“Arboretum America” in Richard Powers’s The Overstory

Abstract

Richard Powers's The Overstory (2018) offers a re-centering of human history and literature around trees and forests as highly relevant, even unsurpassable, biotic and semiotic systems. Trees become an alternative measure of all things in an attempt to question anthropocentrism and to represent humans and trees growing together in a joint narrative in which the emphasis is displaced from the former towards the latter. Divided into four parts entitled "Roots", "Trunk", "Crown" and "Seeds", the novel explicitly follows an organic model that functions as an all-encompassing metanarrative (the "overstory" spelled out in the title). While this model suggests connectiveness, circulation, dissemination and growth, it also entails a reframing of temporality and history, and ultimately a reassessment of literature in general and of the novel as a genre in particular. 1 The Overstory encodes a reflection on the thematic and formal potential of literature activated by a tree-based approach. This article seeks to elucidate the ways in which Powers's engagement with trees and forests invites a reconsideration of American geography, history and literature in general. The novel builds on Transcendentalism, nature writing and environmentalist philosophies, reworking their most radical strands in its ambition to question the place of the human and to embrace a bold version of tree-inspired ethics and imagination. Margaret Atwood compared Powers to Melville in terms of literary scope and vision (Atwood 2006). The Overstory appears to grant non-human creatures (trees) the same central role and encyclopedic treatment that Moby-Dick granted whales in 19 th -century American literature. However, Powers's novel goes much further in wrenching nonhuman creatures from subordination to human goals and fantasy, and in promoting trees to the "active voice" that Val Plumwood argued in favor of, reflecting on how agency, point of view and voice can be granted to trees. Early in the novel, the character of Nicholas Hoel and his ancestor who planted the chestnut tree that dominates the first section come to the realization that art, just like trees, "makes you