the universal - colonialism and capitalism – create particularities and inequalities that are amplified by the oncoming climate crisis. It is important not to skim past this point as it helps us to understand waste. Françoise Vergès writes about this in her essay,

‘Capitalocene, Waste, Race and Gender,’ in which the word refers to rubbish, as well as the phrase, laying waste. She writes,

[s]lavery, colonialism, and capitalism have laid waste to lands and people. Instead of answering human needs, slavery, colonialism and capitalism have constructed desires for things that we do not need while obstructing access to what we do need (clean water, clean air, clean food, clean cities). As defined by geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, ‘capitalism is a

global regime of vulnerability to death.’ The slave trade on which capitalism was built

produced humans as waste and destroyed the cultural/natural world of indigenous peoples and of the continents colonised by European powers. The slave trade had a long-term effect

on the African continent, its populations, and its landscape, bringing filth, desolation, and death. […] Race became a code for designing people and landscapes that could be wasted.

Furthermore,

[i]ndigenous peoples and enslaved Africans were made disposable. The flesh and bones of their dead bodies mixed with the earth on plantations and in silver and gold mines. They were made the humus of capitalism. Black women’s wombs were made into capital and their

children transformed currency.

While a productive critique of Vergès ideas goes beyond the scope of this conclusion, it is an important connotative exploration to undertake, as she denotes the ways in which waste is even a sign of capitalism’s success. Furthermore, it chimes with the current reality, as minority and low-income communities, ‘the humus of capitalism’ are statistically more likely to live in neighbourhoods exposed to toxic waste, landfills, highways, and other environmental hazards and climate catastrophe will displace millions of black and brown people (Miller). Climate crisis, no matter how universalising in the

49 negative, uniting us in our shared sense of catastrophe, will do nothing to level the already existing overflow of systemic oppression. Expanding the semantic capaciousness of the word STILL, Benjamin clarifies that ‘[t]he current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable’ (257).

However, The Overstory explores the logic that the waste of history is also a process of decay, therefore a fertile and ongoing process, as nature shows us in its profligacy. The previous chapter demonstrated how the novel succeeds at showing us our parametric existence that is utterly complex and contingent right from the beginning - this follows through to the end. The clarity of the word

‘STILL’ emerges from its decaying processes. David Abram describes cycle of regeneration in his work, as ‘for almost all oral culture, the enveloping and sensuous earth remains the dwelling place of both the living and the dead. The ‘body’ – whether human or otherwise – is not yet a mechanical object in such cultures, but is a magical entity, the mind’s own sensuous aspect, and at death the body’s decomposition into soil, worms, and dust, can only signify the gradual reintegration of one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all too, are born’ (15). He reports it as a ‘cycling of the human back into the larger world’ (Abram 16). When Olivia dies, firstly momentarily and secondly ultimately, it serves as a catalyst for the next section of the narrative structure. In this way, Powers’ weaves the process of life cycles and regeneration throughout his work. We see what matters changes, passes on, regenerates. While in this case, we are thinking this through as a literal human body, the symbolism of decay can be used to rethink our sacred, secular and aesthetic participation in this planetary household.

As climate crisis sits on the horizon of our future, it troubles the chemical processes and imagining of decay. As Robert Macfarlane writes. ‘[t]ime is profoundly out of joint – and so is place. Things that should have stayed buried are rising up, unbidden (14). Worryingly, ‘[i]n the Artic, ancient methane deposits are leaking through ‘windows’ in the earth opened by melting permafrost. Anthrax spores are being released from reindeer corpses buried in once-frozen soil, now exposed to erosion and warmth’ (14).9 Meanwhile, stories of the underland ‘…recur throughout world myth. Classical literature records numerous instances of what in Greek were known as the katabasis (a descent to the underland) and the nekyia (a questioning of ghosts, gods, or the dead about the earthly future). Among them Orpheus’ attempt to retrieve his beloved Euydice from Hades, and Aenes’ voyage – led by the Sibyl, protected by the Golden Bough – to seek counsel with the shade of his father’ (MacFarlane 16). Inspired by this vision of the underland in myth, MacFarlane lyricises that we have a

9 Ryuichi Sakamoto makes sound-recordings of these processes in his documentary, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017).

50 need to return to the darkness – it ‘may be the medium of vision, and that descent may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation’ (17). After all, ‘to discover’ is ‘to reveal by excavation,’ ‘to descend and bring to the light,’ ‘to fetch up from depth’ (17).

While the poetry of this deep-dive may lose those who are more pragmatic along the way,

MacFarlane makes the valid point that ‘we are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness the most’ (27). This highlights the importance of understanding decay as a process that it is both necessary and productive for our sociopolitico organisation and survival. Keller also regards the productivity of returning to the soil, to our ‘material undercommons’ as ‘[t]o teach earthen entanglement will not prevent great emergencies of climate change; but it fosters, it grounds, the emergence of a complex planetary public’ (72). Digging deeper than the radicalism of the eighties unearths the spring of revolutionary spirit, as it trickles-through the vast web that connects us all.

This process of returning to the decaying understory, is and will always be the task of the humanities. As Haraway writes

My partner Rusten Hodness suggested compost instead of posthuman(ism), as well as humusities instead of humanities, and I jumped into that wormy pile. Human as humus has potential, if we could chop and shred human as Homo, the detumescing project of a self-

making and planet-destroying CEO. Imagine a conference not on the Future of the

Humanities in the Capitalist Restructuring University, but instead on the Power of the Humusities for a Habitable Multispecies Muddle!

Benjamin also understands the importance of decay in literary theory, as well as historical materialism; when criticism means the ‘mortification’ of works. The mortification of all that is historical, transitory, and material, permits works of art to ‘bask in the eternal light of truth’ (Wolin 60). Furthermore,

the more manifestly historical life appears destitute of salvation, the more inexorably it

presents itself as a ruin, the more it refers to that sphere beyond historical life where redemption lies in store. This sphere can only be reached though the utter devaluation and

mortification of all worldly values. Just as the critical mortification of works of art points the way to their ultimate salvation, so, too, the mortification of historical life serves as the

negative indication of the path to redeemed life. In this way Benhamin’s historico- philosophical methodology appears analogous to the exercises in negative theology in which the Kabbalists engaged. For if the Messianic age is deemed the absolute antithesis of the historical age, the deepest insight into the most sacred truths of the former realm are

allegedly indicated, albeit negatively, by the most thoroughly profane and forsaken aspects

of the latter. In other words, there exists a negative semiology whereby the profane order, if

reversed, can be shown to hold the key to the sacred (Wolin 60).

I therefore hope that this thesis project will contribute to the growing effort of those in the humanities to commune with the more-than-human, imagining the life we both have and can have.

The arena in The Wilderness may have taught me an infant lesson in mastery, failure and fear, but the wi(l)der arena of this planet cannot afford the response of turning-away. The political arena we find ourselves in this ‘now’ time allows some of us to climb and while others lay winded on the floor (some people can’t breathe). The global arena of this ‘now’ time needs decay (but not the ecofacist kind; losing lives to Covid-19 is of no benefit to the planetary household).10 It needs regeneration and renewal of the profane and the sacred and the aesthetic, to create the dark, damp humus in which connections are made. This is no longer a simple case of romantic idealisation of the past, of personal attachments to small patches of wilderness in childhood years (an immense privilege). Nor is it a simple call for rewilding, of letting things lie. It is a call for my brothers to put down their weapons, to stand beside me instead of over me. This is an issue of decay, of how we deal with waste, how we can turn our past into fertiliser for the future. If there is anything that writing this thesis has taught me it is that the interconnectedness of pressures, pain and plight can be found in the darker depths in the soil of our histories, where we are always implicit and complicit. As Neelay discovers while writing code for

Mastery, ‘like evolution, it reuses all the old, successful parts of everything that has come before’ (246).

If we are willing to look at our darker depths with a critical (and redemptive) eye, lay waste to that which no longer serves our future, turning over that which has been left to rot, letting it see the light, pay attention to the small seedlings sprouting, the mushrooms flourishing, the silky nets forming, the smelly, mucky, moist task of sifting through our pile of compost. It is an active, dynamic process that will bring us always one node closer to that earthly paradise. As the narrator in The Overstory decrees; ‘[t]his, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end’ (625).

10 David Abram recently wrote a magnificent piece, ‘Our Unknowing,’ on what Covid-19 means for this ‘now’ time for Emergence Magazine: www.emergencemagazine.org/story/our-unknowing/.

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