Speaker
Description
In Western thinking, especially since evolutionary theory and classification, branching patterns are firmly established as a dominant way of understanding the world ontologically and epistemologically. Outward branching—the splitting apart of different branches—has been mobilized to justify hierarchy, privileging the human petiole of the evolutionary tree. The Overstory reverses this directionality by emphasizing branching as a process that begins from a common node, employing connection to collapse dichotomy.
These branching patterns connect trees and humans, but are also disclosed as structuring computer code, evolution, ancestry, narrative, time, and even language itself. In this presentation, I explore the different ways in which the novel employs branching as a way to get at a decentered middle, achieving an arboreal perspective.
On the verbal level, I compare the branching language of The Overstory to Kimmerer’s grammar of animacy in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants (2013). Especially interesting is how Powers makes language branch through anaphora, starting sentences with the same words, as if their endings branch out of a common beginning.
Structurally, The Overstory is divided in Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds, as we observe several storylines coming together and splitting apart like roots and branches. This structure entangles stories with one another, exposing them as always ongoing and never separated.
Thematically, different branching patterns are connected through Powers’ use of metaphor and metonymy. For example, through transgenerational photography, the branching of a chestnut is shown to have the same form as the branching of a family tree, on the condition that we overcome the constrained perspective of human individual timelines. Using the same branching patterns, the common ancestry of all life forms is highlighted, the evolutionary process resembling a node of branching possibilities. This idea is echoed in the development of Mastery, a game in the novel created by branching code that in turn replicates real-world evolutionary branching. Even time seems to be a branching pattern, as Powers describes the choices we have as individuals.
Thus, The Overstory offers a counternarrative to an emphasis on outward branching and difference. It overcomes the human-tree dichotomy by drawing attention to branching as an always ongoing process, something that happens in an in-between. The arboreal cannot be grasped by empirically investigating isolated branches, but needs to be understood from the perspective of connection, focusing on the nodes. This phenomenological access to knowledge is already present in Indigenous epistemology, resulting in an extended sense of self in a non-totalizable assemblage of interspecies multiplicities. The Overstory thus shows branching to be about connecting at least as much as about splitting apart.
| Principal domain of study | English literary studies |
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