Xylosophy and Treeory: The Greening of the Text in Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018)

Abstract

The Overstory is an encyclopedic, cosmic novel, whose structure mimics its object. The text distils a “dendrosophy” or “xylosophy,” a wisdom inspired by trees and their mode of existence. Endowing them with sensitivity, solidarity and the ability to communicate, the book probes the links between man and nature, and questions the dichotomies constitutive of humanism. Interfacing the paper beings that are both trees and humans in a literary work, the novel interrogates the status of both characters and real-world people. Language and our representations of the world are also targeted: the narrator tirelessly ferrets out common language and philosophical expressions that make sense of experience through the use of vegetal metaphors, including the topological frameworks of branching and the rhizome. The novel reaches beyond Western thought into Buddhist philosophy, Native American worldviews, even the threat of a silicon-based next stage of evolution. Referring to trees the text also refers to itself, in a sort of ars poetica spelling out a theory of the green text, imbued with a measure of hope for a renewed symbiosis with the plant world.

Keywords: Richard Powers – ecocriticism – tree ­– branching – rhizome – literary character – green text