The primary affairs that (in subsequent decades) carved out a fertile niche for the growth of a healthy and pivotal network between literature and environment, can be traced back to the last few decades of the 20th century when ideology critique emerged as an epistemological function within Literary Theory. As an institution, it hoped to legitimize the space that literature occupied in academia. A principal incentive that we have currently as a result of literary theorization is the ability to claim that literary studies as a tool are very much capable of constituting the reality in which all earthly species participate. This further requires that critical procedure in practice be well acquainted with the socio-political infrastructure of the territory in which it engages.
Accordingly, protheses of ideological paradigms (namely gender, culture, class) were taken from social studies as premises to develop certain theories such as Marxism, Feminism, Post-Colonialism and so on. Contrary to these constructs, the conjunction of literary studies and the environment was relatively recent, emerging perhaps due to the long-overdue consciousness towards the current environmental crisis.
Various theorists across the world believe that literature, coupled with ecological sensibility, can amend the numerous anthropocentric discourses that shape our rapport with all that identifies as nature. Consequently, ecocriticism-a product of this critical methodology- can be defined as a technique of literary criticism that ventures to comprehend how nature is shaped in literary discourses as well as whether it has the capacity to carve out a healthy rapport between Homo Sapiens and the ecosystem.
A remarkable example would be David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth elaborating on human techno-scientific progress and its impact on the environment. Yet one demands going beyond this approach of ideology critique as by limiting our eco-political stances to ideological domain and classroom discussion as well as condemning and immunize (us) against street-based environmental politics.
This predicament is definitely the least coveted element within the menacing discourse of climate change that we encounter today. Thereupon, a vital transformation has occurred in the methodology that endeavours to shift nature to the very centre of our creative and philosophical discourses leading to the emergence of thought-process that can be counted within neologisms of ‘Ecosophy’ and ‘Ecopoetry’.
The Overstory
Honoured by the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Richard Powers’ The Overstory‘ (2018) is one such text that helps us to better evaluate the principles of this academic construct. Geographically concentrating the narrative in the United States of America, the narrative weaves itself around eight characters sharing a profound association with nature, particularly forests.
Exploring their individual lives and a physical and emotional kinship in the latter half of the novel, Powers portrays a successful account of their pursuit to save the earth and all its inhabitants from the impending environmental destruction caused contributively by exploits of large-scale industries (driven by a capitalistic spirit) and a state in pursuit of rendering the entire ecological community by definition into a private and profitable asset.
Keeping in mind the paraphernalia offered within the novel, I intend to analyse narrative instances as well as their semantics in order to evaluate the manner in which The Overstory successfully justifies itself as a rewarding specimen in literary Eco-poetical and Ecosophical experience and encourages the reader to go beyond itself in all discourses of existence. As rightly said:
“A state of half-ignorance and half-indifference is a much more pervasive climate sickness than true denial or true fatalism.” (Wallace-Wells, p57)
Concluding the first (nearly) post-covid year 2022 and admiring the efforts to overcome the severity of the circumstances, one should also keep in mind the current environmental affairs. National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in Sao Paulo, Brazil, has detected 8,590 square kilometres of deforestation between August 1, 2021 and July 31, 2022, accompanied by “deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon during the first half of 2022 [breaking] all records” (‘Deforestation in The Brazilian Amazon hist Tragic Record in 2022’).
Despite the threat announced by rising greenhouse emissions, indifference dangles like a sword above humanity’s head.
Any devastating environmental consequences are met by temperaments that vary across different communities. This can be further comprehended by understanding the religious take on the pandemic in 2020. As we practically witness the end of the covid 19 pandemic, it is essential to note, as David Wallace-Wells states, that global warming is very much capable of scrambling eco-systems, causing the disease-causing bacteria and viruses to migrate into other regions, thereby giving rise to epidemics around the globe, further indirectly claiming that the pandemic is yet another repercussion of our growing indifference to climate change.
Yet religion chooses to define perfectly explicable phenomena through a holy jargon of ‘Armageddon’ or ‘God’s wrath’ and ‘sin’ and protesting against medical interventions and advocating the worship of idols. Such ideological paradigms not only divert accountability from the culprit but also push the individual into submission in the face of crisis, further neglecting any goals of sustainable development.
A different approach is, therefore, necessary to make amends within these established ideas, which can further lead to a transformation in behaviour and perhaps an active yearning for change. Learners and pedagogues of literary and cultural studies thus have an important role to play in order to carry out this transformation. In the case of the crisis that has been described above, the emergence of ecocriticism and environmental literary studies is thus meant to understand the exhibition of the environment in human literary creation and to grasp whether this rapport can bring forward a behavioural transformation in society.
Certainly, literature depicts nature. Romanticism, the intellectual and artistic movement of the nineteenth century, can be taken as a well-known instance where poets such as Wordsworth, Keats and Shelly took recourse to nature “because [it] was seen as pure and a spiritual source of renewal” (Oosthoek). Yet this period was rather limited in its exploration as a reaction to the notion of rationality that developed during the eighteenth century. Ecocriticism thus differentiates itself from the literary movement principally because
It is, in fact, a perspective defined by its politics. To write eco-critically means to make value judgements about the literature we study…based on a common concern about the exploitation and overconsumption of nature by certain human cultures. (Hitt, 125)
Moving beyond this hermeneutics of suspicion triggered by a critical approach to literature, Richard Powers’ The Overstory goes into an ecosophical stance. As a narrative based on environment, it differs in its approach to building a future ecosystem in the spirit of an egalitarian kinship between the animate and inanimate nature, thereby proving to be a promising Chef-d’oeuvre and a brilliant effort at reflecting the manner in which contemporary for-profit industries treat the ecosystems as the private property meant solely for human consumption.
Part and parcel of the message lies in the title, The Overstory, referring to the top foliage from multiple trees that combine to create an overhang or canopy under which people can walk or sit, highlighting the altruistic spirit of the natural ecosystem.
As a creative literary text, it can not only be seen as a critique of our current relationship with the environment but a narrative that is pregnant with an ecological sensibility, which Guattari puts forward as “an ethico-political articulation…between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity).” (p28).
Taking recourse to trees of various species as a substratum for the emergence of ecological consciousness, individuals rise in solidarity against the perpetual sabotage of the earth through the hand of the Anthropos, who congratulates itself over its oppressively superior temperament.
Through a creative narrative marked by individuals who have an absolute feeling of love for the green to an almost mystical reawakening following a reclamation of having heard a cry for help from “the most wondrous product of four billion years of life.” (Powers, p205), Powers is striving to build an ecosystem that focuses more on what Arne Naess refers to as the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement.
Advocating For A Separatist Stance: On The Lexicon Of Forest
Moving beyond an explicitly radical criticism against the indifference regarding environmental degradation and climate crisis, Powers primarily endeavours to build a realm where humans and their reflections are secondary to the forest, portrayed as a community of complex and self-reliant beings.
While an explicit criticism of human activities, such as in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, is absolutely not visible, the reversal of agency through eradicating the despotic omnipresence of anthropocentric linguistic expression is equally efficient in manifesting a stance of powerful protest against the crisis emanating in the Anthropocene.
Not only are several human social customs described through the intervention of phytocentric vocabulary such as “…shaking hand in the dark [which] feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground” (Powers, p181), the major events in the life of a man incarcerated in a medium-security prison is also curated by “trees and [because of] too much love of them” (Powers, p193). To state briefly, the human has been shifted to the grammatical rank of an object in the sentence.
As part of this attempt to subjectivise a certain marginalized ‘other’ within the literary discourse, an almost forest like figure percolates within the vocabulary applied to creative writing in this particular case. Elaine Showalter within literary feminist studies suggests that
The interest in establishing a more reliable critical vocabulary and a more accurate and systematic literary history for women writers [has become] part of a larger interdisciplinary effort by psychologists, sociologists, social historians, and art historians to reconstruct the political, social, and cultural experience of women (Showalter, p8),
Similarly, a final separatist phase is also reflected in the outline of The Overstory, subjectivising solely the forest as the active agent in the narrative. The writing is deprived of the human-invented bibliographical lexica. While ironically, it is a paper-based material with a human taking credit for creation, the narrative is still quite commendable in the application of an environmental vocabulary throughout the subject matter, such as the concise descriptions of ‘Roots’, ‘Trunks’, ‘Crown’ and ‘Seeds’, each labelling one section of our tree-book. A prologue further emphasizes on the intelligence of the system, through the human eye, claiming that
It shocks him to realize, after a lifetime of looking at wood; He is staring at the seasons, the years pendulum, the burst of spring and the enfolding of fall, the beat of a two-four song recorded here in a medium that the piece itself created (Powers, p193).
The larger connotative stance of the words urges the reader to notice the fact that the forest here or the nature is trying to carve out a separatist space for itself, by striving to diverge from the usual anthropomorphism of nature in writings, from prose to poetry. A ‘green’ language is being put to use to reflect, the large universe of trees where humans are predominantly trespassers. “The tree is saying things in words before words” (p3, Powers) so to unearth its own language, its treasured body of animistic dialogues marked by a whole societal structure where trees tend to communicate with each other through signals similar to the customs within animate realms. The same has been derived through the conclusion that Patricia Westerford arrived on, stating that
The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell. Her maples are signalling. They are linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland. These brainless, stationary trunks are protecting each other (p158, Powers).
Yet the notion that a certain mode of intelligent communication also forms part of the tree life has been rejected as passive by the advent of human language rendering any performative silence on the part of the nature subordinate. Powers also tries to reflect this assumption through a repetitively metaphorical mention of the annual growth rings in a tree trunk through which “like an ancient record, a story of heat and cold, fire and rain, drought and abundance lay at [the] feet. It’s a story that is difficult to read, but there are those who can do it” (Cowan). Similar instances further propagate a perception that Powers had largely manifested in his work, what Arne Naess had theorized under the term ‘deep ecology’.
As postulated in his article, “The Shallow and the Deep, long-range ecology movement. A summary’, the term was meant to take us beyond the shallow criticisms of environmental degradation and deforestation, to adopting methods that could result in the evolution of our anthropocentric discourses, leading to a much-needed adoption of a sincere ecological sensibility. In this manner of saying, deep ecology, as an epistemology, is one of the prerequisites to achieving an ecosophical state.
The novel is frequently marked by examples that could help us comprehend the same. As a manifestation of environmental literature, Powers’ writing is abundant with a narrative central to forests and diverse floral species. More importantly, it marks a departure from other discourses on environment in terms that human intervention remains a supporting role. The core essence of the narrative concerns itself with an aesthetic developed by the forests simultaneously and coherently adhering to the sombre predicament that human infrastructure has inflicted on the planet.
There is moreover a subjectivation of all natural elements, including the nuts “that want to slip free of their spiny protection. Each one volunteers to be eaten, so others might spread far afield.” . Page by page through various instances, Powers builds up instances to elaborate on the elemental nature of things branched to all that is the environment.
He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language…How beech bark played host to earliest Sanskrit letter. (Powers, p146)
Beyond The Current Human
While shifting the forest at the centre of an ecopolitical and ecosophical discourse has been remarkably achieved, the novel capably goes beyond the predicament of the ongoing crisis. Transcending the subtle and shallow greenwashing of usual politics across climate change, the text tends to deconstruct the usual mindset of special hierarchy. One can read through all the eight individuals and conclude that together they metaphorize a ‘Société à venir’ (to come) where citizens ought to go beyond the self and into the world of the other. Rephrasing the perception, it can be said that a post-humanist account is also being proposed as the reader traverses the identity of all the individuals described in the narrative. As postulated by Francesca Ferrando, Posthumanism as a theory
Criticises anthropocentric humanism and opens its inquiry to non-human life…it articulates the condition for a posthuman epistemology as a site of knowledge [calling] for environmentalism, deep ecology, animal-rights and robo-ethics simultaneously emphasizing its own human-centrism on the ground that Posthumanism is still theorized by and for human beings. (Ferrando, p10).
Powers tries to bring forward posthumanism as a consequence of an environment where ecological sensibility is a routine part of human life. It is obvious if one strives to observe the childhood of the eight humans indulged in forming the narrative. Each is surrounded not only by an environment-friendly discourse but also human kins that are pedagogues of veneration towards other creatures and species.
From Nicholas Hoel’s generation-long photography project tracking the phenomenon of growth in nature to Patricia Westerford’s conclusion that trees are a community of living species that can intelligently interact among themselves, we can find evidences throughout the narrative. Another theorization that comes within Posthumanist thought refers to “the acknowledgement that the difference is embedded in the human species itself, with all of its gendered, racial, ethnic, social, individual varieties.” (Fernando).
Surely, by incorporating the narrative of Neeley Mehta, a differently-abled, Indian in United States, Powers has kept track of this spirit that encourages embracing the differences however narrowing down of the discourse to United States (which is also responsible for 30% of global energy use and 28% of carbon emissions) is also debatable in the sense that a broader horizon could have been taken into account underlining the amorphous nature of the economic, political and ethnic status of the population that exploits or is exploited within the existing scheme of things.
Into The Chthulucene?
An important theorization regarding literature was that as an ideological parameter, it is very much capable of transforming our reality.
One can take Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things as an illustration to carry forward this reflection. Originally published in 1997, the text was accused of obscenities and thus not seen as an appropriate reading. Yet the same connotates that indeed a literary work can have a transformative effect on reality. The same proclamation goes for an ecosophical or ecocritical text. Not only does it borrow certain elements from the reality but also moulds them in a manner that the readers themselves undergo a transformation.
Does The Overstory as a literary text capable of having similar effects? One can potentially carry out numerous interpretations and can learn from the plot. That much can be convincingly said about the society that the novel presents and the discourses associated with theories on kinship and the future age of posthumanism.
In her book Staying with the Trouble, Donna J. Haraway claims that the Anthropocene as a geological age needs to be “as short/thin as possible” (Haraway, Capitalocene article), implying that as a society, humanity in companionship with all other species that inhibit the Earth ought to accept and encourage an epoch of sincere ecological sensibility.
American anthropologist Ann Tsing “argues that the Holocene was the long period when refugia, places of refuge, still existed, even abounded, to sustain rewording in rich cultural and biological diversity.” Perhaps we need to transcend the Anthropocene and restore refugia, thus paving for a new age which Haraway calls, the Chthulucene. Elaborating on the etymology she adds that it is inspired from
The diverse earth-wide tentacular powers and forces and collected things with names like Naga, Gaia, Tangaroa… “My” Chthulucene, even burdened with its problematic Greek-ish tendrils, entangles myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as humus. (Haraway, p101)
Curiously enough, summing up the multiplicity in the narratives that The Overstory has to offer, Powers, in my opinion also offered the readers with a vague architectural map from where one can pick up pieces and establish the touchstones of the coming era. Similar to the manner in which Olivia Vandergriff listens to “the most wondrous products of four billion years of life,” we must encourage kinship i.e., making kin, making “other/more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy” (Haraway, p103). Only then can our shallow ecology, our criticism of man-made yet ironically environmental disasters lead to a profound reflection and actual action to curb the current climate crisis that we (and the generations to come might) face.
References
• Wallace-Wells, David, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, Tim Duggan Books, 2019
• ‘Deforestation in Brazilian Amazon hits tragic record in 2022’, CNBC, July 13, 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/13/deforestation-in-brazilian-amazon-hits-tragic-record-in-2022.html\
• Oosthoek, K. Jan, ‘Romanticism and Nature’ Environmental History Resources, August 1, 2015, https://www.eh-resources.org/romanticism-and-nature/
• Hitt Christopher, ‘Ecocriticism and The Long Eighteenth Century’, College Literature, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Summer, 2004), pp. 123-147, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25115211
• Guattari Félix, The Three Ecologies (1989), trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London & New Brunswick, The Athlone Press, 2000, p28
• Powers Richard, The Overstory, W. W. Norton & Company, 3 April 2018
• Elaine Showalter, ‘The Female Tradition’, Chapter 1 in A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977, p8
• Cowan Ernie, ‘Column: Trees tell own stories through their rings’, The San Diego Union-Tribune, December 16, 2019,https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/communities/north-county/story/2019-12-16/column-trees-tell-own-stories-through-their-rings
• Ferrando Francesca, ‘Towards a Posthumanist Methodology. A Statement’, Frame Journal for Literary Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2012, p10
• Donna J. Haraway, ‘Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’, (Chapter 2, in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene), Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.