THE UNIVERSITY OF THE FREE STATE
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
HONOURS LONG ESSAY
TIME AND TREES: AN ECO-CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF TEMPORALITY IN
RICHARD POWERS’ THE OVERSTORY
by
Ananke Meintjes
Supervisor: Professor Helene Strauss
November 2022
INDEX
I. Introduction
pg. 3
II. Literature Study
pg. 4
III. An Eco-Critical Analysis of Temporality in Powers’ (2018) The Overstory
pg. 12
IV. The Importance of Structure and Character(s) in The Overstory
pg. 41
V. Conclusion
pg. 53
I. Introduction
The issue of time represents the ultimate paradox in the minds of scientists, philosophers,
poets, geographers, and sociologists. Due to its complex nature, the majority of studies
concerning this topic are most often linked with frameworks that predominantly examine
time in relation to organizational change. In simpler terms, time becomes more conceivable
to the human mind when it is connected to the existing and familiar frameworks of sociopolitical and economic progression (Dawson 2014: 285). This means that humans
understand time better when it is reduced to a series of “now” and “near-future” moments.
Taking this into consideration, this research paper both suggests and explores alternatives to
such myopic conceptions and examinations of time. It does so by regarding Richard Powers’
(2018) The Overstory as a narrative that expands the issue of time to accommodate its more
comprehensive construct as temporality. Through this new, magnified lens, more space is
created to study time in ways that contrast with the standard “atemporal” and “tenseless”
theories thereof (Dawson 2014: 285). Such theories, as Dawson (2014: 285) suggests,
predominantly aim to make sense of an “ongoing present” and, especially in the field of
organizational change, time remains opaque in terms of theorization. Additionally, in these
theories, time is conceptualized as being “implicit in the explanations captured in macro
planned and episodic models characterised by linear temporality,” which means that time is
mainly understood through being represented as a linear movement in accordance with
‘clock time’ in which the present is made sense of through events of the past (Dawson 2014:
285). Essentially, these poor conceptualisations of time inhibit certain researchers to explore
richer and more empirical understandings of time. Thus, the focus of this paper is deeply
rooted in the concept of temporality and the ways that it features in and charges the ecocritical narrative of Richard Powers (2018) in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The
Overstory.
Throughout his novel, Powers shows how his human protagonists’ immersion in ‘deep time’
gives birth to consciousness as well as conflict and stress. He does this by including moments
in his novel when his nine human protagonists’ anthropocentric perceptions of time are
‘stretched’ in order to accommodate and convey the complexities of ecological time, and, in
the process, come to view the natural world through an other-than-human lens. Additionally,
he encourages a sense of empathy in his readers concerning the issue of time by depicting
the interconnectedness that exits between humans and the natural world as well as the slow
violence of uncontrolled deforestation ventures during which the planet is gradually being
stripped of its lungs (Nixon 2011: 2). It is this progression from temporal unawareness to
profound ecological understanding in Powers’ book that this research paper meticulously
tracks and examines. To do this successfully, the first section of this paper analyses the
masterful use of narrative technique as employed by Powers in The Overstory and discloses
how the author utilizes his writing skills to shift his readers’ anthropocentric perceptions of
time to more eco-conscious temporal understandings. In a second section, this paper
explores the ways that the overall structure and the characters of Powers’ novel brace the
interwoven depictions of human relationships as well as human-nature interconnectedness,
which further inspires the readers to make the necessary shift in their temporal perspectives
to accommodate the vast and intricate processes of the natural world.
II. Literature Review
In order to successfully explore temporality as it is portrayed in The Overstory and to
establish a stable foundation for its ensuing literary analysis, this paper needs to provide
some insight regarding the theoretical issue of temporality by itself as well as in relation to
its primordial phenomenon: time. In his article titled ‘Time, temporality and cultural
rhythmics: An anthropological case study’ Gonzalo Iparraguirre (2016) distinguishes time
from temporality by defining the former as “the phenomenon of becoming,” and the latter
as “the interpretation of becoming” (2016: 614). He expands on his definitions of both these
concepts by explaining that temporality constitutes the “apprehension of becoming, which
every human being accomplishes through his (sic) cognitive system in a cultural context,”
whereas time is “the phenomenon of becoming in itself” (2016: 616). In essence, temporality
is an anthropocentric extension or re-construction of time and it needs to be situated within
existing cultural frameworks to make it understandable, whereas time simply exists. To
explain this more thoroughly, is it useful to also include the observations made by
philosopher Martin Heidegger (1962) regarding these two concepts as they are rationalized
in his book titled Being and Time. Heidegger suggests that time can be envisaged as a series
of homogenous instants or as a “pure succession of nows, without beginning and without
end,” whereas temporality is grounded in the subject’s experience and valuation of “having
been,” “being,” and “will be” (Heidegger 1962: 376). Heidegger’s book validates
Iparraguire’s sentiment that time is simply a phenomenon while temporality acquires a
cultural character since it depends on both the experience and the interpretation of time by
the subject; it demands contextual expansion (Heidegger 1962: 376). Therefore, whenever
this research paper refers to any notions of time in The Overstory, it is actually referring to
temporality and not to time as Powers continually connects meaning and interpretation to
his protagonists’ experiences of time.
It is also necessary to connect the issue of temporality to literature and to do this, I find a
most valuable reference in Paul Huebener’s (2020) reimagining of time, which takes the
form of his critically acclaimed book, Nature’s Broken Clocks. Herein, Huebener claims that
the worldwide environmental crisis is, for the most part, a crisis of time (Huebener 2020: 1).
His study goes deeper than merely humanity’s perception of time in that it thoroughly
examines the various ways that narratives, language, and storytelling are fundamentally
linked to larger forms of meaning and cultural experience, of which time is one, crucial
example.
Any form of narrative, whether it be prose, poetry, a poster, a film, a news article, or a press
release embodies a particular story about time. To substantiate this claim, Huebener
paraphrases Marc Currie (2007), author of About Time, in the following observation: “Every
story knows something about time. Every narrative tries, in some sense, to socialize us into
a particular form of cultural time, to draw us into a set of assumptions about how we should
understand or experience time” (Currie in Huebener 2020: 2). Thus, a story is not just a
story, as will be verified by this paper’s examination of The Overstory later on, but is rather
an imaginative response to the way that time works, whether that be ecological time or
cultural time.
Since a large part of this paper is dedicated to examining the ignorance of humans regarding
the intricacies of the natural world and the ‘deep time’ that governs it, it is also necessary to
define and explain the difference between the two concepts of cultural time (anthropocentric
time) and ‘deep time’ (ecological time). Due to the multi-temporal relations of the Earth
system and the simultaneous and often contradictory temporalities that dictate its
regeneration processes, it has become necessary for theorists to redefine the scale of time
that applies to the earth in order to clearly set its time-scale apart from the frenzied and linear
time-scale that humans adhere to. Theorists like John McPhee and Stephen Jay Gould were
some of the first researchers to adopt the term ‘deep time’ to refer to the
“incommensurability between geological and historical time scales, between the earth’s
gradual changes over hundreds of millions of years and the rapid changes occurring in even
a century of human history” (Heringman 2015: 57). Concerning the concept of cultural time
(anthropocentric time), Anderson (2022) suggests that the time-scale that humans adhere to
is directed by human expediency and poor time-management, both of which constitute the
core of environmental ruin. However, this claim is not enough to explain exactly how such
damaging behaviours and attitudes are reinforced and sustained in our day-to-day life, so
much so that the world has reached such an extreme degree of ecological crisis. For more
clarity, we shift back to Huebener’s (2020) book wherein he explains that the way that
humans tell stories and speak about ecological time mirrors our human priorities. We use
time as a tool, not to understand the intricacies of the natural world and its various delicate
ecosystems, but rather to further our own political influence and to develop our economic
agendas. Without realizing it, we mistranslate the very nature of time to propagate false
reverences concerning newly developed technologies, to stress the elements of nature that
we deem to be most important, to fabricate nostalgic visions of an idealized future, and to
create doubts about all other stories (Huebener 2020: 3). In saying this, we need to take a
look at the prevalent features of the Globalized world with its many technological
innovations and its prevalent vocabularies to understand how humans have re-engineered
the very nature of time in such ways that it suits our endeavours. To find an apt example of
anthropocentric temporal manipulation, most of us need only walk a few steps and switch
on the light of the particular room we find ourselves in. Artificial light, and what it has come
to mean for humans, is one of the best examples of how we have distorted the organic
functioning of time to fit the frenzied pace of modern life. Because of synthetic light, humans
have access to what has widely been dubbed as “the 24-hour day” – a metaphor that has
become a sort of slogan for the modern, capitalist world. To avoid the threat of time ‘running
out’ or ‘flying by’ humans have re-conceptualised time to be fundamentally connected to
the presence of light (which has become easily accessible) and our human experience has
become tied to the technologies of globalisation and the labour market. The meaning of the
common phrase, ‘work-life balance’ has become somewhat murky as the paradoxical act of
hastening time and artificially extending it, particularly through mobile telecommunications
and the internet, means that the work/life boundary has become eroded, so much so that
working practises have spilled over in what was previously regarded as private or personal
times and spaces (Land and Taylor 2010: 398). As Huebener states:
With the spread of electric lighting and global telecommunications technologies, work
schedules have been desynchronized from (natural) daylight. Depending on their field,
many employees are expected either to work in strict accordance with clock-based
shifts that might occur during any portion of the 24-hour period, or to act as though
they are perpetually on call, responding to emails promptly throughout the week (2020:
74).
Why stop at the ceiling light? Let us go to the computer, which, no doubt, is situated fairly
nearby in most of our cases and deal the final blow to our natural circadian rhythms.
However, in doing this, we often fail to consider the fact that the trees standing outside our
windows absorb this synthetic light, and, come spring, they will bloom too early and
therefore be out of sync with the needs of their animal dependants. In these seeminglyinsubstantial ways, a large number of humans that actively participate in capitalist activities
that characterize the modern globalized world aid in furthering the gap between
understandings of the workings of anthropocentric time and ecological time (Huebener 2020:
20). We do not seem to grasp what is truly at stake through our exploitation of time and its
functioning, which is why humanity so often fails to negotiate the age of ecological collapse.
Essentially, the scale of the effects of global warming has reached summits that humans have
yet to figure out how to address. A few examples of negative environmental occurrences
linked with global warming during the last decade include: Hurricane Sandy, which was the
deadliest and most destructive hurricane of the 2012 hurricane season, Typhoon Hayian,
which hit the Philippines in November 2013, the tie between 2016 and 2020 as the hottest
years ever recorded, the devastating Australian bushfires of 2019 that extended into January
of 2020, and the 2022 floods in Pakistan during which torrential monsoon rains caused the
most severe flooding in the country’s recent history1. To truly grasp the degree of human
indifference regarding climate change and its extensive consequences, Huebener shares that
in 2015, which was then regarded as the hottest year on record, people easily adapted to the
abnormally warm weather in December by simply “taking advantage of the extended golfing
season” and the majority of advertisements on television, radio, and in newspapers during
that particular holiday season gladly promoted the purchasing of golf clubs, fishing rods,
camping gear, and even water sport equipment to keep the market going (Huebener 2020:
81). Huebener attributes this sense of indifference to both ecological time and ecological
crisis to the fact that we erroneously believe that nature follows a strictly cyclical pattern and
that this misconception is one of the main reasons why we exploit natural resources so easily
or comfortably adapt to the climactic changes that are taking place around us. Due to the fact
that we think about nature’s time as being cyclical and, therefore, regenerative, we fail to
consider the fact that we extract natural resources faster than the earth can reproduce them
or that we are inflicting damage to the earth’s atmosphere at a faster pace than it can filter
harmful greenhouse gasses out of its composition.
Of course, this essay in no way claims that all humans are equally responsible for the
worldwide environmental crisis or that everyone suffers the ecological and human effects of
such devastation to the same degree. The fact of the matter is that climate change is no longer
a mere threat, it already constitutes a harsh reality that the globe is struggling to deal with.
Since climate change is already part of most humans’ day-to-day reality, I will opt to address
1
Whilst this essay was being written and refined, another devastating natural disaster struck that shocked
the globe. Hurricane Ian, which has been described as one of the largest and most destructive natural
disasters to have ever hit Florida, was a Category 4 Atlantic superstorm that caused extensive damage
across western Cuba and the southeast United States, particularly the states of Florida and South Carolina.
In Florida alone, the most recent confirmed death toll has reached 76. Several communities have been
completely destroyed by its impact (Nouran and Yan 2022).
the issue of human adaption to specific climate impacts instead. According to HartzellNicholz (2011: 689), various factors play a role in how well people are able to adapt to the
changing climate. Such factors include the availability of natural resources and access to
technological and financial capital. Furthermore, the degree to which people are negatively
impacted by climate change depends on their geographical location. As Hartzell-Nicholz
(2011: 689) states:
Impacts will vary greatly across regions, not just because of the differential warming
and the associated physical changes across the globe, but because of variation in
system adaptability and adaptive capacity.
One of the most common effects of climate change is irregular rainfall patterns. If, for
example, there is a severe decrease in annual rainfall in North America, a large number of
American homeowners may not consider this decreased supply of rainwater a severe loss
since they have municipal water supplied to their homes. Contrastingly, the same decline in
rain water could be devastating for a subsistence farmer in Africa (2011: 689). Another effect
of climate change is rising sea levels due to the melting polar ice caps. Again, wealthier
nations are able to protect their cities and vulnerable populations by building walls, whereas
poorer nations may not be able to do so due to their lack of capital (2011: 689). One of the
harshest realities of climate change is the fact that “the negative effects [thereof] are and will
not be directly imposed on those who bear the most causal responsibility for climate change;
those least causally responsible for climate change are predicted to suffer the most from
climate impacts” (2011: 689).
It is also important to acknowledge the link between climate change and capitalism to truly
expose the effects of environmental degradation on human security. Perhaps one of the best
examples I can use to verify this link can be found in rural Kenyan women who are
responsible for the nation’s subsistence agriculture and who contribute little to the slow
violence that is soil erosion. According to Nixon (2011: 131), the gradual annexation of once
workable, fertile land by capitalist organizations serves as an example of localized forms of
slow violence and the most prevalent activities of resource extraction include large-scale
deforestation and the denuding of foliage. Ultimately, these Kenyan women suffer most
directly the consequences of this environmental ruin, which is slow in terms of immediate
consequences, yet drastic in terms of its long-term after-effects. However, a proverbial light
shines at the end of this disconsolate tunnel in the form of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement,
which was cofounded by Wangari Muta Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner. The
Green Belt Movement “serves as an animating instance of environmental activism among
poor communities who have mobilized against slow violence,” which, in this particular case
takes shape as the slow violence of uncontrolled deforestation and soil erosion (Nixon 2011:
128). In her memoir titled Unbowed (Maathai 2006) Maathai supplies her readers with some
valuable insights regarding the many obstacles that the Green Belt Movement (GBM)
encountered in its formulation of “complex, shifting collective strategies […] to oppose
foreshortened definitions of environmental and human security” (2011: 126). Furthermore,
Maathai’s (2006) memoir traces the modest beginnings of the Green Belt Movement via its
narrative recollection of Earth Day in 1977, when Maathai, along with a small group of
women, planted a total of seven trees in commemoration of Kenyan women who had been
environmental activists (2011: 128). By the year 2004, when Maathai won the Nobel Peace
Prize, six thousand tree nurseries had already been created and over a hundred-thousand
women had been given employment by planting thirty million trees (2011: 129).
According to German sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2013), the fast pace that we (individuals
who actively participate in capitalist activities) follow and which seems to be integrated into
the very fibre of our being is the “defining characteristic of modernity” (Rosa 2013: 14).
Rosa’s claim is supported by philosopher Stefan Breuer, who observes that, “speed is
doubtless the god of our era,” (Breuer in Rosa 2013: 14) as well as sociologist Frederic
Jameson who claims that, “Time is today a function of speed, and evidently perceptible only
in terms of its rate and velocity as such” (Jameson 1998: 51). What is the solution, then?
According to Huebener, humans will naturally afford the earth and its resources more
consideration and respect when we start thinking about natural time as following a straight
line and as having a beginning, a middle, and an end (Huebener 2020: 2). Simply put, we
have stop thinking of nature as a boundless shopping mall and start to acknowledge that we
are progressing towards the end of anthropocentric time at an alarmingly quick pace.
Huebener’s book suggests a simple step we can take in our day-to-day life to shift our
anthropocentric perception of time to a more eco-conscious one. Essentially, we have to start
paying attention to the way we speak about time and we can do this by making use of
metaphors and images to give shape to that most elusive element of the human experience.
Although this sounds like a daunting task, metaphor theorists George Lakoff and Mark
Turner (1989) reassure us that, without even noticing it, we incorporate the use of metaphor
in our everyday ways of speaking and that humans already employ a figurative type of
conceptualization of time:
Metaphor is a tool so ordinary that we use it unconsciously and automatically, with so
little effort that we hardly notice it. It is omnipresent: metaphor suffuses our thoughts,
no matter what we are thinking about. It is accessible to everyone: as children, we
automatically, as a matter of course, acquire a mastery of everyday metaphor. It is
conventional: metaphor is an integral part of our ordinary everyday thought and
language. And it is irreplaceable: metaphor allows us to understand ourselves and our
world in ways that no other modes of thought can (Lakoff and Turner 1989: 6).
This is substantiated by metaphorical assertions so common as, “Time is a thief,” “Time
heals all wounds, “Time is running out,” “That time is long gone,” “It’s getting close to
bedtime,” and “We’re racing against time to finish this assignment” (Lakoff and Turner
1989: 34-45). Therefore, our perception of the workings of time is not entirely logical. We
even see metaphorical approaches to time in art and in literature. What come to my mind as
apt examples are Giorgione da Castelfranco’s (c.1500-1501) The Three ages of Man, where
the passing on of skill and wisdom from one generation to the next is depicted; Titan’s (c.
1550-1565) Allegory of Prudence, which shows the viewer human representations of the
three stages of life (youth, middle age, and elderliness); and Brian Bartlett’s poem titled
‘Time, Flying’, where time becomes a moth, a vulture, and a paper plane, with these images
attaching different possible meanings to the way that time can be thought of as ‘flying’
(Bartlett in Huebener 2020: 23). Huebener’s book also makes use of imagery to reflect the
complex and shifting nature of time in the natural world and he describes the image of a
clock to be a paradoxical, perfectly imperfect image for time. On one hand, the clock serves
as a clear and structured way to show time, but on the other hand, its perfect singularity
means that its image is insufficient to represent time within the “living, pulsing, irregular
world of storms and droughts, hummingbirds and glaciers, poverty and wealth, grief and
love” (Huebener 2020: 12). As a monolithic image, the clock suggests that everything in the
universe experiences time in the same way, yet when we read books like The Overstory, we
come to realize the inaccuracy of this idea. So, what then can we use to understand the
diverse expressions of time? We find an answer in Paul Ricoeur’s (1973: ix) three-volume
work titled Time and Narrative in which he claims the following:
With narrative, the semantic innovation lies in the inventing of another work of
synthesis - a plot. By means of the plot, goals, causes, and chance are brought together
within the temporal unity of a whole and complete action. It is this synthesis of the
heterogeneous that brings narrative close to metaphor. In both cases, the new thing-the
as yet unsaid, the unwritten springs up in language. Here a living metaphor, that is, a
new pertinence in the predication, there a feigned plot, that is, a new congruence in the
organization of the events.
Additionally, Ricoeur addresses the link between time, narrative, and human understanding
of time via his observation that, “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized
after the manner of a narrative,” and that “narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that
it portrays the features of temporal experience” (Ricoeur 1983: 3). He adds the following
statement regarding the meaningfulness of time in narrative: “We speak of time and we
speak meaningfully about it, and this shores up an assertion about the being of time”
(Ricoeur 1983: 3). Thus, narratives possess the ability to teach us about ourselves, our
history, and our future. Much like a clock, a narrative can be considered as a type of ‘device’
for marking time and for trying to make sense of the never-ending metamorphoses and
cycles that give shape to our lives.
III. An Eco-Critical Analysis of Temporality in Powers’ (2018) The Overstory
The ‘root’ of this entire research paper can be traced to the final frantic thoughts of one of
the nine (human) protagonists in Powers’ novel, Ray Brinkman. This is his last revelation:
“Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let
this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people,
is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees” (Powers 2018: 422). The next
few lines depict Ray’s death caused by a massive brain aneurism. Like the earth’s rising sea
levels, which slowly submerge the land that humans and terrestrial creatures inhabit, Ray’s
brain is engulfed by a “flood of blood” (Powers 2018: 422). He never gets to speak these
thoughts out loud. Dorothy, his wife, never hears the words coming out of his mouth. But
the readers are more fortunate; we see them typed out in black ink on white paper. It is not
such a far stretch to liken the exploding blood vessel in Ray’s brain to a seed pod bursting
open at precisely the right time it needs to. Its destruction is the final sacrifice that gives
birth to new knowledge, and to a ground-breaking perspective about the interconnectedness
that exists between humans, nature, and temporality. Powers expresses this key ‘solution’
at a fairly late stage of the novel’s plot, but readers are invited to recognize that there have
been several allusions to the contrasting perceptions of temporality as experienced by
humans and the natural world; this is merely the first time that the issue is addressed so
directly. In fact, from the very first section of the novel, titled Roots, we can see how Powers
slowly but surely starts to influence the readers’ temporal perceptions by introducing his
human protagonists to us as well as their connections to and relationships with the natural
environment and time, be it inherent or gradually acquired. Ray Brinkman’s revelation is
but a straightforward articulation of the many implications the novel has, up to this moment,
made regarding its crucial message. Up until this point, Powers has attempted to stretch time
for his protagonists and, by extension, for the readers as well, but ironically, the novel’s core
moral is provided in full in four simple lines. Imminence. Speed. Time. It all boils down to
time.
Although the idea for this study’s topic is found almost at the end of novel, Ray Brinkman’s
final revelation is not the first instance where Powers mentions time in the story. In fact,
from its very first pages and throughout its content, readers are subtly prompted by Powers
to shift our anthropocentric perspective of time to a more eco-conscious one. As stated in
this paper’s first few paragraphs, the entire novel is an embodiment of time. But to truly
understand the genius of Powers, it is necessary to grasp that ‘tree time’ is extremely slow,
indiscernible to the human eye, and extensive, which makes it incredibly difficult to imagine
as well as capture into words (Nguyen 2022: 34). Furthermore, trees do not speak in ways
that are perceptible to the human ear. Yet, Powers, from the outset, overcomes these
difficulties by successfully depicting arboreal connections to human life in the two-pagelong piece that might be considered as the prologue that sets the stage for all that is to come.
Herein, Powers manages to condense the scale of the biblical creational account down to a
familiar twenty-four hours – a typical timeframe that the reader can recognize and imagine.
He does this in the very first line: “First there was nothing. Then there was everything.”
Many readers are able to recognize this grandiose opening line as a very close reference to
the first chapter of the Book of Genesis which describes how, from a dark void of
nothingness, there suddenly existed a universe, an earth, light, everything. Then, suddenly,
from the story of the beginning of time and space, the reader is transported to a park in an
unnamed city after dusk where a woman is sitting on the ground with her back supported by
the trunk of a pine tree. The tree is speaking to her in “the lowest frequencies,” it does not
speak a language that humans can hear; it is “saying things, in words before words” (Powers
2018: 3). A scent in the air urges the woman to close her eyes and to think of willow. Then,
she is prompted to imagine an acacia thorn, but she knows that her imagination is not nearly
capable of conjuring up an accurate enough image of either tree. The tree communicating
with the woman then asks her the following question: “What floats over your head right
now?” (Powers 2018: 3). This sentence is extended by an em dash followed by an italicized
echo of “now?” to indicate the woman’s mystification regarding this particular concept. She
does not know the meaning of now; she has become unacquainted with the very idea of now.
Now is a human construct, a fragmentation of time to make it comprehensible to the human
mind. Suddenly, more trees join the conversation and voice that fundamental human flaw of
only being able to imagine mere “amputations” of “us” – which include the “bewitched
mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg’s inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant trunks, and the
straight-up missile of a sal” (Powers 2018: 3). Powers furthers the gap between the trees and
the woman by referring to humans as “your kind” and, ironically enough, it is humanity that
is described as standing still in a living world with life “running alongside them, unseen”
(Powers 2018: 3). Powers accommodates the human time-scale by attributing trees with
qualities and abilities typically associated with capitalist labour forces, which, as mentioned
already, function in accordance with the “24-hour day” time frame. Such labour-extensive
qualities include:
Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building
atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people
know how to count (Powers 2018: 4).
These are all concepts and actions that the readers can recognize, but they obtain greater
meaning when we consider the scale of creation and time that is invested into such generative
(and regenerative) pursuits. These everyday miracles would be appreciated more if our minds
were “greener thing(s)” (Powers 2018: 4).
Even though this first section of the novel addresses the matter of human ignorance regarding
vegetal agency as if such a mind-set has not been achieved by any of the readers of, or
characters in, the novel, the mere fact that this prologue is distanced typographically from
the ‘main text’ encourages a moment of pause for the readers to reflect on the possible central
aim of the novel before the ensuing action of the central storyline(s). Essentially, Powers
uses this narrative snag to delay the novel’s onset. What’s more, he uses this delay to address
issues such as the communication of trees; in other words, their “narrative agency,” as well
as matters of time and space – which are prevalent topics throughout the novel. In this
prologue, trees are given narrative agency through Powers depicting their speech in the active
voice even though, the exact time and space of the scene remains unclear (for now). If the
reader is already well-acquainted with the content of the novel and is lucky enough to read
it for a second time, they know that this preliminary section of the novel anticipates Patricia
Westerford’s later scientific findings in the field of biochemistry regarding the very real
ability that trees possess to actually communicate. In other words, this preface to the novel
regards the narrative agency of trees as being more literal and, in the process, ‘translates’ to
those potential and timeless messages as communicated by trees via “physical and
biochemical processes into a quasi-human voice” (Spengler 2019: 72). All of this is done by
Powers in his quest to make ‘green minds’ of his readers and this massive endeavour is
carried over from the prologue to the first chapter, which introduces the first of his nine
(human) protagonists, Nicholas Hoel.
In the first chapter of The Overstory, Powers manages to creatively portray ‘tree time’ by
centring the lives and the intergenerational struggles of a Norwegian immigrant family
trying to survive in the American Midwest around a single chestnut tree; the novel’s first
(human) protagonist, Nicholas Hoel, is the fourth-generation product of this particular
lineage. Jørgen Hoel (Nicholas Hoel’s great-great-great grandfather) plants six chestnuts
into the soil of the barren prairie surrounding his and his wife’s small cabin. However, out
of the six chestnuts that he plants, only one survives and thrives hundreds of miles from its
native land. The events of the Hoel family’s life are centred around this resilient tree and by
the time the first short-story is completed, the reader realizes that Powers has managed to
capture four generations worth of human and familial experiences in the span of a mere
nineteen pages. This is, in and of itself, already a creative means of commenting on the
transient nature of anthropocentric perceptions of time when compared with the ‘deep time’
that rules the natural world. In those same nineteen pages, Powers also manages to depict
the growth as well as a relatively substantial portion of the life-cycle of a full-grown,
monumental chestnut tree. Given Powers’ own grasp on the massive temporal scale that
trees adhere to, this paper can only speculate that Powers extends his readers a sort of curtesy
by condensing the time-frame of the chestnut tree into anthropocentric generational
timescales. In its silent constancy, the chestnut that Jorgen plants witnesses the death of the
Hoels’ firstborn and the subsequent births of their next three children in the following four
years. It survives through times of war and, for a while at least, shares its soil with other
chestnut trees. But as the years pass, the strong chestnut becomes one of a few in the entire
country that remains untouched by a destructive fungus disease. It thrives. Powers (2018:
14) manages to portray the tree as incredibly alive and intelligent in the following excerpt:
No mates exist for countless miles around, and a chestnut, though both male and
female will not serve itself. Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living
cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait.
The contrast between natural time and anthropocentric time is clearly depicted in the way
that the chestnut’s condition does not reflect the temporal changes as experienced by the
Hoel family. In the story, numerous seasons, harvests, marriages, mechanisations, and
departures take place on the Hoel-family’s farm during the formation of a single inch of
added rings in the chestnut’s trunk. The contrast between human time and tree time is made
even more complex considering the fact that the chestnut tree is known as being an incredibly
‘quick’ tree - in terms of ecological time at least. Powers informs the readers of this fact in
the following statement: “Chestnut is quick: By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a
chestnut has made a dresser” (Powers 2018: 13). Thus, the tree is quick, yet slow to the
human eye; solitary, yet in the constant company of the frenzied lifecycles of the humans to
which the soil in which it is rooted belongs. It is also interesting to note how Powers
illuminates human priorities in this quote by reducing the purpose of two very dignified
members of the natural world to such trivial objects as a baseball bat and a dresser. The
quote’s central aim, no doubt, is to highlight the issue of time, but one gets the sense that
Powers could not resist the temptation to subtly criticize capitalism’s indifference to nature
here.
Time is further addressed in this first chapter via the photography project that is first
introduced by Jørgen Hoel, wherein he takes a photo of the chestnut tree on the same day of
every month and from exactly the same angle. In order to understand the significance of this
stack of photographs it is useful to refer to the concept of the chronotope, which was
introduced by Bakhtin in his (1937) essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the
Novel’. The meaning of the chronotope is quite literally ‘time-space’ and Bakhtin uses it to
describe “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically
expressed in literature (Bakhtin 1937: 84). To expand on this concept, Bakhtin makes the
following clarification:
In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one
carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh,
becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the
movements of time, plot and history. This intersection […] and fusion of indicators
characterizes the artistic chronotope. (Bakhtin 1937: 44)
Spengler (2019) expands on Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope by saying that the
“chronotopic makeup of a literary text […] has far-reaching implications” and that it “reflects
the episteme that informs the text – its epistemological and ontological presuppositions as
well as the scientific, political, social, and cultural discourses that shape it” (Spengler 2019:
67). Therefore, I would argue that the Hoel-family’s stack of photographs serves as a perfect
example of what Bakhtin conceptualized as the chronotope as it depicts, in the form of art,
the conundrum of the expanse of both time and space, which are usually beyond the abilities
of the human imagination to visualize accurately. The photo album aids both the readers of
Powers’ novel and the members of the Hoel family to bridge the enormous gap between the
anthropocentric limitation of not being able to correctly visualize and understand the ‘deep
time’ of the natural world, and actually ‘seeing’ ecological time at play in a matter of seconds
or through secondary, imaginative experience.
By the time that Nicholas Hoel (Powers’ true Hoel-protagonist and the great-great-great
grandchild of Jørgen Hoel) inherits the farm after his entire family dies due to a gas leak,
almost a thousand photos exist of the massive chestnut, which is more than enough photos
to effectively portray the subtle changes undergone by the chestnut since the project’s onset.
As already stated, the ultimate purpose of this stack of photographs is to be flipped through
in order to reveal the subtle changes in the chestnut tree, which, when viewed in person and
within the time frame of ‘anthropocentric immediacy’, is impossible to detect as ‘tree time’
and the growth and changes that are linked to it follow a much larger and more complex time
scale. The photography project serves as an “apparatus that negotiates between human time
and tree time” as it allows the viewer to break through the chestnut’s illusion of being
completely static and non-temporal (Spengler 2019: 82). Via the thousands of frames that
make up this photography project, the “oldest, shortest, slowest, most ambitious silent movie
ever shot in Iowa” comes into existence (Powers 2018: 13). After about a decade, the album
starts to “reveal the tree’s main goal,” showing the chestnut “stretching and patting about for
something in the sky” (Powers 2018). When the stack of photographs reaches five-hundred
in total, “the time-lapse tree has changed beyond recognition,” and after three-quarters of a
century has gone by since its initiation, the flip-book has turned into a “five-second film”
(Powers 2018: 18). When Nicholas Hoel is finally introduced to the strange-yet-wonderful
photography project, it helps him to acknowledge that there is value in the flip-book’s
acceleration of time:
Each picture on its own shows nothing but the tree he climbed so often he could do it
blind. But flipped through, a Corinthian column of wood swells under his thumb,
rousing itself and shaking free. Three-quarters of a century runs by in the time it takes
to say grace […] Neither his father nor his grandparents could explain to him the point
of the flip-book. His grandfather said, ‘I promised my father and he promised his.’ But
another time, from the same man: ‘Makes you think different about things, don’t it?’
It did. One more flip through the magic movie, and faster than it takes for the blackand-white broccoli to turn again into a sky-probing giant, the nine-year-old cuffed by
his grandfather turns into a teen, falls in love with God, prays to God nightly, […]
grows away from God and toward the guitar, gets busted for half a joint of pot, is
sentenced to six months in a juvie scared-straight facility near Cedar Rapids, and there
[…] realizes that he needs to spend his life making strange things (Powers 2018: 1718).
Furthermore, this photography venture reveals the fact that the chestnut is a temporal being
that changes over time, albeit in very subtle ways as it “visualizes the time of the tree and
allows it to disclose itself” (Nguyen 2022: 35). Through its illustrations of how the chestnut
reaches into the sky, the photo album almost reveals to the viewer that specific “something”
which John Hoel suspected it was seeking earlier on in the story (Powers 2018: 17). In
modern terms, this Hoel-family project can be likened to time-lapse photography, which is
commonly used to “illustrate the extremely active life of trees and plants, presenting a view
usually closed off to us due to the fundamentally different timescales which trees and humans
occupy” (Jones and Cloke in Nguyen 2022: 35). Thus, in the story, the photo album gives
the viewer a visual impression of the slowness of natural time, which, no doubt, is used by
Powers to communicate the massive temporal scale of the natural world to the readers of his
book. There is, however a necessary bitter sweetness that is evoked through flipping through
the photo album; it reminds the viewer and, by extension, the reader, of the fleeting nature
of human life compared to a tree’s evolution. As Spengler (2019: 81-82) observes:
[…] the tree flip-book [constitutes] a way of experiencing human time that may
approximate that of a tree if we take trees to be sentient beings. And while the Hoels’
are imagining that all that is important happens outside of the frame because the photos
hide everything that passes on the farm and to the family’s human protagonists, the
juxtaposition of the tree’s evolvement and permanency with the passing generations
of Hoels and the fleeting moments of their lives suggests otherwise and challenges
traditional notions of what may count as a ‘story’.
Thus, both Powers and the Hoels’ chestnut seem to implore the readers to slow down, not to
project our frenzied perception of time onto the natural world and its processes, and to give
the environment the time that it needs to produce what it is supposed to.
The Hoels’ photo album is not the only thing in the The Overstory that serves as an example
of a tree whose origin can be traced back to the distant past. In chapter seven of the Roots
section of the novel, the reader is introduced to Patricia Westerford, a mildly disabled and
arguably autistic girl with a great love for the outdoors and an overactive imagination. This
specific chapter contains her origin story and along with little Patty Westerford, the readers
are transported back to their own childhoods when playing with dolls made from sticks kept
most of us entertained for hours. Here, Powers seems to encourage a childlike admiration
in his readers regarding the many wonders of the natural world. Initially, Patty Westerford
cannot speak and when her words do start to flow, they are thick and difficult to understand.
Thus, the many lessons regarding nature’s functions are initially not voiced by this particular
protagonist, but rather her father, who shows his “little plant-girl” the world beyond the
boundaries of their own property (Powers 2018: 107). The reader blushes at not immediately
unravelling the answer to this riddle posed by Bill Westerford to his young daughter: “If you
carved your name four feet high in the bark of a beech tree, how high would it be after half
a century?” (Powers 2018: 108). Apparently, and I would venture a guess, to many of our
surprise, the answer is simply four feet. The beginning of this chapter is interactive; it is an
infinitely valuable biology lesson that you hope will never end. During their long drives,
Patricia’s father tells her about “all the oblique miracles that green can devise” and they
share a sense of disbelief at the fact that the “plant blind” children in Patty’s class think that
a black walnut is indistinguishable from a white ash. Through Bill Westerford’s
conversations with his daughter, valuable nuggets of wisdom are shared with the readers,
like: “We only see things that look like us,” and “nothing is less isolated or more social than
a tree” (Powers 2018: 108;109). At the age of fifteen, Patricia loses her father, but she carries
the many lessons he taught her with her throughout her high school journey and during her
years as a student at Eastern Kentucky University. It is only after Bill Westerford’s death
when Patricia Westerford truly comes to embody her role as one of the nine human
protagonists in this novel and starts to influence the readers’ temporal perspectives herself.
Throughout the novel, Powers uses the research done by Patricia Westerford2 to introduce
his readers to more up-to-date scientific discoveries pertaining to the lives of trees and, in
doing so, he encourages us to perceive a sense of agency in both non-human and non-animal
life. For example, this particular protagonist becomes the central proponent of a
“reconsideration for plant life” when she makes the discovery that trees can communicate
with one another, and, through microscopic networks, they manage to exchange vital
nutrients as well as ‘converse’ via “airborne aerosol signals”. They do this to alert other trees
2
Although this character is a fictional composite, Powers has stated that her “mature discoveries” link to
those made by Suzanne Simard, who has produced exciting and valuable insights regarding the “intricate
communicative and resource-sharing networks in a forest,” which Simard refers to as the “Wood Wide
Web” (Morrow and Powers 2018: 61).
about potential threats (both microscopic and macroscopic) and these warning signals incite
those trees that are in imminent danger to form an immune response against the threat
(Powers in Spengler 2019: 70). This is one of the best methods that Powers uses to convey
the interconnectedness that exists between humans and the natural world as these exchanges,
micro-signals, and immune responses that plants are able to yield, very closely resemble the
human body’s natural reaction to being infiltrated by a virus or a bacterium. Furthermore,
such scientific insights also serve the function of enabling the reader to understand the
different forms of plant agency. This statement is supported by Michael Marder (2013: 2),
who, in his book titled Plant-Thinking, states that the human will to “think through the logic
of vegetal life, beyond its biochemical, cellular, or micro-molecular processes and ecological
patterns,” makes possible the problematizing of the existence of plants, thus creating space
for the re-evaluation of the prominence of other-than-human life, especially in the area of
environmental ethics (Marder 2013: 2-3). Through his creation of a character that is naturally
inclined to think using vegetal logic, Powers lends ontological credence to this logic and
makes it more acceptable for the reader. By depicting Patricia Westerford as initially
ostracized by the scientific community and then as rehabilitated into it two decades later,
Powers mimics the possible shift in mind-set that the reader might make in favour of otherthan-human agency; though on an admittedly larger scale.
Marder’s philosophical intervention for a stronger sense of responsibility towards vegetal
life deeply resonates with Patricia Westerford’s own sense of connection to the natural
world. In his book, Marder (2013: 3) asks the following two important questions: “How is
it possible […] to encounter plants? And how can we maintain and nurture, without
fetishizing it, their otherness in the course of this encounter?”
Powers’ imaginative response to Marder’s questions are also linked with the character of
Patricia Westerford through his depiction of how she, later on in the novel, ‘encounters’
vegetal temporality by describing a Florida bald cypress as being “one and a half millennia
older than Christianity” (Powers 2018: 387). Here Powers uses Patricia’s observation to
place emphasis on nature’s massive temporal scale by situating the long life of a tree along
the axis of human history. By depicting the long lifespan of a tree as comparable to a timeline
that most of his readers are familiar with, he ensures that ‘tree time’ becomes more
cognitively imaginable (Nguyen 2022: 36). Thus, one way that humans are able to
‘encounter’ arboreal realities as well as connect with vegetal temporality is to parallel it
against one of the pivotal moments in human history: the birth of Christ. In the simplest of
terms, it becomes easier for the readers to imagine the long lifespan of a tree when we
consider the possibility that it might have sprouted before the birth of Jesus Christ. Of
course, this is not to say that such a recognition is limited to those who follow the Christian
religion; it is also possible through the mere acknowledgement of the depth of history linked
to the birth of this particular religious icon.
Throughout the novel, Powers often uses Patricia Westerford to slow down his narrative
pace and, in the process, mimic the contrasting speeds of existence between humans and the
natural world. We see this especially when she spends one afternoon exploring a forest of
aspen trees and comes to notice the hidden things that expand her understanding of the
extensive time scales of the natural world. She visualises how the “Tangled roots spill from
the banks of a rivulet,” and she studies the “exposed edge of a network of underground
conduits conducting water and minerals across dozens of acres” (Powers 2018: 122). This
entire scene is slowed down by Powers’ use of extensive detail in his portrayal of Patricia
Westerford’s consideration of the complexity of the hidden water system that sustains an
entire forest of aspen trees. In the few moments it takes the readers’ eyes to glide over the
page and absorb its information, Powers, through his depiction of Patricia’s sensory
experiences, enables a “reorientation of perspective” through capturing this particular
protagonist’s “comprehension of the dissonance yet coexistence of extensive time scales and
the details in a moment” (Anderson 2022: 26). Patricia’s temporal comprehension is further
illustrated by Powers in the way she is depicted as smiling at the idea that the “oldest downed
trees are about eighty years,” since she is perfectly aware of the fact that the “fifty thousand
baby trees all around her have sprouted from a rhizome mass too old to date even to the
neared hundred millennia” (Powers 2018: 122). Thus, the age of a tree is not determined by
the trunk and the leaves that humans are able to see reaching up into the sky and this is made
very clear when Patricia observes that the root systems of a forest of trees are “a hundred
thousand if they’re a day” (Powers 2018: 122). Powers depicts Patricia’s understanding of
a complex and massive ecological scale by pairing her examination of a single tree’s
“tangled roots” with the image of “fifty thousand baby trees,” whose combined age reaches
hundreds of millennia back into the past (Powers 2018: 122). Additionally, Powers uses this
scene to introduce his readers to a method of measuring the particulars of natural life within
the “cosmic passage of time” (Anderson 2022: 26). He does this by depicting the
astonishment and appreciation felt by Patricia in her realization that she is busy observing
“one of the oldest, largest living things on earth” (Powers 2018: 122). Her astonishment at
the scalar tension that exists between ecological durability and human transience is made
even more clear in the following lines regarding the specific aspen tree that she is examining:
“The thing is outlandish, beyond her ability to wrap her head around…trees like to toy with
human thought like boys toy with beetles” (Powers 2018: 122). Thus, Powers uses her
awareness of the massive temporal scale that governs the natural world as well as her
recognition of the complex lives of trees to encourage a shift in temporal understanding in
his readers and, by extension, to emphasize the dire consequences of exploiting nature’s
resources.
Powers does not only use Patricia Westerford to depict the scalar tension that exists between
human time and tree time; he also uses this particular character to illuminate how an indepth understanding of tree time and scale reshapes human interaction with the natural
world. For example, Patricia’s study of the resilience of forests leads her to make the
following crucial deduction: “[…] futures […] will depend on the inscrutable generosity of
green things” (Powers 2018: 116). Through this revelation, Powers manages to directly
confront the crux of the worldwide ecological crisis; humanity’s exploitation of natural
resources. To fully illustrate the appreciation that humans ought to extend to nature’s
generosity, Power depicts Patricia as addressing a cedar tree whilst “using words of the
forest’s first humans,” in the following moving lines from the novel:
‘Long Life Maker. I’m here. Down here.’ She feels foolish, at first. But each word is
a little easier than the next. “Thank you for the baskets and the 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.’ (Powers 2018: 126-127)
The relief she experiences at each articulation of gratitude inspires her to go on:
‘Thank you for the tools. The chests. The decking. The clothes closets. The paneling.
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.’ (Powers 2018: 127).
Through his depiction of this particular character’s lengthy show of gratitude, Powers uses
narrative temporality to tangibly depict the clash between anthropocentric perceptions of
time and tree time. The author slows down this interaction between human and tree to an
uncomfortably slow pace, but this is necessary for the readers to get a sense of the slowness
of ecological time. Simply put, these few lines serve as a crucial, tentative introduction to
the deep time of trees and it is necessary for the readers to keep the slow rhythm of these few
lines in mind as we continue on with the story. In essence, this part of the novel confirms
Powers’ intention to go beyond anthropocentrism in order to inspire a deep understanding of
other-than-human experience.
Thus far, this paper has mentioned several distinguished members of the earth’s tree
kingdom, namely the chestnut, the aspen, and the cedar. All three of these trees have
provided the readers with a glimpse of the complex nature of tree time and all of them have
been used by Powers to encourage a sense of wonder and empathy in his readers regarding
other-than-human life and experience. However, this paper contends that the most striking
exemplification of the long lifespan of trees can be found in the giant redwood called Mimas.
Like the aspen trees’ root system, Mimas’ existence is also placed along the timeline of
Christianity in the following observation made by one of the allies of the cause led by Mother
N: “Some of these trees were around before Jesus was born” (Powers 2018: 149). So, what
does a tree look like that might have existed at the same time as Jesus Christ? In the eyes of
Nicholas Hoel, Mimas is the “largest, strongest, widest, oldest, surest, sanest living thing he
has ever seen” (Powers 2018: 230). He refers to the tree as the “Keeper of half a million
days and nights” (Powers 2018: 230). I am no mathematician, so I pulled out my calculator
to figure this out. If Nicholas Hoel’s estimation is anything to go by, Mimas is roughly 1370
years old, perhaps even older. Powers provides his readers with an even more detailed
description of Mimas from Nicholas Hoel’s perspective in the following passage. Mimas is:
wider across than his great-great-great-grandfather’s old farmhouse. Here, as sundown
blankets them, the feel is primeval, darshan, a face-to-face intro to divinity. The tree
runs straight up like a chimney butte and neglects to stop. From underneath, it could
be Yggdrasil, the World Tree, with its roots in the underworld and crown in the world
above. Twenty-five feet aboveground, a secondary trunk springs out of the expanse of
flank, a branch bigger than the Hoel Chestnut. Two more trunks flare out higher up the
main shaft. The whole ensemble looks like some exercise in cladistics, the
Evolutionary Tree of Life - one great idea splintering into whole new family branches,
high up in the run of long time. (Powers 2018: 260)
The readers come to know Mimas almost as well as Olivia and Nicholas do during the year
they spend in its branches in their persistent protest against its felling. In the mornings, its
top branches are shrouded in mist and at night, the flying squirrels terrorize the tree’s two
human residents. We explore Mimas’ hidden treasures along with the two young activists
and meet the various species of insects that reside in his branches. We are also introduced to
a multi-hued and unsuspecting salamander, and we rejoice at Olivia’s (now called
Maidenhair) discovery of a whole patch of Huckleberries on a branch almost two-hundred
feet above the forest floor. Powers uses the tree to illustrate the insignificance of human time
compared to the deep time of trees as, during their stay, “an afternoon, half an hour, a minute,
half a sentence, or half a word all feel the same size,” and both Maidenhair and Watchman
(Nicholas Hoel) start to “disappear into the rhythm of no rhythm at all” (Powers 2018: 235).
Through his height and width as well as his many coiling branches, the inscription of time
on the living and ‘breathing’ Mimas is literal and visible. When Mimas was initially
described to Maidenhair and Watchman, its temporal descriptors were difficult for the latter
(and the readers) to imagine and it remained unfathomable during their year-long tree sit as
well. However, in a shocking and tragic turn of events, this ancient creature’s mammoth age
is violently exposed when he is eventually cut down. True enough, its many years are
recorded in the seemingly infinite number of rings that appear on its stump, which is big
enough for Nicholas to camp on later on in the story. His initial estimation, as well as my
earlier calculation of his age, were not too far off as the rings reveal Mimas to have been
“half as old as Christianity” (Powers 2018: 284). Impressive. Ironically, only by seeing its
stump, the tree’s ancient origin becomes more comprehensible for Nicholas as well as for
the readers. The sight of Mimas’ ‘corpse’ transports Nicholas Hoel back in time and
evolution to “face the primordial world of myth and divinity” (Powers 2018: 37).
Furthermore, the ancient redwood’s long journey is not only placed along the axis of the
timeline of Christianity to make it more palpable as Powers also makes sure to connect other
important events in human history, as well as Nicholas’ anthropocentric time frame, to
Mimas’ lifecycle in the following passage:
He lies on his side as night comes on, his head on a wadded jacket near the ring laid
down the year Charlemagne died. Somewhere underneath his coccyx, Columbus. Past
his ankles, the first Hoel leaves Norway for Brooklyn and the expanses of Iowa.
Beyond the length of his body, crowding up to the cut’s cliff, are the rings of his own
birth, the death of his family, the roadside visit of the woman who recognized him,
who taught him how to hang on and live. (Powers 2018: 308)
Here, Nicholas’ comprehension of the massive temporal scale of Mimas’ lifecycle is similar to
Richard Irvine’s contention that ecological deep time is “not just a process of abstraction, but a
sensory engagement” (Irvine in Nguyen 2022: 37). Essentially, Nicholas ‘learns’ tree time
through feeling the long journey of Mimas with his head, his coccyx, his ankles, and the rest of
his body. One could argue that, through this scene, Powers is suggesting that it is necessary for
complete sensory surrender to the quiet voice of the natural world if the readers want to unravel
the secrets of its processes. Additionally, the author makes it easier for us to accomplish this
particular sensory feat through his employment of the present tense. This correlates with the
contrasting temporal perceptions between humans and the natural environment since what
Nicholas Hoel regards as the distant past of human history has no effect on the everlasting present
of trees. Through language and tense, Powers effectively communicates that the temporal scale
that trees adhere to governs the novel’s entire tense. In short, humans in the novel inhabit a world
of trees, not the other way around.
By the time that Mimas is felled, this tree has come to mean just as much to the readers as it does
any of Powers’ nine human protagonists. In saying this, Mimas’ ‘murder’ becomes connected to
Ray Brinkman’s earlier contemplations of whether or not trees can be thought of as possessing
something similar to human subjectivity and should, therefore, have legal standing. As an
intellectual property lawyer, Ray is compelled to ask the following, crucial question regarding
human ownership of natural resources: “What can be owned and who can do the owning?”
(Powers 2018: 220). Powers depicts the magnitude of the answer through the brain aneurism that
Ray suffers as a physiological consequence of the intellectual understanding of the complexity
of deep time: “From enlightenment to the dam burst in Ray’s brain takes thirteen seconds”
(Powers 2018: 270). However, these life-altering thirteen seconds are stretched since they are
placed within the larger time scale of Dorothy’s night-time ablutions: “Her nightly ritual
graduates from one noise to another: blow-dryer becoming electric toothbrush becoming water
coursing into the ceramic basin” (Powers 2018: 270). The tension that Powers creates here
cements the readers’ attention to the events taking place and ensures that we ‘stay tuned’ for the
big reveal of Ray’s enlightened answer to his earlier self-imposed question. Finally, he
understands the ‘standing’ of trees and he makes the following conclusion: “Time alters what can
be owned, and who may do the owning” (Powers 2018: 271). Powers seems to use Ray Brinkman
as the most direct oracular character in the novel since, as mentioned earlier, his next brain
aneurism gives birth to the ultimate enlightened response regarding the worldwide ecological
crisis and also articulates the central focus of this research paper. However, the story would be
cut too short if Ray were given the opportunity to voice his revelations to other characters in the
novel, so the secrets of Ray’s mind are only shared with the readers so that we may keep them in
mind as we continue reading. By juxtaposing Ray Brinkman’s intellectual insight regarding the
functions of deep time in the natural world during this scene as well as in Ray’s final scene in the
novel, Powers highlights just how profound and complex Ray’s responses to environmental ruin
are. The magnitude of his revelations are twice paralleled to the destructive power of large masses
of water demolishing human infrastructure. During his first stroke, the burst blood vessel is
compared to a dam bursting in his brain and during the second, fatal attack, Ray’s brain is
drowned in a “flood of blood” (Powers 2018: 270;422). During this scene, nature and human
infrastructure come into a head-on collision as the metaphorical “dam burst” is actualised: “A
thing in his brain collapses and everything that was once safe as houses collapses like an overdug mine” (Powers 2018: 272). This simile perfectly articulates humanity’s greed and inability
to deduce exactly when the damage we inflict becomes too much for the natural world to handle:
“Blood floods his cortex, and he owns nothing” (Powers 2018: 272).
Although Ray’s physical trauma is major, I cannot bring myself to contend that Powers’
narration of the stripping away of human ownership of nature’s bounty is not necessary in
this story. After all, what more could Powers do to ‘scare’ a sense of ecological
comprehension into his readers? During this climactic moment in the novel, Ray reaches an
intellectual and corporeal stalemate that symbolically discloses the complexity of
confronting and understanding the issue of deep time. Thus, by framing the complexity of
natural time in relation to human time on various planes, Powers establishes for himself a
useful method of inspiring within his readers a crucial shift in temporal perspective from a
predominantly anthropocentric one to a more eco-conscious one.
Concerning the issue of ecological time and the way it remains largely unacknowledged by
human legal systems, this paper would be remiss if it did not address Adam Appich’s attitude
regarding the punishment he is given for his acts of domestic terrorism in the final pages of
the novel. Here, once again, Powers uses one of his nine human protagonists to illustrate how
deep time causes any anthropocentric perceptions of time to shrink to complete
insignificance and the way that trees and the massive temporal scale they adhere to reveal to
us the ‘newness’ of our existence on earth. This paper has already established that Powers
makes use of ancient trees in his novel to challenge the readers’ anthropocentric notions of
the old and the recent as well as our understanding of the complex functions of time itself.
In saying this, Adam Appich’s nonchalance regarding his sentence is a perfect illustration of
the reaction of an individual who has learnt to think from the perspective of the creatures
him and his fellow activists were trying to save:
The court sentences Adam Appich to two consecutive terms of seventy years each.
The lenience shocks him. He thinks: Seventy plus seventy is nothing. A black willow
plus a wild cherry. He was thinking oak. He was thinking Douglas-fir or yew. Seventy
plus seventy. With reductions for good behavior, he might even finish out the first half
of the sentence just in time to die. (Powers 2018: 401)
His reaction is astonishing. Here, Powers slows down time once more in order for the readers
to quickly make the mental, or physical, calculation of seventy plus seventy. One-hundredand-forty years. In terms of the human time scale, this sentence far exceeds the number of
years a prisoner is able to serve their sentence before ultimately dying. Essentially, in terms
of ‘human time’, this sentence is impossible to complete. However, for the black willow, the
wild cherry, the oak, the Douglas fir, and the yew in Adam’s thoughts, seventy plus seventy
years merely constitutes the formation of a couple of additional rings inside their trunks.
Long after Addam Appich dies, and if they are lucky enough to escape the plague of human
endeavour, these trees will continue to grow, communicate, and breathe.
Powers also uses the themes of death and birth (of human and other-than-human characters)
and the ties to temporality that these events have to emphasize the vast temporal scale of the
environment compared to the ephemeral nature of human life. One of the best examples of
this can be found in the character of Olivia Vandergriff, a college student who is, in a sense,
reborn in a quasi-religious manner after being electrocuted and who finds herself suddenly
able to channel certain “beings of light” who redirect the course of her life (Powers 2018:
163). Again, as with the prologue and Mimas’ lifecycle, there is a certain biblical allusion
concerning her rebirth to the resurrection of the Messiah and Olivia’s eventual acts of
activism are used throughout the novel by Powers to articulate the importance of human to
other-than-human kinship. Unlike the character of Patricia Westerford, whom Powers uses
to slow down time as she is inherently conscious of vegetal life and agency, the events
directly after Olivia’s ‘resurrection’ are dictated by a sense of urgency, almost as if she is
searching for a light in a dark room. She finds her sense of direction in the “presences” that
hastily lead her away from her college-life and into the unknown:
The empty seat next to her rustles. She turns. There, inches from her face, is the thing
she’s been praying for. A cone of charged air gusts into her thoughts. They’ve returned,
beckoning. They want her to stand and leave the auditorium. She will do whatever they
ask. Down the stone steps in her winter coat, she crosses the icy main quad. She skirts
the classroom-buildings, the library, a freshman dorm, walking without thinking,
drawn along by the presences. For a moment, she imagines her destination is the Civil
War cemetery south of campus. Then it’s clear she’s heading toward the parking lot
where she keeps her car. (Powers 2018: 160)
Olivia decides to become an “instrument of their will,” and her own mind “has nothing even
faintly resembling a plan” (Powers 2018: 160). Powers uses this scene to convey a sense of
urgency as, in rapid succession, Olivia passes through various anthropocentric temporal
indicators like “breakfast,” “Dusk,” and “Darkness,” before eventually stopping in the
parking lot of a warehouse store (Powers 2018: 160-161). Then, Powers breaks the feverish
pace of the narrative by inserting a short passage containing an anecdote that recalls when,
before the year 1990 in Indiana, the very parking lot that Olivia is sleeping in, had been an
apple orchard owned and cultivated by a “gentle, crazed Swedenborgian” nicknamed Johnny
Appleseed. He was the owner of “twelve hundred acres of the richest land in the country”
when he died and, during his life, had considered grafting to be a cruel horticultural
technique. So, he decided that the unpredictable will of each individual apple seed should
govern when it would germinate and where it would allow its roots to dig into the soil. Due
to his scorn for human intervention though Chlorokinesis, the apple seeds, with their own
sense of agency, had determined that there would sprout apple trees from Pennsylvania to
Illinois. Taking this shift in narrative pace into consideration, it becomes clear that Powers
deems it appropriate to attribute his human protagonists’ time frames with a sort of chaotic,
fast-paced and uncomfortable panic. On the other hand, he tends to halt his narrative frenzy
when he references vegetal agency and ‘tree time’ to allude to the slow and gentle tempo of
the natural environment.
Later on in the story, Olivia embodies the role of a sort of spiritual ring-leader and Powers
makes extensive use of this character to be the voice of wonder regarding the miracles of the
world’s forests. For example, when Nicholas and Olivia first enter the forest wherein Mimas
is situated, Powers predominantly uses Olivia to articulate the awe-inspiring sights in the
forest:
The redwoods do strange things. They hum. They radiate arcs of force. Their burls
spill out in enchanted shapes. She grabs his shoulder. ‘Look at that!’ Twelve apostle
trees stand in a fairy ring as perfect as the circles little Nicky once drew with a
protractor on rainy Sundays decades ago. Centuries after their ancestor’s death, a
dozen basal clones surround the empty center, all around the compass rose. A chemical
semaphore passes through Nick’s brain: Suppose a person had sculpted any one of
these, just as they stand. That single work would be a landmark of human art. (Powers
2018: 254)
Through her exclamation of, “Look at that!” Olivia invites the readers to become as close to
first-hand witnesses as we can be. This passage in particular aims to truly affect the readers
via Olivia’s sense of wonder. Powers also encourages the readers to keep our attention
focused on the issue of temporality by comparing Nicholas’ temporal reference to growth in
the time-frame of decades with the static maturity of the redwood trees that have been
standing in the same spot for centuries. Through the decades of Nicholas’ life, he has grown
from being a small child into an adult man and his life has been uprooted by a relative
stranger whom he follows on her quest to save a forest of trees from being cut down.
However, over the course of centuries, the twelve trees that they are observing as well as all
the other trees in the forest have remained in the same spot, sustaining each other through
several eras of the earth’s history. Furthermore, Powers, once again, incorporates the timeframe of human history and its connection to biblical circumstances and vocabularies by
referring to the circle of redwood trees as the “Twelve apostle trees,” thereby making the
massive temporal scale that the trees adhere to more imaginable to the human mind.
However, it is not merely in terms of biblical reference that Powers expands his readers’
temporal perceptions via the human-history timeline. According to Hess (2019), the scene
during which Maidenhair and Watchman come across a “grove of trunks six hundred years
old, running upward out of sight,” and then proceed to hail them as “pillars of a russet
cathedral nave,” is an allusion to the “American history of wilderness preservation as a form
of nation-building” (Powers in Hess 2019: 201). This claim is substantiated by Alfred Runte,
who contends that, for long stretches in America’s past, “anyone hoping for scenery imbued
with history had no choice but visit Europe” (Runte 2010: 14). Thus, in order to compensate
for this lack of anthropocentric history, America began to promote the idea of “scenic
nationalism” (Runte 2010: 14). In simple terms, “Wilderness … was to become that unique
characteristic of the American nation” – though this, of course, changed after the industrial
revolution when anthropocentric temporal conceptions became vastly aligned with political
and economic pursuits (Hess 2019: 201).
Olivia Vandergriff’s passion for the plight of endangered trees and her comprehension of the
intricacies of the environment are made real by the fact that Powers moulded this particular
character after a real human being, namely Julia “Butterfly” Hill. Julia Hill was born the
daughter of an evangelical priest and she became “America’s most famous ‘tree-hugger’ in
the late 1990’s after living for 738 days on a six-by-eight-foot platform 180 feet high in the
branches of a giant Californian redwood tree, nicknamed Luna, to keep it from being cut
down by loggers” (Chapman 2015: 37). The connection between Olivia “Maidenhair”
Vadergriff and Julia “Butterfly” Hill is strengthened by the fact that Julia’s activism formed
part of her spiritual journey, which was prompted by her survival of a near-fatal car accident
in August of 1996. Although Julia became a media celebrity due to her lengthy tree-sit, fame
was never her central goal. She lived in Luna from December 10 of 1997 until December 18
of 1999. Her tree-sit finally came to an end after the company called Pacific Lumber “agreed
to sell Luna and a surrounding three-acre buffer to Hill and the land trust Sanctuary Forest
for $50,000” (Chapman 2015: 307). Hill’s first book, The Legacy of Luna, was published in
1999 and documents her long tree-sit and also shares with the readers the various methods
she used to cope with the intimidation tactics used by security forces as well as the
sometimes-hostile natural elements. Per her request, her book was printed on recycled paper
and in ink made from soybean (Chapman 2015: 307). Although Powers gives Mimas a tragic
fate to shock the readers into feeling a deep sense of empathy towards other-than-human life,
Luna is still very much alive; she stands proud and tall in Headwaters Forest in Humboldt
County, California.
Perhaps one of Powers’ most interesting characters that he uses to portray his narrative’s
time-management problem is Neelay Mehta, a paraplegic computer genius who, through his
design of an alternative digital universe, effectively offloads the complexities of the
worldwide environmental crisis and its “humanly unmanageable scale to computers”
(Ciccoricco 2022: 253). During Neelay’s introductory chapter in the Roots section of the
novel, he falls out of an oak tree and fractures his spine. Upon hitting the ground, he briefly
catches a glimpse of the microscopic and intricate processes that comprise every tree’s
existence – processes that are mainly indiscernible to the human eye. He observes the
miraculous activities that make tree-life possible in the following passage:
Time stops. He lies on his shattered back, looking upward. The dome above him
hovers, a cracked shell about to fall in shards all around him. A thousand—a thousand
thousand—green-tipped, splitting fingerlings fold over him, praying and threatening.
Bark disintegrates; wood clarifies. The trunk turns into stacks of spreading metropolis,
networks of conjoined cells pulsing with energy and liquid sun, water rising through
long thin reeds, rings of them banded together into pipes that draw dissolved minerals
up through the narrowing tunnels of transparent twig and out through their waving tips
while sun-made sustenance drops down in tubes just inside them. A colossal, rising,
reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into
the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility from out of nothing:
the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see. (Powers
2018: 102-103)
Neelay’s connection to trees stays with him for the rest of his life. This connection is further
strengthened by the fact that, in the novel, his paralyzed state is “cast as approximating the
human embodiment of a tree” (Herforth, Meinen, and Yao 2019: 48). Powers describes his
limbs as resembling a “bundle of twigs” (Powers 2018: 191) and later on in the novel, whilst
making an odd gesture of revelation during a company meeting by holding up his arms and
extending his palms almost as if prayer, Neelay’s fingers are described as on the verge of
sprouting leaves (Powers 2018: 412). At first, he cannot articulate what exactly his
connection to trees entails until one night when he, as a university student, “experiences the
reception of a message from the huge trees [on his university’s campus] to build a complex
computer game where gamers conquer, expand, interact, store and hoard over the everexpanding game continent” (Herforth, Meinen, and Yao 2019: 48). Through digitizing and
gamifying the complex processes of the natural world, Neelay hopes to inspire a sense of
empathy in those consumers who actively participate in the activities of his “massive
multiplayer resource management game(s)” (Ciccoricco 2022: 253). His ultimate aim is to
make his programs into “Living things. … Self-learning. Self-creating” – just like plants
(Powers 2018: 134). In fact, for Neelay, computer algorithms are directly comparable to the
processes of the natural world, especially via the computer instruction referred to as
branching, which essentially allows the proportions of a game to develop automatically until
it reaches (digitally) about the same level of complexity as “ecosystems on a planetary scale”
(Powers in Ciccoricco 2022: 253). Just like the vast and intricate processes that govern the
existence of trees, Neelay’s algorithms “operate data streams on a scale incomprehensible to
humans, ‘shap[ing] the world’s data so quickly that the knowledge of humans stands still’”
(Powers in Herforth, Meinen, and Yao 2019: 49). Thus, much like ‘deep time’ Neelay’s
algorithms cross the temporal and spatial boundaries that characterize human life and
experience.
Although this does sound impressive, this essay contends that the reader cannot help but
observe a certain dystopian connotation to Neelay’s mind-set and digital creations.
According to Ciccoricco (2022: 253), Powers incorporates digital space into his narrative to
portray the possibility of “functional homologies across biological and digital domains” and
also to suggest the “counterintuitive possibility for the role of creative computational media
in cultivating environmental consciousness”. Although Ciccoricco (2022) makes a valid
point through this specific observation, I would argue that his view is strongly debateable in
terms of whether or not digital media presents a possible solution to dealing with
environmental decay. In its literature study, this essay has already presented strong evidence
that computers, and what they mean to humans in terms of anthropocentric temporal
manipulation, feed directly into western capitalism’s promotion of an everlasting present that
inhibits us to slow down, to stop and think of what we are doing to the earth in our desperate
endeavours for progress. Furthermore, most (if not all) of the evidence that Powers’ novel
presents the readers suggests that Neelay’s digital world and its promotion of mastery over
one’s environment instigates within the majority of its participants a sick sort of desperation
for self-serving economic and socio-political advancement (even if it is in cyberspace).
Powers’ novel even confesses that the concept of ‘mastery’ – which later becomes the name
of Neelay’s most successful game - over the natural environment (even one that is digital) is
impossible: “There’s no real way to win the game. As with running a business, the point is
to keep playing for as long as possible” (Powers 2018: 173). Therefore, the digital
environment that the game presents to the public in Powers’ novel becomes a space for cybercapitalism, which promotes exactly the opposite mental effect that Neelay wishes to inspire
in the players of his games. In fact, one of Neelay’s main hopes for his digital universes is
that they will “do better for trees than humans have done” (Ciccoricco 2022: 253). However,
his hopes seem hardly attainable, especially given the fact that, in one particular instance,
Neelay decides to enter his digital universe as a Sage, but to stay in the game and contribute
to its development and progress, he “must acquire sufficient coal, gold, ore, stone, wood,
food, honor, and glory to pay for his population growth” (Powers 2018: 226). So, even the
creator of this vast digital universe has to participate in capitalistic endeavours to stay in the
game, a game with no real end – essentially, a 24-hour work-day ad infinitum.
Powers also uses his characters to link his novel with the arboreal sublime and to inspire
within his readers an appreciation for human-nature interconnectedness. The best example
of this claim can be found in the character called Mimi Ma, who, at the novel’s beginning
and end is depicted as sitting in a meditative position under a tree. In her introspective state,
her mind “becomes a greener thing” and as soon as she steps out of her mental reverie, she
is suddenly changed: she has become an “altered woman” (Powers 2018: 499-500). Through
Mimi Ma, Powers, once again, fractures the readers’ perceptions of the workings of time. If
we manage to remember the novel’s prologue, we suddenly realize that Mimi Ma’s final
scene in the novel constitutes a continuation of its rather romantic narrative preamble. It is
almost as if the prologue was frozen in time whilst the majority of the novel’s events
unfolded and only managed to resume itself during the last few pages. Essentially, a small
slice of human-time, perhaps the equivalent of two minutes in Mimi’s (and the readers’)
temporal perception is suspended and stretched for more than five-hundred pages. I would
argue that this is perhaps Powers’ most clever narrative tactic to comment on the intricacies
of time, which still manage to mystify numerous scholars that attempt to decipher it.
Furthermore, Powers also uses Mimi Ma to emphasize the transience of anthropocentric
time-scales as opposed to the massive temporal scale that the earth itself adheres to:
The fires will come, despite all efforts, the blight and windthrow and floods. Then the
Earth will become another thing, and people will learn it all over again. The vaults of
seed banks will be thrown open. Second growth will rush back in, supple, loud, and
testing all possibilities. Webs of forest will swell with species shot through in shadow
and dappled by new design. Each streak of color on the carpeted Earth will rebuild its
pollinators. Fish will surge again up all the watersheds, stacking themselves as thick
as cordwood through the rivers, thousands per mile. Once the real world ends. (Powers
2018: 500)
Taking this into consideration, it becomes obvious that Mimi Ma in no way represents a
‘solution’ to the contrasting perceptions of temporality that exist between humans and the
environment; she does not suddenly see, feel or understand everything about time. No,
Powers uses this character to emphasize human fickleness. As soon as she re-emerges from
her meditative state, she actually seems more fallible, confused, and despondent than ever
before, the only difference is that now she readily concedes her own shortcomings as well
as the inconsistencies in her own character make-up: “Guilty, her eyes say. Innocent. Wrong.
Right. Alive” (Powers 2018: 501). This changeability that is connected to human nature just
goes to show that the only fixed, solid, and dependable entity is the living earth, which will
continue to breathe and re-cultivate itself for eons to come and long after humans are gone…
IV. The Importance of Structure and Character(s) in The Overstory
In order for this essay to adequately address the role that structure plays in effectively
communicating human-nature relationships in The Overstory (Powers 2018), it has to
discuss the contents of the novel that the readers encounter before the narrative even starts.
Naturally, we have to begin with the title itself, which ‘branches’ into three separate
directions. Firstly (and literally), an overstory can be defined as the “superior layer of foliage
in a forest, constituting a canopy” – think of it as the forest’s sheltering ‘roof’ (Feith 2022:
100). Secondly (and metaphorically) an overstory, when linked to a narrative, may refer to
the “overarching story of stories” – it is the most important story, all the other stories serve
as the narrative’s tumultuous undercurrent that pushes events forward and links them to the
principal narrative moral (Feith 2022: 100).Thirdly (also metaphorically and constituting a
clever, yet alarming, play on words) the overstory can be linked to the final story, the story
that predicts human extinction if we do not allow ourselves to be affected and changed by it.
According to Saint-Amour (2020: 142) Powers’ “punning title” already hints that there exists
a certain intimacy “between large communities of trees and networks of characters,
respectively—between the forest canopy (“overstory” or “overstorey”) and a capacious
narrative whose overarching structure harbours and connects lots of smaller understories.”
Then, we encounter the novel’s table of contents, which Feith (2022: 100) equates to a
calligramme, whose separate parts are called Roots – which is further divided into nine
different headings that disclose the names of each of Powers’ human protagonists – Trunk,
Crown, and Seeds. Some creative readers, upon viewing the layout of the table of contents
and observing the image that forms via its outline, will also notice that, if you look rather
closely and perhaps even squint slightly, you can see what looks like the characteristic shape
of a fir tree. Feith (2022: 100) contends that this “double allegiance to theme and form,
warping plot architecture to fit the text’s subject matter, endows the novel with a selfreflexive dimension, and even a theoretical impulse.” In simpler terms, the novel is already
alive and hinting at its numerous narrative treasures that are waiting to be discovered. We
get all of this information and the story has not even begun yet.
The promise of the novel adopting a sort of arboreal life cycle in terms of its structure is
realised in the novel’s contents. For example, Roots introduces each and every one of
Powers’ human protagonists in “discrete, sometimes multi-generational backstories” (SaintAmour 2020: 142). This specific section serves as the ‘bridge’ that “connects this
[anthropocentric] side, the storylines of ordinary people, with the other, nonhuman side, the
life of trees” (Masiero 2020: 141). By showing how each of the nine human protagonists
connect with trees and, as a result, grasp the interconnectedness that exists between human
and non-human life, this section subtly introduces the readers to the lower frequencies of
arboreal agency that the rest of the novel depicts. Trunk unites the majority of said
protagonists, initially only in pairs and then eventually as a whole group of collaborators that
vehemently protest against the uninhibited felling of trees (Saint-Amour 2020: 142). The
Trunk section concludes with the tragic death of the group of activists’ ‘messiah’, Olivia
Vandergriff (“Maidenhair”) due to an accidental gas tank explosion during a failed attempt
to blow up a large body of logging equipment. Crown tails each survivor of the failed mission
as they ‘branch’ out and adopt new lives and identities, essentially estranging themselves
from their radical pasts. However, two of them, namely Adam Appich (re-named “Maple”)
and Douglas Pavlicek (or “Doug-fir”) are arrested and incarcerated for committing domestic
terrorism. Finally, Seeds depicts Powers’ now-disseminated protagonists’ concluding
thoughts, moments, and epiphanies which consist, for the most part, of apology,
understanding, death, bereavement, remembrance, and nonconformist creation. In essence,
the overall structure of the novel resembles arboreal life-cycles as both narrative and time
“follow the contours of a tree upward from roots to seeds, beginning with disparate origins,
briefly achieving a unified environmentalist coalition, and ending with a splitting and a
dispersal (Saint-Amour 2020: 142). In fact, this fragmented quality of Powers’ novel
supports the narrative’s eco-centric perception of time as the dispersal of the characters and
their individual stories both at the novel’s beginning and end corresponds to the “structurally
different perspective of trees” (Feith 2022: 116). In other words, Powers’ scattering of
characters, stories, and timelines implies a repudiation of anthropocentric linear time and the
novel’s accommodation of more circular, incremental temporality in its place. This is
corroborated by the following observation made by the novel’s omniscient narrator
regarding the nature of time just before the group of eco-activists split up after Maidenhair’s
death:
But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three
seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just
ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward
and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass
of everything that already died. (Powers 2018: 358)
After this point in the novel, most of the human protagonists stay alone and, similar to its
beginning, the readers have to substitute the linear progression of the narrative with
fragmented discovery and interpretation. Thus, the dendriform structure of The Overstory
(Powers 2018) plays an essential role in linking the lives of its human protagonists with the
natural environment and, in the process, communicates the value of the expansion of
temporal and ecological perceptions to include those of the natural world.
This essay would argue that the section of the novel which most accurately depicts a
regenerative understanding of human-nature interconnectedness is its concluding section,
Seeds. Herein, Douglas Pavlicek, a prisoner, is portrayed as sitting in his cell, contemplating
what seems to be a cancerous tumour growing in his side. Later on, during his final scene in
the novel, Douglas is described as being deeply engrossed in an audio lecture by a renowned
plant biologist who speaks of “the massive tree of life, spreading, branching, flowering,” and
he struggles to remember the term serotinous - which refers to tree cones that only open
when they are exposed to extreme heat or fire (Powers 2018: 491). Powers uses this small
detail in his novel to emphasize the idea of regeneration through ruination. This idea is
strengthened during Mimi Ma’s final scene in the novel wherein the ‘greening’ of her mind
is only achieved after her realization that the Earth will regenerate itself after the worst
devastations of climate change: “… the Earth will become another thing, and people will
learn it all over again” (Powers 2018: 500). At the same time, somewhere in an unnamed
forest in the far north, Nick Hoel, who is now making a living as an environmental artist,
shapes massive letters out of fallen tree trunks that, when they finally decay and stimulate
new growth, will “spell out a gigantic word legible from space: STILL” (Powers 2018: 502).
This word is a reference to a concept that many humans find challenging to comprehend as
well as to those specific feats that many of us find almost impossible to accomplish, namely
quietness, perseverance, and constancy. This claim is supported by the following lines from
the novel:
The learners will puzzle over the message that springs up there, so near to the methanebelching tundra. […] Already this word is greening. Already the mosses surge over,
the beetles and lichen and fungi are turning the log to soil. […] 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. (Powers 2018: 502)
The Overstory (Powers 2018) concludes with a whispering voice – perhaps Maidenhair’s –
that reiterates her dying words: “This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This
will never end” (Powers 2018: 502). Life continues after the reader closes the book.
However, through its rich contents and many lessons, the readers’ perceptions of time and
other-than-human life have been fundamentally altered to question some of those
discriminating cognitive restrictions that comprise anthropocentrism.
Another technique that Powers implements in his novel to make ‘tree-life’ more relatable is
via his text’s overall narrative trajectory, which, according to Masiero (2020: 138), is very
much reminiscent of the numerous parables that one encounters in the Christian bible: “… a
parable has a narrative structure that brings listeners/readers to entertain unheard of concepts
and truths only after having mobilized their already possessed knowledge of the world.” As
stated by Adam Appich, one of the novel’s protagonists: “You can’t see what you don’t
understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice” (Powers 2018:
439).
One could argue that the biblical form that Powers uses in his novel is a sort of humbling
experience for the readers as it forces us to acknowledge that, not only were we largely
unaware of the new realities that this parabolic trajectory systematically reveals to us, but
we also possessed only partial knowledge of that which we were convinced we knew in full.
In essence, and according to Masiero (2020: 138), the tree analogy that governs the
overarching structure of the novel belongs to the “parabolic first phase” – which entails the
promise of a narrative journey that is sure to provide the readers with numerous important
lessons. So, we do not only see the realisation of novel’s parabolic promise - which is first
laid out to us in its table of contents - on the pages that we read, but we are subtly guided by
it throughout the reading process in terms of how to view and interpret the many metaphors
contained in the text itself. It is also important to note that the novel’s parabolic form is not
only hinted at in its table of contents; throughout the text itself, the various title pages and
epigraphs of the individual sections also serve to remind the readers to regard trees as the
novel’s main focus.
Upon very close linguistic examination, we also see that the tree analogy that serves as the
structural premise of Powers’ entire novel activates its parabolic trajectory straightaway in
its table of contents. If we regard the titles of the separate sections of the novel themselves,
we see that they follow a very obvious structural pattern that corresponds with the
relationships of the various protagonists with each other. For example, Roots is written in
plural form, which suggests numerous individual stories or a scattering of characters. Trunk
and Crown are written in singular form, which suggests a coming together of several of the
novel’s characters. Then, once again, a large portion of the protagonists become strangers to
each other by separating and leading different lives, which corresponds with the title Seeds
(which is written in plural form). Furthermore, we also observe that the different sections of
the novel follow a linear progression; it would not have made sense if, for example, Seeds
had preceded Trunk as this order does not correspond with the actual observable structure
and/or life-cycle of a tree. So, in a way, the order of the titles of the novel’s separate sections
predicts an “intrinsically organized trajectory which maps both a linear development through
time and a vaster circular [or cyclical] pattern” (Masiero 2020: 139). This organized
progression of the novel’s section titles communicates its central temporal trajectory from
past (roots) reaching into the future (seeds). Consequently, the readers are subtly encouraged
to regard the sections titled Trunk and Crown as the present. Moreover, this organized layout,
which correlates with arboreal life-cycles, references development that is “independent from
human agency and belonging to a vaster organically designed temporal scale” (Masiero
2020: 139). In simpler terms, the lives of Powers’ nine human protagonists are contained
within an other-than-human context and should be interpreted from that particular angle by
the readers. Thus, before the novel even starts, the readers are already placed within the
appropriate temporal mind-set that is necessary for them to easily navigate the different
timeframes encapsulated in the novel’s contents.
By now this essay has already established that one of the fundamental aims of Powers’
(2018) novel is to expand his readers’ consciousness to include the natural environment and
to integrate this newly-attained awareness into our everyday interests and commitments.
Suffice it so say, overcoming anthropocentrism is in no way an easy feat as there are
numerous psychological hurdles that humans have to overcome in order to successfully alter
our predominantly-egocentric mind-sets. In fact, Powers uses one of his protagonists, Adam
Appich, who is a psychology student, to voice human resistance to thought conformism,
which sometimes even opposes scientific verification:
We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped
primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right.
But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it. (Powers
2018: 291)
Essentially, we are walking around with “social and cognitive blinders” that make it
particularly difficult and intimidating to think outside of those systematically ingrained
mental boxes that we have grown accustomed to and that automatically filter out the majority
of our controversial thoughts and opinions (Feith 2022: 101). Naturally, this constitutes one
of the fiction writer’s most difficult obstacles, the fact that human predisposition mainly
dictates the degree to which a reader will identify with a novel’s plot, its structure, and its
character(s). To depict this particular struggle sufficiently, Powers makes use of Ray
Brinkman to portray human resistance to narrative form:
[The novels] share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear
and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive –
character – is all that matters in the end. It’s a child’s creed, of course, just one small
step up from belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences
like a judge in a federal court. To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a
meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is
mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel
can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few
lost people. But Ray needs fiction now as much as anyone. (Powers 2018: 383)
Although Ray’s views regarding literature seem rather pessimistic and despite the fact that
he is of the opinion that literature does not make much of a difference in changing the world
for the better, he does believe that it possesses the power to “change your mind” (Powers
2018: 383). He finds consolation in the fact that, despite the novel’s “scalar
incommensurability with ecological disaster … humanity might wean itself off its
fascination with character and learn to feel narratively compelled by the contest for the
world” (Saint-Amour 2022: 150). Indeed, this statement correlates with The Overstory’s
fundamental narrative predicament: using its characters to inspire a mental shift in its readers
so that they may become more in tune with vegetal realities whilst resisting the urge to
become so committed to its anthropocentric sub-plots that the novel’s overarching arboreal
narrative fades into the background. According to Ray, literature does possess the power to
captivate readers to the extent that they themselves start to consider the possibility that they
are merely small, inconsequential characters in the metaphorical Book of Life. We see this
most clearly depicted in the novel through Ray’s newly-found appreciation for the fiction
and romance books that Dorothy reads to him after he suffers a stroke. If Dorothy, his “once
adulterous wife,” feels comfortable enough to read to him Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina with
“no trace of self-consciousness or shame,” then clearly literature has provided her with a
“containment field for her real-world betrayal of his trust” (Powers in Saint-Amour 2022:
150). For Ray, the act of reading a piece of fiction serves as proof that “the worst that the
two of them have done to each other is just another tale worth reading together at the end of
the day” (Powers 2018: 383). Thus, Ray’s views regarding literature communicates
anthropocentric inconsequentiality in the sense that one is neither equal to the consequences
of the deeds one commits in this world nor is any human being on par with the scale of
ecological disaster that the earth is facing.
In order to examine the truth of Ray’s observation, we have to delve into the ways that
Powers makes use of his characters to successfully communicate his novel’s core message
without falling into that narrative trap of superficial anthropocentric representations. The
word “character” has various connotations attached to it: “It is not only a fictional persona,
but also an individual’s personality, a defining trait or essential nature of some object or
notion and, even more pointedly, a graphic symbol used in writing or printing” (Feith 2022:
102).Taking this into consideration, this essay argues that in his novel, Powers makes use of
his human protagonists to effectively communicate the many wonders of arboreal realities
through establishing what can only be described as a sort of triangular dynamic between
character(s), trees, and readers. Trees attain agency by becoming “doppelgangers of human
characters, or at least through some form of twinning or entwinement” (Feith 2022: 104).
Think, for example, of the pseudonyms that are adopted by some of the protagonists when
they join Mother N’s activist group: Olivia Vandergriff (“Maidenhair” – i.e. gingko);
Douglas Pavlicek (“Doug-fir” – in reference to a fir tree); Mimi Ma (who becomes
“Mulberry”); Adam Appich (also known as “Maple”). By becoming so closely connected to
specific characters in the novel, these trees, by extension, attain a sense of individuality or
character themselves. This makes it easier for the readers to relate to them as they manage
to negotiate the divide between human and non-human life and agency. Additionally, this
human-tree parallelism is further strengthened by the “correspondence between the shape of
a tree above ground and that of a human figure, with its trunk [serving as ‘legs], limbs
[‘arms’] and crown [‘head’]” (Feith 2022: 104). There are various other vegetal likenesses
in Powers’ novel that support this argument. For example, the chestnut tree on the Hoelfamily’s farm that becomes a landmark - what farmers refer to as a sentinel tree – and that
is the photographer’s “exact coeval” is later featured in a time-lapse photography project and
gives the impression of being gifted with great determination to communicate and portray
“something” that nobody can yet adequately articulate: “The Hoel chestnut keeps lifting the
high-water mark of its leaves. It’s after something, the farmer thinks, his lone venture into
philosophy. It has a plan” (Powers 2018: 13). This teleological depiction of vegetal
progression serves as a personification. Very much later on in the novel, a very similar trope
is linked to Nicholas Hoel with regard to the aura and appearance of Mimas, which he
equates with “Yggdrasil, the World Tree” as well as the “Evolutionary Tree of Life” (Powers
2018: 260). Patricia Westerford also serves as a character that projects certain human
qualities onto trees. Evidence of this statement can be found in the instance when she comes
face to face with a tree that resembles that famous image of the Virgin mother, Mary of
Nazareth:
Patricia looks harder. The figure is there. A woman in the coda of life, raising her eyes
and lifting her hands in that moment just before fear turns into knowledge. The 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. The
impression grows stronger as Patricia walks around it. A dog would bark at the twisting
body. A baby would cry. (Powers 2018: 338)
Patricia accredits the image that the tree presents to her to “pareidolia” – a cognitive
tendency to ascribe meaning, pattern or animism to all things (Feith 2022: 105). Taking
this into consideration, the trees in Powers’ book not only obtain individual character via
their connections to the human protagonists, but they also come to embody a sort of
divinity that strengthens Powers’ message of vegetal agency and formidability.
V.
Conclusion
At the very heart of Richard Powers’ (2018) The Overstory lies a conflict between an
understanding of the extent of the worldwide environmental crisis and human indifference
to the ways in which our capitalist endeavours have contributed to the ecological
predicament our planet is facing. Through its sensitive awareness of scales as well as an indepth understanding of contrasting perceptions of temporality between human and nonhuman life, Powers’ novel creates a thought-provoking narrative space via the author’s
skilful intermingling of the lives of his (human) protagonist with that of trees. Through
illuminating the ways in which anthropocentric perceptions of time are relatively superficial
when compared to the ‘deep’ and complex time-scales that govern the earth’s ecological
systems, Powers endeavours to create a sense of empathy in his readers regarding the
intricacies of the natural environment. As stated by one of Powers’ protagonists, Ray
Brinkman, humanism is characterized by a confusion between what constitutes a “satisfying
story” and what can actually be regarded as a “meaningful one” (Powers 2018: 383). This
essay has provided sufficient proof that Powers’ novel comprises the latter as it pushes itself
to captivatingly depict the “contest for the world” through its employment of a groundbreaking narrative structure that correlates with arboreal life-cycles. Additionally, the impact
of Powers’ novel is magnified via the author’s use of complex and wounded characters who
find solace in each other as well as in their larger purpose, which is to obtain and nurture a
regenerative outlook regarding human/non-human entanglement. Not only that, but Powers
also cleverly balances the degree to which he makes use of his nine human protagonists and
the various meaningful ways that their lives are connected with trees to successfully
communicate the extent of vegetal agency and wonder.
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